Not a Monolith is a Teen Vogue series for Latinx Heritage Month 2023, highlighting the diversity of those in the Latinx community. From disability rights activists to rappers to drag queens, we're showing the range of backgrounds and experiences that inform Latinx culture today. In this op-ed, poet and writer Alan Pelaez Lopez reckons with the devaluation of Black Latinx talent in the entertainment industry and the path forward for representation.
In 2021, after Anya Taylor-Joy was awarded a Golden Globe for best actress in a limited series, Variety ran an article that claimed “Argentinian Taylor-Joy is the first woman of color to win this category since Queen Latifah in 2008 and only the fifth woman of color to win overall since 1982, when the category was introduced.” Ironically, in a 2018 interview with Vulture, Taylor-Joy acknowledged that yes, she is “Latina,” and also “really white and blonde.” After public outrage about Taylor-Joy being identified as a woman of color, Variety modified its statement to “Taylor-Joy is the first Latina to win in this category.” The publication's narrative about Taylor-Joy revealed multiple truths about race and ethnicity that, unfortunately, are still true two years later: Race is unstable, Latinidad is fungible, and when there is Latinx representation in Hollywood, that representation tends to be white or white adjacent.
Light-skinned Latinx narratives, such as One Day At a Time, in US media are uplifted as racial progress due to a scarcity mentality that is accepted by many Hollywood directors, producers, and writers. Scarcity of racial representation in Hollywood is a political action and decision. According to 2022 estimates by the US Census Bureau, the white American population amounts to 58.9%. There is no scarcity of racial and ethnic diversity in the US, but racism, xenophobia, and American essentialism exist, and these everyday barriers are reflected in mainstream media.
This is clear in recent conversations surrounding disapproval from social media users who don’t believe that Colombian Polish American actor Rachel Zegler should play Snow White in the live-action film, despite Zegler herself being white. Here, the outrage is in the fact that Zegler has Latin American ancestry, a prejudice rooted in xenophobia and Anglo American essentialism. (Even more obvious is the anti-Black and racist backlash against Halle Bailey’s role as Ariel in The Little Mermaid.)
Within a framework of Latinx and Latin American media representation, it is clear that Hollywood does not understand race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity when it comes to Latinx and Latin American culture; furthermore, Latinidad in the United States is imagined as a light-skinned or white person with a loud, exaggerated accent and an eccentric personality, such as Sofía Vergara's character in Modern Family. These controlled images leave little to no depth for entertainers and artists who are Black, Asian, or Indigenous Latinxs. Afro Latinx entertainers, specifically, come and go in modern media. What seems like progress — like say, Disney finally addressing Black Latinidad in Encanto — turns out to be temporary.
Black people in the Americas, meanwhile, have been producing culture since the 1500s. Some of the most recognized music in Latin America — salsa, cumbia, bachata, son jarocho, merengue, and more — is African diasporic music. To say that Afro Latinidad has not influenced this hemisphere is simply to erase the ways in which African and African diasporic people in Latin America and the Antilles have insisted on their aliveness, joy, and spirit. The US media must reckon with the devaluation of Black Latinx talent.
This is particularly true because Afro Latinx talent in film and television seems to be additive, and when Afro Latinx talent and stories are portrayed, they’re sometimes not recognized as Afro Latinx or supported in the long durée. As for music, Afro Latinx artists who make it big in the US are often robbed of their ethnic, national, and/or Indigenous identity. Mariah Carey, for example, is of Afro Venezuelan and Irish descent and is rarely spoken about in relation to Black Latinx politics and culture; when she is, it’s usually from Latinx-focused outlets. And Jean-Michel Basquiat is a canonical visual artist who is often referred to as an American artist despite both of his parents being Black Latinxs: His father was born in Haiti and his mother in Brooklyn to Black Puerto Rican parents.
This brings me to the question: Why is it easier for Anya Taylor-Joy and Sofia Vergara to be included and celebrated in public conversations about Latinx representation than it is for renowned figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Mariah Carey? Time magazine’s 2020 interview with Black Panamanian American actor Sarunas Jackson, in which Jackson outlines the constant interrogation he gets from people who do not understand that Latinxs can be Black, reveals the fact that Latinidad has a color — and in public-facing spaces, that color is white.
But not all is lost. If we take a closer look at contemporary cultural production, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight is a very Black Latinx story that attends to the everyday relationship of two queer Black men in a low-income, Afro Cuban Miami neighborhood. The film, which won a Golden Globe for best motion picture, drama, has a special place in Black, queer, and Latinx cinema that goes far beyond representation: In the film, two different Black men grapple with the shortcomings of hyper-masculinity and, in the water and within each other, find the softness they’ve been denied.
