Monday, May 09, 2005

shaggy flores

Here is the official website of spoken word artist Shaggy Flores. The site is called Nuyorican Negritude. And his website describes him by saying:
Jaime Flores is better known as Shaggy the Modern Day Griot, Nuyorican, Massarican, Bilingual, Spanglish Speaking, AfroTaino, Revolutionary, Santero Poet from the Dark Souls Collective.


I think he's a good counter-example which helps reveal some of the limitations of the earlier article on Black Hispanics. If you look at his website, he is obviously light-skinned (although darker than Michael Jackson...lol) at the same time he is obviously joyfully identifying with African component of his Puerto Rican heritage.

Perhaps in certain contexts, it is more useful to think of Latinos in terms of Indo-Hispanics (somewhere along a continuum between white and Indian) or Afro-Hispanics (somewhere along a continuum between white and African). And then we should realize that culture is often very often not reflected by phenotype (how people look).

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