Mixed Race Studies

How My Southeast L.A. Culture Got to Japan

The New York Times
2019-02-19

Walter Thompson-Hernández

I grew up with Chicano and Chicana culture in Los Angeles and heard it had spread to Japan. I wondered: Is this cultural appropriation?

I grew up in southeast Los Angeles, the son of an African-American father and Mexican mother, and the concept of identity is a theme that has been central to my life and a thread that weaves through many of my stories. I heard a rumor that lowrider culture — a community with an affinity for cars, outfit with intricate designs, multicolored lights and heavily tinted windows that can be traced in Southern California to as far back as the 1940s — had traveled to Japan. Apparently a Japanese journalist came to Los Angeles in the early 1990s to cover a lowrider event and returned to Japan with photos and stories to share…

Read the story here and watch the video here.

New York Times journalist comes to talk about multiracial identity for Black History Month

Iowa State Daily
2018-02-23

Naye Valenzuela

Journalist Walter Thompson-Hernandez came to Iowa State on Feb. 22 to speak to students about what it’s like being multicultural and speaks about how to define ones identity. Megan Petzold/Iowa State Daily

As the lights went down and as the crowd hushes to a silence, a man gets up and walks to the podium. He opens his laptop and presents a PowerPoint. The first slide presents a graffiti on a blue brick wall in Los Angeles.

The graffiti says “black power, brown pride – Tupac,” which led to the man’s first question.

“What Tupac song is this from?” He asks the crowd.

A student jumps up right away and proudly states the song is “To Live and Die in L.A.”

Walter Thompson-Hernandez, the guest presenting, is shocked, to realize a lecture attendee in Ames was the first to get it right.

Most known for his work called “Blaxicans of L.A.,” where his photos and videos talk about people in South Central Los Angeles and their experience with their multiracial identity of being both black American and Mexican in the United States, Thompson-Hernandez talks about the history of Blaxicans and what could be the future of multiracial identities in the future…

Read the entire article here.

“Blaxicans of LA” challenges racial binaries and unpacks the complexities of intersectional identity

The Occidental Weekly
Los Angeles, California
2017-04-04

Mallory Leeper

Photograph by Walter Thompson-Hernández

Walter Thompson-Hernández, multimedia journalist and current doctoral student at UCLA, visited Occidental College Monday, March 27 to discuss his research, which aims to bridge the gap between academia and photography and popular culture. Thompson-Hernandez’s lecture explored the historical framework of brown and black relations including anti-black sentiments within the Latinx community. Thompson-Hernández sought to highlight the experiences of Angelenos facing issues of racial classification and assumed singular ethnic identity.

The Latino/a & Latin American Studies department at Occidental College and the Institute for the Study of Los Angeles (ISLA) co-sponsored the Blaxicans of LA lecture in Fowler 202. As a part of their spring speaker series, Professor Raul Villa, department chair, explained that the event is a part of an educational and promotional campaign to bring awareness about the stdy of Latinxs across the hemisphere to Occidental. According to Villa, Latinx representation is an important component in a global education.

Three years ago, Thompson-Hernández started the Instagram page Blaxicans of LA to address the complexity of intersectional experiences — especially those of “Blaxican,” a combination of African and Mexican heritage…

Read the entire article here.

An Emerging Entry In America’s Multiracial Vocabulary: ‘Blaxican’

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2016-03-08

Adrian Florido

When Melissa Adams and her sister were growing up in Lynwood, near Compton, Calif., their black father and Mexican mother taught them to be proud of all aspects of their identity: They were black, and they were Mexican.

At home, that came easy. Publicly, it was harder. Consider the time Melissa was named valedictorian of her middle school when she was 13. It was the first time anyone could remember a black student winning that honor at her school.

“Everyone was excited,” she said over breakfast at her family’s house recently. “It was the first black valedictorian!” School administrators planned a special ceremony for her, and the dean called Adams into her office to congratulate her.

But when Adams walked in, the dean’s smile melted away…

…Like Adams and Tillman, many have struggled to explain their racial identity to the outside world, and sometimes even to understand it themselves.

Much of this has to do with the fact that biracial identity in the United States has often been understood in terms of black and white. And to the extent that labels are helpful for quickly self-identifying, they don’t always exist for the diversity of racial possibilities that mixed Americans increasingly want to see recognized. When it comes to mixed-race in America, Mexican-American author Richard Rodriguez has written, we rely on an “old vocabulary — black, white,” but, “we are no longer a black-white nation.”

This may be why in LA, many young people who are both black and Mexican are turning to a handy word to describe themselves: “Blaxican.”

It’s not a new term. Walter Thompson-Hernandez, a researcher at the University of Southern California who focuses on immigration and race, has traced references back to the 1980s. But it has gained new prominence in the past few years, since he launched a project called “Blaxicans of L.A.” It’s an Instagram account featuring photos of Blaxicans — with their varied hues, hair textures and facial profiles — accompanied by a quote from each person offering an insight on the Blaxican experience…

Read the entire article here.

