Dialogues in Afrolatinidad Michele Reid Vazquez

Luana Reis, born and raised in Bahia, Brazil, is a poet, educator, and scholar. In this episode, she explores the importance of Portuguese in the African diaspora. As founder and president of the ADDverse Poetry Collective, she brings writers and audiences together across the hemisphere to share the power of poetry as a vehicle for engaging a range of expressions –particularly race and gender, freedom and refuge, and language and identity.

This episode features Dr. Jennifer A. Jones, a native of Chicago and a sociologist specializing in contemporary transnational Afro-Mexican studies. She discusses the way race is made in Latin America through her experiences in both Cuba and Mexico, as well as the broader impact of space, politics, and mobility on racial constructions throughout the U.S. She also highlights her recent book, The Browning of the New South, which explores blackness and anti-blackness in Mexico, the current migration of Afro-Mexicans to North Carolina, and their reformulations of race in the U.S. South.

In this episode of Dialogues in Afro-Latinidad Dr. Eddie Bonilla, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Latinx Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, chats with our host Dr. Michele Reid-Vazquez on solidarities within different Ethnic U.S activist movements. Dr. Bonilla speaks about his journey from southern California to academia in Pittsburgh, the evolving field of ethnic studies and what drew him towards this field, Marxism as a foundation for ethnic movements, and Anti-Blackness in the Latino community.

In the first episode of Dialogues in Afrolatinidad our host, Dr. Michele Reid-Vazquez, chats with Dr. Kia Lily Caldwell, a social-cultural Anthropologist and professor of African American and African Diaspora studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who speaks on her work creating scholarship to bring awareness to marginalized communities. Topics focus around the African Diaspora, the experiences of the Black population in Brazil, and producing scholarship on teaching about the African Diaspora that can be used in classroom settings.

In the first official trailer for Dialogues in Afro-Latinidad, you will get a sneak peak delivered by Israel Herndon, of the content that this season is giving you, our viewers. Join our host Dr. Michele Reid-Vazquez every week to hear from the scholars, artists, educators, community leaders, and writers who are shaping understandings of Afro-Latin identity. For more information on Dialogues in Afrolatinidad, visit the website at michelereidvazquez.com/podcast. Look out for and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and Google Podcasts