Mixed Race Studies

Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History by Kathleen López (review)

Journal of Latin American Geography
Volume 12, Number 3, 2013
pages 234-236
DOI: 10.1353/lag.2013.0049

Joseph L. Scarpaci, Professor Emeritus of Geography
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Kathleen López, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)

The new millennium cast into the academic and general public’s dialect the word ‘globalization’ as well as the call that everyone should ‘think globally and act locally.’ That may be all well and good, but this adage often falls flat when scholars aim to connect the local with global (glocal). Like the words ‘impact,’ ‘effect,’ and ‘affect,’ the terms at once say everything but communicate little. As the graduate coordinator of my doctoral program was fond of harping in front of frightened graduate students many decades back, “perfectly general, perfectly true, but absolutely meaningless.” Clichés, alas, often substitute for deep, critical thinking and analysis.

For these reasons, when one sees a subtitle that includes the ambitiously stated ‘transnational history,’ a little skepticism inevitably comes to mind. Geographers are no doubt even more skeptical because, after all, scale and spatial analysis situate both human and physical geographies in the broader context of social and natural sciences, respectively.

Enter Kathleen López: Assistant Professor of History and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies (a title that might also give one pause) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Whereas many Latinamericanist geographers struggle to speak any semblance of Spanish and conduct fieldwork with the assistance of Latin American and Caribbean scholars, Dr. López approaches the study of transnational migration to the island of Cuba armed with fluent Spanish and Chinese. Armed with extensive field work in Cuba, China, and the United States, Dr. López assembles a tour d’force that brings archival, ethnographic, and historic analyses to bear on a story that traces the history of Chinese migrants to Cuba in the nineteenth century, through the alliance with Cuban forces to overturn the colonial yoke imposed by Madrid, to the twentieth century events that include strong xenophobia, the Japanese-China war, WW II, and the Cuban Revolution. Copiously referenced and gracefully written, Chinese Cubans tells the tale of a truly global transnational migration pattern that documents how the Chinese in Cuba used investment, remittances, and return visits to bridge these migrants’ search for the best of Cuba and their homeland. The tale begins with the importation of more than 100,000 Chinese workers – indentured servants often treated as slaves because of Great Britain’s objection to the African slave trade—who build rail lines and work in sugar plantations in ways similar to how Chinese ‘coolie’ workers did in the United States. Chinese Cubans were fiercely loyal to the Cuban independence movement of the nineteenth century, and great accolades were given to them by the fiercest and most venerable of revolutionary fighters. Unlike conditions in Peru, Jamaica, and the especially harsh anti-Chinese movement in Mexico in the 1930s, we learn that Cuba was relatively welcoming (overall) in receiving the Chinese diaspora. They added to the miscegenation (mestizaje) stew (ajiaco) that Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz highly praised. However, to López’s credit, she calls into question the much-venerated Ortíz’s description of this marginal contribution to Cuban culture (which Ortíz postulated that, numerically at least, was a European and African fusion). The so-called ‘third founder’ of Cuba (after Columbus and Alexander von Humboldt), Ortíz derided Chinese immigrants for their certain tolerance of homosexuality, their (limited) use of opium. That is why he classified them phenotypically (i.e., “yellow mongoloids”….”and essential otherness” (p. 210).

Readers will find that similar prejudices hurled upon immigrants elsewhere were also cast upon Chinese Cubans. They were often characterized as ‘inassimilable’ just as Jews were in Europe in the twentieth century and much the way Mexicans are portrayed in the current U.S. immigration debacle. When hard economic times fell upon Cuba, anti-nationalism was whipped up against Cubans of Chinese descent, who were often portrayed as perennial strike breakers and ‘scabs.’

Not surprisingly, there are indirect parallels to be drawn between the relationship of mainland (communist) China and Taiwan, on the one hand, and Cuba and the United States, on the other hand. The 1949 Chinese communist takeover of mainland China and the exodus of Chiang Kai-shek to Formosa (Taiwan) generates yet another out-migration of Chinese to Cuba. And in 1959, many Chinese…

Cuban Color Classification and Identity Negotiation: Old Terms in a New World

University of Pittsburgh
2004
246 pages

Shawn Alfonso Wells

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis analyzes how the Cuban Revolution’s transnational discourse on blackness positively affected social attitudes, allowing color identity to be negotiated using color classification terms previously devalued.

