​​P’alante y pa’tra/Forward and Back: Afro-Boriqua Mothering as Black Activist Practice

• In Event: Black Mamas Teach: Leaning on, Learning From, and Centering Black M(other)work as Educational Praxis

Abstract

In 1984 Audre Lourde wrote, “[r]aising Black children – female and male – in the mouth
of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. And in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach – love, survival” (2007, p. 74). Lourde’s words, as relevant today as they were 36 years ago, capture various themes integral to this project. This paper seeks to bring attention to what Black mothers teach. Black mothers are storytellers, the keepers of knowledges, and innovators of our future. Black mothers birth and rear the next generation, teaching us important lessons about how to live and thrive in a white supremacist, settler-colonial, capitalist patriarchy. Black mothers do all of this as a labor of love and as necessary work for the survival of Black people. Through it all, Black mothers are resilient and committed to having all Black people experience joy. There is so much to be learned from Black mothers; this paper is a small piece of this process. By documenting the multiplicity and variance specifically within and across the practices of AfroPuerto Rican mothers I posit how educators can similarly design Black-affirming educational spaces for AfroLatinx youth.

This paper documents the ways AfroPuerto Rican (other)mothers design opportunities for the learning of blackness as a practice in the lives of children and community members. Employing a sociocultural perspective to ground my exploration of everyday Black practices, I use an AfroLatinx feminist approach to narrative inquiry to systematically document the learning that occurs in and across multiple cultural contexts, with attention to communities’ long histories of blackness-as-practice. I focus on the ways one community, Bahia Bomba, exemplifies AfroBoriqua mothering - an act that occurs within a community of practice that queers how we understand mothering through activism that always center blackness and anti-colonial Puerto Ricanness. The term itself seeks to embody the lived experience of being black and Puerto Rican by being un-hyphenated, using the anti-colonial name for Puerto Ricans – boricuas, and substituting the ‘c’ for a ‘q’ to highlight the queering of roles. AfroBoriqua mothering offers a way to describe the teaching/learning within AfroLatinx multi-generational communities that centers blackness as an ancestral, cooperative, and activist practice.

This study contributes to the scholarly and national conversations on issues of anti-blackness, particularly in the Latinx community, in conceptually and methodologically unique ways. Few studies have considered the role of mothers in affirming blackness within AfroLatinx communities or examined these experiences over a sustained period and across multiple contexts. In a historical moment marked by increasing forms of marginalization and violence against Black-identified Latinx peoples, this study has implications for the sociopolitical limitations and future possibilities of Black-affirming educational spaces for AfroLatinx youth.

Author

• Krista L. Cortes, University of Pennsylvania