Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
with laughter.”46 Indeed, by that time, O’Farrill was “already so popular in Harlem for his performances of the Moreno Cubano…that in [the Latino] colony he is already called the successor of Arquímedes Pous.”47 While eventually La Prensa would identify the role as that of the negrito, as late as May 1927, it continued to call O’Farrill’s blackface character “the moreno.”48
Moreno is a euphemism for the way in which O’Farrill’s negrito invokes “African,” Afro-Cuban, and Afro-Latino identities excessive of both bufo and raza logics. Indeed, moreno is implicated in the very “distasteful” thing it would substitute. The term comes from moro, the word for Moor, and it “was originally used, as it is still, to describe a black horse.” By “the sixteenth century moreno became the general term used to refer to blacks and mulattoes alike”—and thus a category for identities threatening to colonial and Christian power in the Spanish-controlled Americas.49 A nineteenth-century Cuban dictionary, Esteban Pichardo’s Diccionario provincial casi razonado de vozes y frases cubanas, offers a point of entry into the Cuban complexities of moreno. Looking up moreno, one is immediately led elsewhere by the dictionary: “See trigueño,” it says.50 The entry for trigueño reads thus:
Trigueño, ña.—N., Adj.—By definition, a person of darkened color [el color algo atesado] or like the color of wheat [trigo], just as Blanco is said of the lightest person [más claro] who tends toward the milky with something of the pink. Trigueño lavado [Washed Trigueño], a little lighter and more even than the Trigueño. When dealing with races, the word Blanco is used, even if a person is Trigueño, to differentiate from Negro and Mulato; even though among the latter there are some of whiter color [de color más blanco] than many of the white race [la raza blanca]. Moreno is a synonym of Trigueño; but the Negro is also called Moreno to sweeten the expression [para dulzificar la espresión] and never Trigueño; just as the Mulato is called Pardo. As a group, Negros and Mulatos are Gente de color [People of Color]. The Asiatics [Asiáticos] are officially counted among the Blancos.51
The Diccionario’s evasive treatment of moreno is remarkable, and it indicates something of the stakes involved in representing O’Farrill’s Apolo-era blackface performance through the term. The evasion begins with “See trigueño,” which sends one to a word that, upon consultation, is itself elusive, referring to an identity of “color,” except, of course, when it does not: when instead, in its place, “the word Blanco is used,” thus reassuring, through its paradoxical circulation among subjects of “color,” white Cuban power. That the Diccionario finally gets around to defining moreno only as a “synonym” of trigueño further suggests evasion: what moreno means is that to which, whatever it is, trigueño alludes. The Diccionario posits Cuban racial synonymity nearly in terms of a critique of racialization; the moreno is similar to the trigueño, which is itself similar to the blanco, which recalls how there are some “whiter/más blanco” people among the negros and mulatos of Cuba than among “many of the white race,” whose power is again reassured through the “official” inclusion of still others in its ranks, the Chinese indentured workers. Seemingly to forestall the critique, the lexicographer—who, significantly, was also a renowned cartographer—notes the synonymous moreno’s different “shade” of meaning: unlike trigueño, which “never” does, the moreno can mean negro. The metaphor here, “para dulzificar,” is another remarkable element of the entry, both an admission of euphemism and its unraveling: to enact the substitution of the “distasteful” negro, a word is used, “sweeten,” that links moreno to the violence of the Cuban sugarcane plantation.
In La Prensa, moreno would “dulcificar” negrito, but, in fact, as is the case with its “sweetening” of the “expression” negro, it succeeds instead in articulating the fraught histories and racial categories of Cuban coloniality. O’Farrill’s moreno/morenito/negrito thus casts the Apolo stage as a space of dramatic simultaneity: it is at once a comforting bufo space, with the negrito performing a racist stereotype, and an unintended example of Urrutia’s “modern Cuban theater” featuring actors and actresses of “our race”—in this sense, a discomfiting example, for O’Farrill’s moreno is less a representation of Urrutia’s “cultured and patriotic blacks” than a figure for the “synonymous” relations between trigueño, moreno/negro, and the violence of the plantation. The moreno, in short, suggests how O’Farrill may have preserved elements of—even as he surpassed—the belated negrito, hinting at a manipulation of racialized social and stage meanings. To the extent that his performance confuses Cuban racial categories, O’Farrill’s moreno/negrito points to a prevalent, corresponding concern regarding the Harlem bufo in general: that it not be confused with other dramatic genres in New York City or with its Havana bufo counterpart. For example, a play entitled ¿De quién es hijo el negrito? (Whose Son Is the Negrito?), a “Spanish zarzuela,” might trick readers into thinking it was “a play of the Cuban bufo genre.” Whoever “thinks thus,” however, “makes a huge mistake,” for the “play has everything except the bufo genre.”52 Meanwhile, the fragment of a faux letter to the Asturian-born Regino López, the famous director of Havana’s Alhambra Theater, offered a complaint: “How they ride roughshod over the bufo genre in New York!”53 Such theatrical integrity, or lack thereof, in its moral register was an issue regarding bufo audiences, too. Addressing audiences who disrupted performances with “shouts” and “insinuations in poor taste,” La Prensa claimed that when “those same individuals find themselves in an American theater [teatro americano], they behave with decency and manners, but when it comes to a raza show [un espectáculo de la raza], they conduct themselves in a manner ill befitting our gentlemanliness.”54 The bufo audience’s “distasteful” behavior, like O’Farrill’s moreno/morenito/negrito, compromises la raza, linked here to a “gentlemanly” masculinity. Indeed, the implication of the “teatro americano” is that Latino audiences in such spaces may be subject to the varieties of Anglo racialization as a consequence of their public use of Spanish or “Spanish-sounding” English—their Latino performance of the linguistic, in short, whitening or blackening them in the Anglo imaginary. Susceptible to Anglo racialization, the (in)decent raza audience member resembles O’Farrill’s moreno/morenito/negrito, who, at any moment, in terms of U.S. racial logics, may also signify as “African.”
Photo/Gráfico
During the beginning of Gráfico’s run, in ways that countered La Prensa’s moreno appellation, this illustrated Sunday newspaper called O’Farrill’s character, in no uncertain terms, negrito. He was the “negrito who cracked up the public.”55 He was not only the “original negrito” but “the ‘negrito’ of the Apolo.”56 Gráfico, in other words, displayed O’Farrill’s negrito “as such” to the public in print, reflecting how O’Farrill himself performed the negrito “as such” to the public on stage. Yet Gráfico still sought to manage the possible distaste of exhibiting O’Farrill’s negrito, offsetting that with representations of the “real,” “private,” non-negrito O’Farrill, the actual subject seamed up with the role. Such a figure of blackface print culture in Gráfico, the stage-negrito O’Farrill/actual O’Farrill, was suggestive, not unlike the moreno/morenito/negrito in La Prensa, of histories and categories of “Cuban color” (and, in the United States, of their possible “African” signification) that disturbed the composure of raza configurations.
Indeed, Gráfico, which appeared in tabloid form, styled itself a medium for both Latino theater publicity and raza solidarity during what I consider its first period, which lasted from the newspaper’s inaugural issue on February 27, 1927 (the occasion of the forty-seventh Spanish-language performance