Mixed Race Studies

Searching For A Motherland As A Black Latina

The Huffington Post
2018-03-30

Maria V. Luna, Associate Lecturer
Goldsmiths University of London

Author Maria V. Luna in the Dominican Republic on her way to celebrate carnival in 2011. Maria V. Luna

For Black Latinx in the U.S., bicultural, bilingual ― if they are lucky ― and born to immigrant parents, there is no motherland.

Though 25 percent of U.S. Latinos self-identify as Afro-Latino, we are not always made to feel at home in our own country. To be Latinx in the U.S. is to encounter xenophobic rhetoric from the top of our nation’s political leadership down to its base. To be black Latinx is to discover that xenophobia layered with anti-black rhetoric brews even among our own ethnic group.

Scholars Miriam Jiménez Román and the late Juan Flores consider W.E.B. Du Bois when describing the experience of the Afro-Latino in the U.S. as a triple consciousness — an awareness of being black, Latino and American. It is an elastic awareness, a way of moving in the world that has been woefully underexplored in America and in Spanish-language media and entertainment.

As an Afro-Latina, I often wondered: Where are my people? Where are those who crave mangú for breakfast, a Cuban sandwich for lunch and tres leches dessert? Where are those who love the “One Day at a Time” reboot with a Latin cast but winced when Lydia, played by Rita Moreno, repeats with conviction, “Cubans are white!” Didn’t abuela dance to Celia Cruz every morning as she made breakfast?

As soon as I could, I journeyed far from New Jersey to find my people. I looked for my kindred in the Dominican Republic, in Brazil, in Spain and in the maternal monolith I once imagined Africa to be.

I was looking for that mythical interstitial place where my blackness and Latinidad could peacefully coexist. This is what I found…

Read the entire article here.

My Transracial Testimony

Chicago Now
2017-11-05

Doriana Markovitz

Bio: I am a biracial woman, but I identify as Black. My birthmother is what Puerto Ricans call Spanish. I was adopted by two white women when I was a week old. They later divorced. My Jewish mama, who gave me my last name Markovitz, remarried and adopted 2 more baby girls, later on, giving me siblings and ending my own unique child experience at 14. During that time, I swallowed a white liberal education for 9 years, until I was forced to puke it back up in the later years of my high school experience. This is my testimony, my hymnal, my stories, my life as a transracial adoptee.

I have been raised by many mothers; many women have poured themselves into me. I am the product of the multi-dimensionality of womanhood. I have only ever known that experience, the struggle, and hardship, while also the joy and the power that women can offer to one another and their children.

Three women have raised me — the mothers who adopted me, but also the woman who took me in when those two women fell out of love.

Motherhood lives inside my skin, but I am also motherless because there is a woman out there who I do not know, but whose body was my first home. I knew this from the time I could understand that the women who chose me did not look like me.

Their skin did not look like mine, their hair did not feel like mine, and their bodies were not shaped like mine. Even though I knew this, I felt safe inside that truth. I felt loved inside that truth until I couldn’t any longer…

Read the entire article here.

Self-Hate & Forgiveness

OpenHeartTin: Spiritual Journey. Awareness. Love. Healing.
2018-02-07

Sonja Jackson

In case anyone was wondering, I am a black female. I have a little more than that thrown in there (my mom is white/black and my biological father is black), but I identify as black. I’d like to identify as nothing, but hey. Not because I hate being black, but because I’m tired of race and separation. I wish people saw my soul and not my body. But then at the same time, I like seeing different races. Different shades. It adds some spice to life. But when I was younger, I hated being black. I also hated being female. This one is hard for me to write because I still don’t think I’ve completely forgiven myself for having felt this way in the past. I’m ashamed and it’s hard to admit. But I also don’t feel it was all my own beliefs. I’ll get more into that later…

Read the entire article here.

