Politics & Power Quote by Jon Secada

There’s a quiet insistence baked into Secada’s phrasing: not either/or, but both/and. “I might be” opens with the kind of casual qualifier celebrities use to sound modest, then he tightens the frame with “but I’m also,” turning a soft introduction into a corrective. The line works because it challenges the default way U.S. culture flattens Latinidad into a single, marketable identity. “Cuban American” is legible in mainstream terms; “Afro-Cuban American” forces a second look, reminding the listener that race doesn’t disappear just because Spanish is being spoken.

The subtext is about visibility and power inside visibility. In entertainment, “Latin” branding often privileges lighter skin and erases Blackness, even as the music itself is saturated with African diasporic roots. Secada’s addition isn’t a footnote; it’s a demand that Afro-descended Cubans not be treated as an exception or a complication. It’s also a preemptive answer to the kind of audience question that’s really an assumption: What are you, exactly? He refuses the neat category and names the layered one himself.

Context matters: a Miami-born pop star who crossed over in the early ’90s, Secada operated in a space where identity was part of the product. This sentence is him reclaiming authorship over that product. It’s not a lecture; it’s a small, pointed act of self-definition that exposes how much gets left out when “Latino” is treated as a race instead of a world.