Anasa Hicks

Professor Hicks studied at New York University where she completed her Ph.D. in 2017. She specializes in Latin American and Caribbean history, especially twentieth-century Cuba, Hispanic Caribbean, women and gender, and labor studies.

Research Description:

Hicks’s current book project, “Hierarchies at Home: A History of Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution,” explores questions of race, gender, and ethnicity in a field of work with deep ties to Cuba’s slave society past. The majority of Cuban workingwomen were domestics for most of the twentieth century, but domestic service in Cuba failed to reach the valorized status of other forms of work because of who performed it. From the eve of slavery’s abolition to the 1959 Revolution, “Hierarchies at Home” critically examines how Cubans perceived their maids and the work that they did, and how that affected domestics’ lives and circumstances.

Selected Publications and Presentations:

“Speaking of Cities: Domestic Service and Oral History in Post-War Eastern Cuba.”—Paper presented at the Association of Caribbean Historians annual meeting in Havana, Cuba, June 2016.

“Free and Unprotected Labor: Domestic Service and the Law in 1930s Cuba.”—Paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 2015.

"Condemnations and Contradictions surrounding Domestic Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959-1970."—Paper presented at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at the University of Toronto, Canada, May 2014.