Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
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American phenomenon, heightened by an Anglo-racist United States—it is true that Afro-Cuban Americans may occupy with white Cuban Americans the space of an apparent multiracial inclusion through a shared cubanoamericanidad, a Cuban Americanness that, as an ideal of a transnational Cuban belonging, purports an understanding beyond race among Cubans in the United States. Such a shared Cuban Americanness, in particular as cultural and linguistic affinities that bear upon social mobility in the Cuban centers of the country, influences how Afro-Cuban Americans negotiate (if not limit or reject) relationships with other Afro-Latinas/os, not to mention African Americans. And yet, indeed, there are moments in which Afro-Cuban Americans collaborate in solidarity with African Americans and other non-Latinas/os of African descent (those from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, for example) despite the social marginalization such collaboration may entail in Anglo and Latino communities—a risk often deemed worth it, given the opportunity Afro-Cuban Americans may gain from an association with African Americans, measured even against the benefits that Anglo-white and Latino-white hegemonies promise them as foreign blacks and fellow trans/nationals, respectively. To attune a discussion of Afro-Cuban Americans to afrolatinidad in literature and performance is to challenge Cuban America’s normate whiteness—to posit, in fact, an Afro-Cuban America, one made visible in texts ranging from the Caribbean Latino modernist period, with its turn toward minority rights and anti-imperialism after the exile-directed projects of Antillean liberation at the turn of the century, to the postrevolutionary exodus and founding of a Cuban Miami in the last half of the twentieth century, a span whose latter period is familiar to Latino literary and cultural studies, though less so in terms of the Afro-Cuban American countertradition I offer here.
The Afro-Cuban American writers and performers I discuss represent overlapping Cuban and African diasporas, which is to say that histories of displacement from Cuba and Africa bear upon them simultaneously, with changing, uneven effects on their relations, both material and symbolic, to race and nation, host- and homelands. It is a matter that brings together conversations on the discourse of diaspora in African American and Latino Studies, which I do through the work of Brent Edwards and Ricardo Ortiz. For Edwards, who has historicized the concept among black intellectuals and activists in the twentieth century, diaspora is most useful when it guides us to consider specific contacts between people of African descent across the Americas, Europe, and Africa in a way that attends to difference—“difference not only internally (the ways transnational black groupings are fractured by nation, class, gender, sexuality, and language) but also externally: in appropriating a term so closely associated with Jewish thought, we are forced to think not in terms of some closed or autonomous system of African dispersal but explicitly in terms of a complex past of forced migrations and racializations.” Edwards continues that the “use of the term diaspora…implies neither that it offers the comfort of abstraction, an easy recourse to origins, nor that it provides a foolproof anti-essentialism: instead, it forces us to articulate discourses of cultural and political linkage only through and across difference in full view of the risks of that endeavor.”8 This invitation for criticism and theory to turn toward diasporic praxes in their particulars and, especially, to their “constitutive tension” in nationalism and internationalism9 resonates with Ortiz’s thought in Cultural Erotics in Cuban America regarding a possible Cuban diaspora. Working off James Clifford’s treatment of the concept, Ortiz shows that any thinking on a post-1959 Cuban diaspora must attend to the ways in which nationalist inclinations urge Cuban Americans to bring to an end their U.S. displacement through a redemptive return to Cuba (however deferred it may be in practice): diaspora as a desire to recover an island-situated national identity against a Cuban American transnational belonging. With the lure of a territorial homeland, one located “nearby” in the hemisphere, Ortiz underscores the importance of recognizing the variety of Cuban departures to the United States—the moment of a post-1959 diaspora’s initiation. “Exile” is crucial in this regard for its meaning as an unwilling political (or, against U.S. imperial geopolitics, a willing economic) displacement, although by now there is a history of post–Cold War Cuban departures that, in their most recent form, are very well indicative of a postexile: the back-and-forth movements between the United States and Cuba among recent migrants that trouble the earlier exile’s implication of a one-way flow (until such time as a redemptive return). For Ortiz, thinking Cuban diaspora is possible, so long as we account for these limits—limits that touch on sexuality, where the governing of Cuban bodies, on and off the island, impacts who can (or must) leave the country, who can (or cannot) return.10
