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.