The Afro-Latino experience

The Miami Herald has a great series on Afro-Latinos and "our" emerging (well it's been around for centuries, but you know...) movement. I say "our" because I haven't been doing enough to be part of the movement.

This series is especially poignant to me now because my mother almost died when she learned I would keep my hair natural and nappy.....and after learning that an African American sister has left my sorority because of racism.

I guess the least I can do is not straighten my hair. I was seriously moved to tears reading these stories.

Some excerpts from the series:

"For years, it was just so much easier to not 'be' black, to call yourself something else," says Michael Campbell, who grew up 18 miles downriver in Bluefields. "But the key to our future is to strengthen our identity, to say we are black, and we are proud."
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Nicaragua's black population is the largest in Central America, but there is only one black member in its National Assembly, Raquel Dixon Brautigam, who was elected last year.
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Before now, there were no anti-discrimination or affirmative-action laws. Still, a bill that would outlaw institutional racism has languished in the assembly for more than two years, with not enough backers to push it through.
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Newball had thought for a while about what it meant to be black here. She considered all the terms morena, coolie, afro, chocolate, la negra. Then she decided that natural hair -- an enduring barometer of ethnicity was the purest expression of blackness.
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But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. "If you're working in a bank, you don't want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant," the bank teller said. "It's not that as a person of color I want to look white. I want to look pretty." And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.
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"I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it," said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. "They ask me if I just got out of prison. People just don't want that image to be seen."
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Despite their numbers, black Brazilians have long been poorer, less educated, less healthy and less powerful than white Brazilians.
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Brazil claims more than 90 million people of African descent out of a population of 190 million. It has more blacks than any country except Nigeria. In Rio's slums, blacks make up the majority of residents.