Hispanic Caribbean Research Articles

Caribbean Confederations as Relationalities

In this essay, I connect my work on Archipelago studies with Édouard Glissant’s notions of relationality and Caribbean confederations to formulate what I denominate as the erotics of archipelagic thinking. My main goal is to share my process of thinking with and through Glissant’s work to focus on a series of theoretical gestures that have allowed me to propose modes of reading literary depictions of Caribbean con/federations that go beyond the binary opposition between colonialism and nationalism. I am performing an exercise that I assign to my students when I teach the “Introduction to Critical Theory” course at the University of Miami. Instead of writing an essay with a short theoretical introduction followed by a detailed close reading of literary and cultural texts that illustrate a keyword or a theoretical insight, I conduct a methodological meditation in which I theorize the archipelagic as a form of relationality that configures an erotic imaginary beyond the nuclear family and towards affective networks. To think about the Caribbean as an archipelagic formation, I use my comparative work on the Antillean Confederation in the Hispanic Caribbean (1860-1898) and the West Indies Federation in the English Caribbean (1958-1962) as a historical context in which the region congealed as a network of locations “act[ing] in concert."

Photography in a context of change for the insular Hispanic Caribbean

After the Second World War, the Caribbean art experienced profound transformations in their creative practices and modes of cultural understanding. The complex social and political realities in the islands of the Hispanic Caribbean led to a turning point in regional processes, a transformation of the art field, and rethinking of peripheral discourses. from the demonstrations, the topics of interest and the role of the artist in society. Photography, and especially that coming from peripheral spaces in the international logic of art, contributed the most rebellious icons of the moment. The cultural symbols of a new voice, which responds to an emancipatory and decolonizing thought, is expressed in the construction of a visual discourse of ethical and libertarian paradigms. The most innovative language of the time appealed to a background photographic base due to the relationship between immediacy and pregnancy of the image, or the inherent reproducibility that fosters a more effective communicative function.

Hispanic Caribbean Essayistic Writing: Somewhere beyond the Sea

Hispanic Caribbean Essayistic Writing: Somewhere beyond the Sea

Paralelismos tematológicos e imaginarios entre «La hechicera» de Teócrito de Siracusa (III a.C) y el Auto de fe contra Paula de Eguiluz (1623-35)

In this article, we examine how an Auto de fe from seventeenth-century Cuba shows us a historical mirror of life, society and imagination. Through it we witness the story of Paula de Eguiluz, a black slave owned by the Warden Mayor of Santiago de Cuba, who was tried under the accusation of witschcraft by the Inquisition in Cartagena de Indias between 1623 and 1635. The document, considered a contextual proof in its time, today becomes a proof of historicity. Its thematic, symbolic and anthropological scope connects it to the legacy of magical and hidden rituals that survived in the Hispanic Caribbean, and whose origin dates back to Classical Antiquity. Among the texts that testify this connection, we will consider the poem “The Sorceress” by Theocritus of Syracuse , author of the Idylls. This poem tells how Simeta prepares an elixir for the young man she desires, and describes the ritual, and the emotional circumstances that surround it, in detail. In this article, we introduce the connections between the magical imaginary described by Theocritus, and the beliefs that in seventeenth-century Christian Europe were still part of popular culture and that, transferred to America, were hybridizing with indigenous traditions and beliefs coming from Africa through the Atlantic slave trade.

Book Review: Racialized Visions Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean by Vanessa K. Valdés (2020)

Book Review: Racialized Visions Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean by Vanessa K. Valdés (2020)

Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean ed. by Vanessa K. Valdés

