A few months ago, I met a remarkable figure within the Afro-Caribbean community, who has been locally recognized for her powerful narratives and writings living as an Afrocaribeña with Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban descent. Dorothy Bell Ferrer is a writer and a graduate student at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras currently pursuing a graduate education in literature in the Hispanic Studies department. She is also the co-author of the book White Latino Privilege and the founder of the initiative La Tinta es Negra como mi piel, where she has given numerous personal narrative writing workshops in hopes of providing space for black and afro-descendant women of the Caribbean to recognize their autonomy within various types of oppression.
We managed to have coffee and engaged into a profound conversation between writers. After several weeks, we stayed in contact through social media to continue our powerful discourses. Dorothy agreed to answer the following questions to share her motives and experiences to the world.
Your essays and articles feature topics such as Afro-Caribbean identity politics, Afro-Feminism, and decolonization. What motivated you to reflect on these situations occurring in Puerto Rico?
Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican experiences in the United States, and Puerto Rican women were precisely where my motivation started. It was the most accessible tangible “discourse” or “experience” that I could access. As a child, I was very observant of the ways in which I was treated, or my people were treated, while economically exiled in the United States. I asked questions, but they didn’t always get answered, but that never stopped me from raising questions or looking for answers elsewhere.
I was an inquisitive child, which is precisely the culprit of all this work. I had a desire to understand and work through the stuff I was faced with and I still do. When I was about 10 or 11 I could truly understand politically that Puerto Rico was a United States colony, which meant that autonomy on the international level was obviously pretty much nonexistent. There was no real romantic “enlightenment” that occurred. Nobody told me about Pedro Albizu Campos; I found him myself in a library and then did research and consulted my elders. It didn’t take me long before I would realize that a lot of the tragedies that I saw and experienced in our diaspora communities were actually directly related to the racist colonial crisis which has been in Puerto Rico for more than 500 years.
Years later, while studying for my bachelor’s degree in college, I began to study biochemistry and moved forward with political science,often making connections with political discourse to Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican experiences in Puerto Rico and in the United States.I reflected on Marxism through a heavy afrocaribeñista and negrista lens; I introduced myself to the works of Franz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Luis Rafael Sanchez. I critically read El País de Cuatro Pisos by Jose Luis Gonzalez over 10 times and I have subsequently studied the work of Angela Davis and Edouard Glissant. But I want to make it clear that I didn’t limit my studies to the pensadores and the literature; I studied what I call discurso politico de la calle y de la cocina y de la sala. Systematically marginalized people who don’t have access to academic journals already understand those aesthetically complex concepts we talk about in academia; they just don’t have the language to compile 25-page articles or 300-page books.
Most of our abuelas were feminists before the word was even coined. Most of our abuelas understood intersectionality before it was discussed. I spent ample amounts of time with elders. I used to listen in on the bochinche of my tías and I noticed that there was a connection between their experiences and traumas with the grand scheme of the political strife we face in and outside of Puerto Rico.
How do you feel the role of Afro-Boricuas is depicted in Puerto Rican society? Do you believe the role has evolved during the past years?
La afrodescendencia, or the role of Afro-Boricuas in Puerto Rican society, is a tremendous dilution of realities which are improperly recognized from a white hispanofiliac and also gringofiliac lens. What I mean by that is Puerto Rican society is still ridiculously controlled by a “hispanicista” point of view and a “gringuista” point of view which is what has contributed to the ever increasing institutional and systemic racism.
In Puerto Rican society, it is still generally understood that in order to “see” blackness or afro-descendance, you must travel to the tremendous town of Loíza. To be clear, Loíza is to be regarded with proper respect. Loíza and the people of Loíza have contributed to Puerto Rican society, culture, and tradition. In Loíza, folkloric traditions continue to reign with pride and justice which at times throughout history were outlawed ignored; however, the “word” Loíza has carried an extremely racist stereotype. If people who have no intention on getting to know Loíza desde adentro, desde sus raices resistentes, who have zero knowledge of Loíza, its history, and its people, mention bomba y plena and alcapurrias in Piñones, they mention danger and drug trafficking which absolutely none of them have witnessed or experienced.
Violence is found in every corner of Puerto Rico because it is a colony. Whiteness in Puerto Rico, just like in any other country, expects black people to perform so the lack of knowledge of Loíza is so tremendous in Puerto Rico that people think that if you are black and you dance bomba you are from Loíza. They don’t have much information about Puerto Rico and should keep their voyeuristic perspectives outside of the media and any media platforms where they could be taken seriously. Puerto Ricans who do not live in a hypervisible town such as Loíza must assume the responsibility to recognize that the people who are from Loíza are the only people who can speak desde Loíza. Note that hypervisibility is another form of invisibility. The realities of Loíza are almost completely unknown by the people who do not live there. For example, in Loíza, the traditional fogón, which comes from Africa, and the burén, which is of indigenous descent, are used. This is yet another way that blackness has been erased from political and even cultural spaces in Puerto Rico.
