How Afro-Latina Filmmakers Are Redefining Latinidad in Film

Afro-Latinas in media and entertainment are taking up space on the world’s biggest stages, shattering the monolithic, white-centric caricature of Latinas that has long dominated screens. For decades, mainstream media offered a narrow definition of what Latines looked like. One that erased Blackness and presented a one dimensional figure such as the “spicy” love interest or the wise maid. These days, a new generation of Afro-Latina filmmakers are pushing back, not by asking for a seat at the table, but by building their own. They are fighting for authentic representation, ensuring the next generation sees a fuller, more truthful reflection of itself.

This is why the pioneering work of filmmakers like Cynthia Garcia Williams and Eunice Levis is so essential. They are decorated, groundbreaking directors who remain consistently overlooked in mainstream Latino film spaces, precisely because their work bravely centers authentic Afrolatino narratives. These mujeres are rebelliously creating their own spaces, ensuring the Black roots and branches of the Latino experience are seen and celebrated.

For Garcia Williams, this mission is deeply personal. Her directorial debut, Dukkha, based on her journey to sobriety, was created through the Women of Color Filmmakers Directors Lab and earned multiple awards. She went on to write and direct Bilongo, an Afro-Cuban folk tale, and The Bible Thumper and The Bruja, a comedic exploration of belief, power, and vulnerability. In 2024, her supernatural short Legend of El Cucuy, developed through the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival Inclusion Fellowship sponsored by Netflix, premiered at Slamdance. Her first feature film, a romcom We’re Not Married, follows two troubled couples that realize they were never legally married after 10 years and have to decide to stay married or go their separate ways is streaming on Tubi right now.

The 53-year-old writer and director, who defines herself as “Gen X, straight out of the Fania and disco era,” grew up between her Mexican father’s culture and being raised by her Afro-Cuban grandmother, navigating a confusing landscape of identity and race in Latine spaces growing up in Los Angeles.

“I’d want to hang out with [Mexican] girls who were speaking Spanish and they would call me the N-word,” she tells HipLatina. This lack of reflection and the fragmented stories of her lineage led her to write Para Tu Altar, a script inspired by her relationship with her Afro-Cuban grandmother and her great-grandmother, a well known Santera in Matanzas, Cuba.

“That script really deals a lot with colorism and the class system in Cuba and how that hasn’t gone away,” Garcia Williams explains. She is saving this project for the right time and talent as it’s close to her heart. Currently, she is finishing a new script, Coquito and Chaos, which follows four friends who reunite in Puerto Rico for a holiday wedding, only for secrets, exes, and unfinished business to resurface when a storm hits.

While Williams draws power from exploring ancestry and history, Dominican American filmmaker and writer Eunice Levis uses her heritage to build new futures. Levis, a writer/director, is considered a visionary force who uses sci-fi and technology to explore the futures of Latin American and Afro-Caribbean communities. She is currently in development on her feature film Humano, a bilingual dark sci-fi thriller set in a near-future Caribbean powered by human/artificial intelligence fusion, where a disabled young woman risks everything to free her mother from the system that is turning humanity into machinery. She is best known for her short film Ro & the Stardust, which won Best Narrative Short at Reel Sisters of the Diaspora qualifying it for 2024 Oscar consideration, and is now streaming on Netflix.

This genre shift is meaningful because it claims space for Black people in the future, a realm where the community has often been excluded. “One of my personal mantras is we belong everywhere and I truly believe that,” Levis tells HipLatina. “I am imagining a future in the Caribbean that is cyberpunk.”

But for Levis, this isn’t just about sci-fi aesthetics but real-world power and ownership in the tech industry. She sees a dangerous “technological caste system” forming and issues a powerful warning and call to action. “If people of color are developing and keeping up these technologies, then we are the owners of these technologies,” Levis explains. “And I think that we’re not encouraged because of the barriers. We’re not encouraged to be developers. We’re encouraged to be users… There’s a higher cost to not knowing.” Her work is a direct challenge to this colonial dynamic, using AI and tech as tools for liberation and world-building, ensuring Afrolatinas help shape the future, rather than be exploited by it.

The fight for authentic representation on screen begins behind the camera. The presence of Afro-Latina creators in writers’ rooms and director’s chairs is crucial to breaking stereotypes within Latine spaces as well as outside our cultural walls. But this push for authenticity is often met with resistance, even from within the Latine community, whether it’s intentional or due to ignorance.

Levis recounts how she received a note from a Central American executive questioning why a character called her grandmother “mama” instead of “abuela.”

“I really had a pushback on keeping [the character] calling her grandmother mama because that’s just culturally what we do,” Levis says. “What they were asking me to do was change a cultural nuance so that it could be more universal… And that is not why I make my art.”

This pressure to assimilate, even in Latine-centric spaces, is a constant battle Afro-Latinas face. In the Dominican Republic, it’s normal for the matriarch of the family to be called “mama” by everyone, because she is, in essence, everyone’s mother. Other common nicknames include “wela,” a shorthand for abuela. However, this cultural nuance isn’t standard across Latina America but specific to the Spanish Caribbean due to the stronger African cultural retention in these areas.

This framework is illustrated by Afro-Puerto Rican scholar Dr. Marta Moreno Vega in her book, The Altar of My Soul: The Living Traditions of Santería. She details the Yoruba-derived concept of the ilé meaning ‘house’ which refers not to a physical building but to a spiritual family. At the head of this spiritual family is the priestess, the Iyalocha or Iya, whom every member calls ‘mother.’ This practice of extending the title ‘Iya’ (Mother) to a community matriarch, Vega shows, is a direct transfer of a West African kinship structure to the Caribbean.

The secular practice of calling a family matriarch ‘mama’ is a widespread, everyday expression of this same cultural logic. Despite all this historic momentum, these creatives face systemic obstacles due to anti-Blackness in Latine spaces in Hollywood. Levis notes that while she’s found community among African-American peers and mentors, the non-Black Latine community “has not been welcoming to me… I feel like I am the cousin that they don’t really want.” This othering also often extends to the burden of representation, where Afro-Latina creators are expected to be the sole voice for an entire diverse community.

While Levis notes the pressure is often felt through the “obvious optics” of being “the only person of color” in a room, Williams feels it more directly. “Yeah, that pressure is real. When you’re a creator of color, people sometimes expect you to represent an entire community, like your work must speak for everyone,” Williams says. “But honestly, I can’t speak for millions of people… What I can do is tell the truth from where I stand.” This othering appears in Latino creative industries when Afrolatinas are tokenized as the sole voice for Blackness, burdened with educating others on racism while their non-Black peers are seen as representing universal Latino experiences. Their individuality is erased as they are expected to be community spokespeople, trauma storytellers, authenticity validators etc.

Additionally, the battle for authentic casting, where colorism persists, is tireless. Williams admits she’s had to consciously learn to fight for a broader range of skin tones and hair textures in her work, though she credits supportive producers. For her, the fight is internal. She says, “It’s about holding myself accountable to show the full spectrum of who we are… Representation isn’t just about inclusion for the sake of it; it’s about honesty.”

We are in the beginnings of an Afro-Latine Arts Renaissance and the movement is undeniable. With Dominicana Zoe Saldaña normalizing Afro-Latina talent globally from the Oscars to the Cannes Film Festival, Liza Colón-Zayas, who is of Puerto Rican descent, becoming the first Latina to win an Emmy in the Comedic supporting actress category and Afro-Boricua MJ Rodriguez being the first transwoman to win a Golden Globe, Afro-Latinas are taking up space. For Levis, a pivotal seed was planted when she met Maria Perez-Brown, the creator of the groundbreaking Nickelodeon show Taina about a Puerto Rican girl, and the culturally significant Gullah Gullah Island series which ran on Nick Jr. for four seasons.

The latter was the first national children’s show to center family in based on the rich Gullah Geechee culture and history of the Sea Islands, South Carolina, while Taina was one of the first shows on a major national network to center an authentic and aspirational portrayal of a Latine family. Gullah Gullah Island (1994-1998) was the first national children’s series on a major network to feature an African American family as its central cast, running for four seasons and bringing South Carolina’s Gullah Geechee culture to a national children’s audience. Perez-Brown followed this with Taina (2001-2002), one of the first two Nickelodeon series to star a Latina lead.

The show, which ran for 26 episodes, presented a nuanced portrait of a Puerto Rican family, a narrative still rare on mainstream television at the time. Its existence alongside another show she executive produced, The Brothers García, which followed a Mexican-American family in San Antonio, Texas, was itself a powerful statement. By helming these two distinct projects, Perez-Brown demonstrated a profound understanding of the fullness of Latinidad, showcasing the diversity within the Latine community itself and proving that there was no single, monolithic Latine story to tell.

“Maria is a Black Puerto Rican… When I met her, it changed my life because I was like, we could be on TV,” Levis shares. “I want to be that seed to someone else. I really do. I feel like it’s the only way that we’re going to break it”.

This is the core of the work. So Afro-Latines can be seen and heard. Concrete successes are piling up, but more importantly, Afro-Latina creatives are focusing on sustainability mentorship, collectives, and creating their own production companies to maintain creative control. They are building an ecosystem that doesn’t rely on the permission of traditional gatekeepers. The “why” behind this fight is profound. It’s about freedom. So Afro-Latines don’t feel like they need to shrink to fit in. It’s so a young, dark-skinned Dominican girl can see herself as a hero, a scientist, or a space explorer, validating her existence and expanding her sense of possibility.

The work of these creatives is not a passing trend but a necessary and powerful correction to the media landscape and a move towards progress. They are authentically representing the nuances of the Black Latine experience both in the U.S. and Latin America. From Garcia Williams honoring her ancestors to Levis coding new futures, these Latinas are ensuring that the rich Black Latine experience is finally seen in all its glory. They aren’t just asking for a place in the future, but building it, proving that the future of storytelling is not just Latina, its Black.

Nydia Simone is a NY-based storyteller and founder of Blactina Media.