This project explores the practice of exhuming and relocating bodies in the Caribbean and the United States by focusing on the experience of migrant and immigrant communities. Maps, archival and genealogical records, and oral interviews will be used alongside artifacts, objects, and the physical and material spaces of burial to reconstruct the ways in which class, race, and power were implicated in social and cultural systems of burial in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States. The results of this will be presented to the public in multiple formats, including a tour in the Allegheny Cemetery, a public talk, and a digital component that will include the creation of digital maps and the launch of an interactive website.
Bethany M Wade is a Social and Cultural historian of Latin America who investigates the evolution of burial technology in urban cemeteries in the nineteenth-century Caribbean. Her doctoral research combined archival work in cities across Spain, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States with documentation of the physical spaces of the dead left in churches, crypts, and cemeteries.