In the Caribbean and Latin America, most systems of social stratification based on color privilege “whiteness” both socially and culturally; therefore, individuals negotiate their identities with whiteness as the core element to be expressed. This dissertation examines how this paradigm has been overturned in Cuba so that “blackness” is now the featured aspect of identity. This is due in part to the popular response to the government’s rhetoric which engages in an international political discourse of national identity designed to situate Cuba contextually in opposition to the United States in the global politics of color. This shift has occurred in a dialectic environment of continued negative essentialized images of Blacks although blackness itself is now en vogue. The dialogue that exists between state and popular forms of racial categorization serves to recontextualize the meanings of “blackness” and the values attached to it so that color classification terms which indicate blackness are assumed with facility in identity negotiation.

In the past, the concepts of whitening and mestizaje (race mixture) were employed by the state with the goal of whitening the Cuban population so that Cuba would be perceived as a majority white country. Since the 1959 Revolution, however, the state has publicly claimed that Cuba is an Afro-Latin nation. This pronouncement has resulted in brown/mestizo/mulatto and not white as being the national ideal. The symbolic use of mestizaje in Cuban society and the fluidity inherent in the color classification system leaves space for manipulation from both ends of the color spectrum and permits Cubans from disparate groups to come together under a shared sense of identity. The ideology of the state and the popular perceptions of the symbolism that the mulatto represents were mediated by a color continuum, which in turn was used both by the state and the populace to construct, negotiate, maintain, and manipulate color identities. This study demonstrates that although color classification was not targeted by the government as an agent to convey blackness, it nevertheless does, and the shift in how identity is negotiated using racial categories can be viewed as the response of the populace to the state’s otherwise silent dialogue on “race” and identity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction: Mulatas del Caribe
• Chapter One: The problem of race
  • Problematizing Race
  • Field Setting
  • Conducting Fieldwork in Cuba
  • Methodology
• Chapter Two: Historical Context of Color Classification in Latin America and the Caribbean
  • History of racial/color categorization in Cuba
  • The Era of Conquest and Colonization
  • The Plantation Era
    • Color classes
    • Pigmentocracy/Whitening
  • The Era of Capitalism
  • The Era of Socialism and Castro
• Chapter Three: Terms of Classification
  • Settings
    • The Census
    • The Carnet
    • The Medical Establishment
  • Cognitive Categories of Color Classification
  • Features of Classification
  • Constructing Identity
    • Blancos
    • Mestizos, Mulatos and Mestizaje
    • Negros
    • Chinos
• Chapter Four: The social significance of classification
  • Contested classifications
  • Stereotypes and Social Status
  • Shifts in meaning and preference of terms
• Chapter Five: Mulatizaje and Cubanidad
  • Mestizaje, Mulattoization and Cubanidad
    • The typical Cuban
  • Claiming Identity and Negotiating Mulatizaje
    • Extended Case Study #1
    • Case study #2
    • Case study #3
    • Case study #4
    • Case study #5
    • Case study #6
    • Case study #7
    • Case study #8
    • Case study #9
    • Case study #10
    • Case study #11
• Conclusions
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Glosses of Color Terms.
  • Appendix B: Census Enumeration of Writs of Freedom
  • Appendix C: Racial Categories of 1827 and 1841 Censuses
  • Appendix D: Census with Conflicting Terminology
• Bibliography

LIST OF TABLES

• Table 1: Chronological Table of Data Collection Techniques
• Table 2: Census Terms.
• Table 3: Formal Labels on Documents
• Table 4: Descriptive Color Terms
• Table 5: Cognitive Map of Terminology
• Table 6: Labels of Pilesorting Groups.
• Table 7: Percentages of Informants Employing Particular Classification Terms
• Table 8: Johnson’s Hierarchial Clustering.
• Table 9: Color Continuum.
• Table 10: Informal Descriptors
• Table 11: Common Descriptors for Hair Texture
• Table 12: Common Descriptors for Facial Features.
• Table 13: Common Modifying Descriptors
• Table 14: Common Compound Terms
• Table 15: Descriptive Labels