Importantly, Mahershala Ali, a Black American actor, plays the Afro Cuban lead role of Juan, while the younger version of the Black American lead, Kevin, is played by an Afro Dominican actor, Jharrel Jerome. This teaches viewers that Blackness and Latinidad are not always separate from one another, but they can be — and many times are — interchangeable. The interchangeability in Moonlight is ethical, and viewers are able to see both the distinction and solidarity between Black Americans and Black Latinxs.
One of the reasons Moonlight isn’t immediately identifiable as an Afro Latinx narrative is explained in the film when Juan tells Little (Kevin), “Lotta Black folks in Cuba, but you wouldn’t know it from being here.” In a brilliant analysis, journalist Rebbeca Bodenheimer wrote, “Juan is referring to the fact that black Cubans tend to be invisible in Miami, and in the United States in general, their voices and experiences drowned out by the very vocal and largely white, anticommunist exile community.”
Black Cubans are made invisible by white anticommunist Cubans whose negative opinions about Cuba make them desirable migrants who are thankful to the US, while Black Cubans are seen as ungrateful for pointing out racial disparities between white Cuban exiles and Black Cuban exiles. This is all part of the story Moonlight tells. Audiences must listen and watch carefully to understand the film’s racial, ethnic, and nationality-specific commentary. In Moonlight, Black Latinidad is in our faces, in the quiet, in the loudness, and in all the glorious queerness.
Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Steven Canals’ Pose is a three-season FX show that introduced Black American, Afro Latin American, and Afro Antillean experiences to living rooms across the United States. Arguably, this may be one of the most diverse Latinx representations onscreen, including three Afro Latinx leads: Puerto Rican African American Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Haitian Puerto Rican Dominican American Indya Moore, and Dominican American Angel Bismark Curiel.
“Afro Latinidad” and “Latinx” are not words or phrases used in Pose, but the show takes viewers into the intimate lives of Afro Latinx in New York City amid the HIV and AIDS crisis. In the show, we see each character come into their gender and sexual identities while relating to one another as differently Latinx, differently Black, differently trans, and differently queer.
In 2019, Indya Moore told Remezcla, “I, personally, do not identify as Latino because Latino means Latin, and Latin, it means white. And I’m not white, so I just call myself Afro Taíno ’cause that’s what I am.” This is akin to the canonical essay “No, I’m Not a Proud Latina” that was penned by Black Panamanian American cultural worker Dash Harris, in which she explained that she rejects the term “Latina” because the “real and imagined benefits by proxy to whiteness [of Latinidad] still rule.” For Moore and Harris, to reject the term Latina/o/x/e is not a rejection of culture but a rejection of the erasure of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Antilles.
On a similar yet distinct note, the debut collection of writing by Black Dominican American Melania Luisa Marte, Plantains and Our Becoming, begins with the poem “Afro-Latina”; the opening lines read: “According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, the term Latina was invented in the 1970s to describe a woman who is a native inhabitant of Latin America living in Latin America or in the United States. Merriam-Webster, however, does not consider Afro Latina a word. In America’s most trusted dictionary, Latin American people of African ancestry do not exist.”
Through these conversations, one can trace the quotidian fight to be seen in all of one's wholeness: as a Black Latinx and/or Black Caribbean subject without being flattened in the name of a hegemonic discourse that necessitates and desires a white and/or light-skinned Latinidad.
The demand for Latinx representation onscreen is on the rise. In 2022, the Latino Donor Collaborative published the Latinos in Media Report, which found that 3.7% of lead roles on television shows were played by Latinxs. On My Block, for example, is a necessary intervention in Latinx representation and storytelling. The Afro Latinx storyline in the show follows an ongoing conversation in Los Angeles that, to this date, has not received the recognition it deserves.
Writing for The Atlantic, journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan chronicled the relationship between Black and Latinx communities in LA during the 1980s, when Black Angelenos made up 20% of the population and Latinx Angelenos 14%. Kaplan’s writing demonstrated that there have been ethnic, cultural, and racial differences that have brought both communities together in conflict and solidarity. To address this assumed binary relationship, Black Mexican American cultural worker Walter Thompson-Hernandez began the Blaxicans of LA project with the purpose of documenting Black Mexican Americans, a narrative that centers on the resilience and love between African American and Mexican/Mexican American Angelenos.
Fast-forward three years, and On My Block is released on Netflix, in which the stories of Black American, Black Latinx, and non-Black Latinxs are centered for the duration of four seasons. Although actor Sierra Capri, who plays the lead role of Monse Finnie, the Afro Latina tomboy raised by a single-parent father, is not Afro Latina, Moonlight has proved that there can be and often is a sense of solidarity and ethics among Black Latinx actors who play non-Latinx Black roles and non-Latinx Black actors who play Black Latinx roles.
