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The first issue of a new Marvel series aims to focus on the powerful, rich and uplifting stories of a largely overlooked and diverse cast of Latino superheroes.

While Latino superheroes have been part of the Marvel universe for decades, without continuity, many of them are often overlooked, said Aldama, best known for his award-winning book, “Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics” and the director of the Latin X Pop Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.

“I knew personally from reading comics that we had an abundance of Latinx superheroes,” said Aldama, who wrote the “Comunidades” forward. “But the Marvel encyclopedia didn’t even mention them. So there is a story that has been almost willfully ignored, or a history that we need to tell.”

One of the Latino characters featured in the first issue of “Comunidades” is Ghost Rider — a student mechanic-turned-superhero who drives a muscle car with his skull lit on fire. Karla Pacheco, the Latina and Native American Marvel writer who wrote the one-page story of the demonic superhero, says that she wanted to base it on a personal story about her father teaching her how to make tortillas.

“It’s a short story about growing up and learning how to make something,” Pacheco said. “It’s about remembering not to use measuring cups because your cupped hand makes a measuring cup for the flour, and you pinch your fingers just right to get the amount of salt, and then you flip it without a spatula off the cast iron really fast because you can’t be afraid of fire.”

For Pacheco, being able to bring her personal story to a Latino superhero is a significant step forward, because, she said, many diverse characters have not been written by writers of color before.

For Mexican Marvel writer Juan Ponce — who wrote a “Comunidades” story about a Brazilian sorcerer from the 1950s named Nina the Conjuror — discovering a character like Superman who came from another place and was adopted by a new family was enough to resonate with his own immigrant story.

“Obviously, he was a Caucasian man, but he was an alien. And his values and family really spoke to me,” he said. “I never really saw Superman different from my dad. They were both these men who really put a lot of emphasis on doing the right thing for the family and grew up in a farm. And that was the moment where I wanted to write stories about someone like that and carry my values to the page.”

Terry Blas, a Mexican American who wrote a “Comunidades” story about a young magician named Eva (she’s also the cousin of Reptil — a superhero who can turn into a dinosaur), was driven to tell stories for readers who shared common values.

Amara La Negra, singer, reality show star and rapper, is known for embracing her afro and her Blackness. But despite all her success, there’s one battle she’s always had to fight: defending her Afro-Latin Blackness. “I still feel there’s a lot of African Americans that don’t even know that there’s other parts in the world where there’s people like us and don’t speak English,” she told ABC News. “We’re not all African Americans. We are diverse in every single possible way you can imagine.” In a society that clings to categorizing people, Amara La Negra says she’s always having to explain herself.

Born Diana Danelys De Los Santos to Dominican parents, sometimes Amara La Negra finds herself being questioned by African Americans about Ber blackness, like on the radio show “The Breakfast Club.” “Simplify it for me, what exactly is the struggle that you’re facing?” Charlamagne Tha God, one of the show’s hosts, asked her. “You sure it’s not in your mind?” She’s also faced questions from other Latinos, including some in her home state of Florida, who she says questioned why she would participate in a Black Lives Matter march in Miami.

“They were like, ‘Why are you out there protesting? You’re not Black. You have to pick. Are you Latina? You Dominican? Are you Black? You kind of have to pick,’” Amara La Negra told ABC News. “They were saying a lot of negative things toward me. I guess that there was a part of them that didn’t understand how important this is. … It’s a humanity thing.”

In the wake of George Floyd’s death and a renewed outrage over racial inequality in America, there’s a growing spotlight illuminating the diversity of Blackness in the U.S. It’s a lesson that educator Jennifer Whyte says she’s been teaching for years.

The Spanish teacher is the only Latina and the only teacher of color at The Donoho School in Anniston, Alabama. In the rural South, she makes it a point to educate her students about Afro-Latin culture.

“I need to be true to myself. … I know who I am as a Spanish teacher and teaching culture,” Whyte told ABC News. “We’re the ones that teach culture. We’re the ones that bring up these uncomfortable conversations about race and history, too, because we do history. So it’s like we bring up these uncomfortable conversations about race, colorism.”

Pedro Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, focuses on race and policy and believes the United States’ historically poor treatment of African Americans created a massive divide among Latino immigrants — even those who are Black.

“When many Latin Americans come to this country, there’s a tendency to try to distance themselves from Black Americans. And that’s true even among people who, phenotypically from Latin America, are Black,” Noguera said. “You think about American baseball, someone like Big Poppy, the great slugger from the [Boston] Red Sox, who is clearly Black, very dark-skinned, does not identify as Black. [He] identifies as Dominican, as if that were separate somehow from being Black.” Adding to the complexities in the United States, the Latino community encompasses families from many different countries.

“So many Latinos identify more with nationality. They will say, I’m from El Salvador. I am from Panama,” Noguera said. “Latino doesn’t mean a whole lot. It only means something to second- and third-generation Latinos who’ve been in America who understand the way race in America works. And so they will claim a Latino identity. But in their identity, there’s incredible diversity.”

In the U.S., most people strictly think African American when they hear of someone who is “Black,” but according to the the Slave Voyages Project, during the colonial period, about 15 times as many slaves were taken to Latin America than the United States.

Click here to read the full article on ABC News.