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1 / Alberto O’Farrill: A Negrito in Harlem

In an April 1929 edition of the Diario de la Marina, two essays appeared side by side in “Ideales de una Raza”: “El teatro cubano” (Cuban Theater), published by Gustavo Urrutia in “Armonías,” and “El camino de Harlem” (The Road to Harlem) by Nicolás Guillén. In “Teatro,” Urrutia calls for a “modern Cuban theater” in which actors and actresses of “our race” (nuestra raza) would appear in roles as “cultured and patriotic blacks [negros cultos y patriotas], full of dignity.” Urrutia hopes such a theater would challenge not only the contemporary Cuban blackface stage but also the influence of other dramatic works whose settings “in slavery” seem particularly “belated” (tardía) and possibly even “harmful to the harmony of the two Cuban races [las dos razas cubanas].” Advocating on behalf of “Cuba’s colored race” (la raza de color en Cuba) is also the idea behind Guillén’s “Camino.” Guillén cites incidents across the island in which “whites and blacks [los blancos y los negros] stroll on public streets” within separate spaces, the “violation of which by anyone,” but “most of all by blacks, gives rise to true conflicts.” Cuba, he warns, might soon develop a specific, unwanted characteristic of “certain Yankee regions [ciertas regiones yankees],” a “‘black neighborhood’ [“barrio negro”]” in each of its cities and towns. “That,” he concludes, “is the road to Harlem”: a movement toward U.S.-style segregation, the notion of which is intensified in the translation of “El camino de [of] Harlem” into “The Road to Harlem.”¹

The link between race, modern theater aesthetics, and hemispheric space matters in Urrutia and Guillén introduces the broad theme of the first part of this book: the movement of performance and print cultures from Cuba to the United States among Afro-Cubans between the 1920s and 1940s. Afro-Cuban actors, poetry reciters, and literary journalists in the United States challenge Guillén’s “barrio negro” as a primary metaphor for the Afro-Cuban apprehension of segregated Anglo-U.S. geographies, producing instead their own Afro-Latino representations of the experience of race (and spatialization) in the United States, one in which they risk an identification as African-diasporic subjects. The texts of a U.S. “barrio afrolatino,” against Guillén’s island-oriented barrio negro, invoke the spatial and temporal multiplicity specific to the modern performance and print cultures of Afro-Cubans in the United States: the many overlapping periods and barrios of African American, Afro-Latino, and Jewish Harlems, as we shall see, along with their institutional locations in theaters, social clubs, and university halls, as well as in print genres such as the newspaper review and the chronicle.² In such an Afro-Latino reconception of the barrio negro, the multiple negros/as of African diaspora in the United States overlap with early twentieth-century discourses on Cuban race: postracial notions of a Cuba in which “racial differences [are] irrelevant,” counterstrategies among “black and mulatto activists [and intellectuals]” of using “‘blackness’ as a political category,” and mestizaje ideas “in literary, artistic, and touristic circles.”³ In a U.S. barrio afrolatino, in other words, Afro-Cuban writers and performers articulate Cuban race and nation—and, in particular, the Cuban negra/o, mulata/o, and raza de color⁴—with the U.S. Negro, colored, and black; the “West Indian”; and other afrolatinidades, in particular that of mainland Afro–Puerto Ricans.

Afro-Cuban writers and performers were a part of the larger Cuban migrations of the 1930s and 1940s to the United States, migrations that “were smaller in number than the pre-1898 and post-1959 migrations” yet “significant…because they attracted not only Afro-Cuban political migrants but also economic migrants who tended to settle in large urban areas like New York City.”⁵ These Afro-Cubans left the island around a time of ongoing struggles over racial justice that overlapped with the Great Depression and the violence of the Machado dictatorship (including its overthrow with the revolution of 1933), and they encountered on arrival in New York City a shifting Latino scene: whereas at the turn of the century, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Spaniards, and others of Latin American descent lived in the vicinity of cigar factories in the Lower East Side and Chelsea, by the middle of the 1920s, Latino New York City was primarily Puerto Rican and working class in population, with communities located along the Brooklyn waterfront and, in “the largest and most significant of all the inter-wars settlements,” in Harlem, from 110th Street to 125th Street between Fifth Avenue and Manhattan Avenue, including blocks on the East Side stretching down to 90th Street.⁶ Latinas/os in New York City participated in local labor and civil-rights activism, and they engaged in global politics critical of the Machadato in Cuba and of U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico and Nicaragua. Support among them for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War was significant, too.⁷

In what follows, I discuss the careers of two figures in the performance and print cultures of Afro-Cubans in the early twentieth-century United States: Alberto O’Farrill (in the present chapter) and Eusebia Cosme (in chapter 2). O’Farrill was a blackface actor in the teatro bufo, a genre of Cuban theater in which he performed in New York City, beginning in the mid-1920s. O’Farrill himself wrote bufos and was a contributor of literary-journalistic writing to the Harlem-based, Spanish-language weekly El Gráfico, of which, for a time, he was a director. He also appeared in the 1935 film No matarás (Mi hermano es un gangster) (Thou Shalt Not Kill [My Brother is a Gangster]), produced on location in Harlem and in studios in Hollywood by Miguel Contreras Torres, the Mexican director. Cosme was a major performer of “poesía negra” (black poetry), a poetic movement emerging in the late 1920s whose writers, predominantly mulatos and white men from the Hispanophone Caribbean, drew on representations of musical, religious, and spoken-language expression among working-class Afro-Cubans (and other Hispanophone, African-diasporic people) to imagine a poetry both modern and “authentic” to the region. Cosme arrived in New York City in 1938, and she continued performing poesía negra and other verse forms, both on stage and over the radio across CBS’s Cadena de las Américas (Network of the Americas). In later years, she had roles in theater and film, including Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1965).

I argue in these two opening chapters that the careers of O’Farrill and Cosme, once lost but now the objects of recovery through the archive, research, and publication, reveal a late, untimely logic—a “belatedness”—that constitutes the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the United States in the early twentieth century. Such a genealogy of Afro-Cuban American literature and performance between 1898 and 1959 reflects a postcolonial understanding of temporality: of the way in which the colonized, imputed a premodern “pastness” by the colonizer, responds with a consciousness of his or her own alternative historicity, one that exists in a coeval (and, thus, critical) relation with the modernity and coloniality of time.⁸ The fragments arrachés of O’Farrill and Cosme, collected in the archive, engage belatedness in ways that depart from Urrutia’s claim in “El teatro cubano” that the representation of slavery on the Cuban stage is negatively tardía and thus worthy of rejection. For O’Farrill, it is blackface theater’s very belatedness during the period, politically and artistically, that, far from rejecting, he engages—an engagement influenced by O’Farrill’s limited career prospects as an Afro-Cuban actor and refracted in his writings in Gráfico, which emerges as a site of what I call an Afro-Cuban blackface print culture, a material and discursive space in which O’Farrill explored the limits of a raza hispana (Hispanic race) ideology. For Cosme, engaging poesía negra, itself belated politically and artistically after 1938, indexes her own professional vulnerability as an African-diasporic woman working in performance; it structures, too, the commonplace that she was the greatest intérprete of poesía negra, which underscores a tension in the Spanish-language definition of “interpreter” between Cosme’s role, on the one hand, as a performer of the poetry of mulato and white men and, on the other, as a hermeneut with the authority to analyze and revise the texts of these self-same poets—a tension with Cosme around race, gender, interpretation, and authorship that, as we shall see in the next chapter, well describes the scholar’s fraught encounter with the fragments arrachés of her archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Now, however, I consider in detail such issues in an Afro-Cuban American literary and performance history by turning to the career and texts of Alberto O’Farrill, beginning with the circumstances of his U.S. arrival.

The “African,” the Bufo, and Blackface Print Culture

In September 1925, Alberto Heliodoro O’Farrill Gavito arrived in Key West, Florida, from Havana, Cuba, aboard the SS Governor Cobb. Several decades removed from Key West’s history as a Cuban center with an active role in the independence movement, it was still a town with a Cuban presence. The ship’s “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers” states that O’Farrill was a twenty-six-year-old man from the town of Santa Clara; his “nationality (Country of which citizen or subject)” was “Cuba.” O’Farrill was one of only two “alien” passengers on the ship that day. His “calling or occupation” was “photographer,” which was written in hand over the typed word “mer[chant].” The manifest also attested to his literacy: he could read and write in Spanish. O’Farrill’s last permanent residence was on the Calzada de Jesús del Monte in Havana, and his final destination was New York City. Also in the manifest was a column entitled “Race or people,” which included a footnote: “List of races will be found on the back of this sheet.” The other “alien” passenger aboard the Governor Cobb that day, himself a “citizen or subject” of Cuba, was a certain Luis Alfaro, who was identified under “Race or people” as “Cuban.” The way in which O’Farrill, also a “citizen or subject” of Cuba, was himself identified under “Race or people” is another matter, one which invests his very arrival in the United States with the contradictions of race and nation in the Americas: under “Race or people,” the manifest listed O’Farrill as “African.”⁹

Upon O’Farrill’s Key West arrival, therefore, he encountered U.S. racialization as an African-diasporic migrant from Cuba. Unlike his fellow passenger, a “Cuban” twice over in terms of “nationality” and “race or people”—a doubling with multiple implications: it subsumes Cuban whiteness under “Cuban race”; it affirms, however unintentionally, the notion of a postracial “Cuban people”—O’Farrill’s identity is both Cuban and excessive to Cuba: he is a “citizen or subject” of the Cuban nation-state who also belongs to an “African race,” an “African people.” As an “African,” O’Farrill’s identity aligns with African American histories of U.S. “naturalization,” particularly those in which the term “African” signifies identities in legal regimes such as the postbellum Nationality Act, which granted “the right to naturalize to ‘persons of African nativity or descent,’” even as such “persons” continued to live with “the social stigma and unequal status associated with blackness.”¹⁰ An “African” identity thus invokes histories of (il)legal U.S. inclusion and exclusion framed by the way “race and nationality disaggregated and realigned in new and uneven ways” during the period.¹¹ It is such an “African” identity that marks O’Farrill’s difference as an Afro-Cuban migrant in the United States.

Also coming to Key West that September was the Arango-Moreno theater company, led by two white men, Guillermo Moreno and Rafael de Arango. The Arango-Moreno was a Cuban blackface company. The coincidence is striking. In the 1930s, O’Farrill would appear on the New York City stage with Moreno. Now, however, having just arrived in the United States—in all likelihood to improve his chances of working in Cuban blackface—O’Farrill would have found in the visiting Arango-Moreno an occasion to consider the relation between Cuban racial identity and theatrical career opportunities, particularly if he came across a copy of Florida: Semenario Independiente, a Key West newspaper touting the upcoming performances with a full-body photograph of de Arango himself, in blackface, with a caption inviting “the people of Key West to the big event tomorrow, Sunday, at the San Carlos” hall.¹² De Arango was an important Cuban blackface actor of the early twentieth century, belonging in a list that begins with Arquímedes Pous and includes, among others, white Cuban men such as Sergio Acebal, Ramón Espígul, and Enrique “Bernabé” Arredondo.¹³ Indeed, blackface roles in Cuban theater were almost exclusively “played by white actors,” an element in the political economy of Cuban blackface inseparable from the way in which Afro-Cubans “were systematically denied employment in the theater” during the early twentieth century, well into “the 1950s,” and “even today.”¹⁴ The Florida photograph of de Arango, advertising his company’s run at the San Carlos, is a multilayered, transnational Cuban text that complements the “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers,” locating O’Farrill’s U.S. arrival in the context of Cuban blackface professional practices, in which white faces, much more than black, mulato, or “African” ones, were able to earn a living covered in cork.¹⁵

Alberto O’Farrill was a nearly unknown figure in critical history until his appearance in Nicolás Kanellos’s field-defining research in the areas of Latino theater and periodicals. In A History of Hispanic Theatre and Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960, Kanellos’s extensive reading of the New York City Latino press reveals how O’Farrill was a “ubiquitous” blackface performer in “all the major Hispanic stages in New York’s stock and itinerant companies” and worked on Gráfico as an editor, writer, and even cartoonist.¹⁶ Such scholarship has brought O’Farrill into the orbit of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project—in particular, his appearance in Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (2002). Herencia includes a Gráfico column of O’Farrill’s. The accompanying biographical note, however, fails to mention his Afro-Cuban identity or role in blackface, thereby missing an opportunity to reflect on how O’Farrill’s representation of “the social and labor conditions of Hispanic immigrants in the city” also involves Anglo and Latino histories and conceptions of race.¹⁷ Kanellos’s critical work recognizes O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban identity and career in blackface and speculates on his interest in “Afro-Cuban culture, religion, and music.”¹⁸ Ultimately, however, Kanellos treats Afro-Cuban history and identity in O’Farrill as a thematic concern, an approach which casts race and nation in the Americas, at best, as a topic that comes and goes in the work. My focus, informed by the Key West convergence of an “African” O’Farrill and a blackface de Arango, demonstrates how race and nation in the Americas, more than just a theme in O’Farrill’s work, in fact constitute it. In this light, I understand O’Farrill’s newspaper writings and theater performances in the United States as phenomena of an Afro-Cuban blackface print culture, a term that describes how blackface logics shape O’Farrill’s print forms—their production, content, and circulation. Of significance, too, is how such interrelated theater and print texts mediate understandings of Cuban American race specific not only to a dominant Latino public but also to an Afro-Latino counterpublic, one with a possible critical relation to power.¹⁹

O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban blackface print culture turns on the Cuban teatro bufo (comic theater), the primary location of Cuban blackface expression. Emerging in the mid-nineteenth century, the teatro bufo derives from popular Spanish theater forms and the realist literature of costumbrismo (local custom), with influences from U.S. minstrelsy; it incorporates acting, music, and dance in its “parody of blacks and black street culture,” including forms of “improper” Afro-Cuban speech.²⁰ Jill Lane shows that the bufo, “as a central vehicle for the expression of mestizaje as national ideology,” shaped anticolonial politics between 1868 and 1895, a peak era of the genre, during which it exhibited “a coherence organized around a discourse of race, nation, and colonial power that is absent from other forms of vernacular theater.”²¹ The bufo featured three main characters: the gallego (Galician), a Spanish-immigrant man, often a policeman or merchant, typically portrayed with a thick, Spanish accent; the mulata, “at once a pathologized figure of dangerous racial encroachment (‘Africanization’), a miscegenating temptress, and a symbol of the innocent, tropical Cuba to be rescued from the lascivious Spanish imperialist”—the aforementioned gallego; and the negrito, “a manifestly racist caricature of black people by white actors” and the “most popular stage character in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.”²² The diminutive suffix ‑ito, added to negro, renders negrito (“little black man”), “a common racialized epithet” suggestive of an “endearment between white and especially black Cubans,” one that is “never free of the infantilizing, patronizing connotation that ‘little’ carries when applied to an adult black male.”²³ In bufo performances, often in the form of a sainete (one-act play), the “negrito is typically depicted as a hustler, trying to cheat customers and making sexual advances to all mulatas and light-skinned women.” The negrito, therefore, “his occupation depicted as subservient, criminal, or nonexistent,” “occupies the lowest social and cultural rung relative to other figures, even in twentieth-century productions.”²⁴ It is such a figure of Afro-Cuban masculinity that in the late nineteenth century “came to stand in for a national sentiment whose primary attribute was a celebrated racial diversity” and that in the early twentieth led the way for the bufo’s “political commentary” critical of successive Cuban governments.²⁵

By the time O’Farrill began performing the negrito on the New York City stage in the mid-1920s, the belatedness of the teatro bufo in Cuba, in terms of its viability and politics, had become apparent. While performances in the genre did indeed continue—and while elements of blackface have endured in other Cuban expressive contexts across the twentieth century and into the present—it was evident that during the 1930s the bufo seemed about “to succumb,” when it was “only traveling companies in the interior of the republic” that seemed to be performing it.²⁶ By “the beginning of 1930,” writes one critic, with the Machadato, the Great Depression, and the consolidation of radio and sound cinema, bufo works had begun losing their “encanto criollo” (national enchantment).²⁷ Writers and intellectuals of the period reflected an awareness of this. In 1935, the white Cuban poet Emilio Ballagas stamped bufo performances as out-of-date, remarking that “only ten years ago the black man was a beauty mark in bufo works [el negro era un lunar decorativo],” in contrast to current (and “better”) representations of Afro-Cubans in the subsequent poesía negra. Consuelo Serra, meanwhile, challenged the representation of the “eternal negrito catedrático,” proclaiming in 1935 that to endorse a bufo-inspired national culture was not how one “uplifts a race or builds a nation” (ni se eleva una raza ni se construye patria).²⁸ In the case of Havana’s most famous bufo venue of the time, the Alhambra theater, the lapse was literal: the Alhambra building, a male-only space, collapsed in 1935, marking an end to its particular brand of bufo, which extended the genre’s racial, gender, and sexual dynamics through the use of “burlesque and sometimes pornographic” elements.²⁹

