Afro-Latinas/os

The terms “Afro-Latina” and “Afro-Latino” refer to those Latinas/os in the United States who are of African ancestry and choose blackness as a racial identity in addition to identifying along ethnic lines with their Latina/o national origins. The terms are not exclusive to the United States, as activists of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean have also begun to use them (Whitten and Torres 1998; Seelke 2008). As the Latina/o population has grown in the United States, so has the number of Latinas/os of African descent (López and Gonzalez-Barrera 2016). According to the 2010 U.S. census, the 50.4 million Latinas/os in the United States (the nation’s largest panethnic group) account for 16.3 percent of the country’s population. About 2.5 percent of those Latinas/os also identified themselves as “Black” on the 2010 census. That compares with close to 53 percent who said they were also “White” and the 36.7 percent who described themselves as “some other race.” (The 2010 census permitted Latinas/os to select a Hispanic/Latino” ethnic origin category in addition to selecting any number of the racial categories of black, white, Asian, or “some other race.”) Most Afro- Latinas/os in the United States can trace their origins to Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Panama (among other Central American countries), and Puerto Rico, though over a quarter of a million people of Mexican heritage also defined themselves as “Black” in the 2010 census; many Mexicans are of African descent (Vinson and Restall 2009). As compared to other Latinas/os, Afro-Latinas/os are much less likely to be immigrants and are more likely to speak English in their homes.