Hierarchies at Home

Rezensionen / Stimmen

'Hierarchies at Home is a much needed addition to Cuban history. Anasa Hicks brilliantly shows how the myths and realities around domestic servitude were key to creating and maintaining anti-Black racial and gender norms from the republican era through the 1959 Revolution. Her focus on domestic workers yields new insights into labor, gender, and race across traditionally bifurcated time periods. By illuminating the under researched topic of Black women's labor in twentieth century Cuba, Hicks alters our understanding of Cuban history itself.' Devyn S. Benson, University of Kentucky 'In this innovative, impressively researched social history, Anasa Hicks recovers the experiences of Black domestic workers in Cuba from multiple forms and generations of political and archival erasure. This is a history of people supposedly without history, to paraphrase Cuban historians Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux and Juan Perez de la Riva, one characterized by change over time - especially after 1959 - but also vexing continuity. An exciting entry into the new Cuban historiography.' Michael J. Bustamante, University of Miami 'Hierarchies at Home explodes the myth of the 'respectable' Cuban family whose whiteness often depended on the exploitation and invisibility of Black and female labor. With meticulous research and scrutinizing insight, Anasa Hicks illuminates the continuity of violence, racial prejudice and gendered scripts that confined the agency of domestics by 'unsilencing' their voices and perspectives. Ignored by contemporaries and historians alike, Black domestics emerge as central protagonists in the struggle over who and how Cuba would define modernity, citizenship and national wholeness amidst the legacies of slavery.' Lillian Guerra, University of Florida 'Hicks's work fills a significant void in the historiography of Cuba, which has long been dominated by narratives of slavery and revolution. She (rightly) centers domestic labor in the debates over what it meant to be Cuban, both before and after the revolution. Her work calls on historians to reevaluate how we examine traditional studies of labor and activism, much as has been done for studies of slavery and resistance, and is essential reading for scholars of Cuba.' Sarah L. Franklin, Hispanic American Historical Review