Cuba and Haiti, as signs and as sites, were crucial to the imaginative restructuring of race and national identity in the US at the turn of the twentieth century. Between 1898 and 1940, the US occupied the two countries for extended periods of time, creating a transnational, intercultural contact zone that facilitated a large body of cultural production on the part of both black and white US Americans, including plays, operas, dance, music, films, and national spectacle.

In January 2006, I was the first U.S. artist to participate in the annual small format theatre festival sponsored by the Cuban government at El Mejunje in Sta. Clara Cuba. The set-up for the performance was that Miss-Translation was the only contestant in the 2006 Miss-Representations of the USA Beauty Pageant, held in Cuba. She participated in three categories: the swimsuit competition (her one-piece vintage leopard swimsuit ironizing the extended U.S.

Lynette Hunter and Dr. Shannon Rose Riley are co-editing a collection on performance as research that provides the first major document of the histories, methodoligies, and current practices in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. The collection theorizes the diverse contemporary approaches to performance as research, with sections that include key terms, histories, pedagogies, modes of assessment, methodologies, and current practices.

In 2006 I performed with Cuban drag queen Roxy Rojo at the fourteenth annual Festival Nacional de Pequeño Formato in Sta. Clara, Cuba. I played the role of Miss Translation USA, the only contestant in the Mis(s) Representations of the USA Beauty Pageant. In the performance, Miss Translation competes in the swimsuit competition, the interview with the pageant judge, performed by Roxy, and the talent category.

For the last couple of years I have conducted research in Cuba on a range of contemporary performance forms. This work has emerged from a related project that unpacks the meanings that Cuba and Haiti have acquired in the US national imaginary: from their strategic position as the first sites of US imperialism in the Caribbean, and their crucial role in the imaginative restructuring of race and national identity in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, to their marked vilification and erasure today through contemporary US political strategy and foreign policy.