But not all is lost. If we take a closer look at contemporary cultural production, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight is a very Black Latinx story that attends to the everyday relationship of two queer Black men in a low-income Afro-Cuban Miami neighborhood. Winning a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture Drama, Moonlight has a special place in Black, queer, and Latinx cinema that goes far beyond representation: in the film, two differently Black men grapple with the shortcomings of hyper-masculinity and find the softness that they’ve been denied while in the water and within each other. Importantly, Mahershala Ali, a Black American actor, plays the Afro-Cuban lead role of Juan, while the younger version of the Black American lead Kevin is played by an Afro-Dominican actor, Jharrel Jerome. This teaches viewers that Blackness and Latinidad are not always separate from one another, but they can be — and many times are — interchangeable. The interchangeability in Moonlight is ethical, and viewers are able to see both the distinction and solidarity between Black Americans and Black Latinxs.
One of the reasons why Moonlight isn’t immediately identifiable as an Afro-Latinx narrative is explained in the film when Juan tells Little (Kevin), “Lotta Black folks in Cuba but you wouldn’t know it from being here.” In a brilliant analysis, journalist Rebbeca Bodenheimer writes: “Juan is referring to the fact that black Cubans tend to be invisible in Miami, and in the United States in general, their voices and experiences drowned out by the very vocal and largely white, anti-communist exile community.” Black Cubans are invisibilized by White anti-communist Cubans whose negative opinions about Cuba make them legible as desirable migrants who are thankful to the U.S. while Black Cubans are seen as ungrateful for pointing out racial disparities between White Cuban exiles and Black Cuban exiles. This is all part of the story Moonlight tells. Audiences must listen and watch carefully to understand the film’s racial, ethnic, and nationality-specific commentary. In Moonlight, Black Latinidad is in our faces, in the quiet, in the loudness, and in all the glorious queerness.
Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Steven Canals’ Pose is a three-season FX show that introduced Black American, Afro-Latin American, and Afro-Antillean experiences to living rooms across the United States. This may arguably be one of the most diverse Latinx representations on screen, which includes three Afro-Latinx leads: Puerto Rican-African American Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Haitian-Puerto Rican-Dominican American Indya Moore, and Dominican American Angel Bismark Curiel. While “Afro-Latinidad” and “Latinx” are not words or phrases used in Pose, the television show takes viewers into the intimate lives of Afro-Latinx New York City amidst the HIV and AIDS crisis. In the show, we see each character come into their gender and sexual identities while relating to one another as differently Latinx, differently Black, differently trans, and differently queer.