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Porchtales is a podcast by HumanitiesDC, Washington's humanities council, and an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Each season we work with a guest producer to focus on a historic or cultural topic and dig deeper to learn and celebrate the unique experiences that shape our fascinating city. Whether jogging by the capitol or driving along the California coast, Porchtales listeners get to experience DC through the eyes of those who make up the fabric of our nation's capital. Have an idea or a question, send us a note at programs@humanitiesdc.org
*Any views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of HumanitiesDC or the project’s funders.
HumanitiesDC Presents: Porchtales
Our Black Mosaic
A Love Letter to Afro-Latine Youth
Credits:
Porchtales, el podcast original de Humanities DC. [foreign language 00:00:09].
This is Porchtales, a HumanitiesDC show where we get to experience the District of Columbia from the history to the culture to the arts. In each season, we'll hear from the experts, the doers of DC. So, get comfy and maybe grab a few friends, as we gather on our porches to learn on a deeper level and celebrate what really shapes our nation's capital.
Manuel Mendez:
Hello, and welcome to Porchtales, season three, Our Black Mosaic. I'm your guest producer and co-host, Manuel Mendez, a public historian, documentarian, chair of the DC Afro-Latino Caucus, and a University of Maryland PhD student. I'm excited to bring you inspiring stories from DC Afro-Latinos, and their contribution to Washington DC. This season, we will illuminate the challenges, achievements, and experiences that Afro-Latine continue to face.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
And I'm your co-host, Angeley Crawford Gibb, an educator, orator, and your favorite hot gal, tia/prima. My work centers on identity development with a specific focus on adolescent ethnic identity development and language.
Our diverse Latino community has faced segregation, unrest, redlining, white flight, and currently, white recolonization. Mount Pleasant, Columbia Heights, and parts of Petworth are well-known local areas where our community is concentrated. While the Latino population once reached 15%, it now comprises 11% of Washington residents. Specifically, people of Salvadoran and Mexican descent make up a significant portion of the population.
Manuel Mendez:
It all started with a small group of Spanish-speaking Caribbean people, that had a long-standing presence in Washington DC's neighborhood, laying the foundation for the benefits our community enjoys today, such as services, food, jobs, and government support. The common narrative is that our community has its roots in the 1980s and '90s. That is wrong. Historically, the Afro-Latine experience has been intentionally omitted from literature, scholarly work, in the media within the mainstream, and Latino communities. Afro-Latine people have lived in Washington DC since the 1900s. Over the years, their presence have contributed to the culture, politics, and economy.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
This is a love letter to Afro-Latine people. We recognize our responsibility to bridge the intergenerational and cultural gaps. We are familia, kinfolk. By centering our narrative in radical love, we call into a collective voice, the activists, artists, and students of our community. We call them into action to tell their stories. Our listeners will be empowered to enter radical community love and development through their voices. Each episode will spotlight first-hand accounts of a Chocolate City from our perspective. Your role in preserving our culture is crucial, and we invite you to join us on this journey.
Manuel Mendez:
Ode to mayate. Mayate, mayate, mayate.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Mayate, mayate, mayate.
Manuel Mendez:
I realized it early.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
From childhood.
Manuel Mendez:
I realized it after our conversation when you told me-
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
You are not black.
Manuel Mendez:
They are mayate. You speak Spanish. I speak Spanish, don't speak no English. That's still my kin.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
That's still my kin.
Manuel Mendez:
When you talked about me and thought I didn't understand you, when I wanted to play, dance, or your friendship, you looked at me like I was a savage. Or when you looked at my hair and my nose and told me-
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
You are a mayate.
Manuel Mendez:
And when you watch Univision and yelled-
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
That black one sure is ugly.
Manuel Mendez:
And when you spit at me and call me a dog, that's when I understood my blackness and recognize the mayate that I am.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Recognize the mayate that I am.
Throughout the United States, Afro-descended individuals struggle for racial equity and representation. This struggle is not new and does not differ in Latin America. The practice of relegating Afro-Latine peoples to convenient cultural tropes or outright erasure is not uncommon. Their exclusion from the greater Latine cultural narrative ensures that they remain unseen. Afro-Latines have petitioned, develop policies, and organized campaigns to provide accurate portrayals of Afro and black issues in the political arenas and institutions both in the United States and Latin America. Many Latine institutions have remained silent or indifferent to their concerns despite their efforts.
