Armando Brown at Doheny Library on the campus of USC in Los Angeles, California on January 31, 2011.Photo by Anna Wierzbowska

Growing up in South Los Angeles in the 1970’s, Armando Brown never thought about his multiracial identity.

“When I was growing up, I was black,” Brown, a 45-year-old photojournalist, says. “It was never an issue.”

The son of a creole man from New Orleans and a dark-skinned Mexican woman, Brown has a dark complexion and wavy hair.

His family lived in a black neighborhood that remained that way for years because of segregation. But little by little, Latino immigrants started moving in. Then, after the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, black families that could afford it started moving out. The dynamic of the community changed, and so did how people interacted with him.

“Some black people started saying, ‘hey, amigo!’ and Latinos would want to speak Spanish to me,” he remembers. But he couldn’t hold conversations with them because Spanish wasn’t spoken at his home, so he understands some of the language but doesn’t speak it.

Brown’s experience reflects that of the more than one million Latinos of black ancestry in the United States. According to the 2010 Census, 2.5 percent of the 50.5 million Latinos in the country identified themselves as black or African American.

For Brown, as terrible as segregation had been, it had created a black community where he always felt at home, where people talked to each other. He noticed the new neighbors were Latinos who didn’t speak English, so they didn’t easily integrate, and the community lost its cohesiveness.

“Being what I am, I had to learn to hear criticism from both parts of my identity and learn to accept it,” he says. “You learn to accept that there’s prejudice in this world.”

For Anthony Otero, a third-generation Afro-Latino who grew up in the Bronx, college was when he started to think about his identity.

“In the Bronx, which is a melting pot of different races and cultures … it’s something you don’t really notice,” says Otero, whose grandmother is Puerto Rican and grandfather Ecuadorian.

The student population at Syracuse University, however, was predominantly white when Otero was an undergrad student in the 1990’s.

“I started questioning my identity. I was too black for Latinos or too Latino for black kids,” says the 37-year-old.

Otero now keeps a personal blog that sometimes addresses issues of race and identity. He writes under the alias Latinegro, a term coined by one of his professors, Marta Cruz-Jansen.

Otero, who works as an event planner at Syracuse University, doesn’t feel he’s different from other Latinos, but explains that certain things make him an Afro-Latino: His skin color and his interpretation of his own culture.

“I can see African roots in our food… our beats,” he says.  “You can find them everywhere.”

African roots

Salsa lover Eileen Torres has studied the origins of this popular music. She’s a Mexican-American who grew up in Lorain, Ohio around many Puerto Ricans, and got to dance to the beats of many salsa bands.

Torres is a historian who has done presentations on the African roots of salsa, but to commemorate Black History Month, she wanted to “get beyond the music to the culture and the races to explore how these roots are common to all of us.”

Panelists were Yadira Stamp, José Venegas, Miriam Machado-Luces and Eduardo Díaz. (Photo Special to VOXXI)

She organized a panel to explore the racial and cultural aspects of the Afro-Latino identity to go along with her salsa history presentation. Panelists were Miriam Machado-Luces, José Vanegas and Yadira Stamp; Eduardo Díaz, director of the Smithsonian Latino Center, was the moderator.

The event was a candid conversation that touched on how racism, prejudice and ignorance through the centuries have shaped identity in Latin America and among Latinos in the U.S.

Spaniards, for example, had a caste system based on race that kept light-skinned people at the top. African slaves and American indigenous people were at the bottom, and interracial offspring were categorized according to how dark they were.

Though the system was eliminated as countries gained their independence, the attitude remained that the darker people are, the worse off they are in society. This led to the concept of “mejorar la raza,” or improving the race by marrying someone with lighter skin color so that the offspring would be “better.”

“It’s the ignorance of our upbringing, and we continue to carry it forth,” said Stamp, who attended school in Panamá. “But we can’t continue with that mentality.”

The experience of Afro-Latinos in the U.S., Stamp pointed out, varies according to country of origin and place of residence. A Dominican-born Latino with African physical features might not identify himself as black in his country, for example, but in the U.S., based on his appearance and the way people here see him, he would have to rethink his identity.

Vanegas, an Afro-Latino independent video producer and musician in the Washington, D.C. area, grew up in Colombia. He says that when he tells people he’s Latino, they are surprised.

“People think that black people are only in Africa and the U.S.,” he said.

Beyond black history month

When people ask about Brown’s ethnic background, his answer depends on who’s asking.

“If it’s a black person, I’ll say I’m half black and half Mexican,” he says. “In general, I say I’m mixed. If they want me to get specific, then I will.”

Brown says he’s happy with who he is even if it means there’s a certain degree of struggle.

“I’m just thankful that I’m able to move in both circles,” he says.

Latinos should embrace that fluidity, Otero says.

Recently, during a TweetChat about Black History Month organized by Latinos in Social Media, he tweeted: “We as Latinos need to recognize that because we are a conglomeration of so many races, we can be the bridge to global citizenship.”

Perhaps a better way to celebrate our heritage, he says, would be to refocus the Black and Latino History Months into year-long educational efforts.

“It’s important for Latinos to understand the various parts of their identity,” he says. “Identity is very important. If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you are going.”