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Cuban Remix: Rethinking Culture and Political Participation in Contemporary Cuba

University of Michigan
2008
555 pages

Tanya L. Saunders

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology)

This dissertation examines the post-1959 activism of Cuba’s socially critical artists and intellectuals, and the effects of the Cuban state’s institutionalization of culture. I analyze the Cuban underground hip-hop movement as a case study of the ways in which Black artists and intellectuals in Cuba have employed cultural aesthetics to challenge contemporary inequalities organized around race, class, gender, and sexuality. I address the social context in which the Cuban underground hip-hop movement emerged by linking it to Cuba’s revolutionary project and to other counter-cultural social movements in Cuba’s history and from other post-colonial contexts. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic, historical, and interview-based research, the study engages with existing theories of the state, culture, civil society and the public sphere, but also reveals their limitations, particularly when applied to non-European contexts. As such, the dissertation offers significant insights into the relations between politics and culture, hegemony and resistance, history and the imagination of a better future, both in Cuba and beyond.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• Chapter I: Introduction
  • 1.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop
  • 1.2 The Organization of the Dissertation
  • 1.3 Contextual Considerations: Latin American Politics and the Coloniality of Knowledge
  • 1.4 Contextual Considerations: The Cuban Revolution and the Aesthetic Debates
• Chapter II: Methodology
  • 2.1 Background
  • 2.2 Developing a Research Agenda
  • 2.3 Phase One
  • 2.4 Phase Two
  • 2.5 Phase Three
  • 2.6 Data Collection
• Section I
  • Chapter III: Public Spaces, Cultural Spheres: Rethinking Theories of Political Participation, Civil Society and Social Change
    • 3.1: Subaltern Critiques of Cold War Politics
    • 3.2 Post-Socialist? Neocolonial? Republican Socialism? Reflections on Cuba‘s State Project
      • Republican Ideals within a Socialist State
    • 3.3 Citizenship, Democracy and Civil Society in the Anglo-American Metanarrative of Citizenship
      • Citizenship and Civic Participation
    • 3.4 Discussion: ‘Non-Western’ Challenges to Social Change, Political Participation and Civil Society
  • Chapter IV: Civil Society and Art Worlds: Rethinking Politics and Political Participation
    • 4.1 Making the Connections: Art and Social Change
    • 4.2 Rethinking Cultural Logics: Culture, Political Participation and Grassroots Activism
    • 4.3 The Base and Superstructure of Culture: The Institutional Structure of Cuban Culture
    • 4.4 The Ministry of Culture
    • 4.5 Discussion
• Section II
  • Chapter V: Art and Revolution: Cuba‟s Artistic Social Movements and Social Change
    • 5.1 The alternative music scene: hip-hop and Anti-Modernist Aesthetics
    • 5.2 The Marginal Existence of Cuban Rock within Cuban Culture
    • 5.3 Nueva Trova: The Cuban Protest Music Movement
    • 5.4 Reflections on My First Nueva Trova Show
  • Chapter VI: Race, Place and Colonial Legacies: Underground hip-hop and a Racialized Social Critique
    • 6.1 Race and Cuba: Historical Considerations
    • 6.2 American Occupation and the Creation of the Cuban Republic 1898-1912
    • 6.3 The Revolutionary State Attempts to Solve the Race Problem in Cuba
    • 6.4. Making the Linkages: Discussion and Some Additional Thoughts
    • 6.5. Ethnographic Notes: Racial Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 6.6. “Everyone Knows That Whites Exist, But No One‘s Sure About The Blacks” Theoretical Perspectives on Art, hip-hop and Transnational Blackness
  • Chapter VII: Racial Identity and Revolution: The (Re-)Emergence of a Black Identity Among Havana‟s Underground Youth
    • 7.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop and Symbols of Blackness
    • 7.1a Raperos, Activistas, Revolutionaries: Underground Hip-Hop and Social Change
    • 7.2 Notes on Language
      • 7.2.1 Underground hip-hop/Comercialización/Institucionalización
    • 7.3 Transmitting Blackness: Graffiti, T-Shirts and the Black Experience
    • Figure 7q. Album cover, Jodido Protagonista, by Randeée Akozta (independently produced, circa 2004).
    • 7.4 Underground Graffiti: NoNo La Grafitera
    • 7.5 Section Summary/Concluding Remarks
• Section III
  • Chapter VIII: Cuba‟s Sexual Revolution? Women, Homosexuality and Cuban Revolutionary Policy
    • 8.1 All the Women Are Straight and All the Homosexuals are Men: Gender and Female (Homo-) Sexuality
    • 8.2. Silent Women, Invisible Lesbians: Researching the Experiences of Lesbians in Cuba
    • 8.3 Notes on Contemporary Lesbian, Gay Life in Cuba
  • Chapter IX: “Siempre Hay Lucha/There Is Always a Struggle”: Black Women, Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.1 (1). ―No Particular Racial Subjectivity‖
    • 9.2 (2). The Racially Conscious Race Rejecters
    • 9.3 (3). The Racially Awakened
    • 9.4 (4). Racially Conscious Actors
    • 9.5 ¿Y Que Paso Con OREMI?/ And What Happened with OREMI? Black Lesbian Subjectivity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.6 Conclusion
  • Chapter X: “No Soy Kruda”: Las Krudas, Cuban Black Feminism and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.1 Who Are Las Krudas?
    • 10.2 Las Krudas: Raperas Underground
    • 10.3 Krudas‘ Black Feminist Discourse
    • 10.4 Como Existe La Heterosexualidad, Existe Homosexualidad/Just As There Is Heterosexuality, There Is Homosexuality
    • 10.5 Krudas and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.6 Reaction to Krudas‘ Work
    • 10.7 Conclusion/Discussion
• Chapter XI: Conclusion
  • The Sociological Implications of My Research
• Appendix
• Discography, Interviews, IRB Forms & Supplementary Materials
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History