O’Farrill’s career in New York City is attributable to the bufo’s belated condition. As an Afro-Cuban man seeking work in the theater, his migrating to the United States was likely a reprieve from chronic unemployment on the island. Indeed, O’Farrill’s stage negrito in New York City, together with the character’s print counterpart in Gráfico, exploits the very belatedness of bufo performance, setting back O’Farrill’s career even as it moves forward. This is to say that, in New York City, the bufo’s tardy, island incarnation becomes an emerging Latino form, one in which, as Raymond Williams has observed of the emergent, “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created.”³⁰ The music historian Ruth Glasser details such emerging creativity in the bufo-centric New York City Latino performance cultures of the 1920s and 1930s. The “theatrical forms best known to the primarily working-class” Latino groups, she writes, “were not the zarzuela or the Spanish drama but the bufos cubanos.” She continues, “While they sometimes featured companies visiting from Cuba, the bufos also incorporated a variety of Latino artists, including dancers, acrobats, magicians, conjuntos, orquestas, and a surprising number of operatic singers.” They also “used local talent, drew upon older forms familiar to at least Caribbean Hispanics, and provided an opportunity for New York’s Spanish-speaking population both to unite physically and to humorously comment upon the divisions and power relations between them.”³¹

O’Farrill’s blackface work exemplifies such an emerging, localized culture of Latino performance in the way it references prior Cuban bufo forms to project the racial dimensions of latinidad in early twentieth-century New York City. Important here is the signal irony of O’Farrill’s performance: his identity as an Afro-Cuban man in blackface. Approaches to “black-on-black minstrelsy” in the United States, especially in discussions of Bert Williams, born in Nassau, the British West Indies (today the Bahamas), acknowledge a critical tradition of rejecting the practice as “pathological” or politically regressive, even while recognizing how it “mediates and silently complicates the institutionalized dynamics of black and white through a form of intra-racial and cross-cultural signifying.”³² In the Anglo United States, in other words, black-on-black minstrelsy heightens the situation of African American performance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries generally: it “was often a product of self-commodification, a way of getting along in a constricted world,” one that, in terms of performance markets, was marked by Anglo whites’ “greater access to public distribution (and profit).”³³ In the Latino United States, the practice of a “negro-on-negro bufo” betrays its own, not entirely unrelated, dynamics, a way into which is offered by Rosendo Rosell, the white Cuban performer, composer, and writer who was active in radio, stage, television, and film in Cuba before 1959 and, later, in Miami. Remembering Afro-Cuban actors in blackface during the 1940s and 1950s “such as Roger Liver, the negrito Giovanni, and the negrito Silva,” Rosell remarks that they were all “real negritos” (negritos de verdad), “but they painted themselves with burnt cork to come out on stage …?” (pero se pintaban con corcho quemado para salir a escena …¿?).³⁴ The ellipsis and question marks, original in the text, suggest that the notion of “negritos de verdad” is most generative in its seeming incomprehensibility. For one thing, the punctuation marks recall that Cuban racial identity, as a social and political construct, exists “de verdad” (really, in truth) only en route to performance, “para salir a escena,” which is to say, it is de verdad only to the extent that its orientation is also “de mentira” (fake, a lie). Further, like Urrutia in “El teatro cubano,” Rosell clarifies an aspect of Cuban theater in general and the bufo in particular across the twentieth century: namely, that a negrito de verdad, one not covered in burnt cork, would likely find it difficult, if not impossible, in market and ideological terms, to land a role either within or beyond the bufo sphere. Indeed, with respect to white Cuban performers and Cuban whiteness, Rosell’s punctuation marks sound a note of alarm over the possible loss of market and ideological supremacy in relation to the semiotics of Cuban race should an Afro-Cuban actor worry the boundary between de verdad and de mentira by performing the negrito—or any other role—without burnt cork. Even as O’Farrill’s performances resolved these Cuban “institutionalized dynamics of black and white,” they prompt, by virtue of his U.S.-situated Afro-Cuban blackface persona, an Afro-Latino revision of the argument regarding white-Cuban blackface: that, “in Cuba, whites occupy the space of blackness to imagine their nation as mestizo.”³⁵ In the United States, rather, the Afro-Cuban O’Farrill occupies the space of blackness not so much to imagine the Cuban nation as mestizo or even negro (two possibilities nevertheless) as to invoke a Cuban blackness beyond the symbolic exigencies of Cuban nationalism, articulating it, instead, with formations of an early twentieth-century U.S. latinidad—its multiple audiences, cultures, markets—which O’Farrill thereby marks, in the negrito aftermath of his migration to the United States, as “African,” Afro-Cuban, Afro-Latino. To consider the details of O’Farrill’s blackface print culture, I turn now to his early years on the New York City stage and his writings in Gráfico.

Moreno Moments

From the summer of 1926 to the spring of 1931, O’Farrill performed in blackface in over fifty different plays in Harlem. Most of these were bufos, with O’Farrill playing the negrito opposite the gallego and the mulata, though often he appeared just in duets with one or the other of the characters. He also acted in blackface in zarzuela and revsita (revue) productions.³⁶ The most important commercial-theater space in which O’Farrill performed during these years was the Teatro Apolo. It was the Apolo, which had begun “featuring Hispanic comedies, variety, and Cuban musical farces intermittently on Sunday in March 1926,” that “was to fix and systematize what became distinctive of New York Hispanic theatrical culture: balancing the theatre and entertainments of the diverse Hispanic nationalities for the working-class audiences,” which involved “alternating Spanish, Cuban, and Puerto Rican shows” and “integrating lyric theatre with vaudeville and musical revues.”³⁷ Of further significance is the Apolo’s location itself on 125th Street, a key place in the shifting relations among African Americans, Latinas/os, and Anglo whites in the entertainment industry. Ruth Glasser writes that the “Spanish-language shows started at a time when the major movie and stage show theaters of Harlem were owned by a handful of white, mostly Jewish men who were battling for dominance of the local entertainment scene.” In the absence of white performers, who in increased numbers had begun working on Broadway with its higher salaries, theater owners on 125th Street turned to African American artists and audiences. The street thus changed from a mostly “Irish strip” to, by the early 1930s, an African American and Latino space of the entertainment industry.³⁸

