Identity, Belonging, and the Invisible Inheritance

joie
Feb 17
15 min read

THE NOURISHMENT OF REPRESENTATION

I grew up in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, a time and place that feels increasingly distant from where I am now—geographically, temporally, and perhaps spiritually. My elementary school was a microcosm of New York City itself: a beautiful collision of Caribbean accents, African American histories, Puerto Rican pride, Dominican grit, and immigrant dreams. What I remember most vividly is not the curriculum or the classroom lessons, but the faces of my teachers. They were Black and brown. They looked like my mother. They looked like my neighbors. And in their presence, even as a child who didn't yet have language for such concepts, I felt something profound: I belonged. Someone who looked like me already existed in a position of authority, of knowledge, of care. Looking back now through the lens of adulthood, I understand that this representation—this simple fact that my educators shared my brown skin and textured hair—nourished something essential in my young psyche. It told me, without words, that my existence was not an anomaly to be explained but a natural part of the world's design.

THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US

Yet even in that diverse sanctuary, I was learning another lesson simultaneously: division runs deeper than proximity. My childhood friend Carlos—not his real name, but a name that belongs to a memory I've carried for four decades—lived in the same tight-knit neighborhood as I did. Our neighborhood was predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican, a place where Spanish echoed from fire escapes and the smell of cooking seemed to emanate from every home. We knew our neighbors. We played in the same streets. We walked to school together. And yet, despite this proximity and the intimacy of our neighborhood, his family occupied a different world from mine. His family was white-passing, which seemed to grant them a kind of invisibility and protection that insulated them from the struggles the rest of us navigated daily. I spent my afternoons at his house while my mother worked and attended university, and his home was a lesson in the unspoken hierarchy of color that existed even within our shared neighborhood, our shared language, our shared culture.

I remember the day his grandmother met me. The words came in rapid Spanish, directed at Carlos, and I understood every single word: "Tell your friend to go home. There isn't enough food to feed the animals." In her arithmetic, I was unwanted, unworthy. Later, there were other moments that stung differently. When my younger sister visited with beads in her hair—a popular trend at the time that Black girls had made fashionable—Carlos's cousin asked her mother if she could wear the same style. But when she posed the question in Spanish, the response cut across the room like a blade: "No mija, you have good hair. You don't want African hair. It's ugly. That's why her mother put beads in her hair." My sister was only six years old at the time heard every word. That family was deeply religious—we spent time together in storefront Pentecostal churches, singing and praying together. These were God-loving people who opened their home to us, who invited us into their spiritual life. Maria's (Carlos’s aunt) mother was genuinely one of the kindest women I've known. She made the best pastelon and Dominican yellow cake that made the entire neighborhood salivate when she brought them to church potlucks. But there was a cruelty that lived alongside that kindness, unexamined and unquestioned. The same hands that prepared food for community gatherings had no trouble telling a six-year-old child that her hair—our hair—was ugly.

THE TURNING POINT

What changed everything was when my mother came to pick me up one day, accompanied by my cousin who was in her late teens—fiery, protective, unafraid of challenging anyone, no matter their age or their presumed authority. My mother arrived strong, beautiful, unmistakably and unapologetically Black and Latina. Suddenly, Carlos's grandmother's entire demeanor transformed. She became warm and affectionate, as if a switch had been flipped inside her. She had realized my mother was Latina, and in that revelation, my worth shifted. I was no longer the dark-skinned child to be tolerated but a member of an extended cultural family. The woman who had been cold to me now called me "Negrito"—a term of endearment that, in her mouth, revealed something important: the distance she kept from actual Blackness even as she claimed proximity to it.

My sister, though, had not forgotten comment about her hair being African and therefore ugly. She had carried them with her, small and sharp as stones in her pocket. When the adults began exchanging pleasantries—that performative politeness that adults use to smooth over tensions—my sister, with the clarity that only a wronged child possesses, repeated in perfect Spanish everything that had been said about African hair being ugly and worthless. The shock on that woman's face was priceless. The room went silent. And then my cousin lunged at them, protective and furious. Chaos ensued. My mother grabbed my cousin. Someone yelled. And we left, never to return.

