"What colonialism wants to do is prevent us from moving freely through our lives and through who we are": A Conversation with Roberto Carlos Garcia on Traveling Freely: Essays

Alex Rivera
Nov 3
20 min read

Buy:Traveling Freely: Essays by Roberto Carlos Garcia | ISBN: 9780810147881 | Published: October 2024 | Northwestern University Press / Curbstone Books | Pages: 136

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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AR: I'd like to begin by saying that when I received your book, I found out that this is your debut collection of essays and that you typically write poetry. What was the catalyst for this project? What inspired you to begin writing a collection of essays instead of writing this in the form of another poetry collection?

RG: I was talking to a friend of mine years ago, and she had said sometimes some things aren't for poems. Sometimes they're essays. Sometimes they're short stories, and so I started by responding to prompts by editors. They’d say, “Hey, we'd love an essay on this subject, on that subject,” and so, it just came naturally. I have been writing in a lot of different genres since I was younger. I would write comic book stories or music lyrics and things like that. And then one of my favorite writers, James Baldwin, he obviously wrote brilliant essays, but he also wrote novels, and unbeknownst to a lot of folks, he wrote poems as kind of like finger exercises, right? And there were so many things I wanted to talk about, but I wanted to talk about them differently, maybe more directly—more experientially. I was inspired by the essays of James Baldwin. Also, Alan Ginsberg, he wrote an essay collection. A lot of people don't know that. His essays were very interesting because he was also against nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and things like that.

He had some wonderful essays about that. And I began to notice that poets were writing in multiple genres. I'm just grateful that I was able to do it and that I stuck with it. I've been able to, in a way, tell stories because they're very narrative. A lot of my poems are also somewhat narrative at times. It was an extension of the poetry. It helps me unravel the thoughts. With poems, there's a kind of brevity to them, but the essay gave me the freedom to really go into other areas and to talk about these topics differently. That was a big inspiration for this collection. I wanted to continue to talk about the issues that are near and dear to my heart in a way that's more direct and even accessible to a larger audience.

AR: Yeah, oftentimes poetry is viewed as inaccessible—even though I believe it's very accessible with all of the different types of poetry out there. Branching off this topic a little bit, I'm curious about the essays that you've written in this book. How long did it take you to write all of these? Were these essays that you've worked on sporadically, or was it something that you worked on where you began with this idea for a project and just wrote through it? Or did you have some of these essays already written because a lot of them are communicating with one another, so I'm interested in peeking behind the curtain of your process a bit more.

RG: There are a lot more essays than the ones that are in this book, but these are the ones that, as you say, were in conversation with each other. These are the ones I selected for the book, but I began maybe around 2017 or so. The essay titled “Black Maybe,” was originally published as “Hiding Black Behind the Ears: On Dominicans, Blackness, and Haiti," I believe, is what it was called. That essay was published in the now-defunct Gawker. It was an online magazine that published really dope stuff. I pitched my essays to them, and they really enjoyed them. And when we published it, you know, it went viral, and I was floored. But then I remembered our story.

The Afro-Latinos. We are like the silenced Blacks, right? Because a lot of times, we are silenced. Our stories are silenced. Our experience is silenced. But then also we can silence ourselves, whether it be through our own confusion or lack of knowledge and understanding. So at that time, I was working on what would become my second collection. It was actually the first manuscript I started to put together, which is called black/Maybe: An Afro Lyric. But I was still figuring out the book, and what I realized was that the essay was the missing link in the book. I closed the book out with that essay. And then I decided I would open the book with a shorter essay as well. So, I have these two bookends of prose, or like lyric prose. That then gave the collection its shape. The connection of prose and poetry, or lyric prose and lyric poetry, I've always been fascinated by that. Even in my very first collection, I started with a kind of very short lyric essay on melancolía. Over time, more essays just kept coming. After that essay, “Hiding Black Behind the Ears,” I kept going.

