Narratives of Race and Ancestry: Across Cuba and the U.S.

My research explores the ways that ancestry, race, and biogenetic ideas (ideas that intersect biology and genetics) impact racial formation among Cubans on the island and the Cuban American diasporic community in the United States. In Cuba, the narrative suggests that everyone can trace their roots to a mixture of African and Spanish blood. To be Cuban is to be mestizo (racially mixed). Cuba’s national identity as a place of racial mixture and harmony has a long history, but these ideas were reshaped and came to be closely tied to the State’s revolutionary politics after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Growing research demonstrates that systemic racial inequality continues to exist in Cuba, a “colorblind” nation that celebrates its African roots. However, less attention has been given to the biologically-based understandings of race that continue to develop within Cuba, and that legitimize White superiority. My focus on these biogenetic assumptions shed light on the ways Blackness is socially constructed as not only culturally inferior, but even biologically detrimental across Cuban island racial narratives. My transnational scope also pushes back against assumptions that immigrants simply adopt U.S. notions of race and reveals how those categorized as Latina/o in the U.S. retain their own formations of race. Finally, by including those Cuban Americans born and raised in the U.S., my work exposes the ways race is refashioned across generations in a U.S. context where U.S.-raised Cuban Americans are overwhelmingly considering genetic ancestry knowledge for their heritage work and even (racialized) identity productions. Rather than seeing engagement with genomic technologies as re-geneticizing race, my qualitative focus demonstrates that biogenetic assumptions are widespread even in the absence of genetic tests. By exploring the narratives of race and biogenetic ideas of mestizaje, or racial mixture, across Cuban island and U.S. diasporic communities, my research provides insight on the ways that biological ideas continue to shape racial formation, and persistence of anti-Blackness, across the Americas.