Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean, 1850–1902 by Jesse E. Hoffnung-Garskof (review)

Racial Migrations opens on a January evening in 1890 in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where a group Cubans and Puerto Ricans—after days of working in cigar factories, restaurants, or their own homes—gathered together in an apartment to socialize, discuss literature and politics, and eat something comforting. This flat was the home of La Liga, an educational and recreational society dedicated to uplifting Spanish-speaking Caribbean émigrés of color. Though the identifier Afro-Latino was not used at the time, a fascinating array of New Yorkers embodied various points along the Black-Brown-White racial and class spectrum. "In the great swirl of humanity that descended on New York in the late nineteenth century, they were a tiny current," Hoffnung-Garskof acknowledges, but his book is an invaluable reminder that the Big Apple sits on deep historical foundations of African American and Hispanic intellectual production and intersectional activism, particularly around issues of racial equality and anticolonialism on the islands (2).

To "offer insight into the origins and evolution of … revolutionary thought" from a "migrants'-eye view," Hoffnung-Garskof prioritizes the methodology of microhistory (6). He spends a great deal of time situating emigrants in their particular natal contexts in the Caribbean, the varied social identities imposed on or claimed by them, and their publicly articulated ideas about racial hierarchies and forms of freedom. To mention just a few of his characters, Rafael Serra was a cigar maker from Havana who founded La Liga. Juan Bonilla was a cigar maker born in the Cuban enclave of Key West, Florida, who wrote for Black newspapers in both Cuba and New York. Gertrudis Heredia was one of the first Black women to study obstetrics at the University of Havana and delivered babies in New York's migrant community. Sotero Figueroa was a typesetter who became a writer himself and helped to mobilize his fellow Puerto Rican exiles. Hoffnung-Garskof's decision to begin with these figures—rather than the more familiar Cuban exile José Martí—is quite intentional. The point of Racial Migrations is to explicate how lesser-known exiles of color navigated their complex transnational experiences with legacies of racism and slavery, and how they each came to invest in coalitional and revolutionary politics that eventually supported Martí.

Hoffnung-Garskof's skills as a transnational historian, exhibited so well in his first book about the Dominican Republic and New York, continue to shine here. He dives deep into nineteenth-century Cuban and Puerto Rican political landscapes, educating readers on cross-class or cross-racial alliances that emerged and disintegrated at pivotal moments between wealthy landowners and capitalists, the urban artisan class, rural peasants, and enslaved or newly freed people. The 1868 uprising in Lares, Puerto Rico, and the Ten Years' War in Cuba are covered, as well as changes in voter laws and freedom of the press on both islands. Moving the discussion to the exile community of Key West—where workers and nationalists could organize more openly and away from Spanish authority—Hoffnung-Garskof illuminates how Cubanos of color and African Americans engaged in interracial relationships and politics in Reconstruction-era Florida. Toggling back and forth between the United States and the Caribbean, the author continually reminds readers of how activism in one place created changes in the other.

Hoffnung-Garskof then returns to New York, where Serra and the Bonillas had relocated by the early 1880s, to explore how Spanish-speaking Caribbean exiles found themselves newly classified along the United States' particular and confusing color lines. Like African Americans, they experienced discrimination and housing segregation. Many intermarried with African Americans; others created fraternal lodges with them or ate together during factory lunch breaks. What all of La Liga's members held in common was a reverence for education, artistic expression, and the written word. The club was an important...