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Post-soul Latinidad: Black nationalism in Mama’s Girl and Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

Latinidad post-soul: el nacionalismo negro en Mama’s Girl y Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

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Abstract

Contemporary Afro-Latina coming-of-age memoirs often include a significant admixture of African American literary, cultural, and political influences. This is true of Mama’s Girl (1996) by Veronica Chambers and Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina (2013) by Raquel Cepeda. As they came of age in New York City during the early post-soul era, Chambers and Cepeda were attracted to opposite poles of Black nationalism. Chambers repeatedly invokes the civil rights movement’s integrationist agenda in Mama’s Girl, valorizing Talented Tenth elitism and neoliberal luck egalitarianism. In contrast, Cepeda aligns herself with the cultural separatist theosophy and hip-hop of the Five Percent Nation, a splinter sect of the Nation of Islam. The antipodes of Black nationalism in these memoirs mediate Latinidad in ways that reveal a constitutive African American presence in Afro-Latina life writing, a presence that productively bridges the fields of Latino and African American studies.

Resumen

Las memorias afrolatinas sobre el paso a la adultez a menudo incluyen una mezcla significativa de influencias literarias, culturales y políticas afroamericanas. Este es el caso de Mama’s Girl (1996) de Veronica Chambers y Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina (2013) de Raquel Cepeda. Chambers y Cepeda, criadas en la ciudad de Nueva York durante la era “post-soul”, se sintieron atraídas por los polos opuestos del nacionalismo negro. Chambers invoca reiteradamente la agenda integracionista del movimiento por los derechos civiles en Mama’s Girl y valoriza el elitismo del décimo talentoso y el neoliberal igualitarismo de la suerte. Por el contrario, Cepeda se alinea con la teosofía separatista cultural y el hip-hop de la Nación del 5%, una secta separada de la Nación de Islam. Los antípodas del nacionalismo negro en estas memorias median en la latinidad de maneras que revelan una presencia afroamericana en la escritura vivencial afrolatina. Dicha presencia crea puentes productivos entre los campos de los estudios latinos y los estudios afroamericanos.

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Notes

  1. Chambers and Cepeda are part of a growing set of Latina memoirists who celebrate or acknowledge their African heritage: Esmeralda Santiago, Marta Moreno Vega, Sonia Manzano, Rosie Perez, Daisy Hernández, and Sonny Hostin.

  2. It is unclear whether Chambers is partly Dominican. In Mama’s Girl, she says her father was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the United States in 1962 when he was twelve (Chambers 1996, p. 12). In “Secret Latina at Large,” she writes, “I was born in Panama to black Panamanian parents. My father’s parents came from Costa Rica and Jamaica. My mother’s came from Martinique” (Chambers 2000a, p. 21). She repeats this genealogy in “The Secret Latina”(Chambers 2000b, p. 102).

  3. Before moving to Inwood with her father, Cepeda lived briefly in California and the Dominican Republic with her mother.

  4. The FPN is also known as the Nation of Gods and Earths (NGO) because they refer to their female members as Earths, Moons, and Queens and their male members as Suns and Gods (Allen 1996a, p. 166; Swedenburg 1997). For a definition of decolonial, see Maldonado-Torres (2017).

  5. Here, I am using the term African American in its broadest, most pan-ethnic sense.

  6. For a sustained discussion about the post-soul aesthetic, see African American Review, Post-Soul Aesthetic Special Issue 41(4).

  7. Riverhead-Penguin published Chambers and Díaz’s first books in 1996. Chambers and Danticat are co-authors (with S. Jackson) of an Essence Magazine article that promotes their books, Mama’s Girl and Krick? Krack! (Chambers et al. 1996).

  8. For a history of the 1990s memoir boom, see Rak (2013).

  9. Du Bois’s essay focuses on the educational development of Black men and genders the Black race as male (Du Bois 2011, p. 231).

  10. See Seaman (1996); Kraft (1996); Cassel (1996); Booklist (1997); McHugh (1996); Rochman (1996); “Mama’s Girl” (1997). Three reviewers, however, correctly acknowledged Mama’s Girl as an Afro-Latino and/or Caribbean text, see Stuttaford (1996); Harlan (1996); Huneven (1996).

