INTRODUCTION
In the United States, race operates through a politics of division. This politics has traditionally served the purpose of maintaining white dominance—white elites needed to exclude nonwhites and “Others” from full membership in the nation to consolidate power and resources into the hands of the privileged few (Feagin 2010; C. Harris 1993; Lipsitz 2006; Roediger 2002). The need to account for and determine who is not white is crucial for these purposes, and thus race, and the black/white division in particular, became particularly rigid. However, racialized individuals find that they too are compelled to engage in this politics of division, which strips away various kinds of co-belonging. Marginalized groups are obliged to set their group apart from the “Others” to prove they belong in the United States, because improving one’s position within the hierarchical racial structure shapes one’s access to important legal, political, and economic resources and the extent to which one can live as a full citizen with a sense of human dignity and respect (Cacho 2012; De Genova 2005; Horsman 1981; Kim 2000). This is not to say that people cannot oppose and resist the exclusionary values of the nation—they do. But power operates in such a way that marginalized groups must negotiate and contend with exclusionary politics; their very survival could depend on the strategies they use to gain favor with or avoid the ire of the ruling elite.
The divisive racial politics of U.S. inclusion is powerfully illustrated in an oft-cited New York Times story about two men who immigrated to Miami, Florida, from Cuba. The story is introduced with a striking summation: “Joel Ruiz is Black. Achmed Valdés is White. In America they discovered it matters.”1 The two men had been best friends since their childhood in Cuba. However, on reaching Miami in 1994, their friendship began to flounder for a reason neither had expected—race. Although racism indeed exists in Cuba, one can be black, white, or mixed and still be “Cuban.”2 In Miami, however, the identities of “Cuban” and “black” have often been taken to be mutually exclusive, and the men were cast as either black or white by the people they encountered in their everyday lives. Notwithstanding Cuba’s own racial problems, the two friends had shared the same social groups and resided in the same Cuban neighborhood. In an extremely residentially segregated Miami, however, race would determine where they lived, with whom they socialized, and their prospects for mobility. These social forces so changed their relationship that, by the time of the 2001 story that profiled their friendship, it had dwindled into “mostly a friendship of nostalgia.” The two men could not fully relate to each other’s U.S. experiences.
Valdés began learning of his place in the unfamiliar U.S. racial landscape when, as part of the lessons his relatives taught him on how to be “American,” he was cautioned to be wary of African Americans and avoid their neighborhoods. As a white Cuban and Latino, Valdés found that he could feel happy and at home in Miami, where, despite initial economic struggles, he is part of the majority group. He could benefit from the fact that the mostly white Cubans who came to the United States before him following the rise of communist leader Fidel Castro had amassed much power in the area. But erecting a barrier between himself and African American blackness, as his relatives proposed, would also separate Valdés from Cuban blackness. For Ruiz, meanwhile, white reactions to his black color had the greater consequence. A particularly frightening incident happened to Ruiz one night when police ordered him and his friends to exit their car at gunpoint. A white Cuban officer had seen him and his uncle at Versailles, Miami’s famous Cuban restaurant. Possibly motivated by anger that they had been accompanied by white Cuban female companions, the officer made it clear that Ruiz was stopped because he was black.3 As the story reads, the officer “said something in Spanish that forever changed Mr. Ruiz’s perspective on race. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while,’ Mr. Ruiz recalls the officer saying, ‘since you were in the restaurant. I saw you leave and I saw so many blacks in the car, I figured I would check you out.’ ”4 As an authority figure charged with literally policing boundaries, the officer illustrated an internalization of the structure wherein he must take it upon himself to maintain the system of racial oppression. After this encounter, among others, Ruiz soon learned that he could not walk around as freely as he had in Cuba; he has to be vigilantly aware of the particular ways his blackness is criminalized in the United States and conduct himself in a manner that quells racist fears.
Miami has a very complex social environment marked by a foundational history of strict racial divisions between whites and blacks. Since the late 1950s, racial meaning there has also been shaped by mass migrations from Latin America and the Caribbean; U.S.–Cuban Cold War politics, which brought a large and powerful Cuban population to the area; and the development of contentious relations between members of the Cuban and African American communities. Despite this complexity, Ruiz and Valdés found that navigating their new society meant interacting with forces that sought to reduce their multifaceted identities to a black/white binary. While Valdés was encouraged to claim a white identity and the privileges associated with it, as a black Cuban, Ruiz found that negotiating race and identity meant facing the denigration of blackness that is both systemic and consciously perpetuated by Anglos, as well as a racism transplanted by white Cubans, left unchecked in the “ethnic enclave.” Anti-black racial notions brought from Cuba, intersecting with the dominant racial ideologies that circulate in the U.S. context, ultimately bolster the idea of white superiority and black inferiority. For these friends, the pressure to be “black” or “white,” reinforced not only by the overarching white Anglo power base and white Cuban Americans but also by local African Americans among others, pulled them apart.
This book represents an effort to understand and counteract the forces that create divisions between the two friends, between African Americans and Cubans in Miami, and between racialized groups more broadly. Exploring dynamics of conflict as they operated in histories of race making in Miami, I analyze discourses exemplifying and driving divisions between the primary populations Ruiz and Valdés found they had to define themselves in relation to: African Americans and Cubans; generations of Cuban immigrants; and black and white Cubans.5 I argue that divisive notions about what it means to be “white” or “black” shaped contests between these groups over the benefits attached to national belonging. Indeed, conflict between “minority” or “non-Anglo” groups is rooted in the sometimes unconscious and often strategic embrace of these divisive white nativist perspectives. As Aihwa Ong (2003) suggests, the white elite have remapped biological notions of race onto morality-based ideals of “worthy citizenship,” the idea that the privileges of U.S. belonging must be earned by demonstrating one’s worthiness as hard-working, self-reliant, law-abiding, and freedom-loving (see also Gans 1999; Gray 1995; Urciuoli 1996).6 I discuss how this dominant framework of worthy citizenship encourages interethnic conflict as marginalized groups are obliged to prove their worthiness by setting their group apart from the Others. Racialized individuals are compelled to claim binary identities—white/black but also native/foreigner or good/bad immigrants—as they jockey for status within a system that perpetually questions their legitimacy or claims of belonging. In short, white supremacist narratives intended to maintain white elite positioning atop a racial hierarchy govern the conflicts between groups of color: they set the stakes, the rules of engagement, and, often, the outcome.7 These power dynamics play out just as sharply in those American places, such as Miami, that are celebrated as emblematic of the country’s growing diversity.
