Throughout Takkara Brunson's Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba, the careful tracing of African-descended women in the historical record highlights the challenges and rewards of reading between the archival lines. Honoring the contributions of women like Inocencia Valdés, Cristina Ayala, Consuelo Serra de G. Veranes, and Esperanza Sánchez Mastrapa to a larger discourse of women's political roles, citizenship, and the future, Brunson asserts a narrative of “social thought, community activism, and cultural production” on the part of Afro-Cubanas that coexisted with their “imagin[ing] a future that validate[d] their full humanity” (p. 190).
Brunson's study of over 75 years of complex change, from the 1878 Pact of Zanjón's political and economic reforms to the revolution's triumph in 1959, does its intellectual work from a distinct and critical vantage. Focusing on how Afro-Cuban women negotiated citizenship practices, patriarchal norms, and discourses of racelessness, Brunson offers “a gendered analysis...
