Bad Hair belongs to the chapter entitled The Long Journey, which reflects on the weight and great importance of Africanness in the shaping of Cuban identity. Cuba cannot be understood without the heritage of its enslaved people. Their beliefs and legacy permeate Cuban society at all levels.
Bad Hair is a work about Afro-pride in which Cuban female hip-hop singers with feminist and anti-racist discourses, together with Afro-pride civil activists, claim their African heritage. Afro hair has become, along with an Afro aesthetic in clothing, a tool for Afro-descendants in Cuba to claim their identity in recent years.
The expression “bad hair,” which is a derogatory term for the hair of Black people, carries a meaning that goes beyond its literal sense. This expression contains a deep-rooted racism that persists to this day in Cuba. Just as many people continue to use the expression “advancing the race,” which refers to trying to lighten one’s skin by having children with white-skinned people so that the next generation will have a lighter skin tone.
In Bad Hair, I have used archival images and elements related to racism and slavery to generate a visual discourse between the past and the present.
The Island
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