The racialized framework of worthy citizenship not only foments competitive relationships among minority groups but, in doing so, also elides the complex lived experiences of racialized groups that foster mutual understanding and stronger interethnic alliances. I argue that the day-to-day lived experiences of racialized individuals reveal the multidimensional conditions of meaning-making that are flattened by the mainstream racial ideologies that compose worthy citizenship. For instance, in the opening story of the two friends, Ruiz’s identity as black and Cuban became a problem as he navigated life in Miami because he had to contend with how the intersection of the United States’ and Cuba’s exaltation of whiteness over blackness leaves him, in the minds of others, unable to be fully Cuban or American. He does not see his Cuban identity as threatened by his blackness, and he aspires to be American despite the nation’s tradition of blocking African American access to full citizenship. His positioning operates as a potential bridge between African Americans and Cubans, between Afro-Cubans and other black Americans, and between white and black Cubans by illustrating how all these identities are mutually constituted. However, his experiences teach him that his multiplicity is seen as a threat to the dominant order, even in a city with so much ethnic/racial diversity. As Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores (2010, 10) contend, Afro-Latino positionality complicates notions of blackness in the United States and destabilizes dominant assumptions that racial identities such as Latino, black, and “American” cannot coexist (see also Rivera-Rideau, Jones, and Paschel 2016, 11).8 Thus, by foregrounding the ways Afro-Cubans such as Ruiz negotiate and illuminate the transnational circuits of meaning-making around race, I draw out the greater complexity of racialized identities in the United States that are oversimplified by binary racial notions. By examining the nuanced and even unexpected ways that identities taken to be a priori such as “black” and “white” are constructed, negotiated, rejected, and (re)claimed in the context of multiethnic tensions in Miami, I deconstruct the exclusionary discourses that circulated and emphasize the porousness of the boundaries drawn by divisive politics. All in all, the book aims to expose the racist fabric into which interethnic contentions are woven so that it may be unraveled and reworked as a resource for building coalitions. As such, the book has broad application for the study of issues related to “interminority” conflict in multicultural America. My work also seeks to make a contribution to several scholarly fields, including scholarship on race and immigration, African American studies, Latino studies, and Afro-Latino studies. My specific focus on Miami, moreover, provides critical contributions to understandings of Miami race relations, studies on its “native” African American communities, and scholarship on the Cuban diaspora and on Afro-Cuban immigrants in particular in the United States.9
Conflict in Context
Miami has long been hailed “the city of the future” (Didion 1987; Portes and Stepick 1994; Rieff 1987; Woltman and Newbold 2009). The area began decades ago to experience the demographic trends now sweeping across the country. Indeed, Miami is an early example of the “majority-minority” spaces now becoming common in many cities and states. Today, Miami is a “mirror reflecting the debates over immigration, race, and economic transformation facing cities all over America” (Shell-Weiss 2009, 8). Its geographical proximity and long-standing ties to the Caribbean and Latin America make it a “zone of contact” where immigrants and “natives” confront each other all the time and have to work things out with each other (Aranda, Hughes, and Sabogal 2014). As a result, it is one of the most international and diverse cities in the United States with a Latino population of over 60 percent (Pew Research Center 2013). Miami also has one of the most diverse black populations in the United States owing to post-1960 immigration to the area from the Caribbean. About one-in-three blacks (34 percent) living in Miami are immigrants.10 Yet, Miami became Latino and international only in the second half of the twentieth century, with the influx of Cuban and other immigrants (Shell-Weiss 2009). Despite this growing diversity, the city’s deep-seated historical black/white racial tensions have endured, and Miami remains among one of the nation’s most segregated cities (Aranda et al. 2014).11 African Americans continue to be disenfranchised, and now the negative experiences and socioeconomic positioning of Miami’s newer immigrant blacks (such as Haitians and Afro-Cubans) illustrate how entrenched Miami’s anti-black climate is (Aja 2016). All these factors make Miami a critical “case study underscoring the prevailing importance of racial difference in an increasingly multicultural society” (Shell-Weiss 2009, 10).
I begin my study in 1980, the beginning of the period referred to as “the browning of America” and a pivotal year in Miami history (González 2011). By 1980, Miami was already being celebrated for its rich cultural diversity (Didion 1987; Portes and Stepick 1994; Rieff 1987; Woltman and Newbold 2009). Yet, despite its claims to diversity and inclusion, in 1980 Miami was, as we will see, fraught with racial tensions. The city not only saw continued conflict between a white majority and a black minority but was also beset by the racial tensions “of the future” that emerged as black/white relations intersected with a growing population of new immigrants: Cubans. As the United States fought the Cold War in opposition to Fidel Castro, it encouraged mass migration from Cuba through its foreign policy. Bolstered by hard work—and the unparalleled aid that the U.S. government provided to these political exiles for adjustment to life in the United States—the Miami Cuban contingent that came in the first two waves of immigration gained social, economic, and political power in Miami (Grenier and Pérez 2003). The preferential treatment of Cuban Americans, coupled with Cuban Americans’ staunch support of the Republican Party, worsened relations with African Americans still shut out of the political and economic establishment. Still, despite the gains made by the Cuban community, local Anglos made it clear their welcome was tenuous at best. Separating themselves from their new neighbors, white Anglos moved out of the area in droves, illustrating the fact that nativist anti-foreigner sentiments were also running high (García 1996; Grenier and Castro 1999; Shell-Weiss 2009). Meanwhile, the African American community was particularly hard-hit by economic oppression and police brutality during this period (Dunn 1997, 2016; Dunn and Stepick 1992). Tensions came to a head when African American citizens staged a large-scale revolt in a protest known as the McDuffie Riot, named after Arthur McDuffie, an unarmed black motorist killed by police who were then acquitted. The McDuffie Riot was followed almost immediately by a new, third wave of Cuban migration: the 1980 Mariel exodus. The Cubans arriving during Mariel were stigmatized as criminals in both Cuban and U.S. press; thus, this wave of Cuban immigration would affect all Miami’s communities in ways previous waves had not. Moreover, while previous waves of Cuban migrants were overwhelmingly white, the Mariel exodus (and the subsequent fourth wave of Cuban migration, the 1994 Balsero crisis) would bring more black Cubans to the United States than ever before.12 Such dynamic forces occurring in 1980 would compel both Miami’s African American and Cuban American communities to reexamine the terms by which they would define their identities and fight for their rights.
I situate my analysis during the 1980 Mariel exodus and the subsequent Balsero crisis. These two most controversial waves of Cuban immigration intensified the friction between African American “native minorities” and the growing Cuban immigrant population. During the Mariel exodus, 125,000 Cuban refugees were brought to the United States by boatlift, and during the Balsero, or rafter, crisis, 35,000 Cuban refugees came to the United States, fleeing a period of economic and political instability in Cuba brought on by the fall of the Soviet Union (Masud-Piloto 1996). I focus on these waves to analyze the dynamics of conflict between African Americans and Cubans, the city’s two largest minority groups at the time. I focus on these waves, too, because they provide a population, Afro-Cubans, whose presence intervenes in and complicates the strict divisions imagined between African Americans, Cubans, and other populations in Miami.13 Accessing African American and Cuban voices through a study of African American and Spanish-language newspapers, the Miami Times and El Nuevo Herald, I examine how members of these groups documented the drama that unfolded during these events. Given Miami’s fraught racial history, these immigration “crises” would come to be narrated in ways that would heighten the perception of threat for both communities. Specifically, African Americans struggled with the fear that the newcomers would diminish any gains they were able to make after the civil rights movement, and Cuban Americans grappled with threats to their status as model anti-communist heroes. Mariel Cuban migrants were constructed as “black” deviants by the public, the government, and the press, and with the coming of the Balseros, Cuban migrants, for the first time, were made into economic migrants seeking illegal entry into the United States (Masud-Piloto 1996; Pedraza 1996). By analyzing the antagonistic discourses in the newspapers, which pit the various actors in the Miami scenario against one another, I illustrate how binary frames of worthy citizenship exemplified, and at times drove, Miami conflict during the period following Mariel and Balsero. I also illuminate how blackness functioned symbolically to create boundaries between the various communities in Miami. Centering Afro-Cubans in the analysis of the newspaper texts, and through in-depth personal interviews with Afro-Cubans who currently live in Miami and Los Angeles, the book also disrupts the exclusionary constructions exemplified in the papers. As the book weaves the voices of black Cubans throughout the text, we also gain insight into the specific issues Afro-Cuban immigrants face as they negotiate race in the United States.
Theorizing Interethnic Conflict in Multicultural America
Beyond the Race–Immigration Divide
Understanding interethnic conflict and racial dynamics more broadly in multicultural America requires us to bring together—but also critically reframe—multiple disciplines and subfields. First of all, and most simply, my research challenges the tendency within scholarship on the United States’ changing racial and ethnic relations to maintain a separation between studies emphasizing the black/white or white/nonwhite divide and scholarship on the assimilation processes of immigrants of color. As Zulema Valdez details in her preface to the 2017 edited volume Beyond Black and White, in the post–civil rights era, one primary area of research focuses largely on racial differences between African Americans and non-Latino whites to better understand the persistence of inequalities between these groups despite civil rights gains. The other main area of research focuses on the assimilation processes of immigrants of color, as they seek integration into (white) American society (Entman and Rojecki 2000; Portes and Zhou 1993; Zhou and Bankston 1998). The separateness of these two realms of study does not sufficiently capture the complexities of race relations in a society transformed by profound demographic change (Romero 2008; Sáenz and Manges Douglas 2015; Valdez 2017; Valdez and Golash-Boza 2017). With more and more cities, counties, and states becoming “majority-minority,” contests over power and resources in these spaces take place not just between nonwhites and the Anglo population but also between groups of color (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, and Waters 2002). Miami is a case in point given its status as one of the first “majority-minority” cities in the nation. Yet, the separation between studies on the African American/white divide and on immigrant assimilation has also been reproduced in the literature on race relations in Miami. Although previous research has identified Miami as a site for investigating interethnic relations, with some attention to African American–Cuban relations in particular (for example, Aranda et al. 2014; Grenier and Castro 1999; Grenier and Pérez 2003; Shell-Weiss 2009; Stepick, Grenier, Castro, and Dunn 2003), relations between these two groups have rarely been the main focus. In general, African American and Cuban communities are treated as bounded in the numerous studies on Miami’s Cuban community, and just a handful of book-length studies (for example, Connolly 2014; Dunn 1997, 2013, 2016; Rose 2015) have focused on Miami’s “native” African American communities. We can tap into the rich insights that can be gained about how race operates in the multicultural United States, the possibilities for cooperation, and also the dynamics of conflicts that may arise by examining the relations between nonwhite immigrants and “native minorities” in Miami.
Some scholars have suggested that we are now “beyond black and white,” that the black/white binary dynamics are no longer relevant to understanding race. Latinos in particular are seen as challenging the traditional color line given the greater flexibility they have in determining their racial identities, or at least the ways they challenge traditional categories (Fernandez 2008; Frank, Akresh, and Lu 2010; Yancey, 2003). Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2004; 2018) offers a more nuanced take, arguing that the United States is becoming more like Latin America, with a tri-racial hierarchy, with whites on top, honorary whites (such as some Asian groups, lighter-skinned Latinos, and most multiracials), and blacks on the bottom. Bean, Feliciano, Lee, and Van Hook (2009), in contrast, believe the color line is moving from black/white to black/nonblack. These scholars have importantly recognized the growing complexity in U.S. race relations in theories about how the U.S. color line has shifted. Yet they risk neglecting the fact that the black/white binary remains at the root of these distinctions—the power differential with whites on top and blacks on the bottom remains the same. Michael Omi (2001) captures this tension in theorizing a multiracial America. On the one hand, he acknowledges the limits of theorizing with a black/white paradigm, arguing that “We would profit from more historical and contemporary studies that look at the patterns of interaction between, and among, a multiplicity of groups.” But, on the other hand, he warns against decentering the black experience, as it is fundamental to ideas of race in our society. Thus, the challenge is to “frame an appropriate language and analysis to help us understand the shifting dynamic of race that all groups are implicated in” (2001, 251). Like Omi, I believe that despite the limits of the black/white paradigm, the power of white supremacy and the social devaluation of blackness remain foundational to our understanding of contemporary race relations. What we need is to examine how black/white binary dynamics are rearticulated in the present and intersect with issues related to immigrant incorporation.
Toward that end, rather than focusing primarily on immigrants or native African Americans, my discursive analysis gets at the heart of what is at stake for both immigrants and native minorities (African Americans and generations of Cuban exiles) as they lay claim to an American identity. In the periods I explore when the black/white racial dynamics “of the past” began to intersect with the racial tensions “of the future,” African Americans and local Anglos in Miami grappled with what the new population of immigrants meant for them. Native-born African Americans in particular had to contend with a U.S. racializing frame that positions “black” as opposite to “American” and positions “natives” against “foreigners.” At the same time, new immigrants seeking their fortune in the United States were confronted with historical white/black racial dynamics along with anti-immigrant sentiments. I explore the complexity of intersecting and transnational racial ideologies that shape how new immigrants negotiated their identities in relation to U.S. constructions of a white dominance and black subjugation.
Interminority Relations and the Quest for “Worthy Citizenship”
Most studies of interethnic conflict have attributed it primarily to causes such as limited resources, demographic shifts, or negative racial attitudes (Bobo and Hutchings 1996; McClain et al. 2007; Oliver 2010; Oliver and Wong 2003). Conceptualizing interethnic conflict in relation to changing racial dynamics in a more multicultural United States, I refocus our attention on discourse and ideology as key factors explaining the emergence of interethnic conflict. Analyses of conflict between groups of color have much to gain from shifting the focus onto racial ideology and the extent to which it becomes a “commonsense” way to make sense of difference, not only for whites but also for marginalized groups (Bonilla-Silva 2018; Feagin 2010; Lewis 2004).
Scholars have offered powerful explanations of how white elite Americans have constructed racial frames, or ideas about racial superiority/inferiority, to justify their power. Racial frames are social technologies that allow white elites to confer or deny the privileges of citizenship in the nation—privileges such as civil rights, protection, and freedom—on the basis of race (Feagin 2010; Kim 2000; Picca and Feagin 2007). In its history, the United States officially reserved the privileges of citizenship for whites—while denying them to African Americans. For instance, in 1787, the Constitution declared that blacks (as former slaves) counted as only three-fifths of a person for purposes of political representation and electoral votes. The earliest law governing the granting of citizenship to immigrants, the 1790 Naturalization Law, also made race fundamental in determinations of national belonging by stating that only “free white persons of good character” could become citizens. Today, the language of inclusion/exclusion can sometimes be coded but still relies on the traditional designation of “blackness” to signal the Other, while “white” is set as the normative reference point for “citizen,” or the one that belongs (Feagin 2010; Horsman 1981; Ong 2003).
As Aihwa Ong (2003) argues, in the contemporary era, racial frames based explicitly on ideas of biological race have been rearticulated in terms of the moral characteristics of “worthy citizenship.” To earn the privileges of citizenship, members of racialized communities must illustrate they are “worthy” by conforming to “proper”—that is, Anglo, middle-class, moral—standards (2003; see also Gans 1999; Gray 1995; Urciuoli 1996). This focus on individual achievements and morality legitimates the terms of “worthy citizenship,” whereby belonging is rooted in the idea of who is most deserving (Aranda, Chang, and Sabogal 2009; Ong 2003; Urciuoli 1996, 2003). Because the qualities that make people ideal citizen-subjects are taken for granted as having moral value, the acceptance of such ideals can reinforce the status quo, making it difficult to realize the power dynamics that enforce them. Thus, as Ong (2003) suggests, the normative values embodied in worthy citizenship are intended to compel subjects to police themselves. Policies, programs, codes, and practices of the government seek to instill in subjects the values of worthy citizenship, thwarting resistance to dominance at the level of the individual (Ong 2003, 6). As such, social technologies of government designed to create ideal citizen-subjects reproduce the white elite power structure. Although Ong does not explore the topic of interethnic conflict, the concept of worthy citizenship, with its focus on how marginalized groups are disciplined into adopting the social norms that then police them, proves a useful starting point for unpacking it.
