In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 Racialized Culture and Translocal Counter-Publics Rumba and Social Disorder in New York and Havana LISA MAYA KNAUER Introduction This chapter analyzes the social spaces of the racially marked practices of “traditional” Afro-Cuban music and religion—rumba and Santería—in the New York area and Havana. I analyze these cultural practices as shaping a translocal counter-public constituted by multidirectional flows of money, goods, practices, and people, and where varied social actors in both places craft identities through intra- and intercultural negotiation and contestation. This paper highlights two nodes within this translocal counter-public sphere of AfroCubanness : weekly rumba performances in the NewYork area that have become flashpoints for competing claims of authenticity and ownership and racialized, gendered, and class-based conflicts over public space and public culture in Havana. The paper briefly sketches rumba’s evolution in the predominantly poor and black neighborhoods of the port cities of Havana and Matanzas in the nineteenth century. Popular and official attitudes in Cuba toward rumba are shown to reflect heavily gendered racial and class anxieties: like many black urban popular cultures, rumba is associated with rowdiness, civil disorder, and unbridled sexuality while simultaneously celebrated as an icon of national identity. The Cuban Revolution did not erase these ambiguities, which form part of the legacy of the “indigenized” New York rumba culture. Rumba was not simply transplanted to New York, I argue, but actively remade in a new environment over several decades with new social actors: 132 / Racialized Culture and Translocal Counter-Publics successive waves of Cuban migrants with divergent engagements with, and views of, Afro-Cuban culture “back home” and other cultural communities, particularly Puerto Ricans, other Latinos, and African Americans. The New York rumba “scene” comprises both informal open-air gatherings and staged “shows,” and its history has been marked by encounters and negotiations that are aesthetic, racial, and national: among Cubans who emigrated at different times, ranging from the 1950s to last month; between Cubans and non-Cubans; and between rumba participants and the combined forces of city government, private nonprofits, and property owners. As gentrification and privatization transform public culture in New York, police and park authorities have attempted to restrict the Central Park rumba, which throughout its forty-year history has had a free-for-all and unpredictable character. Simultaneously, the “rumba Sunday” at a Cuban restaurant in Union City, New Jersey, came under fire from some neighbors and local authorities and eventually ceased in 2005. This chapter locates these sites and controversies as part of the same “cultural geography” as the rumba landscape of contemporary Havana; in both places, Afro-Cuban culture is discursively constructed as both heritage and a threat to the social order. My narrative foregrounds the voices of the predominantly black and working-class Cuban participants in the New York rumba scene, many of whom maintain contact with or even travel “back home” and who offer a counter-narrative to hegemonic views of U.S. Cubans. I begin with a set of vignettes that outline the contours and suggest some of the dynamics of the rumba “scene” in New York. To provide a historical context, I examine the ambiguities surrounding the development of AfroCuban cultural practices in Cuba. Drawing on public-sphere analysis and, particularly , work on the black public sphere (Black Public Sphere Collective 1996) and Michael Warner’s conceptualization of counter-publics (Warner 2002), I argue that these racialized cultural performances might constitute an alternative public sphere, or counter-public. Cultural performances are always embedded in particular contexts, even as we may view them, and their protagonists may experience them, as translocal and linked to similar practices and performances in other places. I then trace the evolution of Afro-Cuban cultural performance , first in Havana and then New York, highlighting the counter-public aspects. In the final part of the chapter, I examine how the historic construction of rumba as a threat to the social order has shaped contemporary attitudes and policies in both Cuba and New York City. Without collapsing Havana and New York into a single, homogeneous entity, I suggest how we might think of an Afro-Cuban public sphere, or an Afro-Cuban counter-public, that is multisited , multiethnic, and translocal. Lisa Maya Knauer / 133 Setting the Stage: Performing Cubanness in New York On a warm Sunday afternoon in May 2002, New York City’s annual Cuban Day Parade filled the Avenue of the Americas with high-school marching bands, salsa ensembles, and floats.1...

Share