ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the historical and cultural debates within which US Cuban playwrights studied in this book started to develop their work and that regional and community theaters began to produce them. Historically, it offers a different/critical chronology of Cuban migration to the United States, primarily to Miami. Although Miami as site for US Cuban theater projects did not figure prominently during the 1980s and 1990s, Miami exile culture haunts some of the artists studied and, in the 21st century, Miami becomes the site for these artists’ transnational connections with Cuban theater on the island. Informed by Cold War history, it presents and critiques the Cuban success narrative and debunks its exceptionalism. It continues with an analysis of anthropological theories of transculturation contrasting it to the ways in which multiculturalism was deployed in the United States during “the decade of the Hispanic” in the 1980s and “the decade of the Latino” in the 1990s. The playwrights and productions studied entered the mainstream as Latino artists but their work, like that of other Latino writers during the 1980s and 1990s, performed a critical multiculturalism that worked against the homogenizing and commodifying tendencies of the period. The productions performed a critique of Cuban and American exceptionalism present at the time in Cuban and Cuban American Studies and American Studies, respectively. The chapter ends theorizing US Cuban identity as hybrid and heterogeneous. It borrows from cultural studies’ appropriation of scientific theories of chaos and fractals, as well as network theory. It reviews and critiques the literature that uses static approaches to identity formation while it redeploys both the “exile” and “ethnic” category outside of essentialist and nationalist paradigms.
