small axe 68 • July 2022 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-9901654 © Small Axe, Inc. Transnational Renderings of Negro/a/x/*: Re-centering Blackness in AfroLatinidad Omaris Z. Zamora Afro-Peruvian activist and poet Victoria Santa Cruz’s 1978 poem “¡Me gritaron negra!” encap- sulates what it is to have “¡Negra!” yelled at you as a fve- or seven-year-old child and to learn of your own Blackness through the lenses of others. 1 The poem describes her internalization of White supremacy and reminds us that to be negra is not something you choose but some- thing placed on you, policed, and rejected in you. In a diferent geographical context to that of Santa Cruz’s Peru, as a young girl growing up in Chicago’s Humboldt Park community of the 1990s, a mi también me gritaron “¡Negra!” (they yelled “¡Negra!” at me too). This transna- tional reality of how anti-Blackness moves from Latin America and the Caribbean has always been interesting to me, since many are quick to say that these sociopolitical geographies are completely diferent. 2 Yet as a Black Latina literary and cultural studies scholar who likes to think of race, gender, and sexuality in movement, I want to take on the task of refecting on the keyword negro from a transnational standpoint that considers how negro as a sociopolitical 1 See “Victoria Santa Cruz: Me gritaron negra,” Twchkn, 10 February 2009, youtu.be/GfQ-cJ6DTdE (accessed 5 November 2021). Negra means Black woman/girl. 2 For an expansive look at the movement of Black Latin American and Caribbean histories and ethnographies that challenge this framing, see Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Jennifer A. Jones, and Tianna S. Paschel, eds., Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Criti- cal Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2016). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/2 (68)/93/1621583/0260093.pdf?guestAccessKey=77ee72c9-44f2-4c44-88fc-c9d7511b065f by omaris.zamora@rutgers.edu on 08 August 2022