The Afro-Latino Reader

The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States Edited by: Miriam Jiménez Román, Juan Flores

The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant,
yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African
descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of
Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies
the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or
cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening
social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time,
their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and
ethnocentrism among African Americans.

Offering insight into Afro-Latin@
life and new ways to understand culture, ethnicity, nation, identity,
and antiracist politics, The Afro-Latin@ Reader presents a
kaleidoscopic view of Black Latin@s in the United States. It addresses
history, music, gender, class, and media representations in more than
sixty selections, including scholarly essays, memoirs, newspaper and
magazine articles, poetry, short stories, and interviews.

While
the selections cover centuries of Afro-Latin@ history, since the arrival
of Spanish-speaking Africans in North America in the
mid-sixteenth-century, most of them focus on the past fifty years. The
central question of how Afro-Latin@s relate to and experience U.S. and
Latin American racial ideologies is engaged throughout, in first-person
accounts of growing up Afro-Latin@, a classic essay by a leader of the
Young Lords, and analyses of U.S. census data on race and ethnicity, as
well as in pieces on gender and sexuality, major-league baseball, and
religion.

The contributions that Afro-Latin@s have made to U.S. culture
are highlighted in essays on the illustrious Afro-Puerto Rican
bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and music and dance genres from
salsa to mambo, and from boogaloo to hip hop. Taken together, these and
many more selections help to bring Afro-Latin@s in the United States
into critical view.

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