Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
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O’Farrill goes further: he produces an Afro-Latino “blackface print culture” that conflicts with the culturalist, postracial assumptions of a raza hispana (Hispanic race), the pan-Latino ideology of the day. I finish the chapter with a reflection on O’Farrill’s performance in No matarás (Thou Shalt Not Kill), a 1935 film that emerges from his work on the Campoamor stage and offers a rare glimpse of his moving, speaking, indeed, singing and dancing body. Chapter 2 recovers Eusebia Cosme, the poetry performer and actress. By 1938, Cosme was famous in the Hispanophone Caribbean for her stagings of poesía negra (black poetry), the verse of predominantly white and mixed-race men that sought to represent the popular cultures and identities of Afro–Latin Americans. Yet, in August of that very year, Cosme migrated to the United States, where she spent the majority of her life, a sign, I suggest, of the way in which an Afro-Cuban woman such as herself dealt with the scarcity of career opportunities on the island. Her performances in the United States pushed poesía negra beyond its own belated situation over the course of the 1940s, which I recollect in radio scripts and the trace of a sound recording—a career that benefited, in particular, from Cosme’s contacts with African Americans through print-culture spaces such as the Chicago Defender, relationships with such figures as Langston Hughes, and in venues such as the auditorium of Washington, DC’s Armstrong High School, all of which occasioned Cosme’s afrolatinidad, in tension with island-Cuban representations of her racial identity, including Fernando Ortiz’s “mulata” appellation. To emphasize the history and politics of my critical recovery, I offer the remarks of the Anglo-white woman who “discovered” a poststroke, disabled Cosme in Mexico City and was responsible for gathering her effects and sending them to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at the New York Public Library, an itinerary I follow as well in the alternative path that Cosme’s own body took to Miami, where she died in 1976. A major element of Cosme’s biography is her admission into a film career late in life, first in Sydney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker and later in Mexican productions, most famously in El derecho de nacer (The Right to Be Born), which I attend to as examples, however loaded, of Cosme’s admirable commitment to finding and doing work in the arts, against the odds.
In the subsequent three chapters, the second part of the book, I examine the signs of race in Cuban American writing and popular culture after the midcentury. Chapter 3 sees in the way Afro-Cuban Americans identify—indeed, pass—as mainland Afro–Puerto Ricans still another turn in the discourses of afrolatinidad. Central here is how such “boricua identifications” appear in the secondary works of major Afro-Cuban American figures or in secondary ways of reading their most recognized works: the elements of a “supplementary career.” Thus, the 1940s publications on Afro-Cuban religion by the anthropologist Rómulo Lachatañeré become significant in a new way when seen through the archival remnants of their voyage through the peer-review process, where Lachatañeré manages the U.S. institutions of an anthropology on the African diaspora in a way that gestures toward his afrolatinidad. With Lachatañeré, an Afro-Latino identity and professional interest become increasingly associated with mainland Puerto Ricans, culminating in his secondary career in photography, particularly in the photographic documentation of Puerto Ricans in Harlem and on the island of Puerto Rico itself, the journey to which ended in a tragic boricua identification: Lachatañeré’s death in an airplane crash off San Juan in 1952. As literary narrative, a boricua identification intensifies in Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas, whose Afro-Cuban American father appears in the text as a mainland Afro–Puerto Rican, a sign of the exigencies of the 1960s “ethnic-literature” book market and of U.S.