In decades past, it's been a source of pain and stigma. Today, the identity Afro-Latino is embraced by many multiracial people. Well, there is a new celebration of the richness of Afro-Latino identity and culture.
And WGN's Julian Cruz has a look at how things have changed. Afro-Latino adults we talk to describing the struggle for acceptance. Growing up never fully fitting in, they say, in a racialized world at times.
encountering mistrust or even rejection from the larger Latino and black communities. I'm multiracial. My father is African-American and my mother is Mexican.
Blackness has been a part of Latin America since its inception. We are black bodies racially and Latina ethnically. We sat down with three Afro-Latina Because in the arts, they told me how race has impacted culture around the world.
Growing up in the 80s as a multiracial person was very difficult because I was never enough of either side. I think it's really about reclaiming our culture. Mateo, the granddaughter of a black grandfather from the Dominican Republic. There is anti-blackness that happens within the Latino community that comes from the history within our individual countries. We can all be Afro-Latino because we have traces of our culture, traces of our herencia to Africa.
Melissa Dupre currently appearing in the Hulu comedy How to Die Alone. And what we love about even just the phrase Afro-Latina is that it really does tie Latinos to black culture, black history. Her father black and mother white, both of them from Puerto Rico.
There were no spaces made for me. Afro-Latino heritage, a hot topic of discussion at another gathering. You walk in the room looking the way you do, you can't take this off.
Why would you? Members of the Mujeron movement, mentoring and empowering young Latinas, inviting Dupre to talk about race. The term Afro-Latino, in its very sense, is transnational.
University of Chicago scholar, Professor Danielle Roper, among other things, an expert on race and multiculturalism in the Americas and the Caribbean, says Afro-Latinos played a crucial role in the development of new art forms. The big things. are of course reggaeton, of course hip-hop, but we forget about rumba.
We also have to remember that Afro-Latinos gave us salsa. It comes out of kind of black practitioners, black drumming, black... All of this comes out of a history of from enslaved people in the Americas. Chicago's acclaimed Bomba Cumbuya, honoring the sacred art forms of Afro-Latino ancestors, group embracing the richness of their racial and ethnic identity to the delight of audiences worldwide.
Black Lives Matter! Afro-Latinos also bearing the legacy of struggle and protest, joining forces in that battle for racial equality in the Civil Rights Movement, now rekindled, Professor Roper says, by the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It brought to the fore ongoing conversations or things that were perhaps bubbling beneath the surface. So it's a moment of racial reckoning, I would say, that has allowed people or given them license to talk more freely about their experiences as Afro-Latinos. As human beings in general, we are always looking for a place to belong.
Miranda Gonzalez, Melissa Dupre, and Wendy Mateo say that there are still racial barriers for performers when it comes to acceptance and funding projects. But it's really, really important for us to be in decision-making. making roles for an Afro Latina.
The intersection of race and culture in the United States in particular has given way to Afro Latino. Mateo along with Gonzales and Dupre finding time in their busy world to reach out to young Latinos and black Latinos alike to model and create new pathways for students to see what they can become. Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, I'm Julian Cruz.