Editorial: Owning Both Sides

Hapa Mag
2017-12-09

Alison Lea Bender

How do I even begin? I am a person who is trying to navigate this complicated, wonderful, and mysterious life just like everyone else. On top of that, I am in a career that tends to make subjective decisions on race and culture. Needless to say, facing those factors and trying to “fit a bill” for my art constantly makes me analyze and overthink my racial identity. I don’t mind that I’m continuously thinking about it anymore.

I never truly gave my racial makeup much thought my whole life, so I feel like the past few years have been a needed catch-up. I am quite proud of the knowledge I’ve gained from looking at every angle of it, and I feel closer to my roots now. I’ve come a long way, but as far I have come with my own racial identity and accepting and loving every part of myself, it seems that there will always be an obstacle in my way to make me question who I am…

Read the entire article here.

Op-Ed: Think Pieces About Being a White Latino Continue to Miss an Essential Point

Remezcla
2018-03-16

Carmen Phillips

Really? Oh wow. You don’t look Latina.”

My entire life, I’ve heard a variation of those seven words after telling someone I am Puerto Rican. As a matter of fact, it’s a common occurrence for entire subsets of the Latinx community. Both white Latinxs and Afro-Latinxs have had others categorize and subsequently disregard us based on our physical appearance. But if you were to only look at the content mainstream outlets have churned out in the last few years, you’d think being a white Latinx presents a one-sided identity crisis.

The sensation of being left out, of being told they’re not “Latinx enough” has led many white Latinx writers to pen op-eds and think pieces about their experiences. But, those essays always miss an essential point; while our community ostracizes both white and Black Latinxs at times, only Black Latinxs face systematic racial oppression on top of that.

I’m Black. I have an Anglo last name. My Latina identity has consistently elicited surprised reactions, something I’ve grown accustomed to. As long as after our first conversation, the person I’m speaking with drops their feigned surprise that our community come in all hues, we’re good. My problem starts when questioning continues – as if I am somehow lying about my own heritage…

Read the entire article here.

Thoughts on Identity: Who is Hapa?

The Daily Gazette: Swarthmore College’s daily student newspaper. Founded 1997.
Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
2016-04-29

Charlotte Iwasaki

The first time that I consciously considered my multicultural background was in fifth grade when a friend jokingly announced to the class that I was both a Jap and a Nazi. At the time, I laughed along with the class, but I later asked my father what they meant by “Jap” after school. He was vague and kind in answering, but I understood. I knew that my dad was Japanese and that my mom was Caucasian, mostly German, but I never saw myself as really either, or even both. Being mixed race wasn’t something I thought about at the time, but I have never since forgotten.

My parents often tossed around the word “hapa” in reference to my sister and me. They picked up the term back when they were in college in southern California where people often describe anyone who is half-Asian as “hapa.” Growing up, I naturally adopted the word without much thought. But after I entered high school, I began to question what exactly I considered to be my personal identity.

I started the cultural club, Hapa, with the intention of creating a space for people that similarly identify as mixed race and Asian. When I first came to Swarthmore, I was surprised that there wasn’t a community for students from multicultural and multiethnic backgrounds. Everyone in SAO (Swarthmore Asian Organization) was kind and welcoming, but I didn’t feel completely comfortable; I didn’t see anyone like myself in the people around me…

Read the entire article here.

Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad

W. W. Norton & Company
February 2018
352 pages
5.9 × 8.6 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-60926-4

Krystal A. Sital

An eloquent new Caribbean literary voice reveals the hidden trauma and fierce resilience of one Trinidadian family.

There, in a lush landscape of fire-petaled immortelle trees and vast plantations of coffee and cocoa, where the three hills along the southern coast act as guardians against hurricanes, Krystal A. Sital grew up idolizing her grandfather, a wealthy Hindu landowner. Years later, to escape crime and economic stagnation on the island, the family resettled in New Jersey, where Krystal’s mother works as a nanny, and the warmth of Trinidad seems a pretty yet distant memory. But when her grandfather lapses into a coma after a fall at home, the women he has terrorized for decades begin to speak, and a brutal past comes to light.