The diasporas of Afro-Cuban America—the African and Cuban—unfold in relation to afrolatinidad. A sign of African diaspora appears in the way Afro-Cuban Americans articulate blackness in the black-white spaces of the Anglo United States through (a memory of) Cuban nationalism’s postracial and mestizaje ideologies: the former emerging during Cuba’s nineteenth-century wars of liberation as the privileging of a national, over a racial, form of identification, the latter in the early twentieth century as an ideal of a “mixed-race” nationalism, invoked often as culture, where neither black nor white would predominate. Over the twentieth century, Cuban racial injustice continued despite (indeed, because of) postracial and mestizaje nationalisms, which, while providing room for Afro-Cuban mobility, often failed to alter the nation’s de facto white privilege, a social legacy the 1959 revolution inherited and revised as a “raceless” revolutionary nationalism—even as its class-based policies helped disproportionately poor Afro-Cubans.11 A sign of African diaspora appears also in the way Afro-Cuban Americans, in particular those migrating before the revolution, link blackness in the United States with (a memory of) the long-established forms of island-based Afro-Cuban community, which have included mutual-aid societies, religious groupings, and social clubs.12 Such an African diaspora among Afro-Cuban American writers and performers determines the cultural (and, less often in the texts I discuss, political) “linkages” they establish with African Americans in the un/segregated United States, linkages at times firm and enduring, at times uncertain and fleeting. In the Latino United States, Afro-Cuban Americans twist the meaning of a Cuban diaspora by bringing their afrolatinidad to bear on encounters with other Afro-Cuban Americans and white Cuban Americans across the pre- and post-1959 spaces of an unacknowledged white cubanoamericanidad—a Latino whiteness that, in fact, may not welcome a possibly “blackening” association with Afro-Cuban Americans under the Anglo-U.S. gaze. Afro-Cuban Americans mark a (white) Cuban diaspora as black, unsettling its memory, if not practice, of ideological postracial, mestizaje, and “raceless” antirevolutionary nationalisms, now transnationalisms—a disruption that, given my period reach back into the early twentieth century, involves the movements of an Afro-Cuban American diaspora well before, yet carrying through and beyond, the midcentury breaks and migrations associated with the revolution.
A text from this earlier period is the Afro-Cuban American Bernardo Ruiz Suárez’s The Color Question in the Two Americas, a historico-political essay published in the United States in an English translation in 1922, the tenth anniversary of the killing of thousands of Afro-Cubans on the island by the Cuban government and white militias in the “race war” of 1912, a major event of Cuban racial terror begun after members of the Independent Party of Color, an Afro-Cuban political organization founded to redress racial injustice, had begun to protest and resist the party’s banning by the state.13 Well within memory of 1912—perhaps even commemorating it with the book’s publication date—Ruiz Suárez offers another approach to the idea that Afro-Cuban Americans have “no complaints about New York,” that, indeed, they may choose to lead a life in the United States, however much such a decision may signify to other Cubans, on and off the island, as unbecoming: as an “unseemly” association with black subalterns (African Americans, fellow Afro-Cuban Americans) in the Anglo-racist United States, and as an unbecoming of one’s island-Cuban black identity, its “becoming,” as a revision or even an undoing, Afro-Latino.14
In a passage on comparative experiences of racism in the United States and Latin America, Ruiz Suárez writes that the “rough and brutal and contemptuous…methods of the Anglo-Saxon” in the United States nevertheless “goad the black [that is, African American] man into a life of activity and, consequently, a life creative of ideals which may in time be realized.” He goes on to say that, for an Afro-Cuban American, “it