AfroLatinidad: Being Black and Latinx in Theatre Today

WHILE RESEARCHING my dissertation on Afro-Latinx performance, I interviewed more than ten Afro-Latinx performers who had been cast in the play Platanos y Collard Greens. I asked them how they saw themselves and their race and ethnicity onstage. One discovery left me surprised. While there has been a recent public push for Afro-Latinx acceptance, the actors who I interviewed were more interested in being “ethnically ambiguous” for their public than revealing their racial and ethnic identity. Although seemingly empowering, this choice comes from experiencing years of discrimination based on their ethnic and cultural identities.

Upon starting my research, I assumed that these actors would want not only to acknowledge their identities publicly but also to embrace them. Instead, I found them embracing Afro-Latinidad internally but not necessarily externally to a public, again mainly because of systematic racism and perceptions of what a Latinx “should” look like. For the actors I interviewed, the idea of being more “commercially viable” for multiple roles was more important than advocating for more representation for their community. This discovery surprised me, as I had not thought about the need for these actors’ survival. At the end of the day, they feel that their job is to be as castable as possible. By embracing ambiguity, more public opportunities seem to arise for them. Unfortunately, colorism played a factor in their public success, as the dark-skinned Afro-Latinx actors could pass only as Black and were not granted the same opportunities as the light-skinned Afro-Latinx actors. By examining the importance that being cast and gaining work has for Afro-Latinx actors, rather than focusing on the sociopolitical importance of their visibility to the Afro-Latinx community as a whole, I was able to better comprehend their conceptions of what makes them castable.