Black Latine History Is Missing from Schools. These Creators Are Teaching It Online

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 tío, the “family historian,” filled the months between school semesters with lessons about the community — their history, culture, and what it meant to be Black in Colombia. It was an education she wasn’t receiving back in her classroom in Houston, Texas.

“Every summer, I’d get history lessons from my uncle — 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,” Eileen Ivette, 30, fondly tells Refinery29 Somos of those summer lessons from her youth.

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’t reconcile that she was both Black and Latina. She understood the differences between race, ethnicity, nationality, and language — and the many ways they can converge — so she couldn’t understand why the intersections she inhabited felt incomprehensible to both Latines and non-Latines alike.

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

After high school, Eileen Ivette moved to Washington, D.C., to study journalism at Howard University, determined to carry on her uncle’s 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 that created and sustain the erasure of Black Latine communities.

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 “too close to the story,” showing her, once again, that the systems meant to reflect society often silence the very people they cover.

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, like the history of Juan José Nieto Gil, a former Colombian president whose Blackness was removed from history; or how non-white people in Latin America could buy “whiteness” 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. “I went from zero followers to 30,000 at the end of four weeks,” says the video producer, travel influencer, and creator of Black Latin History, an award-winning travel series exploring the African diaspora’s cultural, historical, and social impact throughout Latin America.  

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 and Afro Colectiva 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. 

We spoke with some historians, documentarians, and creators who are shaping how Black Latine history is shared online.

Dash Harris is a Peabody‑award‑winning multimedia journalist, filmmaker, and public historian whose decade‑long docuseries NEGRO explores Afro‑diasporic identity, colonization, and the racial hierarchies shaping Latine experiences across the Americas. She is also the co‑founder of AfroLatinx Travel, a travel and community‑building platform led by Black Latin American locals that connects members of the African diaspora to historical and cultural spaces often overlooked by mainstream tourism.

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. And really I was speaking to myself.

Because we live in an anti-Black world and the most loyal adherents to this ethos are Latin Americans.

My work centers the lives of Black women — particularly dark-skinned Black women who have been structurally confined to permanent servile and extractive classes, yet have been foundational to Latin America’s 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.

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 — 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 “scholarship” originates in fieldwork that documents the lived experiences of people. These “studies” interviewed someone’s 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.

Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa is a historian of Black and Indigenous women’s histories in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the U.S. She’s 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’s work in a Latine Heritage Month video. 

None at all. It did not come up at all. I was born in the countryside of Tenares, Dominican Republic, where I spent my first five years living. And when I went to Jersey City, N.J., I was one of very few Dominican students. I knew immediately that I was racially Black and that had a huge impact on how I saw myself as a little girl. Although I was made to feel beautiful by my mother, I was not made to feel beautiful by my teachers, who were predominantly Central and South American. Facing this concept of Latinidad as a child, and looking different from the brown Indigenous and the white Latine students in my school, this concept of Latintidad, while unifying, felt deeply confusing.

When I started at Princeton University, I trained as a historian in comparative literature, focusing on manuscripts and documents, and my languages were Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic. But I went into these Latin American classes that didn’t speak about Black issues and Black classes that didn’t speak about Latin America. And in each of these settings, I was finding gaps. I was asking about the history of Santo Domingo as a colony, our shared history with Haiti, and our island of Ayiti. That’s when I started focusing my scholarship on Black and Indigenous women in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the U.S. 

I started to feel like academia was too small of a platform to make the cultural impact I wanted to make. For me, I both share a commitment to scholarly rigor and at the same time I have an interest in the scholarship being accessible to people who have never gone to high school or college, people who are stateless, people who are working moms, who are regular people. And behind every scholarly article I write is a paywall. It’s unfathomable. So everything I do on social media is to make this history accessible. Social media is critical to how we understand the world.

It’s always about self-realization and self-empowerment. I also want everything I share to be unifying. A lot of social meda can be about hot takes and rage-baiting. I don’t like to speak in the negative. I speak in the positive. My work unites people. It allows people to see themselves within a legacy of people who have struggled for freedom and have that knowledge inspire them. 

Anthony Modesto Miliàn is an independent fine arts and photo journalist, a public historian, and the writer behind the Learn Something New Today Substack.

Growing up in New York, I saw Puerto Rican history and culture, but what was visible didn’t 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’s 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: Jesús Colón. I just started to realize we did so much more than we were getting credit for.

I can speak to Puerto Rico, where, historically, they have tried to show the island as “above race,” 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. 

In Puerto Rico’s 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, “safe” from the issues facing the U.S. 

We live at a time when people want to learn their history. Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, we’re all hungry to learn our history, especially what we haven’t been taught about ourselves. We want to know where we come from, what we’ve survived. They say, “if you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re going.” And this history fuels us to keep going. Keeping it locked up in an academic setting doesn’t serve us.  

Eileen Ivette is an award-winning video producer, creator of the travel history series Black Latin History, and Black travel content creator and curator. Her next trip will take travelers to Afro-Medellín for Juneteenth.

In the U.S., it’s 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’t look like J-Lo, Shakira, and Karol G. From a Latin America standpoint, it’s rooted in anti-Blackness and white supremacy. Because Latin America approached this differently than in the U.S., people don’t 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. 

What comes to mind for me right now is really this myth that we’re all a mix of the three: African, Spaniard, and Indigenous. That’s true for some, but it’s not true for all. I don’t 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’re usually not Black. They’re usually white or mestizo.

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.