The Bronx Documentary Centre’s Third Annual Latin American Foto Festival (LAFF) brings together artists from across the Western Hemisphere, among them Adriana Parrilla, Luján Agusti, Adriana Loureiro Fernández, and Luisa Dörr.
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For as long as Afro-Puerto Rican photographer Adriana Parrilla can remember, she was called “trigueña” – a word to describe someone who is light-skin Black or mixed-race to distinguish them from someone who was “Negro”, or explicitly Black.
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“It was so common to hear this word that it was almost as if they were calling me by name. ‘Trigueña’ was always used by people as a euphemism, to make me feel better by not calling me ‘Black’ because that had a negative connotation. They only called me ‘Black’ when they intended to hurt me.”
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For Parrilla, growing up, her relationship to her African heritage had been a mystery. “I had thousands of questions about my racial identity, but I never dared to seek some answers,” she says. “My identity was in limbo, a mixture of many elements that I preferred not to examine. Like many Puerto Ricans, I accepted my identity as ‘in-between’ but never as Black.”
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