But we took something with us: the pastelon recipe that we would later make ourselves, the memory of being unwanted in a kitchen that smelled like home, and the understanding that even God-loving people—even kind people—could harbor hatred toward the darkness in others. Even in churches where they prayed to a God who, they believed, loved all his children equally.

THE COMMUNITY AND THE FEAST

Before that day, before the sting of rejection, there was another woman in our neighborhood—our neighbor Ana—who embodied something entirely different. When Ana cooked, the entire neighborhood seemed to pause and hold its breath in anticipation. The aromas of her kitchen—plantains, black beans, sofrito, the caramelization of onions and garlic, the deep earthiness of cumin and oregano—drifted through our building and into the streets, making everyone salivate with anticipation. She made dishes with roots in African soil: rice and beans cooked with coconut milk, collard greens seasoned with garlic and onions, stewed meats that fell off the bone, dishes that carried within them centuries of adaptation and survival.

These foods were born from the African diaspora, adapted and transformed in Caribbean kitchens, carrying within them the memory of survival and the alchemy of making sustenance from necessity. In Ana's kitchen, these weren't just meals—they were acts of cultural preservation, of resistance against the forces that wanted to erase where we came from.

While our parents worked, Ana looked after all the neighborhood kids without fanfare or expectation of payment. She was the keeper of something precious—not just food, but community. Her kitchen was where we learned that love could be expressed through nourishment, that generosity was a form of resistance against the fragmentation that poverty and racism tried to impose on us. She taught us, without words, that our bodies were worthy of care, that our hunger mattered, that we belonged. When I think of belonging—true belonging, unconditional belonging—I think of Ana's kitchen: the democracy of hunger satisfied, the way food could temporarily erase the hierarchies that divided us outside her doors, the way a woman could love children who didn't belong to her as fiercely as if they were her own.

Ana's kitchen was our first experience of what community could be. It was our first lesson in the kind of love that didn't require you to change your hair or deny your ancestry. It was our first taste of home.

AN IDENTITY CRISIS WITHOUT RESOLUTION

Growing up, I moved between these worlds—between kindness and cruelty, between representation and erasure, between neighborhoods that spoke Spanish and identities that didn't fit any category that existed. I was Black and Latino, but constantly asked to prove my heritage, as if these identities were items to produce on demand, like documents at a border crossing. As a child, I suffered what I can only call an identity crisis—not the temporary kind that passes with adolescence, but a fundamental disorientation about where I belonged, about which language held the truth of who I was, about which cultural memory was really mine.

THE WEIGHT OF THE QUESTION

In 2016, I was shooting for a fashion brand in Santo Domingo. A local woman approached our crew, and she was searching for something—but no one on the set could understand what she wanted. She made her way toward me and attempted to communicate. She didn't speak English; she spoke Spanish. But when I responded to her in Spanish, her first reaction was shock, then confusion. "You speak Spanish?" she asked in Spanish, her voice carrying the same incredulity I had heard so many times before. Then she said something that blew my mind: "But you're Black!" And I said "So are you!".

Years later, in Mexico City in 2025, I was enjoying lunch at the Museum of Modern Art, wearing a sweatshirt that said "Essentials, Fear of God"—the name of the brand, not a religious statement. The family seated next to me had a whole debate about my sweatshirt, pointing and whispering. The father in particular kept looking over at me as if he wanted to ask a question but wasn't sure if he should. Finally, I responded in Spanish, informing them it was the name of the brand. His son spit his drink out. His wife went pale. But the father smiled and asked, "How are you able to speak Spanish so well?"

I was bracing for the familiar "But you're Black" comment, but it didn't come. Instead, what emerged was a genuine cultural exchange. I discovered he was a professor, his wife a doctor. The family was well-traveled and cosmopolitan, having lived in multiple countries. They had assumed I was African American because of how I looked. I pulled out my heritage, explained my bilingual childhood, and we had a great debate on the African diaspora in Latin America and the legacies of colonialism. His wife had African ancestry herself, she revealed. I walked away from that encounter with something important: not all people have ill intention. Some—maybe most—white Latinos tend to be willfully ignorant, but others are genuinely open to understanding. Others are eager to learn and to reckon with their own family histories.

