I first explicitly began to explore the theme of Cuban Blackness in 2014 at BE.BOP 14, Spiritual Revolutions & “The Scramble for Africa,” a theoretical and anti-colonial event in Berlin, Germany, organzied by the late Dominican writer and curator Alanna Lockward. I presented my project “Túmbenlo,” which supported the duo rap group Obsesión in their 2010 demands on the Cuban government to demolish the statue that glorifies racism in Cuba: the statue erected in 1936 of José Miguel Gómez, the second president of Cuba, responsible for the 1912 massacre of thousands of Afro-Cubans who were members of the Independent Party of Color (PIC, after its Spanish acronym).

Grendy Isabel Nina Huaycane, who comes from the southern Peruvian Andean region of Puno, grew up in an urban area of Puno, where she heard both Spanish and Aymara, though she remembers that most of her interactions where “only in Spanish.” Her entrance to university was a turning point in her life.

I read in a recent report by the Norwegian Refugee Council that the violence in Honduras is similar to that experienced in war zones.