Mobilizations of Race, Place, and History in Santiago de Cuba's Carnivalesque

I offer a model of racialization, the ongoing process of making race meaningful, by proposing the concept of micro‐mobilities: people's movements through immediate lived space. I examine how qualities of movement in an annual carnival procession normalize racialized bodies and places. In Santiago de Cuba's carnival, neighborhood‐based conga societies participate in official competitive displays and grassroots neighborhood activities. The grassroots Invasion evokes Cuba's wars for independence. Thousands join the Conga de Los Hoyos to process through the “territories” of other congas. I examine the Invasion as a performed diagram of “routes of Blackness” mapped onto a reenactment of Cuba's national “roots” to argue that it mobilizes the racialization of bodies, cultural forms, and neighborhoods. My focus on bodies in motion challenges static mappings of identity, place, and history to instead show how Blackness and whiteness are constituted in the relation between race as embodied experience and object of discourse. [ race, racialization, mobilization, festive performance, Cuba ]