Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
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Moreno and Rafael de Arango. The Arango-Moreno was a Cuban blackface company. The coincidence is striking. In the 1930s, O’Farrill would appear on the New York City stage with Moreno. Now, however, having just arrived in the United States—in all likelihood to improve his chances of working in Cuban blackface—O’Farrill would have found in the visiting Arango-Moreno an occasion to consider the relation between Cuban racial identity and theatrical career opportunities, particularly if he came across a copy of Florida: Semenario Independiente, a Key West newspaper touting the upcoming performances with a full-body photograph of de Arango himself, in blackface, with a caption inviting “the people of Key West to the big event tomorrow, Sunday, at the San Carlos” hall.12 De Arango was an important Cuban blackface actor of the early twentieth century, belonging in a list that begins with Arquímedes Pous and includes, among others, white Cuban men such as Sergio Acebal, Ramón Espígul, and Enrique “Bernabé” Arredondo.13 Indeed, blackface roles in Cuban theater were almost exclusively “played by white actors,” an element in the political economy of Cuban blackface inseparable from the way in which Afro-Cubans “were systematically denied employment in the theater” during the early twentieth century, well into “the 1950s,” and “even today.”14 The Florida photograph of de Arango, advertising his company’s run at the San Carlos, is a multilayered, transnational Cuban text that complements the “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers,” locating O’Farrill’s U.S. arrival in the context of Cuban blackface professional practices, in which white faces, much more than black, mulato, or “African” ones, were able to earn a living covered in cork.15
Alberto O’Farrill was a nearly unknown figure in critical history until his appearance in Nicolás Kanellos’s field-defining research in the areas of Latino theater and periodicals. In A History of Hispanic Theatre and Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960, Kanellos’s extensive reading of the New York City Latino press reveals how O’Farrill was a “ubiquitous” blackface performer in “all the major Hispanic stages in New York’s stock and itinerant companies” and worked on Gráfico as an editor, writer, and even cartoonist.16 Such scholarship has brought O’Farrill into the orbit of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project—in particular, his appearance in Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (2002). Herencia includes a Gráfico column of O’Farrill’s. The accompanying biographical note, however, fails to mention his Afro-Cuban identity or role in blackface, thereby missing an opportunity to reflect on how O’Farrill’s representation of “the social and labor conditions of Hispanic immigrants in the city” also involves Anglo and Latino histories and conceptions of race.17 Kanellos’s critical work recognizes O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban identity and career in blackface and speculates on his interest in “Afro-Cuban culture, religion, and music.”18 Ultimately, however, Kanellos treats Afro-Cuban history and identity in O’Farrill as a thematic concern, an approach which casts race and nation in the Americas, at best, as a topic that comes and goes in the work. My focus, informed by the Key West convergence of an “African” O’Farrill and a blackface de Arango, demonstrates how race and nation in the Americas, more than just a theme in O’Farrill’s work, in fact constitute it. In this light, I understand O’Farrill’s newspaper writings and theater performances in the United States as phenomena of an Afro-Cuban blackface print culture, a term that describes how blackface logics shape O’Farrill’s print forms—their production, content, and circulation. Of significance, too, is how such interrelated theater and print texts mediate understandings of Cuban American race specific not only to a dominant Latino public but also to an Afro-Latino counterpublic, one with a possible critical relation to power.19
O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban blackface print culture turns on the Cuban teatro bufo (comic theater), the primary location of Cuban blackface expression. Emerging in the mid-nineteenth century, the teatro bufo derives from popular Spanish theater forms and the realist literature of costumbrismo (local custom), with influences from U.S. minstrelsy; it incorporates acting, music, and dance in its “parody of blacks and black street culture,” including forms of “improper” Afro-Cuban speech.20 Jill Lane shows that the bufo, “as a central vehicle for the expression of mestizaje as national ideology,” shaped anticolonial politics between 1868 and 1895, a peak era of the genre, during which it exhibited “a coherence organized around a discourse of race, nation, and colonial power that is absent from other forms of vernacular theater.”21 The bufo featured three main characters: the gallego (Galician), a Spanish-immigrant man, often a policeman or merchant, typically portrayed with a thick, Spanish accent; the mulata, “at once a pathologized figure of dangerous racial encroachment (‘Africanization’), a miscegenating temptress, and a symbol of the innocent, tropical Cuba to be rescued from the lascivious Spanish imperialist”—the aforementioned gallego; and the negrito, “a manifestly racist caricature of black people by white actors” and the “most popular stage character in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.”22 The diminutive suffix ‑ito, added to negro, renders negrito (“little black man”), “a common racialized epithet” suggestive of an “endearment between white and especially black Cubans,” one that is “never free of the infantilizing, patronizing connotation that ‘little’ carries when applied to an adult black male.”23 In bufo performances, often in the form of a sainete (one-act play), the “negrito is typically depicted as a hustler, trying to cheat customers and making sexual advances to all mulatas and light-skinned women.” The negrito, therefore, “his occupation depicted as subservient, criminal, or nonexistent,” “occupies the lowest social and cultural rung relative to other figures, even in twentieth-century productions.”24 It is such a figure of Afro-Cuban masculinity that in the late nineteenth century “came to stand in for a national sentiment whose primary attribute was a celebrated racial diversity” and that in the early twentieth led the way for the bufo’s “political commentary” critical of successive Cuban governments.25
By the time O’Farrill began performing the negrito on the New York City stage in the mid-1920s, the belatedness of the teatro bufo in Cuba, in terms of its viability and politics, had become apparent. While performances in the genre did indeed continue—and while elements of blackface have endured in other Cuban expressive contexts across the twentieth century and into the present—it was evident that during the 1930s the bufo seemed about “to succumb,” when it was “only traveling companies in the interior of the republic” that seemed to be performing it.26 By “the beginning of 1930,” writes one critic, with the Machadato, the Great Depression, and the consolidation of radio and sound cinema, bufo works had begun losing their “encanto criollo” (national enchantment).27 Writers and intellectuals of the period reflected an awareness of this. In 1935, the white Cuban poet Emilio Ballagas stamped bufo performances as out-of-date, remarking that “only ten years ago the black man was a beauty mark in bufo works [el negro era un lunar decorativo],” in contrast to current (and “better”) representations of Afro-Cubans in the subsequent poesía negra. Consuelo Serra, meanwhile, challenged the representation of the “eternal negrito catedrático,” proclaiming in 1935 that to endorse a bufo-inspired national culture was not how one “uplifts a race or builds a nation” (ni se eleva una raza ni se construye patria).28 In the case of Havana’s most famous bufo venue of the time, the Alhambra theater, the lapse was literal: the Alhambra building, a male-only space, collapsed in 1935, marking an end to its particular brand of bufo, which extended the genre’s racial, gender, and sexual dynamics through the use of “burlesque and sometimes pornographic” elements.29
O’Farrill’s career in New York City is attributable to the bufo’s belated condition. As an Afro-Cuban man seeking work in the theater, his migrating to the United States was likely a reprieve from chronic unemployment on the island. Indeed, O’Farrill’s stage negrito in New York City, together with the character’s print counterpart in Gráfico, exploits the very belatedness of bufo performance, setting back O’Farrill’s career even as it moves forward.