In this FPP Interview, Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés let’s us walk down the hallway of her childhood Bronx building, shares how as a Black Puerto Rican woman, Arturo Schomburg’s latinidad and his Blackness were not contradictions for her, how her students–many of them are first-generation or are attending school later in life–give her hope for the future. Hear Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés read tonight, November 18th  from 6-8pm at Silvana in Harlem with Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Tanya Domi, Max S. Gordon, Ruby Shamir, Judith Baumel, and Ricardo Hernandez!

As a child, did you have a sense of connection with others beyond your community? When did you develop consciousness of shared Black history and identity throughout the Americas? I grew up in the Bronx, New York, in the tallest buildings in the borough called Tracey Towers. Our next door neighbor, Mrs. Wasserman, was an older Jewish woman who lived alone; another, Jerry, was a Black woman from Louisiana whose husband, Carl, was such a sharp dresser I thought he came out of the movies. Down the hall lived the Robinsons, who were from Jamaica. I say that to say that my community was *always* diverse. We grew up with salsa and R and B, with Essence magazine and Stevie Wonder and Fats Domino and Marvin Gaye on the radio. Blackness – U.S. Blackness – was never foreign to me. And Caribbean Blackness was never foreign to me – there were elders in the building from the Virgin Islands who always asked for my brother and myself; my best friend in high school, her mother was from Barbados. And whiteness wasn’t distant from me either – my elementary school was predominantly Irish Catholic — with many of the parishioners having just come from Ireland — so I grew up with soda bread and corn beef and cabbage and step dancing and singing for St. Patrick’s Day mass and learning that “County” goes in the front of their landmasses, not after. This was my upbringing. It wasn’t until college that I started to have the language to speak about Blackness in Latin America, despite my parents being darker than me and my brother, despite the rhythms of the music that we listened to and the food we ate, all of which have origins on the African continent.

Your recent publication is the biography Diasphoric Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. So many of us know him for his works that led to the creation of Schomburg Center for Reseach in Black Culture. Tell us why you were attracted to his story, and why you centered his Black-Latinx identity.
It was in college that I learned of Arturo Schomburg, and then it was as a man who had a library named after him that was the premier archive for everything related to Blackness. Oh and incidentally, he was born in Puerto Rico. So as a nerd, as a bookworm who had grown up in this city, I thought this was astounding – how could there be a *library* named after a Puerto Rican, and no one knew? And then I saw a picture of him, and he looked familiar to me, like a family member. So he stayed in my mind as someone who I would research maybe, one day. After my book Oshun’s Daughters, was published, I started thinking about how figures such as Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston had made Vodou more public by including it in their work in the 1930s and 1940s – and I wondered what Mr. Schomburg had to say about that, and so I started reading. And *that’s* when I realized he needed his own book, and realized that part of the issue with him was not that he denied his Puerto Ricanness, but that people in telling his story didn’t know how to integrate it with Blackness — because in Puerto Rico and here, the most prominent Puerto Ricans are white. As a Black Puerto Rican woman, his latinidad and his Blackness were not contradictions for me, and so I set out to write a book that showed how he had been living his afrolatinidad, how everything he did reflected that identity.

How can we break down walls between different Black cultures? One way is to honor and respect the history of African Americans in this country. Toni Morrison once said that anti-Blackness, anti-U.S. Blackness, was a first step to assimilation in this country, and so you find anti U.S. Blackness that is rampant amongst all immigrant communities,  including those from the African continent, the rest of the Americas, and all of the Caribbeans, who many think should “know better.” The reality is that every fight we fight to make these United States a more perfect union builds on fights, legal challenges, civic organizations, secret societies, all launched by U.S. Black men, women, and children. There are no civil rights without first learning and understanding U.S. Black history, and from there learning how the rest of us — Latinx, Asians, gay — how we all build from them.

Who does good work in teaching from the whole diaspora? For me, there is no good work about the whole diaspora without talking about South America and the Hispanic Caribbean. I am tired of seeing work labelled as diasporic and then I see all English-speaking countries and intellectuals represented. Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo was the first person I read who looked at Haiti and its impact on Black populations in the US and Cuba — that was the first time I had seen that grouping, when doing research on Mr. Schomburg. Myriam J.A. Chancy wrote a book on Dominican, Haitian, and Cuban women’s literature, and again, I was struck by that grouping, because it is so rare. Both of them paired Haiti with the Hispanic Caribbean – that was striking to me. For me, actually representing how Black peoples in this hemisphere have lived and produced culture, that is my own goal with regards to my work. There’s so much that needs to be done, that requires studying multiple languages and multiple national histories, but we can do it. Mr. Schomburg himself was doing it. Ntozake Shange, may she rest in peace, she was doing it.

