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.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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