Passing as Open Secret: Race and Fictions of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Passing is often understood as a divergence between the private & the public identities of a given subject, with the public identity perceived as fraudulent or as a simulacrum that aims at keeping the private one secret. The study of late nineteenth-century Cuba, however, reveals the need for an alternative analytical model, one that allows us to conceptualize those cases in which this divergence is disregarded or disavowed, and in which an ostensibly false identity is validated by social norms.