Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
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of relationship are continually being created.”30 The music historian Ruth Glasser details such emerging creativity in the bufo-centric New York City Latino performance cultures of the 1920s and 1930s. The “theatrical forms best known to the primarily working-class” Latino groups, she writes, “were not the zarzuela or the Spanish drama but the bufos cubanos.” She continues, “While they sometimes featured companies visiting from Cuba, the bufos also incorporated a variety of Latino artists, including dancers, acrobats, magicians, conjuntos, orquestas, and a surprising number of operatic singers.” They also “used local talent, drew upon older forms familiar to at least Caribbean Hispanics, and provided an opportunity for New York’s Spanish-speaking population both to unite physically and to humorously comment upon the divisions and power relations between them.”31
O’Farrill’s blackface work exemplifies such an emerging, localized culture of Latino performance in the way it references prior Cuban bufo forms to project the racial dimensions of latinidad in early twentieth-century New York City. Important here is the signal irony of O’Farrill’s performance: his identity as an Afro-Cuban man in blackface. Approaches to “black-on-black minstrelsy” in the United States, especially in discussions of Bert Williams, born in Nassau, the British West Indies (today the Bahamas), acknowledge a critical tradition of rejecting the practice as “pathological” or politically regressive, even while recognizing how it “mediates and silently complicates the institutionalized dynamics of black and white through a form of intra-racial and cross-cultural signifying.”32 In the Anglo United States, in other words, black-on-black minstrelsy heightens the situation of African American performance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries generally: it “was often a product of self-commodification, a way of getting along in a constricted world,” one that, in terms of performance markets, was marked by Anglo whites’ “greater access to public distribution (and profit).”33 In the Latino United States, the practice of a “negro-on-negro bufo” betrays its own, not entirely unrelated, dynamics, a way into which is offered by Rosendo Rosell, the white Cuban performer, composer, and writer who was active in radio, stage, television, and film in Cuba before 1959 and, later, in Miami. Remembering Afro-Cuban actors in blackface during the 1940s and 1950s “such as Roger Liver, the negrito Giovanni, and the negrito Silva,” Rosell remarks that they were all “real negritos” (negritos de verdad), “but they painted themselves with burnt cork to come out on stage …?” (pero se pintaban con corcho quemado para salir a escena …¿?).34 The ellipsis and question marks, original in the text, suggest that the notion of “negritos de verdad” is most generative in its seeming incomprehensibility. For one thing, the punctuation marks recall that Cuban racial identity, as a social and political construct, exists “de verdad” (really, in truth) only en route to performance, “para salir a escena,” which is to say, it is de verdad only to the extent that its orientation is also “de mentira” (fake, a lie). Further, like Urrutia in “El teatro cubano,” Rosell clarifies an aspect of Cuban theater in general and the bufo in particular across the twentieth century: namely, that a negrito de verdad, one not covered in burnt cork, would likely find it difficult, if not impossible, in market and ideological terms, to land a role either within or beyond the bufo sphere. Indeed, with respect to white Cuban performers and Cuban whiteness, Rosell’s punctuation marks sound a note of alarm over the possible loss of market and ideological supremacy in relation to the semiotics of Cuban race should an Afro-Cuban actor worry the boundary between de verdad and de mentira by performing the negrito—or any other role—without burnt cork. Even as O’Farrill’s performances resolved these Cuban “institutionalized dynamics of black and white,” they prompt, by virtue of his U.S.-situated Afro-Cuban blackface persona, an Afro-Latino revision of the argument regarding white-Cuban blackface: that, “in Cuba, whites occupy the space of blackness to imagine their nation as mestizo.”35 In the United States, rather, the Afro-Cuban O’Farrill occupies the space of blackness not so much to imagine the Cuban nation as mestizo or even negro (two possibilities nevertheless) as to invoke a Cuban blackness beyond the symbolic exigencies of Cuban nationalism, articulating it, instead, with formations of an early twentieth-century U.S. latinidad—its multiple audiences, cultures, markets—which O’Farrill thereby marks, in the negrito aftermath of his migration to the United States, as “African,” Afro-Cuban, Afro-Latino. To consider the details of O’Farrill’s blackface print culture, I turn now to his early years on the New York City stage and his writings in Gráfico.
Moreno Moments
From the summer of 1926 to the spring of 1931, O’Farrill performed in blackface in over fifty different plays in Harlem. Most of these were bufos, with O’Farrill playing the negrito opposite the gallego and the mulata, though often he appeared just in duets with one or the other of the characters. He also acted in blackface in zarzuela and revsita (revue) productions.36 The most important commercial-theater space in which O’Farrill performed during these years was the Teatro Apolo. It was the Apolo, which had begun “featuring Hispanic comedies, variety, and Cuban musical farces intermittently on Sunday in March 1926,” that “was to fix and systematize what became distinctive of New York Hispanic theatrical culture: balancing the theatre and entertainments of the diverse Hispanic nationalities for the working-class audiences,” which involved “alternating Spanish, Cuban, and Puerto Rican shows” and “integrating lyric theatre with vaudeville and musical revues.”37 Of further significance is the Apolo’s location itself on 125th Street, a key place in the shifting relations among African Americans, Latinas/os, and Anglo whites in the entertainment industry. Ruth Glasser writes that the “Spanish-language shows started at a time when the major movie and stage show theaters of Harlem were owned by a handful of white, mostly Jewish men who were battling for dominance of the local entertainment scene.” In the absence of white performers, who in increased numbers had begun working on Broadway with its higher salaries, theater owners on 125th Street turned to African American artists and audiences. The street thus changed from a mostly “Irish strip” to, by the early 1930s, an African American and Latino space of the entertainment industry.38
The Apolo-era bufo, in the form of scripts or sound recordings, is lost, to the best of my knowledge, but its effects in print culture remain, offering a glimpse of O’Farrill’s stage negrito. For La Prensa, founded in 1913 “to serve the community of mostly Spanish and Cuban immigrants in and around Manhattan’s 14th Street,”39 O’Farrill’s negrito was disruptive of the idea behind the newspaper as “el órgano de la raza” (the organ of the race), a key discursive site of latinidad during the period.40 The raza in question—the raza hispana (Hispanic race)—is “the widespread notion of a single Ibero-American race,” which “gained currency” “in the wake of the Spanish-American War of 1898,” emphasizing “Latin-related cultural values in opposition to the Nordic tradition that the U.S. presumably represented.”41 Raza hispana, in short, represented a “view of race…more akin to ethnicity, culture, or national origin.”42 However, like gente de razón (people of reason), a forerunner concept that in preindependence Mexico could “accommodate the heterogeneity of the colonial population” under a label of “politics and culture,” even as “stigmatized racial categories” such as “the Indian” endured,43 the unresolved raciality of an early twentieth-century, culturalist raza hispana was often configured to forms of tacit, Spanish-derived whiteness (hispano as white), while other possible Hispanophone raza signifiers, including the raza negra, continued to be “stigmatized.” An example of this appears in the particular way in which La Prensa represents O’Farrill’s negrito performance in the Apolo-era bufo: In a significant twist, the role is identified in the early coverage not as the negrito but as the “moreno.” For example, in a piece on the revue Mientras Nueva York duerme (While New York Sleeps), O’Farrill is credited as the play’s “morenito.”44 In another, on the “zarzuela bufo cubana” Bronca entre latinos (Quarrel among the Latins), he is acknowledged for “the naturalness he stamps upon the types of