A Look at Afro-Latinos

[nattyreb]

via: Bro. Runoko Rashidi!
========

Boricuas vs. Nuyoricans—Indeed!
A Look at Afro-Latinos
By Miriam Jiménez Román

Photographs in a controversial video feature smiling
fair-skinned beauty contest winners and fashion
models contrasted with images of scantily dressed,
full-bodied, dark-skinned women in public spaces
---"evidence" of the cultural and aesthetic
differences between "real" Puerto Ricans and those who
make illegitimate claims on that identity.

These are the verbal and visual claims of a
controversial video making recent rounds on the
Internet, explaining the alleged differences between
Puerto Ricans on the Island and those in the United
States. The two-minute video, which has repeatedly
been yanked from YouTube, informs the viewer that
“Puerto Ricans come from the island,” are
overwhelmingly “blancos” or mestizos of Taíno and
European ancestry, and “typically VERY classy and/or
preppy or as we say in Puerto Rico ‘fino’.” Island
Puerto Ricans are also highly educated, the video
asserts. In contrast, Nuyoricans are “3rd or 4th
generation Puerto Ricans that are usually mixed with
African Americans, CAN NOT speak Spanish or speak it
very badly!!! They act very, very trashy and ghetto
or as we say in Puerto Rico cafre!!!” Nuyoricans are
Afrocentric and one is more likely to find them “in
prison than in college.” Indeed, Nuyoricans—a misnomer
since it encompasses the entire Puerto Rican
diaspora—often seem to be a target in this video and
beyond for anti-Afro-Latino sentiment. Nuyoricans come
under fire for their apparent obsession with race and
racism and, most particularly, their identification
with African-Americans and blackness.

I first encountered this view of Nuyoricans decades
ago when I followed my parents' dream and took the
guagua aérea back to the land of my birth. I quickly
learned that to be from the States was to suffer from
a social disability, a condition that the island-bred
believed I had best overcome for the good of the
Puerto Rican nation, if not my own accommodation.
That was in the 1970s, when Puerto Rico was being
invaded by a seeming horde of return migrants. The
children of the diaspora were already perceived as a
problem, one that taxed the island's already scarce
resources and presented perspectives that seemed
antithetical to long-cherished ideas about Puerto
Rican identity. Throughout my many years living and
working in Puerto Rico there was rarely a reference to
los de afuera that wasn't, on some level, derogatory,
so that even compliments (¡Ay, pero tu no pareces ser
de allá! ) only reinforced this sense of undesirable
otherness.

The image of Nuyoricans as immoral, violent, dirty,
lazy, welfare-dependent, drug-addicted felons was not
restricted to the United States; to this day, both
countries produce media images that depict stateside
Puerto Ricans as overwhelmingly engaged in some type
of objectionable behavior. Even by the most
sympathetic of accounts, it's assumed that living in
what José Martí referred to as the “entrails of the
monster” ruins Puerto Ricans, robs them of language
and culture, and leaves them susceptible to
destructive foreign influences.
One aspect of this alleged foreign influence is the
Nuyorican attitude toward race. Yet many foreign ideas
have found fertile ground in Puerto Rico. For
instance, despite initial skepticism about the
feminist movement, by the late 1970s, the Island
boasted a number of feminist organizations, as well as
the official endorsement of the Commonwealth
government. At the Comisión Para los Asuntos de la
Mujer, for example, programs and literature developed
in the United States barely underwent any alteration
in their transfer to Puerto Rico; most were merely
translated into Spanish. Not only were these "foreign
ideas" acceptable but so too was the format—neither
message (middle-class feminism) nor messenger (in the
main, white women) met with the easy dismissal
affected against Nuyoricans who talked about race and
racism. Nor were those islanders who espoused the new
ideas about women's place in society any more
receptive to the new ideas about race than was the
general population. Thus, when I described my own
research on racism in Puerto Rico to the then-
director of the Comisión, I was assured that "we don’t
have such problems here.” Little wonder, then, that
more than twenty-five years after Isabelo Zenón Cruz
published his biting exposé on racism in Puerto Rico,
Narciso descubre su trasero, there is still no
official acknowledgment of its existence on the
island. Newspapers, magazines and the broadcast media
continue to ask if racism exists, rather than
acknowledging that it does, a tactic followed by the
island's Civil Rights Commission in its rare
publications on the subject. Nor is it surprising that
Black Puerto Rican women, so long ignored as women and
as Blacks, found themselves compelled to establish
their own organization, La Unión de Mujeres
Puertorriqueñas Negras, as a vehicle for fighting the
silence, invisibility and abuse that marks their
participation in la gran familia puertorriqueña.

