Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.

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      The Teatro Campoamor opened in 1913 as the Mount Morris Theater. By the summer of 1932, it was featuring Latino stage and musical performances.¹¹⁵ In 1934, the Puerto Rican Marcial Flores, “a wealthy boletero (numbers runner),…rented the closed Mount Morris” and “renamed it El Campoamor” after a Havana theater.¹¹⁶ Flores’s interest in the entertainment business had a precedent: He had earlier opened the Cubanacán, an important club on 114th Street and Lenox Avenue. With Alberto Socarrás leading its orchestra, the Cubanacán featured a “nightly show [and] Cuban music [música criolla].” It was the Cubanacán orchestra under Socarrás that became the house band at the Campoamor. The theater’s artistic director, Fernando Luis, was, in the words of Socarrás, “Cuban, a little white guy.”¹¹⁷ Luis, who, according to Diosa Costello, had entered show business “a la cañona” (by force),¹¹⁸ was previously the artistic director of the Teatro San José/Variedades in the early 1930s, where he had produced shows in which O’Farrill performed. Luis incorporated chorus lines into the Variedades’s revues and emphasized the screening of Spanish-language films, two innovations that, characteristic also of his Campoamor work of the mid-1930s, shifted the experience of Latino theater culture during the period.¹¹⁹ It was Luis’s efforts as theater manager and director that led to the renovation of the Campoamor and its reopening in the summer of 1936 as the Teatro Cervantes. The theater’s motto was “Por el Arte y por la Raza” (For Art and the Race), with offerings that continued to include Spanish-language films, chorus lines, and stage shows.¹²⁰ The Cervantes was short-lived. By the following summer, the Mount Morris/Campoamor/Cervantes “was again metamorphosed into another Hispanic house. This time the name would live on into the 1950s: El Teatro Hispano.”¹²¹

      The significance of the two Albertos’ collaboration at the Campoamor around 1935—O’Farrill and Socarrás’s—cannot be overstated. A glimpse at Socarrás’s biography reveals why: the two share an experience of Cuba’s Pous-era bufo, with Socarrás, unlike O’Farrill, thriving in it, and of a migration to the United States, likely a result of Cuban racist practices in the culture industry. Socarrás was a master flutist, but he also played the clarinet and alto and soprano saxophones. He was born in the town of Manzanillo, Oriente, in 1903, and he was a prodigy. He performed musical accompaniments to the silent movies at a Manzanillo theater, where he was discovered by Pous in 1920. Pous hired him to play in his company’s orchestra. Socarrás’s earliest professional experiences, then, were linked to Cuba’s early-republican bufo cultures—and not just any, but its most successful. Socarrás not only played for Pous’s stage shows; he eventually began arranging pieces. He traveled with Pous from Manzanillo to Santiago, and from there to Havana, remaining with the company for nearly three years.¹²² In Havana, among his gigs, Socarrás played in Moisés Simóns’s band at the Plaza Hotel. During this time, he recognized racism in music hiring practices. “I noticed about some places where they don’t want in this house, negro,” Socarrás said in an interview. “They start all those things, Cubans.”¹²³ Socarrás resolved to go to New York, where he arrived in 1927, at the height of the Apolo era. He was met at the pier in Manhattan by Justo Barreto, an Afro-Cuban musician. The two rode the IRT together to Harlem, getting off at the 125th Street and Lenox Avenue station, where Socarrás was amazed by the majority-black population.¹²⁴ One of his first jobs was with the orchestra of the white Cuban Nilo Menéndez at the Harlem Opera House, where the Teatro Apolo was located.¹²⁵

