Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
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the subject of sexual violence) in favor of a white, Spanish father.
Central to No matarás’s characterization of Edmundo is his servant identity. Yet the film complicates this, too, imagining a servant Edmundo as a possible Afro-Latino agent of violence through his very service to Antonio. This happens in an important sequence. Antonio has just embarked in organized crime and comes to share the news with Edmundo, greeting him in English: “Hello, boy!” The Spaniard-as-white-Latino Antonio (the gallego, as it were) adopts an Anglo-white form of belittling, racist address in his greeting of Edmundo (the “negrito”), a complement to the latter’s own Anglophone “shine, mister” in the opening scenes. Indeed, “boy” resonates with the phrase “Negro boy” used for Rivera as well as the diminutive ‑ito in negrito. Distressed at the news, Edmundo responds with a plea: “I’ll be your driver, your servant [criado], your shoeshine, but take me with you.” Later, Edmundo decides to make a bomb to protect Antonio. “How to make a dynamite bomb,” he reads from a book, as he dissolves black powder in water, here calling to mind the negro cristalino of the Harlem Meer “Pegas.” The film then trades in the comic value of the scene: Edmundo lights a cigarette, which, in a minor flash, sets off the explosive, thereby defusing for now the servant “boy’s” violent practice. Shortly thereafter, Edmundo interrupts a meeting between Antonio and the other gangsters by producing the fully made bomb. It turns out to be a coconut with a fuse sticking out—an exoticist prop that, yet again, relegates Afro-Latino violence to the place of comic relief. Edmundo goes on to demonstrate the “bomb’s” capability by setting off still another minor flash. Antonio asks him where he got the bomb. “Oh, I make them,” Edmundo replies. “I’m preparing to become an anarchist.” It is a joke that works because Edmundo’s threat of political violence appears so unrealistic.
In the judgment of the New York Motion Picture Division, however, it was not so unrealistic. The division decreed that among the “eliminations…to be made in all prints to be shown in New York State” of the film were “all views of Edmundo making bomb, all views of the bomb, and the explosion.” The reason, it stated, was that such scenes “would tend to incite to crime.”152 The elimination of the threat of Afro-Latino violence in No matarás represents a practical application of a kind of cultural theory on the part of the state, which deems the relation between the cinematic staging of a bomb-making Edmundo and the scene’s reception determinative: seeing the bomb-making Edmundo on screen would “incite” the people, with effects the state presumes are criminal. The censored scene thus shares a political occasion with the arrest of Lino Rivera at the Kress on 125th Street: Edmundo’s criminality and afrolatinidad, not unlike Rivera’s mis/recognized criminality and afrolatinidad, threaten to “stir up” Harlem, a possibility that the state (as the police, as the Motion Picture Division) would prefer to eliminate.
Edmundo’s appearance in blackface in No matarás, as I suggested, comments on O’Farrill’s career in the negro-on-negro bufo. Set in a cabaret managed by Fernando Luis, the scene imagines an origin for O’Farrill’s career—one that, no doubt, amounted to an in-joke for the audience at the Campoamor, accustomed as it was to seeing him as a veteran performer at that theater over the past year and even earlier in other venues. Amapola tells Edmundo, “you could be a performer [artista], too,” and introduces him to the Spanish-immigrant cabaret owner as “a great dancer.” Edmundo seizes the opportunity, though not without again revising the raza hispana, telling the owner that he “parece gallego” (looks like a Spaniard/Galician/gallego), to which the owner responds, in a huff, that, in fact, he is “a Spaniard.” The owner then adds, “How can you tell I’m a gallego [in original]?” The exchange foregrounds how Edmundo throws into crisis the matter of a Spain-derived raza hispana, making it a matter of Hispanicity’s own unresolved internal differences (as gallego, español), here provoked (and, what is more, uncustomarily rendered as an object of discourse) by the Afro-Latino character: indeed, appropriately enough, by the film’s would-be negrito. Edmundo’s reply to the owner—“Oh, I know a lot about that, quite a bit. You see, my father was a gallego [in original]”—signifies yet again on the raza hispana, showing Edmundo as he plays the part of the self-denying Afro-Cuban American in an even more incredible (which is to say, unbelievable) way, as he presents himself now not as the son of a catalán, as he did in the earlier scene, but as the son of a gallego. Here, in other words, the Afro-Latino’s assimilation to a raza hispana—an assimilation necessary for Edmundo to receive a job offer in performance—is made a mockery of: the Afro-Latino, in fact, interrupts a raza hispana identification at every turn.