The Apolo-era bufo, in the form of scripts or sound recordings, is lost, to the best of my knowledge, but its effects in print culture remain, offering a glimpse of O’Farrill’s stage negrito. For La Prensa, founded in 1913 “to serve the community of mostly Spanish and Cuban immigrants in and around Manhattan’s 14th Street,”³⁹ O’Farrill’s negrito was disruptive of the idea behind the newspaper as “el órgano de la raza” (the organ of the race), a key discursive site of latinidad during the period.⁴⁰ The raza in question—the raza hispana (Hispanic race)—is “the widespread notion of a single Ibero-American race,” which “gained currency” “in the wake of the Spanish-American War of 1898,” emphasizing “Latin-related cultural values in opposition to the Nordic tradition that the U.S. presumably represented.”⁴¹ Raza hispana, in short, represented a “view of race…more akin to ethnicity, culture, or national origin.”⁴² However, like gente de razón (people of reason), a forerunner concept that in preindependence Mexico could “accommodate the heterogeneity of the colonial population” under a label of “politics and culture,” even as “stigmatized racial categories” such as “the Indian” endured,⁴³ the unresolved raciality of an early twentieth-century, culturalist raza hispana was often configured to forms of tacit, Spanish-derived whiteness (hispano as white), while other possible Hispanophone raza signifiers, including the raza negra, continued to be “stigmatized.” An example of this appears in the particular way in which La Prensa represents O’Farrill’s negrito performance in the Apolo-era bufo: In a significant twist, the role is identified in the early coverage not as the negrito but as the “moreno.” For example, in a piece on the revue Mientras Nueva York duerme (While New York Sleeps), O’Farrill is credited as the play’s “morenito.”⁴⁴ In another, on the “zarzuela bufo cubana” Bronca entre latinos (Quarrel among the Latins), he is acknowledged for “the naturalness he stamps upon the types of the Cuban moreno.”⁴⁵ By the end of his first summer on the Apolo stage, appearing in his own written work, Los misterios de Changó (The Mysteries of Changó), in which he “played one of the principal roles,” “the already famous ‘morenito’ O’Farrill…made an audience that much enjoys” his “doings and jokes roar 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 at the Apolo),⁵⁷ to the July 10 edition of that year. During this four-month stretch, when O’Farrill was listed as Gráfico’s managing editor, its office was located on 115th Street, just off Lenox Avenue; its motto was “Semanario Defensor de la Raza Hispana” (Weekly Defender of the Hispanic Race). Moreover, as its first editorial indicates, Gráfico’s raza interest was inseparable from its satirical mission: “The constant increase of the Spanish and Ibero-American colony [la colonia española e ibero-americana] that daily, in ever more significant proportion, extends across all the neighborhoods [barrios] of the city of New York has impelled us to publish this weekly, Gráfico, that without losing sight of its defining characteristic—satire—comes to work together on behalf of everyone forming the great Hispanic family [la gran familia hispana].”⁵⁸ During those first four months, coverage of the theater world appeared next to anonymous or pseudonymous essays poking fun at its actors, audiences, and impresarios. Readers found pages devoted to reports on the world news, reproduced not without ridicule, and announcements on the activities of social clubs. A personals column appeared next to a resolution of the Liga Portorriqueña e Hispana (the Puerto Rican and Hispanic League), while a mocking report on the Cuban president Gerardo Machado’s visit to the United States included a cartoon by O’Farrill that represents Machado ogling the Statue of Liberty.⁵⁹ This is not to suggest that everything in the newspaper was threaded with the comic. A column in March, “Los portorriqueños,” decried the discrimination and violence faced by Puerto Ricans in New York City and the failure of the state to come to their defense despite their U.S. citizenship, while another piece expressed solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti.⁶⁰ The newspaper’s predominant tone during this period, however, was satiric.⁶¹

On July 24, 1927, Bernardo Vega inaugurated Gráfico’s second period by becoming its editor and president.⁶² A white Puerto Rican from the town of Cayey, Vega was a major figure in Puerto Rican politics and culture on the island and in New York City. He was a tobacco worker, wrote for newspapers, and was a participant in movements on behalf of working-class liberation and Puerto Rican independence. His book Memorias de Bernardo Vega: Contribución a la historia de la comunidad puertorriqueña en Nueva York (Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York) “is widely recognized as the single most important documentary source about the early Puerto Rican community in New York,” with its “wealth of factual information and running analytical and personal commentary.”⁶³ Vega’s leadership was linked to the participation in Gráfico of another great political and cultural figure of the Puerto Rican diaspora: the Afro-boricua Jesús Colón. Under the pen names Miquis Tiquis and Pericles Espada—and under his own name, too—Colón published essays and a handful of poems reflecting on the migrant and U.S.-born Puerto Rican and Latino experience.⁶⁴ In Vega’s first issue as editor and president, Gráfico published a letter of Colón’s, “Palabras de aliento” (Words of Encouragement), in which Colón expressed support for the newspaper’s “principal policy of defending our Colony.”⁶⁵ While Colón’s “Colonia” was arguably that of the raza, a notion still alive in the newspaper’s newly modified motto—“Semanario Defensor de la Raza,” the modifier “hispana” now missing—the presence of Vega and Colón gave Gráfico’s colonia and raza references a greater Puerto Rican meaning, something that, in retrospect, Vega himself acknowledged, writing that the newspaper was “the best” publication “of the Puerto Rican community up until that time.”⁶⁶ The shift was apparent in Gráfico’s editorials, which, under Vega, began including side-by-side English versions, a sign of the newspaper’s interest in communicating with Anglophone readers. One editorial condemned in Spanish how certain “políticos boricuas” in “la colonia” were leading astray “los puertorriqueños en Nueva York” regarding how both Democrats and Republicans were both ultimately in support of “el imperialismo americano en la América Latina” (Gráfico’s English versions for these phrases read “Porto Rican politicians,” “the Colony,” “Porto Ricans resident in New York,” and “American imperialism in Latin America”). The editorial urged los puertorriqueños en Nueva York to struggle for national and international justice by rejecting such kinds of “organización política” (in the English version, “political organization”), advocating instead for a project in which “nos incorporamos a lucha industrial del país.” This last clause, which I would translate as “we incorporate ourselves into the industrial struggle of the country,” appeared thus in the English version: we “fight our battle to defend our economic betterment.”⁶⁷ There is a strategic difference between the Spanish and English versions, with the radicality of the Spanish “lucha industrial del país” (here suggestive of “Porto Ricans resident in New York” who would transform an Anglo-U.S. país through a Latino-inflected class struggle) replaced by the more accommodating, upwardly-mobile-sounding (if still martial) “battle to defend our economic betterment.” The importance of the English-language editorial to Gráfico’s second period is emphasized by an English-language call for advertising, one which links Gráfico’s bilingual maneuvering to “ethnic marketing”: “This weekly Spanish publication is the most read in the neighborhood. Sold all over the section. Nine out of ten of the Spanish Speaking inhabitants of Harlem read Gráfico. Advertise in this Spanish weekly. Read the English editorial column of this publication and become acquainted with our policy.”⁶⁸

