Latinx Files: Bringing color to black and white squares

Periodically, the Latinx Files will feature a guest writer. This week, we’ve asked De Los contributing columnist Alex Zaragoza to fill in. If you have not subscribed to our weekly newsletter, you can do so here.

Juliana Pache has always loved crossword puzzles. They intersect with her lifelong obsession with language, culture and history, though she says they’ve always felt a bit inaccessible.

“I struggle with them still because some of what [the puzzlemakers] are expecting me to know and what they’re considering easy is just out of my realm of knowledge,” said Pache, a native of Queens, New York, whose parents emigrated from Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

She recalls how the clues in one particular New York Times mini crossword puzzle from October 2022 were, as Pache described to me, “more white than usual.” Coincidentally, that day she had a song stuck in her head, one she unabashedly loves — the 2010 parody “Lemme Smang It” by Yung Humma ft. Flynt Flossy. Anyone who was around for the song’s dominance over the internet can recall its catchiness and certified freaky lyrics — “smang” is a portmanteau of “smash” and “bang,” two slang terms for having intercourse.

“I thought to myself, ‘It would be so funny if the word smang was in a crossword puzzle,’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘That’s so niche and so internet brain.’ Black internet brain specifically.”

That random thought led her to search online for crossword puzzles that centered Black culture. When she came up empty, Pache decided to make one herself. Thus Black Crossword, a daily online mini crossword puzzle that caters to the Black diaspora, was born. The project has since turned into a book, “Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora,” out now via HarperCollins.

In an Associated Press story on Black Crossword, data journalist Michelle Pera-McGhee explained that women and racial and ethnic minority groups have long been underrepresented in crossword clues, citing a 2020 study she conducted for the data journalism website The Pudding.

Crosswords are supposed to tap into general knowledge, and Pache acknowledges that they’re “supposed to challenge you.” However, what some might consider general knowledge could — and often does — leave many out of the fun of crosswords.

“Some of what’s covered in mainstream crossword puzzles are very specific to white audiences that are maybe economically better off and male,” Pache said.

This exclusion, whether intentional or not, is what Pache hoped to combat in creating Black Crossword, a project she undertook knowing nothing about how to actually build a puzzle.

“I hear this all the time, where people are like, ‘I’m really bad at crossword puzzles,’ or, ‘I’m usually not good at crossword puzzles, but I’m good at these.’”

It’s no surprise that her crosswords have a growing fanbase, with the site averaging about 3,500 hits a day, and has had 1.2 million total game plays since launching in 2023. The book stands to only help Pache grow her project even further.

“I think the big difference is that what I consider to be our common knowledge is different from what someone at a mainstream crossword puzzle outlet is going to consider common knowledge,” she adds.

From the very inception of Black Crossword, Pache says she wanted to ensure Black cultures from all across the diaspora would be visible in her puzzles, and has long amplified the histories of Black Latinx people, including through the popular Twitter hashtag #blacklatinxhistory, which she started in 2016.

“I think from my experience, both of my parents are from the Caribbean. I was born and raised here in the U.S., so I have ties to so many different experiences within Blackness,” she explained. “And then also growing up in Queens, where there’s every type of Black person from everywhere. It just felt right, and it felt natural to incorporate the entire diaspora. It would otherwise be kind of limiting.”

Her puzzles include staples and figures of Black Latinx culture, like the Dominican dish mangú, Puerto Rican writer and historian Arturo Schomburg, Dominican farming activist Mamá Tingó and runner Marileidy Paulino, who became the first woman to win a gold medal for the Dominican Republic at the Olympics this summer.

Through this project, Pache confronts the erasure and exclusion of Black people not just in white anglo media but also Latinx media, which still suffers from and continues to uphold anti-Blackness within its many spaces, from music to publishing to history books to television shows.

“I think something that I’m trying to do with Black Crossword is to challenge that narrative,” Pache said. “Because there is so much rich Black history, not just in the Spanish speaking Caribbean, but all across, all across Latin America.”

(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibá?ez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)

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