A14 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022
BY RACHEL HATZIPANAGOSG
rowing up, Anyiné
Galván-Rodríguez was
not the darkest-
skinned member of her
part-Dominican, part-
Puerto Rican family, and not the
lightest.
“In every Dominican family,
because you have such a melting
pot of Spaniard, African and Tai-
no origins, you always have a
rainbow of colors,” she said.
Even as a child, Galván-
Rodríguez noticed that her physi-
cal features shaped how she was
treated. While some grandchil-
dren were praised for their looser
curls, Galván-Rodríguez was
chastised for her coarse, curly
hair.
“No one ever directly said, ‘Oh
you have bad hair and because
you have bad hair, you’re less than
the other cousin,’” said Galván-
Rodríguez, 40. “But it was said
like microaggressions.”
As she got older, Galván-
Rodríguez said acquaintances
would call her “Negra fina,” a
Spanish idiom that literally trans-
lates to “fine Black woman” but is
used to suggest that someone has
more-European features.
“It was never said as an inten-
tion to offend,” said Galván-
Rodríguez, who lives in Chicago.
“It was intended as more of a
compliment.”
Galván-Rodríguez said she in-
ternalized these comments and
came to associate her “lighter”
features as good. “I knew my
status based on my skin color,”
she said.
While Latinos in the United
States are often described simply
as “Brown,” that term does not
capture the spectrum of skin
tones and races within the coun-
try’s Hispanic population. These
differences in appearance can af-
fect how Hispanics are treated in
the United States, even by other
Latinos.
A recent survey by the Pew
Research Center asked 3,375 His-
panic adults to identify the skin
color that best represented their
own, based on a scale of 10 tones
ranging from fair to dark. Eighty
percent of Latino adults selected
one of the four lighter skin tones.
Those who self-identified as
having lighter skin said they ex-
perienced less discrimination
than those with darker tones.
About two-thirds of darker-
skinned Latinos said they experi-
enced discrimination in the past
year, while 54 percent of Hispan-
ics with lighter skin color said the
same.
Alex Guzmán, 33, has seen that
reality play out among his own
family.
Guzmán is so light-skinned
that some people don’t realize he
is ethnically Latino. He said he
recognizes that his skin tone has
afforded him some privilege,
since he has faced overt discrimi-
nation only “in relation to the
other people in my life.”
That hit home for Guzmán
when his family was returning to
the United States after a bus trip
to Niagara Falls. As they crossed
the border, Guzmán said that only
his father was pulled aside by
border agents and questioned
about his immigration status.
His father, Guzmán said, has
olive skin and is the most “Latino-
looking” in the family. “I remem-
ber being pretty terrified that
these uniformed agents were tak-
ing my dad off the bus away from
us,” Guzmán said.
For Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa,
being a dark-skinned Latina has
meant constant questions about
who she is and whether she be-
longs. That’s especially true in the
United States, she said, where
race is sometimes understood as a
binary.
Llanos-Figueroa remembers
being in elementary school when
she came across a group of Blackgirls playing double Dutch. She
didn’t know how to play, but she
introduced herself as Dahlma.
They said, “That’s a weird
name,” she recalled.
She said, “I have a Puerto Rican
name.”
And they said, “We thought you
were Black.”
“I’m Black and Puerto Rican,”
she responded.
The girls seemed confused.
“I can see looking back on it
that they were trying to fit me into
a box that they were familiar
with,” said Llanos-Figueroa, an
author who grew up in the Bronx.
“And they weren’t familiar with
the notion of an Afro-Puerto Ri-
can.”
When Llanos-Figueroa was
older and started wearing her
hair in an Afro, Latinas would
comment on her hairstyle.
“Other Latinos would say
things like: ‘You shouldn’t wear
your hair in an Afro. No one will
know you’re Latina,’” Llanos-
Figueroa said. “Or my high schoolunderstand that this person can
encompass two worlds.”
Llanos-Figueroa, 72, turned to
writing to help educate others
about her background. Her 2009
novel “Daughters of the Stone”
centered around five generations
of an Afro-Puerto Rican family.
“You can’t separate my being
Puerto Rican from my being Afri-
can Afro-descendant,” she said.
“So eventually it led me to my
writing career where everything I
write has to do with the Afro-
Puerto Rican world.”
Colorism can also affect how
Hispanic Americans relate to one
another. According to the Pew
study, nearly half of Hispanic
adults say they have often or
sometimes heard a Hispanic
friend or family member make
comments about other Hispanics
that might be considered racist or
racially insensitive.
Tanya Katerí Hernández, a law
professor at Fordham University
and the author of “Racial Inno-
cence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for
Equality,” has studied anti-Black
sentiments and colorism within
the Latino community.