The other side of this is the erasure of blackness in other towns such as Mayaguez, or Caguas, or Ponce, or even Gurabo, and even other southern coastal towns such as Juana Diaz and Patillas and other towns such as Juncos and Cayey. Basically, if you are black and Puerto Rican, people assume that you are either from some other country or you are from just the area of Loíza as I mentioned earlier. Blackness is a part of every piece of Puerto Rican culture and history. The more obvious black symbols such as plena and bomba musical traditions are often erased from the history of towns like Cataño. Even so, many of the foods that we eat are considered to be “criolla”. I refer to the terminology of comida criolla. The criollos were white people who were born in Puerto Rico to parents from European countries. We all know that comida criolla means arroz con habichuelas, pollo guisado, yuca, etc. Those foods are hardly “euro-descendant”; they are afro descendant foods. The limitations that Puerto Rican society puts on blackness here completely erase the very basics of Puerto Rican history in every way.
Apart from this geographic critique, I must bring up the hyper-sexualization of black bodies in Puerto Rico by non-black individuals. Before I briefly get to this point, I want to make it clear that I don’t come from the same thinking as many self-proclaimed feminists come or the criticones del reggaetón come from. There is nothing wrong with being sexualized or seeing a body and then wanting to have sexual relations with it. That’s how it typically works. I also don’t see the biological habit of piropos or what the white US Americans call as cat-calling as entirely problematic. Sexual or street harassment is only when the person approaching you in a sexual manner refuses to stop even after having had been told to stop. All biological creatures have mating calls, but in Puerto Rico, just like in most other countries in the Americas, there exists this “culture” of people who believe that black female or black male bodies exist for their sexual entertainment and pleasure on their terms. Sexuality should always be 100% autonomous. When men have an approach towards me where they go as far as to touch me but recognize the limits of my friend who is equally Caribeña but white, this kind of behavior perpetuates human trafficking of black and mulata women. I also want to make mention that the silence around this theme of the hyper-sexualization of black bodies also plays a role into the human trafficking.
I’d also like to bring up the Mama Ines character logo for Café Yaucono. Do white people in Puerto Rico expect Negras y mulatas to dress like Mama Ines? I doubt it, but there is still a desire for black women to present themselves with a Mama Ines type of personality. Mama Ines is a “happy” black woman, or “mammy”, dressed as a server to essentially keep the people happy with coffee. Perhaps my body and the bodies of other black women aren’t here to serve the people coffee, but Black people are expected to be sweet and docile. For example, rarely are we permitted to speak about racism because that is supposedly a U.S. concept. Some of us take to social media platforms to discuss racism but it comes with serious social economic and political consequences from even the black people who want to avoid any confrontation or taking a risk towards these consequences themselves. If a black woman in Puerto Rico demonstrates discontent, anger, or any negative and valid emotion towards the social realities that exist in the colony of Puerto Rico, they are pintada de rabiosa and problematic or their anger is either fetishized for a movement by people who will not protect her or it is improperly and cheaply psychoanalyzed to seem irrational, “mean”, and unnecessary.
To conclude, blackness and afro-descendance are not properly represented in Puerto Rican society, culture, or institutions by any stretch of the imagination because the colonial institutions within Puerto Rico reject black people as autonomous. Black people in every country are depicted for the “safe-white” lens only; entertainment, hyper-sexualization on the terms of others, one (or a few) geographic locations, and our bodies are “commodified” in a way where we are born under certain parameters and must follow those parameters, or we become ostracized. In order to combat this, everybody plays a part. The very best thing everyone can do to eradicate anti-black racism in Puerto Rico is to first understand the difference between truths and lies, recognize what your “body” individually means in a racialized society and just as the people should not write the stories of others through their paternalistic and infantile lenses, non-black individuals must step out of the way of the space for black people to write their own stories, recognize, and reclaim them. I intentionally do not use the word “allow” here because the oppressed don’t need permission to liberate themselves.
For more information, you may contact Dorothy Bell Ferrer using the following:
E-mail: insurgentprieta@gmail.com
Twitter: @insurgentprieta
Instagram: @insurgent_prieta
Facebook: La tinta es negra como mi piel