What constitutes African American and Latino literature? Should the Afro-Latino memoir be included in the African American as well as the Latino canon? What cohesiveness do both canons gain or lose from such inclusion (3)? These are only some of the provocative questions raised and addressed by Trent Masiki’s Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism. Masiki posits that Afro-Latino writings, despite their literary, historical, and cultural significance, are marginalized in both Latino and African American literature. This timely piece of scholarship sets the record straight by exploring the relevance and contributions of five Afro-Latino/a writers (3). It is focussed on Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), Carlos Moore’s Pinchón: Race and Revolution in Castro’s Cuba (2008), Marta Moreno Vega’s When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio (2004), Veronica Chambers’s Mama’s Girl (1996), and Raquel Cepeda’s Birds of Paradise: How I Became Latina (2013). Through an examination of Black, Latino/a identities, Afro-diasporic consciousness, Masiki explores the relationships of Afro-Latinidad, Afro-Latino pan-African solidarity, Black and Afro-Latino/a identity, and Black nationalism – to name only a few – as key themes emerging in these five writers’ literary vocabulary.

According to Masiki, the Afro-Latino Memoir is the first monograph to focus on African American nationalism, narrative strategies, and cultural tropes in the Afro-Latino memoirs of these select writers (6). The book employs “symbolic geography,” a literary concept developed by Robert B. Stepto that describes and defines two features of African American autobiographical writing: ascent and immersion narration, as such strategies describe African American racial formation (5). One of the common threads of the five writers is that they all have ethnonational roots in various parts of the Hispanic Caribbean: Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Four of the five were born and raised in the continental US, and many established close and personal relationships with African American radicals and activists (4).

Along with an introduction and coda, the monograph consists of four easy-to-read chapters that provide an author profile and an analysis and the significance of their text, followed by a deep textural analysis, and interpretation of their main literary works. Down These Mean Streets by Thomas is a foundational text and must be understood in the context of the Black Arts and Nuyorican movement (37). Regarding Moore, close attention is paid to his encounters with Maya Angelou, Harold Cruise, and Malcolm X, while underscoring his maturing political consciousness and pan-Africanism (63). Vega is an Afro-Puerto Rican scholar, and it is argued that her Afrocentricity and Afro-Latinidad complicate the discourse of Black cynicism and authenticity of the Post Soul Nation (Nelson George) and the End of Blackness (Debra Dickerson) because she offers a more textural understanding of Latinidad (81). Chambers’s and Cepeda’s works are examined against the backdrop of civil rights agendas (Chambers) and Black nationalism (Cepeda). The main argument is that both of their works underscore the African American presence in Latina autobiographies and the fusion of Latino and African American studies (81).

The strength of the monograph is that it is well researched as it builds on African American literary and cultural theory and engages in robust debates regarding post-soul critics, and their detractors, while offering a cogent analysis and interpretation of key writers not known beyond niche African American literary circles except for Thomas and Moore. It demonstrates how importantly they functioned not only as writers but also as activists, thinkers, and cultural producers. More importantly, it bridges the literary gaps between US African Americans and Afro-Latino English writers and (re)inserts them (Afro-Latinos) into African American literature, thereby expanding the canon and thus making it more inclusive and less secular. Collectively, these chapters form a mosaic for an understanding of the various strands of the literary, political, and cultural components of Black political thought and Afro-Aesthetics and how they operate within the Afro-diasporic geocultural spaces: from pan-Africanism, Afrocentricity, the Nuyorican movement, Black Nationalism, the Black Arts movement, Latinidad, and Marxism to post-soul Latinidad and global Blackness.

The Afro-Latino Memoir is therefore highly recommended for both undergraduate and graduate courses in the humanities and social sciences, like African American, Latino/a, women/gender studies, Latin American, and cultural-studies courses. Students of a new generation will be able to discover, rediscover, and appreciate the powerful literary imagination of these five writers, as well as understand how literature functions as a weapon of cultural and political theory.