The Latino community has a beautiful rainbow of skin colors. So why then do we only see white Latino faces? The introduction of the term Hispanic in the 1980s US Census Bureau legitimized its usage.
Manuel Mendez:
As a result, white Hispanics have embraced this brand and identity for commercial and political purposes. The census has had political and economic implication in all our communities. Stacey Abram, Georgia's activist, emphasized the US Census is more than just a headcount, as it influenced the allocation of over a trillion dollars for critical services like healthcare and education, and shapes the delineation of the political districts, school zones and economic development opportunities.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
The terms Hispanic or Latino, have enriched and benefited white and mestizos Latine people, but has failed to fully recognize and represent Afro-Latine and indigenous voices. Spanish language networks continue to struggle and exclude African and indigenous people even today.
Manuel Mendez:
What is mayate? How does it relate to our stories and community?
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Mayate is a term used to disparage individuals with a darker complexion, often aimed at African Americans or people of African descent. This term is as derogatory as the N-word. Presently, while building relationships within Washington DC, the term mayate has frequently come up amongst Central Americans. In understanding the Latine population of the DMV, particularly Central Americans, it is essential to comprehend their relationship with African-aity.
Manuel Mendez:
By doing so, we spotlight the deliberative ratio of Afro-Latine heritage within Latin identity. We must identify anti-black attitudes in the forms they take within the community, power dynamics, political rhetoric, and standards of beauty. One example of this is Mayate.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Mayate. The absence of Afro-Black faces in the telling of Central American history and identity solidifies the ideology that their contributions are marginal or non-existent. Without the influence and contributions of Afro and black descendants, culture, gastronomy, rhythms and beliefs do not exist.
Manuel Mendez:
The purpose of this work is to reclaim the power of narrative through truth-telling. So, we know-
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
La Negra Speaks. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Manuel Mendez:
But we do want to know a little bit of your context of Costa Rica and how you get to Washington DC and work with young people, but specifically, your Costa Rican roots.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Yeah. So am I a US-based Afro-Costa Rican, and it's important to highlight that because I was not born in Costa Rica. I will say this though, my mother, I was born and then immediately sent down, right? And so, I have spent much of my childhood within a space that went back and forth from Brooklyn, New York to Limon, Costa Rica. That's important because when people ask me about my nationality, that's difficult for me to explain or to talk about. I cannot say that I have allegiance to any country, per se. I have allegiance to the provinces and boroughs that raised me, and that is Limon, Costa Rica and Brooklyn, New York. I identify as gringuitica sometimes, right? Or Tika Americana, an American Costa Rican because, as I said, I'm US-based. But my roots are so deeply entwined in Limon, Costa Rica that it would be a lie not to include that completely.
Eulalia Barnard, a poet from Limon, Costa Rica, has a line in one of her pieces where she says, "[foreign language 00:09:38]," my naval string or my umbilical cord is buried there. My mom is buried in Costa Rica, she's buried in Limón, and so I'm always traveling back and forth to my homeland, to my mother, to where my mother's spirit, in my own ways of thinking, live.
So, what does it mean to be Limonense or Afro Costa Ricense? For me, when I traveled to Costa Rica, Costa Rica was Limón. There are seven provinces, six other provinces, but I knew San Jose and I Limón. San Jose because that's where I came with the air students and where my aunt picked me up. And Limón was a three-hour journey that we took back to the Caribbean coast. And in that space, I understood the culture of Afro-Costa Rican identity through a black lens. And it's important to talk about that, right? It was not only a black lens, but it was an Afro-Caribbean lens. So in addition to the Spanish that is spoken in the entire country, within that province, there's a Creolized English that colloquially has been known as Mecatelio, make I tell you, and has now been recognized as Limonense Creole.
So Afro-Latino identity, for me, was never just Spanish. It is not the co-opted thing that we see now today. It is not this kind of racially ambiguous Blackness. It was black, I mean Blackity-black, West Indian Blackity-black, Reguena Espanol. Like it was black and Caribbean. And so I just believed that Afro-descendants in Central America were like all of us. Now, that is my limited understanding. But as I grew older, I learned about the migration of West Indians along the Atlantic coast of Central America. And that conversation is often left out of the picture of talking about Latinidad Afro-Latine identity. There has been concentration on Cuba, concentration on Dominican Republic, on Puerto Rico, heck, even concentration on Brazil. So we went from the Caribbean, jumped over Central America and hit South America. So for me, this work is particularly important because it highlights my identity as a Central American, but also the rich and varied culture of being Central American and Caribbean.
