20 pages • 40 minutes read
Afro-Latina
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Afro-Latina” is a spoken-word poem—as such, it is both a text and a performance. The poem presents several conventions of spoken-word poetry and especially slam poetry, including a first-person speaker, relatively short lines, and language that is both euphonic and highly rhythmic. Contemporary spoken-word poetry circulates through live performances and videos, so gestures and intonation (the rise and fall of the voice) are also important formal elements.
The poem is also in free verse, and instead of relying on defined stanzaic or metrical patterns, Acevedo structures the poem thematically and uses rhyme and other devices occasionally as emphasis. For example, Lines 1-11 are a celebration of the Afro-Latina as a figure in popular culture, particularly music. Short lines like “anywhere she go / como” (Lines 4-5), with the strong pauses at the end of each line and the repetition of those “o” sounds, create an off-kilter rhythm. That rhythm, which brings the reader up short just before the Celia Cruz lyric, is a nod to Afro-Caribbean musical traditions that rely on such rhythms in the drum section, especially of drums like the conga or tumbao. Listen to musician Bobby Sanabria’s “Playing Congas and the Tumbao, Part One” (2014) for an example of this sound in music.
Lines 12-47 are in first-person and comprise anecdotes about how ashamed the speaker was of her language and culture. In keeping with the focus on narrative, these lines are longer and mostly unrhymed.
Beginning in Line 48, the speaker frequently relies on parallelism (repeated grammatical structure) as she describes the history and culture of her people. Lines 54-57, for example, list the speaker’s Indigenous and European forebears, while Lines 65-67 list the products of her ancestors’ stolen labor.
Starting in Line 68, Acevedo holds the section together using irregular rhymes and repetition of vowel and consonant sounds (assonance and consonance, respectively), as in “race history. / And my memory” (Lines 73-74). Those choices show the speaker’s effort to pull all of these disparate histories together into a coherent identity.
The last move in the poem is to define “Afro-Latino” beyond the suffering in its origins. Acevedo returns to parallelism to list where Afro-Latinidad is located, culminating with that declaration of pride at the end of the poem.
Allusion
The poem opens with an allusion to a popular 2001 song by Afro-Cuban American singer Celia Cruz, “La Negra Tiene Tumbao” (“The Black Woman’s Got Style”), which celebrates the boldness and beauty of Black women, particularly Black Latinas. This allusion connects Afro-Latina identity to Caribbean music, an important part of the Dominican culture and the cultural context for the poem. The allusion anticipates Acevedo’s frequent references to music as one cultural reality in which joy rather than sorrow colors how people of African descent view themselves.
Acevedo includes Cruz’s signature catchphrase “¡Azúcar!” (“Sugar!”; Line 5), which recalls the resilience of enslaved Africans who survived forced labor in the sugar plantations of the colonial Caribbean. That lyric exclamation transforms sugar from the product of slavery into a testament to the swagger and resilience of the descendants of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people; this mirrors the transformation of a painful history into one about the beauty of people. Acevedo uses this allusion to preview important themes of the work.
Diction
“Afro-Latina” is a bilingual poem that alternates between Spanish and English to represent Afro-Latino identity. This back-and-forth movement occurs both within and across lines. For example, the speaker memorializes her ancestors by describing how they “built a mundo” (“built a world”; Line 62). The combination of Spanish and English honors all parts of the speaker’s linguistic and cultural heritage. Spanish also appears with the traditional Dominican dishes such as “sancocho” (Line 72), a hearty stew made of rice, beans, and meat. There is then Spanish with the musical genres popular in the Dominican Republic, including “cumbia / merengue / y salsa” (Lines 92-94). The cuisine and the music are a testament to the creativity of Latinos and their blending of multiple heritages to create something new. The seamlessness of that movement from English to Spanish underscores the speaker’s comfort with doing so. It is also code-switching, which occurs when people at the intersection of multiple communities switch their language to match the context of one of those communities.
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By Elizabeth Acevedo
