Text

theses

ETD doctoral

For over four centuries, Cuba was the ultimate destination for countless thousands of island and mainland indigenes transported from throughout the hemisphere as allies, exiles, and slaves, adding to the native indigenous population of the island. In many cases, their paths – and the often tragic circumstances for their departures – are generally known up to their points of embarkation. While these migrations have been the subject of recent scholarship in World, Atlantic, New Conquest, New Indian, and Latin American and Caribbean Histories using transnational, regional, and comparative approaches, few studies have followed these people to their destinations in island homes and convents, presidios, pueblos, plantations, and palenques. Despite their various origins and ethnicities, all of these indigenes were reduced to the monolithic perennial Other of Hispanic colonization, rendered invisible as amorphous, anonymous indios, subsumed in Eurocentrist colonial chronicles and liberal nationalist myths of extinction and mestizaje, and ultimately as romantic symbols of the past that ignored or erased modern indigenous survival, both physical and cultural. Colonists and creoles in Cuba were always dependent on the allied indigenous population for defense and subsistence; captive indio laborers built the island; and indigenous loyalists and rebels figured prominently in the nineteenth century wars of independence. Based on published scholarship and original research into archival sources, this dissertation follows immigrant and native indigenes chronologically and thematically through major transformative junctures of the early and late colonial periods, in which they played significant roles that are only now being examined by Cuban historians. Using local and microhistorical approaches framed within regional contexts, I develop new insights into their diverse social, political, and economic lives in the eastern region of Cuba in selected pueblos established during the Bourbon Reforms Second Conquest, and map their evolution through the Constitutional Reform period, the rise of Second Slavery plantation society, and ultimately the wars of independence, when creole nationalists supplanted the indio as the new indigenes. Finally, I discuss the role of the Cuban indio in indigenous revival throughout the Taíno Antilles and cis-Caribbean region. American Indians were never extinct in Cuba, and their heterogeneity provides a living legacy that has been the bedrock of Cuban culture throughout the island’s history.

ETD_11309

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-rbqw-dc25

The author owns the copyright to this work.