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Proyecto Más Color: Young Afro-Latinas put Latino media on notice

Two young Honduran Afro-Latinas, Victoria and Sophia Arzú, started Proyecto Más Color as a challenge to the colorism evinced in programming and focus of the…

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Two young Honduran Afro-Latinas, Victoria and Sophia Arzú, started Proyecto Más Color as a challenge to the colorism evinced in programming and focus of the Latino media, most markedly in the two Spanish-language networks in the United States, Univisión and Telemundo, and they've done it via the media best beloved by their generation: Youtube.

The sisters have created a series of videos in which they document not only the erasure felt by young Afro-Latinos from Honduras, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but also their efforts in directly challenging the media giants about programming that barely represents mestizo Latinos and completely erases Afro-Latinos. 

By YouTube standards the videos are only modest successes, but after the first was originally posted in July 2014, the sisters' project garnered the attention of NBC, Cosmo for Latinas, and prompted a multi-part series of articles in La Opinion. The Change.org petition they started as they posted their first video has languished, however, standing at half of their goal: 500 signatories as of December 2014.

The Arzús' efforts to address the erasure of Afro-Latinos fits within a growing body of creative and critical work undertaken by Afro-Latinas like Dash Harris (whose Negro: A Docu-series about Latino Identity was screened at Taller Puertorriqueño in Philadelphia in 2013) and Hip Hop activist and journalist Rosa Clemente, as well as the Twitter activism of Bad Dominicana and blogdivaStill the Proyecto Más Color videos have a style and energy of their own, with the young millennial's confidence in the power of a socially networked world to effect change and find justice. 

 

 

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