Subject: Boricuas vs. Nuyoricans-Indeed!;
A Look at Afro-Latinos
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2008 11:33:18 -0400
From: "Hamara Holt"

Boricuas vs. Nuyoricans� Indeed!A Look at Afro-Latinos
By Miriam Jim nez Rom

In Photographs in a controversial video feature smilingfair-skinned beauty contest winners and fashionmodels contrasted with images of scantily dressed,full-bodied, dark-skinned women in public spaces---"evidence" of the cultural and aestheticdifferences between "real" Puerto Ricans and those whomake illegitimate claims on that identity. These are the verbal and visual claims of acontroversial video making recent rounds on theInternet, explaining the alleged differences betweenPuerto Ricans on the Island and those in the UnitedStates


The two-minute video, which has repeatedlybeen yanked from YouTube, informs the viewer that�Puerto Ricans come from the island,� areoverwhelmingly �blancos� or mestizos of Ta�no andEuropean ancestry, and �typically VERY classy and/orpreppy or as we say in Puerto Rico �fino�.� IslandPuerto Ricans are also highly educated, the videoasserts. In contrast, Nuyoricans are �3rd or 4thgeneration Puerto Ricans that are usually mixed withAfrican Americans, CAN NOT speak Spanish or speak itvery badly!!! They act very, very trashy and ghettoor as we say in Puerto Rico cafre!!!� Nuyoricans areAfrocentric and one is more likely to find them �inprison than in college.� Indeed, Nuyoricans�a misnomersince it encompasses the entire Puerto Ricandiaspora�often seem to be a target in this video andbeyond for anti-Afro-Latino sentiment. Nuyoricans comeunder fire for their apparent obsession with race andracism and, most particularly, their identificationwith African-Americans and blackness.

I first encountered this view of Nuyoricans decadesago when I followed my parents' dream and took theguagua a�rea back to the land of my birth. I quicklylearned that to be from the States was to suffer froma social disability, a condition that the island-bredbelieved I had best overcome for the good of thePuerto Rican nation, if not my own accommodation. That was in the 1970s, when Puerto Rico was beinginvaded by a seeming horde of return migrants. Thechildren of the diaspora were already perceived as aproblem, one that taxed the island's already scarceresources and presented perspectives that seemedantithetical to long-cherished ideas about PuertoRican identity. Throughout my many years living andworking in Puerto Rico there was rarely a reference tolos de afuera that wasn't, on some level, derogatory,so that even compliments (�Ay, pero tu no pareces serde all�! ) only reinforced this sense of undesirableotherness.

The image of Nuyoricans as immoral, violent, dirty,lazy, welfare-dependent, drug-addicted felons was notrestricted to the United States; to this day, bothcountries produce media images that depict statesidePuerto Ricans as overwhelmingly engaged in some typeof objectionable behavior. Even by the mostsympathetic of accounts, it's assumed that living inwhat Jos� Mart� referred to as the �entrails of themonster� ruins Puerto Ricans, robs them of languageand culture, and leaves them susceptible todestructive foreign influences.One aspect of this alleged foreign influence is theNuyorican attitude toward race. Yet many foreign ideashave found fertile ground in Puerto Rico. Forinstance, despite initial skepticism about thefeminist movement, by the late 1970s, the Islandboasted a number of feminist organizations, as well asthe official endorsement of the Commonwealthgovernment.

At the Comisi�n Para los Asuntos de laMujer, for example, programs and literature developedin the United States barely underwent any alterationin their transfer to Puerto Rico; most were merelytranslated into Spanish. Not only were these "foreignideas" acceptable but so too was the format�neithermessage (middle-class feminism) nor messenger (in themain, white women) met with the easy dismissalaffected against Nuyoricans who talked about race andracism. Nor were those islanders who espoused the newideas about women's place in society any morereceptive to the new ideas about race than was thegeneral population. Thus, when I described my ownresearch on racism in Puerto Rico to the then-director of the Comisi�n, I was assured that "we don�thave such problems here.� Little wonder, then, thatmore than twenty-five years after Isabelo Zen�n Cruzpublished his biting expos� on racism in Puerto Rico,Narciso descubre su trasero, there is still noofficial acknowledgment of its existence on theisland. Newspapers, magazines and the broadcast mediacontinue to ask if racism exists, rather thanacknowledging that it does, a tactic followed by theisland's Civil Rights Commission in its rarepublications on the subject. Nor is it surprising thatBlack Puerto Rican women, so long ignored as women andas Blacks, found themselves compelled to establishtheir own organization, La Uni�n de MujeresPuertorrique�as Negras, as a vehicle for fighting thesilence, invisibility and abuse that marks theirparticipation in la gran familia puertorrique�a.

