Afro-Latina

“Afro-Latina” explores personal identity as it relates to language, culture, and history, and the speaker puzzles out what it means to be both Latina and Black. She announces her identity by proclaiming herself “Afro-Latina” (Line 1), a word that is both Spanish and English and describes a person of African descent who is from a Spanish-speaking culture.

While “Afro-Latina” (Line 1) is how the speaker identifies herself, the word’s function in these opening lines is also more general and connotes, for example, the late celebrated singer Celia Cruz (whose lyrics appear in Lines 6-7). Lines 1-4 seamlessly shift between Spanish and English within and between lines. For example, the speaker proclaims that this Afro-Latina has a “[s]alsa swagger / anywhere she go / como” (Lines 3-5); together, the English “go” (Line 3) and the Spanish “como” (Line 4) form a rhyme that encompasses an Afro-Latina’s walk and grace.

The speaker describes Spanish as “a gift” (Line 17) that becomes a burden in the rough-and-tumble world of United States schools. The Spanish of her mother was “eh brokee inglee” (Line 32), a phonetic representation of “the broken English” of a person speaking Spanish-inflected English. As a young person, the speaker internalized her peers’ racist disdain, a dynamic Acevedo symbolizes with food—fast food for American culture and slow-cooked traditional Dominican dishes for Dominican culture. Where “Happy Meals / and Big Macs” (Lines 24-25) are unhealthy, the Dominican “habichuela y mangú” (Line 23) are hearty. To become an “American, / a citizen / of this nation” (Lines 40-42), the speaker has had to take in unnourishing beliefs. Her Americanization also entailed internalizing anti-Black racism; Acevedo describes a hatred of her own skin, which she codes as Black through food-descriptors—“[c]aramel-color” (Line 44) and “cinnamon” (Line 47).

In the next section of the poem, the speaker frames her acculturation as a kind of forgetfulness, curable only through contemplation of Dominican historical roots. The poem, itself a part of that cure, becomes a memorial, imparting to her identity a broader but much more complicated context. Lines 52-63 are a genealogy of the Dominicans’ many ancestors, and this ancestry paradoxically includes both oppressors and the oppressed. The speaker’s ancestry comprises Indigenous people like the “Taínos” (Line 53) and their oppressors, “los Españoles / con sus fincas / buscando oro” (Lines 57-59). That heritage is also rooted in theft of the labor and bodies of the African “Yoruba” (Line 60) who built colonial Spain’s physical infrastructure in the Caribbean “con sus manos” (Line 61). Moreover, the speaker’s very existence is proof that somewhere in this genealogy, there is “indigenous rape” (Line 78) and slavery (Line 70); knowledge of such atrocities informs the speaker’s difficulty in transforming her shame into pride.

The speaker reframes her history and culture by celebrating her enslaved and oppressed ancestors’ resilience and groundbreaking creativity: Those ancestors transformed “the bending / and bending / of backbones” (Lines 95-97)—a description of labor—into the dances referenced in Lines 92-93 and into other elements of Dominican culture referenced in Lines 101-106. The speaker offers multiple and sometimes figurative descriptions of Afro-Latinidad, such as an in-between hair texture (Lines 100-111), the branching patterns of pigmented lines on the palms of the hands (Line 112), and bodies as metaphorical “bridges” (Line 124). Further underlining that identity, the diction in the latter part of the poem relies on verbs and adjectives associated with complexity and blending—“unforeseen” (Line 108), “intertwine” (Line 116), and “crossed” (120).

The poem’s overarching movement is from “I,” which appears 10 times starting in Line 13, to “We,” which appears five times in the latter part of the poem. One of those instances occurs at the end of the poem as “Viveremos” (Line 131). Viveremos is a conjugation of the Spanish viver (to live); the conjugated verb can even stand on its own as a complete sentence because it inherently implies a subject as well as a tense, which is first-person plural future: “We will live.” This word underscores the key shift in the speaker’s mindset: She initially saw herself as a first-generation American who feels shame, but she now knows she is part of a larger identity she names as “Afro-Latinos” (Line 132).