Events › An Evening with Rosa Clemente--Can't Stop Our Blackness: Black Latinx Narratives & Resisting Erasure

"To assert who I am is the most liberating and revolutionary thing I can ever do."

Rosa Clemente

Can’t Stop Our Blackness: Black Latinx Narratives and Resisting Erasure: 

More than 90% of enslaved Africans landed in what is today known as Latin America and the Caribbean via the Trans Atlantic Slave trade. The presence of our ancestors is still felt and maintained throughout these regions, including in the United States. Black Latinx/African descendants and people(s) are part of the broader Black community’s cultural and historical landscape in the United States. Contemporary migration patterns of Afro-descended people throughout the Americas have created complex and diverse definitions of Blackness. Through the lens of hip-hop, social justice and Black and Brown freedom struggles, this lecture discusses these diverse and complex experiences in an effort to illuminate intersections and findings about the experiences of people throughout the African Diaspora. Rosa engages with various topics and geographic locations to center Black Latinx and African descendant voices in service of providing historical context and contemporary realities about race, representation, and power within the U.S. Rosa, a voice of the hip-hop generation, draws from 30 years of movement building, third-party electoral politics, and independent journalism, weaving in her personal narrative with the histories and experiences of ancestors, elders, contemporaries, peers, and future generations.


Rosa Clemente is one of her generation’s leading scholars on the issues of Afro/Black-Latina/Latino/Latinx identity.  Her powerful first-person essays on Afro-Latinx identity, particularly her article "Who is Black?" is read in classrooms across the country and has been translated into four different languages.

Clemente’s academic work centers national liberation struggles inside the U.S. with a specific focus on
the Young Lords Party, the Black Panther Party, Black and brown liberation movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s as well as the effects of COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) on such movements.

A brief Q&A will follow the discussion.    

Read Rosa Clemente's article: "Who Is Black?"

About Rosa Clemente

Rosa Alicia Clemente is an award-winning organizer, speaker, political commentator, producer, independent journalist, scholar-activist and former vice presidential candidate. The Bronx-born Black-Puerto Rican is frequently sought out for her insight and commentary on Afro-Latinx identity, Black and Latinx liberation movements, police violence, colonialism in Puerto Rico, hip-hop feminism, third-party politics and more.

In 2008, Clemente made herstory when she became the first Afro-Latina to run for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket. She and her running mate, Cynthia McKinney, are to this date the only women of color ticket in U.S. presidential history.

Since then, Clemente has continued to be a powerhouse. She is the creator of Know Thy Self Productions, under which she has organized multiple national tours; PR on the Map,  an independent, unapologetic, Afro-Latinx-centered media collective founded in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria; and the Black Diasporic Organizing Project, a nonprofit dedicated to combating anti-Blackness within the wider Latinx community.

Recently, she was also associate producer on the 2021 Oscar-winning biographical drama film Judas and the Black Messiah. She is currently completing her PhD at the W.E.B. DuBois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Learn more about Rosa Clemente