At her small apartment near the National Cathedral in Northwest Washington, Maria Martins quietly watched as an African American friend
studied a picture of her mother. "Oh," the friend said, surprise in her voice. "Your mother is white."
She turned to Martins. "But you are black."
That came as news to Martins, a Brazilian who, for 30 years before immigrating to the United States, looked in the mirror and saw a morena
-- a woman with caramel-colored skin that is nearly equated with whiteness in Brazil and some other Latin American countries. "I didn't realize
I was black until I came here," she said.
That realization has come to hundreds of thousands of dark-complexioned immigrants to the United States from Brazil, Colombia, Panama
and other Latin nations with sizable populations of African descent. Although most do not identify themselves as black, they are seen that way
as soon as they set foot in North America.
Their reluctance to embrace this definition has left them feeling particularly isolated -- shunned by African Americans who believe they are
denying their blackness; by white Americans who profile them in stores or on highways; and by lighter-skinned Latinos whose images
dominate Spanish-language television all over the world, even though a majority of Latin people have some African or Indian ancestry.
The pressure to accept not only a new language and culture, but also a new racial identity, is a burden some darker-skinned Latinos say they
face every day.
"It's overwhelming," said Yvette Modestin, a dark-skinned native of Panama who works as an outreach coordinator in Boston. "There's not a
day that I don't have to explain myself."
