A new documentary short film is showing the world what it means to be Black, beautiful and rooted in tradition on the island of Puerto Rico.
“Negra, Yo Soy Bella” — which is Spanish for “Black, I am Beautiful” — tells the story of Mar Cruz, an Afro-Puerto Rican bomba dancer, using the African-inspired improvisational dance tradition to affirm her Blackness and heal her pain.
The film, a product of Queen Latifah’s Queen Collective, is directed by Vashni Korin, a Black Puerto Rican and Caribbean filmmaker, who set out to disrupt the erasure of Afro-Latinos in media through solid representation.
“Growing up, I rarely saw a Black Puerto Rican woman on screen,” Korin tells theGrio in a recent interview on TheGrio Weekly. “When we’re not represented, when you don’t see yourself on television, you don’t see yourself in the media, on billboards … You begin to lose what is possible for you, the magnitude of what is possible for you and your life and what you can do if it begins to disintegrate. So I think it is so important that we begin to infiltrate certain images of ourselves on screen.”
“Negra, Yo Soy Bella” is filmed in a mix of powerful dreamlike sequences that intertwine bomba dancing, bomba drummers and bilingual reflections from Cruz about growing up as a Black woman in Puerto Rico.
With brown skin and dark locs, Cruz recalls being questioned by other Puerto Ricans, asked “Are you from the islands?” as if she were a foreigner in the land In which she was born and raised. The film shows how racism and colorism hit bone-deep, but are valiantly resisted as women like Cruz and Miss Universe Puerto Rico semi-finalist Dorayma Mercado Cepeda insist on wearing their natural hair and claiming their Black identity.
“Before being Puertorriquena,” Cruz says, “I’m a Black woman.”
The women dance bomba in public places and tap into the spiritual…
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