Essential Afro-Latino/ Caribbean Current Events

[Bawon Samedi]

8 People Weigh In On The Importance Of New York's Afro-Latino Festival

Festival-goers from countries all over the Americas talk about black latinx recognition.

By LUNA OLAVARRÍA GALLEGOS
Photographer RAFAEL RIO

This past weekend was the fourth annual Afro-Latino Fest in New York City, a cultural event aimed at bringing black latinx people together through music, dance, and talks. The festival brought together people from all over the world for a three-day dance extravaganza that featured traditional artists, DJs, and rappers playing showcases all right after one another.

In between sets by Nina Sky, DJ Jigüe and El Freaky, The FADER spoke to some of the people at the festival about why it was important for them to come out and represent last weekend. Here are eight fans on what afrolatinidad means to them.

1. Amanda, Afro-Brazilian

How is being Brazilian connected to afrolatinidad?

I consider myself Latina and I also consider myself Black. Brazil is part of Latin America, we were just conquered by different Europeans. Since I’m from Brazil, growing up here I was always torn. Black people would be like, “You’re not from here, you’re from Brazil, you’re Spanish,” and I would be like, “I don’t even speak Spanish.” Spanish-speaking Latinos would say, “You’re too Black.” Something like this, it helps all of us who have that lineage to find that community and that diaspora.

2. Michael, Afro-Puerto Rican

Tell me about what afrolatinidad means to you.

The legacy of the Afro-Latinos themselves is so vast and worldwide, that it’s great to have community and festivals like this that bring those people and cultures together. I’m Boricua, from the island of Puerto Rico, so this is close to my heart. I think the roots of our culture go back to Africa.

Why is this festival special to you?

This is close to my heart because my dad is a black Puerto Rican, my mom is a white Puerto Rican, so I'm Afro-Latino and I identify as Afro-Latino. Being here with people of similar backgrounds is always great. Just to see the different colors and shades is always a beautiful thing.

3. Tamara, African-American and Jamaican

[On Right]

How do you feel about this festival today?

I like this festival because it's traditional. I have never heard this kind of music before so it's exciting. It means a lot for me to be Jamaican and be here because I get to learn about my country.

4. Ozzy, Dominican

What does this festival mean to you?

This festival, culturally means a lot to me. When I was a kid back in the Dominican Republic I used to celebrate my culture with carnaval. Ever since I moved back to the states I haven’t done anything like that, so this is the first time in 10+ years that I have celebrated my culture.

What does it mean for you to be Dominican in New York City?

To some Dominicans, I’m not the most typical — I’m different. I don’t consider myself typical even though I am really proud of my culture and proud of where I come from. I don’t wear the flag all the time.

5. Touré Weaver, Black "New Jerseyan"

Why did you come out today?

I found out about this festival because of Que Bajo's mailing list, but I've been coming for a couple years and going to the different events because I like to hear the music, be with good people, and dance.

How do you see the connection between blackness and Latin America?

I've spent a lot of time in South America, in Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador. In most of those places there are pockets of African people. To see the way that music and different parts of the culture emanates throughout different parts of the culture is really cool.

6. Emiliana, Chilean-American

Why is this festival important to you?

I'm just really glad that this has been created. I think it's important that Afro-Latinos have this festival. Probably some of the artists that have influenced me the most, as an artist, are on this bill — Maluca, DJ Bembona, Nina Sky, Princess Nokia.

Where do you see the current conversation of afrolatinidad in your community?

Honestly, where I'm coming from on Staten Island, that conversation is not had enough. For where I live, I'm not encountering many Afro-Latinos, and that's the truth. I live in a predominantly Mexican and Albanian neighborhood, but I think it's something that needs to be spoken about where I'm from. In terms of having these conversations, we're a little bit behind. Things like this, festivals like this, as an artist, this is something I want to promote on [Staten] Island.

7. Jessica, Salvadorean

​

Why is this festival important to you?

As you can see, I am not dark skinned, but I am a Latina. I am Salvadorean, and I have a lot of cousins and family that are Afro-descendent. For me, it’s beautiful to see Latinos accepting their African culture.

What brought you out to this festival today?

I'm excited to hear Nina Sky, Maluca, Tito Puente Jr. I have been to Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico a lot and I am excited to see so many Caribbean Latinos here.

8. Rolando and Purple, Afro-Cuban, Jamaican, and Sicilian

Tell me about the importance of having this festival in New York City?

This is an opportunity for us to celebrate us as people. Being able to come together in New York, a community where the Afro-Latino community is big but not a lot of us are all connected to each other. It’s also an opportunity to share music and culture with the rest of New York. It's an opportunity to connect with the legacy.

Why is this festival important to you?

I have a daughter who is seven years old. She is Cuban, Jamaican, Sicilian, Black, and there’s a lot diversity in her, and without events like this, it’s a little harder to connect her to the diaspora. Events like this allow me to keep her connected.


July 12, 2016
ART, CARIBBEAN, POLITICS


8 People Weigh In On The Importance Of New York's Afro-Latino Festival​

This is definitely important.

 

[Yehuda]

The erased protagonists: Afroargentines and the whitewashing of history

July 18, 2016

NAIROBI (HAN) July 18. 2016. Public Diplomacy & Regional Security News. BY: Daniel Voskoboynik. When we think of Afroamerica, a hemisphere transformed by the forced population transfer of millions of West African slaves, rarely does Argentina spring to mind. The country is widely perceived to be the “whitest” in the region and many Argentines self-style themselves as “the Europeans of South America”. But as Néstor Ortiz Oderigo, one of the forefathers of Afroargentine studies, wrote: “[Argentina is] not different from the rest of the continent for not having a black population, but for not seeing that population as a part of [its] identity.”

In the late 18th century, a third of Argentina’s population were slaves or of African origin. In the city of Buenos Aires, often epitheted as the “Paris of the South”, Afrodescendants accounted for half the population in the early 19th century. When General San Martin’s Argentine army legendarily helped liberate Chile from Spanish rule, half of its members were former slaves granted freedom in exchange for military service.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Afroargentine population vanished, decimated as cannon fodder in the Paraguayan War, and devastated by subsequent epidemics of yellow fever and cholera.

Afroargentines playing candombe porteño near of a bonfire of Saint John in 1938.

But this shibboleth disregards the existence of a significant Afroargentine community today. Further, it glosses over the way in which the country and its consciousness were systematically and purposely “whitened” by its intellectual and governing class.

A national mythology, stripped of Indigenous or Afroargentine features, was crafted to present Argentina as a melting pot of largely European immigrants. Unsavoury chapters of the past were excised. And the indelible historical and cultural imprint of Afroargentines – such as tango, which finds many of its roots in Afroargentine music and dance, and Argentineasado barbecues, which owe much to the culinary contributions of Afroargentines – was erased and minimised.

What predominates today in Argentina is the product of that process, the unstated imaginary of a white nation, European in character. In 1997, Argentine president Carlos Menem was asked abroad at a university – “are there black people in Argentina?” Menem responded: “No, Brazil has that problem.”

Norberto Pablo Cirio is a musicologist, anthropologist, historian, and director of the programme of Afroargentine and Afrolatinamerican Studies at the University of La Plata. As Argentina’s celebrates the Bicentenary of its Independence this year, we spoke to him to discuss Afroargentines in the country’s memory and oblivion.

The descendants of enslaved Africans taken to Argentina are known as “Afroargentinos del tronco colonial” (Afroargentines of the colonial trunk). They see themselves as forgers of Argentina. In what way?

From heroic acts on the battlefield of independence, to things that may seem quotidian, but are no less important. Like the language we use that is of African origin: mondongo (intestines), mucama (maid), quilombo (brothel/mess). Or the food or the music that we recognise as “traditional”. These were very much shaped by the influence of Afroargentines.

But despite the significant historical role played by Afroargentines, in this country there is a naturalised perception that what is black is foreign. As I say when I teach on Argentine historical figures: “they are all white until proven otherwise.”

Where does that perception come from? How has the whitewash of Argentine history taken place?