Dr. Nicole Ramsey, she's currently teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, has used the term Central American Caribbean. And she's Belizean. It's one that's dear to me because it describes the identity that I had as an Afro-Latine person.
How did this lead me to DC? In 2011, I took an internship in Erevia, Costa Rica. Barablanca, to be specific. And it was so different from what I knew in Limon. Met some people there. They came back to the States, invited me to teach at Don Bosco Cristo Rey High School in Tacoma Park to teach Spanish. And initially I was like, "Hell no, I don't speak Spanish." And the person that invited me to do this work said, "No, sis, you do."
And it's some of the most profound work that I've ever done, because I had students from all over the DMV, particularly from DC, who were black Latin Americans just like me, and who struggled, who felt like they didn't fit in, who felt like they weren't seen, who felt like their Spanish maybe wasn't perfect enough. And because of their phonetic features, felt as though they could not be accepted in the greater Latina community. And here I came with my dark skin, shaved Afro, shaved sides, blonde locks, purple lipstick, and was like, "Hola, como esta. Soy, [Spanish 00:13:57] Espanol." And everyone's like, "You're the Spanish teacher?" And that is what led me here to this area.
My DC experiences in the voices and the relationships that I had with my students from DC who traveled out to the school that I was teaching, and they also made me feel like home. It felt like old school Brooklyn. And it felt like a combination of cultures that I understood. And that's what has made DC so special to me. And that is what has made this work so special to me. I am very clear about the crossings that I've had as someone who is a descendant of Afro descendants who landed in the Caribbean, then from the Caribbean went to Central America, and for me ended up here in the United States, Brooklyn from my childhood. As I'm continuing the journey of crossing, I've now ended up in DC and the work is beautiful.
So talk to me, Manuel Mendez. Tell me a little bit about the president of the DC Afro-Latino Caucus. What does that mean? How did it get started? And tell me what part of your journey brought you to this?
Manuel Mendez:
A lot of my experience has to do with being raised in Washington DC I almost feel like I'm a native, but I was born in Dominican Republic and came when I was like nine, eight years old, to Chocolate City when it was really-
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
When it was Chocolate City.
Manuel Mendez:
When it was really Chocolate City. Came in 1991, during the crack era, or getting over the crack era. So you will see the remnants of the crack era and what was going on. It looked very different than what we see it today. So I went to a small elementary school, Raymond Elementary School. It was all black. My best friends were black. My earliest memories of singing the Black Anthem.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Lift every voice and sing.
Manuel Mendez:
That's right. And being prideful of that.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Ooh. The pride, yeah.
Manuel Mendez:
Yeah. And having that old black piano teacher. And so my experiences with DC has always been of nurturing. I've been watered in DC, like I've been a seed in Washington DC. A lot of my mentors have poured a lot into me. And so coming up and reading and being curious about the history of Washington DC, I never saw or read, or researched our community, the ones that spoke Spanish but looked like and were black. My household was different than DC in the outside. My nickname was Curly, by the way. Every DC person has a, like if you don't have a nickname, I don't know if you were-
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Did anyone ever love you?
Manuel Mendez:
I don't know. My nickname was Curly. So Curly used to come out, but inside my house, it was like a Dominican formal household.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Wait, but talk to me about what that different was, between a Dominican formal household and walking into the world as Curly.
Manuel Mendez:
The difference. It's just culturally different. Like to me, I was embraced by African Americans. So outside I was just like them, I was African Americans. I would play football. I wanted to play football. I wanted to play basketball. One time when a friend of mine's came, he wanted me to play baseball, and I was like, "I don't want to play baseball, I want to play football and basketball," because that was something that my friends were actively doing.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
I think that's a dope portion of the conversation though, because one of the things that a lot of black Latin American youth who are raised in the United States talk about, is walking into the world as a black American person, because people don't know that you also speak Spanish. So I remember going away to college and I had to do a crash course in who Frankie, Beverly and Mays was. I had to learn the classics. I had no idea that you did not have oxtail at every Thanksgiving because we had oxtail and jerk at my Thanksgiving. I had no idea that the greens really were a make or break. And I'm using food references, but you had to get a crash course because some of the household things were a little bit different.
