Life within the Margins: Combatting the Archival Erasure of Cuban and Puerto Rican Women of African Descent in the Wake of "Racially Democratic" Nation-Building Projects (1815-1897)

The Spanish Crown feared the Haitian Revolution’s influence would spread to its Caribbean colonies. In turn, the Spanish Empire implemented a series of whitening policies throughout the nineteenth century to uphold its racial hierarchy, which increased the persecution, surveillance, and racialized violence people of African descent endured. Statutes such as the Decree of Graces (1815) and El Código Negro (1848) accelerated the creation of necropolitical states in the Hispanophone Caribbean in efforts to mollify possible insurrections against the institution of slavery and colonial rule. This paper examines how Puerto Rican genealogical records, legal precedent, and primary sources reflect the Spanish Empire’s anxieties about abolition and independence. Moreover, this paper posits that people of African descent were at the helm of abolitionist, self-determination, and nation-building movements throughout the Hispanophone Caribbean in the nineteenth century. Showcasing women of African descent’s erasure in archival documents and cultural narratives of nationality highlights how empire and ideas of racial democracy ultimately reproduced anti-Black discourses of racial harmony. Through shared ideas of a distinctly Caribbean identity defined by transnational bonds of Afro-diasporic solidarity, movements like Antillanismo contrast discourses of "colorblind" racially democratic discourses by firmly espousing anti-racist and anti-colonial beliefs in the formation of pan-Caribbean revolutionary movements. Drawing from the lives of women such as Mariana Grajales, Rosa Solá, and Bernarda Figueroa, this paper contends that women of African descent’s roles in the fight for abolition and independence were crucial for the organization and success of revolutionary processes.