Uneasy Intimacies: Race, Family, and Property in Santiago de Cuba, 1803-1868.

Abstract

The Cuban War of Independence from Spain (1868-1898) redefined the meaning of social equality in what had been one of the wealthiest slave societies of the Western Hemisphere. In the eastern province of Santiago, the insurgency depended on a large cohort of Afro-descendant soldiers who, along with white allies, rallied around a leadership largely comprised of men of color. These forces invoked an idea of unified nationhood that was stronger than color-based solidarities. This dissertation examines Santiago in the six decades prior to the rebellion, using legal, economic, and demographic sources to understand the milieu from which the Afro-descendants who joined the insurgency emerged. It argues that the insurgents’ wartime vision of social identities that could transcend race actually developed out of Santiago’s earlier competing ideologies of status. During the first half of the nineteenth century, in Santiago, color status was far from fixed. Largely outside sugar’s dominion, this area was situated at the intersection of Atlantic and local currents of commerce and culture. French-Haitian, Spanish, and West African ideas about status inflected local contests over color-based identities. The rise of a coffee plantation economy and its subsequent demise allowed families of varying degrees of African ancestry to shift in and out of different color statuses. Bureaucrats, political elites, slaves, free people of color, and slave owners competed over the meaning of status through property, kinship, and documentary practices. Their antagonisms gave rise to an unstable hierarchy situated at the interstices of vernacular and official repertoires. Individuals sought to modify their status or lose associations with color terms altogether by creating expansive networks of dependents and patrons, by owning slaves, and by asserting multi-generational distance from slavery. Perhaps most remarkably, by the middle of the nineteenth century, local notaries increasingly recorded persons without mentioning color. This thesis argues that the networks of social dependency through which actors destabilized color-based identities became avenues for cross-racial mobilization during the independence movement. Moreover, the newly emergent social identities that did not openly reference race laid the background for the insurgents’ vision of a raceless Cuba.PhDAnthropology and HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120651/1/achira_1.pd