Another development in Gráfico during Vega’s editorship was a decline in its self-referential, 125th Street, farándula (show business) coverage. Such coverage, a hallmark of Gráfico’s first period, seemingly fell into disfavor. In its second-period incarnation, for instance, the newspaper attributed to “various readers” the impression that “Gráfico is better off now, with its new look,” which it contrasted with the earlier period, during which, in its harsh assessment, Gráfico had resembled “a theater program, an announcement of tutti le mundi that wanted to call itself artistic and was paid for with its editors’ money.”⁶⁹ There was a difference of opinion over the matter, and it was public, acknowledged in the newspaper’s very pages. One column stated that “something you won’t see” is “O’Farrill and Simón [Jou] resign themselves to Gráfico’s new policy” or “artists resign themselves to the absence in Gráfico of long encomiums on their work.”⁷⁰ The issue found its (indirect) way into an editorial on the need for collective action on behalf of better housing for the “población hispana” (Hispanic population); it stated that spending time on the “farándula” and the “frivolities of life” would “never earn respect for our racial group [nuestro grupo racial].”⁷¹ The accompanying English version of the editorial, however, elided the farándula reference, a gesture keeping the discussion of the cultural politics of Latino show business in-house. During this second period, Gráfico’s masthead listed O’Farrill as a member of its board of trustees and, eventually, as a contributing editor, a title under which he appeared until January 8, 1928, the last date of his public connection to the newspaper’s management. A year later, Vega’s Gráfico editorship came to an end.

The representations of the stage-negrito O’Farrill/actual O’Farrill span the two periods of Gráfico just described. Important among “actual O’Farrill” representations during the newspaper’s first period are two photographs of him out of blackface. One showed O’Farrill standing among a group of other actors and singers who had taken part in a popularity contest. O’Farrill wears a suit and bow tie and appears from the waist up; he is the only Afro-Latino in the image. The caption calls him “our diligent Administrator” and lauds his work on the contest: he “has worked tirelessly” and “deserves our most sincere congratulations.” Another was a headshot of O’Farrill set among publicity photographs of other performers. The spread commemorated a show at the Park Palace that night. Again, O’Farrill was the only Afro-Latino in the group.⁷² The significance of the photographs as examples of an “actual O’Farrill” always in relation to his negrito performance is evident in a comment in the column “Chismes de la Farándula” (Show-Business Gossip) regarding the first photograph appearing in the newspaper: O’Farrill “ya se retrató fuera de carácter” (has already been photographed out of character).⁷³ A series of throwaway lines in other columns also referenced O’Farrill’s off-stage identity. One quotes a police officer who had apparently “searched O’Farrill’s suitcase” on the street. The officer asks him, “are you a bootlegger or a rag vendor?” Another puts O’Farrill on the street, “stepping off a scale and addressing himself to a group of people: ‘How annoying! I haven’t gained a pound.’” And still another attributes to O’Farrill the admission that “if nature had been more prodigious on his behalf, he would have nothing to envy John Barrymore and Lon Chaney.”⁷⁴ In each throwaway line, there is an aspect of performance—and a connotation of the negrito—in the glimpse of the “real-life” O’Farrill, with the police officer displaying his “wardrobe” and mockingly wondering how to fix O’Farrill’s identity; with O’Farrill himself stepping off the street-corner scale and calling his audience’s attention to the condition of his body; and, finally, with his self-deprecating admission of his failure to meet the standard of a Barrymore or a Chaney, the latter of which, of course, was renowned for his use of makeup.

Simón Jou, who was more than just a colleague of O’Farrill’s, but a friend, was also active in creating such representations. During the newspaper’s first period, Jou wrote, “A few nights ago, we were surprised to see O’Farrill weigh himself on a street-corner scale and heard him exclaim with feeling, ‘I’ve lost four pounds!’” Jou responds by saying, “Calm down, Albertico.”⁷⁵ Jou continued writing about O’Farrill’s everyday life in the vein of performance well into Gráfico’s second period. He not only continued to imagine O’Farrill as a body on display on street-corner scales but suggested that, in the absence of steady theater work, O’Farrill had fallen on hard times: “In order to make ends meet,” “Gavito” (O’Farrill’s maternal last name) “is working as a mechanic, and it seems to suit him well because the last time he stepped on a street-corner scale, he found he had gained seven pounds.”⁷⁶ The final two references to O’Farrill in Gráfico were Jou’s, and they extended the idea of O’Farrill as an everyday man caught in a struggle against economic (and now psychological) depression. Jou called him “Alberto (the worried one)” in the penultimate reference, thus calibrating O’Farrill’s public exposure (as was the case with the use of “Gavito”) by revealing only a part of his name. In the last reference to O’Farrill in Gráfico, Jou addressed him significantly as “Gavitofa,” one of O’Farrill’s Gráfico pseudonyms: “We received a telephone call from Gavitofa, who tells us that” he found a job he likes and “got a raise, gained some weight, got some more suits, and hopes to increase his savings.”⁷⁷ Jou’s micronarratives on “O’Farrill,” “Albertico,” “Gavito,” “Alberto, el preocupado,” and, especially, “Gavitofa” tile O’Farrill’s “actual” and (literary) performance identities, occluding and exposing each to varying degrees. The Gavitofa identity does so more than just by blending within a pen name the two last names, O’Farrill and Gavito; as O’Farrill’s pseudonym for “Se dice que a mí no me importa” (They Say I Don’t Care), a column combining mordant observation with a kind of theater criticism, Gavitofa dismisses the claim that some actors (he cites two bufo colleagues, Juan Rivera and Álvaro Moreno) “know who Gavitofa is,” stating, in fact, that Gavitofa “still hasn’t revealed himself” and that “each time he sneaks into theaters, he pays his own way for the right to tell the truth to whoever is no good.”⁷⁸ Gavitofa turns the tables: less a (performing) body on public display on a street-corner scale, he is an anonymous, and later a pseudonymous, purveyor of judgment on the theater, a role that is compensatory, since, as I have suggested, what prompted O’Farrill’s migration to the United States in the first place was likely the difficulty of finding work as an Afro-Cuban man on the Cuban stage, a fate that, in a way, seems also to have befallen him in New York City.

Simón Jou’s figure of a stage-negrito/actual O’Farrill only alludes to the latter’s appearance in blackface. In contrast, a comment from the first period of Gráfico under the title “Things That Stood Out at the Park Palace Festival” offers an actual description, doing so in a way that foregrounds the performative: it is the “gloves and wig of O’Farrill” that stood out at the performance that night—his costume of Cuban blackness.⁷⁹ Significantly, in the papers of Erasmo Vando, the Puerto Rican actor, writer, and activist, a depiction of O’Farrill in blackface survives: a fragment arraché of Afro-Cuban culture in the United States that, located in the Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, the City University of New York, represents Cuban–Puerto Rican cultural exchanges in Harlem as an unsettling archive effect. It is a 5¾-inch-by-3¾-inch, black-and-white, full-body portrait photograph of O’Farrill as the negrito (see fig. 2).⁸⁰ The photograph is damaged in parts, fragile. It shows O’Farrill standing in front of a blank wall. He wears a boater straw, a jacket with a vest and bowtie, slacks worn high above the waist, and what appear to be tap shoes. His arms are close to the side, but his hands—gloved—are active, with both index fingers pointing outward. O’Farrill’s stance is wide, while his shoulders are much more narrow, drawing the gaze upward, from feet to fingers, torso to head. O’Farrill’s face is painted black, setting off a rictus and wide-open eyes that stare at a spot above the camera. Across the lower quarter of the photograph, in a diagonal line of cursive script, the name “Alberto O’Farrill Gavito” appears. On the back, in handwriting, are the words “El Trópico,” a possible reference to a theater or play. While it is difficult to date the photograph with precision, I place it around the Apolo era or shortly thereafter. The mood of the photograph is complex. The negrito suggests hilarity and entertainment, which O’Farrill’s “real” name extends into publicity: getting the word out about the actor playing the role, the actual O’Farrill. Yet the negrito’s mouth and eyes unnerve. In an attitude of frozen mirth, they bestow on the blackface visage—and on the performance of the negro-on-negro bufo—something of the insensible: the negrito looks unmoved, indifferent to feeling, despite the show of popular merriment.⁸¹ In the context of the many missing materials of the Apolo era, this photograph of O’Farrill in the Vando Papers, which both stages and undoes the idea of a bufo hilarity, arrives as a key text of a modernist afrolatinidad.

Animality, Jews, and the “Pegas Suaves”

Of primary significance to the itinerary of O’Farrill’s negrito is “Pegas Suaves,” O’Farrill’s primary writing contribution to Gráfico during its first period. The noun pega comes from the verb pegar (to hit) and the word suave means “soft.” In O’Farrill’s context, pega is a term for “job,” while suave suggests the kind of job under discussion: an easy one. Signed in a pseudonym, “Ofa,” that further layers negrito/actual O’Farrill identities, the “Pegas Suaves” are realist, first-person narratives ranging from five hundred to six hundred words. In the twenty-one installments that appeared from February to July 1927 (the last “Pegas” coincided with Vega’s inaugural issue), O’Farrill meditates on the conditions of Latino labor and migrancy around the Depression, satirizing the injunction to productive labor and the generation of surplus value in a protagonist who spends as much time looking for work as he does evading any and all kinds of it—suave or otherwise. Indeed, in his critical aversion to work and his marginality even to a working-class identity, the “Pegas” protagonist is a kind of lumpenproletariat figure whose modern, Manhattan-island location links him to the “vagabond,” African-diaspora internationalisms particular to the colonial-center, port-city metropoles of Europe.⁸² In related fashion, the “Pegas” represent the barrio afrolatino as a space of masculine, nocturnal wandering, with the narrator beginning every story in his boarding-house room at three in the morning, about to set out in search of work, and later walking the empty streets, riding the subway, or hitching a ride on the back of a truck en route to a factory or warehouse. Accompanying him always, his motif, is a “valsesito” whose melody he sings or whistles—a “little waltz” entitled “Son las tres de la mañana” (It’s Three in the Morning).⁸³

Figure 2. Alberto O’Farrill in blackface, c. 1930 (Box 5, Folder 9, Erasmo Vando Papers, Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York)

In the connection of the “Pegas Suaves” to dance and musicality, in the persona of an “Ofa” narrator, and in the production of nighttime, public performances of (looking for) work, they allegorize O’Farrill’s negro-on-negro bufo experience during the Apolo era, revealing the concurrent production and constitutive relation of literary-journalistic narrative and stage negrito performance, all of which defines an Afro-Latino blackface print culture. In this respect, it will not do to call the narrator of “Pegas Suaves” a “mulatto pícaro [roguish mulatto],” as Nicolás Kanellos does.⁸⁴ Not only is there no evidence in the “Pegas” of a “mulatto” self-appellation; to ascribe it to O’Farrill’s narrator is to reproduce, rather than inquire into, the categories of modern Latino race present in such print-culture spaces as Gráfico. I propose instead that what converges in the narrator of “Pegas Suaves” are the identities of the moreno and the negrito, as reimagined by their possible “African” author, the Afro-Cuban/Afro-Latino “Ofa.”