Reviewed by: Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean ed. by Vanessa K. Valdés Gabriel Bámgbóṣé (bio) Vanessa K. Valdés, editor. Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean. SUNY, 2020, Pp. 275. US $95 (hardcover) / $24.95 (paper). One of the most powerful elements of Vanessa K. Valdés' scholarship is the incisive comparative lens she deploys, one which reimagines the Black literary and cultural geographies of the Americas. Her monograph, Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas, is a clear example of how this approach advances a greater understanding of the contributions of peoples of African descent in the imagination of the Americas. In the same vein, Valdés' recent edited collection, Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, uses this comparative perspective to rethink the place of Haiti in the Hispanic Caribbean space, with broad implications for resituating the historical meanings and cultural significance of Haiti in the Americas. The contributor Mariana Past articulates the main problem twelve diverse scholars engage with in the collection: "Haiti, independent since 1804—and whose original constitutions abolished slavery and guaranteed universal liberty to all citizens of Hispaniola, who were defined as free, equal, and Black—remains a perpetual outlier in the Caribbean context" (161). Thus, questioning the racialized othering of Haitians in the Caribbean imagination, the collection argues that, notwithstanding the disavowal of Haiti's Blackness, its revolutionary history and culture play a central role in the symbolic and material envisioning of decolonial struggle against multiple colonialities in the Americas. In her preface to the collection, Myriam Chancy notes that, despite the linguistic differences among the Caribbean nations, their "makeup and realities have overlapped and cannot truly be understood fully without one another" (xiv). The quest to map out these overlapping realities and histories of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico is at the center of the collection's eleven chapters. Each chapter explores different but related dimensions of Haiti's fundamental yet denigrated influence on the Caribbean imagination through compelling critical analyses of fictional narratives, poems, short stories, historical texts, and films. Valdés' introduction situates the collection in the problematic of the field, posing the crucial question of how to reread Haiti and its complex relationship with other nations in the Hispanic Caribbean, whereas most studies have often concentrated on Haiti's representations in Anglophone Caribbean literature (15). Valdés contextualizes three key moments that the collection evocatively interrogates and that [End Page 177] signify the tragic consequences of anti-Haitian sentiments: the 1937 massacre of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Haitian-Dominican border under the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–1961); the 2010 earthquake that foregrounded the racialized perception of Haiti as a space of disaster; and the 2013 law instituted by the Dominican Republic Constitutional Tribunal that stripped many Dominicans of Haitian descent born between 1929 and 2007 of their citizenship. Six chapters focus on the problematic relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic; they critique the colonial racialization of geography and Blackness/Africanness that produces the border tension within the island of Hispaniola. In "The Border of Hispaniola in Historical and Fictional Imaginations since 1791," Claudy Delné's sharp analysis of Jacques Stephen Alexis' General Sun, My Brother, René Philoctète's Massacre River, and Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones shows how Haitian writers articulate the experience of border crossing as simultaneously tragic and liberating. Ángela Castro's chapter focuses on the same Danticat novel through a symptomatic reading of time, trauma, and the repetition of historical violence on the Hispaniola border. Drawing attention to Junot Díaz's figuration of implicit "Haitianism" in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Mohwanah Fetus' chapter reads the historical trauma and violence in the novel through the lens of the cane field racialized as "a 'Haitian space' in the Trujillo's nation-state" (211). Carrie Gibson's chapter, "The Dictator's Scapegoat," turns to conservative Dominican historians' ideological roles in propagating the anti-Haitian discourse that occurred during the Trujillo regime. By analyzing Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi's historical writing, Gibson demonstrates how the production of historical texts legitimizes anti-Haitian and anti...

Food Environments in Times of Crises: Examining Menu Changes in Response to COVID-19 Among Hispanic Caribbean Restaurants in New York City

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has affected independently owned restaurants with implications for food access and health equity. Changes in healthy food availability (HFA) were examined in a randomly selected sample of Hispanic Caribbean restaurants in New York City, before and after the COVID-19 onset (n = 76), using an adapted Nutrition Environment Measurement Survey for Restaurants. An overall decrease in HFA scores was found and changes HFA components (fried foods and vegetarian options increased, 100% fruit juice decreased, p < 0.10). Changes were examined against restaurant characteristics. This work augments our understanding of ethnic restaurants and the nutrition implications of business adaptations when responding to emergencies.

