Afro-Latinidades and World Diasporas

Community-Building through Public Programs and Curricular Development 

Blackness has reshaped the fabric of the Americas.

From the Middle Passage to contemporary diasporas, Blackness has constituted a transhemispheric demographic, cultural and historical reality. The region’s history cannot be disentangled from the transatlantic enslavement of more than ten million Africans, the vast majority of whom were forced into the Caribbean and Latin America. Today, more than 150 million Afrodescendants live in Latin America, while in the United States nearly one out of every four Latinx peoples identify as Afro-Latinx.

The history and use of this term remain contested, although it has become increasingly visible in academic, media and even popular discourse. However, it still lacks consistent institutional support and U.S. census recognition. As early as 2005, sociologist Agustín Laó-Montes observed that the signifier “Afro-Latino” was circulating across academic, media and popular discourse, signaling a shift in which Latin Americans of African descent had become a cultural and geopolitical force to be reckoned with. Despite this demographic and cultural centrality, Afro-Latinx Studies has remained marginalized within the academy—fragmented across disciplines, overlooked in curricula and relegated to the peripheries of Latin American, Black and Ethnic Studies. This persistent neglect makes sustained institutional support all the more urgent.

At Harvard University, the Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI) and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research provide strong foundations for the study of Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean. Yet equal attention must also be directed to the field of U.S. Afro-Latinx Studies, which builds on the legacy of key figures such as Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a 20th-century Black Puerto Rican scholar and activist.  The watershed 2010 volume The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, edited by the late Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, blazed a trail for the creation of U.S. Afro-Latinx Studies as an interdisciplinary field of study, offering a transformative framework that continues to shape scholarship, teaching and activist knowledge production.

Arriving as a Lecturer of Latinx Studies at Harvard, I was struck by the institutional amnesia around U.S. Afro-Latinx experiences and sought to create a space for dialogue and scholarly exchange. With support from the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights and the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities, I launched the Afro-Latinidades and World Diasporas Initiative (ALWDI) in Fall 2024. Through programming, course development and community engagement, the initiative seeks to advance scholarship, foster academic exchange and cultivate student research, while also encouraging cross-cultural understanding and a commitment to racial justice.

Over the past decade, Afro-Latinx Studies has been animated by a vibrant body of scholarship and cultural production that insists on the urgency of centering Black Latinx life. Legal scholar Tanya Katerí Hernández, author of Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (2022), has exposed the persistence of racial inequality in Latinx communities, offering critical tools to interrogate the myth of mestizaje and Latin American racial democracy. Writers and artists such as Alan Pelaez López, editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (2024), have intervened through poetry, performance and visual art to reimagine Afro-Latinx futures grounded in queer and trans experience, diaspora and decolonial possibility. Similarly, Tatiana Flores’s essay “Latinidad is Cancelled” (2019) has sparked fierce debates by contesting the homogenizing tendencies of Latinidad and demanding that Afro-Latinx and Indigenous perspectives be at the center of analysis. Together, these works reflect the intellectual and artistic ferment that has made Afro-Latinx Studies a dynamic field of interdisciplinary inquiry.

The need for such a broad project became clear to me in the classroom. Students began to raise concerns around the lack of curricula that focuses of U.S. Afro-Latinidades. Afro-Latinx peoples continue to confront erasure and silencing, both within scholarly canons and in broader public discourse, and some students at Harvard experience these same struggles on campus. The richness of Afro-Latinx experience demands attention: the spiritual traditions, embodied epistemologies, musical innovations, political struggles, community organizing and creative practices that have shaped local neighborhoods and transnational movements alike. To critically engage Afro-Latinidades is not simply to “add” Black Latinx peoples and their histories into an existing framework, but to reorient how we think about the Americas and recenter Blackness and its diasporic reverberations as foundational rather than peripheral.

The Afro-Latinidades and World Diasporas Initiative at Harvard was born out of this conviction. I envisioned it as a meeting ground: a space where students, scholars, artists and community members could gather to learn from one another; to map the geographies of Afro-Latinx life from cimarronaje and slavery to migration and contemporary diasporas; and to consider how Afro-Latinx cultural production speaks to global struggles for liberation. It is a space that insists on transdisciplinarity, where literature and visual arts converse with history and anthropology, and where testimonios, oral traditions and embodied knowledge are taken as seriously as archival texts.

Equally important, the initiative foregrounds gender and sexuality as central to Afro-Latinx life. Queer and feminist Afro-Latinx voices have reshaped how we understand identity, belonging and survival, yet their contributions remain too rarely centered. By lifting up these perspectives alongside broader hemispheric and diasporic frameworks, ALWDI at Harvard generates conversations that are not only academic but also deeply communal—conversations that affirm healing, creativity and relational care as forms of knowledge in their own right. In this sense, the project is more than an initiative; it is an intervention and an invitation. It asks us to see U.S. Afro-Latinx identity, politics and cultural production not as a supplement to existing narratives, but as a force that restructures how we imagine the Americas and the world. It calls on us to honor the resilience and brilliance of Afro-Latinx communities and to recognize their centrality in the ongoing story of diaspora, memory and liberation.