Where is consciousness developing? How can we nurture these connections?
Social media is a space where consciousness is rising, where people are sharing information and learning new things at their fingertips. There are people who have never physically met me or sit in my class, but who may know me from Twitter and then who read my books. Social media is a tremendous advance in terms of the dissemination of information for which people are longing.

It’s 2018. What gives you hope? What gives you pause? My students give me hope – every day I see men and women who are changing their lives. Many are first generation college students; some are non-traditional students who have come back to college in their 30, 40s, and 50, who are making a way for their children. I am inspired by them every single day.

Cynicism gives me pause. Hopelessness gives me pause. On a daily basis, I meet with men and women who have been homeless, or who don’t have food at home, don’t know where their next MetroCard is going to come from, but they hold on to the promise that a college degree is going to mean something in their lives. And they are there, working to get to school. And then I meet PhDs who belittle the lives of these students because they don’t take the time to get to know them. Arrogance gives me pause.

What American crisis keeps you up at night? Hopelessness and willful ignorance, when I think about them too long, can keep me up. White supremacy is embedded in the very fabric of this nation, and it counts on people not being interested in history. This has been the case since enslavement, when it was illegal to teach enslaved peoples to read — which is why literacy is freedom. Education is freedom. Everything that we’re seeing counts on people deliberately applying different standards to white men and women and choosing to uphold white supremacy when they do it. That hypocrisy is more and more apparent – and people are also talking in ways about race and class and sexuality in this country in ways that haven’t been seen in a few decades – which makes me hopeful.

Is there a piece of writing– yours or someone else’s–that really speaks to your experiences these days? I love writers’ essays, particularly those pieces that are beautifully written. Audre Lorde‘s Sister Outsider – I come back to those essays. And every time I see a Lucille Clifton poem, I realize I need to read more of her work.

When do you feel most “we”? When do you feel most “I”? If I’m doing it right, my day, I mean, I feel “we” most of the time. We really are in this together, all of us – trans rights and immigrant children being separated from their parents and voter suppression and the caravan and religious intolerance and DACA — it affects every single one of us. “I” feels like disconnection – like an inculcation of this individualistic ethos that is at the base of the KoolAid we all drink. Growing up, I was taught to be of service to my larger communities – the way I teach, the pieces I write, the histories and literatures I highlight are all meant to illuminate the larger “we.”

Tell us about your Harlem. My Harlem is all of the Harlems – I currently live in Central Harlem, and walk west and there’s Washington Heights and walk east and there’s East Harlem. I love walking these spaces, and passing Little Senegal, and seeing all of our multiple communities.

What was your first knowledge of Harlem? My father was born in El Barrio; my mother, when she came from Puerto Rico with her aunt and uncle, first lived in Loisaida for a brief time before moving up to El Barrio. But I grew up with Showtime at the Apollo being on TV on Saturday night at 1am after SNL – 125th street was a storied street. I can’t remember when I didn’t know about Harlem.

Who are writers that we should be reading right now?
Elizabeth Acevedo and Kiese Laymon and Imani Perry and Hanif Abdurraqib and Alexander Chee and Joel Leon and Peggy Robles Alvarado and Jesmyn Ward and Vanessa Mártir and Marjua Estévez and Walter Thompson Hernández and José Olivarez and Eve Ewing and Ashley Ford and Naiomy Guerrero and Roxane Gay and Nicole Chung and Celeste Ng and Daniel J. Older and Nayyirah Waheed. This is my U.S. American literature.

What advice would you give emerging writers today? Read broadly and widely – and please, please be kind to yourselves. There are all these rules out there- write every day, write in the morning, write 1000 words a day. Trust *your* rhythm. Trust *your* process. It may not look like anyone else’s. We’re all making it up as we go… and it may look differently, depending on the project. And everything counts as writing — taking notes counts, sometimes checking email counts, walking your dog as something comes together counts. Reading and letting it marinate counts. Walking in the Botanical Garden counts. Be kind, be gentle to yourself.