A Trans-Atlantic Encounter - Special Period Migration and La Nueva Espana: Geographies and Cultural Production of the Cuban Velvet Exile in Contemporary Spain.

My dissertation, interdisciplinary in scope, documents the post-1990 Cuban diaspora and its cultural production in Spain. Specifically, I focus on the Velvet Exile, a migratory wave whose immigration to Spain is spurred by the island‟s economic demise after the collapse of the Soviet Union. My analysis is framed by the overarching frameworks of globalization and „coloniality of power‟—the recreation of colonial forms of domination in a post-colonial world. In the first chapter, I engage in historical analysis to frame the trans-Atlantic relations between Spain and Cuba through migratory movements since the Conquest. In the second chapter, I turn to ethnographic methods and geography (a discussion of space) to map the Cuban presence in Madrid. Engaging with Michel de Certeau‟s “Walking in the City” (from The Practices of Everyday Life), I analyze xiii locations established in the Spanish capital during the 1990s that serve as Cuban spaces, contrasting the commercialized places (La Negra Tomasa) with private and public ones serving the community as gathering spaces (La Fundación Hispano-Cubana) and cultural centers (Bar Yemayá). The third chapter examines the Madrid-based musical production of the Cuban hip hop group Orishas and the rock fusion group Habana Abierta. Following Pierre Bourdieu‟s theorizations about the industry of cultural production, I discuss the needs of a global market and how those translate in selling Cuban music. Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to filmic co-productions, addressing the themes of artistic compromise in the workings of the culture industry as seen in Benito Zambrano‟s narrative film Habana Blues (2005) and Arturo Sotto Díaz and Jorge Perugorría‟s documentary Habana Abierta (2002). The fifth chapter‟s singular case study of Alexis Valdés‟s film Un rey en la Habana (2005) examines topics of imperial nostalgia—the desire to establish continuity with the colonial past—and the use of camp to subvert its discourses. Chapter 6 turns to Cuban literary productions published in Barcelona. Framed by Homi Bhahba‟s work on stereotypes, the focus is on Cuban women‟s experience as diasporic subjects in contemporary Madrid as seen in the novels Maldita danza (2002) by Alexis Díaz-Pimienta and Jineteras (2003) by Lissette Bustamante.PhDRomance Languages & Literatures: SpanishUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89767/1/jpiney_1.pd