‘Blaxicans’ photos explore Angelenos straddling two worlds

Cable News Network (CNN)
2016-03-01

Emanuella Grinberg, Writer/Producer CNN Digital

Blaxicans of L.A. is an Instagram account that grew into a show at Los Angeles’ Avenue 50 Studio during Black History Month. The exhibit includes portraits with captions detailing personal histories and experiences with colorism and self-identity. Ken and Alejandra, pictured here, say they tell their daughter she is black and Mexican. “We will explicitly teach her to be proud of the fact that she is Mexican and to be proud of the fact that she is black,” Alejandra said.

Los Angeles (CNN)—As the biggest names in entertainment converged Sunday on the Oscars red carpet at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, about 10 miles to the east, artists, academics and community leaders gathered in Los Angeles’ historically Chicano community for a different sort of cultural event.

“Duality: Blaxicans of L.A.” is a photo exhibit that explores multiracial identity among the city’s two largest minority groups. The show is a Humans of New York-esque portrait series of Angelenos of African and Latino backgrounds accompanied by captions detailing family history, experiences with colorism and self-identity.

The exhibit grew from an Instagram account of the same name started by Walter Thompson-Hernandez, who has a Mexican mother and an African-American father. He launched Blaxicans of L.A. while researching the topic as a graduate student at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies in response to what he saw as a gap in multiracial studies.

“Most multiracial scholarship has been on the black and white binary. I felt it didn’t cover the range of ways that multiracial people identify,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

Filmmakers Behind ‘Invisible Roots’ on Finding Afro-Mexicans Living in Southern California

Remezcla
2016-02-16

Walter Thompson-Hernández
Los Angeles, California

Photo: NOTIMEX/JAVIER LIRA OTERO

Almost a year before the Mexican government officially acknowledged Afro-Mexicans as a distinct racial and ethnic group, directors Tiffany Walton and Lizz Mullis first began working on their film, Invisible Roots: Afro-Mexicans of Southern California, as a film project while attending the University of Southern California (USC). For Walton, whose grandfather was Afro-Panamanian, the project was deeply connected to her family’s Afro-Latino story, while Mullis was motivated by her interests in broader societal questions about race and identity. But during the early stages of the project both struggled to find subjects for their film. After a number of failed attempts at connecting with Afro-Mexican families in the Los Angeles area, attempts they both called “extensive,” Walton and Mullis were fortuitously connected to a few Afro-Mexican families through academic and professional contacts. The film premiered at the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival with which the directing duo hopes to shed light on the experiences of a group that continues to garner recognition both in Mexico and in the U.S…

Can you describe what inspired you to make this film?

TW: I’ve always been really interested in African-American history as well as the African diaspora. I remember first learning that my dad’s grandfather had moved from Panama to Alabama to attend college. I felt excited about having a personal connection to another place, an ancestral place, a place outside of the United States, that I could reference and say, “Hey, I have roots there.” With that, I became really curious about Black people who lived in Central America and other Latin American countries. I wanted to know how they identified culturally and racially, I wanted to know what they ate, and what things we would have in common. I was curious about learning how they navigated the world.

I first learned about Afro-Mexicans from a large poster my dad had hanging in his office. The poster was of a photograph called, “Tres Hermanas,” by Tony Gleaton. On this poster were the words, “Africa’s Legacy in Mexico.” That poster spoke volumes to me. So, the poster inspired me to make this film. It touched me in such an intangible, sublime way that made me want to take action. I wanted to know everything about those little girls. What would we have in common? Were they curious about Africa? Would they feel a connection to me? I really just wanted to know how they viewed the world and how the world viewed them and how they felt about what the world thought of them…

Read the entire interview here.

Bocafloja Confronts Anti-Blackness Across the Americas in New Documentary ‘Nana Dijo’

Remezcla
2016-02-17

Walter Thompson-Hernández
Los Angeles, California

When musicians and filmmakers Bocafloja and Cambiowashere first set out to create Nana Dijo, a gripping documentary about the African diaspora in the Americas, both wanted to stray away from traditional documentary approaches that have tended to sensationalize the Afro-descendant experience in the Americas. Nana Dijo instead provides viewers with a host of intimate accounts of people whose lives have been defined by their ability to negotiate a black racial consciousness in a series of disparate racial, social, and political contexts. But while the film’s directors sought to reconcile regional difference by not providing viewers with the names of locations throughout the film, Nana Dijo also highlights the complexity of identity as it centers blackness through a diasporic lens that moves beyond geo-politics and nationalism.

We sat down with Bocafloja to talk about the inspiration for his documentary and decolonizing our notions of race and identity…

…Your music tends to center on popular conceptions of the African Diaspora, de-colonialism, indigenous rights, and anti-black racism in the United States and throughout the Americas. Your new film Nana Dijo is doing the same thing, albeit through a visual medium. What was the inspiration for this film?

