UC Santa Barbara

With the rise in visibility of AfroLatinidad and the global reach of the Black Lives Matter movement, non-Black Latinxs have increasingly considered anti-Blackness as an inter- and intra-community issue. Accordingly, attention has been placed on the subtle ways in which anti-Blackness within Latinidad permeates the very discourses that construct a Latinx identity as Brown, resulting in ideologies that displace AfroLatinidad and render all Latinxs as “people of color” who cannot contribute to anti-Blackness. This thesis highlights counter discourses of Blackness and Latinidad that were redistributed by a Chicanx/Latinx podcast called the Bitter Brown Femmes (BBF). Specifically, I focus on episode 11 where hosts Cassandra and Ruben discuss a controversy surrounding a tweet that actress Gina Rodriguez posted after the trailer release of the film Black Panther. I begin with an analysis of the outrage that Rodriguez’s tweet erupted, linking it to the conceptual mutual exclusion of Blackness and Latinidad. I continue with an analysis of one of Rodriguez’s interviews in which she defends herself against being anti-Black by evoking discourses of mestizaje (racial mixture in Latin America), linking it to the denial of anti-Black inclusivity. I finish with a juxtaposition of how the BBF podcast uses their platform to deconstruct “subtle” (i.e., non-overt or seemingly non-violent) forms of anti-Blackness via community-internal discussions, using two major strategies that I call “highlighting the micro” and “collecting (y)our people”. In doing so, I highlight various discursive strategies that the hosts rely upon to move towards productive allyship for Black communities or what I title, Black accompaniment which requires the renegotiation of ideologies surrounding Latinidad.