  11. This is the school in which Chambers learned about African American history, about how women like Charlayne Hunter-Gault integrated White colleges (Chambers 1996, p. 53).

  12. Chambers’s jeremiad parallels the Moynihan Report’s conclusion that matrifocal Black families are to blame for the crisis of Black masculinity, see Moynihan (1965); Geary (2015, chap. 5).

  13. Smith, known as Clarence 13X, was a congregant of Malcolm X’s Temple No. 7, see Knight (2007, chaps. 1 and 3).

  14. Raquel Cepeda’s memoir is her most compelling work to date. Her first book and film deal with the history, nature, and politics of hip-hop. She published And It Don’t Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years in 2004, and she released her documentary Bling: A Planet Rock: Blood, Diamonds, and Hip-Hop in 2007. Cepeda explores the relationship between genetic genealogy and ethnoracial self-esteem in her second documentary, Some Girls (2017).

  15. For a review of the Latino origins of and contributions to hip-hop music and culture, see Rose (1994, p. 59); Guevara (1996); del Barco (1996); Flores (1996, 2000); Verán (1999); Rivera (2001, 2002, 2003, 2007, 2010); Rivera et al. (2009, pp. 138, 145, 147–148, 157).

  16. For a review of “black denial,” Afro-Dominicanidad, and Latino American racialization, see Duany (1996, 1998, 2011), Torres-Saillant (2000, 2003, 2007, 2010), Itzigsohn and Dore-Cabral (2000), Candelario (2007), Robles (2007), Jiménez Román (2007), Dávila (2008), Simmons (2009), Flores (2009), Mayes (2014), García-Peña (2016), Ramírez (2018), Myers (2019), Maillo-Pozo (2019), and Oboler (1995).

  17. For a study of how hip-hop music functions as Du Boisian sorrow songs in Bird of Paradise, see Masiki (2017).

  18. Cepeda also mentions Shannon and Joyce Simms, African American freestyle singers; see Cepeda (2013, pp. 350–354).

  19. For sources on the FPN’s influence on hip-hop, see Ahearn (1991), Swedenburg (1997), Miyakawa (2003, 2005), Knight (2007), Mohaiemen (2008), and Bassil (2013).

  20. Like the NOI, the FPN teaches the following: “The original man is the Asiatic Black Man, Owner, Maker, cream of the planet Earth, God of the Universe and Father of Civilization” (“Nation of Islam: Part 1” 2016, p. 73). For the Moorish Science Temple origins of the Asiatic Black Man concept, see Deutsch (2001, p. 196).

  21. For scholars in African American studies, the concept of the ten-percenters resonates with the trope of the Talented Tenth.

  22. Ron G. is famous mixtape DJ from the golden age of hip-hop (Light 1999, pp. 77, 344).

  23. “Wake Up” sets to lyrics the essential doctrine of the FPN catechism, and the video for the single prominently features an FPN temple and the movement’s seven-point star badge/logo, see Brand Nubian 1990b; Wake Up (Reprise in the Sunshine) [Official Music Video] 2018.

  24. On the Neo-Taíno identity movement, see Haslip-Viera (2007, 2008, 2015), Poole (2011), González (2015), University of Cambridge (2018), Wade (2018), and Estevez (2019).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Agustin Laó-Montes and the members of my 2021 Afro-American Studies Workshop at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, Elena Machado Sáez and the members of my 2021 Afro-Latinx Stories MLA panel, and Médar Serrata and the members of my workshop at the 2019 Global Dominicanidades conference at Harvard University. For their timely and substantive feedback on drafts of my articles and book chapters, I would like to thank my colleagues Travis Franks at Boston University, Regina Marie Mills at Texas A&M University, and Jorge Santos at the College of the Holy Cross.

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Masiki, T. Post-soul Latinidad: Black nationalism in Mama’s Girl and Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina. Lat Stud 20, 475–497 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-022-00368-1

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