Another Cubanidad, another Latinidad: Latinx African diaspora in Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics

Abstract

This research proposes that, in taking 1929 Ybor City as its setting, Nilo Cruz’s drama Anna in the Tropics (Dramatists Play Service, New York, 2003) simultaneously enacts an alternative origin story for Cuban American community in the United States—one inclusive of Afro-Cubans—and creates a bridge between Latinx, African American, and Afro-Latin American experiences. Constitutive of that bridge is what this essay identifies as the drama’s subtle invocation of the African diaspora worldviews, practices, and aesthetics of Orisha worship common in the Americas. This spiritual component of the play is central to the resolution of gender, financial, and national conflicts that erupt in this drama, and suggestive of an Afro-Cubanidad that is gender-bending, decolonial, and cosmopolitan. This interdisciplinary analysis situates Anna in the Tropics in both Latinx and African American performance contexts, while also drawing from research in history, religion, gender, and feminist thought.