I examine how the racialized ideologies of worthy citizenship shape—and indeed encourage—interminority conflict, as they come to be accepted and perpetuated by groups of color themselves. Scholars have recognized that nonwhites may also adopt white racial frames and position others as outsiders, but scholars’ focus has primarily been on white efforts to maintain power and on how groups of color resist white racial frames (Feagin 2010; Kim 2000; Picca and Feagin 2007). I argue that in the face of instability, members of racialized communities may also invoke language that affirms dominant assimilative models in order to secure their footing. This is because, as Lisa Marie Cacho explains, “recuperating social value [or achieving representation or acknowledgment by the establishment] requires rejecting the Other” (2012, 17). Given the exclusionary basis of white racial frames, invoking worthy citizenship necessarily involves claiming one’s worthiness over and above other groups. Hence, as racialized communities seek to reposition themselves more favorably in society, they may draw on the language and ideals of worthy citizenship as it is defined in the United States, engaging in what amounts to a zero-sum battle over the benefits of belonging. Racialized groups may employ moralistic and exclusionary language to construct themselves as superior to or more of an insider than other groups (Aranda, Chang, and Sabogal 2009; Cacho 2012; Kim 2000). This often means claiming a position within what I argue are the binary identities constructed by the dominant framework of worthy citizenship: black/white; native/foreigner; and good/bad immigrant. In sum, attempts by marginalized groups to secure status as true Americans can reinscribe white racializing frames. The reinscription of these frames is a testament to the tenacity of the racial structure of power in maintaining white dominance.
Today, despite demographic shifts, white racial power continues to reproduce itself by requiring the complicity of minority and immigrant groups in exchange for a tenuous claim on U.S. citizenship. Groups of color have long sought to and succeeded in resisting the status quo in multiple ways. Still, these efforts to resist white dominance and to claim rights from below are always constrained by the exclusionary framework of worthy citizenship perpetuated from above (Ong 2003). Connecting conflict between groups of color to the often invisible workings of white racial power is necessary to circumvent the temptation to blame these groups themselves as interethnic conflict arises. Moreover, in order to avoid “blame the victim” mentalities that hold marginalized groups responsible for their subjugated positioning, our focus on how minorities work to gain rights and enact resistance must also attend to the ways regulation from above operates to maintain dominance—even after marginalized groups have worked hard and “achieved” the qualities that are supposed to ensure worthiness (Ong 2003).14 Groups of color do play a role in generating conflict among themselves, yet they do so in large part because they are constrained by an exclusionary framework for citizenship designed to reproduce white elite power through strategies of divide and conquer.15
Cuban Whiteness and the Transnational Circuits of Race Making
Exploring how African Americans, Cuban Americans, and black and white Cubans draw on racialized discourses as they jockey for the benefits of “worthy citizenship,” I examine how “black/white” racial dynamics continue to manifest and operate in different forms in the current more racially/ethnically diverse U.S. context. To more fully grasp how the black/white binary gets rearticulated in this context, we must explore the historically specific ways in which transnational circuits of race making intervene. In the case of Miami, this means delving into how whiteness plays a role in claims to citizenship and power by Cuban Americans in Miami. Moreover, focusing on white Cuban relations with both African Americans and black Cubans in Miami entails taking on what is a sensitive subject among Cubans—anti-blackness among white Cuban Americans. But in doing so, I contribute to a “critical Latino whiteness studies,” which interrogates the currency of whiteness in the hemisphere (López 2010, 190; see also Aja 2016).
In the United States, Cubans have been able to benefit from “implicit racial privilege” in ways that many other Latino groups have not because they have been constructed in the media as anti-communist heroes and because of their upward mobility (Aja 2016; López 2010; Molina-Guzman 2008). Immigration scholars have taken interest in the Cuban exiles because of the ways the latter have challenged the traditional assimilation model, meeting success by reshaping rather than assimilating into their environment. As such, Miami Cubans have been offered as an example of the “triumph of pluralism” (Shell-Weiss 2009). Yet, a closer look at the Cuban American community also demonstrates how they “can also serve as local state-level actors and producers in situating their privileged space in a white hegemonic sphere” (Aja 2016, 7–8). This book acknowledges and foregrounds Cuban American privilege and hegemony in Miami. At the same time, as I examine and critique Cuban American claims to a white identity in the United States, I unpack the complexity of Cuban American whiteness, or “off-whiteness”—its hegemony and its precariousness (Aja 2016; López 2012).
As is the case for other immigrant groups, the racial understandings Cuban exiles held before coming to the United States intersect with what they learn about race as they navigate a new and different racial climate (Roth and Kim 2013). Indeed, to understand Miami’s racial dynamics, we must engage with how race operates in Cuba, paying attention to histories of slavery and discrimination there and assessing the impact of Cuban racial ideologies, which simultaneously idealize racial unity and discourage anti-racist organizing. The historical disenfranchisement of blacks in Cuba during and after slavery allowed whites on the island to be wealthier and more powerful than blacks. When Castro disrupted the class system and sought to redistribute the wealth of white Cuban elites, white Cubans were the most likely to be opposed to his government and to flee to the United States (Benson 2012, 2013; Clealand 2013; De la Fuente 2001; Helg 1995). Upon arriving in the United States, white exile Cubans who held anti-black attitudes encountered the U.S. configuration of anti-black racism. The white Anglo dominant ideologies in the United States affirmed the attitudes of exiled Cubans and encouraged them to dissociate from African Americans (Aja 2016; Bailey 2000, 2001; Hay 2009; Landale and Oropesa 2002; López 2012). Bringing into focus the ways Cuban attitudes brought from Cuba intersect with U.S.-based anti-black attitudes, we keep in mind that transnational histories of white settler and colonial domination intervene in relations between non-Anglo groups in the context of the United States.
Along with taking account of racial dynamics in Cuba, it is essential to bear in mind the larger context of the U.S.–Cuba political conflict to understand the complexity of Cuban American whiteness (Grosfoguel 2003). “All in all, U.S. state intervention encouraged ‘whitening’ the perception of [the Cuban American] difference in the imaginary of ‘White’ America” (Grosfoguel 2003, quoted in López 2012, 191). Though Cubans have been afforded a “special status,” this status is limited. United States Cuban immigration policies have become more restrictive over time, and these restrictions illustrate the precariousness of Cuban American claims to a “favored minority” or “whitened” status. Moreover, as Latino studies scholars note, people who would be considered white in Latin America are remade into “Latinos” in the United States through processes of racialization. These processes often position Latinos as perpetual foreigners (Chavez 2013; Mora 2014; C. E. Rodríguez 2000; Santa Ana 2002). Thus, though white Cubans were white in Cuba, in the United States their claims to whiteness are always in relation to a white American elite power base—they are perceived as nonwhite in relation to Anglo whites (López 2012; Mirabal 2003).16
I illuminate how (white) Cubans, not viewed as “true whites” in the United States, work to “reclaim” whiteness by distancing themselves from blackness (López 2012, 191). I do not deny that white Cubans are agents in making claims to a white identity, for some, even in ways that are more overtly racist toward blacks. I realize that several scholars would push back from even the slightest suggestion that Cubans have anything in common with other minority groups. However, I believe it is important to both acknowledge white Cuban hegemony and analyze their contradictory positioning. Because of my focus on the particularities of power dynamics in the U.S. national context, in my discussions about the battle over worthy citizenship in Miami, I describe Cubans, regardless of color, as a minority group, taking into account the ways they have been racialized as distinct from the white numerical majority. This is not to say that they experience their marginality in the same way as other groups, quite the contrary. However, Aihwa Ong reminds us that it is important to discern the domains where preexisting racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural forms and the analytics of power shape “peoples’ attitudes, behaviors, and aspirations in regard to belonging to a modern liberal society” (2003, 15). Following Ong’s recommendation that we emphasize the role of the social technologies of government in creating ideal citizen-subjects, I reveal how white Cuban Americans, responding to threats to their status as “true” Americans, invoke “worthy citizenship” in ways that reinscribe black/white and other binaries. The complex positioning of Cubans, who are white and not quite white, a minority and not quite a minority, blacks and whites, refugees and not (traditional) refugees, allows us to trouble racial categories and definitions. Furthermore, examining Cuban American anti-blackness and the contradictions inherent in Cuban American whiteness advances a critique of the enduring stigmatization of blackness in the hemisphere (Aja 2016; López 2010, 190).