There were various generations of intellectuals that shaped the historical narrative like the so-called Generation of 1837. Then you have the Generation of 1880, which had a very precise project to reposition the country as a global power based on a blind faith in progress and positivism, for which they turned to the United States and particularly Europe, for ideas, values, and populations. They opened the country to mass immigration to “regenerate” the Argentine “race”, which was largely composed of Indigenous peoples and Afrodescendants, who they saw to be unproductive, lazy, and culturally indifferent, incapable of regenerating themselves as workers.

This generation of intellectuals had power in many spheres. They wrote the basis of what today we know as Argentine history, they disseminated their ideas through the press, and they governed the country as politicians. They marked Argentina with fire, and among their desktable certitudes, was an idea that Argentine slavery was relatively light compared to other American latitudes, that numerically the Africans were insignificant, and that they had basically disappeared, along with their traditions.

This historiographical and negationist discourse about Afroargentines managed to permeate into society and constitute itself as common sense, something which remains to this day. Bearing this in mind it’s possible to explain why our country, as opposed to nearly the rest of Latin America, thinks it has no Afro population or cultural expressions of this group.

What are some of the most popular myths that persist about Afroargentines as part of this historical legacy?

One of the main myths is this idea of light slavery. “But they didn’t suffer as much as others in the Americas. They were treated well because they were basically part of the family.”

Who says they didn’t suffer as much? Their descendants or white people? And if they didn’t suffer, how do you explain so many fugitive slaves, so many prohibitions of their culture? There is a scandalous social anaesthesia over the dimensions of pain; as if the only pain that mattered was physical, as if the prohibition of the use of their ancestral languages, their own names, their own religiosity, wasn’t valid. Slavery is slavery, wherever it is.

Another myth is that there weren’t many slaves in Argentina. “There weren’t any plantations or mines here.”

Firstly, who says there weren’t? I’ve documented songs from black sugarcane cutters from Tucumán, the same ones that remembered stories from their elders recounting how their masters forced them to reproduce with enslaved women, in order to generate more productive “merchandise.” Secondly, the quantitative question of their existence is no reference point to make judgments about their relevance. Minorities have rights per se, and precisely because they are minorities, they need attention and care to protect their existence and identity, because they were historically affected.

Another certainty of common sense that negates the actual presence of Afroargentines of the tronco colonial is colour-blindness in the public sphere. “Oh, but I don’t see them down the street.”

I usually ask in response: “What streets do you walk down? What are your streets?” Buenos Aires is an extensive city, spanning over 202km2, with over ten million people. There are lots of streets. Not everything has to take place in the radius of the tourist-friendly city centre.

Culturally, common sense also sees Argentine identity as a set of symbolic expressions that have no connection to sub-Saharan Africa, despite the millions of slaves that were brought over the course of three and a half centuries. “But we don’t have black culture, like Uruguay or Brazil. The candombe [a form of music and dance that originated from African slaves] that is played on the street is Uruguayan.”

If a cultural practice is not publically expressed, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. At a very asymmetrical moment between the nation-state and Afroargentines, Afroargentines decided to withdraw their own candombe to the familial, private sphere, removing it from the streets.

It was the best way they thought to preserve their culture, and they were successful. The candombe of Buenos Aires never became extinct. Only today it is recovering its public protagonism through an empowerment of the Afroargentine community, seen through organisations such as Asociación Misibamba.

Finally, we see the racialisation of culture, the speculation that (black) skin is an indication of the purity of (black) culture: “But the Afroargentines that are around today are not black.”

Generations of documentaries and Hollywood have propitiated an essentialist vision of culture: the greater the blackness of skin, the greater the knowledge of black culture. What happens is that having endorsed the certainty that being Argentine is synonymous with being white, the average citizen has a culturally poor vision of society’s diversity and when they come across someone whose skin is markedly black, they infer they are undoubtedly a foreigner.

 

[Yehuda]

Together with the central myth of disappearance, there’s also an ingrained ignorance, an erasure of the contribution of Afroargentines, from music to literature.

It’s true. But there’s also a fundamental absence of rigorous investigation. Let’s take the example of Bartolomé Hidalgo, a founding author of the gauchesco movement, the first literature that was originally ours. In 1817, Joaquín de la Sagra calls him a ‘mulatillo’ (little mulatto). The father Castaneda describes him as ‘the dark Montevidean”. Now, of course we have to continue investigating. Having a pair of quotations isn’t enough to deduce that Hidalgo was Afro, but if he was, we’re talking about one of the pillars of our identity: gauchesco poetry.

In my research into the culture of Afroargentines from the tronco colonial, one of my concerns has been establishing the Afro ancestry of figures that are central to the shaping of Argentine society and culture. I always start with questions.

What do we know for example about [early 19th century political activist and revolutionary] Monteagudo? What was he like? White? Who says? Well it seems like he wasn’t. Then you have to enter into his work, analyse it, read between its lines, undertake stylistic studies comparing it to ideologies from the dominant narrative at the time, and see if there are coincidences or not. That doesn’t let you by itself assume that all the creations of an Afrodescendant were created along Afro coordinates, but it also doesn’t let you think the opposite, that their blackness was a mere accident of history, situating them in Eurocentric coordinates naturalised as “universal”.

Following these indications, pursuing these leads, can take you nowhere or they can change the pulse of the past. White is not the only colour in history. We have to start painting our world with a broader palette, the broadest possible. The act of colouring history is, in some way, a subversive act, because we’re offering an alternative to the dominant narrative, giving another version of events. Hopefully blackness will enlighten us.

Despite the whitening of history and culture, in Argentine society racial language is ubiquitous. The word “negro” is used with frequency. How do you explain this usage in a society that thinks it has no black citizens?

The insult of insults in Argentina is to call someone “negro”. But that concept of “negro” is displaced from its originary racialisation towards the idea of social class. When you’re talking about “negros” today in Argentine, you’re usually not talking about people who are racially black, but you are thinking of them, at least on an archetypal level, to reduce the Other to a minimal level of humanity.

That’s how the concept of cabecita negra (literally, little black head) emerged to name people from the interior of the country that were a product of the mix of Indigenous peoples with Europeans. As José Ingenieros said: “the worst of the white race with the Indigenous race which was all bad”. According to the historical narrative concocted by Generation of 1880, everything was degenerated by this infamous group.

Society though has forgotten the third Argentine root in the anti-Argentine confabulation of the cabecita negra: the Afroargentines, who also mixed with Europeans and Indigenous peoples. We have three, not two roots; we have to think of things in a tripartite way.

In your writings you also mention how the invisibility of Afroargentines owes itself in part to a lack of distinction between different groups of Afrodescendants.

Exactly. We can’t forget that there is one group of Afrodescendents of Argentina – the tronco colonial, the descendants of slaves – but many groups in Argentina. We have Cape Verdeans who arrived with Portuguese passports at the beginning of the 20th century, as part of the mass immigration. Halfway through that century we see the arrival of Afro-Uruguayans, followed by Afro-Ecuadorians, Afro-Brazilians, and Afrodescendants from other American nations, and during the 1990s, immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

In many situations, all these groups are placed under the indistinct label of “Afro”. I think that conceals more than it contributes.

There are state institutions that have under their remit a mission to work on “Afro issues”, such as combating racism or discrimination. They put on “Afro” festivals but rarely explain the particularities or origins of each group. The public results are expected: there’s lots of interest, but in the words of a man I once overheard at a festival: “very nice, all these foreigners.”

Under such proposals, Afroargentine culture is diluted. That’s why Afroargentines from the tronco colonial rarely participate, preferring to show themselves separately, following their own dynamic of empowerment and cultural promotion.

The debt the Argentine state has isn’t with “the Afrodescendants”; it’s with Afroargentines from the tronco colonial. That’s the group the state enslaved. Other Afrodescendant groups came here largely voluntarily in the condition of immigrants. They have another relationship with the state, another set of demands, despite a common struggle against racism.

What are some of the most important struggles faced by Afroargentines of the tronco colonial today?

A lot of struggles are related to labour precarity, to health, to education, but they’re not central. The fundamental problem relates to inclusion in history; to a demand that their historical contribution be recognised and acknowledged.

What do you think of the response of state and cultural bodies to that demand?

There’s little to celebrate. There are lots of events, lots of performances, almost all of them under a festival theme, but the lacerating problems remain, denting the quality of life of Afroargentines and their relationship to national history.