      Early on in New York City, Socarrás rented a room with an African American family in Harlem to learn English and immerse himself in the everyday cultures of jazz.¹²⁶ His career in African American music and among African American performers during the 1920s and 1930s is well-known: he recorded with the Clarence Williams orchestra, including what is considered the first-ever jazz-flute solo in “Have You Ever Felt That Way”; he was in the orchestra of the Rhapsody in Black and Blackbirds revues; he played with King Oliver, Sam Wooding, Allie Ross, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie; and he led orchestras of his own at the Savoy, the Cotton Club, Small’s Paradise, and Connie’s Inn. He was “also playing Cuban music at El Campoamor, El Cubanacán, and [the] Park Plaza.”¹²⁷ It was a career not only with origins in the island-Cuban bufo circuits of Arquímedes Pous, therefore, but unfolding still in the cultures of the belated bufo of New York City. Socarrás was Marcial Flores’s personal choice to direct the Campoamor orchestra; “he want me there, because he want to have show from Mexico, American shows, from everywhere,” Socarrás said, “and he didn’t have a conductor there,” so “he send somebody to talk to me.”¹²⁸

      Nearly every performance of O’Farrill’s at the Teatro Campoamor around 1935 happened to the accompaniment of Socarrás’s band, as La Prensa’s theater coverage between December 1934 and December 1935 demonstrates. As the theater’s “popular and applauded negrito,” O’Farrill, it seems, had expanded his repertoire in negrito characterization at the Campoamor; in one instance, not surprisingly, he did so through still further racial performance, in relation to a stereotype of gender and Chinese identity in a Warren and Dubin song: the “likeable negrito Alberto O’Farrill again steals all the applause, especially in a parody of ‘Shanghai Lil,’ with an appropriate lyric [poesía], in which O’Farrill shows himself as a magnificent character actor.”¹²⁹ In another show, he appeared with Antonio Machín, “the theater’s chorus, and the orchestra of Alberto Socarrás.”¹³⁰ Finally, in what was again an instance of ideologies of circum-Pacific race informing Latino performance, he appeared in a Fernando Luis production called Hawaiianerías (Hawaiianities) alongside the gallego of Guillermo Moreno—formerly of the Arango-Moreno.¹³¹ O’Farrill’s collaboration with Socarrás thus represented a palimpsest of Pous-era, Apolo-era, and now Campoamor-era bufo expression, theatrically and musically, which Moreno’s contributions inscribed further in relation to the memory of O’Farrill’s Key West arrival.

      The African American uprising in Harlem of March 19, 1935, that resulted in the deaths of three African Americans matters here as well, as text and context of the racial performance of the O’Farrill-Socarrás Campoamor. In the experience of the Afro–Puerto Rican Lino Rivera, the uprising contained an implication of the negro-on-negro bufo: that Afro-Latino blackface performance signifies how an “African” identity in the United States exposes Afro-Latinas/os to Anglo-white violence, including lynching. La Prensa identified Rivera as both a “Puerto Rican youth” (joven puertorriqueño) and a “Hispanic young man” (muchacho hispano), side-stepping his African diasporic identity. Yet the newspaper had to come to terms with it somehow. It did so by “quoting” the African American woman who, as a witness to the detention of Rivera, “misrecognized” him: what began the “riot” was “the shout of an alarmed woman of the colored race that ‘they’re beating to death a colored boy [un muchacho de color] in the basement of this store!’”¹³² Bernardo Vega uses a similar approach in his account of the uprising in the Memorias: Rivera was a “young man” (un muchacho) whom “various women…took for a young black North American [joven negro norteamericano], even though he was Puerto Rican.”¹³³ Both narratives burden African American women with an “African” and African-diasporic mis/recognition of Rivera, a racialized and gendered division of representational labor that offers La Prensa and Vega a subsequent opportunity to disabuse their informants of the idea.

      The mis/recognition of Rivera’s afrolatinidad explains, in part, the dismissive attitude noticeable initially in the press regarding the uprising’s beginning at the Kress on 125th Street. Accounts of Rivera’s detention as a “simple incident” and an “incident of no importance,” and of the uprising as a result of “deceitful circumstances”¹³⁴ and a “false report,”¹³⁵ reflected the apparent facts: that Rivera’s brief detention for shoplifting had somehow become, in the imagination of African American women, an act of police brutality and murder. In fact, such a coding of the uprising’s origins implicates the mis/recognition СКАЧАТЬ