Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
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on his behalf, he would have nothing to envy John Barrymore and Lon Chaney.”74 In each throwaway line, there is an aspect of performance—and a connotation of the negrito—in the glimpse of the “real-life” O’Farrill, with the police officer displaying his “wardrobe” and mockingly wondering how to fix O’Farrill’s identity; with O’Farrill himself stepping off the street-corner scale and calling his audience’s attention to the condition of his body; and, finally, with his self-deprecating admission of his failure to meet the standard of a Barrymore or a Chaney, the latter of which, of course, was renowned for his use of makeup.
Simón Jou, who was more than just a colleague of O’Farrill’s, but a friend, was also active in creating such representations. During the newspaper’s first period, Jou wrote, “A few nights ago, we were surprised to see O’Farrill weigh himself on a street-corner scale and heard him exclaim with feeling, ‘I’ve lost four pounds!’” Jou responds by saying, “Calm down, Albertico.”75 Jou continued writing about O’Farrill’s everyday life in the vein of performance well into Gráfico’s second period. He not only continued to imagine O’Farrill as a body on display on street-corner scales but suggested that, in the absence of steady theater work, O’Farrill had fallen on hard times: “In order to make ends meet,” “Gavito” (O’Farrill’s maternal last name) “is working as a mechanic, and it seems to suit him well because the last time he stepped on a street-corner scale, he found he had gained seven pounds.”76 The final two references to O’Farrill in Gráfico were Jou’s, and they extended the idea of O’Farrill as an everyday man caught in a struggle against economic (and now psychological) depression. Jou called him “Alberto (the worried one)” in the penultimate reference, thus calibrating O’Farrill’s public exposure (as was the case with the use of “Gavito”) by revealing only a part of his name. In the last reference to O’Farrill in Gráfico, Jou addressed him significantly as “Gavitofa,” one of O’Farrill’s Gráfico pseudonyms: “We received a telephone call from Gavitofa, who tells us that” he found a job he likes and “got a raise, gained some weight, got some more suits, and hopes to increase his savings.”77 Jou’s micronarratives on “O’Farrill,” “Albertico,” “Gavito,” “Alberto, el preocupado,” and, especially, “Gavitofa” tile O’Farrill’s “actual” and (literary) performance identities, occluding and exposing each to varying degrees. The Gavitofa identity does so more than just by blending within a pen name the two last names, O’Farrill and Gavito; as O’Farrill’s pseudonym for “Se dice que a mí no me importa” (They Say I Don’t Care), a column combining mordant observation with a kind of theater criticism, Gavitofa dismisses the claim that some actors (he cites two bufo colleagues, Juan Rivera and Álvaro Moreno) “know who Gavitofa is,” stating, in fact, that Gavitofa “still hasn’t revealed himself” and that “each time he sneaks into theaters, he pays his own way for the right to tell the truth to whoever is no good.”78 Gavitofa turns the tables: less a (performing) body on public display on a street-corner scale, he is an anonymous, and later a pseudonymous, purveyor of judgment on the theater, a role that is compensatory, since, as I have suggested, what prompted O’Farrill’s migration to the United States in the first place was likely the difficulty of finding work as an Afro-Cuban man on the Cuban stage, a fate that, in a way, seems also to have befallen him in New York City.
Simón Jou’s figure of a stage-negrito/actual O’Farrill only alludes to the latter’s appearance in blackface. In contrast, a comment from the first period of Gráfico under the title “Things That Stood Out at the Park Palace Festival” offers an actual description, doing so in a way that foregrounds the performative: it is the “gloves and wig of O’Farrill” that stood out at the performance that night—his costume of Cuban blackness.79 Significantly, in the papers of Erasmo Vando, the Puerto Rican actor, writer, and activist, a depiction of O’Farrill in blackface survives: a fragment arraché of Afro-Cuban culture in the United States that, located in the Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, the City University of New York, represents Cuban–Puerto Rican cultural exchanges in Harlem as an unsettling archive effect. It is a 5¾-inch-by-3¾-inch, black-and-white, full-body portrait photograph of O’Farrill as the negrito (see fig. 2).80 The photograph is damaged in parts, fragile. It shows O’Farrill standing in front of a blank wall. He wears a boater straw, a jacket with a vest and bowtie, slacks worn high above the waist, and what appear to be tap shoes. His arms are close to the side, but his hands—gloved—are active, with both index fingers pointing outward. O’Farrill’s stance is wide, while his shoulders are much more narrow, drawing the gaze upward, from feet to fingers, torso to head. O’Farrill’s face is painted black, setting off a rictus and wide-open eyes that stare at a spot above the camera. Across the lower quarter of the photograph, in a diagonal line of cursive script, the name “Alberto O’Farrill Gavito” appears. On the back, in handwriting, are the words “El Trópico,” a possible reference to a theater or play. While it is difficult to date the photograph with precision, I place it around the Apolo era or shortly thereafter. The mood of the photograph is complex. The negrito suggests hilarity and entertainment, which O’Farrill’s “real” name extends into publicity: getting the word out about the actor playing the role, the actual O’Farrill. Yet the negrito’s mouth and eyes unnerve. In an attitude of frozen mirth, they bestow on the blackface visage—and on the performance of the negro-on-negro bufo—something of the insensible: the negrito looks unmoved, indifferent to feeling, despite the show of popular merriment.81 In the context of the many missing materials of the Apolo era, this photograph of O’Farrill in the Vando Papers, which both stages and undoes the idea of a bufo hilarity, arrives as a key text of a modernist afrolatinidad.
Animality, Jews, and the “Pegas Suaves”
Of primary significance to the itinerary of O’Farrill’s negrito is “Pegas Suaves,” O’Farrill’s primary writing contribution to Gráfico during its first period. The noun pega comes from the verb pegar (to hit) and the word suave means “soft.” In O’Farrill’s context, pega is a term for “job,” while suave suggests the kind of job under discussion: an easy one. Signed in a pseudonym, “Ofa,” that further layers negrito/actual O’Farrill identities, the “Pegas Suaves” are realist, first-person narratives ranging from five hundred to six hundred words. In the twenty-one installments that appeared from February to July 1927 (the last “Pegas” coincided with Vega’s inaugural issue), O’Farrill meditates on the conditions of Latino labor and migrancy around the Depression, satirizing the injunction to productive labor and the generation of surplus value in a protagonist who spends as much time looking for work as he does evading any and all kinds of it—suave or otherwise. Indeed, in his critical aversion to work and his marginality even to a working-class identity, the “Pegas” protagonist is a kind of lumpenproletariat figure whose modern, Manhattan-island location links him to the “vagabond,” African-diaspora internationalisms particular to the colonial-center, port-city metropoles of Europe.82 In related fashion, the “Pegas” represent the barrio afrolatino as a space of masculine, nocturnal wandering, with the narrator beginning every story in his boarding-house room at three in the morning, about to set out in search of work, and later walking the empty streets, riding the subway, or hitching a ride on the back of a truck en route to a factory or warehouse. Accompanying him always, his motif, is a “valsesito” whose melody he sings or whistles—a “little waltz” entitled “Son las tres de la mañana” (It’s Three in the Morning).83
Figure 2. Alberto O’Farrill in blackface, c. 1930 (Box 5, Folder 9, Erasmo Vando Papers, Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York)
In the connection of the “Pegas Suaves” to dance and musicality, in the persona of an “Ofa” narrator, and in the production of nighttime, public performances of (looking for) work, they allegorize O’Farrill’s negro-on-negro bufo experience during