In museums it’s hard to see any significant improvements. Many museographers I’ve spoken to are aware of the latest insights, but when it comes to staging exhibitions, stereotypes and absences continue scripting their best intentions.

At too many events, Afroargentines are invited but only to do “their thing”, to perform music. Not to debate, not to give their vision of history. They’re a decorative, artistic element. Wouldn’t it instead be interesting and provocatively original to hear an Afroargentine recount national history from their ancestral experience, as a descendant of slaves?

Do you think there’s any possibility of genuine political change regarding the invisibility of Afroargentines in Argentine history?

There is, but the corridors that matter are not those within ministries, but those where communities live. 90% of community members do not want to approach the subject or get involved. That’s what we have to address first.

You know how difficult it is for an Afroargentine, for example, in Ciudad Evita, to overcome their shame of talking in public? First you have to work on self-esteem, which is often low. I’m aware of many Afroargentines who are still trying to understand who their ancestors are, because there’s always one grandmother lost in the oblivion of the wardrobe of shame. Afroargentines are still trying to learn about their past. To get from there to participating in cultural activities, to opening a door to an academic, to putting pressure on a ministry, there’s light years. That’s why visibilisation starts with fortifying the pride of belonging.

Finally, what has focusing on Afroargentine history and culture taught you?

I’ve always tried to understand and complete history from another perspective, from the counter-hegemonic perspective of the excluded, and through that process, you live robbing yourself of illusions. You begin to understand how your history was told, and how you can tell it in another way. You realise there is no single history, not a truth with capital letters, but many truths. As the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe says, the history of the enslaved is never a neat, linear, complete history; it’s riven and choked by silences, inequalities, rough edges, that hinder making everything convincingly explainable.

When you start to understand the plot of the Afro dimension of Argentine history, just like Indigenous history, the myths crumble and nothing remains the same. But that is totally fecund. It’s constructive, not destructive. Once we’re there, we can work to write a better history, and from there, push to make a better world. For everyone, not for the same people as always.

Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik is a freelance journalist, covering human rights in Latin America.

 

[Yehuda]

The lost histories of the Bengali Harlem

Vivek Bald reconstructs the forgotten stories and communities of Bengalis in America from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

Bengali men with their African American and Puerto Rican wives at a banquet of the Pakistan League of America on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, 1952. Photo: Courtesy of Laily Choudhury

Moyukh Mahtab

It is difficult to do justice in summarising Vivek Bald's book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. An Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media at MIT, the author was inspired by one Habib Ullah, an ex-seaman from Noakhali, who went to the US around the 1920s, eventually marrying and settling there. The scope of the book is staggering, as it reconstructs an almost forgotten narrative of immigration and assimilation of South Asians in America and covers a period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

Habib Ullah, Sr., one of the first Bengali ship-jumpers to settle in Harlem in the 1930s. Bald and Ullah's son, the writer and actor Alaudin Ullah, are collaborating on a documentary about his life, community, and legacy entitled "In Search of Bengali Harlem." Courtesy of Habib Ullah, Jr.

The stories of businessmen and sailors from Hoogly, Noakhali, Sylhet and other parts of Bengal travelling thousands of miles to get to the US, setting up networks for business, integrating into the African American and Creole communities, and navigating the tricky socio-political situations of a largely xenophobic America were retrieved from old forgotten archives—from “ship's logs, census records, marriage certificates, local news items,” as the author puts it. And the picture that emerges is of a community on the fringes that challenges the widely-held assumptions about immigration, race relations and the inception of a Bengali/Indian community in America.

The book describes the nineteenth century businessmen of embroidered silk, who travelling from British India, and landing at a newly built immigration processing centre in Ellis Island, are faced with immigration officers. They build the first networks in the coloured communities of America. This would later pave the way for the hundreds of seamen who jumped ship to escape from the indentured working conditions to find work in the factories of Detroit in the early 1900s. As the US started closing its borders to South Asians, these Bengali men seeped into the coloured communities, marrying into and building lives in a new land. And it is in the description of their lives, and their businesses that Vivek Bald excels.

“Denied official belonging, they became part of another nation, a nation beneath a nation, in working-class neighborhoods of color from New York to Baltimore to Detroit,” he writes in Bengali Harlem.

In an email interview with The Daily Star, Mr Bald discussed the major themes of his book: immigration, racism, identity, and the overarching significance of lost histories.

Vivek Bald

The Daily Star: One interesting aspect of Bengali Harlem is the duality that existed in the US: the simultaneous love for the exotic and the xenophobia. Do you see any parallels or similarities in the US at the moment—not just regarding Indians or Bangladeshis, but with immigrants in general?

Vivek Bald: This is, in fact, a question at the centre of my current book project, which examines in greater detail the American craze for India at the turn of the twentieth century. From then until now, American ideas about South Asians have run in two opposing directions—at any point in time, South Asia and South Asians have been met simultaneously with desire and fear, excitement and derision. At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans desired 'India' for its exotic qualities—for what Americans saw as its sensuality and colour, its freer spirituality, its less constraining modes of dress, its imagery of palaces, maharajahs, Mughals and dancing girls.

But at the same time, American travel writers and missionaries portrayed the subcontinent and its peoples as barbaric and uncivilised, and after Punjabi immigrants began arriving in the Pacific Northwest around 1904, in search of lumber mill, cannery, and railroad jobs, they were portrayed as dire economic and cultural threats, a so-called 'Turban Tide', and were the victims or orchestrated racial violence. In the present, South Asian Americans are caught between the image of the model minority and the image of the terrorist. (And on the desirable side of the binary, of course, the 'exotic' has never gone away.) These aren't just media representations—they have real consequences in the lives of South Asians in the United States.

There are clear rewards—social, cultural, and professional—for those South Asians who enact the model minority image or provide the exotic, and there are clear risks for those who do not or cannot meet that ideal of desirability, or for those who display characteristics that have been portrayed as part of the image of 'the terrorist'— whether these are modes of dress and self-presentation, or community and political activism, or open criticism of US foreign policy or immigration policy. What I am trying to make clear by looking at these dynamics one-hundred years ago, is the fact that this phenomenon of xenophobia/Indophilia is at the core of how South Asians have been racialised in the United States at the same time that it structures how we act, what we strive for, and who we do and do not identify with.

The Bengal Garden Restaurant, 1951, one of the first Indian restaurants in midtown Manhattan, which was run by Habib Ullah (father of East Harlem actor/writer Alaudin Ullah) and Habib's first wife, Victoria, who was an immigrant to New York from Puerto Rico. Photo courtesy: Family of Idris Choudhury, Sr.

TDS: Given that the book is based on archival research, what do you think enabled the fostering of kinship between the black population of America and Bangali migrants?

VB: On the cynical side, one might say that because they were dark-skinned in the era of segregation, Bengalis could live nowhere else other than Black neighbourhoods and that the existing groups in those neighbourhoods didn't have a lot of say in the matter.

On the idealistic side, one might think that Bengalis on the one hand and African Americans and Puerto Ricans on the other, recognised common experiences of oppression—under colonialism on one hand and a US society structured around white supremacy on the other. My sense is that from one case to another, people's experiences were somewhere in a spectrum between these two extremes.

Portrait of Moksad Ali, one of the first of a group of chikon peddlers from Hooghly and Calcutta to settle in New Orleans in the 1890s. Courtesy of the descendants of Moksad and Ella Ali

In some cases, Bengali peddlers or ship-jumpers seem to have kept to themselves and did not intermingle so much with their Black neighbours, but in many cases, again to varying degrees, they became as much connected to the extended families of their African American or Puerto Rican wives as they were to other Bengali men. Whatever the dynamics were that brought Bengalis to US neighbourhoods of colour, I think there was something unique that these men and their neighbours and in-laws went through—they spent decades forging lives across the kinds of ethnic, cultural, and religious differences that are too often presumed to be insurmountable, decades sharing their experiences of daily life, love and labour across those differences. And even though those daily negotiations of difference were not always smooth, the fact that they happened, that they were possible, I think, says something important today, when South Asian communities more often than not set themselves apart from African American, Puerto Rican and other communities of colour in the US.

TDS: It seems from the book that the communities and families that developed in the US were largely syncretic, if not secular. Class status rather than religion seems to have been the defining identity. Your thoughts on this aspect.