Still, I've had strange interactions, especially with Argentines. A close friend's boyfriend refused to have a conversation in Spanish with me, despite my fluency. Another friend later explained that it was probably connected to Argentina's particular form of racial denial—a belief that Spanish-speaking people outside of Argentina and Spain are somehow "low born," less civilized, less worthy of respect. My friend told me that this belief system had been reinforced through Argentina's own history of erasing its Black population. During the Paraguayan War, she explained, the African slaves and Afro-Argentines were sent to the front lines to fight, and many were killed. The country's subsequent mythology of whiteness—the idea that Argentina is a European country, not a Latin American one—was built on the literal erasure of Black Argentines. But that's another story, another layer of the same architecture of superiority that colonialism constructed centuries ago.

THE INVISIBILITY OF REPRESENTATION

When I was growing up in New York City in the 1980s, what society recognized as Latino was either white-passing or Indigenous. On television, in magazines, in advertising—the spaces where culture was defined and reflected back to us—I saw a truncated, carefully curated version of Latinidad. There was barely any Black representation. We were not the face of Latino culture. We were not on the magazine covers or in the advertisements. We were not the ones invited to perform our culture on the mainstream stages. There was barely any Black representation, and what little existed was usually tokenistic or stereotypical.

But narratives can shift. In recent years, I have watched as a new generation has emerged with different stories to tell. Lupita Nyong'o claimed her identity as both African and Latina, refusing to choose, refusing to hide any part of herself. Amara La Negra moved through the world in her dark skin with unapologetic confidence that seemed almost revolutionary for those of us who had grown up believing our darkness was a liability, our Blackness a burden, our nappy hair something to be ashamed of. These women, among others, began to make visible what was always there but had been consistently denied: that Hispanics come in Black. That Latinos are not a monolith. That our diaspora includes everyone—the light-skinned and the dark-skinned, the Indigenous and the African, the mixed and the unmixed. That we all belong here, in our full, complicated, contradictory, beautiful complexity.

THE DIASPORA—ORIGIN AND TRAJECTORY UNDERSTANDING DIASPORA

A diaspora is more than a migration, more than a scattering. The term refers to the forced or voluntary dispersal of a people from their homeland, but more importantly, it describes the networks, the memories, the cultural formations that are sustained across geographic distance and generational time. The African diaspora refers specifically to the millions of people of African descent who now live outside the African continent, their presence a direct result of centuries of enslavement, colonialism, and the violent redistribution of human beings across oceans.

THE NUMBERS AND THE GEOGRAPHY

Between 1500 and 1867, approximately 12.5 million Africans were enslaved and forcibly transported to the Americas. This figure represents the largest transoceanic deportation in human history. Remarkably, the vast majority did not arrive in what is now the United States. Only 3-5 percent of the Africans brought to the Western Hemisphere ended up in the North American colonies. The remaining millions—the vast majority—were dispersed throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Brazil alone received approximately 3.2 million enslaved Africans—more than ten times the number that arrived in the United States. The Caribbean islands received another 4.5 million. Colombia, Cuba, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, and all the other nations that would eventually comprise Latin America absorbed millions more.

TOP 10 COUNTRIES RECEIVING THE MOST ENSLAVED AFRICANS

1. Brazil - 4.9 million (approximately 40% of all enslaved Africans transported to the Americas)

2. Cuba - 773,000+

3. French Caribbean (Saint-Domingue/Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique) - 1.3 million combined

4. Jamaica - 748,000+

5. Mexico (Spanish America) - 2.5 million (entire Spanish America)

6. Colombia - 600,000+

7. Dominican Republic - 584,000+

8. Puerto Rico - 347,000+

9. Venezuela - 400,000+

10. Peru - 95,000+

THE ORIGINS OF THE ENSLAVED

The Africans who were enslaved came from diverse regions. Approximately 40 percent originated from Angola in Southern Africa. Another 30 percent came from the Bay of Benin in West Africa. The remainder came from various other regions, including Senegambia and the Guinea Coast. These people brought with them distinct languages, belief systems, and cultural practices that would profoundly shape the societies of Latin America and the Caribbean, even as they were subjected to the homogenizing violence of slavery.

