EPILOGUE
The search for stories of Latino acts of racial discrimination cannot be done with a simple Google search, because most law cases do not garner the high level of media attention to activate a search engine’s cataloging. Nor will a single query into electronic case law databases suffice. This is because the legal research service databases of Westlaw and Lexis do not neatly categorize cases by the racial and ethnic identity of all the parties. For that reason, the hunt for cases necessitated numerous exhaustive searches for judicial mentions of racial and ethnic party identities, with every possible iteration of Latino identity since the 1964 enactment of the Civil Rights Act. The detailed list of all search queries and data files is publicly available in an online Methodology Appendix.1
Given the possibility of missing a relevant case in this large-scale search due to human error, I included cases across a broad span of time (1964–2021) to track the consistent racial patterns and concerns of those cases that could be found. Furthermore, to gather data about cases that victims never file because they are overwhelmed and beleaguered, I also conducted qualitative interviews with civil rights leaders, attorneys, educators, and self-identified Afro-Latino respondents whom I contacted via Afro-Latino identity-based organizations. Finally, I located additional accounts of discrimination in national and local news electronic databases.
What drove me to persist with the painstaking hunt for the narratives of discrimination when so many Latino scholars and commentators instead suggest that Latino anti-Blackness does not merit deep exploration? My family history as an Afro-Latina would not permit otherwise. This is because embodying Blackness within a Latino family can so deeply ground one in the materiality of Latino bias that fantasies of Latino color-blind unity are unable to interfere with a questioning of Latino racial attitudes.
Inasmuch as this book has centered itself on excavating the narratives of Afro-Latinos and African Americans who have experienced Latino anti-Black bias, it is only fair for me to share my own race story as well. This is because no amount of Latino “we are a racially harmonious rainbow people” rhetoric can ever change that I am the daughter of an Afro–Puerto Rican mother almost given away because of her Blackness. Thus, like every story about race, its beginnings go back generations. But for me, the 1940s is the key marker for my own racial inheritance (as well as my great-great-grandparents’ stories of their lives in slavery).
In the 1940s my maternal grandmother, Lucrecia, was a country girl, or what her fellow Puerto Ricans called a jíbara, from a mountain village in Puerto Rico.2 Her African ancestry appeared slightly in her trigueña (light-wheat-colored) skin tone but was not very apparent in her facial features or hair texture. Her older sisters were similarly light skinned and favored their fair-complected mother more than their darker-skinned father. For this reason, Lucrecia and her sisters considered themselves a race apart from those who appeared more unambiguously Afro-descended. Any tinge of color in the family was attributed to the long-ago legacy of Taíno Indians on the island. It was immaterial to the family that Taíno Indians were documented to have been exterminated by Spanish conquerors by the mid-sixteenth century.3
When my grandmother, Lucrecia, fell in love with and united herself with carpenter and guitarist Juan, her family was not pleased. While he himself was a mixed-race grandchild of a former slave and son of an Afro–Puerto Rican mother and White Spaniard, his appearance was what Lucrecia’s family labeled Black, and thus unacceptable. Puerto Rican identity may claim to celebrate racial mixture, but some of us are thought to look more mixed than others. Dark-skin deviations from the idealization of light skin with European features and straight hair are ejected from the Puerto Rican portrait of racial mixture. Lucrecia’s family was no exception from this Puerto Rican (and Latin American) anti-Black conception of racial mixture.4
Infidelity eventually caused further strain on their union, and Lucrecia’s older sisters encouraged her to leave Juan and migrate to New York. Hoping to teach Juan a lesson and have him mend his ways, Lucrecia secretly boarded a ship from Puerto Rico to New York in the early 1940s with her two-year-old daughter. She was unknowingly three months pregnant with a second child and entertained the romantic notion that Juan would chase her to New York and commit himself to being faithful. Feeling abandoned and hurt himself, Juan never did follow her to New York City. Lucrecia did not inform him of the birth of his second child until she was approximately eight years old.
