A Boricua Educator on Anti-Blackness
No, my name isn’t Prieta
When I was young, I liked asking my grandmother about her life back in Puerto Rico. I’d ask her what it had been like to move to the mainland as a young woman.
Memory is undoubtedly fallible, and while other family members often warned me that Nani’s stories were half-remembered and sometimes fictionalized, I loved to hear them. I’ll never forget when I asked her about meeting my grandfather. She said she fell in love with him “por su piel blanca y ojos claros” — because of his white skin and light eyes. My grandmother has coppery brown skin, dark, deep-set eyes, and black wavy hair that hung in a thick braid down her back. I look similar to her. I was also the darkest of my siblings, and when my grandfather called me “prieta” or “negrita” — pet names meaning “dark or black” — I didn’t know how to feel. It was better, I thought, than when my great-aunts called me “gordita” and suggested I suck in my stomach so it didn’t look so big.
Anti-Blackness in the Latinx community is alive and well (just look at the Soho Karen incident, when Miya Ponsetto tried to use her Puerto Rican heritage to defend herself from allegations of racism.) Although my mother raised me to understand that I have African roots and should embrace them, she still ascribed to and perpetuated stereotypes, as did my father. He strongly objected to my siblings and me listening to rap music, which he saw as glorifying criminals and thugs. Don’t ask me to unpack how he later became a fan of 50 Cent, Eminem, and Kanye West — I don’t have the credentials for that.
When I was in college, my father frustratedly asked me why so many women in the family were choosing to marry or have children with “morenos” — a word that, in Puerto Rican terminology, specifically refers to Black people. At the time, my sister was dating a Black guy, and my dad seemed cool with him, so I didn’t understand why this was even an issue.
I’m not suggesting I’ve been immune to the smog of racism that surrounds all of us. It helped that I had a diverse group of friends even in elementary school and sought books by BIPOC authors well before I took my first sociology and Black Studies classes in college. The internalized oppression and colorism were harder to confront, like how I believed for years that straight hair was more “professional,” or how shocked I was when I first met Afro-Latinos who didn’t look like they should have been able to speak Spanish better than I did.
I was reminded recently of the erasure of Blackness in Latinx communities when speaking to a small group of adolescent Latinas in an affinity group where I work. I asked them about possibly participating in our school’s virtual programming for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. They all fell silent until one girl finally spoke up and said: “Um, Ms. Flores, what does that have to do with us?”
“The internalized oppression and colorism were harder to confront, like how I believed for years that straight hair was more ‘professional,’ or how shocked I was when I first met Afro-Latinos who didn’t look like they should have been able to speak Spanish better than I did.”
I wasn’t upset at the students so much as disappointed at the failure of society to show them Afro-Latinos exist, let alone teach them about the times that Latinos and Black people fought for rights side by side. These are kids who’ve heard of the Black Panthers, but not about the Puerto Rican Young Lords who protested police brutality alongside the Panthers in Chicago. Some had seen the famous Black Power photo from the 1968 Olympics but didn’t realize that one of the athletes raising his defiant fist, John Carlos, was Afro-Cuban. They are not familiar with Roberto Clemente, the Black Puerto Rican baseball player who died in a plane crash on a humanitarian mission and whose face graces a mural in our school’s city — or of Clemente’s friendship with Dr. King.
History lessons have not taught my students that more slaves were brought to South America than North America. They don’t understand it is colonization and slavery that has led to the mixed ancestry of most Latinx people — and our range of phenotypical appearance. Some of the students have families that celebrate indigenous roots but don’t acknowledge African ones. When I taught my students about the marginalization of Black populations and deliberate campaigns by Latin American governments to incentivize European immigration to whiten their populations, they seemed horrified. Part of me wondered if they needed to know all of this now, while the other part worried they’d never learn it at all.
Most American high schools don’t require or even offer ethnic studies classes. Latin American history is rarely, if ever, covered in other history courses. If we continue only to acknowledge African influences in music and food, we’re never going to eradicate anti-Blackness and colorism in our communities. We’ll continue to be okay with media portrayals equating “Latina” with golden skin, flowing hair, and European features — don’t forget the sass and curvy body, though not too curvy, of course. We won’t wonder why reggaeton, a genre with Black roots currently topping charts worldwide, is dominated by light-skinned performers. We won’t question why telenovelas and even news programs on Spanish language television networks constantly perpetuate stereotypes of Black people as inferior and violent.
We must question all of this; we must speak up when family members make racist and anti-Black remarks. I don’t just mean the overtly racist elder who refers to Black people as monos. I’m talking about the tias who categorize a child’s hair as “good” or “bad” based on proximity to European ideals. The cousin’s offhand comment about not letting your skin get “too dark” in the sun. The praise when someone brings home a white guy. Stop perpetuating it and stop accepting it, mi gente. Call it out. Let’s do better for our community, for our Black brothers and sisters, and ourselves.
