United States, which implies not only a “loss” of Spanish among Afro-Latinas/os subject to English-language influences in the United States but the emergence of multilingual Afro-Latino identities, cultures, and politics shaped by contacts with Anglophone, African American history and experience—as was the case, of course, with Schomburg.23
The Urrutia-Schomburg text revises the commonplace heard during the early twentieth century that “Spanish-speaking Negroes from Latin America” in Harlem are “distinct because of their language” and have “but little contact with the English-speaking [black] majority.”24 It invites us, in fact, to reflect on how the subjects of such Spanish-speaking “distinctions” are themselves racialized in relation to their “contact,” however little or great, with the “English-speaking [black] majorities” in the United States—how, in other words, Afro-Latinas/os manage their racialization by vocalizing themselves in certain ways across the multilinguistic spaces of the United States. “From time to time,” for example, “one may see a very dark Negro who will be speaking Spanish more loudly than the rest” because “he does not wish to be mistaken for an American Negro.”25 It is a matter of racialization that involves white latinidad as well—the “rest” implied in the passage. For instance, such an Afro-Latino practice of speaking (and, by extension, writing) aloud one’s racial identity, only now in an opposite way, is familiar among white Latinas/os: These “light-skinned” Latinas/os “would avoid speaking Spanish for fear of being outed” as Cuban American or mainland Puerto Rican, which would carry with it, as I have stated, the menacing possibility of a “blackening” in the Anglo-U.S. gaze.26 Indeed, in a different way, there were those occasions when silence itself, the absence of spoken language in a social field so plotted by its racial effects, would signify in ways comparable to the Hispanophone loudness of “a very dark Negro,” in particular among African Americans manipulating the contradictions of race in the Americas to invest themselves with the privileges accorded by a divide-and-conquer Anglo-U.S. racism to the more “acceptable” blackness of Afro-Latinas/os. Graciela Pérez, the great Afro-Cuban American singer of La Anacaona and Machito and His Afro-Cubans, better known simply as Graciela, tells how, during gigs of the Afro-Cubans in the mid-1940s in Miami and Miami Beach, the baritone saxophonist Leslie Johnakins, an African American member of the band, would respond in silence—“no contestaba” (he didn’t respond)—when spoken to by Anglo whites, lest he compromise his position as a presumed Afro-Cuban American crossing spaces of U.S. white supremacy otherwise off limits to African Americans. The reason, according to Graciela, was simple: “Tu sabes que ellos no creían que los hispanos son negros, sino que nada más los negros americanos. ¡Mira si eran brutos!” (You know they didn’t think Hispanics were black, only black Americans. How stupid they were!).27
These embodied expressions of race and the multilinguistic, in and of themselves and as figures for the literary and performance voices of Afro-Cuban Americans, frame my work in the following pages. They demonstrate the mutual instantiation of Afro-Latino, African American, and white-Latino identities in the context of hemispheric logics of white-supremacist, colonial domination: whether one is white enough or the right kind of white, or less black or the right kind of black, to receive or be denied rights and advantages, based on how one speaks (or does not) in English, Spanish, or both. When Guillén frets over Consuelo Serra’s possible English-influenced vocality deriving from her time in the United States, when the Afro-boricua Schomburg writes a letter in English from Harlem to the Afro-Cuban Urrutia in Havana, who then translates it into Spanish—when these things happen, something of the racializing logic of the multilinguistic, scriptive now and sonic, underlies the exchanges. Indeed, a text such as “Imperialismo afrocubano” suggests the possibility that an Afro-Latino in the United States, writing in English, will be “mistaken for an American Negro,” while an Afro-Cuban in Cuba, writing in “Spanish more loudly than the rest,” will not. The great Afro-Cuban musician and brother-in-law to Graciela, Mario Bauzá, crystallizes the experience of Afro-Cuban Americans in such modalities of the multilinguistic. Like Graciela, he arrives on the page through the genre of the tape-recorded interview. Speaking in English, Bauzá recalls a return to Cuba from New York City during the early twentieth century. He had gone to the U.S. consulate in Havana to obtain a visa for his wife. Upon hearing him speak, the (presumably Anglo-white) consular representative remarked, “You don’t sound like a Cuban. You sound like a Cuban from Harlem.” Bauzá’s response: “That’s exactly where I learned my English. On the streets of Harlem.”28
Unbecoming Blackness contributes through Latino and African-diaspora literary and cultural studies to the critical conversation on Cuban racial identity on the island and in the United States across a variety of disciplines. It pushes this conversation further with its attention to the importance of afrolatinidad; its recovery, through performance texts, of an Afro-Cuban American modernism; and its highlighting the techniques of a post-1959 Cuban American literature in the representation of race as both Afro-Cuban American and white Cuban American. In history and social science, there is a longstanding commitment to the analysis of Afro-Cuban conditions on the island that I hope this book will complement.29 Another area of dialogue is the tradition of Afro-Hispanist literary criticism, which emerged in the United States during the civil-rights and black cultural-nationalism eras among African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latino critics who sought an idiom to discern the aesthetic and political differences between the works of Afro–Latin American and white Latin American writers on racial “themes,” a project that, informed as well by an earlier Négritude, often asserted a “black” Latin American literary culture over the claims of mestizaje and “negrismo,” the tradition of white writers representing black subjects. In many ways, a discussion of afrolatinidad remembers the high era of Afro-Hispanism in the 1970s, even as the U.S. location of our Afro-Latino texts shifts our conversation beyond black/mestizaje cultural oppositions in Latin American nationalism toward a recognition of how Afro-Latinas/os, as writers and performers in English, Spanish, or both represent the simultaneity of their racialization in the Anglo and Latino United States: in the case of Cubans of African descent, their (un)becoming Afro-Cuban American(ness) in relation to African Americans, other Afro-Latinas/os, and white Latinas/os, a condition of U.S. racial, “ethnic,” and “minority” experience that may yet engage island-based mestizaje/postracial nationalisms, now as a memory (if not a revision) proper to a transnational Afro-Latino culture.30 To be sure, Afro-Hispanism engages a tradition of literary criticism on island Afro-Cuban writers by island Afro-Cuban intellectuals after the revolution whose arguments, while committed to the nation-state, are hardly reducible to postracial, mestizaje, or “raceless”-revolutionary apology.31 Meanwhile, a growing area of study, one in which this book situates itself directly, concerns the place of Afro-Cubans in the United States. Leading the way have been scholars in history and social science, with the early 1970s essays of Lourdes Casal serving not just as a backdrop here but as a stimulating point of reference for recent work by Nancy Mirabal, Susan Greenbaum, and Frank Guridy.32 Related to this is the research on Afro-Latinas/os in U.S. music and sports cultures from the early twentieth century to the present.33 These inquiries into Afro-Cuban Americanness all relate to recent announcements of an overt Afro-Latino commitment in an array of multidisciplinary scholarship, none more so than in Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores’s The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, a volume that extends Flores’s longstanding effort in the area, characterized well, for the purposes of this introduction, in his recognition that the “Cuban–Puerto Rican continuum…is intimately associated with blackness in the U.S. context.”34 Finally, as a work also in Cuban American literary and cultural studies, this book foregrounds the other experience of an Afro-Cuban American literature and performance to add to the insights of Rodrigo Lazo, Ricardo Ortiz, and Laura Lomas in their recent publications on the movements—around the hemisphere, within the United States—of Cuban American literary and print cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.35
In the first part of the book, I present archival research to evidence an Afro-Cuban American modernism in performance. I draw on perspectives in African-diaspora studies regarding the archive, whose material and
