Indigenous Passages to Cuba, 1515–1900 by Jason M. Yaremko (review)

JASON YAREMKO'S Indigenous Passages to Cuba, 1515–1900 demonstrates how Indigenous peoples navigated networks of "mobility, migration, and diaspora" throughout the Caribbean and across North America in response to colonialism (164). More specifically, he invites us to rethink how colonialism forced some Amerindians far from their ancestral homelands but nonetheless situated them as important actors in Cuban history. Yaremko provides an account of heterogeneous Cuban Indigeneity, which he describes as the "multicultural or multinational indigenous presence in colonial Cuba," and argues that Cuba (and often Havana more specifically) serves as a central site for understanding histories of Indigenous diaspora, diplomacy, labor, and forced migration of Amerindians (142). Indigenous Passages argues that rather than being a place where Indigenous people were completely eradicated, as the colonial narrative fantasy often goes, Cuba economically depended on the labor of a diasporic Indigenous population well into the twentieth century.

Partly due to missionary efforts, and partly due to Indigenous migration and diplomacy, Havana became an important node on Indigenous circuits of migration, exile, and mobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this way we might understand Havana as a "Native hub," to use Renya Ramirez's term, or a place that operated as a locus for Indigenous engagement with Spanish empire. As Yaremko is careful to insist, however, these thoroughfares and circuits of movement and exchange were dictated as much by Indigenous peoples as they were by the Spanish. Chapter 1 details Spain's fairly fruitless attempts to missionize Indigenous peoples in Florida. Instead of developing a mission network across the territory that would secure colonial control, Yaremko describes how, time and again, leaders from the Calusa and other Indigenous communities in La Florida would request Spanish missionary assistance with ulterior motives that had less to do with desires for conversion and more to do with securing a colonial ear for diplomatic negotiating. Despite Spanish attempts to regulate the spiritual, political, and economic lives of Indigenous populations in Florida and Cuba, Indigenous peoples used understandings of Spanish colonial governance to negotiate to their own ends whenever possible.

In the second through fifth chapters of Indigenous Passages, Yaremko explains that Havana served as a significant destination for Indigenous peoples, in some cases by choice and in others by forced relocation. Havana was a nexus of African slavery and Spain's imperial defense, shipping, and trade in the Americas and, as such, a strategic site for speaking back to empire. Indigenous people of the continental Southeast, particularly Muscogee/Creek communities, maintained relationships with Spain even after Spain conceded control of the region. Indigenous leaders and delegates continued to travel back and forth to Havana, protecting mutually beneficial economic and political relationships and, for Creek delegates, acquiring needed resources and weapons to stave off increasing French, British, and (later) U.S. interference. However, as Yaremko explains in chapters 3 and 4, not all "Amerindians" traveled to Havana as diplomats. Apaches, Mecos, Yucatec Maya, and others were forcibly sent to Cuba in an attempt to weaken the threat posed to continental New Spain by repeated Indigenous uprisings, attacks, and warfare in opposition to colonialism, and later by the Mexican republic. Amerindian deportees provided additional labor to an economy in constant need of a larger workforce and became desirable domestic workers, seen as less costly and racially less threatening than black slaves. Yaremko spends the final chapters of his book detailing Yucatec Maya life in Cuba and the ways Maya advocated for themselves and their communities, especially as an often-exploited labor workforce.

While this book opens up questions about Indigenous diasporas, mestizaje nationalisms, transits, and continental intimacies, it does not actively engage these topics or the work of Indigenous studies (or Caribbean diasporic studies) scholars who are invested in similar lines of inquiry. This seems a missed opportunity, as dialogue with works by Jodi Byrd, James Cox, Shari Huhndorf, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, and Jace Weaver (to name only a few) would serve as compelling interlocutors to reinforce Yaremko's key...