A microhistory of racial segregation in Cienfuegos, a central Cuban port city

Founded as a white colony in 1819, Cienfuegos, Cuba, quickly became  home to people of African descent, both free and enslaved, and later a small community of Chinese and other immigrants. Despite the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity that defined the city’s population, the  urban landscape was characterized by distinctive racial boundaries,  separating the white city center from the heterogeneous peripheries. A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century explores how the de facto racial segregation was constructed  and perpetuated in a society devoid of explicitly racial laws.

Drawing on the insights of intersectional feminism, Bonnie A. Lucero shows that the key to understanding racial segregation in Cuba is recognizing the often unspoken ways specifically classed notions and practices of gender shaped the historical production of race and  racial inequality. In the context of nineteenth-century Cienfuegos, gender,  race, and class converged in the concept of urban order, a complex and  historically contingent nexus of ideas about the appropriate and desired social hierarchy among urban residents, often embodied spatially in particular relationships to the urban landscape.

As Cienfuegos evolved subtly over time, the internal logic of urban  order was driven by the construction and defense of a legible, developed,  aesthetically pleasing, and, most importantly, white city center. Local authorities produced policies that reduced access to the city center along class and gendered lines, for example, by imposing expensive building codes on centric lands, criminalizing poor peoples’ leisure activities, regulating prostitution, and quashing organized labor. Although none of these policies mentioned race outright, this new scholarship demonstrates that the policies were instrumental in producing and perpetuating the geographic marginality and discursive  erasure of people of color from the historic center of Cienfuegos  during its first century of existence.

Crime exists in every society, revealing not only the way in which societies function but also exposing the standards that society holds about what is harmful and punishable. Criminalizing individuals and actions is not the exclusive domain of the state; it emerges from the collective consciousness—the judgments of individuals and groups who represent societal thinking and values. Studying how these individuals and groups construct, represent, perpetrate, and contest crime reveals how their message reinforces and also challenges historical and culturally specific notions of race, class, and gender.
 
Voices of Crime examines these official and unofficial perceptions of deviancy, justice, and social control in modern Latin America. As a collection of essays exploring histories of crime and justice, the book focuses on both cultural and social history and the interactions among state institutions, the press, and a variety of elite and non-elite social groups. Arguing that crime in Latin America is best understood as a product of ongoing negotiation between “top-down” and “bottom up” ideas (not just as the exercise of power from the state), the authors seek to document and illustrate the everyday experiences of crime in particular settings, emphasizing underresearched historical actors such as criminals, victims, and police officers.
 
The book examines how these social groups constructed, contested, navigated, and negotiated notions of crime, criminality, and justice. This reorientation—in contrast to much of the existing historical literature that focuses on elite and state actors—prompts the authors to critically examine the very definition of crime and its perpetrators, suggesting that “not only the actions of the poor and racial others but also the state can be termed as criminal.”