And then the essay, “So, You're Afro Latinx. Now What?” came up because there was this groundswell of writing by Afro-Latinx writing about their experiences and writing about it in very anti-essentialist terms. There was the Afro-Latinx experience that intersects with the Afro-Indigenous experience, and then also with the Afro-Queer and the Afro-Trans experience. Many different iterations of these ideas began to come out. I said, This is wonderful. When I was a young person, I had books like Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets. He was telling his story and his experience, and I was like, “Man, this is so dope. I would love to read this from a Dominican's perspective,” and so I felt very fortunate to have wonderful mentors who encouraged me and said, “Okay, so then do it. Write the book you want to see.” I'm super grateful to have good people around me who encouraged me to explore it. I was writing essays, and they were all getting published which was great. One day, a friend of mine said, “I think you have enough essays for a collection. Have you looked?” And I said, “No, let me see.” When I looked, oh my gosh. I said, “I do, but there are such disparate topics.” I started with what I always do– I'm a publisher– I always tell people when they're working on manuscripts, just spread it all out on the floor and look to see what's talking, what's in conversation with each other. And that's what I did. After that, I was able to put the collection together.

AR: I completely understand where you're coming from with that, and I think you did such a good job of having all of these different topics, but they were still related to one another because when we think about the problems we often see in our society, there is an intersectionality of racism, homophobia, toxic masculinity, capitalism, all of that's meshed together. I'd like to talk a little bit more about those connections, but first, you mentioned the essay, “So You’re Afro Latinx: Now What.” That essay was very powerful to me as someone who identifies as Afro-Latino and has struggled with accepting my own blackness growing up. So I wanted to ask you about that experience of you growing up and what led you to write that particular essay, because you talked about how blackness is stigmatized in the Dominican Republic, and you discuss this caste system of colorism that is present there. You said it can lead people to be confused or hesitant to accept their blackness. I wanted to hear a little bit more about your own experience with that stigmatism and what led you to write that specific essay.

RG: I always like to start by saying that the Dominican Republic isn't a monolith by any stretch of the imagination. Anti-blackness permeates across all of Latin America, and colorism too. Once you get to the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean Islands, there's colorism there too. There's a colorism hierarchy where lighter-skinned people seem to be doing better. They're in positions of power, et cetera. Also, the colonial weapon was created within each of us—a little colonizer that reinforces colonialism within us. They’ll say things like: “Don't be out in the sun too much. Don't get too dark,” you know? “Straighten your hair out or comb that head. You look like a maniac.” So there's this constant. Whether it's subtle or overt. Subconscious or whatever, this negativity around African-ness and African things. We have internalized that as African descended people on this side of the world. The first question for me is “why is black always bad?” Like, I don't understand. Why is that a thing? Why is this such a negative? That's where that came from: exploring the things that helped me recognize that it's not a negative.

I examined the black experience in North America, in the United States. The way that people want to shut down and silence the African American experience. African Americans experience racism and racist violence, and all of these things. That was a parallel mirror. A mirror to our experiences as Afro-Latinx. One of the things that I always like to say is that– I think I said this in the essay– is that the African American experience has given me a blueprint from which to analyze the rest of the marginalized communities in America. We differentiate through language or different cultural norms, etc. But that's helped me examine that experience. In the Latin American community, there is a bias against the African American community. Again, nothing is a hundred percent of the time, but we do know it exists. Once you can overcome that, you realize that that bias exists, and you're like, okay, this is bullshit. And then you begin to examine the African American experience very closely, and you see the parallels.

You can ignore the Afro-Latinx experience at your own peril. If you look at the African American experience and you don't see it in the Afro-Latinx experience, then you're ignoring it at your own peril. It's willful ignorance. That's where the idea for the essay came about, almost as a sarcastic response, because it's almost like a “how-to” or a guide. Now that you realize you're black. Great. Right? Here we go. Ready?

