Joel Alvarado was 6 years old when his mother pulled him aside and asked him to be discreet as he was getting ready to meet his grandmother in Puerto Rico.
“She made me aware that my grandmother was much darker than my other relatives, especially from her side of the family, and she didn’t want me to say anything out of turn or something about her skin color,” said Alvarado, 50, the executive vice president of the Atlanta-based government relations firm Ohio River South.
“These are my blood relatives, what does that make me?” he recalls thinking.At that moment, Alvarado learned that his grandmother and himself were Black Latinos or Afro-Latinos, a group that historically has faced prejudice within Latino communities in the United States and abroad.
