Juliana Odoi used to call herself “Blaxican.”
As an African and Latina, the 19-year-old UF biomedical engineering sophomore said she resisted being siloed into a single identity.
“I was like, ‘No, I’m not just Ghanian. No, I’m not just Mexican. I’m Blaxican. I’m both,’” she said.
It wasn’t until the term “Afro-Latino” became more popular on social media that she finally found a word capturing the identity she resonates with, she said.
For many Afro-Latino students like Odoi at UF, identity lives at the intersection of race, culture and history. At a school where one in five students identifies as Hispanic, on-campus clubs offer meeting places for people with shared cultures, allowing them to explore those blends and meet people with similar upbringings.
Being Afro-Latina, to Odoi, means having “both the struggles of a Hispanic person as well as any Black person.” She said the blend of experiences shapes who she is and how she grows.
Language has been a personal challenge for Odoi, she said, because of its deep cultural meaning. Wanting to connect with her full identity pushed her to learn Spanish and Twi. She can now hold conversations with both sides of her family.
“People were like, ‘Oh, you’re not really African American, you’re [an] African who is in America,’ and yes, I do understand that,” she said. “I understand our cultures are different, but we do face the same mistreatment and the same microaggressions.”
At UF, Odoi has found ways to connect through groups such as the African Student Union and the Mexican American Student Association, including attending their dance sessions.
Participating in these organizations, she said, allows her to foster a sense of combined community. The mixture of both, along with the presence of international students from all parts of the world, has provided space for representation.
As of Fall 2024, a little over 5% of UF students identified as Black and 21% identified as Hispanic or Latino, according to data from Institutional Planning and Research. In Fall 2023, the most recently available data, about 250 international students from Africa were enrolled at the university.
Destiny Gonzalez, a 19-year-old UF animal sciences sophomore, has Puerto Rican heritage and said she identifies as Afro-Latina through her mother’s side of the family. Being the only one in her immediate family born with kinky hair made her realize her African roots, she said.
She said not being able to find much information about her hair growing up made her feel disconnected from that part of her identity. She used to feel more tied to her Hispanic side, but people often questioned her background. It showed her a gap in education on intersectionality, she said.
Intersectionality is a framework for understanding how different aspects of a person’s identity — including race, gender, class and sexuality — overlap and combine to create unique experiences of both privilege and discrimination.
Gonzales said she sometimes struggles with feeling “Hispanic enough” because she wasn’t born in Puerto Rico, and English was her first language. But on her last visit to the island, she realized the country encompasses a blend of cultures and races.
Through UF, she has found a community in student organizations such as the Black Student Union and the Unión de Estudiantes Puertorriqueños Activos.
Gonzales said finding others who share her ethnicity helped her realize that even though the Afro-Latino community at UF is small, it is tightly connected. These groups create events and promote awareness, she said.
She said being Afro-Latina has pushed her to seek information, always wondering, “What are some things I had to grow up doing differently, and why is that?”
A long history
Jairo Baquero-Melo, an assistant professor at UF’s Center for Latin American Studies who is also affiliated with the Center for African Studies, said history ties Afro-Latinos and African Americans together. His work explores the “entangled histories” between the groups.
“It is necessary to include voices from different members and representatives from different sectors,” he said, “… so that those voices of the affected communities [can] be included in different forerooms [and] conversations.”
Shared legacies in colonialism have shaped both groups’ experiences, particularly through slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, he said. Those histories, he added, manifest today in the form of racism and discrimination.
Another shared thread is the Black political movements that have influenced others across the Americas.
Acts of resistance by African Americans in North America have inspired movements across Latin America and the Caribbean, he said. The Harlem Renaissance, for example, served as a catalyst for cultural and intellectual movements for Africans beyond the United States, he said.
Today in the U.S., some paperwork separates race from ethnicity, which lets Afro-Latino people claim both identities, he said.
“This social fight against racism, for example, the right to use public spaces … by Afro-American leaders were an important step for the expansion of rights everywhere around the world.”
Contact Ariana Badra at abadra@alligator.org. Follow her on X @arianavbm.
Ariana is a first-year journalism major and an El Caimán reporter for the Fall of 2025. In her free time, she enjoys reading, spending time with friends and scouring for new songs to play on repeat to an absurd degree.