So it's a little bit of that because there was also this writer. Her name is Amanda Alcantara. She said that there's a kind of gamification that goes on with appropriating African American culture and appropriating African American things. And I'm like, yeah, we don't have to do that. Because in the same way that African Americans have given the United States its musical identity, its spiritual identity, its fashion identity, or anything that brings along any street cred, and it all comes from the African American community. In the same way, we have done this in Latin America. The national dishes were all slave dishes that were created and consumed in Latin America. Then there’s the music. When you think about Cuban songs, when you think about salsa, meringue, and bachata, these are all musical forms created by enslaved Africans in Latin America. During colonialism, the society would not acknowledge the music publicly, but would listen to it privately in secret parties, and then hire the workers and the “help,” who were Black, to perform. The parallels are really fascinating. We also have this obsession with, “Oh, let's go to Europe. Oh, let's go to Paris. Let's go to this.” Instead, what about reconnecting with our African ancestry, visiting the continent of Africa, and learning about those nations? Where our ancestors came from. And really going and viewing Africanness and all of its cultural richness as part of our legacy, too. I think that's important because we, Latinx Americans, are conditioned to view Europeanism and whiteness as “it.” Even in South and Central America, which has large indigenous populations, this term “Mestizo” exists, and it erases indigenous identity and indigenous populations and creates a proximity to Europe and whiteness. That then pushes Afro-identities and pushes indigenous people down to the bottom. You know, Tanya Katerí Hernández has wonderful books that break this stuff down, how Afro and indigenous people are treated in Latin American countries, and how there's a hierarchy there. So that essay was born out of those frustrations.

Then also, something that I really attempted to do with the book is to show I’m not the only person writing about this stuff. Not only do I want to include sources, I'm going to cite those sources, and I'm going to point people to those other writers at work, because we are collectively speaking or writing an experience. We need to build each other up. We need to signal to other people, “Hey, look, there's more of us doing this.” Go read this person. Here's a quote from something they wrote. Maybe this is the path along which things open up for you. Maybe my work is just the first step. If I can make it a little easier, then I want to do that as well.

AR: Yeah, and I think you do a great job, as you said, of pointing to other writers who are addressing these issues and showing that you're not alone in feeling these feelings while also getting people to be more comfortable accepting their blackness. You talk about people wanting to emulate the culture of European countries, like Spain, as opposed to embracing indigenous roots or Africanness. So there is an ideation of Europe, and you bring up this quote on page 15 in the essay: “So you're Afro-Latinx: Now What?” I put a star next to the quote and underlined it, and you even bolded it. You were quoting from Everyday Feminism—Alan Pelaez Lopez's article.

RG: I believe that they bolded it in their article, and I wanted to honor that and bold it also here.

AR: It says, “If you're reading this, I hope you understand that being confused is not your fault. That having questions is okay, and then that you are not the first to learn to accept your full black self and your full Latinx self.” I wanted to ask you about a moment where you internalized that saying, or in other words, that you, upon reflection, thought back and were like, “Yeah, you know what? I am going to accept my blackness.”

RG: Absolutely. I get asked this question a lot. It was a culmination of moments. It's almost like this tidal wave that is building and building and building. I always say I had the distinct honor of being born in 1975 and coming up in the eighties and nineties with the explosion of hip-hop. Between my journeys from New York City to New Jersey and then back and forth as a teenager, imbibing the hip-hop culture in New York. I say it's an honor and a pleasure because that early music was so proud to be black, was so proud to be Puerto Rican, was so proud to be Caribbean. A lot of people don't know it was African Americans and also Caribbeans. You know, people from Trinidad and Jamaica who had immigrated with their parents to the US and were in the Bronx and everywhere else. Early African American traditions that came to the north from the south really made hip-hop what it is. I was such a huge student of hip-hop. You know, like a disciple of hip-hop. I still am of that original hip-hop idea. Through that music, you were also being educated on your blackness. Through all the different movements that have been popping up, you know? Whether it was the Five Percenters, whether it was the Nation of Islam on the corner with The Final Call, right? Then there was KRS-One, who was teaching about the African diaspora through songs like “You Must Learn.” I was like, but those are the Americans he's talking about. Those seeds were planted.

