Body Image and the Ambivalence of Sugar as Heritage Among Cuban Dancers

Abstract

The article looks at vernacular understandings of sugar as Cuban heritage in light of ongoing processes of westernization of Cuban foodways and body image. In doing so, I employ the notion of 'agnostic heritage' (Brumann, 2014) and the proposition of a 'third historicity.' The latter term includes the analysis of people's heritage experiences and beliefs, focusing on changes in local understandings of sugar as heritage, its ambivalence, and, at times, even stigmatization in relation to newly emerging canons and ideals governing body image. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among female dancers in Havana's private schools over the course of approximately ten months from 2015 to 2018.

Black Feminist Rumba Pedagogies

“…Alongside their male counterparts, teaching private lessons (informally, without a license) to foreigners became a strategy, however limited, for economic survival, circumventing the state-controlled market for goods and services (Berry 2016; Stein and Vertovec 2020). Men and women differentially navigated the ways in which these transactions with foreigners, exchanging “Cuban authenticity” for hard currency, reinforced racialized and gendered colonial imaginaries and expectations (Ana 2019; Stein and Vertovec 2020). Significantly, Berta Jottar noted a surge in feminist choreographic choices by rumberas during the “rumba boom,” defined as “an explosion of alternative rumba scenarios evolving from the mid-1990s, culminating in the year 2012 with the opening of El Palacio de la Rumba 15 and the official proclamation of traditional rumba as Cuba's National Patrimony,” and reflective of a context in which rumberas were fashioning identities as “independent, competitive, and assertive performers” (Jottar 2013).…”

“…Black women have borne the brunt of national development in unique ways. Whereas tourism and private businesses ensured a hard currency consumer base for rumba performance and private lessons, women had the added burden of fulfilling patriarchal expectations of social reproductive labor at home (Ana 2019). Moreover, job opportunities for rumberas remained limited relative to their male counterparts and channeled through structures of (Black) male leadership within rumba ensembles and (white) male control in the private sector more broadly 18 .…”

“…At the onset of the reforms in the early 2010s, as Jottar (2013) attests, rumbera choreography may have asserted these dancers’ zeal for economic independence in this new landscape. Yet, Black women's access to employment was shaped by additional gendered labor demands in conjunction with their body's alignment with the imagined desires of (heterosexual male) consumers, thus determining their market value (Ana 2019).…”