This reluctance to engage racism as anything otherthan an imported "gringo" problem is consistent withthe exceptionalist posture typical throughout LatinAmerica, where the myth of racial democracy hascontinued to dominate national discourse despitewell-documented evidence to the contrary. Puerto Rico,identifying as culturally �Hispanic,� has looked forits models to an increasingly Europeanized Spain andto other Spanish-speaking countries. The prevalenttendency is to ignore the neighboring Caribbeanislands, full of �negros de verdad,� and instead tofocus on a Hispanoam�rica ostensibly full of mestizos,indios and blancos�all bound by the same reluctance toacknowledge its strong African roots. Puerto Rico as a �Latin� country exempts itself fromracism even as it distances itself from its Blackness,identifying �real� Blackness as somehow inconsistentwith Hispanic history and culture�or with history andculture, more generally. This perspective has becomethe official line, made real by repetition rather thanconcrete experience or the historical record.

Thecontradictions have provided space for and encouragedthe creation of a Taino revival movementoverwhelmingly composed of second and third generationstateside Puerto Ricans who, by laying claim toindigeneity and thus the most �original� roots,propose to out-authenticate the islanders. It is aview that leaves unexplained why a people ostensiblyso proud of their racial mixture overwhelmingly rejectmixed race classifications. Revealingly, and to theconsternation of many, more than 80% of islandersself-identified as white in the 2000 census. It is to this white identity that our amateurvideo-maker pays homage, citing census figures and themitochondrial-DNA studies of University of Puerto Ricobiologist Juan Carlos Cruz Mart�nez to buttress hisargument that �real� Puerto Ricans owe their geneticand cultural mestizaje to European and indigenouspeoples. And it is this understanding of ade-Africanized mestizaje that many Puerto Ricans clingto when they first arrive in the United States. It permits a scenario in which Puerto Ricans, definedas neither Black nor white, arrive in the UnitedStates devoid of racial prejudice only to be accostedby it in their new home. Puerto Ricans are presumablytaught racism in the U.S. and forced to choose betweenBlack or white identity, to the detriment of their"true" cultural selves. This perspective, prevalent inthe scholarship produced since the 1930s, is alsoexpressed in the autobiographical novel Down TheseMean Streets, the dark-skinned Piri Thomas anguishesover being �caught up between two sticks.� Yet, itwould be more accurate to say that Thomas and theothers are actually stuck between the myth of racialdemocracy with its implicit preference for a bleachedmestizaje, and the reality of African descent as aliability.

The choice, if choice there were, is notbetween Black and white but between the myth ofrace-free color blindness and the reality ofanti-Black racism. It is this fundamentalcontradiction that provided fertile ground for newways to understand race. The generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970ssaw what earlier migrants have seen from the beginningof the Latino presence in the United States. Since theturn of the century people such as bibliophile andhistorian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg have confrontedovert racism.

However, the open acknowledgment of itsexistence, also provided the political space to fightagainst racism. The shared experiences of racialdiscrimination and the concrete conditions flowingfrom it�deficient educational, health, and employmentopportunities�confronted the more subtly phrased, butno less destructive ideology of racial democracy,learned from our parents and our community, and itbecame clear that something was off kilter. The verylanguage of racism�"pelo bueno," "pelo malo," "Negropero inteligente,"�which we heard in Spanish andEnglish, left little doubt that the similaritiesbetween us were actually greater than the differences.The anti-racist, egalitarian ideas that flowed fromthe Civil Rights movement affected all those in theUnited States who were racially subordinated�AfricanAmericans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Native Americans,Asians, etc.�in the United States and throughout theworld. Nuyoricans were particularly receptive to theideas and values that arose from these strugglesbecause, located at the very bottom of the social andeconomic hierarchy of the City, they realized that itis of crucial importance to give due attention to therole of race in our lives.