VB: The men from Sylhet, Noakhali and elsewhere in present-day Bangladesh who settled in Harlem and elsewhere varied quite widely in terms of their practice of Islam, and that translated to their children. So, for example, Ibrahim Choudry, who was one of the community leaders in the New York/New Jersey area from the 1940s-60s, was also at the centre of the Bengali community's religious life during that period. He acted in the role of an Imam, leading prayers, organising Eid celebrations. He built ties with other Muslim organisations and communities in New York, including African American Muslims, and was part of a series of inter-faith activities with New York religious leaders of different faiths.

He tried to teach the daily practice of Islam to his son and to the children of his Bengali friends. According to his daughter, if Choudry was running errands around Manhattan and it came time for prayers, he would duck out of the busy street traffic into a phone booth, close the door and do his prayers there. There were other Bengali Muslim men, however, whose observance primarily consisted of adherence to dietary strictures and the celebration of Eid each year.

In some cases, these men taught their children and in other cases they did not, either because they wanted their children to 'be American' or because they had agreed with their wives that their children would be brought up in their wives' faith. And among the second generation, often 'identity' was more tied to the block they grew up on in Harlem than to anything else.

TDS: What role do you see or would want to see the retrieval of lost histories play today?

VB: In the US context, since the attacks of 9/11, South Asian Americans, and especially working-class Muslim and Sikh immigrants and their families, have dealt with an anti-immigrant tide that has only got stronger. There is a whole generation of Bangladeshi and other South Asian youth who experienced name-calling and bullying in their schools as they grew up, who witnessed or experienced harassment by government authorities during the roundups, detentions, and deportations; who witnessed or experienced threats and physical violence directed at members of their families and communities because of their brown skin or outward markers of their faith. Part of the narrative that Bangladeshis in particular face - part of the narrative that accompanies this violence - centres on the accusation that Bangladeshis are supposedly newcomers, recent immigrants who are undesirable and dangerous, don't have a place in the United States and should "go home".

 

[Yehuda]

Bengali men with their wives and children at the New York City clubhouse of the Pakistan League of America (an organisation that was predominantly Bengali in its membership) around 1950. Courtesy of Amina Ali Cymbala

The importance of the stories laid out in Bengali Harlem, I believe, is that they show that Muslim immigrants from regions that are now in Bangladesh and Indian West Bengal have been here in the United States, making their lives here alongside and as part of other communities of colour, for over one-hundred years, and while small in number, they have been part of the United States for as long as so many other US ethnic communities rooted in the historic wave of immigration that occurred between the 1880s and 1920s. Will the publishing of early South Asian migration stories stop the violence and xenophobia—no—but my hope is that the book will prove significant, as a source of knowledge and strength, for some of the young Bangladeshi Americans and other South Asian and Muslim Americans who are negotiating the current climate.

TDS: Ethnic identities seem to have been very fluid South Asians during the time-span of your narrative. In contrast, the ethnic ‘others’ are largely exclusionary today. What change do you see in the portrayal or perception of South Asians beyond the role of professionals?

VB: Part of what I tried to highlight in the book was the way that oppressed and marginalised groups in the US (whether South Asians or African Americans) learned to use white Americans' ignorance of peoples of color, to some limited advantage. So undocumented Bengali ship jumpers, for example, ‘disappeared’ into Harlem by blending in with African Americans and Puerto Ricans, and some African Americans in the U.S. South wore turbans and took on ‘Indian’ personas in order to gain greater mobility through segregated towns and cities. The subjectiveness and illogic of ‘race’ itself had cracks and fissures that racialised groups had to learn to navigate in order to survive. And from the white perspective, neighbourhoods like Harlem were simply considered ‘black’ or ‘negro’ neighborhoods—there was little understanding for the vast heterogeneity of these neighbourhoods that were home to people from all over the African diaspora, or for other groups, like the Bengalis, who made their home in those neighbourhoods.

Abdul Rub Mollah, one of the Bengali chikon peddlers with roots in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, who operated in New Orleans and other parts of the US South in the 1890s-1920s. Mollah ultimately settled in French Lick, Indiana, where he and his African American wife, Minnie, ran an Oriental Gift Shop on the towns main street. Courtesy of the US National Archives

Today, perhaps, what has changed is the number of South Asian immigrants—today much of the immigration from the subcontinent follows a more classic ‘ethnic enclave’ model in which Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Nepalis settle in neighbourhoods with people from their own regions. At its best, this pattern of migration helps new immigrants make the transition to the United States, at its worst, it creates a situation in which older immigrants might exploit newer ones. But what is lost, compared to the era that I've written about, is that South Asian immigrants that settle among other South Asians do not necessarily have to interact with, build friendships and relationships with, people from other racial, ethnic, or religious groups. This is something that the children of the earlier generation, who are now in their 60s and 70s lament—the fact that this makes South Asian immigrants of today more closed to and closed off from African Americans, Latinos, and other US communities of colour.

TDS: The early Bengali community has largely dispersed. Based on your research, do you think that their descendants from their marriages see the immigrant/South-Asian factor as part of their identity? That is, in what way, if any, does the Bengali Harlem survive today?

VB: For the most part, I'd say that the second generation that grew up in the 1940s-1960s integrated into their mothers' communities—African American, Puerto Rican, Afro-Caribbean. But I have yet to meet a member of that generation that does not still see the South Asian part of their identity as central part of who they are—who do not hold a special place for the Bengali aspects of their family, identity, and childhood experiences.

As someone of mixed background myself (Indian and Australian) I can say that people who are not ‘mixed’ sometimes underestimate the multiplicity and complexity that all of us can and do hold within us. There is a saying that has been catching on over the past decade or so among various people of mixed heritage: "I'm not half, I'm double." I think that very much holds with this group as well.

TDS: What projects are you currently working on?

VB: I'm now working on two projects connected to the book. The first is a documentary that I am working on with the East Harlem writer and actor Alaudin Ullah, whose father was one of the first Bengali men to settle in Harlem back in the 1930s (and whose story set me off on the path of historical research that came to fruition in the Bengali Harlem book).

The second is an oral history website, which I am for now calling The Lost Histories Project. It will be something between a web-based documentary and an archive where the children and descendants of the Bengali-African American and Bengali-Puerto Rican families of the 1940s-1960s will be able to contribute their stories and family photos. It will also include video interviews, archival documents, and dynamic maps. The idea is to create a space that will continue to grow as more and more people connected to these early histories come forward—a collectively-produced people's history.

An abridged version of this interview appeared on print

Moyukh Mahtab is member of the editorial team, The Daily Star

The lost histories of the Bengali Harlem

 

[Yehuda]

Dominican Republic Tops 3 Million Visitors in First Half

July 24th, 2016 | 9:44 pm

The Dominican Republic reported more than 3 million stayover visitors in the first half of 2016, a new record for what is the Caribbean’s most popular destination by volume.

The country saw 3.043 million arrivals, with 42.7 percent from the United States, 21.4 percent from the European Union and 18.3 percent from Canada.

Overall, that represented a 6.5 percent increase in arrivals for the first half.

The country’s hotel sector reported occupancy of 80.8 percent, significantly higher than the regional average of 70.1 percent in the first half of 2016.

The country also reported 236,079 cruise arrivals in the same period, according to new government data.

The Dominican Republic has 5,213 hotel rooms under construction, adding to an existing total of 70,030 rooms in the country.

— Caribbean Journal Staff

 

[Yehuda]

Afroparaguayas reclaman su identidad frente a la discriminación

26 de Julio, 2016

Las afrodescendientes de Paraguay reclaman mayor reconocimiento social frente a la discriminación que sufren, con motivo del Día Internacional de las Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la Diáspora.

Susana Arce, de la Red Paraguaya de Afrodescendientes, dijo a Efe que las personas afrodescendientes están "poco visibilizadas" en Paraguay y que si no se identifican como parte de ese grupo es porque temen ser discriminadas o porque desconocen su historia.

Arce, que vive en la comunidad afro de Kamba Kokué, a unos 160 kilómetros al sur de Asunción, explicó que siendo niña ya sentía la discriminación por el color de su piel en la escuela y escuchaba como muchos de sus compañeros responsabilizaban a los kambá ("negro", en guaraní) de "todo lo malo que ocurría en las ciudades".

