Date of Submission
Fall 2019
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Political Studies
Project Advisor 1
Omar Encarnacion
Abstract/Artist's Statement
In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, black mobilization has been highly repressed and challenged by national myths of racial harmony. This paper focuses on the development and legacies of these national myths in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. All myths of nation consist of rhetoric that favors European enlightenment ideals and rejects false narratives of homogeneous African conditions. The dichotomy of European and African comes from a broader international discourse of liberalism during the 19th and 20th centuries. The promotion of Eurocentric policy on all three islands contributed to eugenics laws and pedagogy around positivism. The results of this policy lead to continued racial inequalities on all three islands. This myth of the nation provides an alternative identifier for people rather than other personal classifications of race and class. The last part of this paper focuses on understanding the continued racial oppression Afro-Latins face on the islands and how individuals have advocated against the myth of racial harmony. The lived experiences of individuals on the islands, and the continued fight against glossed over racial disparities complicates grand narratives in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Garcia, Lourdes, "Blackness on the Islands: The Intersections of Race and Nation in the Spanish Speaking Caribbean" (2019). Senior Projects Fall 2019. 27.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_f2019/27
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
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