De aqui, de alla: Race, empire, and nation in the making of Cuban migrant communities in New York and Tampa, 1823--1924.

Abstract

On February 24, 1895 war broke out in Cuba. Three years later the United States intervened in the Cuban War for Independence. Known as the Spanish-American War, the war and its aftermath would forever change the Cuban immigrant community. The dissertation examines the history of Cuban migrants in New York and Tampa before, during, and after the United States' intervention. Beginning in 1823 it looks at how events such as the Ten Years War (1868--1878), the exile of Jose Marti in 1880, and the abolition of Cuban slavery in 1886 shaped the Cuban exile and migrant community. Few studies have examined the role of the Cuban exile and migrant community in engineering, resisting, and later accepting the intervention. The dissertation uses primary sources including Spanish and English newspapers, census records, club records, oral histories and Federal Writers Project papers, along with secondary sources to reconstruct the early history of the Cuban community. In directing the theoretical gaze on the Cuban migrant community, this study disrupts traditional accounts of the war and its aftermath, as well as the early history of racialized migrants in the United States. First, it situates the war within a context of empire building that includes the responses and actions of the Cuban exile and migrant community. Second, it positions the United States as a critical site for developing the Cuban nationalist and independence movements and, for initiating a public dialogue among Cubans on US imperialism, annexation, and the building of nation in Cuba. Third, it employs race, multipositionality, and diaspora as categories of analysis for understanding Cuban identity and community formation in the United States, the relationship between African-Americans and Cuban migrants, and the negotiation of race among Cubans, in particular Afro-Cuban migrants during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.