15 years of The Afro-Latin@ Reader: Past and Future Directions

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In dialogue with this year’s theme, we propose a panel that explores the past and future directions of Afro-Latinx Studies by celebrating the 15th anniversary of the publication of the watershed edited volume curated by the late Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States published by Duke University Press. The sustained focus on United States Afro-Latinidades with a transnational and hemispheric framework broke ground for what has been often understudied and undertheorized histories, politics, and cultures of Black Latinx communities in the empire of the United States. In this roundtable, the co-editors of the second volume, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, Omaris Z. Zamora, and Paul Joseph López Oro along with scholars and section editors of the second volume invite us for a meditation on the first volume of The Afro-Latin@ Reader, the vision of late Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Roman, and a discussion of the current state of the field. We will also share the new directions and the collective vision of the second volume, which focuses on contemporary concerns and developments in Afro-Latinx Studies that center race, gender, sexuality, history, and politics through interdisciplinary dialogue. This volume centers embodied knowledge productions rooted in the memories and racialized gendered experiences captured by testimonios—centering what Nancy Lopez calls “street race,” meanwhile expanding Flores’ notion of “the fact of Afro-Latinidad.” Furthermore, we offer a meditation on the geographies and cartographies of AfroLatinidad from slavery and cimarronaje to transnational migration and diasporas. We push against the essentialization of Afro-Latinidad with a hemispheric approach to Blackness and the importance of the U.S. Census. In this intellectual and communal gathering of scholars, activists, educators, and artists, we craft directions, pathways, and futurities of AfroLatinx studies, culture, and life. Furthemore, the collective exercise of this project is rooted in community care, fateful witnessing, and fluidity that continues to center the African Diaspora in the Americas and Black life.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Yomaira C Figueroa-Vasquez, CUNY Hunter

Panelists

• Paul Joseph Lopez Oro, Bryn Mawr College

• Amarilys Estrella, Rice University

• Omaris Z Zamora, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

• Ashley Coleman Taylor, The University of Texas at Austin

Comment

• Petra Rivera-Rideau, Wellesley College

Biographical Information

Amarilys Estrella is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a faculty affiliate for the Center for African and African American Studies and the Center for the Study of Gender, Women and Sexuality at Rice University. Her research interests broadly focus on the intersections of race and gender within Black transnational movements, as well as human rights and anti-racist activism. Her first book project investigates movement organizing among stateless Black grassroots activists of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic.

Paul Joseph Lopez Oro is Assistant Professor and Program Director of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr University. Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro is a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose teaching and research interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black diaspora theories and ethnographies, and Black Queer Feminisms. His research interests include Black politics in Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. AfroLatinidades, Black Latinx LGBTQ movements and performances, and Black transnationalism.

Omaris Z. Zamora is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Latinx Studies jointly appointed in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Africana Studies Department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. ​​She is a transnational Black Dominican Studies scholar and spoken-word poet. Her research interests include: theorizing AfroLatinidad in the context of race, gender, sexuality through Afro-diasporic approaches. Her forthcoming book, Cigüapa Unbound: AfroLatina Feminist Epistemologies of Tranceformation examines the transnational Black Dominican narratives put forth in the work of Firelei Baez, Elizabeth Acevedo, Nelly Rosario, Ana Lara, Loida Maritza Pérez, Josefina Baez, Cardi B, and La Bella Chanel. Zamora pays close attention to how they embody their blackness, produce knowledge, and shift the geographies of black feminism. She fuses her poetry with her scholarly work as a way of contributing to a black poetic approach to cultural studies.

Ashley Coleman Taylor, is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. As an interdisciplinary ethnographer of circum-Caribbean descent, she specializes in the intersecting lived experiences of embodiment, Black genders, and Africana religions in Puerto Rico and her hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Her book-in-progress is tentatively titled Majestad Negra: Race, Class, Gender and Religious Experience in the Puerto Rican Imaginary. It is an intersectional Black feminist approach to race, class, gender, and coloniality in Puerto Rico. The manuscript was a finalist for the University of Illinois/National Women’s Studies Association First Book Prize.

CHAIR:Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vasquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She is Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies and is the Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at CUNY Hunter. She is author of the award-winning book Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020; translation, Editora Educación Emergente, 2023), and the forthcoming book, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press). Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, Hispanofila, Contemporânea, Diálogos, and Feminist Formations. She is the PI of the 2022-2024 “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $2M Mellon Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies and leads the CENTRO “Rooted and Relational” Initiative, a $6.48M project supported by the Mellon Presidential Initiatives.

MODERATOR: Petra Rivera-Rideau is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Duke, 2015) and the forthcoming book Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba (Duke, 2024). She is also the co-editor of Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Dr. Rivera-Rideau co-founded the Bad Bunny Syllabus with Vanessa Díaz (Loyola Marymount), an online resource that contextualizes the cultural, social, and political impact of the reggaetón artist Bad Bunny. Petra and Vanessa’s new book, P FKN R: Bad Bunny and the Sounds of Resistance in Puerto Rico will be published by Duke University Press in 2026. Petra has published articles in journals such as Latino Studies, Identities, and Journal of Popular Music Studies. Her article “If I Were You: Tego Calderon’s Diasporic Interventions” published in Small Axe in 2018 won the inaugural Blanca Silvestrini Prize for Best Article in Puerto Rican Studies from the Latin American Studies Association. Petra frequently appears in popular media such as NPR, Al Jazeera +, and The Atlantic, among others, and she has written for The Washington Post and PBS’s American Experience. She has served as a consultant on several reggaetón-related projects, including on Bad Bunny’s historic 2023 Coachella headlining performance.