Twenty years ago, Junot Díaz vowed to write a children’s book for his goddaughters – two Dominican girls living in the Bronx, who never saw themselves or their experiences in the stories they read. In the two decades that it took him to fulfill his promise (his book Islandborn, which has an Afro-Latina main character, is due spring 2018), the Afro-Latinx experience remains woefully underrepresented.

Each year, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center tracks the diversity in children’s and YA books. According to last year’s survey, Latinx authors only wrote 94 of 3,200 books – a number that accounts for just 2.9 percent, even though Latinx comprise about 17 percent of the US population. Looking at this data, there’s no easy way to tell how many Afro-Latinx authors wrote these 94 books, but given the continued lack of visibility for this marginalized group, it’s likely that the number is very small.

And this is an issue when the media vacillates between erasing and harmfully stereotyping Afro-Latinxs. Racial identity is never as simple as society wants us to believe, and Afro-Latinidad is no exception. A Pew Research study indicates that about a quarter of US Latinos are Afro-Latinx, but 39 percent of them report their race as white or white mixed with another race.

This is unsurprising given the disparaging ways the media, particularly Latin American media, portrays Afro-Latinx people. We Afro-Latinxs grow up in a society that tells us our African features, like afro-textured hair is “malo.” And not being able to see yourself represented in pop culture in nuanced and diverse ways can lead to internalizing anti-blackness and ultimately rejecting your own African heritage.

Book publishing by no means accurately represents the diversity of the Latinx community, which is why the efforts of organizations like We Need Diverse Books – which advocates for changes in the publishing industry so that all young people have books that reflect their realities – are so necessary. As the push for diversity and representation are pushed to the forefront, it’s also important to recognize those who have given our stories a platform. Here are 10 books that feature complex and well-developed Afro-Latinx lead characters: