Books by Corinna J. Moebius
Magic Cities:
Havana, Miami, and the Capitol—Race, Ritual, and Resistance
(coming late 2025)
Magic Cities follows the “Magic City” across centuries and shores—colonial Havana, Spanish Florida, Little Havana’s Calle Ocho, and Washington, D.C.—to show how landscapes become altars of power and sites of repair. The book traces how white supremacy works not only through laws and policy but through ritualized spaces. Parks, murals, monuments, and public ceremonies can channel unseen forces and craft sacred myths.
Drawing on history and ethnography, I explore the appropriation and resilience of Afro-Cuban spirituality and “trickster resistance” and the enduring pull of colonial narratives. I use “white powers” and “black magic” as analytic terms to name intertwined forces of coloniality: the legitimized powers associated with whiteness and the stigmatized, often criminalized powers of resistance.
Discover how episodes (from the 2020 Black Lives Matter banner burning in D.C. to memorial politics in Little Havana) circulate and collide with older imperial scripts, and how they are contested.
Building on anthropologist David H. Brown’s idea of “altared spaces,” Magic Cities spends significant time in the Calle Ocho district. The symbolic heart of Miami’s Cuban community, it’s a zone of in-betweenness. Magic Cities follows its threads to other places that sustain (and are sustained by) its myths.
By seeing how people move through, mythologize, and “altar” these landscapes, we can better understand the magic of white supremacy and the ongoing struggles for safety, belonging, and power.
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A History of Little Havana
(The History Press, 2015)
Co-authored with Dr. Guillermo Grenier, this is the first in-depth history of Miami’s storied Little Havana: its people, politics, culture, and transformation.
Still imagined as primarily a Cuban extension of the city, Little Havana has been home to refugees even prior to the 1959 revolution, experiencing fascinating changes to become what it is today.
Find out how a location associated with old Cubans playing dominos has become a vibrant, multi-ethnic community and a birthplace of Miami’s most exciting arts and music movements.
Learn why Little Havana has continued to serve as a political stage for thousands of Cubans demonstrating on its streets, like the famous Calle Ocho.
Dr. Grenier and I trace the history and growth of this world-renowned neighborhood.