Maddox's charge to the profession has taken on increased urgency since the death of George Floyd in May of 2020. The AATSP as an organization has provided much-needed support for its members through "Inclusivity Resources" in Spanish and Portuguese on the website and virtual professional development seminars (e.g, a 2021 webinar led by Maddox on teaching about Afro-descendant communities and their cultures in the Spanish classroom). The demand by educators for more guidance was the impetus for the AATSP's guaranteed session for MLA 2022, "Afrodescendencia/Afro-descendência in Spanish and Portuguese Programs: Issues and Approaches." The session will highlight broad curricular concerns such as centering Afro-descendance in programs, reconceptualizing identity and discussing issues of equity in culture classes, and digital humanities and the African diaspora.
The four presentations for this proposed nonguaranteed session, "Afrodescendencia/Afro-descendência in Spanish and Portuguese Programs: Texts and Contexts" will complement the guaranteed session by making visible the expertise and experience of professors who already teach the literature and culture of Afro-descendant communities in Latin America and Spain as well as of U.S. Afro-Latinx persons. The presentations, limited to 10-12 minutes each, will provide concrete models and sample texts for attendees to consider in developing their own language, literature, and culture courses to be taught in Spanish or Portuguese. Fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion will follow, and we anticipate a lively exchange of ideas among those present.
Anne Fountain, the first presenter, will analyze texts by Cuban José Martí that contain powerful condemnations of the enslavement of Africans in Cuba as well as reactions to the lynching of a Black man in the U.S. in the late 1800s. She will connect these texts with the contemporary Cuban poet Nancy Morejón's "Príncipe negro para George Floyd" (2020) and other poems that denounce racism toward Afrodescendants in Cuba and the United States. Fountain will provide a framework for using these texts from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries to highlight questions of racial injustice in a comparative context in Spanish classes.
In the second presentation, Jacqueline Mitchell and Paula Cronovich will discuss their development of a general education course taught in Spanish that focuses on Black people in Mexico and along the U.S./Mexico border, including mixed race migrants. The course is grounded in cutting-edge research in anti-racist pedagogies and highlights questions of identity, representation, and equity. They will share course components including texts, assignments, rubrics for assessment, and data collection.
Fély Catan will present an upper-division course on Afrolatinidades whose signature component is a community-based learning project in which students conduct a series of interviews of Afro-descendant individuals from Costa Rica or Ecuador over the course of the semester and analyze the interview data through reports and presentations. Catan explains that the "multilayered project aims primarily to counteract the way in which Black communities have constantly been denationalized in Latin American countries" as well as make visible their crucial contributions to said societies.
The final presentation, by Carmen Granda, focuses on the least studied Afro-descendant communities: those in Spain. She focuses on the 2018 autobiography Ser mujer negra en España, written by Desirée Bela-Lobedde, an Spanish Afrofeminist of Equatorial Guinean heritage, as a key text in bringing the African diaspora in Spain into anti-racist curricular initiatives.
The four presentations as a group exemplify some of the most innovative teaching strategies in our field today at the same time that they respond to both burning local and national issues and the UNESCO's "International Decade for People of African Descent" (2015-2024).