For her book, she analyzed ex-
amples of anti-Black bias in the
workplace, in schools and within
families. One of her most memo-
rable case studies, she said, was
the story of a dark-skinned Do-
minican woman looking for hous-
ing. The woman was referred to a
housing placement agency by her
light-skinned relatives. But when
the apartment-seeker showed up
to the apartment, moving date set
and money arranged, the Latina
apartment owner told her, “Nope,
not you. There’s been some mis-
take,” Hernández said.
“It’s a stark example of rejec-
tion based on racialized appear-
ance within a Latino community,”
she added.
Experts say this kind of color-
ism, or discrimination based on
skin tone, has deep roots in the
Caribbean and Latin America.
Lorgia García Peña, an associ-ate professor of race, colonialism
and diaspora studies at Tufts Uni-
versity, said that colonialism had
a significant impact on how race
and ethnicity are understood
across Latin America.
“What you have is sort of this
stratification of levels of humani-
ties where White Spaniards were
deemed as the real humans, as the
only humans,” García Peña said.
“And then below that were Indig-
enous people and then below that
were African people who were
brought into the country.”
García Peña said that hierarchy
has echoed across generations
and is still reflected in the ways
many Latinos think about race
and ethnicity. For example, in the
Dominican Republic, mixed-race
people typically do not identify as
Black.
That history of colorism and
discrimination plays out in the
United States as well.
Latinos here have always faced
discrimination and racial terror,
even as non-Black Latinos experi-
ence at least some White privi-
lege. In the 19th century and the
start of the 20th century, Mexican
Americans were targeted for
lynchings in Texas and subjected
to “Juan Crow” laws, modeled
after Jim Crow laws in the South.
In 2018, Texan Patrick Crusius
was accused of murdering 23 peo-
ple, mostly Mexicans, at an El
Paso Walmart in what was the
deadliest attack against U.S. Lati-
nos in modern history. Police said
that Crusius told them he was
targeting “Mexicans.”
But increasingly, Latinos in the
United States are embracing their
multiracial roots. In the 2020
Census, Latinos made up 17 mil-
lion of the nearly 25 million more
people who identified as multira-
cial. The number of Latinos who
identified as multiracial in-
creased from 3 million in 2010 to
more than 20 million in 2020,
according to the census. About a
quarter of Latinos identify as Af-
ro-Latinos.
Just this week, actress Ariana
DeBose affirmed her identity dur-
ing her Academy Awards accep-
tance speech for best actress in a
supporting role as Anita in “West
Side Story.”
“Imagine this little girl in the
back seat of a white Ford Focus.
When you look into her eyes, you
see an openly queer woman of
color, an Afro Latina, who found
her strength in life through art.
And that’s what I believe we’re
here to celebrate,” DeBose said.
Carolina Contreras, the owner
of Miss Rizos salon in New York
City, started a blog focusing on
curly hair care in 2011 because she
noticed a lot of women in her
native Dominican Republic
“weren’t rocking their curls even
though the Dominican Republic
is anywhere between 86 to 92
percent Afro-descendant.”
“I was a product of the society,
still a product of a society that
bombards us with ... these ideals
of beauty that don’t include wom-
en who look like me,” Contreras
said.
Contreras, who is Afro-Latina,
sees her hair as a way of embrac-
ing her roots, even though her
family once tried to discourage
her from wearing her hair natu-
ral.
“I remember telling my grand-
mother and my mom that I want-
ed to have my hair be closer to
how God made it, and they’re
both very religious. And that did
it,” Contreras said.
Galván-Rodríguez said she is
happy to see more people embrac-
ing their Afro-Latino roots on
social media and in census forms.
“The Afro-Latina movement is
the renaissance of our ancestors
not wanting their stories to go
untold,” Galván-Rodríguez said.
“Our ancestors are like: ‘We didn’t
go anywhere. ... Our grandchil-
dren and great-grandchildren are
finally claiming us.’”Colorism shades how Latinos of
different skin tones are treated
Survey finds those who identify as darker skinned reported more discrimination
PHOTOS BY CHRISTOPHER GREGORY FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTcounselor, when I went to sign up
for a Latino scholarship, she sug-
gested I should apply for a schol-
arship through the United Negro
College Fund instead.”
Llanos-Figueroa said these ex-
periences made her feel like, “You
don’t fit in, like you’re ‘the other.’ ”
“I think in general people want
to keep it simple. You’re either
this or that. They don’t like com-
plications,” she said. “And the
reality is that we are all compli-
cated, we are all nuanced. And it
may take a little more time toLoribel Peguero
recalls that when she
was 10, her darker-
skinned grandmother
called her own skin
tone a “punishment”
from God. She later
realized that her
grandmother was
“saying that it has
prohibited her from a
lot of opportunities.”From left, Ashley Marte, Enmanuel Perez and Carolina Contreras. Marte said that at her predominantly White college, her identity as a Dominican American sometimes makes her feel like “an outsider.”
Contreras embraces her natural hair at her New York salon Miss Rizos, even though her family tried to discourage her from wearing it that way.