20 pages • 40 minutes read
Afro-Latina
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Background
Historical Context: The Dominican Diaspora
The Dominican Republic is located in the Caribbean on the eastern half of the island of Hispaniola (called “Quisqueya” by its early Taíno inhabitants); it shares the island with Haiti. The speaker in “Afro-Latina” is a child of the Dominican diaspora, the movement of Dominicans back and forth between the Dominican Republic and the United States, particularly to Northeastern cities in New York and New Jersey.
The speaker’s ambivalence toward her cultural identity is rooted in the history of the Dominican Republic—as that history is central to European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere, she struggles to reconcile the violence with her heritage. In 1492, Christopher Columbus took the island from the Taíno people on behalf of Spain, marking the start of European conquest of Indigenous territory in the Americas and the Caribbean. Spanish colonial policies maximized the extraction of resources through forced labor and intensive agriculture on plantations, and this destroyed Indigenous culture and people. The European colonists not only brought diseases that precipitated fatal epidemics—they also enslaved the people they took from Africa, binding them in chattel slavery (a form of slavery in which people are enslaved in perpetuity and treated as moveable property). Indigenous women and women of African descent alike were subjected to sexual exploitation and rape, resulting in descendants of Spanish, African, and Indigenous racial heritage, hence the speaker’s feelings of shame regarding her ancestry.
The Dominican Republic ultimately achieved independence from Haiti in 1844 and Spain in 1865 (Clarke, Colin, and Bridget Brereton. “Decolonization of the West Indies.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 2022). However, United States occupations in the 1800s and early 1900s recreated colonial power relations. The speaker’s family in the United States includes a grandmother who wears traditional Dominican dress and a mother whose English, with its distinctive accent, is clearly her second language; the speaker’s family is likely part of the generations of Dominicans who made their way to the United States during or after the dictatorship of Dominican Rafael Trujillo, whose rule ended with his assassination in 1961. As the child of immigrants to the United States, the speaker wants to acculturate herself and leave behind the Spanish language and traditional Dominican culture—but by the end of the poem, she reassesses her heritage and concludes that her people’s survival of colonialism, slavery, and migration is admirable.
Literary Context: Slam Poetry
“Afro-Latina” is a spoken-word poem, composed for the explicit purpose of live performance with theatrical elements such as music, dance, or gestures. In the United States, spoken-word poetry has thrived in places and times as widely divergent as Harlem Renaissance clubs during the 1920s and working-class bars in Northeastern cities during the 1950s. Slam poetry is a contemporary form of spoken word in which poets share their work at “slams,” poetry performance competitions where audiences are usually the judges. Acevedo has formal training as a poet, but she honed her voice through poetry slam competitions.
Such performance-oriented poetry calls extensively on the poet’s physicality—their voice, their gestures, the way they hold their bodies—to connect with the audience. In turn, the audience judges and engages with the poet using shouts, cheers, jeers, or scores. Outside of this competitive context, the audience for more intimate spoken-word performances (in settings like clubs) may also engage with the poet with affirmative expressions, claps, snaps, or other sounds. For example, starting at time marker 1:17 of Acevedo’s performance of “Afro-Latina,” the audience cheers at Acevedo’s dramatic gestures and amplification, and at the poem’s other aural qualities that heighten its momentum.
Slam poetry’s defining prosodic features are less textually formal and more performance-reliant. While slam poetry may be rhymed, it very frequently is in free verse with occasional rhymes designed to enhance the rhythm of particular lines, as is the case in “Afro-Latina.” Such poetry’s subject matter varies, but the work frequently allows the poet to share their own particular perspective on race, culture, gender, and social justice. In “Afro-Latina,” the speaker works through some complications in Dominican cultural pride. Finally, both the content and the form of spoken word reflect the influence of diasporic African oral culture and music. “Afro-Latina” honors those influences by referencing popular Dominican and Afro-Latino musical forms.
Cultural Context: Afro-Latinidad
“Afro-Latina” explores the contours of Afro-Latinidad, a diverse cultural identity that includes racial heritage from Africa and ethnic origins in Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking countries, particularly those in the Americas and Caribbean. Though its history is not widely acknowledged, Afro-Latinidad is documented to have existed in the Western Hemisphere for all the recorded history of European colonialism. Afro-Latinidad invisibility is the result of racism and colorism, whereby people whose appearance more closely approximates whiteness gain economic or social advantages.
The speaker in “Afro-Latina” proudly proclaims that she is “Afrodescendant” (Line 10), of African descent. That pride is hard-won and comes after a series of erasures—of the speaker’s Spanish language and her identity as the child of Dominican immigrants. Additionally, some her ancestral racial markers have undergone erasure through choices such as “[s]traightening [her] hair / in imitation of Barbie” (Lines 26-27). By grounding the early part of the poem in her internalization of anti-Black racism, Acevedo names aloud the uncomfortable truth that this racism not only has a home in wider United States culture: It is doing damage inside of the marginalized groups themselves.
The need for a proud embrace of Afro-Latinidad has become visible during lively and sometimes painful public debates about representation in the media. For example, the 2021 film In the Heights is set in Washington Heights, a predominantly Dominican American neighborhood in New York, and casting favored lighter-skinned leads; the people and music who bear more obvious traces of African ancestry are secondary in the film, which belies the neighborhood’s actual culture and demographic. Acevedo’s “Afro-Latina” counters those cultural forces of erasure by naming them, exploring their roots, and placing Dominican identity in the larger context of Afro-Latinidad.
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