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6 - Conjuring Ghosts

Domestic Service’s Remains after 1959

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2022

Anasa Hicks
Affiliation:
Florida State University
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Summary

Chapter 6 explores memories of domestic service and intimacy between the 1960s and 1980s. Using oral history interviews, the chapter argues that the memories of former domestic workers and former employers of domestic workers informed their racial politics in the present. These memories were almost entirely devoid of political activism, even though this book has demonstrated that domestics were politically active for all of twentieth-century Cuban history. Instead of politics, the emblematic memory that Cubans retained was “the emotional logic of domestic service,” which allowed and even celebrated harmony between black and white Cubans while maintaining a strict and often unspoken racialized hierarchy. After the official end to domestic service in the 1960s, nostalgia for domestic service became a way for anti-Communist Cubans in exile and on the island to argue that pre-1959 had not been racist, as the revolutionary government has always insisted. This chapter historicizes the emotions around domestic service and demonstrates that an institution that had always distilled racial hierarchy in Cuba into its purest form was used to argue for a horizontal equality that never existed.

Type
Chapter
Information
Hierarchies at Home
Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution
, pp. 153 - 171
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Conjuring Ghosts
  • Anasa Hicks, Florida State University
  • Book: Hierarchies at Home
  • Online publication: 18 August 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009070577.007
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  • Conjuring Ghosts
  • Anasa Hicks, Florida State University
  • Book: Hierarchies at Home
  • Online publication: 18 August 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009070577.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conjuring Ghosts
  • Anasa Hicks, Florida State University
  • Book: Hierarchies at Home
  • Online publication: 18 August 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009070577.007
Available formats
×