The Global Lives of Afro-Latinos in the 21st Century
Posted on February 28, 2008
 
VidaAfroLatina.com emerges in a new era. For so long, national and global focus on heroic African-American social struggle, revolutionary activists and popular culture—identity in a broad sense—has overshadowed Latino, Afro-Latin, Native and Asian-Pacific-American lives and cultures in the United States.

But the racial and ethnic discourse about individual and national identity in the U.S. has been fundamentally altered by a demographic shift: Latinos are the new majority-minority.
 
In the first decade of the 21st century, we are witnessing increased transnational connections between the daily lives of U.S. Afro-Latin citizens, residents and new immigrants, and their family, friends, colleagues and fellow social activists living in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa.

The new era in U.S. national and group-specific identity formation and politics also coincides with a seminal development in the global African Diaspora. Afro-Latin populations in Latin America and the Caribbean are reflecting new depths of consciousness, self-organization, and political agendas and projects. They are intensifying challenges to racism in various national philosophies about inclusion, equality and identity.

Afro-Descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean are ratcheting up efforts to inform and to participate in their respective governments’ conversations about regional Latin American and Caribbean integration, alternatives to neoliberalism and projects to achieve 21st century socialism.

These national and international connections are being amplified through the African Union’s landmark decision to declare the Diaspora as a Sixth Region of the continent. The connections are also growing through projects from the Diaspora in Europe and the Americas that engage government and civil society participation in intra-African continental and global geopolitics.        
 
The need for a serious, timely information-gathering and dissemination about Vidas Afro Latinas (Afro-Latino lives) is obvious. Historical and contemporary circumstances—national and transnational—surrounding the rising U.S. discourse about Afro-Latinos certainly deserves concentrated attention. This reality is the lived context in which Vidas Afro-Latinas are constructed and negotiated, within and between groups and nations.
 
What are not so obvious are identity nomenclature and methodological considerations employed by writers and readers: What is Vida Afro-Latina life and identity? How should we interpret Vida Afro-Latina and by what measures? 

A fundamental question raised throughout all of the Americas centers around: Who is Black, African-American, Afro-Latino, Afro-Descendent, and by what historical and contemporary standards across the distinct countries of the Americas? 

The multifaceted question too frequently posed is what difference does official racial and ethnic identity and individual identity selection make? How do they impact the pursuit to improve the quality of cultural and material life? How do they affect efforts to move nations toward embracing participatory democracy, individual and group-specific equity, national sovereignty and self-determination? What does identity matter amid the shifting tides of neoliberal capitalism which defines global life, amid palpitating populist and socialist pursuits of New Possible Worlds?
 
These questions should not suggest some abstract criteria for establishing identity within or across countries. Nor can the questions be avoided given the common histories of life-defining racism, the contemporary similarity in the destitute lives of large sectors of African descendants in the Americas, common racial ceilings and the vibrant cultural ties across Vidas Afro-Latinas. 
 
So let the inquiries, reading, writing and interpretation of VidaAfroLatina flow!

James Counts Early is the Director of Cultural Heritage Policy at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He also serves on the TransAfrica Forum Board of Directors.