‘We Are Black. We Just Speak Spanish’: Why Some Afro Latinos Want More Visibility During Black History Month

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Latino Studies, Media Archive on 2022-03-11 16:21Z by Steven

‘We Are Black. We Just Speak Spanish’: Why Some Afro Latinos Want More Visibility During Black History Month

KQED News
San Fransisco, California
2022-02-18

Blanca Torres

Novelist Aya de Leon (left), Nelson German, head chef and owner of alaMar, and Jacqueline Garcel, CEO of the Latino Community Foundation. All three are Afro Latinos who live in the Bay Area. (Blanca Torres/KQED)

Nelson German, the chef and owner of alaMar, a seafood restaurant in Oakland, remembers the day a Black family asked a staffer about the Black owner they had heard about.

“This isn’t a Black-owned restaurant,” he recalled the staffer telling the family. “This is a Dominican-owned restaurant.”

Hearing about that interaction was a turning point for German. As a Black Dominican American, German, 41, realized he hadn’t done enough to educate those around him about his Blackness and the importance of it.

“We are Black. We are part of the African diaspora. We just speak Spanish,” German said. “The African continent influenced the world. We should embrace that, and really give tribute to it now, because there’s a lot of people who had to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for us to be in this position. We should show them some respect.”

“So, I always say Afro Latino,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

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