Research and Resources

Afro-Indigenous Latinidad

Black Spanish Dialect Features

Coming Soon!

Recommended Books

Andrews, G. R. (2016). Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600–2000. Harvard University Press.

Of the almost 11 million Africans who came to the Americas between 1500 and 1870, two-thirds came to Spanish America and Brazil. Over four centuries, Africans and their descendants—both free and enslaved—participated in the political, social, and cultural movements that indelibly shaped their countries’ colonial and post-independence pasts. Yet until very recently Afro-Latin Americans were conspicuously excluded from narratives of their hemisphere’s history. George Reid Andrews seeks to redress this damaging omission by making visible the past and present lives and labors of black Latin Americans in their New World home. He cogently reconstructs the Afro-Latin heritage from the paper trail of slavery and freedom, from the testimonies of individual black men and women, from the writings of visiting African-Americans, and from the efforts of activists and scholars of the twentieth century to bring the Afro-Latin heritage fully into public view. While most Latin American countries have acknowledged the legacy of slavery, the story still told throughout the region is one of “racial democracy”—the supposedly successful integration and acceptance of African descendants into society. From the 1970s to today, black civil rights movements have challenged that narrative and demanded that its promises of racial equality be made real. They have also called for fuller acknowledgment of Afro-Latin Americans’ centrality in their countries’ national histories. Afro-Latin America brings that story up to the present, examining debates currently taking place throughout the region on how best to achieve genuine racial equality.

Anya, U. (2018). Racialized identities in Second language learning speaking blackness in Brazil. Routledge.

Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil provides a critical overview and original sociolinguistic analysis of the African American experience in second language learning. More broadly, this book introduces the idea of second language learning as “transformative socialization”: how learners, instructors, and their communities shape new communicative selves as they collaboratively construct and negotiate race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and social class identities. Uju Anya’s study follows African American college students learning Portuguese in Afro-Brazilian communities, and their journeys in learning to do and speak blackness in Brazil. Video-recorded interactions, student journals, interviews, and writing assignments show how multiple intersecting identities are enacted and challenged in second language learning. Thematic, critical, and conversation analyses describe ways black Americans learn to speak their material, ideological, and symbolic selves in Portuguese and how linguistic action reproduces or resists power and inequity. The book addresses key questions on how learners can authentically and effectively participate in classrooms and target language communities to show that black students’ racialized identities and investments in these communities greatly influence their success in second language learning and how successful others perceive them to be.

Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. Routledge.

Bringing together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic supremacy, this book provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts. By highlighting the counterstories of Black students, Baker-Bell demonstrates how traditional approaches to language education do not account for the emotional harm, internalized linguistic racism, or consequences these approaches have on Black students’ sense of self and identity. – Perlego synopsis

De la Fuente, A., & Andrews, G. R. (2018). Afro-Latin American studies: an introduction. Cambridge University Press.

With contributions from nearly two dozen historians, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnomusicologists and literary scholars, largely based in the United States but shaped by scholars from Latin America, the thick volume brilliantly, if densely, offers a synthesis of much of the research in the humanities and social sciences from the past century on Africans and their descendants in Latin America and the ways in which they have been imagined. The book grows out of the most recent efforts to institutionalize Afro-Latin American Studies as a field of its own.

Guridy, F. A. (2010). Forging diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a world of empire and Jim Crow. University of North Carolina Press.

Cuba’s geographic proximity to the United States and its centrality to U.S. imperial designs following the War of 1898 led to the creation of a unique relationship between Afro-descended populations in the two countries. In Forging Diaspora, Frank Andre Guridy shows that the cross-national relationships nurtured by Afro-Cubans and black Americans helped to shape the political strategies of both groups as they attempted to overcome a shared history of oppression and enslavement. Drawing on archival sources in both countries, Guridy traces four encounters between Afro-Cubans and African Americans. These hidden histories of cultural interaction–of Cuban students attending Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, the rise of Garveyism, the Havana-Harlem cultural connection during the Harlem Renaissance and Afro-Cubanism movement, and the creation of black travel networks during the Good Neighbor and early Cold War eras–illustrate the significance of cross-national linkages to the ways both Afro-descended populations negotiated the entangled processes of U.S. imperialism and racial discrimination. As a result of these relationships, argues Guridy, Afro-descended peoples in Cuba and the United States came to identify themselves as part of a transcultural African diaspora.