SLAVERY IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE UNITED STATES

For a long time, historians believed that slavery in Latin America was fundamentally different from slavery in the United States. This mythology suggested that slavery in Brazil and Caribbean colonies was less harsh, more humane. The Catholic Church's intervention, some argued, meant that enslaved people had certain rights. This narrative was comforting to many Latin Americans, a way of distinguishing themselves from the United States' more overtly racist regime. Yet deeper examination reveals a more complicated truth: slavery was intense in Latin America and lasted longer than in the United States. While the United States abolished slavery in 1865, Brazil—the last country in the Americas to do so—continued until 1888.

DEMOGRAPHIC DIFFERENCES

The key difference lay not in the kindness of the masters but in demographics. In Brazil and the Caribbean colonies, the enslaved population had a much lower proportion of women, a far lower birthrate, and a much higher proportion of recently arrived Africans. Death rates were catastrophically high. In stark contrast, the enslaved population in the American South had roughly equal sex ratios, high birthrates, and was predominantly American-born. This meant slavery in the American South was self-reproducing through natural population increase, which simultaneously meant that enslaved families lived together, community formation was possible, and culture could accumulate across generations. The price of this was that slavery in the United States created a racial caste system of extraordinary rigidity, legally and culturally enforced.

A SHARED BRUTALITY

By 1860, approximately two-thirds of all enslaved people in the Western Hemisphere lived in the American South—a striking reversal of the original distribution. Yet the fundamental reality remains constant across geography: slavery was a comprehensive system of dehumanization, designed to extract maximum labor while minimizing the humanity of the enslaved.

THE COLONIAL CASTE SYSTEM

When Spanish and Portuguese colonizers encountered Indigenous populations and enslaved African peoples, they created complex systems of racial classification. In Mexico and parts of Spanish America, a rigid caste system emerged that assigned specific names and status to each possible racial combination. A mestizo referred to someone of Indigenous and European heritage. A mulato referred to someone of African and European heritage. A zambo was someone with African and Indigenous ancestry—perhaps the most marginalized category of all.

THE END AND THE PERSISTENCE OF THE SYSTEM

With independence in the early nineteenth century, the formal caste system was abandoned. But something curious happened: rather than disappearing, the logic transformed. The category of mestizo became increasingly central to national identity formation, particularly in Mexico and Central America. What had been a colonial classification became a post-colonial mythology—the idea of mestizaje, of racial mixing, became the basis for imagined national unity.

RACIAL MIXING BY COUNTRY

The extent to which racial mixing occurred varies significantly:

MEXICO: Mestizos comprise between 50-90 percent of the population, depending on how the category is defined. A study by Mexico's National Institute of Genomic Medicine found mestizo Mexicans are on average 58.96% European, 31.05% Amerindian, and 10.03% African.

BRAZIL: While only 10 percent of the population identifies as Black in census data, many more Brazilians have African ancestry. Genetic studies reveal extensive African admixture.

COLOMBIA: Mestizos and whites comprise 86% of the population according to census data, though this obscures significant Afro-Colombian presence, particularly in coastal regions. In Valle del Cauca, the European contribution to the mestizo population is as low as 39-42%.

PERU: Mestizos represent a significant portion of the population, with 25% Indigenous ancestry remaining prominent.

BOLIVIA: Indigenous populations remain the majority, comprising 62% of the population.

ARGENTINA & CHILE: These countries have the lowest levels of visible African and Indigenous ancestry, with white European populations comprising the majority.

THE INVISIBILITY OF BLACKNESS

One of the most striking features of Latin American racial categorization is the invisibility of Blackness. A person with significant African ancestry may identify as mestizo, mulato, pardo, trigueño, or simply "white" if they have sufficient economic resources or light skin tone. This fluidity, while sometimes presented as more progressive than the rigid binary of the United States, has its own insidious effects: it renders Blackness optional, temporary, something that can be escaped through individual achievement, economic mobility, or strategic marriage.

