BLACKstream

by Leslie A. Fields-Cruz

When I was a little girl growing up in the 70s in Southern California, I remember my parents talking about a singer named Celia Cruz.  I can’t remember the context in which her name came up, but I remember that we were all sitting around watching TV and her image flashed across the screen and she was singing in Spanish.  So, you might ask what’s so significant about that? Well for a little black girl growing up in a slowly, and I mean slowly integrating Southern California, the image of a black woman singing in Spanish on television bonded her to me for life.  Clearly this bond went beyond cultural and linguistic lines.  She was Cuban, I was American, she spoke Spanish, I spoke English.  But what was most important was that she was female and she LOOKED like me, as far as I was concerned that was enough.

Fast forward thirty some odd years later, we share the same last name, it’s the first decade of the 21^st Century, and with a host of interactions and experiences to help me better understand how race, culture, gender and language affect the human condition, I still claim Celia Cruz as one of my own.  She represents the early stages of what is now a rapidly diversifying African American demographic.

African Americans of the 21^st Century hail from across the globe. We are from Jamaica, Kenya, Cuba, UK, Ghana, South Africa, Brazil, Trinidad-Tobago, Nigeria, and, of course, the United States. We speak English, Spanish, Creole, Portuguese, and French. We eat collard greens, arroz con pollo, jerk chicken, gumbo, and goat pepper stew.   We don’t always connect as a community as often as we should, but when a person such as Celia Cruz, a musical icon who’s work as an artist who transcended racial, cultural, and linguistic boundaries, it behooves us to come together as members of today’s diverse African American community to celebrate her. Thus, it is with pleasure that the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC) in partnership with Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB) present a free screening of Celia The Queen at the Lehman Center for Performing Arts on October 9, at 7pm.