Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.

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СКАЧАТЬ the abovementioned corner, with the aim of renting it in order to put on Hispanic shows [funciones hispanas].”¹⁰² The drawing is of a corpulent man, seen from the back, who wears a checkered jacket and a straw boater, carrying a valise and smoking a cigar. The point of the piece, which may well have been written by O’Farrill himself, was that everyone was trying to get into the Spanish-language theater business, including “Jews.” The tone of a line in the following week’s Gráfico, however, was darker: “Spanish theater [El teatro Español] must, should, and will be the property of Hispanics [hispanos], for Hispanics, and by Hispanics. Never for the Jews [Nunca para los judios].”¹⁰³

      But it was in Gráfico’s Spanish-English editorials that such Latino-Jewish signs were most strikingly apparent, revealing a raza hispana under stress. Consider the following example: “One of the arguments that our detractors use constantly with the intention of insulting us,” a 1927 editorial begins, “is to accuse us of belonging to the colored race [raza de color]. According to the opinion of these enemies, it is only Indians and blacks [indios y negros] without culture and education that exist in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Hispanic countries [países hispanos].” The charge of being “de color,” according to the editorial, arises from the way in which “we Spanish speakers [los que hablamos español]” have a “spirit of tolerance” and “don’t distinguish among ourselves on account of race hate [odio de razas] in the neighborhoods and towns where we live.…There are in all our countries whites and blacks [blancos y negros], just as in the United States,” and “if on account of having this liberal, altruistic, and human feeling we should be considered as blacks [hemos de ser considerados como negros], then let it happily be so.” What begins with the promise of an acknowledgment of an Afro-Latino identity concludes instead with a figurative admission: that the newspaper’s Latino voice considers itself, in fact, “como negros” (as blacks), which thus instances afrolatinidad as an attitude toward Afro-Latinas/os, the practice of which, as a “feeling” (sentimiento), constitutes here an element of raza hispana ideology. In the English version, the first paragraph reads differently from its Spanish counterpart, dropping “negro” entirely and replacing it with “colored race”: “One common argument heard often among some individuals in Harlem,” begins this English-language version, “is that all Porto Ricans, Cubans and South Americans are either uncivilized Indians or people belonging to the colored race. But what moves us to a good healthy laugh is the fact that this argument is used as a sign of race superiority by people who are as discriminated in the United States as the Porto Ricans or the Negroes are.”¹⁰⁴ The English-language editorial works along tacit lines. Jews are invoked not by name but by indicating a history of discrimination specific to an unnamed “people.” The word negros, meanwhile, cut out, thus obviates the translation (and admission) of this category of Latino blackness into English.¹⁰⁵ In fact, what negros signified in the Spanish text appears in the English as “colored race,” a phrase that suggests “raza de color,” the island-Cuban “uplift” category for negras/os and mulatas/os. To an English-language reader, however, “colored race” may also include African Americans. In order to hinder such a possibility, with its troubling suggestion of the African Americanizing of a raza hispana (the very threat that led to the editorial in the first place), Gráfico turns to the word “Negroes,” here representing African Americans, who are thereby segregated in print from Afro-Latinas/os (who “aren’t” Negroes), even as such “Negroes” share with “Porto Ricans” and other unnamed “people” an experience of structural oppression. The text thus forestalls both an Afro-Latino and African-diaspora identity among its readers, all in response to a (tacitly Jewish) accusation of the community’s afrolatinidad. In this way, Gráfico’s editorial, like O’Farrill’s Harlem Meer “Pegas,” encounters the limits of a raza hispana ideology in its engagement with a Harlem “Jew.”¹⁰⁶

