The uniter

When Yvette Modestin was growing up in Colón , the city in Panama where the Caribbean people who helped build the Panama Canal settled, everyone looked like her. But once Modestin, an Afro West Indian Latino with European and South Asian ancestry, moved to Boston to get her psychology degree at Emmanuel College in 1986, she discovered what many other people with her ethnic background know: the combination of brown skin and fluency in Spanish makes some people uncomfortable.

Because of Modestin's dark complexion, some of her fellow Latinos rejected her. Her Spanish-speaking skills and affinity for Latin culture made it hard for some African-Americans to embrace her.

Modestin began to understand her awkward place in society a bit better after attending a symposium at Brooklyn College in 2000 that introduced her to the concept of Latin Americans with African ancestry. That conference encouraged Modestin to commence her own personal journey. Instead of the Catholicism she grew up with, she started practicing the traditional African religion of Ifa. After years of sporting chemically straightened hair , she cut off her relaxed strands almost a year ago and began wearing her hair in a short, natural style.

Simultaneously, Modestin informally created "The Encuentro" (Spanish for "The Gathering") and began hosting programs exploring the issues of race and racism in the Latino community. Two years ago she held her first big event: a two-day conference at Northeastern University titled "The Gathering of Afro-Latinos in Boston: Who Is Your Grandmother?" This summer, after attending a conference in Nicaragua held by the Organization of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Women, Modestin changed the name of her organization to Encuentro Diaspora Afro. The new name reflects her desire to address issues of concern to all people of African descent while still focusing on issues particular to Latin Americans.

"Encuentro is trying to make the connection from Latin America to Africa to the US," Modestin, 40, explains while sitting in her apartment in Boston on the border of Brookline and Allston. "It still [has] the focus of Latin America, because I am a woman of Latin America. But when I get up in the morning and I walk out in Boston, I'm a black woman. My fights and my struggles are that of a black woman. So it's become more important to make the connection."

According to the World Bank, 29 percent of people in Latin America and the Caribbean are of African descent. Most are descendents of the enslaved Africans who centuries ago arrived at major slave ports in Brazil and Colombia. They live in Argentina, Mexico, Honduras, and other countries. And they're united by their tendency to be "the target of racial discrimination and exclusion [who] suffer great economic and social deprivation in Latin America and occupy far fewer leadership positions in society," according to the Inter-Agency Consultation on Race in Latin America (IAC), a Washington, D.C.-based organization of international development agencies that tackle issues of concern to Latin Americans of African descent.

The contributions made by the members of this community are also often ignored. Modestin gives the example of the Panama Canal, which, she says, was built by people of African descent, although that's not often discussed.

"If we've done so much, why are we still having to fight to be acknowledged?" says Modestin, whose father is from Martinique, whose mother is from Jamaica, and who recently connected with relatives in France who share her Modestin surname. "Why is it so difficult to have people say, 'Yes, black people are in this country; black people had influence in this country and black people fed to the history of this country'?"

Encuentro and the IAC are among a growing number of national and international organizations seeking to bring attention to and, in the process, rectify these imbalances. There are veteran organizations such as the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York, which 30 years ago began hosting exhibitions, concerts, and conferences that explore Afro-Latino heritage, and the 14-year-old Organization of Women of the Afro-Caribbeans and Afro-Latin America , for which Modestin recently became the first US representative to the executive committee. Younger groups include the Global Afro Latino and Caribbean Initiative , run out of Hunter College in New York, which was created by a group of nongovernmental organizations in the United States, Latin America, and Caribbean in 2000.

"It's not an issue that was popular 10 years ago," says Marta Moreno Vega , the founder and executive director of the Caribbean Cultural Center, whom Modestin invited to present at her Northeastern conference two years ago and who has since become a source of support for Modestin along with a number of other intellectuals and scholars. "It's become increasingly popular and visible."

Most pinpoint the reason for the increasing interest back to 2001, when the United Nations hosted in South Africa the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. That conference was preceded in 2000 by a regional meeting in Chile, which examined how these issues affect people in Latin America .

Since then, says Judith Morrison , executive director of the IAC, there's been "a lot happening in the region. Because the region has a growing consciousness, it makes it easy to exchange dialogue with African-Americans in the US." Communities that have been separated for centuries, says Morrison , are finally getting an opportunity to discuss the similarities of their cultural and social experiences.

Modestin, who runs Encuentro with the help of program coordinator Lorena Escoto , highlights these connections when she points out that Colón suffers one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in Panama; in the United States, African-Americans account for 50 percent of all new HIV/AIDS infections. There are also unspoken points of unity that don't get discussed.

One example is the the recent debate about immigration.

Modestin was "heartbroken," she says, when some African-Americans took a stand against immigration. At the same time, the people taking prominent positions on the Latino side of the debate tended to be light-skinned, leaving Afro-Latinos without a voice. "It carves a division, and we are more isolated in that dialogue," says Modestin, who since being laid off from her job as program director of Latinas en Accion at the Hispanic Office of Planning and Evaluation a year ago has used her psychology skills as a consultant.

During a recent two-hour Encuentro event in the South End, about 20 people gathered to celebrate the contributions of six local Afro-Latinas. Among those in the audience was Hope White , 42, program director for YWCA Boston's ENCOREPlus, which educates women about early detection of cervical cancer and breast cancer .

"I'm not an Afro-Latina," says White, an African-American, "so I came to find out a little bit more about that culture."

During the program, Rhoda Johnson , an AIDS prevention manager for the Boston Public Health Commission, talked about growing up in Honduras, where only 1 percent of the population was black. Her Jamaican father taught his children to retain pride in their culture by insisting that they speak English at home.

Giovanna Negretti , founder and executive director of the Latino political organization, Oiste? (Spanish for "Have you heard? " ), exemplified one of Modestin's most important points of the evening: that being Afro-Latino had nothing to do with skin color. Negretti notes that her olive skin tone would make most people identify her as a white Latina. But Negretti's father left her middle-class , Puerto Rican family when Negretti was 7, forcing her mother to move from Vieques to a poor neighborhood in San Juan, where Negretti grew up with dark complexioned people who clearly had African roots.

"My role, really, in my life as I see it," says Negretti, "is to embrace my African heritage, which we all have whether we want to admit it or not. . . . Walk and breathe my Africanness without shame because you won't be able to see it, but it's in here."