Diversión. Albert Sergio Laguna

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СКАЧАТЬ racial codes from the United States and Cuba have and continue to be melded together in a thoroughly transnational sense to reproduce this Cuban American whiteness over time. It is in the realm of the popular that we can see the crucial role race has played in consolidating a Cuban American identity in South Florida.

      Focusing on how narratives of whiteness circulate in popular culture is essential for understanding social relations not only among Cuban Americans but across Latina/o groups. While race and ethnicity in the Latina/o context is often discussed as in conflict with United States regimes of white supremacy, scholarship has examined the place of whiteness and anti-black sentiment within Latina/o communities.57 More of this work is necessary. Attention to ludic popular culture, in particular, can provide access to those notions that circulate within a community, unsaid yet understood. Inside jokes and ideas about the other are often invoked under the sign of the comic as audiences revel in having narratives of group identity with wide currency defamiliarized through humor. Examining popular forms can be an especially insightful avenue for understanding the ways in which these communities come to understand themselves in a quotidian register and how negative conceptions around race and other ethnic groups structure social relations, even acting as a barrier to broader coalitional politics.

      But the point of considering race and discrimination is not to somehow separate “good” diversión from the “bad.” As Stuart Hall usefully reminds us, cultural forms are not “either wholly corrupt or wholly authentic. Whereas, they are deeply contradictory; they play on contradictions, especially when they function in the domain of the ‘popular.’ ”58 The binary logic of resistance/suppression does not adequately account for the messiness of, and our complex attachments to, popular culture forms that can produce pleasure, anger, and disappointment, sometimes simultaneously. Keeping this in mind will allow for a more nuanced understanding of how racist jokes can be uttered right after a satirical skewing of Anglo discrimination in South Florida. It can shed light on how blackface representations on Miami television in the twenty-first century reproduce racist tropes from Cuba that hearken back to the nineteenth century but also play a role in unraveling conservative resistance to improved relations between the United States and Cuba.

      A critical approach attentive to the contradictions of popular culture moves us away from simply identifying racist representations and toward asking more productive questions. Why have these representations persisted in diasporic popular culture despite profound generational and demographic changes that include not only original exiles and their children, but also Cubans born and raised in a post-revolutionary Cuba that claims to have mostly eradicated racism? Why do US-born Cuban Americans continue to invest in a narrative of a Cuban identity at all? To answer these questions, I will pay special attention to historical context and most importantly, to how narratives built upon whiteness and heteronormativity have circulated and functioned as a means to claim a hegemonic identity in South Florida with its attendant privileges.

      But of course, as Hall reminds us, the world is rarely so neat. It would be reductive to characterize Cuban popular culture and its consumption as an orderly two-way street to explain the intersection of popular culture, privilege, and power. Popular culture must, as Richard Iton explains, “be understood as a result of the creative process and its embedded intentions; the potentially quite distinct and even contrasting—but equally creative—use made of them by others; and the feedback mechanisms and interpolative possibilities linking these various stages.”59 Heeding Iton, I make space for the difficult, fraught relationships one can have with dominant narratives of Cuban American identity, especially in relation to race and politics. This ambivalence manifests itself most clearly along generational lines when US-born Cuban Americans, for instance, may revel in the performative aspects of diversión but may not subscribe to conservative politics and racist representations when they do arise. Can one enjoy the way a joke is told—the cadence, the words used, the accent, the style of it all—and still feel ill at ease with the punchline? We can laugh, but it does not always mean it feels good. This is the routine dissonance that often frames cultural consumption in quotidian life. These moments can reveal the disidentificatory potential of diversión, the potential for “identification with and total disavowal of the dominant culture’s normative identificatory nodes.”60 This disidentificatory mode can have real effects, acting as a means to levy critique and enact a cubanía at odds with the troublesome representations that can creep up in popular culture.

      Popular culture can offer communities a mechanism for self-critique without challenging the desire for group cohesion. Here, we once again see the contradictions of popular culture—its potential for reifying and challenging dominant narratives, at times simultaneously. These are the contradictions this book will live in. Engaging moments that can make us uncomfortable but nonetheless offer pleasures lays bare the complexity of our feelings and attachments within an area of cultural experience so often seen as overdetermined, “good” or “bad”—the popular. A comer arroz con mango.

      Examining the relationship between race and diversión provides a means for understanding how Cubans in the diaspora have imagined themselves in the United States and how that imaginary has had both sustained and integral effects on social relations in South Florida. But this study also seeks to make an intervention in studies of race, sexuality, and ethnicity in the United States more broadly by “diverting” attention away from cultural forms that privilege the pain, anger, and disappointment in the lives of ethnic-racialized subjects. To be sure, scholars in fields like Queer Studies, Native American Studies, and African American Studies in particular have pointed to this imbalance and have shown what analysis of ludic forms can teach us. Sara Warner argues that her focus on “gaiety” in LGBT performance “serves as a rejoinder to the long-lasting romance with mourning and melancholia in queer theory.”61 Glenda Carpio explains that “African American humor has been an underestimated realm of analysis” in her book on black humor in relation to the legacy of slavery.62 Yet the question remains: Why has so little been published?

      The answer lies, in part, in the history of these fields. Race and ethnic studies in the United States as we know them were made possible by the rise of protest movements. Institutional recognition has always been a fight, and maintaining that tenuous foothold in the university has been a constant challenge. This has no doubt affected the direction of scholarship. Focusing on pleasure and play would seem to run counter to the “real” work at hand. As the struggle for representation continues, the need for “serious” scholarship that legitimates the field has inadvertently created an imbalance in how we write about the lives of ethnic-racialized subjects.63 In Latina/o Studies, a field I am deeply engaged with as a scholar and teacher, popular forms of humor and play have rarely been the explicit focus of academic studies.64 Diversión foregrounds the ludic not only to provide an affective complement to the fields of Cuban and Latina/o Studies but also to better understand the necessarily complicated relationships people have with popular culture representations that capture a range of feelings that frame and enable social relations.

      A Changing Cuban Miami

      Popular culture circulates and succeeds because of its relationship to time: “The particularity of time in popular culture is that it is momentary, that with all its embeddedness in tradition and the historical past, it is present, it is contemporary, it is always now.”65 Concentrating on popular culture from the 1970s to the 2010s allows me to provide the quotidian texture necessary to understand this book’s second major intervention: tracing the degree to which the Cuban diaspora has changed over time in relation to politics, feelings toward the island, and the ways in which a Cuban cultural identity is performed publically—especially since the mid-1990s. The balsero (rafter) crisis of 1994 was the catalyst for policy agreements between the United States and Cuba that initiated the steady influx of Cubans into Miami that continues today. In 1994, over 30,000 Cubans took to the sea on makeshift rafts bound for the United States in response to the crushing scarcity of the Special Period.66 In 1994 and 1995, the United States and Cuba agreed to stem the tide of rafters by negotiating migration accords that included a provision that would allow at least 20,000 Cubans a year to migrate to the United States. This agreement fundamentally changed the character of the Cuban diaspora in the 1990s СКАЧАТЬ