Paula Davis Hoffman's "Making the Miami Cubanita"

Paula Davis Hoffman is an adjunct professor of history at Houston City College.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Making the Miami Cubanita: A Pop Cultural Genealogy, with the following results:

If a browser were to open Making the Miami Cubanita to page 99, they would land almost smack-dab in the middle of Chapter 3. Titled, “In the 1970s, la Virgen de PBS Asked, ‘¿Qué Pasa, USA?’”, it investigates a half-hour sitcom series that ran from 1977-1980. Featuring the Peñas, a multigenerational Cuban refugee family living in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood in the late 1970s and 1980, this show was one space created by Cuban exiles and endorsed by the U.S. government both to engage the exile community and to represent it to the broader American public at a pivotal moment.

Page 99 begins with an analysis of one episode in which older brother Joe was ordered to babysit his 17-year-old sister while his parents and grandparents went out. As they walked out the door, they demanded, “¡Cuida tu hermanita!” (Take care of your little sister!) Though mere months away from being a legal adult, Carmen barely strained against the figurative leash her family conspicuously paraded for all to see, a marker of the family’s honor. This page touches on existing scholarship on Cuban American racial identity during these years and demonstrates how this sitcom’s depiction of communal standards of femininity furthered a political agenda. While there is significant pan- Latin confluence on many of the behavioral mandates related to female comportment (such as chaperonage), in this PBS show these mandates were presented as distinctly Cuban.

Reading this page alone would provide readers with a fair but not complete picture of what my book is about. Making the Miami Cubanita explores Cuban American assumptions of whiteness and right-wing politics from a pop cultural and historical lens. Organized by decade, I start with a prelude from the Spanish American War and then jump to the portrayal of Cuban femininity in I Love Lucy in the 1950s, radionovelas in the 1960s, ¿Qué Pasa, USA? in the 1970s, Miami Vice and Scarface in the 1980s, Old School Miami Bass in the 1990s, the Elián González saga in the 2000s, and movements to reanimate chongaism via social media in the 2010s. My epilogue ties it all together in the 2020s and going forward. I was very deliberate about writing in an accessible, engaging way. I want people to enjoy reading my work, both academic and lay audiences.

Visit Paula Davis Hoffman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue