LatiNegr@s Project: My Testimonio

I did not always identify as a LatiNegra. As many of my long-time readers know, my parents who are Puerto Rican immigrants, racially identify as White while they ethnically identify as Puerto Rican. I’ve always literally and figuratively been the Black sheep of my family. I’ve written about what that means to me in various capacities before. Today I want to share how I came to evolve into my LatiNegra identity.

Picture it: Beltsville, MD 2003. I’d just left my first ever full-time job with benefits when George Bush the second was re-elected President of the US. I realized that there would be no pay increase for me at my job where I provided training and did research on sexual health among adolescents and teen parents. What better way to stick out the next 4 years than in a PhD program in Women’s Studies? (I know there are many other ways, stay with me here).

I had earned a 2 year fellowship to study and part of the research I was doing with faculty of Color was creating an Intersectional Research Database (which was also used to help publish a book). As part of that research I came across an article by Dr. Lillian Comas-Díaz called "Mental Health Issues of African Latinas" which she wrote in the early 1990s. You can read my short Annotation in the Intersectional Research Database here. That was followed by an article by Marta I. Cruz-Janzen called Latinegras: Desired Women-Undesirable Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, and Wives where she writes:

Latinegras are Latinas of obvious black ancestry and undeniable ties to Africa, women whose ancestral mothers were abducted from the rich lands that cradled them to become and bear slaves, endure the lust of their masters, and nurture other women's children. They are the mothers of generations stripped of their identity and rich heritage that should have been their legacy. Latinegras are women who cannot escape the many layers of racism, sexism, and inhumanity that have marked their existence. Painters, poets, singers, and writers have exalted their beauty, loyalty, and strength, but centuries of open assaults and rapes have also turned them into concubines, prostitutes, and undesirable mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives.

Latinegras are marked by a cruel, racialized history because of the shades of their skin, the colors and shapes of their eyes, and the textures and hues of their hair. They are the darkest negras, morenas, and prietas, the brown and golden cholas and mulatas, and the wheat-colored triguenas. They are the light-skinned jabas with black features and the grifas with white looks but whose hair defiantly announces their ancestry. They are the Spanish-looking criollas, and the pardas and zambas who carry indigenous blood.

Latinegras represent the mirrors that most Latinos would like to shatter because they reflect the blackness Latinos don't want to see in themselves. (1) I am a Latinegra, born to a world that denies my humanity as a black person, a woman, and a Latina; born to a world where other Latinos reject me and deny my existence even though I share their heritage. As Lillian Comas-Diaz writes, the combination of race, ethnicity, and gender makes Latinegras a "minority within a minority." (2) Racism and sexism have been with me all my life. I was raised in Puerto Rico during the 19505 and 1960s, and lived on and off in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Today, I still live in both worlds, and most of the gender and race themes I grew up with remain. This essay is my personal and historical narrative of the intersection of racism and sexism that has defined my life and that of other Latinegras.

It was like I had found home.

Prior to finding that article I had chosen to make a political statement and racially identify as either Other or Black. I was identifying as Black more so than Other. I had made this decision the last time I filled out the US Census on my own and chose Other and wrote “African, Taino, Spanish/European colonizer.” I thought I was a rebel. I still think I am.

There were several similarities I experienced with Black women that I did not with other Latinas and then there were other similarities I shared exclusively with Latinas and not with Black women. There was always that “in between space.” That “hyphen.” But what happens to that space between the hyphen. Look at it this way:

Afro-Latino or Afro-Caribbean.

Last year when I was reading the last book by Elizabeth Nunez called Anna In Between, she asked that question as she joined our book club reading: what about the space between the hyphens? That hyphen doesn’t connect the words because there are spaces between the words and the hyphen. They do not every join. It is a bridge. A connector. It is not an explanation.

I started to joke with one of my homegirls, a Black woman living in the US, Keeley, that we would be the LatiNegras of the crew (capitalizing the L and the N to see them BOTH as proper nouns). Since then it has stuck. It is who I am. There is no hyphen to join two different identities, it is one identity all the time. It is me. I celebrate it. Will you join in the celebration?

Visit the LatiNegr@s Project Tumblr page and consider submitting something!

Sunday Night Common Sense

Today I want to quote one of my favorite people I follow on twitter who is also a scholar and who I would be incredibly honored if she mentored me (it's already surreal the advice she shares and the convos we have on twitter)! She hosts the blog Like A Whisper where our love for popular culture, media, feminisms, intersectionality, and ending oppressions via social justice and change merge:

if your response to someone drawing your attention to intersectionality is to ask "what have you done to effect change" you are the problem

By profsusurro

Sexuality, Disability & Teaching

I'm teaching a class at the College of Mount Saint Vincent this summer called Women, Art & Culture. I'm super excited to teach this class again because I get to share and discuss topics I love. Also, I get to have my students interact with dynamic media, and phenomenal women. Guest speaker line up includes: Maegan "La Mamita Mala" Ortiz, Sofia Quintero aka "Black Artemis" and my homegirls from DC who focus on mestizaje identity and women in jazz music.

In researching videos to include in my syllabus, which is interdisciplinary and incorporates intersectional theories, I will be using the following videos throughout the class to highlight the connection of gender, race, age, ethnicity, national origin, disability, citizenship status, sexuality, sexual orientation, and other aspects of our identity. I think it is important to share resources. These three videos will be used in my class. They are created by The Empowered Fe Fes, a group of young women ages 13-24 who "all different kinds of disabilities and come from different racial and ethnic communities."

The first one is called Why The Got To Do Me Like That? Here's what the film is about from the website, Beyond Media, where you can purchase them:

(The Empowered Fe Fes Take On Bullying) was produced in a workshop with the junior group of the Empowered Fe Fes, a project of Access Living in Chicago. In this film, 13 young women with disabilities explore school-based bullying by interviewing people on why bullying happens and how they respond, then acting out common experiences with new solutions. The Empowered Fe Fes demand viewers to consider bullying as a serious issue of discrimination, letting us know that we can work together to both understand the stop the problem.

Why They Gotta Do Me Like That? from Beyondmedia Education on Vimeo.

The next video is called Beyond Disability and is about:

The Empowered Fe Fes (slang for female), a group of young women with disabilities, hit the streets of Chicago on a quest to discover the difference between how they see themselves and how others see them. Their revelations are humorous, thought provoking and surprising. As the young women grapple with issues as diverse as access, education, employment, sexuality and growing up with disabilities, they address their audience with a sense of urgency, as if to say, "I need to tell you so you'll see me differently."

Beyond Disability Trailer from Beyondmedia Education on Vimeo.

This last video is called Doin' It: Sex, Disability & Videotape

The Empowered Fe Fes, a peer group of young women aged 16 to 24 with different disabilities, strike again with their second video production, an insightful investigation into the truths about sex and disability. In the video, the Fe Fes educate themselves about sex from many angles by talking with activists and scholars. The viewer tags along on a date between a woman with a disability and her able-bodied boyfriend, exploring relationship issues of dating with a disability over a candle-lit dinner.

Doin' It: Sex, Disability and Videotape Trailer from Beyondmedia Education on Vimeo.

You may buy all these videos at Beyond Media.

I hope it goes without saying that having a "disability week" in a syllabus is condescending and inappropriate, just like a "lesbian week" or "Latino week" would be.

Here's My Plan:
Currently, I plan to introduce the topic of disability and how it intersects with our multiple identities on the first day of class. Students will complete a social identity profile/matrix and I have assigned a paper around this profile/matrix. My colleagues and disability activists have shared and suggested to me terminology, definitions, and statistics on people living with disabilities in the US especially among women, women of Color, working-class women, and youth. What I have discovered is that when disability is discussed with other aspects of our identity, able-bodied privilege is one of the most surprising privileges many able-bodied students rarely think about. It is often the only privilege that students openly talk about and admit to having (if they do) versus discussions of White privilege, privilege of citizenship, Anglophone privilege etc., which are usually met with more resistance and defense of such privileges.


I plan to use these videos throughout the class, on three different days, and showing them again (as they are all under 1 hour) at other times during the course when my students have learned media literacy skills (I think it's important for students to acquire the skills to then re-watch a film and actually see how their lenses have widened/shifted/become more informed). Usually, when discussing reproductive rights and health, I remind students that it was not just Puerto Rican, Haitian and poor women of Color who have been carelessly used as "guinea pigs" for birth control research in the US, but women with disabilities were included too and are still not protected or given the same rights/choices/agency.

When we discuss violence against women, where we watch NO! The Rape Documentary, I remind students of how women with disabilities are also survivors of assault and rape. When we discuss pornography and watch the Frontline documentary American Porn, we also read Helen Ryles' piece "Pornography" in the book Tales From The Clit: A Female Experience of Pornography, where she shares her experience as a blind and deaf woman reading erotica in Braille. Those are just a few examples of the media I use and how I facilitate a discussion that can utilize intersectional approaches with students.

I hope this post can begin conversations on what we as educators use in our classrooms and with one another. I want to challenge the ideas that we learn the best and most useful knowledge from a "book." Incorporating films, poetry, testimonios, sculpture, cartoons, photography, and TV (to name a few) are what I enjoy included in my classes. What are some other resources you use? Do you have thoughts on using these resources? Please share!