Afro-Latina Rising
"The Cardi B Phenomenon," and the impact thereof on my sex work.
“The question of how we “see” latinidad remains particularly vexed for scholars of visuality, particularly absent linguistic cues or national markers.
Latinidad, because it can include those marked legally or socially as Black, white, Asian, or Indigenous, and is very often a mixture of these elements, is always about reading beyond these readily produced categories of phenotypic difference and reading into the ways that localized racial logics emerge within the particularities of each encounter.
Forged through colonial conquest, slavery, miscegenation, and migration, visual or linguistic markers that signal latinidad might be perceived in aesthetic, corporeal, and linguistic performances, but legibility already depends on access to specific cultural codes.” - Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex by Juana Maria Rodriguez
This article was originally published by the author on PetitMort on 9 September 2024.
Imagine my shock in the winter of 2023 when a white British client—among a group of men I and other dancers were giving a group lapdance—growled at me from my position straddling his lap: “Are you Latina?” It was only in the past two years that I had begun to be recognized as Latinx by people from my own community; to be clocked by a white man in a strip club in Europe was flabbergasting. I was, however, a bit pleased. “Yes,” I smiled, and continued grinding on his lap before flipping myself over to twerk in front of one of his friends.
