Dr. Marta Moreno Vega

Marta Morena Vega is a Nuyorican (a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent), who grew up in the historically Puerto Rican neighborhood of East Harlem, also known as El Barrio. As a visual artist, Afro-Latina activist, scholar, author, educator, and Yoruba priestess, Vega has dedicated her life’s work to shedding light on the experiences and contributions of people of African descent. As the second director of El Museo del Barrio (1972–1976), she described her vision for the museum as “challenging inequality, providing a creative thought process and creative expressions that would lead to solutions with the brilliant eyes of our artists.” Then, in 1976, she founded the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, which advocates for and connects Afro-descendent communities. This work led her to co-found the Global Afro Latino and Caribbean Initiative through Hunter College in 2000. In this photograph, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders elegantly captures Vega’s strength, determination, and wisdom.

This photograph is part of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s series The Latino List, which explores what it means to be Latino in the twenty-first century.