At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Pose star Indya Moore, who is of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent and uses the gender neutral pronouns they/them, talked about identifying as Afro-Taíno. So when Remezcla spoke to them at the Emmys red carpet on Sunday, September 22, we asked them to elaborate on what this term means to them and what stories they hope to see about this community.
“I think we definitely need to come to a place where the African diaspora needs to understand that the African diaspora is the African diaspora,” they said. “Black Latinos don’t necessarily have the same experience as Latinos who are not Black. I, personally, do not identify as Latino because Latino means Latin and Latin, it means white. And I’m not white, so I just call myself Afro-Taíno ’cause that’s what I am.”
Moore wants the African diaspora to come together, for everyone to understand that the “boat stops were harmful to everyone.” For Black people from Latin America or of Latin American descent, their blackness is sometimes questioned by others from the diaspora. It’s even more frustrating as Afro-Latinos are already erased from the Latino community.
“When I watch Telemundo, yes, I’m here for Spanish content,” they said. “But I just see only white Spanish people on Telemundo. I don’t really see Black Hispanic people because Black people are also Hispanic. I think Intersectional inclusivity is important because inclusivity affirms that you belong, and I think that’s something we should be pushing for in the media that we create, in all forms. For Afro-Taínos, for everybody. Everybody that’s marginalized.”
Red carpet reporting by Manuel Betancourt.