ABSTRACT
Inspired by the story of Jessica Krug, a white woman pretending to live and work as an Afro Latina scholar, Rachel Lynett’s play Black Mexican takes up the scenario of racial masquerade in academic and artistic institutions. She examines the hurt, disorientation, and injustice experienced by Afro Latina artists and academics who are routinely excluded from Latinidad due to their blackness while white women cosplay their identities. The play necessarily centers these Black women’s lives and asks audiences to interrogate the institutional norms and structures that facilitate and incentivize such a violent appropriative performance for so many years. This chapter is a close reading of how Lynett’s play presents us with Latina characters whose stakes in Latinidad range from ambivalence to a righteous desire for inclusion. At the same time, it is a broader reflection on how performances of Latinidad – in particular gendered and classed gesture, accent, and corporeality – circulate as a kind of currency that capitalize on blackness without centering Black bodies.
