[Vignette]

(JH, SH, C-U)

Editor's note: The following is re-printed here in order to permit a further exploration of the identity and race issue among Virgin Islanders of Puerto Rican heritage. The student might be encouraged to prospect for commonalities and differences in approaches to race and identity issues in the Pitterson interview and the Borrero article, and later to see how these Afro-Hispanics compare with Virgin Islands French people in these matters.

Black is not the opposite of Spanish. It took me all of my adult life to understand that my need to express myself as a Black woman was not in opposition to my being Puerto Rican. All of my life I heard the sad refrain, "She's Black but. . . " whenever I was spoke of in Spanish by other Spanish folks.

Whenever they said I was "pretty, smart, had good hair" it was fairly complimentary, but I could never understand why it was in opposition to being Black.

Racial prejudice among Puerto Ricans and other Spanish colonized people was always a nebulous thing. On the surface the society was clearly mixed, making it appear that racism was impossible since most families contained mixed racial types.

In Latino society, when one looks at who has the "good" jobs and looks at the barometer of society's values--television--one quickly observes that us "colored folks" are missing as equals.

That is not a coincidence. There is a clear historical pattern of racism in Spanish culture. While dancing salsa, and wearing the beads of the Yoruban Orisha religions brought by the slaves to the new Spanish colonies, many fair-skin Latinos are uncomfortable with the idea of a separate Africa-based personality within the culture.

They often say we are all one here, but cannot explain why the poorest people are Black in any Spanish country, why white actors in black face are used in Spanish soap operas from Latin America and why most executive-level positions are held by the "lightest" people.

The explanation lies deep within the essence of the Spanish slave tradition which was considered to be more benign than other European masters.

The Spanish often mixed with their slave women and produced the mulatto cultures we see today in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and throughout Latin America. Cultures in which the myths around "Blackness" are told in terms of the sexual prowess of the Black woman and the fearsome violent nature of Black men--"El Negro Bembu." Cultures in which Black people often observe among themselves wryly that, without the African element Latino culture would be like "rice without salt," bland and tasteless.

Against the backdrop of these dichotomies, I learned that I was a special kind of Spanish. I was a Black Spanish woman.

My father, Heriberto Borrero, an independentista and fiercely proud Puerto Rican, had the same hunger to know his roots that drove Arturo Schomburg, a Puerto Rican-born West Indian, to amass a huge library of the Black contributions to civilization. He taught me about the universality of the African personality. Not just our survival from slavery, but our contributions to all that mankind calls great.

My journey to myself was further strengthened by the Black Spanish women around me who taught