Afro-Latino Identities, Part I

Feb 17, 2017 @ 7:00pm

Film Screening: Nana Dijo: Irresolute Radiography of Black Consciousness, followed by Q&A and spoken word performance by film director Bocafloja. Music by Irka Mateo Folk Quartet
Featuring folk songs that were sung by descendants of the maroons in the Dominican Republic countryside, as well as Palenquera, an original song dedicated to the women of San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia, the first black town in the Americas to abolish slavery.
Afro-Latino Identities in Art & Black History Month
The earliest manifestations of the Afro-Latino presence, in what would become the United States, was in the settlement of St. Augustine in Florida in 1565, in the Castillo de San Marcos and the Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (Fort Mose). They preceded the English settlements at Plymouth and Jamestown. Historically Afro- Latinos in the U.S. tended to be of Caribbean origin—Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Do- minican Republic—yet are now growing communities from Central America (Panama and Honduras), Mexico and the coast of Venezuela and Colombia. The migrations here were due to various reasons. The first sizable Afro-Latino community was in Tampa, where exiles from the Ten Year’s War (1868-1878) in Cuba formed the backbone of the cigar workers industry there. In the 1940s many of the Afro-Cuban cigar workers would settle in the Bronx and found one of the most important music venues in the borough, the Club Cubano Interamericano on Prospect Avenue.
Towards the end of the 19th-century revolutionary work against colonial Spain by Cubans and Puerto Ricans led to many of them settling in NYC. One of those who would join the movement was Puerto Rican Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938), who worked in the club, Las Dos Antillas, which was led by Jose Marti. Schomburg would later gain renown in the Harlem Renaissance as a collector and bibliophile of the Africana experience. His collections became the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The Harlem Renaissance was a surge in creativity in all the arts within black America which reached its zenith in the late 1920s in NYC The 1930s saw a similar literary and artistic movement throughout Latin America, which manifested most strongly in the Caribbean, specifically in poetry (the Harlem Rennaissance was also led by poets such as Cluade McKay and James Weldon Johnson). Nicolás Guillen was part of the Afrocubanismo movement in Cuba which was directly inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and also included scholars Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera and writer Alejo Carpentier.
After Guillén published, Sóngoro consongo (1931). Luis Palés Matos in Puerto Rico published the seminal work, Tuntún de pasa y griferia (1937) establishing the poesia negroide movement. The poetry of both of them integrated African words and a rhythmic structure evoking a drumbeat. In the French Antilles, the negritude movement emerged led by poets Aimé Cessaire of Martinique and León Dumas of Guyana. These movements sought to celebrate black culture the Afro-Antillean identity and the islands as distinct from the colonial powers. African-Americans and Latino connections have a continuing history throughout the 20th century. The 369th Regimental Band during World War I led by James Reese Europe introduced French audiences to early jazz music and about a third of the band were Afro-Puerto Rican, including Latin America’s greatest composer, Rafael Hernández. Later Chano Pozo, a Cuban conguero who arrived in the mid-1940s, worked with Dizzy Gillespie, and their collaborations produced, Cu-Bop. Although Chano didn’t speak English and Dizzy didn’t speak Spanish, Chano said they were able to work together because they both “spoke African.”