Center for Humanistic Inquiry CHI Salon: Post-Soul Latinidad - Black Nationalism in Mama’s Girl and Bird of Paradise

Afro-Latina coming of age memoirs written after the advent of Black Arts Movement often include a significant admixture of African American history, culture, and political ideology. This is true of the memoirs Mama’s Girl (1996) by Veronica Chambers and Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina (2013) by Raquel Cepeda. Chambers and Cepeda were raised in New York City in the wake of the Black Power movement. As they came of age, Chambers and Cepeada were attracted to the antipodes of Black nationalism. Chambers repeatedly invokes the civil rights movement’s integrationist agenda in Mama’s Girl, and she does so in a way that valorizes Talented Tenth elitism and neoliberal luck egalitarianism. In contrast, Cepeda was aligned in spirit, if not in practice, with the cultural separatist pole of Black nationalism. She was attracted to the hip-hop and theosophy of the Five Percent Nation, a splinter sect of the Nation of Islam. In a forthcoming article in the journal Latino Studies, CHI Fellow Trent Masiki argues that the ways in which the antipodes of Black nationalism mediate Latinidad in Mama’ Girl and Bird of Paradise reveal the significance of the African American presence in Latina autobiography and highlight the commensurability between Latino and African American studies. He presents his findings in this salon.