This thesis explores how the Cuban writer and anthropologist, Lydia Cabrera, experienced exile following the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Cabrera’s personal letters and photos show that she endured a nontypical exile experience. Instead, Cabrera is an example of a transnational exile, because throughout her life she remained both professionally and personally connected to people in multiple locations. Although discussion regarding the Cuban Revolution describes its transnational scope, for Cabrera and similar transnational figures, the events of 1959 meant a disruption to their longstanding international networks. In this way, this thesis will present evidence of Cabrera’s transnational connections and her response to disruption of these networks from 1960 – 1962. Key sources for this thesis can be found in the archival holdings at the University of Miami’s Cuban Historical Collection in Coral Gables, FL.

This project focuses on African American and Afro- Hispanic literature and folklore. Specifically, I employ Fernando Ortiz’s theory of transculturation. Ortiz makes the case that a new Afro- Cuban identity is created with the intermingling of African, Spanish and native inhabitants of Cuba. Using Ortiz’s critical framework as the foundation of my study, I undertake a new critique of Zora Neale Hurston’s portrayal of African American identity. Analyzing Hurston’s work through the model of transculturation, I examine the parallel between her work and that of Lydia Cabrera, a Cuban ethnographer whose work represents Afro-Cuban identity as a transcultural one. Establishing this comparison, I reflect on the similarities and differences among their strategies of representing Transculturation in African- based identities. I look at their works from a womanist lens to analyze how their female anthropologist status influenced their folkloric portrayals and how they enacted a political agenda that emphasized female agency. I also analyze the oral aesthetic of their texts; in my opinion, Hurston and Cabrera reproductions of the spoken are ways to represent transcultural dialogue. Finally I compare their ethnographic studies of the African- based spiritual systems of Santeria and Voodoo.