Covering themes of friendship, romantic love, fat liberation, undocumented migration, and gun violence, among others, On My Block highlights stories that at their core are very Black and very Latinx, without leaning on the trope that Los Angeles has a binary Black/Latinx issue — a goal similar to Thomson-Hernandez’s Blaxican project.
Freeridge, the 2023 spinoff of On My Block, tells stories of familial responsibility, grief, curiosity, bisexuality, and witches, but the show fails to include Afro Latinx characters. In a Refinery29 article, journalist Nicole Froio broke down Latinx representation in television, and in her analysis of Freeridge wrote, “While there are two Black characters, neither of them is Latine, which reproduces a dichotomy that Latine people can’t be Black. I’m still waiting for a breakout show about Afro Latinas that I can highly rate — unfortunately, this wasn’t it.”
As a spinoff, Freeridge doesn’t have to follow the storyline or cast of On My Block, but the show is still based in the same neighborhood, which means that Afro Latinx representation and Afro Latinx talent shouldn’t have been dismissed. The show won’t have the chance to improve, though; Netflix canceled it in early 2023, after one season.
Similarly, Netflix’s Gentefied introduces a story of a queer Afro Latina organizing against gentrification in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood of East Los Angeles. The show features actor Julissa Calderon, who started her career in Buzzfeed’s Latinx channel Pero Like, and Marvin Lemus and Yvette Chavez, the co-creators of Gentefied, rewrote the role of Yessika Flores to fit Calderon’s reality as an Afro Dominican woman.
This is a prime example of what should happen when Latinx talent shows up to a casting call and blows people away: If need be, a role should be modified to fit the ethnic and linguistic truth of an actor; if it cannot be, the writing room and the directors need to know who and what they are excluding.
In 2020, for the Saved by the Bell reboot, the character Aisha was rewritten to match Alycia Pascual-Peña's heritage. “The fact that NBC and Peacock were willing to have conversations with me and commit to creating this multidimensional [character, a] Black woman who just happens to be of Latin descent, meant the world to me,” she told Teen Vogue at the time.
Although Calderon was a recurring actor and not a lead in Gentefied, her character got to build some of the geopolitical bridges that reflect California’s Afro Latinx Caribbean community, especially in Los Angeles, home to one of the largest Black Belizean diasporas. (Netflix canceled Gentefied in 2022, after two seasons.)
While On My Block, Gentefied, and Freeridge are all useful examples of what happens when a culture that spans over 20 countries and territories is flattened in the media, there are still Afro Latinx milestones to celebrate: Jharrel Jerome’s 2019 Emmy win made him the first Afro Latino to win an acting Emmy; Michaela Jaé Rodriguez became the first trans actor to be nominated for an Emmy, in 2021, and a year later took home a Golden Globe for best actress in a television drama; and Ariana DeBose’s 2022 Academy Award for best supporting actress made her the first openly out queer woman of color to win. There have also been other accomplishments in the arts: Rachel Lynett’s 2021 Yale Drama Series Prize, Goyo performing at Victoria Secret’s World Tour in 2023, and Carlos Martiel winning the Inaugural Prize from El Museo del Barrio in 2023.
What this history teaches us is that we must be rigorous with what we mean by representation. When Anya Taylor-Joy corrected Variety that, yes, she is Latina, and no, she is not a woman of color, what she did was open a critical discourse about race in the Latinx diaspora. She was honored to be a Latina who won a Golden Globe, and she named her whiteness in that win. When DeBose accepted her Academy Award for her role in West Side Story, she didn’t name the lack of representation in media, but she did address her younger self: "Imagine this little girl in the back seat of a white Ford Focus. When you look into her eyes, you see an openly queer woman of color, an Afro Latina, who found her strength in life through art.… So to anybody who's ever questioned your identity ever, ever, ever or you find yourself living in the gray spaces, I promise you this: There is indeed a place for us.”
There should be space for Afro Latinas, but what does that retention look like? As journalist Lorraine Avila has noted before, “Dark-skinned Black women are missing from Afro Latina representation.” What are the steps that the media needs to take for someone like Julissa Calderon to be a lead actor and not only a recurring player? What types of questions must Latinx audiences ask of themselves as they imagine Latinidad through queer, trans, fat, disabled, Black, Asian, and Indigenous vernaculars?
There is space for all of us; we must learn that we are differently Latinx — and finally stop accepting the bare minimum.
