The Harlem of the Club Las Dos Antillas

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof examines the Cuban and Puerto Rican diasporas and analyzes of the multiracial origins of the club Las Dos Antillas in Harlem by focusing on race, space, and politics in early Antillean New York. As the author notes, Las Dos Antillas was one of several revolutionary exile clubs in the United States, established in the late nineteenth century, which served as the cauldron of a political alliance between Cubans and Puerto Ricans, both Black and White. Hoffnung-Garskof centers on the development of a racially inclusive ideology among Afro-descendant members of the Cuban nationalist movement, along with their Puerto Rican allies, who tended to settle in what would later become the Spanish Harlem neighborhood of New York City. This chapter draws upon the minutes and other archival materials on the Club Las Dos Antillas to reconstruct “a multiracial coalition in the broader experience of ‘migrating while Black’ in a city with a very small Black population” in the late nineteenth century. This historical experience of coalition building between mostly working-class Caribbean migrants gives new meaning to the expression “two wings of a bird.”