This seminar will analyze images of the participation of Cuban women in microbrigades: groups of workers temporarily working in housing construction. Photobooks and architectural and feminist magazines from the 1970s highlight the women’s involvement in building large-scale architectural projects and, in doing so, demonstrate how the socialist political regime of the time contested the remnants of patriarchal capitalist practices. Jácome-Moreno’s research considers the multiple contradictions in the socialist Cuban state’s understanding of the “emancipation of women”—namely, their potential to work in industrialized contexts that did not represent the redistribution of work in everyday life.

By focusing on a selection of objects from the CCA Collection, particularly magazines and feminist publications, Jácome-Moreno will show how these publications concealed such tensions and presented an optimistic perspective for achieving a beneficial, constructive outcome for Cuban society; they presented a visual and written rhetoric of communal work as a source of happiness. For Jácome-Moreno, images of women—sometimes very similar to those of men at work in socialist contexts—are about exercising the control of the state’s gaze over the capitalist body, framing the body as a primary locus of production, and circumscribing joy as a reflection of the state’s mechanisms to produce happiness.

Cristóbal Jácome-Moreno is an art historian and curator specialized in the art and architecture of the Americas from transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives. He received a PhD in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin, supported by scholarships from the Jumex Foundation, the Mexican National Council for the Arts and Culture, and the Fulbright Garcia-Robles Exchange Program. Jácome-Moreno has been a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes-France. He currently teaches courses on Latin American art and architecture at Mexico’s Autonomous National University. His first book manuscript, Volcanic Monumentality: Architecture and Archeology in Mid-Century Mexico, is forthcoming with The University of Texas Press.