Once you figure out that they're sampling songs from back in the day and meshing them into this new music, then you start hearing merengues and salsas differently. Now you're hearing those African drums in those seventies salsa songs: those Willie Colón, Fania All-Stars, and Celia Cruz, and you're like, “Yo, that's African!” These are all seeds that then begin to germinate. As you have experiences, like me having experiences with police brutality, me having experiences with racist teachers in school, me having experience with family members saying out of pocket shit. All of that. It's like a tidal wave that's building, and then eventually you just be like, all right, I get it. You read books, you talk to people, you go to places, and you hear things, and you watch certain films or whatever it might be.

You know, something that always struck me as I was watching Do the Right Thing when I was younger. There's a scene where Radio Raheem is walking, and he’s got the boombox, and the Puerto Rican brothers are on the porch, and they're playing the salsa, and they have a competition. Who can play the music louder? And Radio Raheem wins, and he walks away, and they're like, wow. Anyway, the shit goes down at the end of the movie, and it struck me. It's like, man, all those people are in that hot box because of colonialism. All of those people are in that position, and whether they realize it or not, whether they understand it or not, they're in there for that reason. They have so much more in common than they do that separates them. Everybody's fighting for their corner of survival, and that's what colonialism does. There was a lot of Black and Latino solidarity in the Bronx and in certain neighborhoods of Harlem. In those early days, where there were conversations between both communities, and then as West Indians started to come in. There was a lot of work done to show the intersections. If you know how to look and find it. One thing leads you to another thing, it leads you to another thing. It leads you to another thing until finally you have this enlightenment. Or this awakening if you're lucky.

AR: If you’re lucky for sure. So, one thing you mentioned was ideation of these European countries, and you actually talked about your experience when you and your family traveled to Spain. You were on this airplane, you were speaking Spanish to the flight attendant, and they were kind of confused. They were thrown off. So, during this essay, you talk about that feeling, like feeling like a fraud, and how they were surprised you spoke Spanish at all. But you also talk a lot about language and how people utilize the language of the oppressors to oppress others. I really like this connection that you made between language, race, and identity. And so I want to ask if you can elaborate on that time on the plane, and also to hear more about this idea of language as a tool to oppress others, and what we can perhaps do to resist that.

RG: Yeah, definitely. I'll give myself a slap on the wrist because I wanted to—I've been wanting to dive deeper into this scholar who’s Caribbean, and his name escapes me right now. I think he was Cuban, and he would talk about wanting to create a new language for people of the diaspora, or people from formerly colonized places, a kind of creole, if you will. To be able to get away from these colonial languages, from English, Spanish, and French. And I agree with them because something that always annoys me, to this day, is if I go to a supermarket or a store, or—as a matter of fact, I'll give you a very specific example. We were throwing a birthday dinner for one of our teachers, and the restaurant had two parts. One part was a place where you could go sit down, eat your dinner, and across the street, it was like a bar and a dance floor or whatever. So I went into the wrong place, and I was asking, okay, where is the right place? The bartender did not know English, so I spoke to her in Spanish, and she did not want to reply to me in Spanish. She didn't want to acknowledge the fact that I spoke Spanish perfectly well, and I could talk to her. Then a man came over because he saw what was happening, and he replied to me in Spanish, and he looked at her like, “Don't you understand? He's talking to you in Spanish?” And I was like, “I don't know. I said the same thing.” So he told me where to go, and I went across the street. And this has happened to me before in many different moments where I'm like, okay, this person doesn't know English, so I talk to them in Spanish. I know Spanish, and yet they refuse to talk. But then there are also these moments where people who speak Spanish want to speak in Spanish in front of people who do not speak Spanish, and in my experience, they have predominantly done it in front of Black people, African Americans, or people of other Afro diasporas.

