This study examines how a centuries-old European genre has been transformed by contemporary Afro-Latin American novelists to address key aspects of the diaspora in various Caribbean and Latin American countries. While attention to Afro-Hispanic and Brazilian literature has increased in recent decades, few critics have focused specifically on the Afro-Latin American bildungsroman written in both Spanish and Portuguese. Postcolonialism provides a useful theoretical framework for analyzing this literature, especially because it explores the movement of populations domestically and internationally. As noted by Bill Ashcroft and his coauthors in The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice, “A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with place and displacement. It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being.”

That crisis of identity has everything to do with the continuing movements of people. As Afro-Brazilian poet and novelist Conceição Evaristo stresses (in the first epigraph to this chapter) in her description of a Brazilian mother's search for her children who have gone to a distant city, “the ritual of coming and going” each time increases “the starting point” and, as we will see, works toward the final coming together of the family. Thus, this study of coming-of-age novels focuses on stories of young people searching for their families and, especially, a home. The second epigraph, from Pulitzer Prize–winning Dominican writer Junot Diaz, underscores how so many of these journeys calling young people “back home” pull them between nations with such different cultures that they experience difficulty understanding who they are. In addition to the movement of populations, another aspect of identity that Afro-Latin American writers examine relates to literary Blackness in different countries.