Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
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as its first editorial indicates, Gráfico’s raza interest was inseparable from its satirical mission: “The constant increase of the Spanish and Ibero-American colony [la colonia española e ibero-americana] that daily, in ever more significant proportion, extends across all the neighborhoods [barrios] of the city of New York has impelled us to publish this weekly, Gráfico, that without losing sight of its defining characteristic—satire—comes to work together on behalf of everyone forming the great Hispanic family [la gran familia hispana].”58 During those first four months, coverage of the theater world appeared next to anonymous or pseudonymous essays poking fun at its actors, audiences, and impresarios. Readers found pages devoted to reports on the world news, reproduced not without ridicule, and announcements on the activities of social clubs. A personals column appeared next to a resolution of the Liga Portorriqueña e Hispana (the Puerto Rican and Hispanic League), while a mocking report on the Cuban president Gerardo Machado’s visit to the United States included a cartoon by O’Farrill that represents Machado ogling the Statue of Liberty.59 This is not to suggest that everything in the newspaper was threaded with the comic. A column in March, “Los portorriqueños,” decried the discrimination and violence faced by Puerto Ricans in New York City and the failure of the state to come to their defense despite their U.S. citizenship, while another piece expressed solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti.60 The newspaper’s predominant tone during this period, however, was satiric.61
On July 24, 1927, Bernardo Vega inaugurated Gráfico’s second period by becoming its editor and president.62 A white Puerto Rican from the town of Cayey, Vega was a major figure in Puerto Rican politics and culture on the island and in New York City. He was a tobacco worker, wrote for newspapers, and was a participant in movements on behalf of working-class liberation and Puerto Rican independence. His book Memorias de Bernardo Vega: Contribución a la historia de la comunidad puertorriqueña en Nueva York (Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York) “is widely recognized as the single most important documentary source about the early Puerto Rican community in New York,” with its “wealth of factual information and running analytical and personal commentary.”63 Vega’s leadership was linked to the participation in Gráfico of another great political and cultural figure of the Puerto Rican diaspora: the Afro-boricua Jesús Colón. Under the pen names Miquis Tiquis and Pericles Espada—and under his own name, too—Colón published essays and a handful of poems reflecting on the migrant and U.S.-born Puerto Rican and Latino experience.64 In Vega’s first issue as editor and president, Gráfico published a letter of Colón’s, “Palabras de aliento” (Words of Encouragement), in which Colón expressed support for the newspaper’s “principal policy of defending our Colony.”65 While Colón’s “Colonia” was arguably that of the raza, a notion still alive in the newspaper’s newly modified motto—“Semanario Defensor de la Raza,” the modifier “hispana” now missing—the presence of Vega and Colón gave Gráfico’s colonia and raza references a greater Puerto Rican meaning, something that, in retrospect, Vega himself acknowledged, writing that the newspaper was “the best” publication “of the Puerto Rican community up until that time.”66 The shift was apparent in Gráfico’s editorials, which, under Vega, began including side-by-side English versions, a sign of the newspaper’s interest in communicating with Anglophone readers. One editorial condemned in Spanish how certain “políticos boricuas” in “la colonia” were leading astray “los puertorriqueños en Nueva York” regarding how both Democrats and Republicans were both ultimately in support of “el imperialismo americano en la América Latina” (Gráfico’s English versions for these phrases read “Porto Rican politicians,” “the Colony,” “Porto Ricans resident in New York,” and “American imperialism in Latin America”). The editorial urged los puertorriqueños en Nueva York to struggle for national and international justice by rejecting such kinds of “organización política” (in the English version, “political organization”), advocating instead for a project in which “nos incorporamos a lucha industrial del país.” This last clause, which I would translate as “we incorporate ourselves into the industrial struggle of the country,” appeared thus in the English version: we “fight our battle to defend our economic betterment.”67 There is a strategic difference between the Spanish and English versions, with the radicality of the Spanish “lucha industrial del país” (here suggestive of “Porto Ricans resident in New York” who would transform an Anglo-U.S. país through a Latino-inflected class struggle) replaced by the more accommodating, upwardly-mobile-sounding (if still martial) “battle to defend our economic betterment.” The importance of the English-language editorial to Gráfico’s second period is emphasized by an English-language call for advertising, one which links Gráfico’s bilingual maneuvering to “ethnic marketing”: “This weekly Spanish publication is the most read in the neighborhood. Sold all over the section. Nine out of ten of the Spanish Speaking inhabitants of Harlem read Gráfico. Advertise in this Spanish weekly. Read the English editorial column of this publication and become acquainted with our policy.”68
Another development in Gráfico during Vega’s editorship was a decline in its self-referential, 125th Street, farándula (show business) coverage. Such coverage, a hallmark of Gráfico’s first period, seemingly fell into disfavor. In its second-period incarnation, for instance, the newspaper attributed to “various readers” the impression that “Gráfico is better off now, with its new look,” which it contrasted with the earlier period, during which, in its harsh assessment, Gráfico had resembled “a theater program, an announcement of tutti le mundi that wanted to call itself artistic and was paid for with its editors’ money.”69 There was a difference of opinion over the matter, and it was public, acknowledged in the newspaper’s very pages. One column stated that “something you won’t see” is “O’Farrill and Simón [Jou] resign themselves to Gráfico’s new policy” or “artists resign themselves to the absence in Gráfico of long encomiums on their work.”70 The issue found its (indirect) way into an editorial on the need for collective action on behalf of better housing for the “población hispana” (Hispanic population); it stated that spending time on the “farándula” and the “frivolities of life” would “never earn respect for our racial group [nuestro grupo racial].”71 The accompanying English version of the editorial, however, elided the farándula reference, a gesture keeping the discussion of the cultural politics of Latino show business in-house. During this second period, Gráfico’s masthead listed O’Farrill as a member of its board of trustees and, eventually, as a contributing editor, a title under which he appeared until January 8, 1928, the last date of his public connection to the newspaper’s management. A year later, Vega’s Gráfico editorship came to an end.
The representations of the stage-negrito O’Farrill/actual O’Farrill span the two periods of Gráfico just described. Important among “actual O’Farrill” representations during the newspaper’s first period are two photographs of him out of blackface. One showed O’Farrill standing among a group of other actors and singers who had taken part in a popularity contest. O’Farrill wears a suit and bow tie and appears from the waist up; he is the only Afro-Latino in the image. The caption calls him “our diligent Administrator” and lauds his work on the contest: he “has worked tirelessly” and “deserves our most sincere congratulations.” Another was a headshot of O’Farrill set among publicity photographs of other performers. The spread commemorated a show at the Park Palace that night. Again, O’Farrill was the only Afro-Latino in the group.72 The significance of the photographs as examples of an “actual O’Farrill” always in relation to his negrito performance is evident in a comment in the column “Chismes de la Farándula” (Show-Business Gossip) regarding the first photograph appearing in the newspaper: O’Farrill “ya se retrató fuera de carácter” (has already been photographed out of character).73 A series of throwaway lines in other columns also referenced O’Farrill’s off-stage identity. One quotes a police officer who had apparently “searched