This section is an incomplete biographical directory of Afrodescendant artists in Cuba, from the colonial period to the present.

This chapter places the Cuban experience in a broader, Afro-Latin American context. It highlights some similarities and differences with other Latin American countries, with a special emphasis on Brazil, where scholarship about artists of African descent is considerably more advanced. As we begin the difficult task of reconstructing the lives and contributions of artists of African descent across the region, new cartographies in the art history of Latin America emerge. For example, the historiographic project linked to San Alejandro appears to have been uniquely successful, as it is possible to identify larger numbers of artists of African descent in other countries during the nineteenth century. At the same time, the presence of Afro-Cuban artists in early twentieth-century Europe was not unique, although the Cubans were there in larger numbers. Many of these artists, like their Cuban peers, were excluded from the new “modern art” that emerged under European influences in the interwar period and were relegated to the corners of academic, “pre-modern,” art. The chapter highlights intriguing parallelisms between Cuba and Brazil, which persist even after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

Nearly thirty years after the end of the civil war, campesina women continue to remember their revolutionary past. The Survivors’ Historical Memory Committee of Arcatao, Chalatenango, has worked on four major projects: the exhumation of victims killed in military-led massacres, the construction of a sanctuary to house the remains of loved ones, commemorative events, and a community museum led by survivors themselves. These popular historians facilitate intergenerational continuity across decades of struggle. The committee’s work to mourn, exhume, bury, and remember the dead charts a path toward healing, a tenuous process given the ongoing violence in postwar El Salvador. Additionally, I draw insights from two workshops I facilitated in 2015 to trace how committee women understand their revolutionary past. They have a specifically feminist understanding of their insurgent past and highlight the central role of civilian organizing within the guerrilla territories. Campesina women insisted on remembering how their revolutionary organizing created more equitable gender relations and resisted state violence against women, and they critiqued male leftists who ignored their contributions.

This chapter focuses on the role of women teachers and campesinas in the class struggle. Two mass organizations played a critical role in building a combative labor movement: the National Association of Salvadoran Educators and Union of Rural Workers. Women comprised 80 percent of members in the teachers’ association, while significant numbers of campesinas participated in the rural union. By 1975, teachers and peasants joined forces in a revolutionary coalition to overthrow the political and economic system that exploited the entire working class. Many teachers and rural workers joined guerrilla organizations, such as the Popular Liberation Forces, whose cadre helped build mass organizations. Participation in the class struggle led to changes on two fronts. First, it deepened women’s class consciousness and revealed the state’s brutality in crushing the most minimal reforms. Second, the struggle transformed how women saw themselves and their role in changing society. Women confronted sexist expectations that shamed them for working alongside men and prioritizing political participation over domestic work. Fifteen years prior to the outbreak of the revolutionary war in 1980, a multigenerational movement of women had broken with patriarchal tradition. That rupture was fundamental. It facilitated women’s political participation and their increasing militant action that elevated class struggle to unprecedented levels. This gendered history allows us to appreciate what it took to build and sustain the revolutionary mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

In late eighteenth-century Havana, residents frequently referred to the existence of large communities of negros and pardos as “officers in the trade of painter” and the authors of “exquisite works.” But who are these artists, and where can we find their works? What sort of works did they produce? Where were they trained, and how did they master their crafts with such perfection? By centering the artistic production and social worlds of artists of African descent in Cuba since the colonial period, this revisionist history of Cuban art provides compelling answers to these questions. Carefully researched and cogently argued, the book explores the gendered racial biases that have informed the constitution of the Cuban art canon; exposes how the ideologues of the slave-owning planter class institutionalized the association between “fine arts” and key attributes of whiteness; and examines how this association continues to shape art historical narratives in Cuba.

I detail the impacts of US imperialism on both the structural and interpersonal levels and how these memories live in the bodies of migrants. I discuss Comandante Susana’s unearthed archive, which was found by a campesino farmer in a corn field in 2015. That archive contained the intimate letters of Domitila, the woman whose story opened the book. I show how history can be a tool to connect with movement ancestors, heal historical trauma, and reawaken a radical imagination to organize powerful social movements. I underscore the necessity of revolutionary feminism in our current historical moment. I conclude with a discussion of the larger political lessons of the Salvadoran revolution and its current-day political relevance. In an era of state violence and despair, we have much to learn from Salvadoran women who waged revolution.

In late eighteenth-century Havana, residents frequently referred to the existence of large communities of negros and pardos as “officers in the trade of painter” and the authors of “exquisite works.” But who are these artists, and where can we find their works? What sort of works did they produce? Where were they trained, and how did they master their crafts with such perfection? By centering the artistic production and social worlds of artists of African descent in Cuba since the colonial period, this revisionist history of Cuban art provides compelling answers to these questions. Carefully researched and cogently argued, the book explores the gendered racial biases that have informed the constitution of the Cuban art canon; exposes how the ideologues of the slave-owning planter class institutionalized the association between “fine arts” and key attributes of whiteness; and examines how this association continues to shape art historical narratives in Cuba.

The Association of Women of El Salvador, an organization composed of combatants, peasants, and exile, redefined revolution to mean the overthrow of both capitalism and patriarchy. The sites of feminist praxis included guerrilla territories in El Salvador, refugee camps in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and solidarity networks in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the United States. Within the guerrilla territories, AMES members actively participated in community councils, an experiment in popular democracy, and generated a feminist praxis that linked the exigencies of wartime survival to the long-term liberation of women. At the international level, Salvadoran women collaborated with other radical women from Latin America and the United States to push their organizations in more feminist directions.

In the mountains, guerrilleras politicized the organization of reproductive labor, as their memories of armed struggle make clear. Their efforts embodied the everyday making of a liberated territory based on feminist interpretations of revolutionary values. I focus on the two largest guerrilla groups rooted in opposite ends of the country: the Popular Liberation Forces in Chalatenango department and Revolutionary People’s Army in Morazán department. I show how women fought to collectivize food production, gain access to sanitary napkins, navigate reproductive choices, and pressure FMLN leaders to punish infidelity and sexual violence. Such efforts resisted sexism within the ranks, transformed camp norms, and challenged sexist definitions of who constituted a revolutionary. From these everyday experiences, combatant women developed a vision of women’s liberation and fought to put it into practice, using documentaries to disseminate their message. In doing so, they helped to shape the political discourse of the insurgency.