African Americans and the “New” Immigration
As non-European immigrants renegotiate whiteness/blackness to claim worthy citizenship within the United States, these struggles necessarily overlap with the struggles of African Americans who perceive themselves to be “native minorities.” Despite the gains of the civil rights movement, the continued disenfranchisement of African Americans highlights the enduring legacy of a U.S. system that positions African American “others” against white “citizens.” Yet the experiences of African American communities are often absent in studies of immigration, and existing research has failed to explain how the influx of new immigrants and the United States’ growing ethnic/racial diversity intersects with the continued systematic disempowerment of blacks in the United States. Thus, my focus on African American negotiations of the racial climate of the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States provides a necessary and important scholarly intervention. In the case of Miami, because interethnic conflict has in large part been related to local reactions to mass immigration from Cuba, I offer a new look at the Mariel exodus and Balsero crisis, highlighting the voices of African Americans, which are often left out of the numerous studies on these migration waves (for example, Aguirre 1984; Aguirre, Sáenz, and James 1997; Bach, Bach, and Triplett 1981–1982; Camayd-Freixas 1988; Greenhill 2002; Henken 2005; Hufker and Cavender 1990; Masud-Piloto 1996; Nackerud, Springer, Larrison, and Issac 1999; Wilsbank 1984).
As descendants of slaves brought to the U.S. South, African Americans have a very different relationship to the United States than do immigrants (regardless of color). Because of their position in the United States as both minorities and as “Americans,” African Americans have often sought to align racially with the “Other” but have also desired to establish their rightful place in the U.S. nation (Brock and Castañeda Fuertes, 1998). The alliances blacks have made with other groups of color historically is encouraging and demonstrates that conflict is not the norm. Nevertheless, the findings of scholars investigating black opinions on immigration from as far back as when the Chinese arrived between 1850 and 1882 and when Mexicans arrived during World War II, to the more recent post-1965 migration of the twentieth century, reveal a strong contradiction: blacks generally support the rights of immigrants but tend to oppose immigration when it infringes on their job prospects (Diamond 1998; Fuchs 1990; Hellwig 1981, 1987; Jaynes 2000; Pastor and Marcelli 2004; Schulman 2004; Thornton and Yuko Mizuno 1999). The response to the Cuban influx in Miami in 1980 and in 1994 demonstrates a similar contradiction, complicated by the fact that Cubans, who were the “Other,” were constructed simultaneously as “white” and viewed as a privileged group.
Capturing a moment in time before Miami’s black population grew to be as diverse as it is today, I explore how African Americans responded to the Cuban influx, as well as to a new black immigrant presence owing to the influx of black immigrants from other areas of the Caribbean. I examine how Miami-based African Americans contended with what the new diversity would mean for their still disenfranchised community and look into their struggles over the politics of black identity. For African Americans living lives in which they feel disempowered and ignored, some may voice their concerns in ways that flatten out geopolitical complexities and reinscribe racial binaries and white racial frames. But by taking the time to listen to their concerns and illuminating their struggles for “worthy citizenship,” I not only undermine the simple binaries that compose worthy citizenship; I take seriously the concerns of African American “native minorities” who feel caught up in a zero-sum game. My focus on African Americans in Miami ultimately underscores that given changing demographics, scholarship on African American experiences must continually be in conversation with scholarship on immigrant experiences.
Today, African Americans and Latinos together constitute the majority of residents in most of the nation’s largest cities, and the residential integration of blacks and Latinos will continue to increase (Telles, Sawyer, and Rivera-Salgado 2011). These demographic shifts make it important to put more scholarly attention on the relationships between these groups, whether in relation to the issue of conflict or otherwise. Clearly, African Americans have a long tradition of building coalition with immigrant groups and with Latinos (Behnken 2016; Johnson 2013; Kun and Pulido 2013; Márquez 2014). Thus, while heeding the warnings of scholars who argue that constructions such as “the Black–Latino divide” have been overhyped in U.S. media (Sawyer 2006; Telles et al. 2011), I also acknowledge a need to recognize the divisions that do exist. In places such as El Nuevo South—North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and other southern regions—“although cooperation and conflict coexist in Hispanic newcomers’ relations with whites and blacks, often in ambivalent and contradictory ways, black-Hispanic tensions frequently outweigh a sense of shared racial solidarity vis-à-vis whites” (Marrow 2011, 118; see also Gay 2006; McClain et al. 2007).17 As such, my study contributes to the burgeoning literature about black/brown relations in “new” contexts, particularly the South.18 Given the longer history of raced immigration to Miami, which preempts the large-scale immigration of Latinos into other metropolitan areas, Miami acts as a predictor of how complex racial dynamics between blacks and Latinos may continue to unfold in other areas of the country (Grenier and Stepick 2001).
Afro-Cuban Immigrants—Confounding Racial Divides
As I have argued, it is necessary to capture how the poles of “black” and white” continue to be entrenched in today’s multiethnic society and create divisions between groups such as African Americans and nonblack Latinos as they struggle for worthy citizenship. Yet it is equally important to challenge such binary divisions and the consequences they create for marginalized groups. The way forward, I would suggest, is to attend to the complexity of what it means for people who straddle black and Latino identities to assimilate into the national framework of the United States. Drawing from and contributing to Afro-Latino studies, I focus on Afro-Cuban immigrants to reveal possibilities for challenging the logic of worthy citizenship and of anti-blackness through alternative forms of identification and interethnic cooperation.
Latino studies scholarship, which centers the implicit heterogeneity of Latinos, has been instrumental in complicating U.S. racial politics and resisting the strict divisions of the U.S. black/white binary (Dominguez 1997; C. E. Rodriguez 2000). But despite the resistive potential found in embracing the ambiguities inherent in the category “Latino,” Latino studies scholarship often neglects the issue of blackness and the specificity of black Latino experiences (Jiménez Román and Flores 2010; Rivera-Rideau et al. 2016; Torres-Saillant 2002, 2003, 2010). Afro-Latinos in the United States must contend with the black/white opposition in ways their nonblack counterparts do not. Furthermore, the exaltation of racial ambiguity lends itself to the affirmation of Latin American myths of racial democracy, which deny existing racism with the assertion that because of race mixture (and other multiplicities), specific Latin American countries have moved beyond race (Duany 2005; Jiménez Román and Flores 2010).
The scholarship on Miami race relations reflects this inattention to the black Latino experience. Afro-Cubans have been virtually absent from analyses of contemporary Cuban immigrant experiences (Aja 2016; Gosin 2010; Mirabal 2003), and until Alan Aja’s (2016) important contribution, Miami’s Forgotten Cubans, post-1959 Afro-Cuban immigrants have been excluded from most book-length analyses of both Cuban Miami and Miami race relations. Afro-Cubans remain a quite small proportion of Miami’s population, which partially explains their absence from these studies. Yet their numbers in the United States grew substantially during the Mariel and Balsero immigration waves. Although previous studies focused on Mariel have considered the issue of race, with the observation that being categorized as black played a major role in the Marielito stigma as well as their rejection by some “white” Cubans (Aguirre 1984; Bach et al. 1981–1982; Camayd-Freixas 1988; Hufker and Cavender 1990; Masud-Piloto 1996; Wilsbank 1984), the issue of blackness has not been the main focus of these studies.19
The growing scholarship on Afro-latinidades works to resolve these tensions within the Latino studies and Miami immigration literatures. It highlights the ways political identities and categories such as “Latino” “are always historically and discursively constructed” (Beltrán 2010, 9) but also forces a relooking at the poles of black and white as they operate in the lives of people who are phenotypically black (Jiménez Román and Flores 2010; Oboler and Dzidzienyo 2005; Rivera-Rideau et al. 2016; Torres-Saillant 2002, 2003, 2010). For the literature on Miami, this means, rather than taking the Mariel stigma for granted, as is done in most studies, we must explore how the stigma came into being through a language around blackness, making connections between what it means to be African American in the United States and what it means to be “black” for Afro-Cuban immigrants. More broadly, building on Afro-Latino scholarship allows me to explore how Afro-Cubans disrupt an anti-black racial politics of division. The Afro-Cuban experience illustrates the complexity, simultaneity, and porousness of identities taken to be discrete, pointing to alternative ways to claim belonging.
In my study, the Afro-Cuban presence among the Marielitos and Balseros brought into question a dominant narrative in African American newspapers that positioned African American “natives” against (white) Cuban “foreigners.”20 Their presence troubled the boundaries between “black” and “white” and between “African American” and “Cuban” as well as the very definitions of these identities. Their presence also challenged white Cuban Americans who sought to dissociate from African Americans in order to (re)claim their white identities, because white Cubans were forced to acknowledge their own “blackness” and the fact that the Cuban welcome in the United States was not as stable as they hoped. Furthermore, as revealed in interviews, Afro-Cubans recount stories illustrating instances in which they deliberately challenge divisive racial notions in face-to-face interactions. They challenge Cuban exile anti-blackness, the impulse among some African Americans to define black membership around a U.S. identity and the English language, and the idea that black and Latino identities are distinct. As they juxtapose the ways in which Cuban notions of “whiteness” and “blackness” are remade in the United States, the Afro-Cubans in this study enact a strategic use of racial discourses of a different sort, reclaiming problematic Cuban racial democracy discourses to combat negative racial experiences in the United States. Through their negotiations of the U.S. racial order, they challenge the limitations of racial categories and anti-blackness, as well as other oversimplifications necessary in the politics of division as manifested in the U.S. racial hierarchy. Making this challenge is important because such oversimplifications support a political order that many people in all groups find unlivable.
Charting the complex relations between African Americans and Cubans, generations of Cuban immigrants, and black and white Cubans during periods of radical transformation in Miami, I seek to illustrate how interethnic conflict must be understood as part of the broader effort of ethnic groups to make claim to the nation and construct their identities. In the chapters to come, I criticize the negative attitudes some African Americans harbor against Latinos as well as the anti-black racism that can be seen among some Latinos. But a main goal of the book is to bring to light how conflict between groups of color is connected to, even compelled by, the historically white dominant social order. Using Miami as an exemplary case, I explore a history of strict black/white divisions that provides the foundation of race making there. Connecting the current more “multicultural” racial context to these histories of white domination, I seek to more fully challenge the racial status quo and white power base that continues to limit resources of marginalized peoples, frames them as unfit for the nation, and creates a standpoint of precariousness that gives rise to the need among these groups to struggle for U.S. belonging. In this way, rather than blaming racialized groups for the conflict that exists, I affirm the desire among marginalized groups to more fully establish themselves or contest their exclusion from a “true” American identity. I also work toward rooting out and exposing the fallacy of subscribing to the white power base’s exclusionary ideals of “the nation” as a tool for asserting power, unity, and identity. I reinforce the fact that the boundaries around racial/ethnic identities are in fact porous. But this is not the simplistic call to “get rid of racial categories,” nor is it about challenging what people call themselves. Rather, I contend that looking at why these boundaries get made in the first place, and the power dynamics involved, is necessary to get to the book’s ultimate goal—to direct us to the idea that the people being identified are not so separate; our oppressions are mutually constituted, and our fates are bound up together.
Research Strategy: Examining Text and Talk
To more effectively understand processes of racialization as they lay out divisions between groups and shape interethnic conflict, there is a need “to look at the cultural representations and discursive practices that shape racial meanings” (Omi 2000, 260). Race is constructed through discourses of text and talk, that is, through discourses circulating in the mass media and in face-to-face interaction (Van Dijk 1993; West-Durán 2004; Wetherell and Potter 1992). I explore dominant discourses on conflict between African Americans and Cubans in Miami, as well as how these groups draw on such discourses in different ways as they seek the benefits of “worthy citizenship.” This dual focus requires analyzing discourse at different sites of production and paying attention to the production of dominant discourses about national belonging and how minority individuals and communities interpret, understand, and utilize these discourses to their own ends. As such, the research in this book draws both on textual analysis of newspapers as critical sites of the production and contestation of dominant discourse and on in-depth interviews that provide a lens into the interpretations and strategies of individuals as they reflect on how such discourses affect their daily lives.
Discourse and the Media
During the Mariel exodus and the Balsero crisis, the media functioned as an important multifaceted site of discourse production about race, immigration, and interethnic conflict. To be clear, the media and media processes are not the subject or main concern of the research per se, but rather the media are used as a tool or site for capturing discursive practices and understanding the framing of the concerns of the communities investigated. Media scholars Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki define discourse as “how people understand, think, and talk about something, be it an issue or a category of people” (2000, 6). Following Marx, Gramsci, and the Frankfort School, Rojecki argues “that our tendency to take things as a given and not be self-reflective on them privileges a set of power relations, a rationalization of privileged class interest” (2000, 17). Such apathy can be exploited by privileged groups who may manipulate discourse to support their constructions of consensus through language and texts (Hall 1997; Van Dijk 1987, 1993). What is important is that “the media do not exist in isolation. They reflect and validate the existing social order and disparage those who are perceived as a threat” (Hufker and Cavender 1990, 333).
Accordingly, in regards to marginalized groups, the mainstream media have often painted a broad, negative, and decontextualized picture of these groups, further contributing to their marginalization. Toward the goal of avoiding such decontextualization, this book engages with mainstream as well as nonmainstream discourses by investigating African American and Spanish-language press. Ethnic news media were created in part to challenge the dominant elite voices prominent in mainstream media and to provide alternative readings of society. Newspapers are indeed mediated, reflecting the priorities of editors and journalists. Yet they (ethnic newspapers especially) are also always in conversation with their perceived public. This conversation can be indirect or more direct, as such newspapers act as an interactive space for their readers to voice their opinions and concerns (Jacobs 2000; Rhodes 1995; A. Rodriguez 1999). In this book, I access the voices of Miami’s African American community through an examination of the Miami Times. As “the South’s largest Black weekly circulation, serving Miami-Dade County since 1923,” the Miami Times, based in Liberty City (one of Miami’s historically African American neighborhoods), was and continues to be the most widely circulated black community newspaper in Miami.21 In 1980, the paper reached 23,049 people on a weekly basis (National Research Bureau 1980). Established in 1929 during the heyday of the black press, it performs for Miami what Ronald Jacobs describes as the black press’s role: it provides a forum for debate and to promote self-improvement, monitors the mainstream press by providing alternative readings of news, and increases black visibility in mainstream society (2000). Between 1900 and 1950, the black press in the United States was at its strongest and provided a valuable space for discussions of integration and issues of civil rights. Black newspapers were important venues for black organizations and leaders to mobilize the community (Jacobs, 2000). Similarly, the Miami Times reported on civil rights concerns (such as unfair hiring practices and so on), local events and politics, black firsts, and sports. The paper also contained a large section on local black church happenings, a poetry section, death announcements, classifieds, and a section where community members could offer thank you notes to other community members and supporters. Although the newspaper likely did not reflect the views of all blacks at the time, this official voice provides insight into leading African American opinions about current events.
The Spanish-language paper I examine, El Nuevo Herald, has a more complicated history with the Cuban American community. The Miami Cuban community created a strong local news media with hundreds of newspapers, tabloids, and magazines dedicated to the defeat of Castro (García 1996).22 Along with these smaller papers or periodiquitos more focused on the politics of Cuba, in 1980 Miami had two other prominent Spanish-language newspapers, Diario las Americas and El Miami Herald (later renamed El Nuevo Herald). Diario las Americas, a Nicaraguan-owned newspaper, catered to the right-wing, exile community (A. Rodriguez, 1999). Seeking to engage a Spanish-language paper with a primary focus on local concerns and capturing more diverse Cuban American political viewpoints, including more moderate views, I examined El Nuevo Herald. El Nuevo Herald was created by the Knight-Ridder Company in 1979 in response to Cuban American criticism of the company’s English-language Miami Herald, which is Miami’s flagship newspaper. By the late 1970s, the Cuban American community had become fed up with the Miami Herald, which they believed was insensitive to Cuban issues, painted Cubans and other Latinos as criminals, and was too soft on communism and Castro (Portes and Stepick 1994; Soruco 1996). Because El Nuevo Herald was created to attract the readership potential of the growing Cuban population and was created in response to dissatisfaction with the Miami Herald, it needed to strike a balance between Anglo-American or mainstream ideals and the concerns of the Cuban American community in order to sell papers. In 1987 El Miami Herald became independent of the Miami Herald, with a separate staff and editor, and changed its name to El Nuevo Herald. A Cuban American, Roberto Suarez, became the paper’s editor, and the journalists were almost exclusively Cuban (Portes and Stepick 1994; Soruco 1996). Although the paper was still owned by the Knight-Ridder Corporation, the move to independence from the English-language paper allowed a more prominent Cuban voice and identity of the paper. Under the editorship of Suarez, El Nuevo Herald grew to a daily circulation of more than a hundred thousand by 1990 (Soruco 1996) and has continued to be the most widely read Spanish-language paper in Miami.
I analyze El Nuevo Herald’s coverage of Mariel because during the time it reflected several voices; in the same paper we are able to see coverage that reflects both mainstream depictions of the Marielitos as well as Cuban American reactions to those depictions. Controlled by the same editorial board that produced the mainstream paper, it reflected an often expressly negative view of Mariel, exhibiting the press’s role in enforcing a racialized normativity by directly presenting the same overarching views promoted in the mainstream paper in editorials and news stories (often direct translations of the English version) (Portes and Stepick 1994). Yet the paper also engaged strategies that signaled the Spanish-language paper’s attempts to align more closely with the exile community. For instance, it presented more explicitly Cuban voices in op-eds, letters to the editor, and other material more unique to El Nuevo Herald. Besides containing different op-eds and letters than the mainstream paper, El Nuevo Herald also differed from the Miami Herald in the placement of stories (giving stories about Mariel more prominence on the front page) and the amount of stories on Mariel (El Nuevo Herald published more). By paying close attention to these areas in which El Miami Herald and the Miami Herald differed, I tease out Cuban American engagement with the discourses being produced about the Mariel refugees in the English-language paper. By the time of the Balsero crisis, El Nuevo Herald had become independent and therefore more accepted within the Cuban American community. Thus, my analysis of the paper during the Balsero crisis captures a more solidified Cuban American voice.
Afro-Cuban Voices
To further expand the discussion about the complexities of racializing frames and expose their limitations, my study also includes a focus on unofficialized discourses of talk through in-depth interviews with a sample of Afro-Cubans from Miami and Los Angeles.23 I interviewed Afro-Cubans living in the United States to gain a deeper understanding of their individual voices, examine how they negotiate their racial positioning, and connect their views to the structural and ideological issues affecting the construction of race. The interviewees include thirty individuals, fifteen in each city, gathered through snowball sampling and consisting of eleven women and nineteen men from nineteen to sixty-five years of age. The majority of interviewees came to the United States during the 1980s and 1990s (three arrived in the first decade of the 2000s) as adults or late teens. A little more than half of the interviews were conducted in Spanish and then translated.
The qualitative methodology captures nuances within subjective interpersonal interactions, which are difficult to capture in quantitative studies. I explore several questions: How do these Afro-Cubans believe Anglos, African Americans, and other Latinos position them in the U.S. racial hierarchy? How do they determine their own place in society and in relation to the predominant racial structure and to other racialized groups? How do their present experiences relate to the findings from the newspapers? Having a small sample allowed an in-depth look into individual life experiences. I do not attempt to generalize the findings to a larger population but to identify patterns and concerns that can be expanded on in future studies. Ultimately, by centering Afro-Cubans through interviews, I seek to engage in a scholarly conversation about the complicated negotiations faced by transnational black immigrants and illuminate how through their multiplicity, post-1980 Afro-Cuban immigrants challenge assimilative models and impulses.
Notes on Terminology
There are several terms that are used repeatedly in the book that require explanation. One is “minority.” According to a politics of division, white Euro-Americans have been pitted against “nonwhites” (Valdez 2017), and thus I use the term “minority” to describe populations (such as African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans) that traditionally have been racialized as distinct from the white numerical majority. This polarity has remained consistent over time (Dominguez 1997; Feagin 2010; Urciuoli 2003). Thus, in the United States, the term “minority” has meant more than proportionally smaller numbers of people; it has signaled a group of people who have been denied full access to institutional power. Currently, there are moves away from using the term “minority” in part because the demographic trend is toward no one group being the majority or the minority. Although I continue to use the term, I also use terms such as “groups of color,” “racialized groups,” or “Others” as I work toward finding descriptive alternatives to a term that has a long tradition of usage in scholarship on race and ethnicity but needs to be rethought given demographic trends.
“Latino communities” or “Black communities.” I distinguish between “Latino” and “black” (African American) communities in the tradition of scholarship that seeks to identify trends and patterns. However, I acknowledge and highlight in this book that in reality, there is much heterogeneity within these populations; there is no one “Latino” or “black” community. Furthermore, as Afro-Latinos exemplify, these communities are not discreet.
Black.
The term “black” is used in two ways. It is used as a descriptor of African heritage or of black color (which could be applied to Cubans or other newer immigrants of African descent), and it is also used interchangeably with “African American.” The term “African American” broadly refers to the descendants of slaves brought to the continental United States, but this category can include Afro-Caribbeans who share this quasi-“native” status in that they immigrated to the United States early in Florida’s history (such as the mid-nineteenth century). These earlier black immigrants integrated themselves in a unified “black” African American community, often adopting an “African American” political and social identity (Rose 2015; Shell-Weiss 2009). What is important to know is that regardless of early origins, members of this group consider themselves to be “native” to the United States, in contrast to more recent immigrants (black or non-black) who arrived after the 1960s. Although using only “African American” to refer to “native” blacks could be simpler, I include the use of “black,” because it was used most often in the Miami Times newspaper to describe the group that today is more commonly called “African Americans” in formal language. “black” is also a commonly used self-descriptor by African Americans.
Afro-Cuban. The term “Afro-Cuban” is used in this book because it is the term commonly used in U.S.-based scholarship to describe black people from Cuba. However, it is not used in Cuba; there Cubans who describe themselves as “black” (referring to phenotype) use the term “black” or “negro.”
Chapter Outline
Chapter 1 develops Miami as a distinct location in the United States and expands on the concept of “worthy citizenship.” The chapter provides more depth on Miami’s history, demographics, and racial dynamics to provide background for understanding interethnic tensions during the 1980 Mariel boat lift and 1994 Balsero crisis. I argue that three dominant race-making frames are involved in the creation of worthy citizenship: the black/white frame, the good/bad immigrant frame, and the native/foreigner dichotomy. These binary frames, traditionally utilized by whites to divide themselves from groups of color, become useful for racialized groups when they are faced with political, economic, and social instability in the United States and are compelled to prove their worthiness by aligning with the dominant order. As such, these frames shape the contentious interethnic relations explored in the book.
