AfroLatinidad Writes Back

Vado reviews Regina Marie Mills’s Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades, published by the University of Texas Press. Mills’s Invisibility and Influence, part of broader Latinx studies critical engagements with the life writing genre, is not concerned with whether or not we should, as Latinx Studies scholars have debated and continue to debate, affirm or reject the project of Latinidad. Rather, Mills’s wide-ranging text attempts to map a literary history of AfroLatinidades that documents the richness and multiplicity of Black Latinx lives throughout and beyond the twentieth century. Writing over and against the myth of mestizaje that has long captivated the Latin/x American cultural, political, and social imagination, the writers Mills features in her study generatively turn to the life writing genre to resist and counter their invisibilization. Overall, Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades is an intellectually vibrant monograph and a significant contribution to the fields of Black studies, Caribbean studies, Latinx studies, ethnic studies, and studies of life writing.