Afroreparaciones y Veneraciones: How Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro and Ana Castillo Muñoz decolonize young imaginations

• In Event: Puerto Rico, Empire, and Children’s Literature

Abstract

Puerto Rico: an archipelago filled with wondrous natural landscapes, beaches, local hospitality, and remnant histories of Western colonization. Millions of schoolchildren in Puerto Rico, throughout the years, have digested white supremacist-centered narratives of Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, indigenous ethnocide, and enslavement. With glorification and excessive esteem towards Western colonists, such as Cristóbal Colón and Juan Ponce de León, students in Puerto Rico have had little to no contextualization of archaic and precolonial indigenous Caribbean and African history, figures, and folklore. In addition to Puerto Rico’s colonial perceptions of race, ethnicity, and nationality – where Puerto Rican nation-state propaganda promotes the myth of racial harmony, absence of racism and that everyone is equally from Taíno, Spaniard, and African descent – Black and other racialized Puerto Rican children and youth continue to face racism, colorism, and little to no representation in the workforce and media.
As a response, emergent Afroboricua writers like Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro and Ana Castillo Muñoz restore Black Puerto Rican narratives and deliver positive representation in Puerto Rican children’s literature. Works like Arroyo Pizarro’s Mejorar la raza and Pelo Bueno and Muñoz’s Al ritmo de Petra shed light into lived experiences of Black Puerto Rican youth, in celebration of Afroboricua culture, music, and folklore. These works not only detail the realities of racism in Puerto Rico’s youth, but also share stories of Black Puerto Rican girls who listen to their elders and of family members who honor their ancestors and preserve their traditions — such as recipes, afro hairstyles, bomba, and plena. Via a framework influenced by both Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Edward Said’s Orientalism, my decolonial and postcolonial analyses map the cultural impact of these Afroboricua writers on Puerto Rican children’s literature. Fanon’s perspective on Black children’s exposure to colonial, Eurocentric education and Said’s analysis on the West’s perceptions of cultures in the East as “the Other” will also be crucial to examine how Puerto Rico’s nation/state propaganda has viewed blackness and Black Puerto Ricans and its effect on Black Puerto Rican children and their perceptions of themselves in the archipelago.

Author

• Celia M. Ayala Lugo, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras