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Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated every year between September 15 and October 15. Here are a few links—new and old—about the tangled intersections between slavery and the Hispanic experience in the United States.
- Natasha S. Alford, “National Hispanic Heritage Month Is Incomplete Without Afro-Latino History,” Time (September 15, 2022): LINK.
- Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, “Everyone is talking about 1619. But that’s not actually when slavery in America started,” Washington Post (August 23, 2019): LINK. Slavery in what is now the United States “dates back a full century before 1619. Slavery in Florida [and other Spanish colonial settlements] reveals how a multinational slave trade built on personal greed and white supremacy forced Africans and African Americans to build North American wealth in which they would not be able to share. Then, adding insult to injury, these early black slaves were erased from the standard narrative of American history.”
- John Burnett, “A Chapter In U.S. History Often Ignored: The Flight of Runaway Slaves to Mexico,” NPR (February 28, 2021): LINK. Recovering the legacy of the “little-known underground railroad that led through South Texas to Mexico during the 1800s. Thousands of enslaved people fled plantations to make their way to the Rio Grande, which became a river of deliverance.”
- “Hispanic-Americans in the Civil War,” American Battlefield Trust (n.d.): LINK. Short version: they fought on both sides.
- Nicole Acevedo, “The Afro Latino who redefined how Black history is remembered,” NBC News (February 24, 2022): LINK. “Arturo Schomburg’s experiences as an Afro Puerto Rican at the turn of the century influenced his approach to rescuing and preserving Black history.” Schomburg’s collection of materials from the African diaspora became the core of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
- Natasha S. Alford, “New book explores how anti-Blackness still thrives in Latino communities,” TheGrio (August 23, 2022): LINK. An interview with Fordham university professor Tanya K. Hernández, who argues that “Latinos themselves don’t like to admit that we harbor anti-Black bias, … [but] we are part and parcel of systems of racism both within Latin America, the Caribbean, and in the United States.”
And the rest of this week’s links:
- Jackie Llanos and Krystian Hajduczka, “UR renames law school because of namesake’s role in slavery,” The Collegian (September 24, 2022): LINK. The board of trustees at CIC member University of Richmond voted to “rename the University of Richmond Law School because of its former namesake’s enslavement of at least 43 people. … The decision [came] six months after the Board adopted 10 naming principles, resulting in the renaming of six campus buildings.”
- “Student researchers contribute to the Genealogy of Slavery,” Roanoke College News (September 30, 2022): LINK. “[T]he Genealogy of Slavery project at Roanoke College’s Center for Studying Structures of Race this summer involved research to develop a database of information about enslaved people in Southwest Virginia before and during the Civil War. … [S]tudent researchers were working to restore the names and stories of people who have been virtually erased from history.” Roanoke College is an Institutional Affiliate of the Legacies of American Slavery network.
- Julia W. Bernier, “Teaching Black Perspectives,” Black Perspectives (September 29, 2022): LINK. Deploying the Black intellectual tradition to “help our students understand how the world as we know it came to be.” The author teaches at CIC member Washington & Jefferson College.