Critical Afro-Latinx Studies: Pedagogy as Praxis

The first articulation of the Afro-Latinidades and World Diasporas Initiative took shape in the classroom. In Spring 2025, I designed and taught “Critical Afro-Latinx Studies” (EMR 167), the first course at Harvard dedicated entirely to this field. The course introduced students to the historical and contemporary dynamics of Afro-Latinx intellectual, artistic and cultural life in the United States, while also asking them to reflect on the very conditions of knowledge production that have often erased Black Latinx histories and epistemologies.

Course readings ranged from canonical texts such as Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967) and the Román and Flores iconic reader to contemporary works such as Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X (2018) and Melania Luisa Duarte’s Plantains and Our Becomings (2023). Visual and performance art were also central: students studied Firelei Báez’s paintings and exhibitions, María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s art installations and Carlos Martiel’s body-based performances, alongside theoretical texts by scholars such as Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez and Paul Joseph López Oro. In doing so, the course demonstrated the Initiative’s commitment to transdisciplinarity — treating literature, visual arts, music and performance not as supplementary materials but as primary sites of theory-making.

Assignments reinforced the ethos of pedagogy as praxis and activism. Weekly reflections and peer exchanges created a communal interpretive practice for all the students. A collaborative digital anthology of Afro-Latinx literature asked students to become co-archivists, weaving together and contextualizing texts that both extended and unsettled the syllabus. Group art exhibitions, curated on digital platforms, encouraged students to present Afro-Latinx visual cultures as living archives of resistance and imagination. What emerged was not simply a course but a laboratory where students learned to see Afro-Latinx Studies as a dynamic field they were helping to legitimize and take beyond the classroom.

Inaugural Lectures and Public Events

From the classroom, ALWDI extended outward into a series of public events that brought leading voices in Afro-Latinx arts and literature to Harvard. In March 2024, the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights hosted the Morocco-based Puerto Rican poet Víctor Hernández Cruz, a foundational figure in the Nuyorican literary movement. Cruz’s poetry reading and conversation with Professor Doris Sommer wove together African cultural retentions in the Americas, the legacies of decolonization, and the enduring creativity of diasporic communities. For students and faculty, the event was not only an encounter with a legendary poet but also a reminder of the living genealogies that sustain Afro-Latinx cultural production.

Later that year, on the last week of the Spring semester, we welcomed Juana Valdés, an Afro-Cuban multidisciplinary artist whose work interrogates migration, material culture and memory. Her lecture, followed by a dialogue with Tufts professor and founding director of the US Latinx Art Forum Adriana Zavala, challenged audiences to rethink the histories of empire and diaspora through objects as seemingly ordinary as porcelain and textiles. By foregrounding material culture as a diasporic archive, Valdés exemplified how Afro-Latinx art unsettles dominant narratives and reframes history through the textures of everyday life.

In April 2025, the Initiative collaborated with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) to host “Rethinking Afro-Latinidad Through Literature”. This event featured Afro-Puerto Rican writer and scholar Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro and Mexican writer and translator of Japanese and African descent Jumko Ogata Aguilar, alongside myself as moderator. Together, we explored Afro-Latinidad across the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America, emphasizing how literature creates both bridges and fault lines across geographies and languages. By partnering with DRCLAS and its Mexico and Central America programs, the Initiative underscored its hemispheric reach and its commitment to collaborative, border-crossing dialogue.

The Initiative also extends into public scholarship, amplifying new Afro-Latinx voices beyond Harvard’s walls. In Spring 2025, Afro-Dominican novelist Alejandro Heredia visited my course Critical Afro-Latinx Studies to discuss his debut novel Loca (2025), which engages queerness, Blackness and Dominican diasporic identity. Students were moved by Heredia’s candor and by his insistence that queer and Black stories are not secondary but central to understanding the Dominican Republic and its diaspora in the Bronx. Following this visit, I conducted an extended interview with Heredia, later published in Latinx Talk. In that public forum, we reflected on storytelling, kinship, queerness and the politics of literary visibility.

Future Directions

The Afro-Latinidades and World Diasporas Initiative is seeking to generate new forms of pedagogy, public programming and community engagement. Its next phase will expand this foundation by developing events and courses that address U.S. Afro-Latinx intersections with Indigenous studies, medical humanities and global Black diasporas. In doing so, the Initiative aims to cultivate new terrains of knowledge production by and for Black Latinx peoples whose histories, politics, and cultures remain understudied and undertheorized.

Collaborative endeavors with Boston-area institutions of higher education are also on the horizon, creating opportunities for Harvard students and faculty to connect with artists, writers and activists beyond Cambridge. Students have expressed strong interest in pursuing these questions through sustained independent projects and senior theses on Afro-Latinx literature, Afro-Indigenous intersections and queer and trans Black Latinx storytelling.

The Initiative is deeply indebted to the synergies and collaborations it has found with ALARI and DRCLAS. Their role as institutional hubs has been essential, and their continued partnership will be central to the Initiative’s growth. Looking ahead, the Afro-Latinidades and World Diasporas Initiative warmly welcomes collaboration. Faculty, students, artists and community members are invited to join in sustaining and expanding this work so that Afro-Latinx Studies flourishes as a vital field of inquiry at Harvard.