And so I'm like, if only you knew, right? Like what it was like when you're trying to talk to somebody in Spanish because you are a Spanish speaker, and they don't want to acknowledge you because you're Black and you're speaking Spanish as a way to almost hate you. I find it interesting that we use language in the Latinx diaspora as a way to criticize other Spanish-speaking nations. Dominicans always get made fun of for the way we speak Spanish. And certain people from Latin America think their Spanish is the best. And we're having this competition to see who can speak it the best. The only people who speak Spanish, the perfect way it should be spoken, are the Spaniards in Spain. It's their way. We have done what we have done with it through time. Tried to make it our own, et cetera. I guess I cannot really wrap my head around why we're so proud to speak Spanish. Like I just can't. In the same way, I guess I don't understand, you know, why we're so proud to speak English. We only speak it because of a particular set of circumstances. We have to speak the language. Well, we have to move through society. We write in these languages because we're writers. I get it. We have a love of language, but it's not to say that I'm in love with these languages. I'm trying to learn Haitian Creole. You wanna talk about taking a language and making it something completely different? You know, that your French oppressors cannot figure out? That's what I'm talking about.

In the essay, I point to all of those things because as they're happening, they are these wild moments where I'm just like, okay, this is crazy. Like, I got to write this down. When I was there in Tenerife, we met this really wonderful cab driver who had been born and raised in Tenerife. He had ideas about what he called Peninsulares, which I guess means Spanish mainlanders, and that there's a distinct difference. He said to me, Don't ask one of them for directions because they will purposely mislead you. They do this to tourists. He said that they do this to Black tourists, too, so be careful. It was interesting because even though he was of Spanish descent, he told me that people from Tenerife, a lot of them, consider themselves Guanches. Guanches was the name of the indigenous people of Tenerife who were all but annihilated by the Spanish. But then the peasant class that was there, the Spanish peasant class that was there, made it their home and took that name on for themselves. In his mind, they are different from mainland Spanish people. And so as we were in the airport leaving, we're in Madrid, we asked somebody for directions to the terminal, and they gave us the wrong directions. They were sending us to the complete other end of the airport.

I looked at my wife at that time, and I said, “You remember what the cab driver said? And she was like, “Yes, yes. Oh my God.” We had to ask someone else and said, “Yeah, we asked someone, they gave us the wrong directions,” and she was so apologetic. But it was just crazy that that happened. It was a very surreal trip, and that's why I chose to write about it because I was like, I'm not being paranoid. I'm seeing this, and everybody on the trip could confirm it. And I thought, “Okay, good. It's not just me.”

AR: I think that's a powerful role that writing has—to basically make those moments more visible, and to have people be able to connect to those moments. Kind of like what we were talking about before, to be able to say: I'm not alone in this. Like I'm not crazy. This is something that has happened, and it makes us more aware of those oppressive powers or these small microaggressions that we experience on a day-to-day basis.

I appreciated you writing about that. Now I want to shift to talk about the connections within this collection. Like I said before, you talk about themes of racism, toxic masculinity, depression, suicide, and traveling shows up in these topics in different ways. Like this idea of being free and traveling freely, and so you discuss travel in reference to Anthony Bourdain. You share your experiences traveling, and you talk about people who are able to travel or not due to socioeconomic circumstances. I'm very interested to hear you talk about the different connections that you made while putting this essay collection together and how you sort of landed on this idea of traveling freely.

