This chapter examines the literary representation of Afro-Cuban orality by three major Cuban literary figures of the twentieth century: Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, and Nicolás Guillén. Their writing is considered in the context of wider debates about the representational value of Latin American literary portrayals of the Other and the question of the subaltern speaking, thus linking them with the late 1980s body of criticism known as postmodern ethnography. In this sense, critics tend to favor Cabrera’s self-reflective innovative representation over Ortiz’s supposedly objective detachment as traditional anthropologist. However, this chapter draws attention to the fact that both Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s studies were forms of salvage ethnography, an approach based on the erroneous belief that oral traditions need to be preserved or rescued through writing. The chapter then addresses the son poetry of Nicolás Guillén as a contrasting representation of Afro-Cuban orality in the realm of written poetry that circumvents Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s reifying approaches by drawing on the lyrics of Afro-Cuban music son. Thus, the poem "Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio" achieves an openly subjective literary reworking of an Afro-Cuban son text while recognizing its parallel existence as a legitimate Afro-Cuban literary form and foregrounding its own status as copy.

This chapter examines the literary representation of Afro-Cuban orality by three major Cuban literary figures of the twentieth century: Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, and Nicolás Guillén. Their writing is considered in the context of wider debates about the representational value of Latin American literary portrayals of the Other and the question of the subaltern speaking, thus linking them with the late 1980s body of criticism known as postmodern ethnography. In this sense, critics tend to favor Cabrera’s self-reflective innovative representation over Ortiz’s supposedly objective detachment as traditional anthropologist. However, this chapter draws attention to the fact that both Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s studies were forms of salvage ethnography, an approach based on the erroneous belief that oral traditions need to be preserved or rescued through writing. The chapter then addresses the son poetry of Nicolás Guillén as a contrasting representation of Afro-Cuban orality in the realm of written poetry that circumvents Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s reifying approaches by drawing on the lyrics of Afro-Cuban music son. Thus, the poem "Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio" achieves an openly subjective literary reworking of an Afro-Cuban son text while recognizing its parallel existence as a legitimate Afro-Cuban literary form and foregrounding its own status as copy.

Chapter 4 explores how transnational, antifascist constructions of blackness in Mexico allowed anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and artist-cum-ethnographer Miguel Covarrubias to trace Mexican cultural expressions back to Africa. It shows how Mexican and Afro-diasporic politics converged during the Second World War, when Mexico transformed into an ideal site for the inter-American study of indigenous and African-descended peoples and cultures. With Mexico City as the headquarters for the International Institute of Afro-American Studies, an impressive cohort of scholars concerned with blackness in the Americas -- including W. E. B. Du Bois, Melville and Frances Herskovits, and Fernando Ortiz -- came into direct contact with Mexican social science. As other nations took inspiration from Mexico’s cultural brand of race, these Aguirre Beltrán and Covarrubias adopted the ethnographic theories and methods prevalent elsewhere used to recognize the presence of African cultural retentions, or Africanisms, in the Western Hemisphere. For the first time, ethnographic data and archival research about African slaves and their descendants from the United States, Cuba, and Brazil were relevant to Mexican history and ethnography.

Chapter 6 turns to popular culture, especially poetry written by the city of Veracruz’s official chronicler Francisco Rivera, to explore how little the elite constructions of blackness detailed in previous chapters permeated the public sphere in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Reading the same Cuban intellectuals who helped Baqueiro Foster and Katherine Dunham Africanize “La bamba,” Rivera adopted an Afro-Cuban vernacular to define the city of Veracruz’s musical and historical relationship to the African Diaspora. A symbol of the city’s identity, his verse articulates a collective cultural memory rooted in the history of public spaces: the city’s main square, streets, parks, and piers. It blackens the city’s identity while lamenting the declining popularity the Afro-Cuban musical genres, chiefly danzón, that had enlivened local culture in the nineteenth century and especially during the 1910 Revolution. In short, he argued that, to resuscitate Veracruz’s African-descended musical heritage, the national elite needed to celebrate its festive improvisation and polyvocality: two pillars of the political participation that epitomized the democratic yearnings of the 1910 Revolution. Without the danzón’s resurgence, postrevolutionary democracy would remain a farce, and the PRI would continue to rule without regard for the people it supposedly represented.