Lucrecia’s second child, Nina (my mother), was born in the 1940s, and much to the dismay of Lucrecia’s family, to them the child was dark. Too dark. Too dark to count as racially mixed and certainly too dark to pass as a “White” Puerto Rican. Baby Nina did not pass the “look behind the ears” Caribbean test to seek out the future darkness of infants.5 Even more problematic, Nina’s skin tone (approximating that of the 1940s African American singer and actress Lena Horne—the Beyoncé of her time) would complicate the family’s image as disassociated from Blackness. The campaign to send baby Nina away began in earnest. Lucrecia’s family lobbied to have baby Nina placed for adoption with an African American family. Any African American family would do, as long as baby Nina was removed from the household. Only as an adult researcher would I later learn from a colleague how much the family impulse paralleled the dynamic in Puerto Rico of returning foster children like damaged goods when they became “too dark.”6
At the same time, the family’s animus toward the Afro–Puerto Rican father that baby Nina favored did not extend to her older sister, Mónica. Mónica was lighter in complexion with long straight hair. Monica’s African ancestry did not announce itself so loudly in her appearance, and she was immediately accepted by the family. Their physical comparison between the two sisters was a constant obsession, with Nina being called monito (little monkey) and negrita bembe (little Black African-like girl), while Mónica was simply called la nena (the little girl).
Lucrecia ultimately refused to succumb to the family pressure to give baby Nina away, but she never let Nina forget it. It is uncertain whether Lucrecia refused to give Nina away because she still entertained the hope that her partner would swoop in from Puerto Rico for a reunification or whether it was rooted in a semblance of maternal affection. What is irrefutable is that Lucrecia viewed Nina’s darker skin tone and African tresses as problematic. Her kinky curls—pelo malo (bad hair) was a source of consternation that compelled Lucrecia to continually shave baby Nina’s hair in the hope that it would grow out straighter. Any infraction of Lucrecia’s rules of discipline were greeted with both a beating and an expression of regret for not having given her away to an African American family at birth, along with the threat to place Nina in a foster home.
This was a marked contrast to the indulgence accorded her older sister, Mónica, who had slightly lighter skin and, more importantly, straighter pelo lindo (pretty hair). Even milk in the home was rationed across a color line. Lucrecia’s mother, my great-grandmother, would allocate the milk in the home to Mónica and give Nina water instead. Birthday party celebrations were reserved for Mónica alone. Unlike for Mónica, light-colored nail polish was forbidden for Nina lest her hands look even darker. The racialized distinctions between the two girls continued their entire lives.
The pain of family rejection based on her apparent African ancestry was so profound for my mother that she shared her stories with me very early on. My own childhood experiences with differential treatment based on how mixed or Black I looked on any given day or context only reinforced my understanding of the relevance of anti-Black sentiment within celebrations of idealized notions of mixture. My appearance reflects the mixture of my mother Nina’s Afro–Puerto Rican physical traits and those of my father’s White-skinned background. While slightly lighter in skin shade than my mother, the brownness of my skin would never cause anyone to view me as White. Many have told me that I am a doppelganger for their various relatives in India. However, the comparison to relatives in India often disappears depending on what my hair decides to do that day. On a low humidity day with enough hair care products to make my hair lay down and be wrestled into a curl-hiding bun, I look more Indian. If I let it out and allow the curls to reign supreme, my African ancestry is more apparent to others.
How much of my perspective on the meaning of race might have diverged had my hair been different? I wonder. My abuelita (grandmother) Lucrecia was never happier than when my hair was greased down into two long braids down my back, and I looked to her to be an indigenous “Taína.” But her absolute preference was for me to have my hair blow-dried straight, regardless of how short in duration the look would last (one day in humid weather, or maybe a week with the aid of large rollers, dry air, and a nightly “dubi” scalp wrapping of the hair for maximum stretch). However, the Hair Wars began in earnest when I cut off my hair in an act of adolescent rebellion. My grandmother was mystified as to why I would choose to have my curls spring out on display, resembling my mother’s Afro. In my grandmother’s eyes, my mother was unfortunately afflicted with overtly “bad hair,” but why in the world would I choose to emulate that style when I had the “benefit” of being better situated to beat my hair into submission with a “more attractive” simulation of Whiteness. Every visit to her apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was greeted with some version of “Ay ese pelo” (Oh, that hair) or “¿Porque no haces algo con ese pelo?” (Why don’t you do something with that hair?).
