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Afro-LatinX Experience Team / Literature-Literatura / SPEL Stories

“Finding La Negrita,” a new novel inspired by real life history of powerful Afro Latinas

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Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, author of the new novel, “Finding La Negrita,” compares her narrative about powerful African women living in colonial Costa Rica to “The Woman King,” the 2022 movie directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. Viola Davis starred in the film as Nanisca, the leader of the Agojie, an all-female army of the West African kingdom of Dahomey. Both Gordon-Chipembere’s book and Prince-Bythewood’s movie are about enslavement in colonial-era Africa and the Americas. 

“‘The Woman King’ didn’t receive any Oscar nominations, snubbed because a lot of people didn’t understand the complexity of the slavery system in the West Coast of Africa,” says Gordon-Chipembere. “It was said that the movie glorified the Africans who sold slaves to the Europeans. But they don’t understand that eventually, those people who sold their prisoners of war or other people into slavery to the Europeans ended up enslaved themselves.”

Finding a publisher for Gordon-Chipembere’s book wasn’t an easy task. People didn’t care about slavery in Costa Rica, she says, and how it intertwined with the story of “La Negrita,” the Black Madonna, the religious symbol of the country whose story the novel incorporates. She published her book with Jaded Ibis Press in September of last year. Little by little, she has been working with a public relations team and collaborating in spaces in Afro-Latinx publications and projects, such as AfroLatinx Travel and Afrolatin@ Forum. 

Cover of the novel Finding La Negrita on open books

Born in New York to a Costa Rican mother and a Panamanian father, Gordon-Chipembere considers herself Afro-Caribbean.

“I’m the darkest person in my family. My mother looked very indigenous. My brother and sister could pass as White-presenting Latinos,” says Gordon. “Growing up in New York, I would walk with my mother, and people thought she had adopted me. We looked the same, but people can’t get past race,” she says. “This book is part of a conversation about Afro-Caribbeans. There were enslaved people in Costa Rica who built so much of its foundation, and yet this country does not recognize their legacies.”

Today Gordon-Chipembere is a Latin American and Caribbean Studies professor in Long Island University’s (LIU) Global Studies program. While LIU is based in New York state, she teaches at the LIU campus in Heredia, Costa Rica, on the northern outskirts of the country’s capital, San José.

Gordon-Chipembere has a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Africa. She wrote her dissertation on Sarah Baartman, “an enslaved Khoisan woman in the early 19th century who was taken to Europe and made to work in ‘freak shows,’” says Gordon-Chipembere. Her dissertation was later included in the anthology “Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman,” which she also edited. It was published in 2011 by Springer Press.

Though Gordon says she didn’t have Baartman in mind when she started writing “Finding la Negrita” in 2016, she saw a parallel between enslavement and the representation of Black women worldwide. She wanted to push back disempowering stereotypes. 

“When you write about slavery rebellions, you usually think about men. [But] Sarah Baartman, the ‘Woman King’ warriors, and the characters in ‘Finding La Negrita’ are examples of resistance and agency we carry out.” 

Interview with Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

In our interview, Gordon-Chipembere discusses her book, its focus on freedom, and the parallels between colonial and contemporary enslavement through migration fluxes since the 19th century. 

*Click on a question below to read Gordon-Chipembere’s answer.

So for me, I use the term Afro-descendant, or African descendant, as the term to essentially speak of anyone outside of the continent of Africa who’s in the diaspora, somebody of African descent. And so, because I feel like the term “Black” is almost synonymous with “African American,” and specifically in, you know, kind of focused in the United States. And even saying “African American,” we are in the Americas. So I think that using the term “African descendants” is so much broader, right? And it’s how you can be from Brazil, you can be from Chicago, you can be in Costa Rica, you know, but it, essentially, encompasses your experiences as someone in your ancestral line, having come from Africa, and in many cases come through by force, not choice.

My great-grandmother was from Jamaica. And she came to Costa Rica on the Caribbean coast to work for the Northern Railway Company and the United Fruit Company in 1908. So I’m a fourth-generation Costa Rican. But I was born in New York, and then I moved back to Costa Rica nine years ago with my husband and two children. We left that life and came here. 

One of the things I’ve always spoken about to my mother and other family members is this idea that Costa Rica really presents itself [as]. And you see it in the way that tourism is projected; it is sort of the Switzerland of Central America. It’s very White, people understand themselves as White or White-presenting, but they’re all mestizos. I mean, if we all did that Ancestry.com genetic test, we’d be deeply, deeply entrenched in sort of indigenous and African pathways and family lineages. But Costa Rica is also a very wealthy country, right? There’s a very large middle class. People are making a lot of money. So, in many ways, they really understand themselves in relation to España, to Spain, to the motherland. For me, that was always the question, you know? 

I remember sitting and thinking, “Well, how does it work?” Costa Rica had over 200 years of slavery, and there’s no discussion about it. Even when I talked to my mother, who went to the University of Costa Rica, she was like, “No, there was no slavery in Costa Rica.” When I talked to everyday people, they were like, “No, there was no slavery.” It’s not in the textbooks. When you’re studying cívica (civics) here in Costa Rica, you’re not really encountering slavery. Or if it is, it’s a paragraph that says, “Yes, but there were no big numbers. And then everybody sort of blended into the bloodstream. And we’re all this kind of homogeneous people.” I mean, that’s sort of the way that it’s presented. But then I was like, “Well, how does that work?” If we’re not acknowledging this huge Afro presence and legacy, particularly in building the colonial city of Cartago, which was the first capital, how do we sort of erase that? 