THE IDENTITY CRISIS CONTINUES

I have been asked this question hundreds of times: "What are you?" "Are you Black or Latino?" Each question carries an implicit assumption: that these identities are mutually exclusive, that I must choose one at the expense of the other, that my existence itself represents a contradiction.

THE SPECTER OF RACISM IN LATIN AMERICA

What I have learned is that racism in Latin America is pervasive, structural, and often more invisible than the overt racism of the United States precisely because it exists in a cultural context that simultaneously denies its existence. If everyone has African ancestry, the logic goes, then racism cannot exist. If mestizaje has created a unified national identity, then racial discrimination is merely lingering prejudice, not a systemic problem.

MODERN POLITICAL REPRESENTATION—THE NEW PARADIGM

What gives me hope is the emergence of Black and Afro-Latino representation at the highest levels. In 2018, Epsy Campbell Barr became the first Black woman to serve as Vice President of any country in the Americas when she was elected in Costa Rica. An economist and human rights activist, Campbell's election signaled that the conversation about what it means to be Latino had finally begun to include people of African descent.

In 2022, Colombia elected its first Black Vice President, Francia Márquez, an environmental activist from a rural community of African descent, representing a radical disruption to Colombia's political establishment. These women represent something unprecedented: Black and Afro-Latino people claiming not just a seat at the table but the ability to reshape it entirely.

WHERE WE GO FROM HERE

I am writing this in 2026, at a moment of profound uncertainty and possibility. Racism still exists in Latin America. The structures of inequality that colonialism created remain largely in place. Afro-Latinos continue to face disproportionate poverty, police violence, health disparities, and systemic exclusion. Yet something is changing. I see it in the conversations with younger Afro-Latinos who refuse the false choice between their various identities. I see it in the emergence of a robust Afro-Latino cultural production—literature, music, visual art, activism. I see it in the growing scholarship that documents histories that were deliberately obscured. I am Black and Latino, not because I cannot choose between them, but because I refuse the premise that these identities should exist in opposition. I carry in my body and my memory the histories of Africa and Latin America. In claiming my full identity, in insisting on its coherence and its complexity, I participate in the long struggle for a world where identity is not a hierarchy to be navigated but a simple matter of recognition, of belonging, of home.

RECOMMENDED READING

10 ESSENTIAL BOOKS ON THE AFRO-LATINO EXPERIENCE

1. Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas - A classic memoir about growing up Afro-Latino in Spanish Harlem, navigating the intersection of racial and ethnic identity.

2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz - A novel that brilliantly captures Dominican-American life while exploring family trauma, love, and the weight of history.

3. The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat - A moving novel about a Haitian woman in the Dominican Republic during the 1937 genocide, exploring diaspora and displacement.

4. Sestinas and Other Stories by Ibi Zoboi - Contemporary fiction exploring Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latino lives with nuance, humor, and emotional depth.

5. Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora (Edited by Dr. Marta Moreno Vega) - A powerful collection of essays and poetry by Afro-Latinas across Latin America addressing racism, oppression, and resistance.

6. High Spirits by Camille Gomera-Tavarez - A debut short story collection exploring an Afro-Dominican family across generations and geographies.

7. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo - A young adult novel in verse about an Afro-Latina teen navigating family expectations and her own identity.

8. American Dreamer by Adriana Herrera - A romance novel centering an Afro-Caribbean protagonist, offering representation often absent from the genre.

9. Never Look Back by Lilliam Rivera - A modern retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in Puerto Rico with Afro-Latinx characters and supernatural elements.

10. Black Hair/Inheritance by Elizabeth Acevedo - A spoken-word poetry collection exploring the history, pain, pride, and power of Black hair in Afro-Latinx communities.

SOURCES AND WEB LINKS

UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) https://www.cepal.org/en/notes/children-african-descent-latin-america African Diaspora in the Americas

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora_in_the_Americas Slavery in Latin America - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Latin_America Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_Latin_America

Historical Context

American Slavery in Comparative Perspective - Gilder Lehrman Institute https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/historical-context-american-slavery-comparative-perspective The African Diaspora: History, Adaptation and Health - NIH/PMC https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5318189/ Epsy Campbell Barr