‘The People of All Kinds Who Walk Along the Lines’: The Precarious Mobilities of Unfree Workers on Cuba's Early Railroads

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the spatial politics of unfree Africans and their descendants who constructed Cuba's pioneering first railroads, and their interactions with those who inhabited the changing landscapes through which the lines ran. Railway workers and local enslaved populations collectively constructed ‘counter-maps’ of the worlds of the lines, repurposing slaveholder-designed spaces and infrastructures in ways that held rich, multiple social significances. While sources on railway construction often focus on male workers, the article explores how we can read between and beyond such documents to reveal women's specific spatial practices. Creative, contestatory forms of movement entwined closely in unfree people's lives with the profound racialised and gendered vulnerability to which mobility exposed them, and with their constant exposure to coerced movement. These tensions, the article argues, produced what we can call ‘precarious mobilities’.