Exposure Leads to Expansion: Eileen Ivette on Slow Content, Afro-Latinidad, and Why Data Keeps Failing Black Travelers

This season has been all about our 2026 Bessie Award winners, and this episode features our Trailblazer Award recipient, Eileen Ivette — the Afro-Colombian journalist and creator behind Black Latin History, a video series that uplifts Afro-Latino stories and confronts anti-Black erasure across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Eileen started posting Black Latin History content in October 2022, with zero followers and a pitch she couldn't sell inside the newsroom where she worked — her bosses told her the stories about anti-Blackness in Latin America made her "too close to the story" to be objective. Within a month of launching on her own, one video about how Afro-Colombian women used braids as escape maps during the colonial period hit 4 million views and got reposted by Viola Davis. Three years later, she's built an entire ecosystem — video, articles, mentorship for other creators, and group trips to places like Medellín — out of a story she once had to fight to tell.

We talk about her "speed versus substance" talk at WITS this year, and why she believes quality content builds trust in a way virality alone never can. We get into her own layered identity as an Afro-Latina raised in Houston, constantly having her Latinidad questioned, and the anti-Blackness she's encountered from within the Latino community itself. And we dig into what the travel industry keeps getting wrong: the tourism boards leaving money on the table by ignoring Afro-tourism, the historical census erasure that's left the industry working off bad data, and why she had to publicly beg the internet just to find an Afro-Peruvian tour operator in Lima. It's a conversation about identity, patience, and what it actually looks like to build something real instead of chasing a trend.

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