NEGRIТО

“Ven aqui, mi negrito,” my mom would say to me. I felt so loved and seen in those moments. 

I must have been 3 or 4 years old when she would call me to her. This was before school started and before the outside world became a reality. I didn’t know what “negrito” meant back then. 

But I knew she was calling me, and I ran to her with joy.
I struggle with this memory now. It’s not my mom’s love that I question for calling me her “little Black baby.” It’s my racial identification, which evolved in full force once I started school. I became a Black boy in the eyes of the world, but, over time, I chose to become a Black man. My language here is intentional, because I own my racial identity; it does not own me.

Recently, I explained my choice to be a Black man in contradistinction to being a Latino man. I am Latino – one hundred percent. No one in my immediate family was born in the United States, nor were they English-speaking people. My father gave me my brown skin, but he left before I met him. What I know about him is that he was bom in Costa Rica or Panama and that he earned a living singing salsa music. My mom and grandma, two women who pass for white are both from Honduras, relocating to the US in the late 1960s. Spanish was my first language, salsa was my first music, and Honduras is my homeland.

Still, I identify as a Black man, not Latino. This fact confuses some of my colleagues. One person from India couldn’t understand how I could be both Black and Latino at the same time. For him, these are mutually exclusive racial categories Another person from the Dominican Republic asserted that I am both. She told me I was Afro-Latino and dared to school me on the
difference between race and ethnicity. She grew up differently than I did, with a family who had dark skin like hers. They both, nevertheless, missed my point: I am Black by choice.

It was a constrained choice, I admit. I was labeled as Black in public, grouped with other people who had my skin color. But I’m not scared to speak up, and I have plenty of data to prove my Latinidad. Had I wanted people to know that I was from Honduras, believe me, they would know. But I never wanted to say that I was NOT Black in order to lift up a Honduran heritage in which I was Black, too.

And despite all the times people in my communities called me the N-word, or stereotyped me as a criminal, or assumed my intellectual inferiority, I never forgot how much love I received from my Black people here in the US, where I was bom. I have so much appreciation for the US Black community that I made my first career studying Black history. I taught college
classes about slavery, feel me!
I thank my Honduran family for that. Among them were prejudicial aunts and cousins, who isolated me as “el negro” – at family gathering. But, more importantly, one of my Honduran family members was my mother, who welcomed her “negrito” into her arms, smiling, hugging, and caring for me like I was her joy. I chose to be that little Black boy the rest of my life.