Blood, Race, and Nativeness: Conjuring Identities in Colonial Eastern Cuba

Blood based conceptions of ancestry underlying Iberian notions of race and caste “circulated” across the South Atlantic world and acquired new significations in New World imperial contexts. These blood based categories became pervasive criteria of imperial classifications imposing order and hierarchy throughout new colonial territories, particularly with reference to the tripartite system of Spaniard, Indian and black (African ancestry) and their multiple biotic “mixes” often indexed by the term “castas.” Yet, despite their indisputable force, questions remain regarding the ascendancy that these (“pure” or “tainted”) blood based orderings took in the production of colonial subjects and scholars should focus as well on how the interaction of these racial orderings with other categories could also modulate, if perhaps not altogether displace, their performative force and the attendant political abilities or disabilities they produced in the colonial polity.
      More specifically this paper examines how racialized enslaved and free subjects of African ancestry in a non-plantation frontier region of pre-plantation colonial Cuba also mobilized a repertoire of affiliations closely related to territorial origin, such as local “nativeness” [or naturaleza], creoleness, and even “indigeneity” in their articulation of collective “self.” In doing so these subjects complicated their identities, modulated the force of (“pure” or “tainted”) “blood” and made bold political claims to freedom, inclusiveness, and local citizenship rights in the colonial polity. Ultimately, the dynamics of this case may shed light on the significance of “blood” in the production of identities elsewhere in what has begun to be termed in the historiography as “Afro-Latin America.”