Reclaiming “Papá Africa:” Blackness and Belonging in Roberto Carlos García’s AfroDominican Poetry

• In Event: Afro-Diasporic Influences in Caribbean and Latinx Cultural Production

Abstract

While Black erasure has characterized the field of Latinx Studies, we are witnessing a paradigm shift led by Afro-Latinx cultural producers and scholars who are confronting the erasure of Black histories and voices from latinidad. Afro-Dominican poet Roberto Carlos García has emerged as a powerful voice in recent years. His work centers Blackness and pushes back against the racism and anti-Blackness prevalent in Dominican and US societies. In this presentation I show how his poems unveil the racism that Black Dominicans experience from their Dominican families and communities–a recurrent theme in Dominican diaspora letters–but how they call out the rejection they experience from Black US society, which often fails to recognize their Blackness. Through the methodology of textual analysis, I examine selected poems that reference Africa and the Middle Passage of the speaker’s ancestors. The reference to the Middle Passage is noteworthy, as it serves to affirm the African roots of the Hispanophone Caribbean. I demonstrate how by recalling the history of enslavement of Papá Africa, the speaker rectifies the erasure of African heritage from Dominican identity.

Author

• Marisel C Moreno, University of Notre Dame