Por este motivo, Arce negaba ser afrodescendiente, pero con el paso de los años fue recuperando el orgullo por sus ancestros "que lucharon y sufrieron como esclavos", hasta lograr "el respeto de las demás comunidades".

Arce trabaja ahora en la Municipalidad de Paraguarí, desde donde promueve eventos culturales, como la Noche de los Tambores, para recuperar la percusión africana, y obras teatrales que reconstruyen la historia de los afrodescendientes en Paraguay.

Según datos oficiales de un censo de 2007, la población que se reconoce como afroparaguaya está compuesta por unas 7.600 personas, que residen en su mayoría en las comunidades de Kamba Kuá (área metropolitana de Asunción), Kamba Kokué, y Emboscada (a unos 50 kilómetros al noreste de la capital).

El 60 por ciento de estos afrodescendientes en Paraguay cursó la educación primaria, pero solo un 1 por ciento de ellos accedió a estudios universitarios, lo que evidencia la "negación de sus derechos básicos", según el Fondo de Población de Naciones Unidas (UNFPA).

Foto ilustrativa contra la discriminación racial - bolivia.com

Además, el 90 por ciento de las mujeres afroparaguayas trabajan como empleadas domésticas, según estos datos.

Este el caso de Anastasia Fernández, quien viaja tres veces por semana desde Emboscada hasta Asunción para trabajar como cocinera en casa de una familia.

Aunque Fernández trabaja con retiro y puede seguir viviendo en su comunidad, cree que la migración hacia la capital para buscar trabajo influye en que muchas mujeres afroparaguayas de Emboscada, especialmente las más jóvenes, dejen de identificarse como tales, según dijo a Efe.

Agregó que en Emboscada, pese a la migración y el mestizaje con grupos indígenas, la mayor parte de los habitantes conserva "rasgos físicos afro", que van más allá del color de la tez o el cabello, como "la forma de la nariz o de los labios".

Su preocupación es tratar de inculcar a las generaciones más jóvenes "la curiosidad por conocer sus raíces", como una forma de evitar que renieguen de su identidad.

Las mujeres afrodescendientes latinoamericanas buscan cambiar la exclusión, la marginación, las grandes brechas de desigualdad y la falta de empleo derivadas del racismo y la discriminación, y presentes en todo el continente, según afirmó la Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la Diáspora durante una reunión en Nicaragua celebrada en 2015.

Ese año, la ONU instauró el Decenio de los Afrodescendientes, con el fin de promover y proteger los derechos de quienes se consideran descendientes de africanos, y que son unos 200 millones de personas solo en las Américas, el 90 % de las cuales vive en la pobreza.

Por su parte, el secretario general de la Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA), Luis Almagro, reclamó el pasado mes de marzo que se adopten "medidas de reparación histórica" por los "crímenes de lesa humanidad" sufridos por estas poblaciones en el continente, en muchos casos vinculados a la esclavitud. EFE

Afroparaguayas reclaman su identidad frente a la discriminación

 

[Poitier]

15 black Brazilian women writers that you should know

Note from BW of Brazil: Over the course of this blog’s existence, we have documented and demonstrated how Brazil consistently makes its black population invisible in various realms of society. Perhaps the only two areas in which Brazilians of visible African ancestry are allowed recognition and the opportunity to shine in the mainstream media is in the nation’s most popular sport, futebol, and the culture and style of the most Brazilian of all musical rhythms, the samba. Save these areas, Afro-Brazilians are basically rendered non-existent or the element of society that is to be avoided. Of course they may be featured on novelas (soap operas) typically as slaves, crooks, maids and persons who generally serve white people, but as we’ve argued in past posts, such representations are perhaps worse than complete invisibility because of the media’s power to naturalize certain beliefs about society.

One of the areas in which Afro-Brazilians are made most invisible is in the realm of literature. We were reminded of this once again a few weeks when one of Brazil’s most important literary festivals was a near complete blackout. As author Ana Maria Gonçalves reminded us once again, “Brazilian art still doesn’t know how to deal with black people.” Go to any Brazilian bookstore and one will have difficulty finding fictional or non-fictional books by black Brazilian authors or featuring Afro-Brazilians as the main characters in novels. And the excuse of there not being any Afro-Brazilian writers simply doesn’t fly as today’s post demonstrates. To remedy this problem, some Afro-Brazilians have created publishing companies that make this underappreciated literature available to the public. Of course these companies cannot compete with the big publishing houses that dominate the Brazilian book market, but similar to others finding creative ways to fill the void of representation in theater, television and print media, Afro-Brazilian writers are taking steps to let the worold know that they exist!

Below are a number of black women writers who are bringing the Afro-Brazilian experience to the world of literature. Some are relatively new to the game and some are seasoned veterans. If you read Portuguese or are interested in learning the language through the vision of black writers, check some of these ladies out!

15 black women authors of Brazilian Literature

How many Brazilian black women authors have you’ve ever read?

I bet not many, but they exist! And they are feminists, mothers, from the periphery, workers and researchers who know how to put into words the point of view of the black woman who feels everything in her skin. They deal with various topics in an exciting way, but unfortunately are poorly disseminated and published – it’s almost impossible to find their works in bookstores.

We talked with Bianca Gonçalves, USP (University of São Paulo) researcher and creator of the project Leia Mulheres Negras (Read Black Women), and together, we selected 15 black Brazilian women writers you need to know. After all, as Alzira Rufino would say: the possible, we are doing now; the impossible takes a little longer!

Maria Firmina dos Reis

No more, no less than the first female Brazilian novelist. Maria Firmina was born in Maranhão in 1825. Over her 92 years of life, she had several publications, the first was the novel Úrsula, one of the earliest writings produced by a woman in Brazil. During the abolitionist campaign, the book A Escrava (The Slave) reinforced the anti-slavery stance of Maria, who is the composer of the anthem of the abolition of slavery. Founder of the first free and mixed school of the state, the writer always fought for education, racial and gender equality.

Carolina Maria de Jesus

When asked about the reason for writing, Carolina said, “When I had nothing to eat, instead of cursing I would write. There are people who, when they are nervous, curse or think of death as a solution. I would write my diary.” The resident of the old favela (slum) Canindé, of north zone São Paulo, she worked as a scrap paper collector and recorded her daily life in old pages found in the trash. The writer was discovered by a journalist, and then had her book Quarto de Despejo – Diário de uma favelada, dealing with the day to day full of discrimination of a black woman, mother, poor and favelada (slum dweller) published. In addition, the book is a reference for Brazilian socio-cultural studies and even though it was published in 1960, tells of a reality which unfortunately is still that of a lot of people.

After these publications, the books Casa de Alvenaria, Pedaços de fome e Provérbioswere released. But there are also posthumous works, the latest is 2014’s Onde Estaes Felicidade.

Elizandra Souza

The writer and journalist also strives to give voice to the periphery in the South Zone of São Paulo. Elisandra Souza published the book of poetry Águas da Cabaça in 2012 and has interests in literary magazines and anthologies such as Negrafias and Cadernos Negros (an important publication that has maintained itself for over thirty years divulging names of black literature, well worth knowing). She is editor of Agenda Cultural da Periferia at Ação Educativa and founder of the collective Mjiba (Mjiba means revolutionary woman <3).

Jenyffer Nascimento

The body of Jenyffer’s work is intense and covers those super important and empowering themes that we love: love, identity, negritude, sexism and racism. The Pernambuco native is one more of the black feminist voices screaming out in the periphery through poetry. Some of her poems were published in the book Pretextos de Mulheres Negras (pretexts of black women), a work of poems that included the participation of 22 black women. The author released her first book Terra Fértil (Fertile Land) through the Mjiba collective (the one founded by Elizandra, remember?).

Jarid Arraes

Jarid show her indignation with strong and direct verses through engaged cords. Among over 40 published titles, the most popular, Não Me Chame de Mulata (don’t call memulata), yielded many discussions on social networks. In her book of short stories As Lendas de Dandara, the cearense (native of the state of Ceará) addresses human trafficking and slavery telling the story of the guerrilla quilombola Dandara dos Palmares (Zumbi’s wife) with a light touch and with a hint of fantasy fiction. Thecordelista (1) is committed to human rights projects and has a weekly column in the forum magazine called Questão de Gênero (Gender Issues).

Ana Maria Gonçalves

Born in Minas Gerais, Ana Maria Gonçalves was an advertiser in São Paulo, but went to the Island of Itaparica to write her first novel, Ao Lado e à Margem do que Sentes por Mim. The book, written in six months, was published independently. Later, Ana Maria went to live in New Orleans. Her second novel, Um Defeito de Cor, from 2006, won the Casa de las Américas prize in the category of Brazilian Literature, the work is inspired by the (beautiful) history of Luisa Mahin.

Conceição Evaristo

A PhD in literature, she published her first poem in 1990 in the thirteenth volume of Cadernos Negros. Since then, she’s published poems and short stories in various anthologies. Conceição was born in a slum in the city of Belo Horizonte and militates in and outside of the academic world. In addition to the recent storybook Olhos d’Água, she wrote the novel Ponciá Vicêncio, published in 2003, Becos da Memória in 2006, and Poemas da Recordação e Outros Movimentos in 2008.

Alzira Rufino

A professional in the field of nursing, she’s engaged in supporting victims of racial, sexual and domestic violence. Alzira was the first black writer to have her statement recorded in the Museu de Literatura Mário de Andrade (Mário de Andrade Museum of Literature) in São Paulo/SP. A pioneer in her region writing for the press from a perspective of gender, race and on violence against women, Alzira is also responsible for the increasing involvement of these issues in the media, in government and in everyday discussions, besides giving political visibility to black women of the Baixada Santista region.

 

[Poitier]

Geni Guimarães

Geni is also part of the team of authors published in Cadernos Negros. In 1979, she released her first book of poems, Terceiro Filho. The Fundação Nestlé (Nestle Foundation) published her volume of stories, Leite do Peito. Her book A Cor da Ternura received the prestigious Jabuti and Adolfo Aisen awards. Born in the state of São Paulo, the writer began her writing career publishing poems in newspapers in the city of Barra Bonita.

Miriam Alves

Miriam ministered Literatura e Cultura Afro-Brasileira (Afro-Brazilian Literature and Culture) courses at the Portguese School of Middlebury College in 2010, in the United States. She was part of Quilombohoje (São Paulo group of writers), for which she published several texts of prose and poetry. She has the following books of poems published: Momentos de Busca, Estrelas nos Dedos, the play Terramara, essays inBrasilafro Autorrevelado, Bará – na Trilha do Vento and the storybook Mulher Mat(r)iz. In addition, of course, to the poems published in Cadernos Negros and several national and international anthologies.

Lia Vieira

“Our role is to rescue creatively the vast African heritage. Black culture is much more than capoeira and couscous,” recalls Lia, speaking of the role of escritoras afrodescendentes (writers of African descent). Author of the book Só As Mulheres Sangram (Only Women Bleed) (this you can find in physical and virtual bookstores, Record publisher), she has a degree in economy, tourism, letters, a PhD in Education, is a researcher, artist, director of the Associação de Pesquisa da Cultura Afro-brasileira (Research Association of Afro-Brazilian culture) and militant. Too busy, no?

Cristiane Sobral

The author has three works: Não Vou Mais Lavar os Pratos, of poetry; stories inEspelhos, Miradouros, Dialéticas da Percepção; and her latest book of poems published in 2014 Em Só por Hoje Vou Deixar Meu Cabelo em Paz we have engaged poems against racism, from the perspective, above all, of the reconstruction of femininity of the black woman. Much of the poems make of cabelo crespo (kinky/curly hair) the lyrical starting point for the denouncement, steadying the end of their empowerment,” says Bianca Gonçalves. Cristiane affirms that she writes like a cry for freedom. The Rio native, resident of Brasília is a mother and Director of Cultural Production and management in the Sindicato dos Escritores do Distrito Federal (Union of Writers of the Federal District).

Cidinha da Silva

You may also know this writer from her blog. About her book Sobre-viventes! that will be released on May 23, the Minas Gerais native explains “It goes beyond that said with the saying. For me, this is literature. Saying beyond the said. Intentionally hiding in order to reveal. To reveal the concealed. In this game, unraveling the human. But, human is still generic: this book lays bare the survivors and the living.”

Cidinha became a great writer after she began publishing scholarly articles on social and gender relations in the university department of History. It was from there that she developed a keen critical sense of speaking of everyday racism. Her first book Cada Tridente em Seu Lugar, addressed the controversial issue of access and permanence of blacks in universities. The Minas Gerais native has written novels, children’s literature and chronicles.

Esmeralda Ribeiro

Writer, journalist and coordinator of the Quilombhoje group, Esmeralda participates in lectures and seminars addressing her experience as a writer. In addition to poems in national and international collections, Malungos e Milongas is a book of short stories published by the author. About how her literary career began, Esmeralda says “death, pain, love and longing were feelings that brought another rhythm to my life; it was in 1978 with the death of my father that I wrote a poem in prose entitled Sábado (Saturday), with this poem I walked by paths until ending up in my literary solitude. My favorite subjects are suspense, magic, surrealism, police.”

Mel Duarte

Mel Duarte even has to poetry inspired by Jair Bolsonaro. The São Paulo writer is an activist and cultural producer. She recently released the book Negra, Nua e Crua (Black Woman, Nude and Raw). According to Mel, her latest work is compiled from experiences and sensations. “There it’s not only Mel talking. From the reaction I get from other women, I realize that it has a lot of us and that’s what gives me the gas to continue.” In 2013, the poet published the book Fragmentos Dispersos (Dispersed fragments).

Source: Tão Feminino

Note

1. A cordelista is a person who does Cordel literature (from the Portuguese term,literatura de cordel, literally “string literature”), which are popular and inexpensively printed booklets or pamphlets containing folk novels, poems and songs, which are produced and sold in fairs and by street vendors in Brazil, principally in the Northeast. They are so named because they are hung from strings in order to display them to potential clients. Source

15 black Brazilian women writers that you should know

 

[Yehuda]

Why We Shouldn't Forget This Community When Talking About #BlackLivesMatter

• 
• JUL 27, 2016 12:45 PM
• ANDREA GONZALEZ-RAMIREZ

PHOTO: REDENS DESROSIERS FOR NEW VISUAL COLLECTIVE.

Dominican singer Maluca during the 2016 New York City Afro-Latino Festival earlier this month.

What does it mean to be Afro-Latino in the time of Black Lives Matter?

This community is often overlooked when we discuss race in the United States, almost as if being Black and being Latino were mutually exclusive. But you probably recognize the names of celebrities such asZoe Saldana, Rosario Dawson, and Joan Smalls, even if you never knew that they were Afro-Latinos. They’re some examples of the scope and influence of this community across the U.S.

Black Latinos make up almost a quarter of the Latinos in the U.S.,according to the Pew Research Center, and through different initiatives are fighting the invisibility they face.

"Not everyone identifies as Afro-Latino. People use [terms such as] Black Latina,Latinegra, Afrodescendants," Janel Martínez, founder and editor-in-chief of Ain't I Latina?, told Refinery29. "But what all of them mean is that you're a descendant of Latin America by way of Africa. Or, you've a parent who's African-American and one who's Latino. It's a way of recognizing our Black roots."

The Honduran-American and daughter of parents who are part of the Garifuna community — a mixed race minority in Central America — started identifying as "Afro-Latina" in college.

"People questioned me because I was a Black woman, but my last name is Martínez and I spoke Garifuna," she said. "And I embraced that term."

Earlier this month, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed in by police. For Angelique Crawford, a 29-year-old New Yorker of Costa Rican descent, the New York City Afro-Latino Festival provided a safe haven.

"Being here is healing, it's an experience full of love. It's everything I needed after the most horrendous week I've experienced in 2016," she told Refinery29. "I'm absolutely at all times a Black woman from a Latin [American] country, embracing that."

Martínez also has a strong sense of what her roots are. She believes, too, that the Afro-Latino community and the #BlackLivesMatter movement are inevitably intertwined.

"You may not see their names in the headlines, but there are Afro-Latinos within the movement who are doing the work," said Martínez.

PHOTO: MARIO RUBÉN CARRIÓN.

The panel #BlackLivesMatter Beyond Borders: Race, Space & Consciousness in the International Decade of Afrodescendants Part II was held at New York City's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in early July.

