Episode 69: The Mambo Kings and Cuban Music with Christina Abreu

This week Christina Abreu drops in to discuss Cuban-American history, Cuban music, and the representation of Cubans in film. We explore the origins and characteristics of Cuban music, as well as the migration of Cubans to the United States in the 1950s. We also discuss the relationship between Cuban-Americans and other Latino groups, as well as the integration and segregation within Cuban-American communities. This is a fun podcast and deep dive into Cuban American history. I hope you dig it.

About our guest:
Christina Abreu is associate professor of history and director of the Center for Latino/Latin American Studies at Northern Illinois University. Her research focuses on the role of race, nationalism, and migration in the Cuban and Spanish Caribbean diasporic communities of the United States with a particular emphasis on popular culture.  Her first book, Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Cuban New York City and Miami, 1940-1960, examined the relationship between black and white Cuban musicians and the Cuban and broader Latinx communities of New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s. In her second book, Patria over Profits: The Story of Afro-Cuban Boxing Champion Teófilo Stevenson, she offers a cultural history of the life and times of Afro-Cuban boxing champion Teófilo Stevenson, winner of three heavyweight boxing Olympic gold medals in 1972, 1976, and 1980. In detailing Stevenson’s triumphs in the ring, another more complex and interconnected story emerges about revolutionary Cuba and the island’s Afro-Caribbean connections, race and black athletic activism, Cuban exile culture and politics, and international sports celebrity. Patria over Profits is under contract with the Sport and Society series at the University of Illinois Press.