Suárez offers another approach to the idea that Afro-Cuban Americans have “no complaints about New York,” that, indeed, they may choose to lead a life in the United States, however much such a decision may signify to other Cubans, on and off the island, as unbecoming: as an “unseemly” association with black subalterns (African Americans, fellow Afro-Cuban Americans) in the Anglo-racist United States, and as an unbecoming of one’s island-Cuban black identity, its “becoming,” as a revision or even an undoing, Afro-Latino.14
In a passage on comparative experiences of racism in the United States and Latin America, Ruiz Suárez writes that the “rough and brutal and contemptuous…methods of the Anglo-Saxon” in the United States nevertheless “goad the black [that is, African American] man into a life of activity and, consequently, a life creative of ideals which may in time be realized.” He goes on to say that, for an Afro-Cuban American, “it is most gratifying to observe the accomplishments of his congeners in the United States in the development of their own instruments of civilization.” For Ruiz Suárez, such a state of affairs contrasts with the conditions in a place like Cuba. In such “Spanish-American countries,” the “apparent cordiality” of members of the “white race” works to “conceal their sentiment” of racism, which leads to a “specious national unity” that, for an Afro-Cuban, thwarts the “self-dependence of his race.”15 In the “gratifying” experience of beholding “the accomplishments of his congeners,” Ruiz Suárez’s narrative exemplifies the diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America: in particular, it expresses an unbecoming desire for the way in which African Americans belong in the “rough and brutal and contemptuous” Anglo United States—a description here characteristic of the discourse of a violent U.S. inhospitableness that, on the island, often becomes a message delivered to Afro-Cubans (and, in a sign of the Afro-Latino difference, less so, if ever, to white Cubans) to discourage their migration north, a discourse observed across the twentieth century, as an Afro-Cuban Mariel migrant in 1980 Miami demonstrates, recollecting how, “in Cuba, they said dogs were set upon black people here [que aquí a los negros les echaban los perros].”16 In the aftermath of 1912, with its catastrophic failure of an island Afro-Cuban project for “self-dependence,” such an Afro-Cuban American desire for African American institutions in the United States makes sense in terms of desire as a complex of always wanting after, if never quite achieving, its object, an idea apparent in the translated condition of Color Question itself, which comes to us not in the English-language voice of Ruiz Suárez himself—in his achievement of Anglophony—but in the translated echo of his Spanish, the Afro-Latino threat of which, as a possible Anglophone-influenced impurity, we have seen in Serra. There is an implication in all this, finally, that Afro-Cubans are somehow “better off” being in and belonging to an explicitly racist U.S. nation rather than, it turns out, Cuba. This being and belonging is asserted against the “best interests” of a postracial, mestizo, even negro island-Cuban nation—indeed, against the “best interests” of Afro-Cubans themselves. It is a desire signaling Cuban nationalism as a struggle over the “enjoyment” of a Cuban “way of life” from which Afro-Cubans, often assigned a menacing, excessive enjoyment of the nation, such as in 1912, are now “stealing” themselves (and something of the Cuban nation-myth) away to the Afro-Cuban American United States.17
An Afro-Cuban American voice tainted by English in the United States is important for understanding the writers and performers in my study, since such a voice, as a figure for the literary and performance languages in a twentieth-century Afro-Cuban America, emerges as a primary site of racialization: the way in which an Afro-Latino racial identity is “made” in the United States, depending on how one sounds (in writing, in performance) in English, Spanish, or both at the same time. The contemporary Afro-Cuban American novelist H. G. Carrillo makes this point, that the English/Spanish speech, writing, and performance of Afro-Latinas/os, far from being neutral, have a “color,” one that bespeaks Afro-Cuban experiences in coloniality. In the novel Loosing My Espanish, Carrillo’s narrator is a teacher who delivers a long lecture on Cuban history (and thus stands as a performer) before his students: “Miren my hands,” he says. “This color on the map, this bit of orange here, Illinois. Chicago stares me in the face every morning when I shave, señores. My face, this color, a subtle legacy of the British Royal African Company, is, as they say in the vernacular, el color of my Espanish.”18 Carrillo’s narrator meditates on geography, the body, and language—on the circumstances that have led an Afro-Cuban American’s mouth to speak the English-language word “Spanish” in a Cuban-Spanish-accented English, as “Espanish.” His narrator is not only resident in the United States—in Chicago: a midwestern Afro-Cuban American—but, in fact, sees himself as the “color” of Chicago. Here we have what Guillén was worried about with Serra, rendered into fictional narrative. The Afro-Cuban American speaks, writes, and performs with an English/Spanish multilinguistic impurity that signifies his blackness not just in (and according to) the Anglo United States but in relation to the other “coloreds” of Illinois, the state’s many Latinas/os and African Americans.19
To underscore the transhistorical significance of such modalities of race and the multilinguistic, I return to Gustavo Urrutia—now not just a character in Guillén’s writing but a writer himself—and another representation of an early twentieth-century afrolatinidad in Afro-Cuban print culture. In a March 1, 1936, “Armonías” column entitled “Imperialismo afrocubano” (Afro-Cuban Imperialism), Urrutia satirizes imperialism, which in the column stands for U.S. designs on global domination (“imperialismo yanqui”) but also, more implicitly, “black empire,” a very different project of black solidarity involving a “global vision of the race” that “shadows histories of empire and colonization in the Americas.”20 Urrutia’s satirical starting point is the influence that “Armonías” appears to have on the “North American conscience,” for the column, it seems, was circulating, in transamerican fashion, among readers in “the Hispanic-American colony of New York” (la colonia hispanoamericana de New York). Indeed, because of the column’s presence “on the avenues of Harlem” (por las avenidas de Harlem), Urrutia can claim that “our ideals and literature” are being “planted” in the United States and that soon “our vigorous money” will take over “their lands, industries, banks, and press,” to be followed by “our warships and marines,” all to ensure “our conquests.”21 But what occasions the column and Urrutia’s sense of its circulation in the United States—what, in fact, occupies half the column’s space in the newspaper—is a brief English-language letter dated February 6, 1936, from the activist, historian, and African-diaspora archive builder Arturo Schomburg in New York City to Urrutia in Havana, a letter reprinted in the column in a Spanish translation. In the English-language original, Schomburg, called by Urrutia in the column an “Afro-boricua” (afroborinqueño), mentions possessing “pages from the Diario de la Marina” with Urrutia’s “articles on ‘Ideals of a Race.’” Schomburg states that these pages have now been “mounted on Japanese transparent silk paper and bound with buckram,” and he calls the resulting “volume,” the description of which has allowed him to revel in the sensuality of the book-making process, “a most remarkable contribution to the Negro race from the Spanish-American angle.” Schomburg, in fact, feels “certain that there is no other copy like it any part of the world.”22 What I want to underscore in this text of a (Spanish-translated) Afro-Latino letter within an Afro-Cuban column is Urrutia’s attitude toward Schomburg’s writing—that is, to his letter-writing in English, an Afro-Latino textual condition that, like Carrillo’s novel, confirms the fear of an English-language taint. Urrutia tells readers that “Mr. Arthur Schomburg…hardly remembered Spanish” (apenas recordaba el castellano), and he emphasizes the point by remarking, just before quoting “the translation of this letter,” that it has arrived “written in English,” a “detail that urges us to push forward with the reconquest.” Here, Urrutia’s satire slips from an Afro-Cuban “conquest” of the United States to a “reconquest” of Afro-Latinas/os that, recalling the interview with Serra seven years earlier, would discipline an English-writing/speaking Afro-Latina/o by exposing his or her private writing/speech to the public, “on the avenues of Havana,” translated
