Unbecoming Blackness. Antonio López M.

by Bug Music and Antobal Music Company, all rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

      Introduction

      One afternoon late in 1929, two Afro-Cuban men visited the Havana home of an Afro-Cuban woman to conduct an interview for a newspaper article. Nicolás Guillén was already known for his journalism and was on the way to becoming a renowned poet. His companion, Gustavo Urrutia, was a prominent figure in Afro-Cuban social and intellectual life as the editor of “Ideales de una Raza” (Ideals of a Race), a Sunday page on Afro-Cuban topics in El Diario de la Marina. Guillén published the interview in “Ideales” as “Señorita Consuelo Serra,” a title that revealed to readers his interviewee’s connection to Cuban history: Consuelo Serra was the daughter of Rafael Serra, the famous journalist and Cuban independence leader in the United States during the late nineteenth century.¹

      Serra proved a provocative interview, beyond the association with her father. She had migrated from Cuba to New York City when she was seven years old and lived there for fourteen years. She went to public school and graduated with degrees in English from Hunter College and education from the city’s Normal School before returning to the island in 1906.² This was not lost on Guillén and Urrutia. In the article, Guillén describes how, on the afternoon in question, they come to Serra’s apartment, where a “girl, black and smiling” (niña negra y sonriente), opens the door. As they wait for their host, they note the very few paintings on the walls, a sign, Guillén says, of good taste. And then Serra arrives, also “smiling.” Her speech leaves an impression on Guillén: “despite having lived in the North for fourteen years, her Spanish is pure [conserva límpido su castellano], without any of those incriminating Rs [erres delatoras], pronounced with a grinding sound [como si se las triturara], that so clearly registers the influence of English.”³ Serra begins to comment on her college career, but Urrutia “interrupts her”: “Of course, a college exclusively for people of color [gente de color] . . .” “Nothing of the kind,” she replies. “For blacks and whites [Para negros y para blancos].” Serra explains that, in her graduating class, six students were “of color” and that she was “the only Cuban,” yet she “never felt uneasy [molesta] or passed over [preterida].” This prompts a reply from Urrutia: “So in New York there are no problems,” he begins, only before he can specify the kind of problems he has in mind, it is Serra who cuts in: “Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest as much! Yes, there are, as is the case everywhere in the Union. Slightly less than in the South, but it exists. What I have tried to point out is the fact that I never had an occasion to get upset [disgustarme] at the college. And on the street…Well, on the street, whenever I ran into some difficulty, I always had the authorities on my side. But that only happened a few times. I really have no complaints [quejas] about New York.”⁴

      Consuelo Serra established schools, taught English, and wrote journalism in Cuba during the first decades of the twentieth century, the early years of the republic.⁵ In Guillén’s narrative, she prompts among “middle-class” Afro-Cubans a tense encounter, a primary reason for which is her seemingly erstwhile Afro-Cuban Americanness: her identity and history as a Cuban woman de color, a negra, living in the United States. For Guillén, this implies a possible impurity, one whose signs he seeks, not surprisingly, in language. Guillén puts the sounds of Serra’s speech under surveillance. For Urrutia, it leads to pointed questions regarding her exposure to racial injustice in the United States, the significance of which is fraught, as evidenced by the tacit conversation: nowhere does Guillén show Urrutia or Serra calling these “problems” by name, even as Serra offers examples that leave little doubt in the reader’s mind. She notes U.S. racism’s geographies and uses her personal experience to place it in institutions such as the unsegregated school, where it may produce bad feelings and jeopardize opportunity, and unsegregated public space, where its effects, now implying a physical menace, call for an intervention by the state. Serra’s spoken Spanish was a signifier for her Afro-Cuban American history even earlier still. In 1905, the Afro-Cuban intellectual Miguel Gualba wrote in Havana’s El Nuevo Criollo that “Consuelo, despite having taken courses for thirteen years exclusively in the English language [en puro idioma inglés], speaks our language, hers [habla nuestro idoma, el suyo]—the one of the home in which her conscience was formed—correctly and with such naturalness as if she had been studying it in Cuba the whole time.”⁶ There is in these anxious expressions of an English-free, Spanish-speaking ability (Gualba goes so far as to imagine its power to undo Serra’s U.S. migration altogether, transporting her back to the island) a link between femininity and Afro-Cuban Americanness: a Spanish-language “home” in the United States cultivates the class-identified propriety of the Afro-Cuban American woman. Indeed, the final questions Guillén poses Serra in the article are “Are you a feminist [feminista], Miss Serra? Are you in favor of the vote?” She says, “Yes, I am a feminist,” and begins to recall a lecture she gave as a student in New York on “equal rights for women.” But just then the telephone rings, cutting off the conversation. As Guillén leaves the apartment with Urrutia, he again draws attention to that sonic sign for how an Afro-Cuban woman in Havana may, in the end, “really have no complaints about New York”: as he walks down the stairs, Guillén hears Serra’s voice, now on the telephone, “slowly fading away.”⁷

      Unbecoming Blackness inquires into expressions across literature and performance of an Afro-Cuban experience in the United States that the apprehensive imagining of an English-sounding Consuelo Serra would invoke. It begins during the period of the Marina article, with Afro-Cuban American writers and performers of the first republican generation who migrated to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, especially to New York City, and continues into the late twentieth century, with those who arrived or were born into a majority white-Cuban exile that, in the aftermath of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, witnessed an increase in the Afro-Cuban population of the United States. The book examines the idea of an Afro-Cuban American voice tainted by the English language in the United States as an indication of broader concerns over the kinds of relations and relationships that Afro-Cuban Americans, as writers and performers, may cultivate beyond the island: relations in trans/national cultures and politics, relationships with fellow Cuban Americans, with other Latinas/os—white, indigenous, and of African descent—and with African Americans. It also sees in the clipped, tacit conversation on racial injustice in the United States and Serra’s accompanying admission to having “no complaints about New York” a hint regarding how Afro-Cuban Americans may reside on U.S. soil despite the fact of Anglo and Latino racisms, a choice the book explores as an example of an Afro-Cuban American redefinition of the United States as a space propitious for the pursuit of careers in literature and performance, not to mention the possible achievement of citizenship rights. In poetry, fiction, and the essay, in blackface theater, poetry recital, and film—indeed, in artistic careers often unavailable to them in Cuba—Afro-Cuban Americans transform the shapes, themes, and concepts of their work in and beyond racial identity in a body of critically underexamined texts that surface the importance of aesthetic re-creation in the constitution of Cuban and African diasporas in the United States.

      Figure 1. Consuelo Serra in New York, 1905 (From Rafael Serra, Para negros y para blancos: Ensayos políticos, sociales, y económicos, cuarte serie [Havana: Imprenta “El Score,” 1907])

      This book discusses Afro-Cuban American literature and performance as an example of afrolatinidad: the Afro-Latino condition in the United States, which Afro-Cuban Americans share with other Latinas/os of African descent, including, but not limited to, those with origins in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela. Central to afrolatinidad is the social difference that blackness makes in the United States: how an Anglo white supremacy determines the life chances of Afro-Latinas/os hailed as black and how a Latino white supremacy reproduces the colonial and postcolonial Latin American privileging of blanco over negro and mulato (mixed-race) identities, now on behalf of white Latinas/os who may themselves face Anglo forms of racializing discrimination. Yet, if an Afro-Latino difference reveals how, for Afro-Cuban Americans, encounters