Decline and substitution of Spanish future subjunctive in northwest and southwest Colombia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries

AbstractThe use of future subjunctive (FS) has suffered a steady decline in written Spanish from the fourteenth century. It is not clear whether it disappeared similarly in each clause, and whether its use was determined by regional distinctions to be considered as a dialectal feature. Granda (1986) suggested that the Hispanic Caribbean countries in the Americas were more conservative in the use of FS in contrast to other regions in a southerly direction. Ramírez-Luengo (2008), however, argued that FS decline occurred uniformly in the Americas, with the eighteenth century being the critical time for the substitution. In a sample of 45 legal documents (60,852 words) from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, issued in northwest and southwest Colombia, the proportions of FS and other alternating forms were equally likely in both regions. FS tabulations were less likely to occur in the nineteenth century within relative clauses, while they were equally likely to occur in conditional protases. This suggests that FS in written Spanish does not show dialectal differences and that its decline might have occurred earlier in relative clauses than conditional protases, probably due to a stylistic motivation.

Digesting Tensions and Change

Digesting Tensions and Change

Transnational Renderings of Negro/a/x/*

This essay takes on the task of reflecting on the keyword negro from a transnational standpoint that considers how negro/a/x, a sociopolitical identity, falls in and out of AfroLatinidad in Latin American and hispanic Caribbean diasporas. In particular, the author is concerned with re-centering Blacknesss in AfroLatinidad in response to the depoliticized usage of this identity. Through a focus on diaspora, movement, and the embodied fact of Blackness, the author argues that when thinking about negro (Black) and negritud (Blackness) from a transnational Spanish Caribbean context, we should remember that AfroLatinidad, or Black Latinidad, is first and foremost about Black lives, embodied experiences, movement, translatability, and untranslatability.

Contributors

Contributors

Review: Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas, by Jennifer Jolly

Review: <i>Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas</i>, by Jennifer Jolly

Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, by Vanessa K. Valdés (ed.)

Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, by Vanessa K. Valdés (ed.)

Counternarratives of Nationalist Anti-Black Images: Normalizing and Extolling Blackness in Contemporary Art of the Hispanic Caribbean

This article examines contemporary art of the Hispanic Caribbean as a counternarrative to the antiblack aesthetic ideals in the region. By exploring beauty standards on these islands through quotidian language and images that portray beauty, the prolif- eration of whiteness as the epitome of the aesthetic is exhibited in modern day Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. This article follows the work of scholars who have theorized and evidenced that the post-independence narrative has dominated the islands’ perceived racial identities, marginalizing blackness and praising whiteness. We add that this discourse has also impacted its peoples’ daily beauty rituals, as most of them facilitate the ‘whitening’ of one’s appearance. Present-day art that extolls blackness and questions the exclusion of people of African descent on the islands thus serves as a powerful truth reveal; contrarily to the official history, negritude is not rebellion, rather it is the region’s nature and beauty. In other words, this research seeks to explore how this art portrays negritude as the face of the Hispanic Caribbean, normalizing and celebrating the appearance of the majority of its people.

“Because I don’t come from the culture:” Examining dietitian’s experience promoting healthy dietary behaviors among Hispanic Caribbean clients in New York City

Dietitians are key in addressing existing diet-related health inequities, yet, research is lacking concerning how dietitians’ experiences working within culturally diverse communities. Addressing this gap, we interviewed fifteen dietitians working with Hispanic Caribbean (HC) communities in New York City, an understudied community with high incidence of diet-related conditions, to assess the best practices and experienced barriers when working with these communities. The best practices identified included building rapport, incorporating cultural values, and addressing food access. However, the interviews revealed important barriers that prevented successful implementation of these best practices. These included personal factors (language, food culture knowledge, food preferences), lack of culturally-relevant resources, cultural challenges that prevented engaging clients in participatory decision making, and institution-related constraints (time scarcity and funding). The findings underscore the need for improved training for dietitians to be better equipped to work with communities with different cultural and economic backgrounds from their own, for more culturally-relevant resources and funding to address underlying causes of diet-related health disparities in minority populations, and for increased diversity in the profession. Furthermore, our focus on Hispanic Caribbean communities expands existing research promoting cultural competence in the profession, presenting experiences working in with this large segment of the Hispanic community in the United States.

