The Identity I Didn’t Know I Could Claim

By Sekani Robinson (She/Her)

Growing up, my identity has always felt a little complicated. Or maybe “complicated” isn't quite the right word, but it has been a journey. A journey that I didn't always realize I was on.

I was born and raised in Southern California, but my mom is an immigrant from Panama. She came to the United States at 18 after living in Panama, then Mexico for a couple of years, and then returning to Panama. Spanish was her first language, and she eventually became fluent in English. My mom is Afro-Latina. 

Phenotypically, she is Black: dark-skinned, with a golden undertone, kinky curly hair, and features that many people would immediately racialize as Black. Ethnically, she is Latina. Nationally, she is Panamanian. And those things have never been contradictory to her. In fact, it took me longer to understand that they didn't have to be contradictory for me either. 

Panama is a small country at the narrowest part of the land bridge connecting North and South America, bordered by Costa Rica to the west and Colombia to the east, with the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. It is easy to think of Panama primarily through the Canal, but Panama has a much longer and more complicated history of movement, migration, race, and Blackness.

Colón, on Panama's Caribbean coast, is particularly significant to that history. The city and surrounding region have long been home to Afro-Panamanian and Afro-Caribbean communities, including descendants of Caribbean migrants who came to work on the railroad and, later, the Panama Canal; and I think their Spanish dialect is a reflection of this.

The Spanish I heard Panamanians speak was never simply a matter of words. There was a cadence to it, a rhythm and emphasis that seemed to reflect the Caribbean culture in which the language had developed. Panama’s connections to the broader Black Caribbean world offered one way of understanding that familiarity; and if I had to describe the sound, I would say it was Spanish with something that, to my ear, resembled the cadence of Jamaican patois. I noticed it particularly in my mother and aunt’s speech; the way they emphasized certain words, the rhythm of their sentences, and the way the sounds seemed to move. It almost feels like a fusion of Jamaican patois and Spanish. 

And it’s not to say that there is a single way to speak Spanish. Spanish carries the history of the places and communities where it is spoken, which is why the rhythm, expressions, slang, and even the sound of the language can vary so much from one place to another. The Spanish you hear from a Puerto Rican family can sound very different from the Spanish you hear from a Mexican family. For me, the Spanish I heard from my mother carried the particular history of the Caribbean, and I came to recognize that history not only in what she said, but in how she said it.

So when I think about my mother being from Panama, I am thinking about a Caribbean-facing country with its own Black history, its own Afro-Panamanian communities, and its own complicated relationship to race and national identity.

I never thought much about any of this when I was growing up; and that changed when I started participating in extracurricular activities and spending more time outside of my family and neighborhood. I remember specifically, one day when my mom was dropping my friend and me off at softball practice. She was on the phone speaking Spanish. I was sitting in the front seat, and I could feel the movement and shock of my friend beside me. I looked back to confirm what I already expected. My friend was shook. 

When we got out of the car and started walking toward the field, she turned to me.

“Your mom speaks Spanish.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Still shook, but now a little confused too.

“But she's Black.”

“Yeah,” I awkwardly confirmed.

“So is she Mexican?”

“No. She's from Panama.”

“So she's Mexican? And you're half Mexican?”

I remember being a little frustrated because I felt misunderstood. At the time, “Afro-Latina” wasn't a term I heard regularly, so I didn't have language for what felt so obvious to me. I knew my mother was Panamanian; and I knew she was Black; and I knew she spoke Spanish. What I didn't yet know was how to explain that all of those things could exist together without one canceling out the other; and because my friend didn't understand, I did something interesting. I separated myself from my mom. I would say, “She is Panamanian”. Or “She is Latina”; “I am Black.” This wasn't the first time someone assumed my mom was Mexican, and I didn't realize I was making a distinction. All I knew was that somehow, it seemed easier to explain it to her if I made myself something different, and this certainly wasn't the last time I would do this.

Growing up in Southern California, Mexican identity was often the Latin American identity I encountered most. So when people saw my Black mother and heard her speaking Spanish, Mexican was usually the first, and sometimes only, explanation they could come up with. But it wasn't just my mom’s identity that people struggled to place. I've also gotten used to being asked:

“Where are you from?”

And I mean, where are you really from?

