Detangling Beauty, Curly Hair, and Race: (Re)Interpreting Beauty and Latinx Racial Identities through Natural Hair Narratives

The natural hair movement aims to encourage people from the Black diaspora to embrace their natural afro-textured hair, which has facilitated a cultural change in the United States. This article asks how Dominican and Dominican-American women in New York City interpret the racialized and gendered discourse through narratives about their hair. Dominican racial identity has historically relied on a rhetoric of Indo-Hispanicity (“brownness”) for its simultaneous proximity to whiteness and distance from Blackness. However, afro-textured hair is becoming more popular among Dominicans in the Dominican Republic and the United States. This article utilizes hair as a cultural tool to trace the racialized and gendered experiences among Dominican women in New York City. Through 49 interviews of Dominican women with curly or natural hair about their “natural hair journey” or personal hair narratives, this article explores how they negotiate their Black and Latinx racial identities and gendered expectations of beauty. This article finds Dominican women use their natural hair journeys to demonstrate Ambivalence or Embracement for their natural hair textures that tie to their Latinx or Afro-Latinx identities. This article applies Du Boisian theory of racialized subjectivity to Latinx people to make a critical theoretical intervention in Latinx sociology to include Afro-Latinx perspectives.