Triscornia Migratory Camp: Empire, Public Health, and Exclusion in Cuba’s Ellis Island

Triscornia Migratory Camp: Empire, Public Health, and Exclusion in Cuba’s Ellis Island is a pioneering work that explores Triscornia, Havana’s immigration processing center. Despite being overlooked, Triscornia predates most immigration detention centers in the U.S., except for Ellis Island. Both Ellis Island’s current building and Triscornia opened in the same year – 1900. Built during the U.S. first military occupation of Cuba, it represented the cutting-edge of modern nation-building and public health infrastructure. This volume offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Triscornia’s importance by uniting scholars from literature, history, critical theory, and anthropology. This book illuminates the significance of migratory policy in the early Cuban Republic and its neocolonial relationship with the United States. By focusing on Triscornia, the contributors engage broader scholarly discussions on migration and border control, imperialism and nation-building, memory, public health, race, gender, class, and national identity.