One need not subscribe to Benjamin's view of original and translation as so many shards of a greater language to imagine some semantic overlap between the Spanish noun negro and its English counterparts. Not surprisingly, such overlap has invited much theoretical speculation on kinship relations among the cultural formations of the African diaspora in the Americas. But can a 'spic' really be a 'Negro,' or even a 'nigger'? When one tries to determine just how similar negro in, say, early twentieth-century Cuban (literary) usage is to racial epithets such as 'negro,' 'Negro,' 'black,' 'darky,' 'boy,' or 'nigger,' as they have circulated in the United States at different points in time, it quickly becomes apparent that claims to cultural sameness are, in practice, far more complicated than they might appear in theory. The author aims to untangle some of these complications in this article by considering a handful of literary translations by African American poet Langston Hughes. While he agrees with Michael Riffaterre that translations 'are not a reliable index of cultural difference', any more than they are an unfailing guide to cultural similarities, the ways in which writers approach the task of translation can provide insights into the value they attach to certain cultural differences at the expense of others. He is particularly concerned in this essay with the effect of cultural homogeneity that American English-language translations of diasporic texts have tended to produce. Hughes's translations are no exception. They show that even a writer who has been hailed as a literary innovator and as a political radical - without, however, being fully recognized as a modernist poet - embraced a conservative approach to translation when it came to the work of writers of colour from the south of the South.