In her book project, “Ethnography, Literature, and National Projects in the Hispanic Caribbean,” Daylet Domínguez analyzes both the links between literature and ethnography in the Hispanic Caribbean between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the early twentieth century and ethnography’s role in the rise of cultural nationalism. Domínguez uncovers how the traditions of travel literature and costumbrismo (picturesque representations of local customs) were important to the establishment of ethnography in the Hispanic Caribbean. While most studies on Caribbean ethnography focus on its connection with European and North American scientific paradigms, Domínguez proposes an alternative genealogy emphasizing the clear continuities between ethnographic discourse and the rhetoric of travel and costumbrista literatures. She argues that this new discourse offered nationalists an apparatus for rethinking multiracial Caribbean societies and played a key role in circulating fictions of identity and difference over which national paradigms were traced.