VivirLatino

I watched pedazos of the Unidos Por Haiti telethon on Univision on Saturday night. According to Don Francisco, who hosted the event as part of his usual Sabado Gigante time slot, the event raised $50 million. While stars like Thalia, Alejandro Sanz, and Ricky Martin sang their hearts out, images of the aftermath of the earthquake played on a screen behind them. That screen was where most of the black faces were seen as Univision couldn’t find one Afro-Latino to perform. While a lack of black faces is nothing new for Univision or for Spanish language television in general, the use of Haiti’s faces and “races” if you will, demonstrates the huge issues that Latin America and Latinos still have with race.

Black and Latino are seen as mutually exclusive and are presented in one of two ways. If you watch the faux news shows like Primer Impacto and even the real news shows, Haiti is shown as violent and out of control with little historical or actual context. My mother, saturated herself with the coverage asked me why there wasn’t more military intervention/control. Our own la Macha explored some of the issues with this, and I would add that the perception of the media, English and Spanish language is that Haiti wasn’t colonized enough, meaning it wasn’t made “white” enough. All people need to do, according to the Spanish language coverage is look to the other side of Hispaniola, to the Dominican Republic, where even Sammy Sosa has learned that whiter is righter and great pains are taken to separate the Dominican from the Haitian, the “white” from the “black”, even though as I told my friend the other night, there is only one letter difference between “rara” and “gaga”, an Afro-Caribbean musical and religious tradition.
Read more…