I've had people tell me that I don't look Black American, which I still don't quite understand, especially since my dad is a Black American man from Georgia. I've been asked if I'm African of some sort, especially when people find out where my name comes from.

My name is Sekani. It is one of those names people tend to ask about and comment how unique it is. It then inquires the questions: Where is it from? What does it mean? How do you pronounce it?

So let me go ahead and tell you all here. Sekani is a Tumbuka name meaning “laughter.” Tumbuka is spoken across Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, with the name particularly associated with Malawi in some naming traditions. But then I have another explanation to give which is that my mom got my name from a book and that she is from Panama, and somehow, people find that even more intriguing. Because now they have to reconcile a Black American father from Georgia, a Black Panamanian mother, a name with roots in southeastern Africa, and a daughter standing in front of them who is somehow all of these things at once.

My mom didn't choose my name because she was from Malawi or Zambia or Tanzania. She found it in a book, liked it, and gave it to me. But growing up, I became accustomed to explaining my name and, in the process, explaining myself.

A few times, after explaining that my mom is from Panama, I've watched people almost visibly relax. “Oh, that makes sense.”

One woman actually said to me, “That's why you're so pretty.” I remember thinking about that one for a while. Like… what kind of comment was that? As if my mother's Panamanian ancestry provided an explanation for something about my appearance that Blackness alone couldn't. It was another reminder that people often have ideas about what Blackness is supposed to look like. And when you don't fit that expectation, they go looking for another explanation.

My mom has always been the person who disrupts those assumptions. She worked in Spanish-speaking environments, so speaking Spanish has always been a normal part of her life. When we're out together, she'll speak Spanish if she knows the person doesn't speak English well or would be more comfortable speaking Spanish. And people are always intrigued when they realize she speaks fluent Spanish.

“¿Tú eres de México?”

“Soy de Panamá,” she’d reply.

“¿Panamá?” they’d react, almost intrigued by the answer itself.

And then, almost inevitably, someone would turn to me.

“¿Tú hablas español también?”

“No,” I’d respond.

“¿Por qué no?”

I’d typically just chuckle and point to my mom who’d give a brief, rehearsed explanation.

That question has always been a little more complicated than people realize. My mom didn't teach us Spanish. It wasn't because Spanish wasn't part of her life, in some ways, it was the opposite. My mom had developed a complicated relationship with speaking Spanish in the United States because people often couldn't understand how a Black woman could be speaking Spanish.

There were experiences that stayed with her like when her stepfather assumed she was being rude to him because she wasn't speaking English to him. The reality was that she didn't speak English at the time and barely understood what he was saying. She was speaking the language she knew, but people were interpreting it through their assumptions about her, and I think some of that stayed with her.

More plainly, my dad is from Georgia. He's Black American who doesn't speak Spanish. So, my childhood wasn't simply a “Latina household” or “Black household;” it was both. 

My dad would teach my mom Black American customs that became part of our household. He taught her how to make collard greens and baked mac and cheese. There were the foods, expressions, music, humor, and traditions that came through his side of the family. And it would coincide with my mom’s.

My mom would make empanadas for class potlucks; eating patacones for breakfast, sometimes with sausage; and arroz con gandules, con leche y pollo as an almost daily dinner. I would be listening to Spanish and understanding just enough to know what was being said, especially if I really wanted to eavesdrop and get the chisme, the tea.

Therefore, I grew up with this fusion of Black American and Panamanian cultures that made up our particular version of home. It was all there; I just didn't have the language to understand myself through it. I remember another friend once asking me a question similar to the one I had heard before; another question that, to me, felt much more complicated than it actually was.

“So you're half Latina.”

And I paused because she wasn’t wrong. I just had never thought of myself that way. And I guess, without realizing it, my own understanding of the identity had become surprisingly narrow because I felt like Latina primarily belonged to people who spoke Spanish, or who were actually from a Latin American country so I had unconsciously separated myself from my mother when it came to that part of who I was.

I mentioned the conversation to my mom, expecting perhaps a more complicated explanation, but instead, she was almost matter-of-fact. “Yeah. You’re half Latina. But you’re also Black. I wanted to make sure y’all understood that.”

