Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
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quickly, and soon there were more than four hundred curious onlookers, watching me and full of envy. But since they’re such cowards, none of them decided to jump in. I was already considering myself a hero. I thought I would be given an award, like the aviators who went to Paris, when I noticed someone going for my pants. Thinking that the gentleman wanted to steal the nickel I carry around to trick others, I shouted at him, and since he wouldn’t let go of my clothes, I swam to the edge. I saw him rush toward me, and as his jacket flew open, I saw that the guy had a badge. I turned around and swam with hurried strokes to the other side, while everyone yelled, “Quick!” [English in original.] I got out and immediately I smash full-speed through the park, taking a tremendous lead on the guy. But I failed to realize that I was in my BVDs and that, of necessity, I would have to pass a policeman. And it wasn’t long, in effect, before one stopped me. I was already seeing two blows to the ribs with a nightstick, when he said, “Oh! You’re a boxer and you’re in training [English in original].” I let out a big, startled yes [English in original], which he wouldn’t have believed if it weren’t for all the running I’d done. And that’s how I was able to go free. But when I got home—oh, Lord!—what a huge mess [titingó] I got into with the landlady. She got it into her head [cayuca] that I was crazy and tried at all costs to find a policeman to put me in the hospital.92
O’Farrill’s Harlem Meer comments on his situation in the negro-on-negro bufo through the anti-Semitic figure of a Jew off whom runs water the color of a “negro cristalino” (clear black), a sign of Jewish “pollution” suggesting blackface paint itself and, by extension, early twentieth-century U.S. Jewish minstrels such as Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and George Burns.93 The narrator’s immersion in the negro cristalino run-off before hundreds of onlookers represents not only performance in general but a special kind of blackface routine, one in which the narrator’s blackface paint failed to take, leaving him exposed. The routine thus suggests a comparative canon of ethnicized, racialized minstrel practices in the early twentieth-century United States—the Jewish American judío on black, the Afro-Latino negro on negro—and, for the narrator, the difficulty of (imagining) movements between the two. His is not the fraught career in minstrelsy through which Jewish American performers managed an “assimilation” of their ethnicity in the anti-Semitic Anglo United States; at the same time, for the raza hispana, his immersion in Jewishness, however endorsed by an anti-Semitic feeling, suggests a problematic likening of the Afro-Latino with the Jewish, given how Jewish identity fissures the raza hispana in relation not only to the anti-Semitism of early-modern Spain but to the more recent conflicts between Latinas/os and Jews in Harlem during the Apolo era itself. If, for O’Farrill, the negro-on-negro bufo promises to tighten, but in fact loosens, his bond with the raza hispana, his association with the figure of the Jew troubles matters even more.
The Harlem Meer “Pegas,” set in and around that particular liminal zone of Central Park and Harlem, invokes the relations among the Latino and Jewish barrios during the 1920s. The latter’s population was in decline by the end of the decade, particularly in East Harlem, where the Jewish population (poorer and more working class than the Jews of Central Harlem) had begun migrating to the Bronx, leaving behind “vacated tenements [that] were soon occupied by New York’s newest immigrants—the Puerto Ricans.”94 Among the connections between the Jewish and Latino barrios was violence, particularly in the summer of 1926, when the “ill-feeling of recent weeks between young Porto Ricans and others of Spanish blood who have been moving into Harlem in large numbers recently and the older residents of the district broke out…in an attempt at riot, which was quelled by police reserves of four precincts before it got well started.”95 The “ill-feeling” among Latinas/os and Jews in Harlem, according to observers of the period, was the result of “commercial rivalries” involving “disputes and bloody fights” and “much difficulty in renting shops,”96 although others narrate Latino-Jewish amicability and coexistence, stating, for example, “we became friendly neighbors with Jews” and “the Hebrews or Jews” were the “race with which we, the boricuas [in original] coexisted for a brief time,” partly because of their being “persecuted and discriminated against as we were.”97
O’Farrill’s negro cristalino run-off is significant for the way it orients bufo elements with anti-Semitism as a form of ideological consolidation.98 For a raza hispana ideology in the Latino United States, the negro cristalino projects the social as constituted not simply by negros and indios “salvajes,” but by judíos, too: the Sephardim diaspora of New York City, which had migrated from the former Ottoman Empire, whose ancestors the Spanish Crown had expelled in 1492, and whose Ladino language, “based on early modern Castilian, with admixtures of Hebrew, Aramaic, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, French, and Arabic, and traditionally written in Hebraic letters,”99 transforms further the racial politics of Latino language practices, representing here a “Spanish” that, in the form of a Hebrew alphabet, recollects an earlier, Peninsular raza hispana ideology itself stressed by “vile casts”—that “of the Jews and Muslims.”100 The cultural signs of a negro cristalino at the time were multiple. At the Apolo, a bufo entitled Terremoto en Harlem o conflicto entre judíos e hispanos (Earthquake in Harlem or Conflict between Jews and Hispanics) featured O’Farrill himself and engaged the “recent conflict between Hispanics [hispanos] and Hebrews,” which the bufo represented as “a purely commercial issue” that, according to La Prensa, should motivate “all Spanish speakers [a todos los de habla española] to come and work together to elevate our race and avoid friction and unpleasant occurrences.”101 In Gráfico, O’Farrill contributed a drawing (called a “photograph” in the following quote) of a “Jew” in a discussion of the proliferation of venues for Spanish-language theater: “Alberto O’Farrill, our editor-photographer, armed with his camera, went to 125th Street and 7th Avenue and took the photograph we include here, which shows a Jew who, unable to find a theater in which to offer Spanish performances [representaciones españolas], goes to the roof [English in original] at the abovementioned corner, with the aim of renting it in order to put on Hispanic shows [funciones hispanas].”102 The drawing is of a corpulent man, seen from the back, who wears a checkered jacket and a straw boater, carrying a valise and smoking a cigar. The point of the piece, which may well have been written by O’Farrill himself, was that everyone was trying to get into the Spanish-language theater business, including “Jews.” The tone of a line in the following week’s Gráfico, however, was darker: “Spanish theater [El teatro Español] must, should, and will be the property of Hispanics [hispanos], for Hispanics, and by Hispanics. Never for the Jews [Nunca para los judios].”103
But it was in Gráfico’s Spanish-English editorials that such Latino-Jewish signs were most strikingly apparent, revealing a raza hispana under stress. Consider the following example: “One of the arguments that our detractors use constantly with the intention of insulting us,” a 1927 editorial begins, “is to accuse us of belonging to the colored race [raza de color]. According to the opinion of these enemies, it is only Indians and blacks [indios y negros] without culture and education that exist in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Hispanic countries [países hispanos].” The charge of being “de color,” according to the editorial, arises from the way in which “we Spanish speakers [los que hablamos español]” have a “spirit of tolerance” and “don’t distinguish among ourselves on account of race hate [odio de razas] in the neighborhoods and towns where we live.…There are in all our countries whites and blacks [blancos y negros], just as in the United States,” and “if on account of having this liberal, altruistic, and human feeling we should be considered as blacks [hemos de ser considerados como negros], then let it happily be so.” What begins with the promise of an acknowledgment of an Afro-Latino identity concludes instead with a figurative admission: that the newspaper’s Latino voice considers itself, in fact, “como negros” (as blacks), which thus instances afrolatinidad as an attitude toward Afro-Latinas/os, the practice of which, as a “feeling” (sentimiento), constitutes here an element of raza hispana