It isn't the first collaborative movement led by Blacks and Latinos together. For example, Martínez pointed out that the Puerto Rican Young Lords organization, a nationalist group based in the U.S., had strong ties to the Black Panthers Party and the Black Power movement in the 1960s.

That hasn’t stopped the Latino community from being left out of the conversation about Blackness, not only in the U.S., but in Latin American countries, as well, according to Yvette Modestin, a Panamanian immigrant and the coordinator of the Black Latinas network, Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la Diáspora.

She said her life experiences as a Black Latina and the life experiences of those who have been killed by the police or who have died in their custody in the States are interconnected. But this fact is not part of the mainstream conversation.

"I am Sandra Bland," she said during the panel #BlackLivesMatter Beyond Borders: Race, Space & Consciousness in the International Decade of Afrodescendants Part II. "Michael Brown could have been Panamanian."

Today, about 130 million people of African descent live in Latin America, according to the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America at Princeton University.

However, this community's presence is often overlooked. For example, in Mexico, it wasn't an option to identify oneself as Black in the national census until last year. Other countries, such as Costa Rica and Venezuela, share this problem. In Puerto Rico, people say that it’s possible to "mejorar la raza" — improve the race — through interracial marriages.

Modestin said explaining what it means to be Black and Latino can be uncomfortable for others. But it's still a conversation that people must have inside and outside of the Latino communities.

"This is about colorism within us. This is about classicism within us," Modestin said. "The healing is not gonna happen with how they see us. The healing is gonna happen with how we see ourselves."

For Martínez, educating the Latino community about the Blackness within it and educating the mainstream is crucial to change the way Afro-Latinos are perceived. She believes it's a conversation that's not only necessary among adults, but one that needs to happen with the younger generations. A conversation that emphasizes the beauty of their identity.

She said, "Be proud that you're Black. Be proud that you're Latino. That's a beautiful thing."


Why We Shouldn't Forget This Community When Talking About #BlackLivesMatter

 

[Yehuda]

Mujeres piden ser visibilizadas en Caribe Sur

Afrodescendientes se reunieron para discutir principales retos

Ileana Lacayo Ortiz | 26/07/2016



Este 25 de julio se celebró el Día Internacional de las Mujeres Afrodescendientes y en Bluefields diferentes organizaciones se reunieron para conmemorar la ocasión y hablar de los principales retos.

“Hoy (ayer) se conmemora 24 años de que se oficializara esta fecha como nuestro día internacional, ya que fue el primer encuentro internacional de mujeres negras reunidas en Santo Domingo, República Dominicana, en 1992, en ese momento se aglutinaron unas 400 mujeres de 70 diferentes países”, expresó Johana Whatherborn, activista de la Red de Mujeres Afro.

La Red de Mujeres Afro en Nicaragua organizó un foro para debatir sobre la propuesta que presentarán al Gobierno de Nicaragua para que el próximo censo nacional incluya la variable étnica.

Para la concejal Lourdes Aguilar Gibs, en el Caribe Sur, las autoridades deberían de celebrar con altura este día, porque aquí se concentra la mayoría de población afrodescendiente de Nicaragua. “Lo que vemos es a las mismas mujeres de siempre organizando un acto, pero vacío de presencia institucional”, dijo.

Para Nora Newball, presidenta del Gobierno Comunal Creole, no hay nada que celebrar. “Llevamos más de un siglo en resistencia para obtener el reconocimiento como pueblo y respeto como nación afro; sin embargo el Gobierno de Nicaragua el pasado 31 de marzo aprobó el territorio Creole de Bluefields por 149,577 hectáreas, lo que representa solamente el siete (por ciento) del total demandado”.

¿CUÁNTAS SON?

Zada Saphrey, activista feminista afrodescendiente, dijo que la principal demanda de las mujeres negras de Nicaragua es ser visibilizadas en el próximo censo nacional, “solo así podemos saber cuántos somos y dónde estamos exactamente, con estos datos oficiales podremos demandar el diseño de políticas públicas incluyentes y sostenibles para la realidad de nuestros pueblos afrodescendientes”.

Mujeres piden ser visibilizadas en Caribe Sur

 

[Yehuda]

Afrodescendant population struggle to be taken into account

Louisa Reynolds

7/18/2016

Young garifunas from the municipality of Livingston preserve their traditional music. / Louisa Reynolds

Afro-Guatemalans feel invisible in a country where a deep racism persists.

Afro-Guatemalan journalist Joanna Wetherborn experienced racist abuse for the first time at the age of 16 when she attended a new school and was bullied by her classmates. “Nobody talked to me. It was hell. Kids used to exchange drawings depicting me as a beast,” she recalls.

Two years later, when she finished high school and applied to study at the state-funded University of San Carlos, Wetherborn found she was not eligible for a scholarship, as funding was only available for Mayan and garifuna students.

As the descendant of Jamaicans who emigrated to the city of Puerto Barrios, close to Belize’s southern border, in the 1920s, to work for the US banana corporation United Fruit Company, Wetherborn belongs to a minority of creole Afro-Guatemalans rather than the garifuna ethnic group, mixed race descendants of West African, Central African, Carib and Arawak people, who live along the Caribbean coast of Central America.

“I refused to label myself as garifuna purely to meet a quota and get a scholarship so I had to apply for a student loan instead,” says Wetherborn.

During her university years, Wetherborn often found that her lecturers appeared to be taken aback by the fact that she was intelligent and got top grades. “My performance surprised them. They always stereotype you as the girl who dances and cooks dishes with coconut milk. They never talk about our achievements or our contributions to the economy,” she says.

Like many other Guatemalan women, Wetherborn is often subjected to street harassment by men and says that black women are often targeted in a particularly vicious and violent manner. “They (men) graphically describe how they’re going to rape me, which they don’t do to other women walking ahead of me. All women suffer harassment but other women are not harassed in such a vulgar and morbid way because there’s a sexualized stereotype of black women as being sexually available, as women who are there to be used,” says Wetherborn.

Absence of reliable data

Guatemala’s afrodescendant minority was officially recognized for the first time when the Guatemalan armed forces and left-wing guerrilla groups signed the 1996 Peace Accords, ending a 36-year-long civil war in which more than 200,000 civilians were killed.

The agreements, which were woven into the Guatemalan Constitution, acknowledge that Guatemala is a “multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual country” and that

“The parties recognize and respect the identity and political, economic, social, and cultural rights of the Maya, Garifuna, and Xinca people.” However, this official recognition of the afrodescendant community excludes non-garifuna blacks such as Wetherborn.

One of the first steps taken by the Guatemalan government towards addressing the needs of the afrodescendant population has been the provision of bilingual education garifuna and Spanish, since 2014, in three schools in the municipalities of Livingston and Puerto Barrios, in the eastern department of Izabal, where the majority of students are garifuna.

Benneditha Cantanhede da Silva, an expert on afrodescendant and garifuna issues, says this is an important step towards preserving garifuna culture as migration and fear of ridicule if they speak their own language has led many garifuna children to abandon their native language.

However, the absence of reliable census data on the afrodescendant population makes it difficult to implement wider public policies to address its specific needs.

The latest official statistics on the afrodescendant community (based on the 2002 census) place the number of black Guatemalans at 5,100, less than 1 percent of the population. However, research carried out by various garifuna organizations estimate that the real figure is closer to 200,000, including some 10,000 creole afrodescendants.

“A census is crucial because invisibilization leads to a lack of public policies. As long as we don’t know who they [the afrodescendants] are and how many they are, public policies will be based on pure fantasy,” says Cantanhede da Silva.

Racial discrimination

At the crux of the problem, believe afrodescendant leaders, is the deeply ingrained racism in Guatemalan society, embodied, for instance, in racist depictions of black people in the media.

In January this year, Jimmy Morales, a former comedian who ran for the right-wing and pro-military National Convergence Front (FCN), took office. Throughout his acting career, one of the roles he played, in blackface and donning an afro wig, was Black Pitaya (black dragonfruit), a character that exploits offensive stereotypes about afrodescendants.

