This Is What It Means To Be Afro-Latino

In a Q&A for his 2011 PBS documentary “Black In Latin America,” Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said:

There were 11.2 million Africans that we can count who survived the Middle Passage and landed in the New World, and of that 11.2 million, only 450,000 came to the United States. That’s amazing. All the rest went south of Miami as it were.

There’s no doubt that the intersection between Black and Latino identity runs deep, and yet the Afro-Latino experience remains largely invisible in mainstream media. In honor of Black History Month, we asked HuffPost Latino Voices and HuffPost Black Voices readers to send us their thoughts via Facebook on what it means to be Afro-Latino. What makes being Afro-Latino beautiful? Challenging? Unique?

We received dozens of responses and compiled a list of our favorites below. We also paid homage to a few of the many Afro-Latinos who’ve influenced American culture.

• “Being Afro Latino is being a bridgebuilder, standing squarely at the crossroads of pan Africanism in the US. I am a proud Black Panamanian! We exist! And we exist with the knowledge that Blackness is global in its scope. No one has hegemony on Blackness and we are the proof!” — Merrick Moise
• “Afro-latino is not about being Black and Latino, Afro-Latina means to be a Black Latina/Latino hence why the term Afro-latino came about in the late 70’s.

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