I understand this as a historical responsibility in which we reclaim our narratives from a perspective that is not subjugated to cultural hegemonies. Most of the visual work that has been done in regards to the African Diaspora in Mexico or Latin America happens to be inclusionist, politically safe and focused on a culturalist approach instead of other more transgressive elements that are inherent in the whole experience. Nowadays there is an “Afro-Latino” boom which under the liberal democracies framework becomes just the ideal experience to promote shallow forms of multi-culturalism that are not really promoting any type of process of empowerment or deep analysis about the effects on our psyche as colonial subjects today. I identify myself as a black and brown individual, so for me this project was definitively relevant in order to give voice to thousands and thousands of people that in the context of Mexico and Latin America never found an outlet to express or justify the true genesis of their identity…

Read the entire interview here.

In an increasingly multiracial America, identity is a fluid thing

89.3 KPCC: Southern California Public Radio
Pasadena, California
2016-02-16

Leslie Berestein Rojas, Immigration and Emerging Communities Reporter

If there’s any part of town that’s solidly Latino, it’s where Walter Thompson Hernandez grew up, in Huntington Park.

The city, on the southeast fringe of Los Angeles, is 97 percent Latino. Thompson-Hernandez was raised there by his mother, an immigrant from Jalisco, in what he describes as a very Mexican household.

“Quinceaneras, Vicente Fernandez, chilaquiles – those were very prominent fixtures in my upbringing,” said Thompson-Hernandez, now a graduate student researcher at the University of Southern California.

But he was different: “I saw myself as Mexican, but I stood out. I was always the tallest kid, had the curliest hair, the darkest skin,” he said.

His father was African-American, born in Oakland. His parents were estranged when he was very young. His mother always told him about his mixed heritage. But it didn’t really hit him until they moved to Palms, on the Westside.

“When we moved to the Westside, most of my friends were African-American,” Thompson-Hernandez said. “In a way, I sort of longed to identify that part of my heritage. So all my friends were black. I would spend countless hours, sleepovers at their house. So I came into this black identity by experiencing blackness with my friends.”

In his early twenties, he reconnected with his father and his side of the family. It was around that time that he first hear the term “Blaxican,” for black and Mexican. It resonated – and he ran with it…

…This evolving dance with race and identity is a familiar theme for Los Angeles actor and playwright Fanshen Cox. She produces a one-woman show called “One Drop of Love,” which she performs around the country. Her father is a Jamaican immigrant. Her mother is Native American and Danish.

Cox remembers how some black relatives and friends in Washington, D.C. identified her as a child: “In D.C., which is where I was born, I was ‘red bone’ and ‘high yellow.’”

These terms labeled her as a light-skinned black person – and set her at a distance, closer to white, as she describes it. Then her family moved to liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts…

Read the entire article here.

Blaxican: The Revolutionary Identity of Black Mexicans

teleSUR
2015-07-29

“The Afro-Latino term felt like home. There was finally a term that described what all of this was. It was a group of people who felt like I was feeling. I was finally able to identify with a group of people and it was a relief.”

Walter Thompson-Hernandez shares with teleSUR English the often-forgotten faces and stories of Black Mexicans, or Blaxicans, in the United States.

Walter Thompson-Hernandez often sees a reflection of himself in the stories his camera captures. Boldly staring into the lens of his camera, Black Mexican, or Blaxican, men and women slowly unveil a bit of themselves to him.

“I ethnically identify as Afro-Mexican. Racially, I embrace my Blackness as here in LA that is typically how I am read and what my experience is,” reads one of the photo stories now available on Instagram gallery known as “Blaxicans of Los Angeles.”

“The identity of Afro-Mexican acknowledges my African roots as well as the land we live on, though claimed by America, belongs historically to indigenous Mexican peoples.”

As the child of an African-American father and a non-black Mexican mother, the stories resonate with Thompson-Hernandez who started the Instagram page as an academic research project for the University of South Carolina, but found himself personally drawn to the project to understand the complexities of race and ethnicity in a country that often sees both as one and the same thing…

Read the entire article here.

More Than Just Party Music: New Book ‘Remixing Reggaetón’ Mines the Complicated Racial Politics of the Genre

Remezcla
2015-10-21

Walter Thompson-Hernández
Los Angeles, California

For centuries, the complexities of racism in Latin America have been overshadowed by the false perception that high rates of racial mixture have created a racially democratic Latin American society. In her new book, Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, scholar Petra Rivera-Rideau challenges this idea through the prism of a genre of urban music that gained momentum in impoverished neighborhoods on the island and ultimately became a global pop phenomenon.Read the entire article here.

Positing that reggaetón challenges the racial democracy myth, Remixing Reggaetón focuses on leading Puerto Rican artists like Tego Calderon and Ivy Queen, who are shifting traditional views on gender, sexuality, and race through provocative, unapologetic performances. Using a historical and contemporary analysis, Rivera-Rideau situates the music against the backdrop of Puerto Rico’s legacy of anti-black racism, looking at how reggaetón both jump-starts the party and raises critical awareness.

We caught up with Rivera-Rideau to learn more about the motivations for her project, and how a sound popping off in the club is providing us with a language to talk about Afro-Latinidad…

Read the entire interview here.