Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
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hired him to play in his company’s orchestra. Socarrás’s earliest professional experiences, then, were linked to Cuba’s early-republican bufo cultures—and not just any, but its most successful. Socarrás not only played for Pous’s stage shows; he eventually began arranging pieces. He traveled with Pous from Manzanillo to Santiago, and from there to Havana, remaining with the company for nearly three years.122 In Havana, among his gigs, Socarrás played in Moisés Simóns’s band at the Plaza Hotel. During this time, he recognized racism in music hiring practices. “I noticed about some places where they don’t want in this house, negro,” Socarrás said in an interview. “They start all those things, Cubans.”123 Socarrás resolved to go to New York, where he arrived in 1927, at the height of the Apolo era. He was met at the pier in Manhattan by Justo Barreto, an Afro-Cuban musician. The two rode the IRT together to Harlem, getting off at the 125th Street and Lenox Avenue station, where Socarrás was amazed by the majority-black population.124 One of his first jobs was with the orchestra of the white Cuban Nilo Menéndez at the Harlem Opera House, where the Teatro Apolo was located.125
Early on in New York City, Socarrás rented a room with an African American family in Harlem to learn English and immerse himself in the everyday cultures of jazz.126 His career in African American music and among African American performers during the 1920s and 1930s is well-known: he recorded with the Clarence Williams orchestra, including what is considered the first-ever jazz-flute solo in “Have You Ever Felt That Way”; he was in the orchestra of the Rhapsody in Black and Blackbirds revues; he played with King Oliver, Sam Wooding, Allie Ross, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie; and he led orchestras of his own at the Savoy, the Cotton Club, Small’s Paradise, and Connie’s Inn. He was “also playing Cuban music at El Campoamor, El Cubanacán, and [the] Park Plaza.”127 It was a career not only with origins in the island-Cuban bufo circuits of Arquímedes Pous, therefore, but unfolding still in the cultures of the belated bufo of New York City. Socarrás was Marcial Flores’s personal choice to direct the Campoamor orchestra; “he want me there, because he want to have show from Mexico, American shows, from everywhere,” Socarrás said, “and he didn’t have a conductor there,” so “he send somebody to talk to me.”128
Nearly every performance of O’Farrill’s at the Teatro Campoamor around 1935 happened to the accompaniment of Socarrás’s band, as La Prensa’s theater coverage between December 1934 and December 1935 demonstrates. As the theater’s “popular and applauded negrito,” O’Farrill, it seems, had expanded his repertoire in negrito characterization at the Campoamor; in one instance, not surprisingly, he did so through still further racial performance, in relation to a stereotype of gender and Chinese identity in a Warren and Dubin song: the “likeable negrito Alberto O’Farrill again steals all the applause, especially in a parody of ‘Shanghai Lil,’ with an appropriate lyric [poesía], in which O’Farrill shows himself as a magnificent character actor.”129 In another show, he appeared with Antonio Machín, “the theater’s chorus, and the orchestra of Alberto Socarrás.”130 Finally, in what was again an instance of ideologies of circum-Pacific race informing Latino performance, he appeared in a Fernando Luis production called Hawaiianerías (Hawaiianities) alongside the gallego of Guillermo Moreno—formerly of the Arango-Moreno.131 O’Farrill’s collaboration with Socarrás thus represented a palimpsest of Pous-era, Apolo-era, and now Campoamor-era bufo expression, theatrically and musically, which Moreno’s contributions inscribed further in relation to the memory of O’Farrill’s Key West arrival.
The African American uprising in Harlem of March 19, 1935, that resulted in the deaths of three African Americans matters here as well, as text and context of the racial performance of the O’Farrill-Socarrás Campoamor. In the experience of the Afro–Puerto Rican Lino Rivera, the uprising contained an implication of the negro-on-negro bufo: that Afro-Latino blackface performance signifies how an “African” identity in the United States exposes Afro-Latinas/os to Anglo-white violence, including lynching. La Prensa identified Rivera as both a “Puerto Rican youth” (joven puertorriqueño) and a “Hispanic young man” (muchacho hispano), side-stepping his African diasporic identity. Yet the newspaper had to come to terms with it somehow. It did so by “quoting” the African American woman who, as a witness to the detention of Rivera, “misrecognized” him: what began the “riot” was “the shout of an alarmed woman of the colored race that ‘they’re beating to death a colored boy [un muchacho de color] in the basement of this store!’”132 Bernardo Vega uses a similar approach in his account of the uprising in the Memorias: Rivera was a “young man” (un muchacho) whom “various women…took for a young black North American [joven negro norteamericano], even though he was Puerto Rican.”133 Both narratives burden African American women with an “African” and African-diasporic mis/recognition of Rivera, a racialized and gendered division of representational labor that offers La Prensa and Vega a subsequent opportunity to disabuse their informants of the idea.
The mis/recognition of Rivera’s afrolatinidad explains, in part, the dismissive attitude noticeable initially in the press regarding the uprising’s beginning at the Kress on 125th Street. Accounts of Rivera’s detention as a “simple incident” and an “incident of no importance,” and of the uprising as a result of “deceitful circumstances”134 and a “false report,”135 reflected the apparent facts: that Rivera’s brief detention for shoplifting had somehow become, in the imagination of African American women, an act of police brutality and murder. In fact, such a coding of the uprising’s origins implicates the mis/recognition of Rivera itself: what was dangerously “false” and thus in need of a hasty dismissal was the Afro-Latino Rivera’s interpellation as an African American. Such was the power and perplexity of the mis/recognition that some believed Rivera “had been substituted for the Negro boy” who, according to rumor, had actually been murdered.136 The performance logic particular here to Rivera imagined as an Afro-Latino stand-in for an African American corpse was reproduced in more general terms in Alain Locke’s “Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane,” his account of the uprising that appeared in Survey Graphic eleven years after his editing and publishing the New Negro materials in that same journal. Locke, calling Rivera “a Negro lad of sixteen,” described the uprising as “the first scene of the next act,” a “curtain-raiser,” and a “dress rehearsal” for Harlem’s future.137 The stage language also signified literally: “The publicity [Rivera] received from the riot has brought him two offers to go on the stage, his friends revealed.”138
Miguel Conteras Torres’s No Matarás and O’Farrill’s performance in this Campoamor-centric film invoke the 1935 Harlem uprising in a raza hispana narrative of belated bloodshed (here in the film’s Prohibition-era setting and bootlegger plot) that would seal off the film from the violence and racial mis/recognition of the recent uprising. The film was very much a primary text of the Campoamor. Not only did it premiere at the theater in November 1935 (and, as we shall see, include its exterior in an opening scene); it featured two of the Campoamor’s primary figures, O’Farrill in a supporting-actor role and Fernando Luis in a smaller part, in addition to two amateur performers who had won a contest sponsored by the theater. For O’Farrill, appearing in No matarás was likely the highlight of his career. He was credited third, after the film’s two stars, Ramón Pereda and Adriana Lamar, and he played a character that, “straight” and in blackface, won over the public at the Campoamor—a character that reprised the limits and possibilities of O’Farrill’s nearly decade-long career in negro-on-negro negrito performance in the United States.
No matarás was “the second and final ‘Hispanic’ film” (that is, film set in the Latino United States) of Miguel Contreras Torres’s career, which dated to the early 1920s; Contreras Torres was its writer, director, and coproducer.139 The film was made in August and September of 1935, on location in New York City and at the Talisman Studios in Hollywood; it was produced by Hispano International Film Corporation and distributed by Film Selectos and 20th Century Fox.140 The cast included the Spanish-born Pereda, its leading man; the Mexican Lamar,