And suddenly, it seemed so obvious. There was nothing to prove. I understood Blackness as a race, and I understood Panamanian as a nationality. But I had treated Latina as something else entirely, an identity that required evidence. Language. Appearance. Cultural fluency. Some recognizable connection that would make my claim feel legitimate.

My mother had never understood it that way. She had never taught me that being Black made me less Latina, or that not speaking Spanish made me less connected to her. She simply understood herself and me as both. Somewhere along the way, I had taken the complexity of my identity and turned it into a set of categories that needed to be justified. My mother had never asked me to choose.

My mother never saw these identities as competing; so, it wasn’t anything to her, but I did. Or, perhaps more accurately, the world taught me to see them as competing.

I feel like post high school, the term Afro-Latina started floating around more, and something clicked. There is actually a history behind the term itself. Afro-Latino is not a new identity, even if the language was new to me. Scholars have traced the use of “Afro” to name African-descended peoples in Latin America to earlier Black intellectual and political movements, while the English-language term “Afro-Latino” began appearing more prominently in the 1970s.[i] In Brazil, Black activists and intellectuals were also using language such as Afro-Latino-América to emphasize the African presence in the region.

So there isn't really one person I can point to and say, “This person coined Afro-Latina,” and, honestly, I like that. The term emerged out of a much longer history of Black people in Latin America naming themselves and challenging the idea that Blackness and Latinidad were separate or competing identities and that part is important to me.

It is important because I didn't invent a new identity when I started calling myself Afro-Latina. I finally found language for something that had existed long before I had the language to describe it and I began to understand that Blackness and Latinidad were not mutually exclusive. Being Latina didn't require me to look a particular way. I don’t have to speak Spanish fluently for cultural belonging. And there were other people whose identities, families, and experiences looked something like mine. I started to resonate with the term Afro-Latina because it felt right. But it also made me wonder, why did it take me so long to realize that I could claim it?

That question led me to recognize that my uncertainty was not entirely personal. I had grown up in a culture that often treated Blackness and Latinidad as separate categories, even though the two have always existed together. I thought about actresses Christina Milian and Gina Torres, both of whom have spoken about being Afro-Latina in Hollywood and about the ways they could be understood or cast as Black women while their Latinidad was often overlooked. Their experiences gave me another way to understand what I had been feeling; sometimes the difficulty is not that an identity does not exist, but that other people have been taught not to see all of it at once.

A Black Latina can be so thoroughly read as Black that her Latinidad disappears because Afro-Latinas are not always recognized as Latina; and sometimes, after enough people fail to recognize a part of you, you stop recognizing it in yourself. That is the part I've been thinking about most because identity isn't only something we inherit from our families. It is also shaped by the social world around us and by who recognizes us, who questions us, who makes assumptions about us, and what identities we learn are “allowed” to belong together.

For a long time, I thought I should only say Black because Latina wasn't mine to claim. My mother never saw it that way. She never asked me to choose; she simply gave me both. I was the one who had learned to separate them.

Maybe that is what has stayed with me most. Identity is not only something we inherit from our families. It is also shaped by the social world around us and by who recognizes us, who questions us, who makes assumptions about us, and, sometimes, by the identities we learn to see as belonging together.

In a couple of months, I am going to Panama for the first time with my mom. In some ways, Panama has never been completely foreign to me. It has existed in fragments e.g. in our kitchen, at family gatherings, in Panamanian events in downtown Los Angeles, in the Spanish I heard but did not speak, in the food, the stories, and the memories my mother carried with her. But I have never stood there myself, and now I will.

My mother hasn't been back since she was eighteen. She has lived more of her life in the United States than she ever did in Panama, yet she has carried so much of Panama with her. The country she left became part of the home she created, and in turn, part of me.

I keep thinking about what it will feel like to see it with her. To eat the mangos she has spent years insisting were better than anything I've had here. To see the place that existed in my life mostly through her. Maybe that is another part of finally claiming an identity I once thought I wasn't allowed to claim. I used to think belonging required fluency, familiarity, or some obvious connection I could point to and say, this is mine.

Now I understand that sometimes belonging looks different. Sometimes it is inherited before it is understood. Sometimes it lives in a mother's accent, in the food on your table, in the stories you grew up hearing, or in a country you have never visited but somehow already know through someone you love. My mother knew I was both before I did. I just had to learn that I didn't have to choose.

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Sekani L. Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.