Estudiante

De que parte do Brasil vem você?, the Peruvian Customs Agent inquired cordially in his muddled but intelligible Portuguese shortly after he welcomed me to Lima’s Jorge Chávez International Airport.Expecting to practice his português with me, he inspected my American passport, but upon realizing that I was not Brazilian but rather an African-American that hails from Greensboro, North Carolina helooked at me agape. As he stamped my passport, he explained to me that I was the first African-American that he had met and that my presence contradicted everything that he had believed aboutAmericans and their racial composition.
Although my ethnic background has never been easy to guess, due in large part to my native command of Spanish, the supposition that I was from O Gigante do Sulstruck me like a million bolts of lightning, igniting in me a burning interest in the African presence in Latin America. This encounter, though unanticipated, left an indelible mark on both my socialand academic developments.
My experiences abroad have been stimulating, though always imbued with a strange combination of being able to blend in, while at the same time maintaining my identityas an African-American male who hails from the South. By venturing abroad on a shoestring budget-to Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay-I have been able to transcend my comfort zone, immerse myself inculturally-rich environments and expand my horizons in ways I thought unimaginable. Perhaps more importantly, studying abroad in these countries was transformative because it allowed me to redefine mysense of self and reexamine my “blackness” through a different cultural lens.
Living abroad in Latin America has also taught me not to view it as a single, homogenous entity, but rather as aregion characterized by incalculable diversity. Argentina is as different from Peru as Sweden is from Greece. There is a world of difference between the cosmopolitan societies of Buenos Aires,...