Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
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souls of the same race [misma raza]” that inhabit the Americas.141 The protagonist himself, Antonio Guerra (Pereda), is one such soul, a Spanish immigrant in New York City, and he is down on his luck. On the street one day, he meets Edmundo (O’Farrill), an Afro-Cuban shoeshine who takes him in. Antonio ends up bootlegging, despite Edmundo’s reservations. To protect his identity, Antonio changes his last name, going as Antonio “López.” Antonio eventually rises in the criminal organization, supplanting the boss. The rise, however, was a ruse: Antonio’s promotion was orchestrated by the gang in order to make him the fall guy, with the boss now working behind the scenes. It is only after the boss is murdered that Antonio truly ascends in the organization. Meanwhile, he woos Amapola (Lamar), a Mexican singer at a Spanish-immigrant-owned nightclub managed by a Cuban, Fernando (Luis). Amapola spurns Antonio at first, suspicious of his illegal activities. Eventually, though, she grows fond of him. With Edmundo confiding in her, she learns of Antonio’s participation in a kidnapping plot and alerts his brother, who comes from Spain to rescue Antonio from a life of crime. Amapola also helps Edmundo find a job with Luis’s nightclub, where he performs a “rumba” in blackface. The climax sees Antonio nearly going through with the kidnapping, only to be prevented by his brother, whom he nearly assaults. Appalled at his own behavior, Antonio has a change of heart. The final scene shows him aboard a ship bound for Spain with his brother. They are joined by Amapola, who is embarking on a performance tour of the Spanish peninsula, and by Edmundo, now her “empresario.”
The production and release of No matarás were very much identified with Latino Harlem and, in particular, the Campoamor. During the summer of 1935, Contreras Torres appeared there during a showing of an earlier film, Tribu, announcing that he would soon be directing a new film with an “inter-Hispanic flavor [sabor intra-hispano], for which he wishes to cast actors of all nationalities, and, naturally, he hasn’t forgotten about New York.”142 The Campoamor-sponsored contest to “find young people of both sexes” to appear in the film even spilled onto the Campoamor stage, with some of the contest participants appearing in a bufo with O’Farrill himself.143 It seems likely that Contreras Torres “discovered” O’Farrill and cast him in the film during this time; it is likely he even wrote the part of Edmundo specifically for him. By the film’s Campoamor premiere in November 1935, No matarás was known as the film with “the soul of the Hispanic-American colony of New York [la Colonia Hispano-Americana de New York]” and as the “magnificent film on the life of the Hispanics [los hispanos]” in the city.144 Its reception underscored the importance of technology matters to understandings of Hispanophone cinema during the period. The film programming at the Campoamor had already prompted discussions regarding the technological successes of the film industry in Spain, which had improved in “lighting, photography, and sound.”145 With the release of No matarás, such discussions continued, weaving together in praise the film’s technological features and Latino-Harlem content: No matarás was claimed as the “Spanish-language film that has surpassed the precedents established up until now in its impeccable technology and the way in which, in the film, the real character of the Hispanic colony in New York vibrates.”146 The Anglophone press, with little advocacy interests in the representation of Latino Harlem, offered a response more attuned to elements of the film as a text of the 1935 uprising: its violence and belatedness. No matarás was a “well-made gangster picture,” “shot in New York and assembled in Hollywood,” that “is outdated by being timed during the last months of the dry era and dealing with the activities of bootleggers instead of policy racketeers and the like”—“policy racketeers,” one hastens to add, such as Marcial Flores.147 In another review, No matarás was a film in which “some good acting and a satisfactory production offset the rather outdated theme.”148 Such a lag would have been apparent to O’Farrill, if for only one reason: nearly ten years earlier, during Prohibition, he had appeared on the Apolo stage as the negrito in a bufo entitled En el país de los secos, o el efecto de la prohibición (In the Country of the Dry, or the Effects of Prohibition).149 Finally, the attention and praise received by O’Farrill for his performance in the film was noticeable. His return from California was hailed as “triumphant,” and an advertisement for the premiere (which included an O’Farrill bufo and the regular performance of the Socarrás orchestra) featured a still of him in blackface next to Adriana Lamar.150 Indeed, in a review of No matarás, La Prensa remarked how O’Farrill, the “popular negrito and idol of the Hispanics [los hispanos], nearly ‘steals’ three quarters of the film.” “Never before had he played a part in films,” it remarked and then added, in a comment of unintentional, bitter irony regarding the situation of theater (and now film) work among Afro-Cuban performers, “yet he acts as if he had been working on screen for years.”151
O’Farrill’s performance as Edmundo in No matarás both revisits and goes beyond his earlier print and performance bufo work. Edmundo, for example, appears out of blackface for a majority of the film, which thus imagines him as a Harlem Afro-Cuban identified with servant work and hard times, with the latter representation reminiscent of Simón Jou’s Gráfico micronarratives of O’Farrill’s lean years during the late 1920s. It is also out of blackface that Edmundo briefly participates in the plot’s criminality and violence. His one blackface scene, which takes place at Fernando Luis’s cabaret, suggests a metacinematic moment: Edmundo appears in a film image that, at the premiere, was projected on a screen above the actual stage on which O’Farrill performed regularly as the negrito. Meanwhile, from start to finish, No matarás draws on a raza hispana ideology that, with Edmundo’s trip to Spain at the end, is rendered literal: the Afro-Latino is finally “back” in Hispania/España.
In fact, in the film’s opening Madrid scene, what prompts the protagonist’s brother to muse on the “one hundred million souls of the same race” that inhabit the Americas, and on the possibility of “uniting [them] with Spain…on practical, moral, and racial foundations,” is an altogether different project, one that hinges on a kind of raza uncanniness: that of “uniting Spain and Africa,” which the plot implies is strictly a business proposition, involving the construction of a physical link between the peninsula and North Africa. Such “African” refractions of raza carry over into a following scene, Edmundo’s first, which features him plying his trade on a Harlem sidewalk—in front of the Teatro Campoamor itself, at 1421 Fifth Avenue—and calling out in English to a passerby who happens to be the protagonist, Antonio: “Shine? Shine? Shine, mister?” The first words we hear O’Farrill speak in the film are in English; after encountering him for so long on the print-culture page, it is a moving experience to hear his voice. The English-language utterance renders Edmundo’s afrolatinidad uncertain: is this shoeshine an African American, or is he an Afro-Latino who learned English? Edmundo soon clarifies the matter, speaking in a Cuban-accented Spanish that facilitates a public show of Latino racial (and national) identification. He begins by confirming Antonio’s white latinidad, telling him, “Usted parece español” (You look like a Spaniard), before asking him, “¿De dónde es Usted?” (Where are you from?). In that same scene, Edmundo also mocks the film’s raza hispana inclinations, here as a concept deriving from Spain as the “motherland.” Having gotten Antonio to say that he comes from Castilla la Vieja (Old Castile)—a historic region of the Medieval Kingdom of Castile, which thus intensifies the script’s Hispanicity—Edmundo replies, “¿La vieja? ¿Qué vieja?” (The old woman? What old woman?). It is a reply in which Edmundo disrupts Castilla la Vieja’s possible grandeur, and he takes it further still: “¡Entonces somos casi paisanos! Yo también soy de Santiago. Santiago de Cuba. Pero mi padre era catalán. Catalán, ya Usted ve. Casi callestano [sic]” (Then we’re almost compatriots! I’m also from Santiago. Santiago de Cuba. But my father was a Catalan. Catalan, you see. Almost callestano [in original]). The play of Edmundo’s Cuban-accented voice—the “catalán” is “casi” the “castellano,” which, in fact, Edmundo “corrupts” further, as “callestano”—not only further disrupts Hispania, satirically disintegrating Spain and its modern, disparate provinces in an ominous gesture on the eve of the Spanish Civil War; it invokes, too, the Afro-Latino uncanny