Moor, Mulata, Mulatta

Abstract

The second chapter centers a figure familiar within US sentimental literature, the tragic mulatta, placing her among hemispheric counterparts: the enslaved Moor and the Cuban mulata. Mary Peabody Mann’s only novel, Juanita (1887), offers an Uncle Tom’s Cabin-style antislavery narrative set in Cuba, importing a US racial hierarchy to the island. Mann’s novel overwrites figures such as the Cuban mulata and the mulato antislavery leader, replacing them with Eva-like children and a tragic US mulatta. Yet Cuban author Cirilo Villaverde’s novel Cecilia Valdés (1882) demonstrates how Juanita’s racial hierarchy diverges from that developing in late-nineteenth-century Cuba, which offered a different model of racial relationships. Erasing the multiracial nature of Cuba’s antislavery and anticolonial movements, Juanita prefigures US influence in Cuba following the Spanish–American War.