{"id":5205,"date":"2026-03-03T18:25:55","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T19:25:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/?p=5205"},"modified":"2026-03-05T14:57:46","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T14:57:46","slug":"black-latine-history-is-missing-from-schools-these-creators-are-teaching-it-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/03\/black-latine-history-is-missing-from-schools-these-creators-are-teaching-it-online\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Latine History Is Missing from Schools. These Creators Are Teaching It Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

Growing up, Eileen Ivette<\/a> spent her summers flying to Buenaventura, Valle del Cauca, a Pacific coastal seaport city in Colombia where her family is from. Like her, much of the town is Afro-Colombian, and her t\u00edo, the \u201cfamily historian,\u201d filled the months between school semesters with lessons about the community \u2014 their history, culture, and what it meant to be Black in Colombia. It was an education she wasn\u2019t receiving back in her classroom in Houston, Texas.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery summer, I\u2019d get history lessons from my uncle \u2014 how we traced our roots back to Africa, how we are Black in Colombia and Black everywhere else, how our Blackness connects us to people all over the world,\u201d Eileen Ivette, 30, fondly tells Refinery29 Somos of those summer lessons from her youth.<\/p>\n

Deeply connected to her history and identity, it was always confusing to return home to Texas and find herself constantly explaining her Colombianness to people who couldn\u2019t reconcile that she was both Black and Latina<\/a>. She understood the differences between race, ethnicity, nationality, and language \u2014 and the many ways they can converge \u2014 so she couldn\u2019t understand why the intersections she inhabited felt incomprehensible to both Latines and non-Latines alike.<\/p>\n

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\u201cEvery summer, I\u2019d get history lessons from my uncle \u2014 how we traced our roots back to Africa, how we are Black in Colombia and Black everywhere else, how our Blackness connects us to people all over the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eileen Ivette<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

After years of explaining herself, she realized part of the problem was representation<\/a>. Until people met her, they had rarely encountered someone like her \u2014 a failure, she knew, that fell on the education, media, and cultural systems meant to reflect society back to itself.<\/p>\n

After high school, Eileen Ivette moved to Washington, D.C., to study journalism at Howard University<\/a>, determined to carry on her uncle\u2019s tradition of oral history and storytelling by sharing narratives of the African diaspora across Latin America and the Caribbean. She wanted to expand representation and, just as importantly, to interrogate the histories of mestizaje and anti-Blackness<\/a> that created and sustain the erasure of Black Latine communities<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But soon, she confronted the ways the news media also actively removes stories like hers. Her pitches on Afro-Latine culture, identity, and history were routinely rejected. On the rare occasions they were accepted, editors rewrote them so heavily that the heart of the story, the voices of her sources, and her own perspective were stripped away. To justify the whitewashed revisions, editors told her she was \u201ctoo close to the story,\u201d showing her, once again, that the systems meant to reflect society often silence the very people they cover.<\/p>\n

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\u201cLike many aggrieved journalists, artists, and historians, she took to social media to cover and report on the stories she cared about, unfiltered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raquel reichard<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

So like many aggrieved journalists, artists, and historians, she took to social media to cover and report on the stories she cared about, unfiltered. In September 2022, she began posting one video a week about Black Latin American history,<\/a> like the history of Juan Jos\u00e9 Nieto Gil, a former Colombian president whose Blackness was removed from history; or how non-white people in Latin America could buy \u201cwhiteness\u201d in the 18th and 19th centuries through a Gracias al Sacar certificate; or how enslaved Black women in Colombia would communicate and plan escapes through braids. \u201cI went from zero followers to 30,000 at the end of four weeks,\u201d says the video producer, travel influencer, and creator of Black Latin History<\/a>, an award-winning travel series exploring the African diaspora\u2019s cultural, historical, and social impact throughout Latin America.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like her audience of now tens of thousands, people all over are increasingly turning to social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to learn about the Black Latine history often missing from classrooms, community centers, entertainment, and media. Groups like Afro Feminas<\/a> and Afro Colectiva<\/a> each have hundreds of thousands of followers who discover and share the histories of Black women, specifically, across the Americas in Spanish. For those in the diaspora who prefer content in English, creators across academic disciplines and industries are also building spaces to center these stories, translating and adapting histories to reach broader audiences while preserving their cultural nuance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We spoke with some historians, documentarians, and creators who are shaping how Black Latine history is shared online.<\/p>\n

Dash Harris, Panamanian<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/figure>\n

