Afro-Latina

This is one of those blogs that I have thought about doing before but I haven't quite gotten around to it. I was at a party tonight and a typical thing happened. Some guy came towards the end, and the one person who knew him, did the polite thing and introduced me:

"This is Vielka."
"Dee-el-ka?"
"No, with a V. Vielka. She's Central American too, from Nicaragua."
He started with my feet and gave me a slow long look over. By the time he got to my face, his mean mug was only matched by my own. Why the hell was he looking me up and down? I was already a bit annoyed. I know people feel obligated to share my family history with strangers who don't seem to get it, and that makes me uncomfortable. But the inevitable next few minutes are the worst.

So I walk across the room to avoid having to ask a fool something about the look on his face and I hear the person who introduced me say "She's a Black Nicaraguan. There are Black people in Nicaragua," hella loud over the music. And then I catch him looking at me again, he still looks upset, like I've robbed him of something.

I've encountered this situation many times. I almost feel like it has happened multiple times in a day. If someone isn't explaining my name, they feel some strange obligation to explain a plethora of other things with "she's Nicaraguan":
She likes to read.
She listens to music in Spanish.
She does well in school.
She doesn't sound that ghetto when she talks.
She has immigrant parents.
She has never eaten grits.

She's Nicaraguan.
She's Nicaraguan.
She's Nicaraguan...as if to say, she isn't really Black. Or as some people have said, not that Black.

The person who did my hair last month explained to me that I was an "acceptable" Black person, like Barack Obama, having parents who did not grow up in this country. "You all don't hate America yet, you don't have that chip on your shoulder." I answered with "I would like to see a Nicaraguan in this country that doesn't have a chip on his or her shoulder" and that ended that conversation.

The thing I hate most--and trust me, the explaining away is pretty close to the top--is having to prove an identity. So I get asked to speak Spanish quite a bit. It usually goes like "You're Nicaraguan? Speak Spanish then." Speaking Spanish has become such a spectacle for me, I won't even do it when I have to. When I worked at Burger King in high school, one of the managers asked if I could translate "please mop the floor" for the guys in the back. Another manager ran across the "restaurant" to hear me say it in Spanish, so I said "please mop the floor" instead of "por favor, mopiar el piso." I told the manager that I didn't understand why she had to run across the dining area like that, causing most everyone to turn and stare at me. When people ask me to speak Spanish, just to prove I am who I say I am, I tell them how insulting that is. Since I work with young people a lot, I take the time to explain why I won't do it, in case they run into another Afro-Latino one day.

If I'm not asked to prove I'm Nicaraguan, I'm covertly asked to prove my Blackness. I've been asked how to prepare collard greens and grits on countless occasions even though I have no clue. I've been asked about Black colloquialisms, still mostly without a clue. I've been asked to attend certain meetings or become parts of groups for African Americans and I have made people angry when I decline this invitation for a Latino function. What I know of the Black experience in this country is from what I've read or what my father taught me when I was younger. I know about the Black immigrant, Afro-Latino experience.

As of late, I have also been asked to prove an Afro-Latino identity, as people start to see more and more African-descended people from Latin America. But in these cases, I'm asked to play capoeira or dance samba and merengue. I'm not too mad at this since we are in the general area at least, but all Afro-Latinos are not made the same.

My family is from Bluefields on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Bluefields and Corn Islands in Nicaragua, along with Limon in Costa Rica and some of Colon's Black population in Panama, are part of the same migration from San Andres island in Colombia. San Andres is actually much closer to Corn Island than mainland Colombia. Most Black people in Nicaragua and Costa Rica can trace their ancestors to San Andres. During a recent conference in San Andres, the hotel people kept telling me about all the Hoys on the island. One person came by and even drew my family tree for me. If that wasn't validation enough, the conference was the Caribbean Studies Association held in San Andres, a place they deemed, along with Bluefields, the capital of the Western Caribbean. Some people have said that Bluefields is figuratively closer to Jamaica than Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. To say that I am from Bluefields was not a shock to anyone there; actually, it made perfect sense.

This is what I do now. I'm working on my PhD, discussing the experience of Afro-Latinos in California. My cousin often times reminds me that a lot of people are waiting for me to finish, so that I can tell their story, so that we don't have to explain constantly who we are. Another friend once said to me that I will be the first Nicaraguan PhD that she knows and most definitely the first Afro-Nicaraguan one. The pressure is immense but when I have experiences like I had tonight, it is well worth it.