This reluctance to engage racism as anything other
than an imported "gringo" problem is consistent with
the exceptionalist posture typical throughout Latin
America, where the myth of racial democracy has
continued to dominate national discourse despite
well-documented evidence to the contrary. Puerto Rico,
identifying as culturally “Hispanic,” has looked for
its models to an increasingly Europeanized Spain and
to other Spanish-speaking countries. The prevalent
tendency is to ignore the neighboring Caribbean
islands, full of “negros de verdad,” and instead to
focus on a Hispanoamérica ostensibly full of mestizos,
indios and blancos—all bound by the same reluctance to
acknowledge its strong African roots.
Puerto Rico as a “Latin” country exempts itself from
racism even as it distances itself from its Blackness,
identifying “real” Blackness as somehow inconsistent
with Hispanic history and culture—or with history and
culture, more generally. This perspective has become
the official line, made real by repetition rather than
concrete experience or the historical record. The
contradictions have provided space for and encouraged
the creation of a Taino revival movement
overwhelmingly composed of second and third generation
stateside Puerto Ricans who, by laying claim to
indigeneity and thus the most “original” roots,
propose to out-authenticate the islanders. It is a
view that leaves unexplained why a people ostensibly
so proud of their racial mixture overwhelmingly reject
mixed race classifications. Revealingly, and to the
consternation of many, more than 80% of islanders
self-identified as white in the 2000 census.

It is to this white identity that our amateur
video-maker pays homage, citing census figures and the
mitochondrial-DNA studies of University of Puerto Rico
biologist Juan Carlos Cruz Martínez to buttress his
argument that “real” Puerto Ricans owe their genetic
and cultural mestizaje to European and indigenous
peoples. And it is this understanding of a
de-Africanized mestizaje that many Puerto Ricans cling
to when they first arrive in the United States.

It permits a scenario in which Puerto Ricans, defined
as neither Black nor white, arrive in the United
States devoid of racial prejudice only to be accosted
by it in their new home. Puerto Ricans are presumably
taught racism in the U.S. and forced to choose between
Black or white identity, to the detriment of their
"true" cultural selves. This perspective, prevalent in
the scholarship produced since the 1930s, is also
expressed in the autobiographical novel Down These
Mean Streets, the dark-skinned Piri Thomas anguishes
over being “caught up between two sticks.” Yet, it
would be more accurate to say that Thomas and the
others are actually stuck between the myth of racial
democracy with its implicit preference for a bleached
mestizaje, and the reality of African descent as a
liability. The choice, if choice there were, is not
between Black and white but between the myth of
race-free color blindness and the reality of
anti-Black racism. It is this fundamental
contradiction that provided fertile ground for new
ways to understand race.

The generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s
saw what earlier migrants have seen from the beginning
of the Latino presence in the United States. Since the
turn of the century people such as bibliophile and
historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg have confronted
overt racism. However, the open acknowledgment of its
existence, also provided the political space to fight
against racism. The shared experiences of racial
discrimination and the concrete conditions flowing
from it—deficient educational, health, and employment
opportunities—confronted the more subtly phrased, but
no less destructive ideology of racial democracy,
learned from our parents and our community, and it
became clear that something was off kilter. The very
language of racism—"pelo bueno," "pelo malo," "Negro
pero inteligente,"—which we heard in Spanish and
English, left little doubt that the similarities
between us were actually greater than the differences.
The anti-racist, egalitarian ideas that flowed from
the Civil Rights movement affected all those in the
United States who were racially subordinated—African
Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Native Americans,
Asians, etc.—in the United States and throughout the
world. Nuyoricans were particularly receptive to the
ideas and values that arose from these struggles
because, located at the very bottom of the social and
economic hierarchy of the City, they realized that it
is of crucial importance to give due attention to the
role of race in our lives.

