![]() In a bright future, I want to pick up a book that goes above and beyond to highlight just how diverse and multifaceted Latino culture can be. ![]() We don’t only need characters we need intersectionality. The thing that’s missing here is a little thing called representation. I can’t help thinking maybe it would have been different if more were in books. I’ve always felt too black to be Latina and too foreign to feel completely African-American. No matter how real you appear to be, standing there in front of them, they have to question your existence and blink a million times at the mere sight of you. I tell people all the time being a Black Latina has to be the equivalent to seeing a unicorn in real life. But the thing that hurt the most for a kid who liked to lose herself in books was that a girl like me, Black and Cuban with an unusual name that almost no one can say, was never in any works of fiction. In fact, I hadn’t even known that any Black Latinas made contributions to Latin American societies until I was well out of college and half way into my 20’s. ![]() You see, a darker skinned girl with kinky hair like me never made it to my TV screen when “La Familia” parked our butts down to watch Spanish language programs.Īfro-Latinas like me rarely, if ever, showed up in any history lessons. And what’s devastating is that for a while, I believed them. At home, I was Libertad, but to the world I was a Black girl with a Spanish name.įrom first glance, loads of people tell me I don’t “look” Latina. I knew what it meant when I was old enough to talk, I knew what it meant before I ever entered school, and I knew what it meant at 18 years old when I took my first job as a barista at a local coffee shop and was again subjected to wearing the name tags I so dreaded as a kid. “Libertad? You know it means ‘Freedom’ in Spanish, right?” Of course, I knew what my name meant. A trip or experience.This was a question that made me hate name tags since the second grade. Washington, an African American educator, orator, and presidential advisor in the late 19th and early 20th century. A popular baby boy name because of Booker T. Historical African American Baby Names and Meaningsīecause America is indeed the world’s melting pot, many cultures have inspired names we think of today as popular Black names. Louisiana and parts of the American south were also French-occupied, which resulted in a unique language called Creole. Many of the West Indes and parts of Africa were settled or ruled by the French. As a result of interest in African Americans tracing their roots, there was an increase in Arabic names and Muslim names. Historians estimate that 10-30% of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves were Muslim.
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