University of North Carolina Press
June 2013
352 pages
6.125 x 9.25
15 halftones, 3 maps, 7 tables, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4696-0712-2
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4696-0713-9

Kathleen López, Associate Professor of History and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean studies
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

In the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba’s infamous “coolie” trade brought well over 100,000 Chinese indentured laborers to its shores. Though subjected to abominable conditions, they were followed during subsequent decades by smaller numbers of merchants, craftsmen, and free migrants searching for better lives far from home. In a comprehensive, vibrant history that draws deeply on Chinese- and Spanish-language sources in both China and Cuba, Kathleen López explores the transition of the Chinese from indentured to free migrants, the formation of transnational communities, and the eventual incorporation of the Chinese into the Cuban citizenry during the first half of the twentieth century.

Chinese Cubans shows how Chinese migration, intermarriage, and assimilation are central to Cuban history and national identity during a key period of transition from slave to wage labor and from colony to nation. On a broader level, López draws out implications for issues of race, national identity, and transnational migration, especially along the Pacific rim.

A Rising Voice: Afro-Latin Americans

Miami Herald
2007-06-10 through 2007-06-24

In this series, the black experience is unveiled through a journey: to Nicaragua, where a quiet but powerful civil and cultural rights movement flickers while in neighboring Honduras, the black Garffuna community fights for cultural survival; to the Dominican Republic where African lineage is not always embraced; to Brazil, home to the world’s second largest population of African descent; to Cuba, where a revolution that promised equality has failed on its commitment to erase racism; and to Colombia, where the first black general serves as an example of Afro-Latin American achievements.

Part 1: Nicaragua and Honduras: Afro-Latin Americans: A rising voice
Audra D.S. Burch
A close-up look at a simmering civil rights movement in a tiny port settlement along Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast.

…To appreciate the story of race here, is to understand the kaleidoscopic legacy of slavery, the historic demonization and denial of blackness and the practice of racial mixing.

