Black Inclusion, Black Enclosure

Chapter 1 traces how elite and state interests choreographed rumba historically for nation-building. Beginning in the nineteenth century and through the 1959 Revolution, representations of Black people dancing have tended to delink the embodied practice from Black consciousness and spirituality. This process of inclusion within Cuban ethno-nationalism has relied on heteropatriarchal ideologies, reifying limiting figurations of Black femininity and Black masculinity that have also co-constructed its practice. How rumberos have strategically participated in these folkloric enclosures, and their discontents, are also explored.