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"Hierarchies at Home traces the experiences of Cuban domestic workers from the abolition of slavery through the 1959 revolution. Domestic service - childcare, cleaning, chauffeuring for private homes - was both ubiquitous and ignored as formal labor in Cuba, a phenomenon made possible because of who supposedly performed it. In Cuban imaginary, domestic workers were almost always Black women and their supposed prevalence in domestic service perpetuated the myth of racial harmony. African-descended domestic workers were "like one of the family," just as enslaved Cubans had supposedly been part of the families who owned them before slavery's abolition. This fascinating work challenges this myth, revealing how domestic workers consistently rejected their invisibility throughout the twentieth century. By following a group marginalized by racialized and gendered assumptions, Anasa Hicks destabilizes traditional analyses in Cuban history, instead offering a continuous narrative that connects pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba"--
List of contents
Introduction: Violent intimacies: Constructions of nation, race, and gender inside Cuban households; 1. Embodied anxieties: Hygiene, honor, and domestic service in republican Cuba; 2. Of domestic (and other) offices: Black Cubans' claims after independence; 3. Stopping 'Creole Bolshevism'; Liberal correctives to increasing labor radicalism; 4. Patio fascists and domestic worker syndicates: Communism, constitutions, and the push for labor organization; 5. Pushing the present into the past: The revolution's solution to domestic service in the 1960s; 6. Conjuring ghosts: Domestic service's remains after 1959; Conclusion: Revisiting a racial democracy: Cuban history from inside out.
About the author
Anasa Hicks is Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University. She specializes in Latin American and Caribbean history, focusing on twentieth-century Cuba, the Hispanic Caribbean, women and gender, and labor studies.
Summary
Hierarchies at Home traces the experiences of Cuban domestic workers from the abolition of slavery through the 1959 revolution, centering the quotidian work that so many Cubans – in particular black Cuban women – did to survive. A fascinating, unique work on Cuban history that challenges established narratives.
