Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.
“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 in No matarás that he parlayed into a stage production in Havana at a theater located two blocks from the ruins of the Alhambra, thus exporting “in triumph” his “straight” and negrito performance in the film into the vacuum of Cuba’s collapsed bufo establishment.114
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,