Wearing my hair in a short, curly mop also worked to seemingly eject me from my presumed membership in the Latino imaginary. Encountering Latino merchants and other Latino service providers, I was constantly greeted with a surprised “Oh, you speak Spanish” and “Where did you learn to speak Spanish?” My hair now barred the door to automatic entrée to Latino kinship. I had to earn my way back into Latinaness by constantly speaking Spanish loudly and referencing my Latina culture. Like in Latin America, the imagined Latino community had and has a decided vision of mixture that does not encompass tightly coiled hair with brown skin. The anti-Black slurs I heard used in the Latino community with respect to African Americans only reinforced my early impressions that Blackness was problematic, despite our assertions of Latino pride in being a mixture of races. It became evident to me that cultural mestizaje pride (race-mixture pride) aside, not all parts of the mixture were equally welcomed or celebrated.
When I became older and took on the role of translating government forms into Spanish for my grandmother, our disputes about race escalated into the Census Conflict. In the 1980s she was fine with responding yes to the question of whether her ethnicity was of Hispanic origin. After I translated the census question, she told me to check the Hispanic-origin ethnicity box “Yes.” But when it came to the separate question regarding racial ancestry, she became agitated and wanted us to just skip the question. Being an argumentative teenager with control over the English-language form, I insisted that she engage with the category options of White, Black, Native American, Asian, or other. Screaming matches ensued as she demanded that I insert “Boricua” (Puerto Rican) as a race into the “Some Other Race” slot, and I insisted that Puerto Rican is not a race unto itself. If we were so proud of being racially mixed Puerto Ricans, why not list all parts of the mixture on the “Some Other Race” line? That was unacceptable to her.
By the time the census forms were modified in 2000 to permit multiple-box-checking responses to the racial category question, she was living in a nursing home unable to communicate in any language about government forms. Yet, everything about her lifelong aversion to attributing her light brown skin to African ancestry and her preference for deflecting from race within the unenumerated racial mixture of Puerto Rican identity tells me that she would have been uninterested in the ability to check multiple racial boxes, let alone the “Black” box. My abuelita has long since passed away. However, I hope that the insights contained in this book can contribute to the social justice effort of interrupting Latino anti-Black bias among other Latinos who are reticent about checking a “Black” box or dealing with Blackness in any form. Ojalá y Aché!7
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Gayatri Patnaik, the best editor I have ever worked with.
Immeasurable gratitude to my mother and all the interviewees who so kindly shared their candid reflections on what were often very painful memories. This book would not have been the same without your insights.
I also owe thanks to each person who generously read and commented on earlier versions of various book chapters: William (Sandy) Darity Jr., Laura Gomez, Bruce Green, Hilda Llorens, Ana Ramos-Zayas, Bernd Reiter, Susan Scafidi, Lourdes Torres, and Rodman Williams. Much appreciation as well to my census data gurus: Howard Hogan, Nicholas Jones, Mark Hugo Lopez, and Jeffrey Passel.
I was also greatly benefitted by the opportunity to present chapters before the Fordham University Law School Scholarship Workshop and its 10/10 series, the Afro-Descendant Working Group Colloquia, the UCLA Advanced Critical Race Theory Workshop Seminar, the Cafecito Network of Latina Lawyers, the New York City Commission on Human Rights, the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, the Hispanic Lobbyists Association, the Association of Black Sociologists, and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.
And last but never ever least are the Fordham University Law School librarians and the legion of research assistants who help me each and every day—thank you for all you do.
Any shortcomings are, lamentably, entirely my own.