In February, activist and Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza founded the Black Futures Lab, a political action network dedicated to the Black community and Black voters. “We really want to be able to project how the Black community is very complex, nuanced, and diverse,” Garza told CASSIUS at the time. “The 20 states we’re visiting have the highest concentrations of Black immigrants, Black people who have been incarcerated, Black queer people, and Black people living in rural areas. We want to reach folks that might not be on the internet, they may not want to put their information on the internet, we want to make sure that they’re represented as well.”
Now the network is partnering with Latinx racial justice organization Mijente in an effort to highlight the concerns of the Afro-Latinx community. According to Remezcla, together they are launching what they call the largest Spanish-language census geared toward Afro-Latinx people living in the United States.
“Our fates as marginalized people are linked and across the Latin American diaspora runs the lineage of African descendance,” Mijente co-founder Marisa Franco said in a statement. Garza added, “Too often, diverse voices within the Black community are silenced because of the pervasive misconception that Black people are a monolith. Not all Black people are African-American, and we have a duty to create spaces where no one has to check any part of their identity at the door.”
Through their collaboration, BCP and Mijente hope to encourage Black communities to step into charge. As Remezcla also notes, in offering the census in Spanish, they also hope to make such information more accessible while welcoming those “who might be more comfortable completing the survey in English.”
“Language is key to accessibility,” Mijente digital director Amanda Chavez Barnes told Remezcla. “Spanish-dominant people are online like everyone else, and if the content is not available in their language, they won’t be able to engage with it as fully.”
You can access the Black Census Project online in Spanish at BlackCensus.org/es or in English at BlackCensus.org.
