Specialization

African Diaspora, Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean

Education

Ph.D., New York University (NYU)

Bio

I am a historian of the African Diaspora in Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean. I am a Venezuelan of Haitian descent. By now I am a person shaped by larger worlds: I have lived for years in the Northeast of the United States and, before that, I spent two years in Socialist Eastern Europe and West Africa respectively. My first profession and interest, conservation biology, brought me to the U.S. and later took me to Cameroon, where I came across the roots of several Venezuelan and Latin American cultural elements. I began to question silenced African contributions to the hemisphere.

In Philadelphia, I created the Annual Arturo Schomburg Symposium (going to its 21st consecutive year), at Taller Puertorriqueño, Inc.http://tallerpr.org/event/20th-arturo-schomburg-symposium/. This event brings together scholars, professionals, activists, and artists to share their expertise about African contributions to Latina/o and Latin American history and cultures with a wide audience. My thirst for understanding Latin America’s racialization processes and the ways these have shaped power dynamics in the region, since the colonial period, led me to fall in love with the discipline of history.f the African Diaspora in Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean. I am a Venezuelan of Haitian descent. By now I am a person shaped by larger worlds: I have lived for years in the Northeast of the United States and, before that, I spent two years in Socialist Eastern Europe and West Africa respectively. My first profession and interest, conservation biology, brought me to the U.S. and later took me to Cameroon, where I came across the roots of several Venezuelan and Latin American cultural elements. I began to question silenced African contributions to the hemisphere.

In Philadelphia, I created the Annual Arturo Schomburg Symposium (going to its 21st consecutive year), at Taller Puertorriqueño, Inc.http://tallerpr.org/event/20th-arturo-schomburg-symposium/. This event brings together scholars, professionals, activists, and artists to share their expertise about African contributions to Latina/o and Latin American history and cultures with a wide audience. My thirst for understanding Latin America’s racialization processes and the ways these have shaped power dynamics in the region, since the colonial period, led me to fall in love with the discipline of history.

Research

More broadly I am interested in:

• The construction of hegemonic narratives across time and the role these play in shaping the “social order”
• Inherent and inherited systemic overt and hidden forms of violence
• The intersectionality of “Honor,” Race, Gender, Class
• Our responsibility as Social Historians to Public History, Activism, and Social Change

Projects

My current research focuses on identities and political consciousness among Africans and their descendants during the colonial period. I document the ways their agency contributed to political debates in the Province of Caracas. By the end of the eighteenth-century, people of African descent (most of them free) represented the majority of the population, and although this was a peripheral region through most of the colonial period, at least from the perspective of the Spanish Crown, it has been described as “the only mainland region in Spanish America where slave plantations developed an export trade to Europe (and the Americas) on any scale.”
I am currently working on various articles and a book manuscript about “Black Honor.” This project examines the ways Afro-descendants perceived their identities, contested the idea that they had no honor, and, by the turn of the nineteenth-century were shaping modern ideas of rights, freedom, citizenship, and equality.