Hudley, A. H. C., & Mallinson, C. (2013). We do language: English variation in the secondary English classroom. Teachers College Press.

“In We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary Classroom, [the authors] have penned a volume that lays out in an accessible, pragmatic, and adaptable way the thorny problem space that secondary English/language arts professionals face as they do their jobs, with intentionality and dedication, in classrooms that are multiply defined—by socio-economic status, culture, gender, sexuality, ideology, and other vectors of the human condition and experience. Drawing together a richly articulated and manageable array of theoretical principles and pedagogical frameworks about language, literacy, and culture, Charity Hudley and Mallinson connect these principles and frameworks to action. We Do Language is grounded, thereby, in specific examples of the work that teachers and students are actually doing, exemplifying, as their title suggests, that the primary goal of their research has been to investigate what success looks like when educators and students actually ‘do language.’” —From the Foreword by Jacqueline Jones Royster, Ivan Allen Chair in Liberal Arts and Technology and Dean, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology

Lokken, P., Lohse, R., Offen, K. H., & Gómez, R. C. (2010). Blacks and blackness in Central America: Between race and place. Duke University Press.

Many of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas came to Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and people of African descent constituted the majority of nonindigenous populations in the region long thereafter. Yet in the development of national identities and historical consciousness, Central American nations have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African ancestry and social and political involvement in favor of Spanish and Indian heritage and contributions. In addition, a powerful sense of place and belonging has led many peoples of African descent in Central America to identify themselves as something other than African American, reinforcing the tendency of local and foreign scholars to see Central America as peripheral to the African diaspora in the Americas. The essays in this collection begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region’s history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed-race majorities as “Indo-Hispanic,” or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of the first region of the Americas in which African Americans not only gained the right to vote but repeatedly held high office, including the presidency, following independence from Spain in 1821.

Schwartz, A. (2023). Spanish so white: Conversations on the inconvenient racism of a ‘foreign’ language education. Multilingual Matters.

Explicit discussions of race and racial identity have traditionally been omitted from Spanish language education in the US – especially in curricula designed for imagined ‘native’ speakers of English. Consequences of this de-racialization of Spanish language learning include the perpetuation of institutional racisms and missed opportunities to build productive conversations about the ways race and power are enacted through language. Spanish So White is written specifically for secondary and post-secondary teachers who identify as White and second language learners of Spanish. It supports the development of language education that centers a racially dynamic Spanish-speaking world and challenges interpersonal and institutional forms of racism. Author Adam Schwartz shares stories of his own socialization into Whiteness and Spanish-English bilingualism. He invites readers into the work of reconciling privileges they too may share as White Spanish-language learners and teachers.

Restall, M. (Ed.). (2005). Beyond black and red: African-native relations in Colonial Latin America. UNM Press.

Beyond Black and Redis the first book to deal primarily and specifically with relations between Africans and native peoples in colonial Latin America. Matthew Restall has collected nine essays that represent contributions to the larger fields of colonial Latin American history, African diaspora studies, and ethnohistory. Among the subjects addressed are marriage and miscegenation, identity and nomenclature, cultural exchanges, labor, and cooperation in resisting colonialism versus collaboration. The authors examine core areas such as Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Brazil, and peripheral ones such as Florida, Colombia, and the Orinoco basin. The contributors find that relations between black and native peoples were sometimes harmonious, sometimes hostile, depending on local dynamics and individual agendas. Native and black soldiers fought sometimes as comrades, sometimes as adversaries, and couples in mixed marriages might identify as Indian or as black depending on where the advantage lay in a given society.

Telles, E. (2014). Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, race, and color in Latin America. UNC Press Books.

Pigmentocracies–the fruit of the multiyear Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA)–is a richly revealing analysis of contemporary attitudes toward ethnicity and race in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, four of Latin America’s most populous nations. Based on extensive, original sociological and anthropological data generated by PERLA, this landmark study analyzes ethnoracial classification, inequality, and discrimination, as well as public opinion about Afro-descended and indigenous social movements and policies that foster greater social inclusiveness, all set within an ethnoracial history of each country. A once-in-a-generation examination of contemporary ethnicity, this book promises to contribute in significant ways to policymaking and public opinion in Latin America. Edward Telles, PERLA’s principal investigator, explains that profound historical and political forces, including multiculturalism, have helped to shape the formation of ethnic identities and the nature of social relations within and across nations. One of Pigmentocracies’s many important conclusions is that unequal social and economic status is at least as much a function of skin color as of ethnoracial identification. Investigators also found high rates of discrimination by color and ethnicity widely reported by both targets and witnesses. Still, substantial support across countries was found for multicultural-affirmative policies–a notable result given that in much of modern Latin America race and ethnicity have been downplayed or ignored as key factors despite their importance for earlier nation-building.