Chapter 2 analyzes the coverage of the 1980 Mariel boatlift in El Miami Herald. This chapter illustrates how the black/white binary of worthy citizenship was perpetuated in the framing of the Marielitos as either potential “worthy citizens” or “black criminals.” As exiles fleeing the Fidel Castro regime, Cuban Americans had presumably secured their welcome in the United States by proving their worthiness through an upward mobility that distinguished them from the nation’s (black) underclasses. Yet, the newcomers from the 1980 Mariel boatlift, or Marielitos, were younger and poorer than Cubans who came during previous waves, a higher percentage of them were black, and they were criminalized in the Cuban and mainstream U.S. press (García 1996). Their criminalization created a dilemma for established Cuban exiles: they desired to both support the newcomers as their compatriots and escape the stigma that threatened the community’s “Golden Exile” image. I argue that a language around blackness helped produce the Mariel stigma, as voices in the Herald invoked the good/bad immigrant binary through white dominant tropes about laziness, dependency, and criminality to distinguish “worthy” (white) from “unworthy” (black or nonwhite) citizens. Highlighting an intra-Latino struggle between black and white Cubans shaped by the racial context of Cuba, the chapter juxtaposes the newspaper discourse with Afro-Cuban testimonials as they discuss how public opinion about blackness affected their acceptance during Mariel. By examining how racist attitudes from Cuba intersect with a U.S. brand of anti-black sentiments in the context of the U.S. anti-communist imperatives, the chapter illustrates how and why anti-black discourses may be adopted by various racially marginalized groups to set themselves apart from “unworthy citizens.”
Chapter 3 analyzes African American responses to the Mariel boatlift in the Miami Times. The Mariel boatlift came on the heels of what became known as the McDuffie Riot, an African American uprising against the latest notorious incident of police brutality. As the local government turned its attention to the influx of 125,000 Cuban newcomers, some African Americans feared Miami’s white dominant infrastructure would continue to ignore their persistent concerns. Furthermore, the Times drew on the native/foreigner binary to endorse the idea that black Americans and white Americans were the “real Americans” who were “losing out” due to mass migration and that Cuban refugees (constructed as white) were receiving preferential treatment over another controversial group of migrants coming seeking U.S. refuge at the same time—“unambiguously” black Haitian refugees. The seeming disdain for Cuban immigration is, upon closer examination, directly related to African American desires to more fully challenge the persistence of anti-blackness in the United States. But the binary frames used to characterize “white” Cubans and “black” Haitians flattened out the greater complexity of a climate in which immigration and refugee policies were actually consistent with a reversal of civil rights movement gains. The chapter illustrates that the larger presence of black Cubans among the new refugees forced a reexamination of African American modes of solidarity that decide group membership and black identity according to a bipolar black/white racial paradigm. This critique becomes all the more important as African Americans are challenged by the nation’s growing ethnic/racial diversity with how to fight anti-blackness while also incorporating other populations such as Latinos into their struggles for greater equality.
Chapter 4 examines the polarizing effect of the 1994 Balsero crisis on Miami’s African American and Cuban American communities and the different interpretations of the crisis that were disseminated in both El Nuevo Herald and the Miami Times newspapers. My findings demonstrate the extent to which, for racialized native-born and immigrant communities alike, citizenship is implicitly understood as conditional and earned through suffering, an assumption that establishes the grounds for interethnic conflict. I contend that through its civil rights and immigration policy, the United States has created a hierarchy of suffering that makes human rights a zero-sum game. Accordingly, the newspaper coverage reveals that the varying interpretations of the Balsero crisis centered on the differential treatment of Haitian “boat people” and the Balseros. The Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers could be co-opted to make each community’s suffering visible and to highlight the desirability of being included in the U.S. nation. The arrival of over 35,000 Cubans on makeshift rafts had led to the historic move of the Clinton administration to further close the open-door welcome on Cuban immigration, and the Herald conveyed Cuban exiles’ anger over what they perceived as U.S. betrayal. The theme of Balsero suffering, captured in images depicting the desperation of rafters at sea, became a primary theme in the paper and was offered as proof that they deserved asylum. Meanwhile, the Miami Times continued a critique of the differential treatment of Haitians and Cubans, reflecting African American discontent that all suffering is not equally recognized. The Times made the case that after more than a century as suffering “Americans,” blacks were still deemed unworthy citizens by white elites. Taken together, the messages in both newspapers illustrate that in the quest for U.S. belonging, interethnic conflict emerges as racially marginalized groups are coerced to compete with one another over who has suffered most. Nonetheless, discussions of the struggles of Afro-Cubans in both papers, though limited, point in the direction of alternative ways of understanding the Balsero crisis. They highlight the racial origins and consequences of U.S. immigration policy and generate new potential for collaborative rather than competitive relations between Cubans and African Americans and other racialized groups.
In negotiation with the mainstream discourses I trace in earlier chapters (around black/white binaries, good/bad immigrants, and natives/foreigners), blackness, Cubanness, and Americanness are reimagined by Afro-Cuban informants in ways that are more nuanced and complex. Chapter 5 focuses on the narratives of post-1980 Afro-Cuban immigrants living in Miami and Los Angeles to foreground the often-neglected perspectives of contemporary Afro-Cuban migrants and to gain greater insight into how people situated on the borders and “in between” confront dominant racial frames. The stories they tell about their daily racial encounters shine a light on the spaces where they found a welcome and on the overlaps where coalitions between groups such as African Americans and Latinos are possible. But their stories also detail experiences of rejection by members of groups within which they might be expected to have affinity. In some of their encounters with Cubans and African Americans in Miami, and with African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, they have been expected to choose one identity or the other or have been rejected because of their blackness. However, the interviewees strategically undermine the fixed notions of race and ethnicity that are embraced even by some nonwhites. Furthermore, they draw upon problematic “racial democracy” discourses from Cuba to contest such negative racial experiences. Although this chapter points to the resistive potential in the fluidity in Afro-Cuban identity, lauding this potential does not mean accepting an overly simplified U.S.-based “multicultural rhetoric” or the idea that “race does not matter” (which also comes through in Latin American racial democracy discourses). Rather, this chapter underlines that Afro-Cuban negotiations illustrate just how much race continues to shape the social lives of those seeking U.S. belonging and highlights the continued strength of racial notions that denigrate blackness.
My conclusion draws together the broader implications of my arguments about how and why the binary frames of worthy citizenship come to be internalized and utilized as a strategy for marginalized groups to make claims to the nation and about how all those caught up in the Miami scenario—African Americans, (white) Cubans, and Afro-Cubans—actually help us disrupt these binaries. Their negotiations of race illuminate the greater transnational and geopolitical contexts that are mediated in U.S.-based race making. The conclusion also situates the historical analyses of previous chapters to the current Miami context and outlines the national implications of this book’s study. The Obama presidency brought the greater political congruence between younger Cubans, Afro-Cubans, and African Americans to the fore, but Obama’s opening of relations between the United States and Cuba and the Cuban vote during the 2016 election for Donald Trump have also reminded us of the continued hardline stance of older Cuban exiles. This chapter ponders what the new climate in Miami means for the future of race relations there. The lessons learned from the cases explored in the book allow us to anticipate and better understand contemporary struggles that arise between African Americans, Latinos, and other racialized groups across the nation and give us the background we need to contemplate solutions. Thus, the conclusion also discusses African American and Latino conflict in light of more recent examples and in light of anti-immigrant rallies used as a stage by powerful white politicians to play African Americans against immigrants. Ultimately, the conclusion reminds us that as whites become the numerical minority, challenging the pull to embrace white dominant exclusionary ideologies, as well as dismantling structural inequities, will be crucial for the forging of effective alliances between currently marginalized groups.