Measures of Equality
Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1902-1940
Alejandra Bronfman
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 10/2005
Pages: 256
Subject: History, Social Science, Law
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807876244
DESCRIPTION
Law, science, and the social sciences--which, during this era, enjoyed growing status in Cuba as well as in many other countries--played central roles in producing knowledge and shaping social categories in postindependence Cuba. Anthropologists, criminologists, and eugenicists embarked on projects intended to employ the tools of science to rid Cuba of the last vestiges of a colonial past. Meanwhile, the legal arena created both new freedoms and new modes of repression. Black and mulatto intellectuals and activists, working to ensure that citizenship offered concrete advantages rather than empty promises, appropriated changing social scientific and legal categories and turned them to their own uses. In the midst of several decades of intermittent racial violence and expanding social and political mobilization by Cubans of African descent, debates among intellectuals and activists, state officials, and legislators transformed not only understandings of race, but also the terms of citizenship for all Cubans.