"Pero yo soy negro" : Reclaiming Blackness in Roberto Carlos Garcia's AfroDominican Poetry

Abstract: Roberto Garcia's poetry is broad in scope, but a constant thread that runs through it is the topic of Blackness and how it intersects with his Dominican and Latinx identities. As such, he joins the ranks of new and established AfroLatinx poets who are challenging, destabilizing, complicating, and redefining what we understand by Latinx poetry. Using selected poems, in this essay I examine how the speaker embodies what critic Lorgia García Peña refers to as rayano consciousness, although I push its original meaning grounded on the concept of dominicanidad to also include the marginal position that AfroLatinx people occupy vis-à-vis US Blackness. I show how Garcia's affirming his Blackness becomes a gesture directed both inward (Dominican culture/family) and outward (US society) that foregrounds hemispheric/global Blackness.