When Edmundo finally appears in blackface, he revisits elements of O’Farrill’s earlier negrito work in print and performance. Back at the Fernando Luis cabaret, he peeks into Amapola’s dressing room and asks her, “Do you recognize me?” Edmundo’s face is covered in blackface paint, down to his neck. He wears a wig underneath a fedora, which is on backward. His costume suggests a stylized stage “rumba” outfit, with a scarf, sash, and many-ruffled shirt. “How funny,” Amapola replies. “You look like a Cuban Al Jolson.” Edmundo affirms that, yes, “that’s exactly who I want to be like. All I need now is the voice. But—I don’t know. I’m nervous. I’m not sure if people will like me.” Luis then introduces Edmundo to the audience: “I now have the pleasure of introducing to you a new performer, a creator of Cuban dances, who with his partner, Estrella, is going to dance a hot rumba [rumba sabrosa].” Edmundo appears on stage with his partner, a white Latina named Estrella, herself wearing stylized stage “rumba” attire, including a dress with a long, ruffled train and a scarf around her head. Edmundo begins by singing the verse of a son about a slaughtered goat, accompanied by a quartet (violin, piano, bass, accordion), and then, with the montuno section, he dances the “rumba” with his partner: a dance suggestive of the mannered, often commercialized version of that popular Afro-Cuban dance form.153 Edmundo’s negrito is limited here to performing a version of the bufo’s “final rumba” with Estrella, who was played by Estrella Segarra, a winner of the Campoamor contest. Appearing with such a local-girl-done-good intensifies the Latino-Harlem associations of the negrito Edmundo, whom the audience already knew, of course, as the negrito O’Farrill. But it is the likening to Al Jolson that most significantly renews the film’s and O’Farrill’s relations with a Latino-Harlem locality. A “Cuban Al Jolson,” here in the film’s belated Apolo-era/Prohibition setting, figures anew the central image of O’Farrill’s Harlem Meer “Pegas Suaves.” In his big, blackface break, identifying with a renowned Jewish-blackface performer, Edmundo is awash, like the “Pegas” protagonist, in the negro cristalino run-off of a Jew—an identification that, again, compromises the raza hispana.
It is no surprise, then, that No matarás concludes with the principal characters aboard a ship bound for Spain. It is an Americas-phobic ending that would take the cast to the Hispanic “source” of the raza (in the case of O’Farrill, as a maritime “Hispanic” departure that reverses the meaning of his “African” Key West arrival on the Governor Cobb). Yet, because the film gives Edmundo the last word, the ending takes a different course. At one point, Edmundo claims to have seen a whale and is accused of having “visions.” “And what is life?” he replies. “A vision.” He then paraphrases a few lines from the poem “Dolora XXXV: Las dos linternas” (The Two Lanterns), by Ramón de Campoamor, the nineteenth-century Asturian poet. A sign of Campoamor’s popularity at the time, Edmundo’s reference is also more: as the namesake of the theater on 116th Street and Fifth Avenue—even as the film abandons Harlem and the Americas—Campoamor allows O’Farrill to pay tribute to the theater, the site of his greatest professional success.
Off screen, where O’Farrill ended up was a different story. Most immediately, in late November 1935, he was the subject of an homage at the Club Atlético y Social Pomarrosas on Eighth Avenue between 116th and 117th Streets: “No one deserves such a tribute better than Alberto after triumphing in his first film, Mi hermano es un gangster. O’Farrill’s work has been well appreciated by the public wherever he has performed, and tomorrow night a supportive crowd will applaud the honoree, offering thanks