New World Racial Orders: Transnational Racial Formation and Charting a Space for Afro-Latinos

PI: Michelle Bueno Vasquez, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern University

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $1,548, Marguerite Ross Bennett Fund

Project Abstract: U.S.  political language around Black and Latino minority groups has historically excluded those who exist at the intersection of these seemingly disparate groups. This erasure of Afro-Latinos has dire consequences: their double vulnerability to race-based discrimination, lack of government recognition and assistance, and political disenfranchisement. I argue that this erasure is not coincidental and has historical and contemporary links to imperialism, minority activism, and Census administration.

Through my dissertation, I pursue the questions: How did U.S. military interventions export U.S. racism and Black erasure to Latin American nations? How did adding the “Hispanic” category erase Afro-Latino presence in data and Latino politics? Can diaspora change notions of race and restore Black empowerment across borders?

I answer these queries over time. Using archival methods and process tracing, I demonstrate how the U.S. occupations of the Dominican Republic contributed to the creation of a Dominican racial rhetoric of Black denial during the early 20th century. I analyze the development of the U.S. and Dominican Census from the 1980s to the 2010s and how they continue the work of invisibilizing Afro-Latinos through a theory I call minority essentialization. Finally, I study how Black Lives Matter activism in 2020 sprouted Black consciousness throughout the Afro-Latino diaspora through a digital ethnography of the movement’s spread through Twitter.

This interdisciplinary project can be located within diverse literature on race and ethnicity in the humanities and social sciences. Beyond academia, my work advances the study of intersectionality, the pursuit of equity for the minorities within minorities, and the power of activism in restoring lost roots and unifying communities across borders.

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