Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
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a “mulatto pícaro [roguish mulatto],” as Nicolás Kanellos does.84 Not only is there no evidence in the “Pegas” of a “mulatto” self-appellation; to ascribe it to O’Farrill’s narrator is to reproduce, rather than inquire into, the categories of modern Latino race present in such print-culture spaces as Gráfico. I propose instead that what converges in the narrator of “Pegas Suaves” are the identities of the moreno and the negrito, as reimagined by their possible “African” author, the Afro-Cuban/Afro-Latino “Ofa.”
Two “Pegas” are relevant to the discussion here. In the first, published on July 10, the narrator describes a job he found in Brooklyn:
The job that turned up came about through all the many influences I have in this country, all due, no doubt, to my way with the words of a crude vocabulary that sprouts from my hard little chola [in original; “head”],85 covered in tangled, bundled-up hair [una pelambre y recopilada cabellera].
Before anything, I want you to know that I get paid fifty-five dollars a week. All I have to do is play a few roles in Coney Island, where animals of every species are exhibited. I, among them, merely put myself in view of the public.
It’s therefore a job worth having, despite appearances. Even though we’re all together, we aren’t mixed up, because each of us is in his own apartment, luxuriously decorated and protected by iron bars, but only so the curious won’t get the urge to touch and annoy—or better said, so we’ll be within sight but not within reach.
We stay there from 3 to 12. They give us an hour break between 5 and 6, and, what’s more, they offer us the same apartment to sleep in if we want to save money on renting a room.
Don’t think my job is that easy. To do this, you need a man with many intellectual resources, which is why they always thought I was the only one in New York who could do it, which I am.
I have to imitate the roar of the lion, the tiger, and all the songbirds, which is the only thing I’m really afraid of, because at the beach, stuck inside a cage, I can very easily coger un airecito y quedarme con el pescuezo jorobado [in original].86 And I’ve got a clean conscience; I’d rather keep playing the . . . I don’t know what role I’m playing inside a cage, but, in reality, I prefer it to walking around, flapping my arms with a crooked neck.
Then, naturally, I have to give the person who got me the job twenty-five percent of my wages, twenty-five percent to the boss [in original] and a good tip to the person who takes care of my apartment so he’ll keep it clean.
I don’t care about any of this because there’s enough to go around. It’s the case that I have a good job and earn a good salary, and even though I don’t take everything home, they pay me fifty-five dollars every week.87
The caged narrator performs his roar and singsong in a way that stages the boundary between the human and nonhuman animal. In light of the discourses of modern racist primitivism, in which the “ape was the Negro [and the Afro-Latino negro] unmasked,”88 the Coney Island “Pegas,” like racist primitivism, blurs such boundaries, here to turn a profit: acting like an animal earns the narrator a wage. Furthermore, Coney Island as the site of such a performance of racialization allegorizes the period’s primary institution of Latino racial performance, the Teatro Apolo. Over the weekend, a theatergoer could witness O’Farrill as the stage negrito and then, as a Gráfico reader, reencounter him on the page (in the same medium that advertised the Apolo) as a literary character satirizing the very discourses and professional conditions constitutive of his bufo career. The description of the body in its animality is still another sign of O’Farrill’s blackface print culture in the Coney Island “Pegas”: the narrator’s unruly head of hair suggests the negrito’s wig, which, in fact, is implied in the word cabellera, while pelambre can also mean the hide of an animal; this is also the case with pescuezo, which popularly means “neck” but more properly signifies “scrag”—the neck of an animal.
The convergence of animality, race, and performance in the Coney Island “Pegas” draws attention to the fissures in a raza hispana ideology at other important moments in Gráfico in 1927. The very first editorial under Bernardo Vega, for instance, laments that for the “common American [vulgo americano],” there are “only Toltecs, Mayas, cholos, and gauchos”89 who “inhabit the countries south of the Río Grande, living in a savage state,” which leads them to consider those countries as “incapable of living the civilized life of our century.”90 A column later that summer, called “Palpitations of National Life,” went even further in its elaboration of the Latino white-supremacist subtext of the raza hispana, using a report of Irish American protests against the film The Callahans and the Murphys (1927) to suggest that if Latinas/os protested in a similar way against U.S. cinematic depictions of “lions in Cuba, alligators in Puerto Rico, and barefoot and naked negritos climbing coconut trees [negritos descalzos y desnudos subiendo a las palmas de coco],” one would invite an Anglo-racist “anti-Latino” backlash: “in all the major dailies there would be” a confirmation “of the savages, of the Indians, and of the blacks of Hispanic America [de los salvajes, de los indios y de los negros de la America Hispana].”91 In Gráfico’s depiction of a colonized, Americas indigeneity (toltecas, mayas), a European/indigenous-Americas “miscegenation” (the cholos, the gauchos), and a colonized but now seemingly U.S. “white,” European-immigrant indigeneity (the Irish), the newspaper would anthologize identities and subjects of the “salvaje” that, across the Americas (and the British archipelago), the raza hispana (or the raza anglosajona) would subject to violent “assimilation.” “Barefoot and naked negritos” are implicated here, too, of course, only in a curious way: they are “fictitious”—like Cuban lions and Puerto Rican alligators, the mishaps of an Anglo-racist imaginary. Yet, when figured as the “blacks of Hispanic America,” these “negritos” are also real, perhaps too real, for Gráfico, as are the “unassimilated” “Indians.” It is such a fissure in raza hispana ideology that, earlier in 1927, the Coney Island narrator of “Pegas” exploited through his narrative of animality and racial performance. What this Gráfico article displaces in such an antsy way on the Anglo imaginary—the fictitious “negritos,” aligned with nonhuman animals—is what O’Farrill’s narrator critically embraces: not only is the a narrator a negrito himself, on stage and in print; he is a Cuban lion, roaring. The “savage-animal” condition of the Coney Island “Pegas” narrator, in short, resituates the “barefoot and naked negritos” of the Gráfico article from a Latin American elsewhere (“south of the Rio Grande”) to the Latino United States itself. The “negritos” of the Gráfico article inhabit Harlem, O’Farrill’s narrator says, and, if not “barefoot and naked,” they are covered in cork, contending with “African,” moreno, and animal identities.
The other “Pegas Suaves” I wish to discuss was published on June 11, 1927, in the same issue of Gráfico in which O’Farrill’s head shot appeared. It, too, meditates on otherness and performance. The narrator, as usual, is up at three a.m. He sings his valsesito, which prompts the boarding-house landlady to ask him to end his song: “porque a los vecinos les agrada ir al teatro pagando su dinero, y…yo les estaba dando una función gratuita” (because the neighbors like paying money to go to the theater, and…I was giving them a free show). With the theater-motif connection now openly admitted in the narrative, the “Pegas” manages Cuban blackface and raza hispana ideas through a crucial subject of Latino modernism in New York City: the Jew.
Taking into account what that good woman said to me, I headed out really early in the direction of Central Park. Arriving at the lake, I stopped and contemplated the ducks playing in the water. It made me feel so jealous, and unable to resist and thinking I could serve as an example and be the first one to do it, the happy thought occurred to me, of course, to wash myself down in that water, which, despite its appearance to what a Jew sheds after taking a bath, due to its clear black color [que aunque parecía la arrojada por un judío después