‘Los Negros en USA’ and the US Slave Narrative Project

• In Event: Afro-Diasporic Influences in Caribbean and Latinx Cultural Production

Abstract

In this presentation I discuss an untitled photo essay that appears in “Los Negros en USA” (1960), a well-known number of the iconic Cuban literary magazine, Lunes de Revolución. Through archival research I have discovered that the portraits in the photo essay are of formerly enslaved people with verifiable identities and well-known histories, but this information is not provided anywhere in the magazine. The photos were products of the Slave Narrative Project (SNP), a massive undertaking by the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). Between 1936 and 1938 the FWP sent out-of-work writers in seventeen states to carry out interviews with the formerly enslaved, which were collected, along with hundreds of portraits, in 1941 and bound into seventeen volumes titled Slave Narratives: A Folk History in the United States from Interviews with Former Slave. Given the fact that the portraits and their captions came directly from the Slave Narrative Project, with which several of the African-American co-editors of the special issue of Lunes were familiar, it is not clear why neither the project nor the names of the enslaved are mentioned anywhere in the magazine. In my presentation I explore the process through which these images and stories became part of the special number of Lunes and discuss several possible explanations behind the editors’ decision to omit references to the SNP in their evocative photo essay.

Author

• Thomas F Anderson, University of Notre Dame