Vega, M. M., Alba, M., & Modestin, Y. (Eds.). (2012). Women warriors of the Afro-Latina diaspora. Arte Público Press.

A fascinating look at the legacy of more than 400 years of African enslavement in the Americas, this collection of personal stories is a must-read for anyone interested in the African diaspora and issues of inequality and racism. The authors included are from all over Latin America—Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Puerto Rico and Venezuela—and they write about the African diaspora and issues such as colonialism, oppression and disenfranchisement.

Online Resources

The Black Syllabus: https://www.blacksyllabus.com/

This is a list of academic resources curated by a self proclaimed Black nerd regarding Black life across the Americas.

AfroLatino Travel: https://www.instagram.com/afrolatinotravel/?hl=en

This is an Instagram page the encourages and organizes trips to Latin America. It was started by independent scholar Dash Harris and Dr. Javier Wallace. The page also has videos and other information about Black Latin America.

Blog about studying abroad while Black: https://www.goabroad.com/articles/study-abroad/black-students-travel-guide

This is a blog about the realities of traveling while Black in countries outside the United States. It also provides resources to find alternative study abroad options for Black students.

Black in Latin America: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/black-in-latin-america/

This website hosts the full docuseries produced by PBS following Dr. Henry Louis Gates in his exploration of Blackness in six Latin American countries. Episodes can be used individually or the site can be offered as a resource for students to pursue individual research projects.

Black Latinas Know Collective: https://www.blacklatinasknow.org/

This website is the homepage for a collective of Black Latina scholars, producers of innovative and important intellectual contributions to the intersectional study of race within Latinidad and Blackness. The website offers commentary of Black Latina experiences through the lens of Black Feminism. It also features events and a blog with a monthly column acknowledging the varying experiences of being Black and Latina across the diaspora.

La Segundaria: https://lasecundaria.org/incorporate-afro-latino-culture-in-the-spanish-classroom/

This is a teaching resource with lots of free activities and guides if you subscribe. The author is a Black woman from South Carolina who put this blog and website together to help Spanish teachers incorporate Black culture into their teaching.

Radio Caña Negra: https://linktr.ee/radiocananegra

This is a variety of resources, social media pages, podcasts, radio shows, and booking availability for the independent scholar Dash Harris, who is an Afro-Panamanian scholar of Black histories in the Americas.

Understanding Afro-Puerto Rican and other Afro-Latin@ Culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTf7sjwd9vY

A scholarly panel with Dr. Miriam Jiminez and Dr. Juan Flores, the authors of the Afro-Latin@ reader. They speak about the development of Afro-Latino consciousness in the 60s and 70s in the United States.

Negro- Docuseries: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cO-AOpblV1dfy1v98vJGDVceDFQ_T10P/view

This is a 2 hour docuseries with the goal of combatting erasures in the Americas concerning Blackness and Black populations

*Black Beyond America- Afro-Latino: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6bC2sgHgg

This is a short video exploring the experience of Afro-Latinidad for Afro-Latinx United Statesians.

Los Negros de México – Documental “Costa Chica”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB7CBevyfkk

This is a hour long documentary in Spanish exploring the experience of being Black in Mexico. It feature Afro-Mexican music and shows Afro-Mexican festivals.

Children's Books

AfroKidz by Gibran Freilla Williams and Janvieve Williams Comrie

Grandma’s Gift by Eric Velasquez

Bad Hair Does Not Exist! by Sulma Arzu Brown

If Dominican Were A Color by Sili Recio

Niñas Bellas by Dania Peguero

A is for Activist by Innosanto Nagara

My Name is Celia/Me llamo Celia: The Life of Celia Cruz/la vida de Celia Cruz by Monica Brown & Rafael Lopez

Granny Jus Come by Ana Sisnett

I Know I Can! By Veronica N. Chapman, Paige Davis, Jonathan Scott Chapman

My Hair Comes With Me by Sulma Arzu-Brown, Mr. Miguel Rodriguez, Mrs. Isidra Sabio

Furqan’s First Flat Top by Robert C. Liu-Trujillo

Resources on Task-Based Language Teaching

East, M. (2021). Foundational principles of task-based language teaching. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

This book introduces readers to the concept of task-based language teaching (TBLT), a learner-centred and experiential approach to language teaching and learning. Based on the premise that language learners can enhance their second language acquisition (SLA) through engagement in communicative tasks that compel them to use language for themselves, TBLT stands in contrast to more traditional approaches. Accessible and comprehensive, this book provides a foundational overview of the principles and practice of TBLT and demystifies what TBLT looks like in the classroom.

Complete with questions for reflection, pedagogical extensions for application in real classrooms and further reading suggestions in every chapter, this valuable and informative text is vital for anyone interested in TBLT, whether as students, researchers or teachers.

Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based language learning and teaching. Oxford University Press.

This book explores the relationship between research, teaching, and tasks, and seeks to clarify the issues raised by recent work in this field. The book shows how research and task-based teaching can mutually inform each other and illuminate the areas of task-based course design, methodology, and assessment. The author brings an accessible style and broad scope to an area of contemporary importance to both SLA and language pedagogy.

Long, M. H. (2014). Second language acquisition and task-based language teaching. Wiley-Blackwell.

This book offers an in-depth explanation of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and the methods necessary to implement it in the language classroom successfully. Combines a survey of theory and research in instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) with insights from language teaching and the philosophy of education. Details best practice for TBLT programs, including discussion of learner needs and means analysis; syllabus design; materials writing; choice of methodological principles and pedagogic procedures; criterion-referenced, task-based performance assessment; and program evaluation. Written by an esteemed scholar of second language acquisition with over 30 years of research and classroom experience. Considers diffusion of innovation in education and the potential impact of TBLT on foreign and second language learning

Long, M. H. (2005). Second language needs analysis. Cambridge University Press.

The studies in this volume explore needs analysis in the public, vocational and academic sectors, in contexts ranging from service encounters in coffee shops to foreign language needs assessment in the U.S. military. In each chapter, the authors explicitly discuss the methodology they employed, and in some cases also offer research findings on that methodology. Several studies are task-based. Contributions include work on English and other languages in both second and foreign language settings, as well as a comprehensive overview of methodological issues in needs analysis by the editor.

Samuda, V., den, B. K. van, & Bygate, M. (2018). Tblt as a researched pedagogy. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Bringing together experienced classroom researchers and teacher educators from different countries where tasks are playing an influential role in language education, this collected volume critically explores how TBLT research can engage with pedagogy, and how TBLT pedagogy can engage with research. A defining part of the TBLT project has always been a dual concern – both with the nature and use of tasks in language teaching, and with empirical research to guide and support classroom practitioners, the two concerns suggesting a central and reciprocal relationship between research and pedagogy. However, this relationship has at times been unbalanced, and its centrality has sometimes gone by default, problems which this volume aims to address. The introduction proposes criteria to improve the congruence between the research base of TBLT and the concerns and terms of reference of classroom practitioners. Using a range of methodologies, the individual chapters illustrate and explore different aspects of this theme. The book will be of interest to all those wishing to further their understanding of – and/or investigate – the use of TBLT in educational contexts.

East, M. (2021). Foundational principles of task-based language teaching. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Tasks in Second Language Learning aims to re-centre discussion of the ways in which language learning tasks can help offer a holistic approach to language learning, and to explore the research implications. It relates the broad educational and social science rationale for the use of tasks to the principles and practices of their classroom use. The authors provide a balanced review of research as a basis for exploring a broader research agenda. Throughout, the book offers telling illustration of the contributions of a range of specialists in research, teaching methodology and materials development, and of the authors’ own argument.

Wills, D., & Wills, J. (2007). Doing task-based teaching. University Press.

Task-based teaching has created enormous interest among teachers in recent years. But how does the idea of designing tasks (e.g. discussions, problems, games) that encourage learners to use real language work in practice? This book explains the basic principles behind task-based learning and teaching and gives practical examples of how to make it work in different teaching situations.

TBLT Teacher-Training Materials

Coming soon.