-imperial relations between Cubans and Puerto Ricans, marked by amicability and enmity. Chapter 4 turns to the period and texts around 1979 in Miami and the overlapping histories of the illicit drug trade, African American uprising, Mariel migration, and my family. In a personal-critical narrative, I consider how the presence of Afro-Cubans in the Mariel migration panicked the old-guard Cuban exile regarding its (purchase on) Cuban American whiteness. A spicsploitative response to Mariel appeared in the 1983 film Scarface, which put its lead actor, Al Pacino, in brownface, as the Mariel migrant Antonio Montana, a minstrel moment whose lineage involves the Jewish American Paul Muni’s Italianface performance in the 1932 version of the film and, moving forward in time, African American and Afro-Cuban American appropriations of Montana in rap music, which amplified the Cuban exile’s original fear. These acts of a Scarface minstrelsy, as the seeming idolizing of the drug-violence corpse of Antonio Montana, commemorate other corpses as well, such as that of Arthur McDuffie, the African American whose murder by the police led to the 1980 African American “riot.” Cuban American whiteness is the focus of chapter 5, in which autobiographical narratives of a voyage back to Cuba during the post-Soviet 1990s by white, middle-class, Cuban American academics lead to a return to the family house left behind, now lived in by island Afro-Cubans. This trope of the “Afro-Cuban-occupied house” seems to leave us with yet another representation of Afro-Cubans in the white Cuban American text; in fact, it discloses Cuban American whiteness and its basis, textured here by the complexities of the autobiographical plot, in social and economic privilege. A counternarrative of an Afro-Cuban American return to the island, the video Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories, further frays the edges of going back in the Cuban American imaginary. In the conclusion, I look to someone who very much has become a recognizable figure in our discussions of Afro-Cuban American literature, Evelio Grillo, the author of Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir. With my interview of Grillo, and with an examination of the unheralded antecedents of his book, I suggest what may remain as we search forward and back in afrolatinidad.
1 / Alberto O’Farrill: A Negrito in Harlem
In an April 1929 edition of the Diario de la Marina, two essays appeared side by side in “Ideales de una Raza”: “El teatro cubano” (Cuban Theater), published by Gustavo Urrutia in “Armonías,” and “El camino de Harlem” (The Road to Harlem) by Nicolás Guillén. In “Teatro,” Urrutia calls for a “modern Cuban theater” in which actors and actresses of “our race” (nuestra raza) would appear in roles as “cultured and patriotic blacks [negros cultos y patriotas], full of dignity.” Urrutia hopes such a theater would challenge not only the contemporary Cuban blackface stage but also the influence of other dramatic works whose settings “in slavery” seem particularly “belated” (tardía) and possibly even “harmful to the harmony of the two Cuban races [las dos razas cubanas].” Advocating on behalf of “Cuba’s colored race” (la raza de color en Cuba) is also the idea behind Guillén’s “Camino.” Guillén cites incidents across the island in which “whites and blacks [los blancos y los negros] stroll on public streets” within separate spaces, the “violation of which by anyone,” but “most of all by blacks, gives rise to true conflicts.” Cuba, he warns, might soon develop a specific, unwanted characteristic of “certain Yankee regions [ciertas regiones yankees],” a “‘black neighborhood’ [“barrio negro”]” in each of its cities and towns. “That,” he concludes, “is the road to Harlem”: a movement toward U.S.-style segregation, the notion of which is intensified in the translation of “El camino de [of] Harlem” into “The Road to Harlem.”1
The link between race, modern theater aesthetics, and hemispheric space matters in Urrutia and Guillén introduces the broad theme of the first part of this book: the movement of performance and print cultures from Cuba to the United States among Afro-Cubans between the 1920s and 1940s. Afro-Cuban actors, poetry reciters, and literary journalists in the United States challenge Guillén’s “barrio negro” as a primary metaphor for the Afro-Cuban apprehension of segregated Anglo-U.S. geographies, producing instead their own Afro-Latino representations of the experience of race (and spatialization) in the United States, one in which they risk an identification as African-diasporic subjects. The texts of a U.S. “barrio afrolatino,” against Guillén’s island-oriented barrio negro, invoke the spatial and temporal multiplicity specific to the modern performance and print cultures of Afro-Cubans in the United States: the many overlapping periods and barrios of African American, Afro-Latino, and Jewish Harlems, as we shall see, along with their institutional locations in theaters, social clubs, and university halls, as well as in print genres such as the newspaper review and the chronicle.2 In such