Event

“Refashioning AfroLatinidad: Garifuna New Yorkers in Diaspora”

Central Americans of African descent are in the margins on the histories of transmigrations and political movements in the isthmus and their diasporas. The absence of Black Central Americans in Latinx Studies and Central American Studies is an epistemological violence inherited from Latin American mestizaje. The insurgence of Afro-Latinx Studies is an intellectual and political response to the erasure and negation of Black people and Blackness in the field of Latinx Studies. In this essay, I map out the political urgency to call for a refashioning of AfroLatinidad that dismantles the dangerous allure of ethno-racial nationalism (i.e., Afro-[insert nation-state]) and mappability of Blackness into exclusionary geographies of Spanish-speaking Americas (i.e., “you must be Dominican, because you don’t look Guatemalan”). Drawing on oral history interviews, visual cultures, and social media, I demonstrate how transgenerational Garifuna New Yorkers histories and politics of self-making, beginning in the late 1950s to the present, highlight their negotiations and contradictions as they perform their multiple subjectivities as Black, Indigenous, and Latinx.

Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Smith College and the 2021-2022 Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow at The LatinX Project at New York University. His research and teaching interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black Feminist & LGBTQ activism and hemispheric political mobilizations, and Black Queer Feminist ethnographies in the Américas. His current in-progress manuscript, Indigenous Blackness in the Americas: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York is a transdisciplinary ethnography on how gender and sexuality shapes the ways in which transgenerational Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent negotiate, perform, and articulate their multiple subjectivities as Black, Indigenous, and Central American Caribbeans.