This portrait is complicated by the lack of reliable census data because of traditional undercounting and because some blacks decline to identify themselves as such.

The dynamic along the coast is a layered quilt of Miskitos, mestizos and blacks. The ancestors of other Afro-Nicaraguans were free blacks who immigrated from Jamaica and other Caribbbean countries, lured by the good, steady jobs available for English speakers.

Stories abound about people who have hidden behind ambiguously brown complexions, “passing” for Miskito Indians, or mestizo.

“It’s hard to mobilize when you are still recouping the identity and just starting to openly use the term black,” says [Juliet] Hooker, the University of Texas professor whose father was a regional councilman…

Part 2: Dominican Republic: Black denial
Frances Robles
An examination on the sensitive nature of racial definition in a nation with inextricable ties to Africa.

SANTO DOMINGO—Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.

Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo—bad hair.

But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. “If you’re working in a bank, you don’t want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant,” the bank teller said. “It’s not that as a person of color I want to look white.   I want to look pretty.”

And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.

Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.

Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket.  The richer, the “whiter.” And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black…

Part 3: Brazil: A Great Divide
Jack Chang
Black Brazilians speak out and push for affirmative action laws in the hemisphere’s most Africanized nation.

…And Brazilians are finally discussing race after decades of telling themselves and the rest of the world that the country was free from racism, said Sen. Paulo Paim, author of one of the pending affirmative-action bills.

“The Brazilian elite says this is not a racist country, but if you look at whatever social indicator, you’ll see exclusion is endemic,” he said. “We want to open up to more Brazilians the legitimate spaces they deserve…

…”I have never seen any evidence that suggests anything other than there’s widespread racism in Brazil,” said UCLA sociology professor Edward Telles, who studies race in Brazil…

…Black leaders also blame what they describe as decades of self-censorship about race spurred by the “racial democracy” vision of their country, which long defined Brazilian self-identity.

Preached in the early 20th century by sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the vision depicted a Brazil that was freeing itself of racism and even of the concept of race through pervasive mixing of the races…

Part 4: Cuba: A barrier for Cuba’s blacks
Miami Herald Staff Report
Economic and political apartheid are alive in Cuba, despite a revolution launched in 1959 that promised equality.

..DISPARITY IN NUMBERS

Cuba’s official statistics offer little help on the race issue. The 2002 census, which asked Cubans whether they were white, black or mestizo/mulatto, showed 11 percent of the island’s 11.2 million people described themselves as black. The real figure is more like 62 percent, according to the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.

And the published Census figures provide no way at all to compare blacks and whites in categories like salary or educational levels. Ramón Colás, who left Cuba in 2001 and now runs an Afro-Cuba race-relations project in Mississippi, said he once carried out his own telling survey: Five out of every 100 private vehicles he counted in Havana were driven by a Cuban of color.

The disparity between the census’ 11 percent and UM’s 62 percent also reflects the complicated racial categories in a country where if you look white you are considered white, no matter the genes.

“You know, there are seven different types of blacks in Cuba,” said Denny, who now works as a waiter but dreams of a hip-hop career. From darkest to lightest, they are: negro azul, prieto, moreno, mulato, trigueño, jabao and blanconaso…

Part 5: Achievers: Racism takes many hues
Leonard Pitts, Jr.
An overview on the achievement of black leaders in the region. And a personal essay by Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.

…Which brings us back to that earnestly debated question: Who is black?

A COMPLEX MATTER

The question is more complex than an American might believe. In Brazil, a nation of indigenous peoples and descendants of African slaves, European colonists and immigrants, a dark-skinned man who might automatically be called black elsewhere has a racial vocabulary that allows him to skirt the Africa in his heritage altogether. He can call himself moreno (racially mixed), mestizo (colored) or pardo (medium brown). Anything but “afrodescendente” (Africa-descended) or negro (black)…

..Brazil likes to think of itself as a racial democracy, says Miriam Leitao, but that’s a delusion. She has, she says, been making that argument for 10 years and has become one of the nation’s most controversial journalists in the process.

