Growing up, I was very aware of what I looked like. My grandmother's favorite novellas had white passing Latino characters and I was confronted with the realization that none of them looked like me at a very young age. I had always wished I looked more like my fair skinned Puerto Rican mother than my dark skin Dominican father. But I don't. I'm not the darkest Latina but my skin and my hair happened to be the subject of most conversations. My father's relatives never hesitated to point out how I have "dark" skin with "good" hair the minute they met me. During the first couple of days in middle school, a friend told me she was amazed to see a "light skin" black girl with such "good" hair. My Puerto Rican side of the family would call me "Negrita", a nickname I would grow to hate later on in life because of the negativity tied to blackness.
Visible or not, I always knew I had African roots. Before I entered a high school history class I already knew the horrors of colonization and the history of my people. As I began to read about what happened to natives in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico I became more aware of who I was and I accepted it. Unfortunately, Ancestry.com cannot map my family tree for me (unless I take the DNA test). Colonization probably put my ancestors somewhere new and some how some way I'm here today. All I know about us is the knowledge past generations have spread forward.
But where do we fit? I choose not to identify as just Latina because most of my adolescence I allowed people to call me "Spanish" (I'm not from Spain though) and went along with it because I didn't know any better. Since Latinos are known to deny their blackness, I wanted to embrace that part of me. There is no part of me that will deny my African roots and I will teach my future children to do the same.
Today, I see more and more young people celebrating what it means to be Afro-Latino. As we speak out on our experiences future generations will continue to do as we do and embrace their blackness. That's the most important part for me. Older generations do not seem to understand. My own father denies his blackness and clings to identifying as solely "Dominican". As race and ethnicity continue to be a part of the conversation in our families there is a greater chance that acceptance will occur.