But at the same time, 90-something percent of the Catholic population in this country venerates a Black Madonna that is sitting in the Basílica (the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles) today. Like how do they reconcile blackness? That’s really the impetus of my book, you know, I was trying to figure it out. Originally I was thinking about actually writing a historical text. I’m a professor, I’m a scholar of slavery, I’m an Africanist, and I’ve been doing this for a long time. So I originally thought I was gonna write a historical sort of text and go into the archives. 

This book took me seven years to write because I was in the archives for so long, looking up all these documents, but then I realized that I could not … historically there were too many gaps. It was historical fiction that allowed me to really world-build with authentic information about the space and the characters I wanted to develop, particularly the characters of free Blacks who were in Cartago at that time period.

The introduction talks about how you went to church and saw the Black Madonna and had this ecstatic moment.

I was also raised Catholic, and I’m outside of that dimension, and so a deeply spiritual, ancestral person. But one of the things I wanted to do — what was very, very clear in the archive — was how complicit and what a leader the Catholic Church was in the slave trade. The Catholic Church was one of the largest owners of enslaved people during this time period.  It was common practice for the wealthy in their wills to donate slaves or enslaved people to the Church to wash them of their pecados, … their sins. If they didn’t pass on their enslaved person to another person in their family like their property, then they would maybe donate. That’s an authentic practice. 

What we see in the book is that Esmeralda is donated as an enslaved person, as a gift to the Church. Because they follow chattel slavery, essentially, they’re following the belly. So if she had any children, those children would automatically then be property of the Church as well and enslaved. Historians of slavery know that. It’s in a circle, it’s not something that’s widely known or generated as a common everyday fact. I think that there’s some pushback against that information being known, but very clearly, the Catholic Church was able to prosper because of this ownership and because of how invested it was in the slave trade. We know originally it was about enslaving the indigenous. I mean, think about Brazil, right? Then thinking about the Catholics, it was like, “Okay, we’re going to convert the indigenous people. They are no longer heathens and pagans, but we still need this labor because we’re gaining all this wealth from the sugar plantations through this free labor.” 

You wrote: “The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger.” That made me think about the migrant fluxes nowadays, especially to the U.S. and Europe, and seeing the relationships still in place. Also what about contemporary enslavement? For example, I’m from Brazil. We can see in Brazil there are people in slave conditions.”

I guess the book really centers around the idea of freedom, right? How people define freedom, and how freedom is so tenuous. So even thinking about today, thinking even about Syria, thinking about the crossing of the Mediterranean and all these people who are moving through spaces. Right now in Costa Rica, we have so many Venezuelan families and little ones, you know, on the street, and they’re in transit, but they’re literally living under bridges, and they’re begging on the street. It’s just so many children because they’re trying to move to the U.S. But they’re trying to collect enough money so they can get on buses to get to the border, then move into Nicaragua, and then move through. 

When I think about those types of movements, — what inspires people to continue moving and to not stay and to leave situations that are dire or oppressive — it is because they’re aspiring towards freedom. Freedom as how they perceive that something else will give them, something different than the oppression …. That is why people move because the situations are so dire. They also want to imbue that (respect for freedom), in many cases, into their children and their future generations. 

I think it’s the same thing when we’re thinking about the colonial period. When we think about these characters, some of them were free, and some of them were enslaved, but the line between slavery and freedom is so thin. 

In this story, there’s a part where Dakarai tells his daughter, “There’s going to be a slave auction in town. You’re free, you were born free, but the last thing that needs to happen is for you to go into that auction. Because even if you are free, these people could still grab you and then put you into enslavement. So even though you understand yourself as a liberated person, other people have ideas about your body, and they could take you. So don’t put yourself in those spaces.” 

Now we know, obviously, that’s a challenging situation and things didn’t work out in the way that he wanted his daughter to take care of business. But nonetheless, it’s the same about aspiring toward freedom, particularly then and now. But how do you define freedom? As an enslaved person who doesn’t own your body, how do you then define your freedom? And I think those are the questions that I really wanted to figure out in writing this book.

I don’t venerate her in terms of a Catholic, right? Not in that sort of performance, but I understand her as a sacred divine. And as a black, feminine sacred divine, she is part of the ancestral team that I walk with, whether it’s my abuelita, my tía (my grandmother, my aunt). She is part of the team that I call on in my prayers, at my altar for protection, particularly for my children. My son goes to university in Canada; he’s quite far from me. He is my heart walking outside of my body. He’s far from me, so she is definitely someone that I go to daily to ask for protection for my son, to wrap her goodness around him. And so, that is how I understand her: this very spiritual, very feminine motherly presence, but she’s part of a team or a community of spirit energy that is very fluid with me. She’s a part of me every day.

Flyer for Finding La Negrita

*This story has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

– Marco Cerqueira

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