The Caribbean‐American Dementia and Aging Study (CADAS): A multinational initiative to address dementia in Caribbean populations

AbstractBackgroundLatinos represent the fastest growing proportion of dementia cases among different ethnic groups. Most of the studies in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) include Latino populations within the same group, failing to sufficiently account for the real richness of linguistic, ethnic, ancestry, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity represented across Latino communities (e.g., Caribbean‐Hispanic vs Non Caribbean‐Hispanics), yet there is substantial AD disparities and disease heterogeneity among Hispanic groups.MethodsThe Caribbean‐American Dementia and Aging Study (CADAS) is a multinational initiative aimed to answer key questions regarding dementia determinants and consequences in Caribbean‐origin populations in origin communities as well as among emigrant populations in the United States. By building a collaborative team of leading Caribbean and U.S‐based dementia researches, CADAS will analyze differences in dementia prevalence and risk factor profiles between Caribbean‐Hispanics living in the main Hispanic Caribbean Islands and extend comparisons to Hispanic immigrant groups in the US as well as non‐Hispanic whites, exploiting the considerable difference in life course risk exposures across these populations.ResultsPreliminary findings from the CADAS study indicate that prevalence of dementia in the older Caribbean population is high, both in the main islands and in U.S. compared to non‐Hispanic‐whites. We found overall weaker associations between education and dementia probability in the three main Caribbean islands. By contrast, a stronger association between education and dementia probability was found in the US among non‐Hispanic whites, Mexican Hispanics, and non‐Mexican Hispanics; these persist even after controlling for income and wealth.ConclusionsThere are differential associations between SES risk factors, education, and dementia probability between Caribbean islands and the U.S., which may be attributed to differences across societies in risk factors correlated with education. The CADAS study will fill a critical gap in AD knowledge, exploiting rich variation in life‐course exposures to better disentangle genetic versus environmental determinants of dementia levels and disparities. Future studies within this populations will focus on early‐life socioeconomic status, gene by environment interactions and societal cost.

Irune del Rio Gabiola, Resistant Bodies in the Cultural Productions of Transnational Hispanic Caribbean Women: Reimagining queer identity

Dans Resistant Bodies, l’hispaniste Irune del Rio Gabiola propose une analyse decoloniale d’œuvres d’artistes queer d’origine portoricaine, cubaine, et dominicaine faisant ou ayant fait l’experience de la transnationalite. La transnationalite est un mode d’emancipation de l’Etat-nation ou les individus marginalises peuvent trouver l’opportunite de reformuler leur propre identite nationale en habitant un entre-deux induit par l’existence de frontieres. En quittant leur territoire national insu...

Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean ed. by Vanessa K. Valdés

Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean ed. by Vanessa K. Valdés

Contributors

Contributors

Area Characteristics and Consumer Nutrition Environments in Restaurants: an Examination of Hispanic Caribbean Restaurants in New York City.

Hispanics in the USA, particularly those of Caribbean descent, experience high levels of diet-related diseases and dietary risk factors. Restaurants are an increasingly important yet understudied source of food and may present opportunities to positively influence urban food environments. We sought to explore food environments further, by examining the association between neighborhood characteristics and restaurant consumer nutrition environments within New York City’s Hispanic Caribbean (HC) restaurant environments. We applied an adapted version of the Nutrition Environment Measurements Survey for Restaurants (NEMS-R) to evaluate a random sample of HC restaurants (n=89). NEMS-HCR scores (continuous and categorized as low, medium, and high based on data distribution) were examined against area sociodemographic characteristics using bivariate and logistic regression analysis. HC restaurants located in Hispanic geographic enclaves had a higher proportion of fried menu items (p<0.01) but presented fewer environmental barriers to healthy eating, compared with those in areas with lower Hispanic concentrations. No significant differences in NEMS-R scores were found by other neighborhood characteristics. Size was the only significant factor predicting high NEMS-HCR scores, where small restaurants were less likely to have scores in the high category (NEMS-HCR score>6), compared with their medium (aOR: 6.6, 95% CI: 1.8–24.6) and large counterparts (aOR: 5.6, 95% CI: 1.5–21.4). This research is the first to examine the association between restaurant location and consumer nutrition environments, providing information to contribute to future interventions and policies seeking to improve urban food environments in communities disproportionately affected by diet-related conditions, as in the case of HC communities in New York City.