RG: So the book is broken down into two parts. “The Diaspora” and “This is America.” So already we're traveling through two different experiences. The experiences of being not just of the African diaspora, but also of a Dominican diaspora, of a Latinx diaspora, or an Afro-Latinx diaspora. Experiences with being racialized, but also traveling through poverty, also traveling through society's own isms and phobias. Through class, and then traveling through identity and how identity is not essentialism. It's anti-essentialism. That means that many things are true at one time, and what colonialism wants to do is prevent us from moving freely through our lives and through who we are. That became the title for the title essay because it was a business trip. I was traveling, but then I also began to see how Baltimore, at that time that I was there, was this microcosm for so much of what was happening all across America. Only through moving from where I was comfortable—from what I know to what I didn't know was I able to see that.

Then also the psychological side of it, I think, with Bourdain and that essay. That essay actually came later, and it managed to make it into the book. But what can I say about this man? He wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. He had his flaws, he had his blind spots, we know, but he was moving to the world in a kind of way where he wanted to show the world to people, and he wanted to show people how other people were moving through the world, and that's why I decided to kind of close the essay with him and his experience because most of us salivate at the idea of going to the places he went, eating the foods he ate, meeting and talking to the people he spoke to. But somehow that was not enough. Somehow all that physical travel didn't necessarily equate to a spiritual movement, a spiritual, or even emotional travel. I think that they all intersect, and they intersect in a messy way. I'm not trying to present some neat little puzzle. I'm trying to show how messy it all is. I feel that this is such a relevant book in the moment we're living in right now. I feel that it's so relevant based on the world we are seeing right now. You know, sometimes that makes me sad because I'm like, “Man, it is so messy out here right now. Like it is wild out here right now.” But then at the same time, I'm like, I just feel grateful that I was able to think about these things, explore these things, and write these things. That the book is out there, and that maybe somebody will throw it in their book bag, travel with it, and when they sit down, read an essay, go through it. They’ll look at the world and understand that there are no neat, folded corners. There are nice, rounded edges. You have to keep smoothing and working and smoothing and working to learn more, to see more, and understand more. The idea of movement and the idea of change are at the heart of everything I'm talking about. Of going from this place of understanding, from this place of recognition, to another level of understanding and recognition. Moving from one layer of identity and then finding where another layer intersects. Case in point: I did my 23 and me. I did my African ancestry, and very obviously, I'm like 70% African, and I know exactly where from and everything, but guess what? I’m also 30% Spanish, but also Italian, of all things, indigenous ancestry from the island of Puerto Rico, somehow, and also Ashkenazi Jewish. So it's like, wow. I have to move and understand those identities as well. We are not fixed; we are traveling, we are moving beings. When we are static, when we are not moving, that's not necessarily a good thing. I'm a big believer in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. God is change and change is inevitable, and so we are traveling through different phases of our lives, different phases of being and existing, of recognizing who we are and what we are. So that's why it's so central to the book, because life is so much about moving, traveling from here to there, whether it's physically, geographically, or whether it is ideological or in our understanding of our own selves.

AR: I got chills from that answer. That was beautiful. Thank you. It's all so very true, and I can tell you've done a lot of introspection and thinking about the intersections of these different oppressions and everything like that. Thank you for writing this book and sharing a little bit of your story with me through this interview.

Roberto Carlos Garcia writes poetry and prose about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-Diasporic experience. His work has been published widely in places like Poetry Magazine, NACLA, Poets & Writers, The Root, and others. Garcia is a 2023 New Jersey State Council of the Arts Poetry Fellow and the author of five books. Four poetry collections: Melancolía (Cervena Barva Press, 2016), black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric (Willow Books, 2018), [Elegies](Flower Song Press, 2020), What Can I Tell You: Selected Poems (Flower Song Press, 2022), and one essay collection, Traveling Freely, (Curbstone Books / Northwestern University Press 2024). Garcia is the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit.

Alex Rivera is an MFA student studying poetry at the University of South Florida. His work has previously appeared in Creative Loafing-Tampa, the Florida Humanities Institute, and the Los Angeles Review. His poetry explores topics of masculinity, migration, and marginalization through the lens of family relationships.