In Translating Blackness Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña argues that Black Latinidad is a social, cultural, and political formation—rather than solely a site of identity—through which we can understand both oppression and resistance. She takes up the intellectual and political genealogy of Black Latinidad in the works of Frederick Douglass, Gregorio Luperón, and Arthur Schomburg. She also considers the lives of Black Latina women living in the diaspora, such as Black Dominicana guerrillas who migrated throughout the diaspora after the 1965 civil war and Black immigrant and second-generation women like Mercedes Frías and Milagros Guzmán organizing in Italy with other oppressed communities. In demonstrating that analyses of Black Latinidad must include Latinx people and cultures throughout the diaspora, García Peña shows how the vaivén—or, coming and going—at the heart of migrant life reveals that the nation is not a sufficient rubric from which to understand human lived experiences.
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"García Peña offers an innovative way of thinking about Latinidad and Blackness … Translating Blackness offers significant contributions to the field of Latina/o studies."
" - Latino Studies
"García Peña pushes the reader to consider sites that lie outside the common migratory routes of Black Latinx individuals. Bringing together the fields of Black and Latinx studies, García Peña ... offers a transnational conceptualization of Black Latinidad that goes beyond its academic theorization in the U.S. context." - Lateral