When she writes about racism in Brazil, people tell her she’s crazy. “I don’t know how to explain the thing that, for me, is so obvious,” she says

Multimedia

Read the entire series here.

For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun

The New York Times
2013-03-23

Roberto Zurbano, Editor and Publisher
Casa de las Américas Publishing House

Translated from Spanish by Kristina Cordero

CHANGE is the latest news to come out of Cuba, though for Afro-Cubans like myself, this is more dream than reality. Over the last decade, scores of ridiculous prohibitions for Cubans living on the island have been eliminated, among them sleeping at a hotel, buying a cellphone, selling a house or car and traveling abroad. These gestures have been celebrated as signs of openness and reform, though they are really nothing more than efforts to make life more normal. And the reality is that in Cuba, your experience of these changes depends on your skin color.

The private sector in Cuba now enjoys a certain degree of economic liberation, but blacks are not well positioned to take advantage of it. We inherited more than three centuries of slavery during the Spanish colonial era. Racial exclusion continued after Cuba became independent in 1902, and a half century of revolution since 1959 has been unable to overcome it…

…Raúl Castro has announced that he will step down from the presidency in 2018. It is my hope that by then, the antiracist movement in Cuba will have grown, both legally and logistically, so that it might bring about solutions that have for so long been promised, and awaited, by black Cubans.

An important first step would be to finally get an accurate official count of Afro-Cubans. The black population in Cuba is far larger than the spurious numbers of the most recent censuses. The number of blacks on the street undermines, in the most obvious way, the numerical fraud that puts us at less than one-fifth of the population. Many people forget that in Cuba, a drop of white blood can — if only on paper — make a mestizo, or white person, out of someone who in social reality falls into neither of those categories. Here, the nuances governing skin color are a tragicomedy that hides longstanding racial conflicts…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Hist7362: Histories of Exclusion: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

University College of London
2013

Paulo Drinot, Senior Lecturer in Latin American History

This course examines race and ethnicity, and processes of racialised and ethnic exclusion, in Latin America in historical perspective. It invites us to consider the historical role played by race and ethnicity in hierarchically structuring Latin American societies and reproducing patterns of exclusion from full citizenship in a number of contrasting case studies from the wars of independence until c. 1950. Among some of the topics to be considered are: the role of Afro-descendants and the indigenous in the region’s independence from Spain and Portugal, the persistence of slavery in Brazil and Cuba in a context shaped by ostensibly liberal ideas, the so-called Indian question and its place in liberal thought in the nineteenth century, debates over desirable and non-desirable immigration and on immigration’s impact on the ‘racial stock’, the adoption and adaptation of scientific racism and eugenics by Latin American thinkers as well as the critiques that such approaches to race engendered, the rise and demise of indigenista ideas, policies, and cultural expressions in both Mesoamerica and the Andes, the development of the notion of ‘racial democracy’ in post-slavery Brazil and Cuba and of ‘whiteness’ in the Southern Cone and their role in shaping racialised social policies. More generally, the course considers the ideological and practical construction of ‘racial states’ throughout Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries…

..Course structure

1. Introduction
2. Independence and Race
3. Slavery in Brazil and Cuba
4. Liberalism and the Indian Question
5. Immigration: Europeans, Asians, Jews and Arabs
6. The Science of Racism
7. Indigenismo in Mexico and Central America
8. Indigenismo in the Andes
9. Racial Democracy in Brazil and Cuba
10. Race in the Southern Cone

For more information, click here.

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

University of Pennsylvania Press
2005
288 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-3867-9

Jill Lane, Associate Professor of  Theater and Performance Studies
New York University

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895 offers a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in nineteenth-century Cuba. Through a study of Cuba’s vernacular theatre, the teatro bufo, and of related forms of music, dance, and literature, Lane argues that blackface performance was a primary site for the development of mestizaje, Cuba’s racialized national ideology, in which African and Cuban become simultaneously mutually exclusive and mutually formative.