“It’s a character that ridicules afrodescendants and wormed its way into the collective imagination with his bland jokes. Guatemalans are afraid of this population, they refer to people of color as ‘dirty blacks’ and ‘lazy blacks’ and make jokes about them,” says semiologist Ramiro MacDonald.

In compliance with the Peace Accords, the Guatemalan government created in 2002 a Presidential Commission Against Racism and Discrimination Against Indigenous Peoples (CODISRA) to investigate and prosecute cases of racial discrimination.

However, afrodescendant leaders say that non-Mayan voices often go unheard in this institution. “CODISRA alone cannot fight racism in Guatemala. When people talk about multiculturalism in Guatemala they refer to the diversity of Mayan cultures and when you dare to speak about other identities people feel uncomfortable. Even though we’ve had a close relationship with indigenous groups, the opportunities for participation are so limited that people think that if you highlight one group you’re taking away their space,” says Wetherborn.

Garifuna leader Gloria Núñez de Silva, a Guatemalan representative from Afroamérica XXI, a Latin American Afrodescendant organization. believes political representation is the only way to ensure that afrodescendant voices are heard but clientelist practices and the huge amount of resources needed to launch a campaign have prevented garifuna women from running for office. Afrodescendant leaders often point out that black politicians such as Mario Ellington Lambe, who served as Minister of Culture and Sport under the administration of President Oscar Berger (2004-2008), are only appointed to ministries that are underfunded and have little political clout.

“We’re fighting to be taken into account and to be seen from the waist upwards rather than from the waist downwards. One of our greatest challenges is political participation. As garifuna women do not engage in corruption, they end up marginalized because positions have a price. To run for mayor you need to pay 1.5 million quetzales [US$65,500],” says Núñez. – Latinamerica Press.

Afrodescendant population struggle to be taken into account

 

[BigMan]

mad Garifuna now in the States

 

[Poitier]

Juleyka Lantigua-Williams
1:28 PM / July 29, 2016
When a Dictator Becomes Part of Your Family

A poster that was required to hang in every Dominican home during the Trujillato. It reads, "In this home Trujillo is a national symbol." "Rectitude. Liberty. Work. Morality." "1955: Year of the Benefactor of the Motherland" (Wikipedia public domain)
The Dominican Republic, where I’m from, is among the countries in the Americas that had authoritarian rulers for multiple decades. Almost all of my uncles and aunts, and both my parents, were born during Rafael Trujillo’s reign of terror, which began in 1930 and ended with his assassination in 1961. His influence on the country, and on my own life, is still felt today.

When I was growing up, adults in my family talked politics all the time, almost as much as they talked baseball. But in our family, politics was personal because my father’s father briefly worked for Trujillo, as an assistant of some sort. At our weekend family gatherings, some aunt or uncle could be found surrounded by nieces and nephews like me, breathing in a fresh retelling of a hand-me-down story from my grandfather’s past—in hushed whispers, of course. My grandfather himself never uttered a single word about his work with the dictator, and he took that part of his life to his grave a few years ago.

In some versions of my relatives’ stories, my grandfather was the official food taster, to whom his boss’s meals would be presented for inspection and sampling. (To this singular culinary task my family attributed his strict adherence to mealtimes and table manners.) Other renditions described him as a personal secretary of sorts, handwriting dictated letters to society families whosedaughters were “invited” to lavish balls thrown at the executive palace, where many young ladies were summarily deflowered by the head of state in well appointed bedrooms.

(Having studied Dominican history, I am highly suspicious of the circumstances that may have led to my grandfather working for such a man. The autocrat was known for conscripting people into his service or else.)

I am partially a product of the codes and mores established by my grandparents, who raised most of their children during the Trujillato. I was raised to accept and respect strict hierarchies in my own family and in organizations in general. I was expected to prefer and defer to men for decisions, control, and public leadership—all things I slowly unlearned and relinquished as an immigrant in 1980s New York City, where the only valid code was hard work.

Dominican author Junot Díaz has said that all Dominicans are Trujillo’s children. I interviewed him in 2007 just before his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was published. Much of the plot takes place during the Trujillato, which the novel presents as a cosmic curse that befalls the island nation. This is what Díaz told me about Trujillo’s place in his own life:

The evil of the father lasts. The consequences of those kinds of patriarchal traumas last to the point where the person no longer has contact with the origins of that evil. I had no concept that I was Trujillo’s son. I had no concept until I was reading, got older, went traveling, and I was like, OK, my dad was a total copy of Trujillo. I mean he grew up in the military, during the Trujillato. He thought Trujillo was a great f* man, and we had in my family—and this is very common in many Third-World families—a dictatorship in the house. La dictadura de la casa. And everyone has different dictaduras, but the one that I lived under was a dictadura that would’ve made Trujillo very, very comfortable, because he helped design it.

The idea of having a genetic link to Trujillo—an evil force so pure that it warped an entire country—has stayed with me ever since. His legacy sometimes cautions me when I encounter limited thinking, when I consider untapped reasons for choices I’ve made, and as I raise two sons whose worldview I hope to make more capacious and expansive than mine.

***

Did you grow up under an authoritarian regime? Did your parents or other close family members? Please share your stories with us at hello@theatlantic.com and describe how you think the dictator’s legacy shaped you.

When a Dictator Becomes Part of Your Family

 

[Yehuda]

UEF celebrates 3rd annual observation of Emancipation Day

Features — 30 July 2016 — by Micah Goodin

BELIZE CITY, Thurs. July 28, 2016–The UBAD Educational Foundation (UEF) is organizing its third annual observation of Emancipation Day in a thought-provoking fashion.

In 2014 the UEF through its treasurer, Virginia Echols, collaborated with Belizean Egbert Hignijo to host an eighteen-member delegation of students from the San Jose Community College and San Jose Evergreen Community College in California. Those students majored in areas of African studies, ethnic studies and anthropology. The theme that year was “Understanding Enslavement in Belize 2014.”

In 2015 the UEF organized a lecture featuring Myrtle Palacio and Dr. Jahlani Niah.

Palacio, the PUP’s Former Secretary General, completed her Master of Science degree at the College of Urban and Public Affairs at Armstrong University, Berkeley, in December 1995. Palacio’s thesis was entitled, “Redefining Ethnicity, the Experience of the Garifuna and Creole in Post-Independent Belize.”

Dr. Jahlani Niah, a farmer, author and lecturer at UWI’s Mona Campus, was joined by his wife Dr. Sonjah Stanley Niah, who holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and a Bachelor’s degree in Geography from UWI.

However, this year’s invited guests who are scheduled to present lectures between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. at the University of the West Indies Open Campus on Princess Margaret Drive are Omitade Adediran and Dr. Kurt B. Young.

Adediran’s lecture is focused on traditional African spirituality as it relates to the Afro-Belizean in 2016.

Young’s lecture will focus on Belize’s role in Pan-Africanism. Young, who is of Belizean heritage, holds a Master’s degree in Political Science and is an associate professor and chairperson at Clark Atlanta University.

Dr. Kurt B. Young will be joined by his wife Arna Young, and cousin Paul Jones.

His Belizean roots can be traced back to the Youngs and Hoares from Gracie Rock, the Thurtons and Tuckers from Belize City and the Jones family in the Lake Independence area.

On July 31 from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m., there will be a “singspiration” session at the Queen Street Baptist church.

From 10:00 to 11:00 p.m. refreshments will be served and from 11:00 to 12:00 p.m. a service will be held to recognize the freedom of our enslaved ancestors and their freedom in Christ.

On August 1 at 6 a.m. the general public is invited to release colorful paper boats into the sea at the House of Culture to “symbolize the freedom of our former enslaved African ancestors.”

At 8 a.m. on that same day stakeholders in the activities for Emancipation Day will be present on KREM’s Wake Up Belize Morning Vibes talk show.

At 10 a.m. the Museum of Belize is to launch an exhibition titled, “enSlaved” at its Gabourel Lane address, which will remain open for an entire year.

All Belizeans are welcome to attend the various events organized for Emancipation Day. The UEF hopes that Belize will officially celebrate and recognize Emancipation Day.

UEF also acknowledges, and expresses appreciation, for the support and collaboration of the following community partners: ISCR/NICH, the Museum of Belize, Queen Street Baptist Church, House of Culture in Belize City, Kwanzaa Youth Club, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, University of the West Indies, and Kremandala.