In the lyrical patois of her mother and grandmother, Krystal learns the long-held secrets of their family’s past, and what it took for her foremothers to survive and find strength in themselves. The relief of sharing their stories draws the three women closer, the music of their voices and care for one another easing the pain of memory.

Violence, a rigid ethnic and racial caste system, and a tolerance of domestic abuse—the harsh legacies of plantation slavery—permeate the history of Trinidad. On the island’s plantations, in its growing cities, and in the family’s new home in America, Secrets We Kept tells a story of ambition and cruelty, endurance and love, and most of all, the bonds among women and between generations that help them find peace with the past.

Delilah

Carrie Hawks
2012
Running Time: 00:04:15

Delilah tells the story of a woman who started out with a seemingly simple task, just filling out a family tree. She uncovered generations of secrecy and shame. Outside of Tacoma, Washington, Delilah shares a very personal story her search and the ramifications that unfold.

Delilah premiered at the Animation Block Party at Brooklyn Academy of Music in July 2012.

The film was awarded “Best Experimental Film” at the 15th Annual Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival in October 2012.

In April 2013, The Kansas City Jubilee Film Festival included the film in their programming.

For Multiracial Women, Hair Is a Political Statement

The Link
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Volume 38, Issue 5 (2018-02-06)

Aysha White & Marissa Ramnanan

Two Women of Colour Talk About the Racialization of Their Hair

I have a weird ethnic first name (Aysha) and she has a weird ethnic last one (Ramnanan).

We are both mixed race, meaning we won’t find ourselves represented in mainstream media. In mostly white environments, such as universities, we become uncomfortably aware of how different we look from people belonging to a single race.

I gravitated towards Marissa, guessing she was also mixed because of her very curly hair…

Read the entire article here.

Broken identity

The Times Literary Supplement
2018-01-31

Bernardine Evaristo

Afua Hirsch ©Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock

Afua Hirsch, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018)

People of colour raised in the openly racist Britain of the 1960s and 70s often put an identity quest at the heart of their fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction. Joan Riley’s novel about an alienated girl, The Unbelonging (1985), and Caryl Phillips’s pan-European travelogue, The European Tribe (1988), provide powerful early examples. Hanif Kureishi’s first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), opens with the mixed-race protagonist declaring, “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost”. In her play Talking in Tongues (1991), Winsome Pinnock wrote about an Afro-Caribbean woman who sought to reassemble her fragmented identity back in her parents’ Jamaica. In my own verse novel, Lara (1997), the mixed-race protagonist journeys to her father’s Nigeria to see if she can belong there. Back then, writing in this genre spoke of the dilemma of not feeling accepted in Britain; to the children of immigrants, the seemingly harmless question, “Where do you really come from?”, was seen as a challenge to their British birthright. Jackie Kay’s memorable poem “In My Country” encapsulates one response: “Where do you come from? / Here, I said, Here, these parts” (Other Lovers, 1993).

It is a question I haven’t been asked in decades; I hoped it had died out along with the idea that Black and British was an oxymoron. Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish), however, finds it still tripping out of people’s mouths, as the most “persistent reminder of that sense of not belonging”. The book digs deep into the reasons for this enduring question, skilfully blending memoir, history and social commentary around race, culture and identity. Hirsch writes with an incisive honesty that disproves the idea that privilege can be easily reduced to racial binaries. She fully acknowledges the exclusive pedigree of her own background as a lighter-skinned woman of mixed parentage in a colourist society, who enjoyed a comfortable middle-class suburban childhood with her Ghanaian-born mother and English Jewish father. Her education was private all the way to Oxford University, and led to a first career as a barrister. Ten years ago she became a journalist. Hirsch is ostensibly the successful embodiment of Britain’s multicultural project, but her privileged status has not immunized her from the perniciousness of racism…

Read the entire book review here.