Dash Harris is a Peabody\u2011award\u2011winning multimedia journalist, filmmaker, and public historian whose decade\u2011long docuseries NEGRO<\/em><\/a> explores Afro\u2011diasporic identity, colonization, and the racial hierarchies shaping Latine experiences across the Americas. She is also the co\u2011founder of AfroLatinx Travel<\/a>, a travel and community\u2011building platform led by Black Latin American locals that connects members of the African diaspora to historical and cultural spaces often overlooked by mainstream tourism.<\/p>\n

When did you first begin actively seeking out Black Latine history and education for yourself?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In high school, I saw a passage in one of my social studies textbooks that had a photo of three girls on a bench: one white, one Indigenous, and one Afrodescendant, and the caption made reference to how all were Latin American. I thought, well I am going to find out more about that Black girl in that photo. <\/em>And really I was speaking to myself.<\/p>\n

Why do you think Black Latine history has been erased, minimized, or hidden for so long?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because we live in an anti-Black world and the most loyal adherents to this ethos are Latin Americans.<\/p>\n

What areas of Black Latine\/Latin American history do you focus on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My work centers the lives of Black women \u2014 particularly dark-skinned Black women who have been structurally confined to permanent servile and extractive classes, yet have been foundational to Latin America\u2019s cultural, social, and political production. These women have shaped collective movement-building, political mobilization, knowledge production, and organizing across the Americas, even as their lives and labor are routinely invisibilized, invalidated, and left untended within dominant historical narratives. I am interested in tracing both their material conditions and their intellectual, cultural, and spiritual contributions, insisting on their centrality rather than their marginality.<\/p>\n

Why is it important to you to share this history in public, accessible ways rather than keeping it confined to academic spaces?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Academic knowledge is largely inaccessible to anyone outside the academy. The only reason I myself have sustained access to academic research, essays, and archival materials is because of generous relationships \u2014 friends and colleagues who share what is otherwise locked behind institutional paywalls. I take that access seriously and redistribute it. More importantly, the academy is not the sole or even primary site of knowledge production. Much of what becomes \u201cscholarship\u201d originates in fieldwork that documents the lived experiences of people. These \u201cstudies\u201d interviewed someone\u2019s grandmother, aunt, sister, mother, or neighbor. We must continue to value lived experience, oral history, and community-based knowledge as legitimate and vital epistemologies. There is already an abundance of publicly available information created by Black communities themselves. Rather than fixating on narratives of absence or lack, I am committed to directing people toward that abundance and to building pathways that make engagement with it possible, meaningful, and transformative.<\/p>\n

Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa, Dominican<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa is a historian of Black and Indigenous women\u2019s histories in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the U.S. She\u2019s a public scholar, curator, and recipient of the 2024 Letitia Woods Article of the Year Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. In 2024, Savage X Fenty highlighted Dr. Rosa\u2019s work in a Latine Heritage Month video<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why is it important for you to share this history in public, accessible ways rather than keeping it confined to academic spaces?<\/strong><\/p>\n

History is not just how we understand the past; it\u2019s how we understand ourselves in the present moment. Where tradition and familiarity is lost, that sense of alienation and disconnect begins. Learning my own history has brought me back to myself. It\u2019s helped me make sense of the conditions that formed me. It has allowed my community to affirm their dignity and legacy. Teaching classes in universities is uniquely rewarding. My students at Princeton, Stanford, and Baruch have been formative toward my practice. When I taught courses at Stanford, my students built a database of almost a hundred digitized archival collections featuring rebellions in the Caribbean. Yet, when I teach for the public, something new is unlocked. I appreciate being able to have people who never went to college, or who have been excluded from academia, learn how to read a 16th-century document from scratch. In one 1570 document we just transcribed, it was said about a free Black Puerto Rican woman, \u201cBecause she was free and manumitted, she did as she pleased\u201d (\u201cY como tal libre y horra ha\u00e7ia de su persona lo que queria\u201d).<\/p>\n

What kinds of responses or transformations have you seen from people engaging with your work, especially those encountering Black Latine history for the first time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It genuinely feels like having siblings and cousins around the world. No feeling can replace having a Haitian father come up to me and say, \u201cMy daughter sends me your videos!\u201d Or a Dominican brother and sister say, \u201cYou helped heal so much generational baggage in our family.\u201d This work feels deeply intergenerational. And, I gotta say, these responses are healing for me, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What does it look like to truly democratize Black Latine history? What still needs to change for that to happen?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now more than ever, history is popular culture. It\u2019s relevant to all of us. If digital content is the future of media, then we want to build those systems, too. And that\u2019s what we\u2019re doing as creators.<\/p>\n

