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This book examines the intersection of Afro-Cuban and Latino/a culture and religiosity through the study of a particular group, the Cuban-American community. It proposes a theological analysis of the everyday faith of Cuban-Americans, informed by the political, cultural, and economic markers that characterize this community and explains that the underlying thesis of this study is that Afro-Cuban culture saturates Cuban culture. It examines the notion of identity within Afro-Cuban and Latino/a theologies, explores Cuban-American theology and discusses Cuban and Cuban-American identities, both historical and contemporary.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the intersection of Afro-Cuban and Latino/a culture and religiosity. The results reveal the centrality of Afro-Cuban religiosity and culture for understanding the Cuban/Cuban-American condition. The findings also indicate that this Afro-Cuban saturation of Cuban and Cuban-American life goes well beyond race to affect all Cubans and Cuban-Americans despite their pigmentation or self-identification.

This chapter explores the fragments arrachés of Alberto O'Farrill—the black writer and actor who appeared on the teatro bufo (Cuban minstrelsy) stage and in the New York City Latino newspapers La Prensa and El Gráfico from the 1920s to the 1930s. O'Farrill's arrival in the United States via Key West seemingly allowed him a career in the transnational teatro bufo, which was then a belated form of troubling racial representation. The traces in La Prensa of O'Farrill's “negro-on-negro” performances display an awareness of his afrolatinidad. In his own autobiographical-fictional writings in Gráfico, O'Farrill explains how he produces an Afro-Latino “blackface print culture” that conflicts with the culturalist, postracial assumptions of a raza hispana (Hispanic race). The chapter concludes with a review of O'Farrill's performance in No matarás (Thou Shalt Not Kill).

This chapter focuses on Verdecchia, who situates his reflections in a decidedly Canadian context where borders have a very different resonance, and where allusions to Latino and Latin American cultures have very little resonance at all. Although his work is influenced by the art and politics of U.S. Chicano, he is wary of the tendency to conflate all Latino border cultures with the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and the erasure of Canada from accounts of inter-American culture that focus exclusively on relations between the United States and Latin America. By introducing Canadian characters and settings, his work gives new coordinates for locating “El Norte,” while at the same time disrupting the binary between north and south with a necessary third term.

This introductory chapter provides the background of study of Latina/o musicians in Charlotte, North Carolina. These musicians and their audiences play a vital role in defining Latino expressive culture. Moreover, their lives also reveal issues of politics, labor, community, class, division, and belonging that have become central to a globalizing region and city that are struggling to decide how wide the circle of “We” should be. In particular, the theme of el sueño gris (the gray dream) described the trajectory of the dreams and aspirations of Latino immigrants to the U.S. South. Examples of this graying dream appeared in personal narratives of Latino musicians during informal conversations and recorded interviews throughout the fieldwork process.

This chapter reconstructs, through oral history and personal networks observed in study, the brief history of Latino musicians in Charlotte. While other Latin music scenes have emerged in U.S. cities, Charlotte is notable for the diversity of the musical styles being performed there and the intense debates musicians are having about the future of Latino culture. Relying on scholarship on music and cultural studies, the chapter also examines the threads connecting U.S., southern, and Latin American music(s) together up to the early twenty-first century. It outlines the bands that are the focus of this book and describes their musical style.

This chapter highlights the multiple ways in which Burgos's legacy extends into visual culture and El Barrio neighborhood in East Harlem. In the act of remembering Julia de Burgos, visual artists are less concerned with finding the “true” Julia; rather, they create sites of memory that are at once collective and individual. As Burgos emerged as an icon specific to New York Latino/a culture, remembering her became one of the memory circuits mapping the migratory routes of New York Latino/a cosmopolitan networks. The chapter then charts the course of Burgos's iconography, mapping the migratory trajectories and circulation of her influence from New York to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and consequently offering insight into New York Latino/a cultural production.

This chapter takes an in-depth look at a significant aspect of Wilson's life and music, that of Latino culture. Wilson met and soon married Josefina Villaseñor in 1948. They had three children, and Wilson titled compositions after each of them. The importance of family, especially as it plays a major role in Latin American and African American culture, has in many ways sculpted the artistic and spiritual profile of Wilson. His marriage to Josefina not only changed his personal life but also changed much of the cultural context that had always been such an essential element in his artistic enculturation and creative approach and output.