      One of the final traces of O’Farrill in print around the Apolo era is an advertisement in La Prensa, and it is fitting: “¡Una noche sólamente! ¡Sensacional! ¡Emocionante! Concurso de rumba con los campeones mundiales, Alberto O’Farrill y Margot Guerra. Fama, fortuna, y gloria. Savoy, el mejor salón de baile en el mundo” (One night only! Sensational! Exciting! Rumba contest with the world champions, Alberto O’Farrill and Margot Guerra. Fame, fortune, and glory. Savoy, the best dance hall in the world).¹⁰⁷ O’Farrill’s hosting a concurso de rumba at the Savoy is a symbolic event. The typical bufo during the period still ended with a “final rumba [in original]” in which “all kinds of [plot] contradictions are resolved.”¹⁰⁸ O’Farrill’s concurso de rumba is the “finale,” in a way, of his hot-and-cold career on the blackface stage during the Apolo era. Less a resolution, however, of the contradictions of that career, the concurso, in fact, reiterates them. For one thing, resorting to hosting a concurso was a sign of his falling on hard times, a general condition during the Depression, to be sure, but also of specific meaning to an Afro-Cuban man seeking work on the stage in the early twentieth century—and particularly to an Afro-Cuban like O’Farrill, who, less than five years earlier, was likely greeted upon his arrival in Key West with a reminder, in the Arango-Moreno company, of his white-Cuban competition in the Cuban and (now) Latino U.S. markets of racial performance. Another important fact of the contest involves the space itself: the Savoy Ballroom. The Savoy performance links O’Farrill’s career to a particular history of Latino, Afro-Latino, and Afro-Cuban uses of that African American–identified venue. By the time of O’Farrill’s contest, the Savoy Ballroom, like the Cotton Club, Small’s Paradise, and Connie’s Inn, was a “successful jazz” space.¹⁰⁹ It was where, in the 1930s, Alberto Socarrás would play “jazz and blues” before heading to the Park Palace or the Campoamor theaters (which were also bufo spaces) to play Cuban music;¹¹⁰ where, during the same period, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other Latinas/os would dance jazz “from 3 to 7 p.m., then go to the Park Palace at 5th and 110th from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m.” to dance Cuban and Puerto Rican music;¹¹¹ and where, in the following decade, Machito, Graciela, and Mario Bauzá would play Afro-Cuban jazz. The figure of O’Farrill as a dancing Afro-Cuban man who sits (or dances) in judgment of other dancing men and women at the Savoy suggests still other possibilities for his “African” identification: a sharing of space, at times alternating, at times simultaneous, among Afro-Latinas/os and African Americans.

      Screening Harlem Uprising

      I turn now to a time around 1935, a moment of great professional success for O’Farrill. He performed regularly at the Teatro Campoamor on 116th Street and Fifth Avenue with Alberto Socarrás and his orchestra; he appeared in Contreras Torres’s No matarás (Thou Shalt Not Kill), filmed in New York City and in Hollywood; he enjoyed an homage in recognition of his theater work dating to the Apolo era; and, finally, he returned to Havana for a season to produce and perform in his own stage show. Two seemingly unrelated events in the histories of race in the Americas—both occurring within a month of each other—converge in this career narrative. The first was the “Harlem Riot” of March 1935, which began at an E. H. Kress and Company store on 125th Street, across from the Harlem Opera House (the Teatro Apolo) and the Hurtig and Seamon (the Apollo Theater), when an Afro–Puerto Rican named Lino Rivera, described in the city’s subsequent report as “a 16-year-old colored boy,” was detained and accused of theft.¹¹² The other was the collapse in February 1935 of the Teatro Alhambra building on the corner of Virtudes and Consulado Streets in Havana, an event that the theater critic Eduardo Robreño saw as a physical manifestation of the Alhambra’s (and its bufo’s) “decadence,” the signs of which had already been apparent “around the year 1930.”¹¹³ The “gangster” violence and raza hispana ideas represented in No matarás, O’Farrill’s “straight” and blackface performance in the film, and its close association with the Teatro Campoamor (where it premiered) suggest a modern Latino popular-cultural text in dialogue with the African American uprising of 1935 and, in particular, its “accidental” protagonist: the Afro–Puerto Rican “colored boy.” It was O’Farrill’s work СКАЧАТЬ