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| More Than Black : Afro-Cubans in Tampa | 
| Authors: Susan D. Greenbaum, Henry Alan Green, Marcia Kerstein Zerivitz
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Category: Book
Buy New: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1909594
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 80
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 0813024668
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.8687291075965
EAN: 9780813024660
ASIN: 0813024668
Publication Date: June 30, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
This engaging ethnography follows Cuban exiles from Jose Marti's revolution to the Jim Crow South in Tampa, Florida, as they shape an Afro-Cuban-American identity over a span of five generations. Unlike most studies of the Cuban exodus to the United States, which focus on the white, middle-class, conservative exiles from Castro's Cuba, More Than Black is peopled with Afro-Cubans of more modest means and more liberal ideology. Fifteen years of collaboration between the author and members of Tampa's century-old Marti-Maceo Society, a mutual-aid and Cuban independence group, yield a work that combines the intimacy of ethnography with the reach of oral and archival history. Its weave of rich historical and ethnographic materials re-creates and examines the developing community of black immigrants in Ybor City and West Tampa, the old cigar-making neighborhoods of the city. It is a story of unfolding consequences that begins when the black and white solidarity of emigrating Cubans comes up against Jim Crow racism and progresses through a painful renegotiation of allegiances and identities. Building on Marti's declaration that being Cuban was "more than white, more than black," this study views, from the vantage of a community unique in time and place, the joint effects of ethnicity and gender in shaping racial identities. Photographs of individuals, families, and events, both historical and contemporary, complement the highly readable text
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| Customer Reviews:
Race, ethnicity and community history July 16, 2005
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Dr. Greenbaum, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida (Tampa), has written a complex and highly readable work on Tampa's Afro-Cuban community from the late 1800s to the
present day. The book fills in intellectual territory on the interplay of race adn ethnicity.
The book centers around , a turn-of-the-twentieth-century mutual aid society (the Marti-Maceo Society, La Sociedad la Union Marti-Maceo) formed by Afro-Cubans residing in and around West Tampa and Ybor City.
The book largely addresses teh internal and external construction of race and ethnicity. Tampa's Afro-Cubans are a case in point: they were "black" by America's Jim Crow standards but they themselves focussed on their Cuban-ness, even when rejected by white Cubans seeking the "wages of whiteness." Unfortunately, the Southern obsession with race controlled how the community at-large regarded Afro-Cubans. Greenbaum goes to much-needed lengths to disassociate ethnicity from race, since "race is a uniform you wear, and ethnicity
is a team on which you play"
The first chapter contains takes to task scholars who attribute "racial democracy" to western hemispheric countries in which race is professed to be irrelevant to one's social status, in contrast to the United States' black-white dichotomy. Greenbaum argues that such claims are weak.
But the spiritual and intellectual heart of this book is the Marti-Maceo Society. Afro-Cubans nurtured this society, part medical insurer, part mutual aid, part social, in ways analogous to other immigrants, in addition to setting them apart from the African American community which lay nearby.
Towards the end, Greenbaum slams the urban renewal and revitalization movements of the late twentieth century. She raises important points about the the obscuring of Ybor City's Afro-Cuban history so as to given the area a "Latin," i.e. "white" past that will be suitable for fun-seekers and prospective residents.
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