He thought there was a shortcut. “The world is flat,” he thought, “I’ll go west and beat everyone to India.” One thought, one ambition, changed the course of history. People were exploited, diseases were spread, and colorism took root. The Europeans settled and there were about 11.2 million Africans that survived the Middle Passage and landed in the New World; only 450,000 of that 11.2 million came to the United States. Afrolatinx are people of African descent in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and by extension those of African descent in the United States whose origins are in Latin America and the Caribbean. But the reality is that the term is not universally accepted and there is no consensus about what…show more content… We struggle a lot with the question “where are you from?’ or “what are you?” The question throws you off at first because you are wondering what they mean. You are from the United States just like them. When you tell them as such, you get a weird look and then a repeat of the same question. You then realize that you look different from them and are trying to understand why. You are “exotic” to them, even though you were born and raised in the same country. There is also a preconceived idea what a Latina looks like. They look at our possibly popular Spanish last name and we are required to give an abbreviated history lesson on how my brown skin and curled hair can be connected with de la Rosa, my last name. Some Afrolatinx don’t speak Spanish, which makes it harder for other people to accept their identity. If a light skinned Latin American only spoke English, there would be no qualms, questions or concerns. This shouldn’t even be a matter of concern. Instead of the struggling economy and lack of health care in Caribbean countries, our people are focused getting accepted by society. “We need a vocabulary that will allow us to talk about certain forces as social rather than communal, as involving power…” (Harris, 21). There is a lot of political correctness in the Afrolatinx community because there is a strong history of oppression there is a conscious effort to tip toe across certain names of…show more content… I didn’t even know that there was a term for who I was. I just knew that I was Dominican and that my skin happened to be darker than my mother’s. Afrolatinos “The Untaught Story” is a documentary based on a segment on American Latino TV. This is the story of the estimated 150 million indiscernible afro-descendants currently living in Latin America. Afrolatinos is a seven-part series in English and Spanish, that shows the rich culture and shares the influences the enslaved Africans who arrived to the Caribbean, Central and South America, had on it. This history is rarely told or often omitted when talking about these regions of the world. Talk more about
