'No common folk': Free blacks and race relations in the early modernization of Havana (1830s--1840s)

This dissertation explores what heretofore has been the largely unknown presence and daily participation of the sizable population of free blacks in the modernization of nineteenth-century Havana. Free blacks were men and women who had either bought their freedom through gradual self-purchase, received it as a gift in the testament of a deceased owner, or were the descendants of freed slaves, a population that had existed in Cuba since the sixteenth century. Far from being marginal actors, they were indispensable to the city. They constituted the majority of artisans, peddlers, care takers, and musical performers in the city. They transformed the city through their daily practices at the margins of the law, social norms, or traditions, which stretched the boundaries of the capital city as mapped out by the elites.;This dissertation focuses on the 1830s and 40s, a period of accelerated urban growth and transformations due to the booming Cuban sugar economy of the 1800s and the cultural change that came about with Cuba's new place in the world economy. During those decades, Havana saw the recasting of social values to accommodate such changes. Havana's path to modernity, like that of many other Latin American cities, was paved through the city's racialization of spaces and modernizing discourses. A central premise of my thesis is that in nineteenth-century Cuba, race, perhaps as much as class, generated the social tensions that propelled a modernizing impulse.;Many important institutional reforms that were motivated by the racial tensions in the rapidly growing city show the sort of modernization that took place in Havana outside the context of industrial relations. An increased physical and social contact between races became the core preoccupation of the modernizing elites, who strove to create new social boundaries that would ideally contain such contact and better define the numerous gray areas the modern dynamic city was creating. The response of free blacks, their creation of daily survival strategies, give an insight into how daily spatial practices transform a city beyond the control of urban plans.