Anthony Modesto Mili\u00e0n, Puerto Rican<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Anthony Modesto Mili\u00e0n is an independent fine arts and photo journalist, a public historian, and the writer behind the Learn Something New Today Substack.<\/a><\/p>\n

Were there moments when you realized something was missing from what you were being taught?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Growing up in New York, I saw Puerto Rican history and culture, but what was visible didn\u2019t look like me or my family. It was the Ricky Martins, the Marc Anthonys, the people who look like that. Even when you look at musical history, salsa history, there\u2019s a lot of Black Puerto Ricans, but these people, who are the foundation of what we listen to, who built the foundation for the people we see later on, are rarely seen. Even our name, Nuyoricans, came from a Black man: Jes\u00fas Col\u00f3n. I just started to realize we did so much more than we were getting credit for.<\/p>\n

Why do you think Black Latine history has been erased, minimized, or hidden for so long, both within Latin America and across the diaspora?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I can speak to Puerto Rico, where, historically, they have tried to show the island as \u201cabove race,\u201d not like the U.S. where we have complicated racial issues. The idea is that we are all one people, Puerto Rican, not white, or Black, or Indigenous. Just Puerto Rican. Except, whiteness remains the default.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How do anti-Blackness, colonialism, nationalism, or mestizaje narratives factor into this erasure?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Puerto Rico\u2019s case, a lot of it has to do with finances. Claiming that Puerto Rico was above race, while still purporting whiteness, it made itself available to business, \u201csafe\u201d from the issues facing the U.S.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why is it important for you to share this history in public, accessible ways rather than keeping it confined to academic spaces?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We live at a time when people want to learn their history. Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, we\u2019re all hungry to learn our history, especially what we haven\u2019t been taught about ourselves. We want to know where we come from, what we\u2019ve survived. They say, \u201cif you don\u2019t know where you come from, you don\u2019t know where you\u2019re going.\u201d And this history fuels us to keep going. Keeping it locked up in an academic setting doesn\u2019t serve us.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eileen Ivette, Colombian<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Eileen Ivette is an award-winning video producer, creator of the travel history series Black Latin History<\/a>, and Black travel content creator and curator. Her next trip will take travelers to Afro-Medell\u00edn for Juneteenth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Why do you think Black Latine history has been erased, minimized, or hidden for so long, both within Latin America and across the diaspora?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the U.S., it\u2019s because the U.S. has painted the idea of Latine as one specific way. To be Latine is to look a specific way. So for a U.S. base, it throws people off when they meet Latines who don\u2019t look like J-Lo, Shakira, and Karol G. From a Latin America standpoint, it\u2019s rooted in anti-Blackness and white supremacy. Because Latin America approached this differently than in the U.S., people don\u2019t understand that anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity have been equally, if not more, violent there as in the U.S. But this history has been whitewashed because history is told by the winners, and because we are still a marginalized community. But, for Black Colombians, we are proud of our Blackness, we are pioneers in fighting for Black rights in Latin America, and we see ourselves as part of a larger diaspora, not just Colombian.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How do anti-Blackness, colonialism, nationalism, or mestizaje narratives factor into this erasure?<\/strong><\/p>\n

What comes to mind for me right now is really this myth that we\u2019re all a mix of the three: African, Spaniard, and Indigenous. That\u2019s true for some, but it\u2019s not true for all. I don\u2019t have Spaniard blood or Indigenous blood. I can trace 98% to 100% percent of my ancestry to Africa. This idea that we are all mixed plays a role in denying the lived realities of Black people in Latin America. Anytime I hear someone say it, they\u2019re usually not Black. They\u2019re usually white or mestizo.<\/p>\n

How are you working to fill in these historical gaps now?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Black Latin History started as a social series, but I want to turn it into a long-form travel docuseries where I travel to Black communities in Black Latin America, so we can immerse ourselves in them, learn history and living history, and see how these communities live today. Because knowing the history is beautiful, but how are folks faring in the present? How does this exist in the present? My work connects the past to the present and why things are happening in communities.<\/p>\n

Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Growing up, Eileen Ivette spent her summers flying to Buenaventura, Valle del Cauca, a Pacific coastal seaport city in Colombia where her family is from. Like her, much of the town is Afro-Colombian, and her t\u00edo, the \u201cfamily historian,\u201d filled the months between school semesters with lessons about the community \u2014 their history, culture, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5207,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5205"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5205"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5212,"href":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5205\/revisions\/5212"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/baldheadedgirls.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}