2 - Of Domestic (and Other) Offices

Summary

Chapter 2 explores Afro-Cuban responses to stereotypes that connected blackness, dirtiness, and servitude. Using black newspapers and the legal petitions of black women in Santiago de Cuba, the chapter examines the tension between “racial uplift” – the notion that African-descended people could prove their worthiness as citizens by behaving “respectably” – and the lived realities of many black Cuban women. The chapter uses legal petitions from eastern Cuba to show how African-descended domestic workers advocated for themselves to the new national government. African-descended Cubans of the middle classes tended not to discuss the problems of their working-class counterparts, resulting in an almost complete absence of discussion of domestic service or domestic servants in black newspapers or magazines. Chapter 2 offers a pluralistic perspective on blackness in twentieth-century Cuba, showing the connections between and divisions among people in the same racial group.