Research

My research focuses on Black politics in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and the United States. In the Caribbean, I examine Black public opinion and Black consciousness to determine how attitudes are influenced by the juxtaposition of national narratives of racial harmony and realities of structural racism.  My study of racial identity politics in the United States focuses on Afro-Latino politics and racial identity among Latinos.

The Power of Race In Cuba: Racial Ideology & Black
Consciousness During the Revolution

2018 Winner of the Best Book Award from the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association & W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

The Power of Race in Cuba creates a framework of how racial ideologies that negate the existence of racism influence racial attitudes and affect (and impede) racial progress.  The book traces the history of racial discourse in Cuba and outlines how public opinion regarding race among Black Cubans responds to this discourse.  Through original survey data of Black Cubans and interviews with Cubans of all races, including activist and artists, the book reveals the realities of Black life in Cuba.  The book emphasizes an underground critique of racism among Black people and calls for an examination beyond public activism and social movements to understand Black politics both in Cuba and in the Americas as a whole.

Alternate Black Worlds": Black Cuban Migration During Jim Crow and Beyond
(With Devyn Spence Benson)

 This project is both a book manuscript and a digital archive funding by the National Endownment for the Humanities composed of 100 oral histories of Black Cuban Migration with a focus on the 1960s and 1970s. The digital archive will feature filmed interview, GIS mapping of housing and school segregation in Miami, and interpretative analysis of the lives of Black Cubans that came to the United States from 1959-1980. This will be the first manuscript and public digital space to archive previously silenced Black Cuban oral histories of community, resistance, and exclusion in Miami’s Cuban enclave. In doing so, it will re-narrate the story of Cuban immigration after the 1959 Cuban Revolution through the lens of Black Cubans. Our project’s focus on anti-Black discrimination, Black activism, housing and school segregation and racial privilege separates it from previous research on Cuban immigrants to the United States. Moreover, this interactive website will tell the story of what it was like to be in Miami as a black immigrant during Jim Crow and analyze how redlining and state- sponsored segregation affected Black Cubans. 

Racism and Black Public Opinion in Puerto Rico

In collaboration with the University of Puerto Rico-Cayey and Mariluz Franco Ortiz, this project uses an original survey of Afro-descendent Puerto Ricans to examine Black public opinion, experiences with racism and racial inequality.  The study represents the first project on the relationships between race, representation, partisanship and Black group consciousness on the island.