Popular with white Cuban-born audiences during the period of Cuba’s anticolonial wars, the teatro bufo was celebrated for combining Spanish elements with supposedly African rhythms and choreography. Its wealth of short comic plays developed a well-loved repertory of blackface stock characters, from the negrito to the mulata, played by white actors in blackface. Lane contends that these practices were embraced by white audiences as especially national forms that helped define Cuba’s opposition to Spain, at the same time that they secured prevailing racial hierarchies for a future Cuban nation. Comparing the teatro bufo to related forms of racial representation, particularly those created by black Cubans in theatres and in the press, Lane analyzes performance as a form of social contestation through which an emergent Cuban national community struggled over conflicting visions of race and nation.

Table of Contents

• Preface. On the Translation of Race
• Introduction. ImpersoNation in Our America
• Chapter 1. Blackface Costumbrismo, 1840-1860
• Chapter 2. Anticolonial Blackface, 1868
• Chapter 3. Black(face) Public Spheres, 1880-1895
• Chapter 4. National Rhythm, Racial Adulteration, and the Danzón, 1881-82
• Chapter 5. Racial Ethnography and Literate Sex, 1888
• Conclusion. Cubans on the Moon, and Other Imagined Communities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments

“Our America” That is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes

Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture
Volume 22, Number 3 (Fall 2000)
pages 87-113
DOI: 10.1353/dis.2000.0007

Monika Kaup, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

In the past two decades, discontent with the exclusions operative in nationalist frameworks of American and Latin American Studies has placed issues of transnationalism, hybridization, and a diasporic view of cultures at the center of attention. As a provisional academic base for this desire to think more globally, scholars have invented a new tradition, so to speak the transnational and burgeoning field of hemispheric American Studies. Thus, the recent collection, José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, calls for such a change of paradigms. In their introduction, the editors single out Cuba, the birthplace of poet and revolutionary José Martí, as a fertile location for their project:

For Cuba lies at the intersection of Our America’s two principal transnational cultural formations: the geocultural system we have come to know as the Black Atlantic and the complex region of interactions among the Spanish, Native American, and English peoples (extending from the Caribbean to California) that we have come to call the Latino Borderlands. (Belnap and Fernández 11)

Cuba’s nationalism, from José Martí and Cuba’s late-19th century Wars of Independence to post-1959 formations under Castro, has always been a mestizo and mulato nationalism. One reason was that in Cuba abolition was not a consequence, but a condition of independence (Sommer, Foundational Fictions 125): in contrast to the U.S. and most of Latin America with the exception of Puerto Rico, Cuba achieved independence only in 1898, thanks to the full participation of Afro-Cubans in the anti-colonial wars against Spain, whose investment in Cuban independence was motivated by their desire for racial justice. Indeed, Cuba’s population in the modern era, “slightly over half Spanish in origin and slightly under half black or mulatto, with a small number of Chinese” (Bethell 20), suggests an encounter of the two distinct NewWorld diasporas known as the “Black Atlantic” and Martí’s Spanish-speaking “Our America” on equal terms.

While the discourse of mestizaje and racial amalgamation nourishes Cuba’s nationalism, and while the notion of cubanidad is built on the myth of racial synthesis, this symbolic reconciliation has repressed actual and continuing conflicts of race and their memory. Indeed, 20th century Cuban history, culture, and literature bear testimony to the uncanny reassertion of resistant diasporic black voices sublated into the dominant mestizaje nationalism. One major purpose of this essay is to examine the relationship between the Black Atlantic and José Martí’s “Our America” cultural formations intersecting in Cuba, as pointed out in the passage quoted above as a troubled and unstable one. Whereas “Our America” stands for the homecoming of Blacks in the interracial nationalism of Martí’s Latin America, the Black Atlantic stands for the continuing homelessness of Blacks in the Americas, and the memory of exile, displacement, and the violence of the Middle Passage…

Read the entire article here.

