American Negra: A Memoir by digital media executive and public speaker Natasha S. Alford, reflects her upbringing in Syracuse, New York as an Afro-Latina. The only child born to an African American father and a Puerto Rican mother, the book details various aspects of her life as a result of her multiethnic background which makes the book relatable and impactful for people who have been in her shoes before. Alford writes about the challenges of speaking her native tongue of Spanish to the relatives on her mother’s side, experimenting with her hair, colorism, acceptance, and more. As her memoir details, she grew up in the middle of two worlds and dealt with issues from both sides of her heritage.
Despite all the challenges of her childhood, Alford grew up to a successful career woman who speaks out about her experiences as an Afro-Latina and talks to other people about their life as an Afro-Latino/a/x. She now serves as a VP of Digital Content and senior correspondent for theGrio, and a CNN Political Analyst for attending Harvard University and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. TheGrio is a website and American television network that has entertainment, news, and video content that is often geared toward African Americans.
I admire the structure that Alford chose with her memoir, which makes the book feel like a time machine by having the chapters represent a different time in her life. She starts her book by writing about the relationship her parents had with each other before she was born. She provides background information about their families and her parents' upbringing before meeting each other. Starting the book about her parents was an important move because their story connects with hers, it started with them and continued into her life. She writes,
“the two worlds my parents came from blended into a hybrid that had always been perfectly normal to me,”
reflecting her African-American and Puerto Rican heritages. While the first three chapters focused on her younger years, the next three covered her teenage years, which then lead to her being a young adult in the later chapters. It felt like you grew up with her as you read deeper into her story.
When reading the chapters, I learned a lot about life as a multiethnic person and it made me have more respect for them. In chapter two called Mother Tongue, Alford wrote about how her mother didn’t teach her Spanish because she believed that her daughter would be more accepted by society if she only spoke English. “I felt my mother had sent me into the world unprepared, unarmed,” Alford writes. “For every bit of pure love she’d poured into me, she didn’t give me the one thing she was best positioned to give me: her language.”
It's not uncommon for Latinx parents to not to teach their native tongue to their children in hopes of them having a better life, through an assimilation to “the American Dream.” In the United States, speaking another language other than English automatically puts a target on your back because you are labeled as a foreigner or as an “intellectual inferiority” as Alford explains.
Even though the US narrative of democracy and freedom is that it embraces all cultures and languages, not speaking English cause trouble. You can speak multiple languages as long as English (preferably without an accent) is one of them. In this chapter, Alford described how she felt distant from her relatives on her mother’s side in Puerto Rico when they spoke Spanish around her and didn't know how to respond to them. She talked about the division that the Puerto Rican community faces for living in the States rather than the island. For Alford, growing up in America was very different from the lifestyle of her primas residing in Puerto Rico who grew up speaking Spanish. She writes, “Even Puerto Ricans who grow up here are not considered Boricua enough by some who live on the island, M’ija. We’re like gringos to them too, Mamí would say to console me.” Readers of many backgrounds can relate to this chapter because finding belonging in the world can be challenging when their either ignored, discriminated against, or dismissed from their own culture.
Besides talking about her childhood, Alford includes many historical facts and moments in her memoir that are educational and of critical importance to the themes of the memoir. She discusses the history of both her Latin American/ Caribbean and African roots. Her discussion of both her backgrounds shows how she embraces her roots and is proud of who she is because of the sacrifices and struggles that her ancestors went through for the future descendants like herself.
Identity is a critical theme throughout the memoir because it focuses on how Alford struggled with finding her place in the world. Becoming a member of theGrio website, for example, was a key moment for her as a place where she felt at ease and free to express her journalism skills by telling stories for Black communities. She also gave insight into the historical background on theGrio which in my opinion connects to who Natasha Alford is. She describes, “The name was a play off the West African term griot, which translates to storyteller.”
Alford is a storyteller, a griot. In this memoir, she shares her life story for people to read and learn from.
Natasha S. Alford did an amazing job bringing attention to the issues of Afro-Latinidad with Hispanic/Latinx communities that aren't talked about enough. The themes of identity, belonging, colorism, historical context, Afro-Latinidad, representation, and self-discovery are present in her memoir. As an African American woman and student of literature, I was able to relate to some of the concepts that she talked about in her book even though I am not Latina and in other ways, I learned a lot about the specifics of an Afro-Latina experience. Her book is a 10/10 and a high recommendation for all people to read.
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