My Thanksgiving table had arroz con pollo and potato salad paracon remolacha, so potato salad with beets, and how do I explain to my Black American friends why my potato salad is pink? So these things that were just so ... we are different in these cultural ways, but when we walk out in the world, we were Negroes.
Manuel Mendez:
You made me think of banana pudding in Washington DC.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Yes.
Manuel Mendez:
My first introduction of banana pudding was-
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
When you were completely unsure what to do.
Manuel Mendez:
What to do. That was major for me. I mean, for me, in Washington DC, to see all the black faces, but then not to read about Black Latinos was like a 180 for me.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Where are we?
Manuel Mendez:
Yeah, where are we? Were we here? And talking to a lot of the elders in the community, and you talked about how did DC Afro-Latino Caucus come about, it's because looking at the Latino history in Washington DC, I didn't see myself and the people that I saw on a regular basis. Folks like Casilda Luna, folks like Arturo Griffin. A lot of our elders that walk and work and put so much effort into the mainstream Latino community, I didn't read about them and I didn't read them about them through our lens. I want to emphasize that, that it's through our lens, like the black lens that I don't see to this day. And this is our attempt to tell some of those stories about these elders that our young people, people who are the general audience need to learn about, students need to learn about, because they put so much effort into the things we truly have benefited from. I think about Arturo Griffin and the Hispanic Festival. What's Fiesta DC today? And I think about Casilda. Those are major folks that put so much politically.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
They lay the foundation.
Manuel Mendez:
That foundation.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Absolutely.
Manuel Mendez:
And I did not read about them. I touched them, they mentored me, but-
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
They were nowhere to be found.
Manuel Mendez:
Nowhere to be found in the readings. And knowing that they came in 1963, and before-
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
And not 1980.
Manuel Mendez:
Right.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Before-
Manuel Mendez:
Before.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Before other migrations that are deeply written about.
Manuel Mendez:
Right.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Absolutely. That's one of the things that I think is super important that you target and that you talk about because there is this misconception that Afro-Latinidad has just came out of the air, and part of that misconception has led people to believe that the conversation centers solely on, "You can be black and Latino."
What we want to do as well, in this podcast, is dispel that notion. Black folk been black-folking in Latin America the whole time, and we are not confused that we are black. I know that there are a lot of people, and there are a lot of misconceptions that many Afro-Latinas are confused about their blackness. There needs to be space and place for that conversation. I am not erasing it. It is important to understand what black erasure has meant for many Afro-Latine people. However, as I said, black folk been black-folking the whole time in Latin America. And everything that is produced and sent out into the world that people believe is Latina or Latino or Hispanic, is rooted in black African diasporic cultures in Latin America. Let me say this one more time. Black folk been black-folking in Latin America the whole time.
Manuel Mendez:
Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that gets missed. Just as one can be African American culturally, someone can also be introduced to Latin American culture as well, and feel like that they have some Latin culturally. Like you said, we're not confused about how black, at least the folks that we deal with in terms of the Afro-Latino caucus, we're not confused about the blackness. Musically, we're the foundation. Food, gastronomy, we're the foundation. Politically, we are the foundation, when you think of the Haitian Revolution and blacks being ... well, just Haiti being the first black nation and the example that it had, the ripple effect that it had in South America.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
And there is no, air quote, Latino liberation without Afro descendants. And that's something that we highlight a lot in this podcast as well, as we talk about Casilda Luna, as we talk about Fiesta DC, there is no Fiesta DC without black bodies. There is no liberation without black bodies and without black intellectuals.
Manuel Mendez:
Can you talk a little bit about being black Central American in a Central American centric DMV?
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
It has been one of the hardest experiences of my life. I have been being prepared for it my whole life. There is not a large Costa Rican population here in the DMV. We tend to be centered more in New York, New Jersey, and in California. So the DMV Central American population is rooted in El, Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, very few spaces that I would necessarily fit in, in the DMV. And so teaching my students was a joy, and it was also very fertilized ground for anti-Blackness. Tu eres, la maestra Espanol. You're the Spanish teacher? Si. Pues de donde eres. Where are you from? Mis apas son de Costa Rica. En serio. My parents are Costa Rican, and really? Wow, hubiera dicho, la República Dominicana Panama. I would've said the Dominican Republic or Panama.