The effect of the US antiracist movement on PuertoRicans in the island has received less attention butthere is ample evidence of those influences. Itextends far beyond the short lived trendiness of theAfrican-inspired dress and hairdos or the continuingfascination with the musical innovations that we knowas "salsa" and reggaet�n, or even the growingintellectual interest in identifying the Africaninfluences�or, at another level, foundations�of PuertoRican culture. Less obvious, or at least lesscommented upon, is the effect on the educational lifeof Puerto Rico, where the astounding growth ofpost-secondary educational institutions on the islandcan be directly attributed to programs implementedunder federally-mandated Affirmative Actionguidelines. Inter-American University, SagradoCoraz�n, and the countless technical colleges thatopened their doors in the 1970s were able to developprecisely because all Puerto Rican students�whether onthe island or in the States�qualified for federalassistance programs.

Yet even as Puerto Ricans,especially on the island, rejected the stigma ofracialization, they still accepted�indeed, activelysought out�the benefits of this racialization. That somany of the beneficiaries have often been the childrenof the more economically privileged sectors of ourvarious communities does not diminish the significanceof those race-based reforms. At the same time we wouldbe remiss if we ignore the ways in which ideas aboutrace and class continue to influence the actions takenby university admissions officers, corporateboards�and disgruntled video-makers. But of even greater importance for those concernedwith social justice has been the steadily growingchorus of voices raised against the Latino myth ofracial harmony. For decades, stateside Puerto Ricanshave been among the most active supporters of theAfro-Latin@ movements in Latin America and theCaribbean.

In recent years the transnational dimensionhas gained momentum as Black Latin@s, and those whosimply affirm their African ancestry, have organizedin cities across the U.S. and across national borders.In addition to university-based organizations andcultural institutes, grass-roots groups such as TheAfro Latin@ Institute of Chicago (ALIC), ENCUENTRO inPhiladelphia and ENCUENTRO �Voices of AfroLatinos� inBoston are working to bring visibility to issuesaffecting African-descendant Latinos. Such efforts arealso taking place on the island; in defiance of thesilencing ideological and psychological controls ofthe rainbow/mixed race nation construct a group ofpeople in the towns of Aguadilla and Hormig�eros(�Testimonios afropuertorrique�os: un proyecto dehistoria oral en el oeste de Puerto Rico),� havejoined forces to �pursue a collective agenda so thatAfro-Puerto Ricans no longer remain at �the bottom ofthe barrel.�� Black Puerto Ricans are demonstratingthat when it comes to class and race matters it�sdefinitely not a question of Boricuas versusNuyoricans.

Miriam Jim�nez Rom�n is director of afrolatin@ forum,a research and resource center focusing on BlackLatinos and Latinas in the U.S. She was the ManagingEditor and Editor of Centro: Journal of the Center forPuerto Rican Studies. For over a decade, sheresearched and curated exhibitions at the SchomburgCenter for Research in Black Culture, where she alsoserved as the Assistant Director of theScholars-in-Residence Program. Currently, she is avisiting scholar in the Department of Social andCultural Analysis at New York University.

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I for one never doubted that many Peurto Ricnans were racist. look at how the voted for Hillary Clinton in such large numbers. Many fair skinned Hispanics/Latinos truelly think they're white. This is because the America's have a far less stringent classification on who is and isn't white. They even clasisfy Arabs as white there. The joke is that when many of these so called 'white' Latino's actually visit or work in their spiritual home, Spain they are called Moors and mixed breeds for the Spanish do not see them as European. Most Northern Europeans even have a problem with classifying Southern Europeans as white so how is a Puerto Rican going to claim white? Let them come to England and try and call themselves white. lol!

Heard about their voting against Obama rather than for Clinton, something about Dominicans migrating to their countries...



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