Myths of Racial Democracy: Cuba, 1900-1912

Latin American Research Review
Volume 34, Number 3 (1999)
pages 39-73

Alejandro de la Fuente, UCIS Research Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

This article reviews the recent literature on the so-called myths of racial democracy in Latin America and challenges current critical interpretations of the social effects of these ideologies. Typically, critics stress the elitist nature of these ideologies, their demobilizing effects among racially subordinate groups, and the role they play in legitimizing the subordination of such groups. Using the establishment of the Cuban republic as a test case, this article contends that the critical approach tends to minimize or ignore altogether the opportunities that these ideologies have created for those below, the capacity of subordinate groups to use the nation-state’s cultural project to their own advantage, and the fact that these social myths also restrain the political options of their own creators.

In a very real sense, nothing can be more real than the unreal.
Ashley Montagu, Race, Science, and Humanity

Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes called it “prejudice against prejudice”; U.S. sociologist Thomas Lynn Smith described it as “a veritable cult.” Both were referring to what has come to be known as the Brazilian myth of racial democracy.

In its simplest formulation, the “myth” is that all Brazilians, regardless of “race,” enjoy equal opportunities and live in a racially harmonious society. It could not be otherwise, according to the myth, because Brazil’s strength and greatness reside in the widespread racial mixture of its population. It therefore makes no sense to talk about blacks and whites in a country in which most citizens are some of both. “Race” in Brazilian society is constructed along a continuum moving from “black” to “white” based on phenotypical features (skin color, type of hair, facial features) and on social factors like education and financial status. Several centuries of intimate contact and miscegenation, biological and cultural, have created a new hybrid race that is authentically Brazilian.

The notoriety of the Brazilian case has been guaranteed by the brilliance of its myth makers, foremost among them Gilberto Freyre. But it has also been sustained by two fundamental facts: no other country in the hemisphere has a numerically larger population of African descent; and no other country enslaved its black population as late as Brazil did, until 1888. A hegemonic ideology advocating some form of racial fraternity is remarkable in a country like Brazil but hardly unique. Since the late nineteenth century, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s, intellectual elites in numerous Latin American countries have articulated racial ideologies that were similar in purpose and content to the Brazilian myth. Mestizaje was exalted as the true American essence, a synthesis that incorporated (allegedly on equal terms) the best cultural and physical traits that the various ethnic and racial groups populating the Americas had to offer.

Forced to cope with the troubling aspects of a North Atlantic ideology that flatly advocated the inferiority of non-Anglo-Saxon peoples and the deleterious effects of racial mixing, the elites in Latin America had to reach a compromise that would allow them to reconcile the goal of modernity with the undeniably mixed nature of their populations. During this search, the mestizo was invented as a national symbol. The result was an ideological formulation that broke with the past while upholding it. The discourse on mestizaje remained prisoner of the same canon that scientific racism proclaimed as incontrovertible truths—the essentialness of race—but the discourse revolutionized social thinking by minimizing the other central tenet of the hegemonic racial gospel: biological determinism. Although race was still associated with ascribed characteristics as immutable and overpowering as those championed by genetically based racism, the emphasis was shifted to geographical, cultural, and historical factors. This is no small distinction. By placing social factors at the core of their ideological constructions, Latin American intellectuals were openly contesting the notion that their countries were doomed to failure and perpetual backwardness, while asserting (however implicitly) that social transformation was the way to reach modernity. They thus had fabricated a way out of the ideological iron cast that the North Atlantic world had manufactured by means of its high science, universities, and royal societies.

But the escape was only partial. While contesting or just ignoring the idea that racial miscegenation meant degeneration, Latin American thinkers accepted the premise that ample sectors of their populations were basically inferior and that their human stock needed to be “improved” Such inferiority was to be explained in terms of culture, geography, or climate rather than pure genetics, but the dominant vision still presented the lighter end of the spectrum as the ideal and denigrated the darker end as primitive and uncivilized. In this formulation, whiteness still represented progress. Miscegenation was perceived as the way to “regenerate” a population unfit to perform the duties associated with a modern polity, with white immigration serving as a precondition for progress. The idea that regeneration was possible at all subverted biological determinism, but the expressed need for regeneration presupposed acceptance of the idea that “race” explained the “backwardness” of Latin American societies. Whitening became the way to remove a surmountable, albeit formidable, obstacle on the road to modernity.

Read the entire article here.