20 pages • 40 minutes read
Afro-Latina
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Themes
Language and Identity
“Afro-Latina” is a bilingual poem in which the speaker’s understanding of cultural difference through language causes shifts in her self-understanding. As a child growing up in the tight, comforting circle of home and family, Spanish was the language of “lullabies” (Line 32), songs that soothe babies who cannot bear to be separate from their loving parents.
The speaker’s recollections show that she reconceptualized the Spanish language when she began to establish an identity outside a familial context. Spanish is behind her mother’s “eh brokee inglee” (Line 32), with “eh” representing the Spanish article el, and “inglee” (Line 32) denoting “English” but with the “i” of the Spanish inglés. Such language shows her mother’s roots rather than obscuring them behind language that is strictly Spanish or strictly English. This is the language of a recent immigrant. However, it isn’t just a marker of the family’s history of migration. It is a marker of the first moment the speaker conceived of her difference from both her family and her peers, who were presumably Americans whose first language was English. As a child, the speaker allied herself with those outside of her family, laughing alongside them as they ridiculed her mother. She believed that this was the toll for claiming her identity as an “American, / a citizen / of this nation” (Lines 40-42).
Understanding that she can embrace multiple identities without deprecating the others didn’t come until the speaker acknowledged that she is the product of many languages, people, and geographies. The poem’s final lines—“Viveremos para siempre / Afro-Latinos / hasta la muerte” (Lines 131-133)—are in Spanish, which has become the language most fit to express the speaker’s pride in her identity.
Culture, History, and Identity
The speaker’s conflict isn’t just a matter of language. It is a matter of history, of coming to terms with the violence of a lineage involving colonialism, slavery, and migration. The speaker describes her identity as coming from “indigenous rape” (Line 78) and the blood of “children / of slaves / and slave masters” (Lines 68-70). She questions how she could feel anything but “bittersweet bitterness” (Line 79) with a history like that.
The speaker deals with that difficulty by naming it, but the poem becomes a space that allows for the intermingling of seemingly incommensurate identities and histories, and she can finally accept the contradictions in her heritage. The speaker contrasts the ancestral violence with her ancestors’ creativity, their reshaping the world around them through the swaying of their “song / the landscapes / of [their] skirts” (Lines 101-104). Through these creative acts, Dominicans did more than just survive. They gained agency over self-representation and their identities despite historical processes and power relations that encouraged them to do otherwise.
In creating a poem that centers Dominican food, dance, and language, Acevedo is adding to the store of those creative acts. She closes the poem with a call to all “Afro-Latinos” (Line 132), an even more expansive identity that includes all Latino and Latina members of the African diaspora. The poem ultimately asks the reader, particularly those who are Afro-Latinos, to see their identities as part of a larger whole.
Celebrating the Black Body
“Afro-Latina” is both a written and spoken-word text. As a spoken-word text, the poem places in front of audiences the bodies and voices that Eurocentric cultures have ignored and denigrated. In “Afro-Latina,” Acevedo celebrates the Black body through bodily descriptions and allusions to song and dance.
The poem features multiple Black bodies. There is the laboring Black body that Europeans exploited in pursuit of gold, sugar, and an expanded enslaved population. For the speaker, the sexual violation of Indigenous women’s bodies is the worst of the violations; while she wants to forget this violence, she cannot because it is there, encoded in the color of her skin. Then there is the Black body that “built a mundo / nunca imaginado” (Lines 62-63). The “unimagined world” becomes reality each time the Black bodies engage in pleasurable pursuits like dancing, which Acevedo paints as a kind of “bending / and blending / of backbones” (Lines 95-97); dancing is both work (physical effort) and pleasure.
The other Black body is Acevedo’s own, which she uses in her spoken-word performance to illustrate what the Black body can do. For example, she gestures to her own hair (time markers 0:36-0:37), and she sways back and forth when she does the roll call of Dominican and Caribbean music at Lines 90-94 (time markers 1:46-1:47). The control she exercises over her voice allows her to present the Black body in another form of pleasurable work, the sharing of poetry. The presence of this creative Black body allows Acevedo to counter a history in which Black bodies exist only for the profit and pleasure of others.
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By Elizabeth Acevedo
