Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Cubans migrated to New York City to organize and protest against Spanish colonial rule. While revolutionary wars raged in Cuba, expatriates envisioned, dissected, and redefined meanings of independence and nationhood. An underlying element was the concept of Cubanidad, a shared sense of what it meant to be Cuban. Deeply influenced by discussions of slavery, freedom, masculinity, and United States imperialism, the question of what and who constituted "being Cuban" remained in flux and often, suspect.

The first book to explore Cuban racial and sexual politics in New York during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Suspect Freedoms chronicles the largely unexamined and often forgotten history of more than a hundred years of Cuban exile, migration, diaspora, and community formation. Nancy Raquel Mirabal delves into the rich cache of primary sources, archival documents, literary texts, club records, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to write what Michel Rolph Trouillot has termed an "unthinkable history." Situating this pivotal era within larger theoretical discussions of potential, future, visibility, and belonging, Mirabal shows how these transformations complicated meanings of territoriality, gender, race, power, and labor. She argues that slavery, nation, and the fear that Cuba would become "another Haiti" were critical in the making of early diasporic Cubanidades, and documents how, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Afro-Cubans were authors of their own experiences; organizing movements, publishing texts, and establishing important political, revolutionary, and social clubs. Meticulously documented and deftly crafted, Suspect Freedoms unravels a nuanced and vital history.

Author: Nancy Raquel Mirabal
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 01/10/2017
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.06lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.73d
ISBN: 9780814761120

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2017

About the Author
Mirabal, Nancy Raquel: - Nancy Raquel Mirabal is Associate Professor of American Studies and the Director of the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. Mirabal is the author of Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957; first editor of Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies and co-editor of Keywords for Latina/o Studies. Her publications have appeared in the Latino Studies Journal, The Public Historian, Cultural Dynamics, and Callaloo.