Hierarchies at Home

Anasa Hicks is Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University. She specializes in Latin American and Caribbean history, focusing on twentieth-century Cuba, the Hispanic Caribbean, women and gender, and labor studies.

• 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.

'Hierarchies at Home is a much needed addition to Cuban history. Anasa Hicks brilliantly shows how the myths and realities around domestic servitude were key to creating and maintaining anti-Black racial and gender norms from the republican era through the 1959 Revolution. Her focus on domestic workers yields new insights into labor, gender, and race across traditionally bifurcated time periods. By illuminating the under researched topic of Black women's labor in twentieth century Cuba, Hicks alters our understanding of Cuban history itself.' Devyn S. Benson, University of Kentucky