Why is that significant? As Latin Americans, particularly Central Americans, we do not necessarily automatically identify as Latine or Hispanic. Those are US based terms that have been commercialized and work for capitalism. When we are working within our own respective countries, we will say that I'm Costa Rican, Ecuadorian, Panamanian, et cetera, et cetera. How does that tie in? Each country has its own accent. When I speak in Spanish, it is not a Dominican or Panamanian accent, both of which are ubiquitous within Latin American musical culture. So it's not as though they've not been heard before. But it is because I am black, and particularly in the DMV, blackness is deeply associated with the Dominican Republic, and to a lesser extent, Panama.
So even within that question that could seem innocuous or could seem as though it's just a ... or a statement that could seem that it's just light, there is anti-Blackness wrapped around it. Because what is being said, the undercurrent is, "I didn't even know," and sometimes it was outright said, "I didn't know that there were people like you in Costa Rica." Costa Rica is known as the Switzerland of Central America. Do the math.
Manuel Mendez:
And it also, because this place is such Salvadorian-centric, the recurrent narrative for them, it's like we never had black people. There never was black people in El Salvador. So we were free from the ...
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Enslavement. And there's so much history that needs to be recounted there about migration practices, and also who their borders were open to, when and how, and Blanqueamiento, the whitening of a race that happened throughout Latin America. And these are uncomfortable statements to make when you are in an area that is governed by Central Americans who don't recognize you.
One of the reasons why this particular podcast is important is because it highlights the work of Latine people, Afro-Latine, people who predate the large migration of Salvadorans and Mexicans and central Americans. In addition, we hold space for the Central American voices, like mine, that are consistently being erased.
Off Georgia Ave, there was a restaurant named Panamanas, it was the only Afro-Panamanian restaurant in the neighborhood. And I believe her name is Yavita. It was a place I went to feel like home. Unfortunately, it closed down. But when it closed down, so did a large part of the ability for Afro-Panamanians or even Afro-Central Americans to go someplace and feel a sense of home.
So one of the things, Manny, that we want to talk about is why we're using the terms Afro-Latinx and Afro-Latiné. There's been a lot of controversy around them, but for the sake of the work that we're doing, can you talk about why we chose these terms?
Manuel Mendez:
We chose these terms because we want to include as much people as possible that want to contribute to this work. And that goes from race, gender, to all the non-binary folks that claim blackness. And we don't want to exclude someone because we want to call ourselves Afro-Latino or Afro-Latina. We want to include all the people that want to contribute to this work. And I think people have an issue with a language that was never necessarily our own. I don't claim to speak the correct Spanish in Spain, nor Mexico, nor in any of the formal countries, or in the United States. We're not here to police language or have folks feel about certain terms. We want to make sure that everyone's included and feel that they want to contribute to this effort of recognizing black people wherever they are.
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
And to add to that point, we wanted to specifically use Afro-Latine because there has been some controversy around Afro-Latinx being used as a form of linguistic imperialism because it is US-based. And while we're not ascribing to that, what we do want to hold space for is the voices of other people and the desires of our community to feel heard in all the ways possible. Afro-Latine is used because the E in Spanish, here's the teacher coming out, the E in Spanish is one of the few letters that is non-binary. And so we have chosen to go with Afro-Latine versus Afro-Latinx. But at the end of the day, what we're saying is this feast that we're preparing, you are welcome to come and eat, and eat well.
Manuel Mendez:
And also too, the fact that even for African Americans, the word African Americans didn't just appear, like it was called Negro, Afro-Americans, and then African Americans. That transition, we should hold space for that as well. Call ourselves what we want to call ourselves
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
Self-identification is absolutely important.
Manuel Mendez:
One of the biggest things that I wanted to talk to you about was our commonality. For me-
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
We love the babies.
Manuel Mendez:
For me, I worked with young people for a really long time. I seen the young people graduate, have their masters, growing up, have families. How have you dealt with young people in Washington DC, and specifically Afro-Latino youth?
Angeley Crawford Gibb:
If you would've asked me a decade ago if I would be doing work with Afro-Latine people, specifically Afro-Dominican youth, helping usher them into blackness, I would have said, "Absolutely not." In fact, I would've emphatically said no, because a lot of the anti-blackness that I experienced in the US came at the hands of Dominican people, Dominican hair salons, just a lot of really, really hard things.
When I went to college in 2008, I met my best friend, a Dominican woman from Brooklyn, and we were the only two girls in the middle of Pennsylvania looking around at this sea of whiteness, and suddenly we were both from Brooklyn, and it was like, "Okay, girl. Well, I guess it's us against the world." And that first year was really hard. We really had to do a lot of deconstructing work. She had feelings about Afro-descendants and black people because the black girls at her school always used to beat her up, and I had problems with mestizaje and Dominicans because the anti-blackness and fat phobia would always hit me in these really hard ways.
But I can honestly say that the foundation of our friendship had led me to the work that I did some 10, 15 years later. So my works specifically with the youth of DC, Afro-Latine youth, has been creating pathways to them understanding their blackness. The first year that I started teaching in 2015, I'll never forget, one of my students raised her hand and said to me, Dominican, and said to me, "So Ms. Gibb, am I black?" And this is my first year teaching in a predominantly non-black Hispanic Latino school, and I had no idea how to answer because the answer was yes, but how do I answer this and keep my job? Because I don't want her to go home and tell her mother that I told her she was black if her mother has been telling her, her whole life that she's not.
The answer I gave her is, "Well, you'll decide." We got to the end of the year, I had created projects and curriculum for them to do, specifically a unit on Afro-Latinos, and she chose the Dominican Republic. She chose the region of the Dr where she was from Samana. And Samana has such a history that she just didn't know anything about. And by the end of the year, she said to me, "I'm Black." The next year, she was a junior at that point, the next year I created a course called the Afro-Latin Diaspora, where I covered brief histories of five different Latin American countries in the Afro descendants in those countries. And by that point, we got into the end of the year and she said, "I'm black, and I know that."
I had students who would sit in my class and things that I took for granted. Being from New York, you hear, oftentimes on the streets, you hear the Dominicans and sometimes Panamanians say, "De lo mio." And I would just kind of dap my students up in the hall and say, "De lo mio." And unbeknownst to me, they would go home to their parents and say, "No, Ms. Gibb love us. We belong to her." That work, that's profound. Saying to them, it was our secret code in the halls, de lo mio, this understanding that you belong to me, and I belong to you, that I am here because of you.
And as the years kept going, I'll never forget I had a student who came on opening school night for the open house, choosing the school, her mother's Afro-Cuban, beautiful dark-skinned Afro-Cuban woman and her father is Mestizo Salvadoran, and she looks ... The baby just looks Afro. And she saw me standing outside of the Spanish classroom speaking in Spanish, and she beelined towards me. She said, "Hi." And I was like, "Hi, baby. How are you?" This is one of my students who struggled deeply with Spanish, with speaking Spanish, and felt a lot of insecurity because she felt like her Spanish wasn't good. Her mother came to tell me later on that she chose that night to come to our school because of me.
The work has been good. The work has been beautiful. And I am committed to the babies. I'm going to call them babies because they're always going to be my babies. Some of them are 25 and 26 now, and I will still pinch their cheeks and, "Hi, mi amor," because they are always going to be my children. But to be able to create a soft place for them to land when one was not created for me is the thing that I'm most proudest of. But more than that, I have told them the work that I'm teaching you to do, I may not get there with you, I may not get to see what I'm teaching you to fight for. I might not. But if you get there, oh baby, if you get there, then I have done my work. And so, this is a love letter to the babies. This is a love letter to Afro Latine youth. If you get what you need from it, great. But this is a love letter to the future.
Manuel Mendez:
Ode to Mayate, written by Manuel Mendez and performed with Angeley Crawford Gibb. Music by Pepe Gonzalez, produced by Humanities DC, edited by Katie Davis. And this is Our Black Mosaic.
Credits:
Porchtales is produced by Humanities DC. If you want to share your DC story, check out the link in the show notes and be sure to rate and review us wherever our podcast lives on your favorite podcast player. This season is made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.