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Literary and art critic Andrea O’Reilly Herrera analyzes an itinerant art exhibition known as CAFÉ (Cuban American Foremost Exhibitions), curated by Leandro Soto (b. 1956) since 2001. O’Reilly Herrera argues that the artists participating in this exhibition raise many of the same issues as earlier vanguardia artists in Cuba, including the significance of the island’s African and Indigenous roots, landscape, and architecture, although they do not claim to represent the entire Cuban diaspora. Still, O’Reilly Herrera’s analysis of the artworks of several cafeteros, such as Soto, José Bedia, and Raúl Villarreal, identifies recurrent themes and common concerns, especially with displacement and transculturation that, in the end, “allude to the all-embracing nature of Cuban culture itself.”

This chapter explores the complex manifold hybrid cultural manifestations stemming from the human interactions discussed in the previous chapter. The chapter recurs to Fernando Ortiz’s ajiaco (Cuban stew) metaphor as representative of the syncretic or hybrid culture forged by transculturation among Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans. The chapter brings to life the stories of different characters that are emblematic of creolization and transculturation in religion and burial practices, food and diet, and music.

Chapter 8 interprets the results of diverse lines of evidence. The demographic differences and mortuary behavior between locals and non-locals, the ethnic composition of the burial population, the chronology of the cemetery and of the non-funerary zones, the particulars of the material culture present, and the historic information for the zone where the site is located, identify this place as a town of Indian encomendados. The cemetery developed under pressure from the Spanish but appears to be maintained by the indigenous population. It is a place of syncretic character that combines diverse cultural traditions and reflects the needs of a region of intense colonial activity. Evidence of Christianization, the abandonment of indigenous practices, such as cranial modification, and the burial of individuals in clothing point to the appearance of the Indio as an individual adjusted to colonial requirements. This place appears as a stage in the process of transculturation in which new individuals emerged (Indians, mestizos, criollos).

The introduction uses the 2005 memoir of a Mexican American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, along with accounts of other Latina/o soldiers who fought in France during WWI and WWII, to illustrate the inadequacy of extant paradigms and hermeneutic practices for explicating the expansive and ideologically discrepant range of Latina/o spatial ontologies and uniquely globalized identities from the midnineteenth to twenty-first centuries. It simultaneously introduces a new theory for Latina/o literature that draws upon the Colombian interdisciplinary field of Violence Studies—violentología—to adapt a flexible yet historically grounded method for identifying how Latina/o identities throughout time and place, or chronotopes, are undergirded by various forms of violence. These intersecting yet unique Latina/o formations extend through and beyond conventional theories of Latina/o citizenship, nationality, and history, as well as Latina/o identity, culture, and ideology—or Latininidades—and thus are identified as supra-Latina/o violentologies. This new and expansive category accommodates a fuller range of complex Latina/o modalities across geopolitical terrain and the ideological gamut. The subsequent introduction of proliferating and increasingly diverse Latinidades thus foregrounds a new era for Latina/o Studies.

Once Prieto retired from the military, he and his wife, Maria Francisca Camejo, became the leaders of one Cuba’s most famous cabildos de nación dedicated to Santa Bárbara, aka Ṣàngó. Their leadership lasted between c. 1818 and 1835. In this mutual aid society, Camejo and Prieto organized extensive festivals, and participated in many different types of religions from Africa and Cuba, which are arguably at the root of modern-day Santería.