Hierarchies at Home
Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution

This book destabilizes racialized and gendered assumptions about labour in Cuba and challenges traditional chronologies of 20th-century Cuban history.

Anasa Hicks (Author)

9781316513651, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 August 2022

247 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.9 cm, 0.47 kg

'Hierarchies at Home explodes the myth of the 'respectable' Cuban family whose whiteness often depended on the exploitation and invisibility of Black and female labor. With meticulous research and scrutinizing insight, Anasa Hicks illuminates the continuity of violence, racial prejudice and gendered scripts that confined the agency of  domestics by 'unsilencing' their voices and perspectives. Ignored by contemporaries and historians alike, Black domestics emerge as central protagonists in the struggle over who and how Cuba would define modernity, citizenship and national wholeness amidst the legacies of slavery.' Lillian Guerra, University of Florida

Hierarchies at Home traces the experiences of Cuban domestic workers from the abolition of slavery through the 1959 revolution. Domestic service – childcare, cleaning, chauffeuring for private homes – was both ubiquitous and ignored as formal labor in Cuba, a phenomenon made possible because of who supposedly performed it. In Cuban imagery, domestic workers were almost always black women and their supposed prevalence in domestic service perpetuated the myth of racial harmony. African-descended domestic workers were 'like one of the family', just as enslaved Cubans had supposedly been part of the families who owned them before slavery's abolition. This fascinating work challenges this myth, revealing how domestic workers consistently rejected their invisibility throughout the twentieth century. By following a group marginalized by racialized and gendered assumptions, Anasa Hicks destabilizes traditional analyses on Cuban history, instead offering a continuous narrative that connects pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba.

Introduction: Violent intimacies: Constructions of nation, race, and gender inside Cuban households
1. Embodied anxieties: Hygiene, honor, and domestic service in republican Cuba
2. Of domestic (and other) offices: Black Cubans' claims after independence
3. Stopping 'Creole Bolshevism'
Liberal correctives to increasing labor radicalism
4. Patio fascists and domestic worker syndicates: Communism, constitutions, and the push for labor organization
5. Pushing the present into the past: The revolution's solution to domestic service in the 1960s
6. Conjuring ghosts: Domestic service's remains after 1959
Conclusion: Revisiting a racial democracy: Cuban history from inside out.

Subject Areas: Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL]