Growing Up Afro–Puerto Rican: Designing for the Development of Positive Afro-Latinx Identity

• In Event: From Colonized to Woke: Reframing Afro-Latinidad in Educational Spaces

Abstract

This paper examines Afro-Puerto Rican youth’s development of positive associations with their afro-descendency. As a microcosm of Afrolatinidad in the US, Puerto Ricans suffer from the highest rates of low-wage labor, unemployment, and low educational attainment when compared to the overall Latinx population (Center for Puerto Rican Studies Education Research Brief, 2013). Surrounded by structural deficiencies, Puerto Rican adolescents are particularly susceptible to identity crises and the formation of unhealthy notions of self (Nakkula, 2008; Noguera, 2008). If given the opportunity for reflection and experimentation with their identity, it is more likely these adolescents will enter adulthood with increased health and success (Nakkula, 2008). Focusing on the experiences of Puerto Rican youth allows us to intervene in this downward mobility and offer insights and implications for Afrolatinxs broadly.
Understanding Puerto Ricans as “afro” in the US requires a nuanced approach that undertakes notions of diaspora and geography. To account for heterogeneity Godreau (2015) offers scripts of blackness - the “dominant narratives and stories that set standards, expectations, and even spatial templates for what is publicly recognized, celebrated, and sponsored as black and Puerto Rican” as a useful analytic that brings attention to the geographical emplacement of blackness (14, italics in original). This paper therefore considers the role of space and place in the creation of multiple Afro-Puerto Rican identities.
This paper reflects on the development of a Social Design Experiment (SDE) that is grounded in a Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) framework. The SDE included the development of a curriculum that spanned five weeks, for a total of 75 hours with youth. Video was collected during our sessions as well as written reflections and 15 hours of interview data. Six youth, ages 11-15 participated. A CHAT approach fostered an environment for youth in which the learning of ‘blackness as negative’ and common place notions around the division between latinidad and blackness were disrupted. In this space youth learned about afrolatinidad, collectively finding ways to positively associate with blackness. Students repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) were acknowledged and sought out so that students felt they were actively contributing to the learning of the collective group and led us to build in meaningful ways towards expansive learning (citation). Youth left the five-week program having transformed notions around blackness and latinidad as expressed in their exit interviews.

By participating in this study youth gained the confidence to “become designers of their own futures”, learning to participate in systems in order to change them (Gutiérrez 2016, 194). Participants new notions of self, that is positive associations with their blackness, led to a desire to share this new knowledge with members of their family and broader networks (friends, teammates, church groups, for example). Ultimately, this project has led to a better understanding of Afrolatinx youth which has implications for such things as culturally-relevant and responsive curriculums in classrooms, as well as, more robust policies, for example, that can improve the life-outcomes of Afrolatinx communities in the United States.

Author

• Krista L. Cortes, University of California - Berkeley