Dash Harris Machado will be leading a walking tour through Harlem on Tuesday, July 28, that calls on people to view our famous Black cultural mecca as an archive — one composed of streets, ballrooms, libraries, and former clubs where Afro-Latinos helped shape Black New York.
The two-hour tour, “Afro Latines and the Making of Black New York,” starts at 6 p.m. at West 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue and heads south through Harlem. Harris Machado will lead the tour just after the close of this year’s July 22–26 AfroLatino Festival NYC, where she’s scheduled to take part. She shared that since she’s coming to New York for the festival, it was the perfect time to plan a Harlem tour. “I’ve been wanting to do a tour like this for a while, like, for years, but I live in Panama,” she said. “And so, this was actually the perfect timing for it.”
Harris Machado is an award-winning multimedia journalist and co-founder of AfroLatino Travel, an organization that leads travel tours through Latin America and the Caribbean. She also produced “NEGRO,” a documentary series about Latino identity that looks at how colonization, anti-Blackness, and colorism shape Afrodescendant and Latino identity.
Her Harlem walking tour will highlight cultural sites like the Cotton Club, the Savoy Ballroom, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Elks Rendezvous. “It’s about public space and public sites and public memory,” Harris Machado said. “Although people traverse through public spaces, they still hold a lot of memory in terms of the people who also traversed there historically and what that means for the current day.”
The haunts of famous people like Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg; Afro-Cuban bandleader and arranger Mario Bauzá; Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo; pianist Luis Russell; performer Princess Orelia Benskina; musician René Endreira; and vocalist Graciela Pérez Gutiérrez will all be incorporated into the tour.
Harlem became a mecca for Black culture in the 20th century because it concentrated Black political organizing, publishing, nightlife, scholarship, performance, and everyday community life in one neighborhood. The Great Migration brought African Americans from the South, and mixed them with Caribbean, Afro-Latin, and African immigrants from across the seas.
That diasporic togetherness is often ignored now. “When people think about Black Harlem, they think about the Harlem Renaissance, they think about certain figures,” Harris Machado said. “I’m emphasizing that Afro-Latins were part of the cultural fabric because what we know today as Afro-Cuban jazz came out of Harlem, came out of those collaborations.”
Schomburg may be the most prominent example. Born in Puerto Rico in 1874, he dedicated his life to collecting books, manuscripts, art, newspapers, and documents that documented the depth of African and African diasporic achievements. In 1926, the New York Public Library acquired his collection, which later became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture — one of Harlem’s most important institutions.
But someone like Mario Bauzá is another example. Born in Havana, he was one of the main architects of Afro-Cuban jazz in New York. He worked with Machito and his Afro-Cubans, helping bring clave, big band swing, and Afro-Cuban rhythm to jazz innovations. Bauzá also connected Dizzy Gillespie with Chano Pozo, whose conga rhythms transformed modern jazz before his death in Harlem at only 33 in 1948.
Harris Machado said the tour is also a response to gentrification and erasure. “In this type of environment where people are being actively physically disappeared, their memory cannot also be lost,” she said. “And so, yeah, it’s through this kind of resistance against gentrification or this insistence that these places emerged from Black world making, diasporic Black world making specifically.”
The Harlem walking tour is rain or shine, Harris Machado said, and geared toward anyone interested in Black people and the African diaspora — community members, students, teachers, professors, and travelers. “What I’m seeing with this new generation [of Afro-Latins] is this kind of longing for belonging,” she noted. “And I’m like, you don’t have to long: we’ve been here, we have our own stuff. It’s just about plugging into the historiography because it’s really gorgeous when you look into it. You find that connection there, and there’s been a connection for a very long time among Black people.
“People are like, oh, Afro-Latino is a new thing. But I’m like, ‘actually, we were talking about this for a long time.’ And people have been, historically, just saying that they’re Black. The Latino part wasn’t even necessary. Some people may still need that, but there are lots of us who never needed it because we weren’t really interested in that. There wasn’t this longing for belonging. People were already belonging. The fact that Afro-Cubans could just come up on the scene, be integrated, create these genres of music, and be in community with other Black people –– like, when you have two Black people or more, you have a community.”
Harris Machado’s hope is that by walking Harlem, people will understand that Black New York was made not by one migration or one people, but by overlapping Black worlds. For more info on the walking tour, visit eventbrite.com.more info on the walking tour, visit eventbrite.com.
