Interrogating Blackness and Overlapping Diasporas in Afro-Central American First-Generation Communities

• In Event: 18.025 - (Un)Educating Diversity: Afro-Latinidad in the U.S. Educational Context

Abstract

The history of immigration and migration within Latino communities demonstrate a phenomenal account of complex power struggles that lead to divisiveness.. Much literature has been written on Caribbean identity and culture among the Caribbean immigrant community (Foner, 2001; Waters, 1999; Mollenkopf, 2004). However, few authors have examined the constructions of race and identity among the first-generation American born children. First-generation descendants of Afro-Central American immigrants in the United States negotiate their identity within the context of black im/migration and segmented assimilation. As a result of the diverse cultural components that constitute these varied identities, the ways in which the first generation self-identify are typically influenced by geographical locations, understandings of diaspora, socialization and personal experience (Patterson & Kelley, 2002).

For the purposes of this paper, I explore how first-generation Afro-Central Americans construct new narratives and identities by establishing a fluid identity that reflects both their conceptions of race and ethnicity—and in doing so, how they might challenge both racial and ethnic binaries that accompany immigrant communities within schools and the dichotomies between African American, Latino and Caribbean identities (Gordon & Anderson, 1999). I examine conceptions of blackness and identity among first generation Afro-Central Americans on the West Coast through cultural production and performance—while also paying close attention to how these performances are used as tools for learning and conceptualizing Central American blackness. Building off of Mark Anderson’s work on Garifuna consumer culture, identity and activism in Honduras, I utilize various framings of everyday articulations and performances of Blackness and identity within a transatlantic-U.S. context (Anderson, 2009). In using cultural production as my entry point, I investigate how performances (i.e. afro-pop, Reggae en español y ingles) are also rooted in conceptions of diasporic belonging and longstanding traditions of Central American blackness through the lens of multiple generations. Utilizing both content analysis (i.e. lyrics, images) and interviews allows me to understand how such performances are used as a diasporic resource in addition to informing how particular Afro-Central Americans negotiate their place in both national and local cultures (Rivera-Rideau, 2015). With this research I found that Blackness within Afro-Caribbean Diasporas and the multifaceted ways in which individuals choose to identify is not only an expression of larger processes of identity making within the Diaspora, but extending such analyses to places where a collective black identity is not always a given, indicates the complex ways in which geopolitics and multiple understandings of Diaspora has shaped racial discourse (Patterson & Kelley, 2002).

Author

• Nicole Denise Ramsey, University of California - Berkeley