Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories (2000)

This documentary traces the tangled paths and multifaceted identity of a black Cuban family in the Bronx. The subjects of this film experienced firsthand some of the great historical events of the 20th century – they saw Castro’s arrival in Havana and had their neighborhood bombed in the Bay of Pigs invasion; one son fought in Vietnam and a daughter marched against it. Both working-class and professional, black and Latino, foreign and native, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking, the family is shown in the constant process of negotiating its identity. On their arrival in Miami, the family immediately encountered racial segregation, and as children in a mixed Puerto Rican/African-American neighborhood in the Bronx, they were forced by their playmates to choose their identity: “Are you black or Spanish?” Even the family’s roots in Cuba are complex - the grandfather was the son of Jamaican immigrants to Cuba – and their relation to the Cuban Revolution is ambiguous.