The Seattle Times

Living: Sunday, November 12, 2000

Black Hispanics resist color labels

Maria T. Padilla

The Orlando Sentinel

ORLANDO - Miguel Lanzo moved from Puerto Rico to Boston in 1974, ill-prepared for the school desegregation strife that tore that city apart.

As a black Puerto Rican, Lanzo hadn't witnessed such open racial conflict on the island. Boston's racial tensions were a different story.

"The whites were on one side, and blacks were on the other. It was dangerous to walk down the streets. I felt that something could happen to us," said Lanzo, who left Boston in 1988 for Orlando.

Julio Bueno, a black Dominican, did not experience that degree of racial tension. But he found the ease with which he mingled with different races in his home country could get him in trouble here.

He didn't realize that some black people in this country would interpret his actions as meaning he wasn't "black" enough.

"They would ask why I have so many white friends. I said that, for me, it's not difficult to make friends. I don't see a big difference," said Bueno, who in 1988 moved to Orlando.

There are an estimated 23,000 black Hispanics in central Florida, and more than 170,000 in all of Florida. And like their counterparts nationwide, many of them find racial boundaries difficult to navigate in this country, where color lines can be rigid. In the Spanish-speaking world, where the populations are more racially mixed, color is a much more fluid concept than it is in the United States.

In many Caribbean and Latin American countries, for example, 50

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