Back in 2022, when that leaked audio recording caught Nury Martinez, then-president of the Los Angeles City Council, calling a two-year-old Black boy “monkey,” it was no surprise to Dr. Marta Moreno Vega.
Martinez had been celebrated and welcomed as the first Latina to serve as L.A. City Council president, but the leaked audio revealed that even within the Latino community, there remain stark racial divides. Martinez was heard giggling while demeaning Black and Indigenous people alongside fellow Latino Councilmembers Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, with Ron Herrera, then-head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. This small, politically powerful circle decried the growing clout of L.A.’s Black community; called the Black adopted son of a white colleague a changuito (little monkey); and deemed the city’s Indigenous Oaxaca, Mexican immigrants as tan feos (so ugly). At one point, Martinez said of Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón: “F— that guy, he’s with the Blacks.”
“I wasn’t reacting to that only,” confided Vega, founder of New York’s Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI), as she discussed why she took action after hearing those comments. “But that conversation heightened issues that––as a Black woman, as a Latina, as a Puerto Rican––one has been dealing with within family and outside family. The obviousness of one group labeled a minority attacking another group labeled a minority, and then trying to disenfranchise that other group, and the language that was revealed––it fired me totally because, you know, we’ve heard those terms within our families and our communities because racism exists, discrimination exists, [and] white supremacy exists.
“At this point in time in our history, and in this country, this was just unacceptable.” It took her to another level of anger, and forced her to do something.
Vega created a new vehicle for promoting conversations about Latinidad and Blackness. Under the new “Absolutamente Negro/a/x-Absolutely Black” conversation series, Vega is promoting national discussions about everyday Afro Latino concerns.
She harnessed the resources of a group she created called the Creative Justice Initiative (CJI) and began working with other organizations to conduct the new conversation series. Their introductory event, “Contextualizing Absolutamente Negro/a/e/x,” was livestreamed this past October on the CJI YouTube and Facebook channels. The program featured Vega in a discussion with afrolatin@ forum director Guesnerth Josué Perea, journalist-activist Rosa Clemente, writer Janel Martinez, and Rafaela Uribe of LatinoJusticePRLDEF.
Panelists talked about how school book bans have been methodically erasing the Afro Latino cultural footprint. They pointed to the fact that more of the immigrants showing up on U.S. shores are of Indigenous and African descent, and said this might be a reason they are facing increased hostility. They talked about the need to build a national Afro Latino coalition that could truly and faithfully align with other U.S. Black organizations.
The second scheduled series conversation, “Afro Latinas’ Realities: A conversation about racism, healthcare, economics, education, and more,” will be held on January 25 at 6 p.m., once again on the CJI YouTube and Facebook channels. It will be in collaboration with Hunter College’s CENTRO/El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños.
A total of nine more hybrid in-person/live-streamed events will take place this year at places like GALA Theatre, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Austin, Texas; Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico; and the Schomburg Center in Harlem. In 2025, a second phase of conversations will look at what was learned throughout 2024 and build on that momentum.
The series will help people understand that racism exists among Latinos and that ignoring it––in a period when right-wing movements are growing––disenfranchises communities. “For people that are labeled Latino to be party to it and complicit to it complicates the issue,” Vega told the AmNews. “And for people outside of our communities, it’s not clear, it’s not understood, because we don’t talk about racism enough within the Latino community. Racism affects us as a joint community, and as people who identify as Black and as Indigenous, it has to be talked about and it has to be deconstructed in ways that we understand it and can move forward with it toward an initiative that makes sense.”
For more information about the Absolutamente Negro conversation series, visit https://absolutamentenegro.org/.