This meticulous local history of Cienfuegos, Cuba, from its founding in 1819 to the end of US occupation in 1902 addresses questions that might have been ripped from today's headlines. How, in the absence of legal segregation or de jure discrimination, did free Afro-Cubans end up concentrated in mostly black and mostly poor neighborhoods, unable to accumulate intergenerational wealth and excluded from respectable society? The answers seem equally relevant to current debates: Lucero finds evidence of local zoning requirements pushing poorer blacks out of desirable areas in repeated cycles of gentrification, a failure to enforce laws against private discrimination, overpolicing of racially coded “crime-infested” areas, and an economy whose ups and downs undermined the employment stability particularly of black males, which contributed in part to the predominance of female-headed households.
The dust jacket markets the book as “drawing on the insights of intersectional feminism,” but this description both misleads and undersells what Lucero has accomplished. This is not a book of great theoretical innovation; it is, however, a tour de force of painstakingly researched old-fashioned urban social history. Lucero's command of local archives is spectacular: she deftly employs baptismal records, probate records (especially of manumissions and land sales), civil and criminal trials, meeting minutes of Afro-Cuban beneficent societies, and more, to document her arguments with all the force of a good prosecuting attorney.
The abundance of detail may not suit the casual reader, but it richly rewards the careful and curious. Lucero follows several families over generations as they sold their lots and moved further and further from the city center, while built-up, respectable, mostly white neighborhoods expanded at their expense. She shows the process graphically with maps. She finds trial records that show Spanish or Catalan café owners did not technically break the law by refusing to serve Afro-Cubans outright, but charged twice or ten times the going price and called police when the indignant customers refused to pay. She shows cases where bylaws against vagrancy and stereotypes of black shiftiness criminalized a population for working in unstable longshoreman jobs.
How was such great archival detective work possible? It was no doubt convenient that probate and trial records in Cienfuegos so often carried racial identifiers, even as late as the 1890s. The city's manageable size and unique history also surely helped. Originally founded for the purpose of attracting white colonists when the post-Haitian Revolution fear of Cuba becoming “Africanized” was at its peak, Cienfuegos nevertheless evolved into a multiracial urban center in the heart of sugarcane country. A loyalist bastion in the Ten Years' War and beyond, Cienfuegos thought of itself as a white city even as economic forces and Cuba's gradual path toward abolition created opportunities for manumitted persons, disproportionately female, to buy or lease property and make lives for themselves in town. Each wave of arrivals saw their originally peripheral lands coveted by whites as the city grew and enveloped them. The expulsion of blacks from the city center peaked, not surprisingly, during the years of US occupation, but Lucero considers this an intensification of existing trends rather than fundamentally different in kind.
Lucero's interpretation falls firmly into the revisionist school, intensely opposed to the Frank Tannenbaum/Marvin Harris/Carl Degler vision of a Latin America where race comingles with class and money whitens. She sometimes oversimplifies the opposing historiography and occasionally views her evidence as more dispositive than it may be. One could, for example, raise the often-voiced objection that criminal cases definitionally highlight exceptions rather than rules, and one might notice that immigrants, not native-born whites, were responsible for almost every cited case of illegal discrimination against Cienfuegos's beleaguered black middle class. But on balance Lucero's evidence speaks loudly and compellingly. Highly recommended for scholars, graduate students, and specialized seminars in race or social history.