The effect of the US antiracist movement on Puerto
Ricans in the island has received less attention but
there is ample evidence of those influences. It
extends far beyond the short lived trendiness of the
African-inspired dress and hairdos or the continuing
fascination with the musical innovations that we know
as "salsa" and reggaetón, or even the growing
intellectual interest in identifying the African
influences—or, at another level, foundations—of Puerto
Rican culture. Less obvious, or at least less
commented upon, is the effect on the educational life
of Puerto Rico, where the astounding growth of
post-secondary educational institutions on the island
can be directly attributed to programs implemented
under federally-mandated Affirmative Action
guidelines. Inter-American University, Sagrado
Corazón, and the countless technical colleges that
opened their doors in the 1970s were able to develop
precisely because all Puerto Rican students—whether on
the island or in the States—qualified for federal
assistance programs. Yet even as Puerto Ricans,
especially on the island, rejected the stigma of
racialization, they still accepted—indeed, actively
sought out—the benefits of this racialization. That so
many of the beneficiaries have often been the children
of the more economically privileged sectors of our
various communities does not diminish the significance
of those race-based reforms. At the same time we would
be remiss if we ignore the ways in which ideas about
race and class continue to influence the actions taken
by university admissions officers, corporate
boards—and disgruntled video-makers.

But of even greater importance for those concerned
with social justice has been the steadily growing
chorus of voices raised against the Latino myth of
racial harmony. For decades, stateside Puerto Ricans
have been among the most active supporters of the
Afro-Latin@ movements in Latin America and the
Caribbean. In recent years the transnational dimension
has gained momentum as Black Latin@s, and those who
simply affirm their African ancestry, have organized
in cities across the U.S. and across national borders.
In addition to university-based organizations and
cultural institutes, grass-roots groups such as The
Afro Latin@ Institute of Chicago (ALIC), ENCUENTRO in
Philadelphia and ENCUENTRO “Voices of AfroLatinos” in
Boston are working to bring visibility to issues
affecting African-descendant Latinos. Such efforts are
also taking place on the island; in defiance of the
silencing ideological and psychological controls of
the rainbow/mixed race nation construct a group of
people in the towns of Aguadilla and Hormigüeros
(“Testimonios afropuertorriqueños: un proyecto de
historia oral en el oeste de Puerto Rico),” have
joined forces to “pursue a collective agenda so that
Afro-Puerto Ricans no longer remain at ‘the bottom of
the barrel.’” Black Puerto Ricans are demonstrating
that when it comes to class and race matters it’s
definitely not a question of Boricuas versus
Nuyoricans.

Miriam Jiménez Román is director of afrolatin@ forum,
a research and resource center focusing on Black
Latinos and Latinas in the U.S. She was the Managing
Editor and Editor of Centro: Journal of the Center for
Puerto Rican Studies. For over a decade, she
researched and curated exhibitions at the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture, where she also
served as the Assistant Director of the
Scholars-in-Residence Program. Currently, she is a
visiting scholar in the Department of Social and
Cultural Analysis at New York University.

[Guinan]

VIDEO
Well, I found the video...as disgusted as I am, I have to admit that this is the perception held by some Puerto Ricans directly from the island and also some in the united snakkkes. Interestingly enough, after speaking with my eldest aunt (a Boriqua, born in Arroyo ) some years ago, she said that attitude changed with the more influence the u.s had on the island. Black people were seen as negative and many people with African blood in them were shunned or so ashamed of it they did their best to hide it.

The writer said "...Nuyoricans come
under fire for their apparent obsession with race and
racism and, most particularly, their identification
with African-Americans and blackness..." Funny, it seems the blancos are the ones shunning the 'sortaricans'.

Bleh, the stupidity of it all.

Good post, Queen Natty