Cuban Racial Politics in Nineteenth-Century New York: A Critical Digital Approach

Abstract

Abstract This essay offers a reappraisal of the racial politics of the nineteenth-century Cuban independence struggle through an analysis of the experience, as migrants, of Rafael Serra and other Afro-descendant activists in New York. Serra was the leader of a community that worked with José Martí to create the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC). The author makes use of digital tools for network visualization and mapping to illustrate the evidence of both race-based (diasporic), class-based, and nationalist social networks among Serra’s constituents. These networks, created against a backdrop of highly localized residential segregation, facilitated a range of political strategies including the creation of race-based organizations, alliances with African Americans, and the more famous cross-racial coalitions of the PRC. Such strategies were not mutually exclusive, as has sometimes been presumed, but rather mutually dependent. In presenting this evidence, the author responds to recent work by Putnam on research “in the digital age” and follows Solberg’s call on digital humanities scholars to “give away our game,” presenting a critical self-appraisal of the digital methods, tools, and labor arrangements employed. Following Tufte and Theibault, he concludes that digital visual representations are useful to humanities scholars not because they generate or validate arguments, but because they can effectively illustrate arguments that rest on humanistic systems of analysis and evidence.