Mobilizing Blackness as History in Santiago de Cuba’s Carnivalesque

• In Event: Stirring the ajiaco: Mobilities of race in Cuba

Abstract

This paper theorizes how racialization happens through micro-mobilities--people’s movements through their immediate lived space in one city, and how a yearly procession highlights and normalizes the spatialized racial order, thus performing Blackness while disguising racializing processes themselves as historical re-enactment. The July Carnival season in the city of Santiago de Cuba centers on the activities of Congas--neighborhood-based societies that participate in officially promoted, competitive displays and grassroots neighborhood events described as tradition. Of these, the Invasion is the quintessential grassroots event, a musical and danced reworking of the 1898 battles defeating the Spanish, in which thousands follow the Conga de Los Hoyos through the “territories” of other Congas. Based on ongoing fieldwork since 2006, I examine the Invasion as a performed diagram of “routes of Blackness” mapped onto a reenactment of Cuba’s transculturated “roots” and mobilizing the racialization of bodies, cultural forms, and neighborhoods. I focus on the upscaling potential of bodies in motion in the ongoing work of naturalizing race, thereby challenging static mappings of identity and place. In dialogue with Fernando Ortiz's ajiaco metaphor, I instead offer a dynamic model of how Blackness is constituted in the relation between race as a field of embodied experience and an object of discourse. Carnival mobilizations make Blackness tangible and sensible while contributing to its normalization as marking only some neighborhoods and cultural practices. It is not surprising that the mass “mobilization” of the Conga’s Invasion gets folkloricized as “traditional Black culture” and treated as a socially dangerous event.

Author

• Kristina Wirtz, Western Michigan University