Two “Pegas” are relevant to the discussion here. In the first, published on July 10, the narrator describes a job he found in Brooklyn:

The job that turned up came about through all the many influences I have in this country, all due, no doubt, to my way with the words of a crude vocabulary that sprouts from my hard little chola [in original; “head”],⁸⁵ covered in tangled, bundled-up hair [una pelambre y recopilada cabellera].

Before anything, I want you to know that I get paid fifty-five dollars a week. All I have to do is play a few roles in Coney Island, where animals of every species are exhibited. I, among them, merely put myself in view of the public.

It’s therefore a job worth having, despite appearances. Even though we’re all together, we aren’t mixed up, because each of us is in his own apartment, luxuriously decorated and protected by iron bars, but only so the curious won’t get the urge to touch and annoy—or better said, so we’ll be within sight but not within reach.

We stay there from 3 to 12. They give us an hour break between 5 and 6, and, what’s more, they offer us the same apartment to sleep in if we want to save money on renting a room.

Don’t think my job is that easy. To do this, you need a man with many intellectual resources, which is why they always thought I was the only one in New York who could do it, which I am.

I have to imitate the roar of the lion, the tiger, and all the songbirds, which is the only thing I’m really afraid of, because at the beach, stuck inside a cage, I can very easily coger un airecito y quedarme con el pescuezo jorobado [in original].⁸⁶ And I’ve got a clean conscience; I’d rather keep playing the . . . I don’t know what role I’m playing inside a cage, but, in reality, I prefer it to walking around, flapping my arms with a crooked neck.

Then, naturally, I have to give the person who got me the job twenty-five percent of my wages, twenty-five percent to the boss [in original] and a good tip to the person who takes care of my apartment so he’ll keep it clean.

I don’t care about any of this because there’s enough to go around. It’s the case that I have a good job and earn a good salary, and even though I don’t take everything home, they pay me fifty-five dollars every week.⁸⁷

The caged narrator performs his roar and singsong in a way that stages the boundary between the human and nonhuman animal. In light of the discourses of modern racist primitivism, in which the “ape was the Negro [and the Afro-Latino negro] unmasked,”⁸⁸ the Coney Island “Pegas,” like racist primitivism, blurs such boundaries, here to turn a profit: acting like an animal earns the narrator a wage. Furthermore, Coney Island as the site of such a performance of racialization allegorizes the period’s primary institution of Latino racial performance, the Teatro Apolo. Over the weekend, a theatergoer could witness O’Farrill as the stage negrito and then, as a Gráfico reader, reencounter him on the page (in the same medium that advertised the Apolo) as a literary character satirizing the very discourses and professional conditions constitutive of his bufo career. The description of the body in its animality is still another sign of O’Farrill’s blackface print culture in the Coney Island “Pegas”: the narrator’s unruly head of hair suggests the negrito’s wig, which, in fact, is implied in the word cabellera, while pelambre can also mean the hide of an animal; this is also the case with pescuezo, which popularly means “neck” but more properly signifies “scrag”—the neck of an animal.

The convergence of animality, race, and performance in the Coney Island “Pegas” draws attention to the fissures in a raza hispana ideology at other important moments in Gráfico in 1927. The very first editorial under Bernardo Vega, for instance, laments that for the “common American [vulgo americano],” there are “only Toltecs, Mayas, cholos, and gauchos”⁸⁹ who “inhabit the countries south of the Río Grande, living in a savage state,” which leads them to consider those countries as “incapable of living the civilized life of our century.”⁹⁰ A column later that summer, called “Palpitations of National Life,” went even further in its elaboration of the Latino white-supremacist subtext of the raza hispana, using a report of Irish American protests against the film The Callahans and the Murphys (1927) to suggest that if Latinas/os protested in a similar way against U.S. cinematic depictions of “lions in Cuba, alligators in Puerto Rico, and barefoot and naked negritos climbing coconut trees [negritos descalzos y desnudos subiendo a las palmas de coco],” one would invite an Anglo-racist “anti-Latino” backlash: “in all the major dailies there would be” a confirmation “of the savages, of the Indians, and of the blacks of Hispanic America [de los salvajes, de los indios y de los negros de la America Hispana].”⁹¹ In Gráfico’s depiction of a colonized, Americas indigeneity (toltecas, mayas), a European/indigenous-Americas “miscegenation” (the cholos, the gauchos), and a colonized but now seemingly U.S. “white,” European-immigrant indigeneity (the Irish), the newspaper would anthologize identities and subjects of the “salvaje” that, across the Americas (and the British archipelago), the raza hispana (or the raza anglosajona) would subject to violent “assimilation.” “Barefoot and naked negritos” are implicated here, too, of course, only in a curious way: they are “fictitious”—like Cuban lions and Puerto Rican alligators, the mishaps of an Anglo-racist imaginary. Yet, when figured as the “blacks of Hispanic America,” these “negritos” are also real, perhaps too real, for Gráfico, as are the “unassimilated” “Indians.” It is such a fissure in raza hispana ideology that, earlier in 1927, the Coney Island narrator of “Pegas” exploited through his narrative of animality and racial performance. What this Gráfico article displaces in such an antsy way on the Anglo imaginary—the fictitious “negritos,” aligned with nonhuman animals—is what O’Farrill’s narrator critically embraces: not only is the a narrator a negrito himself, on stage and in print; he is a Cuban lion, roaring. The “savage-animal” condition of the Coney Island “Pegas” narrator, in short, resituates the “barefoot and naked negritos” of the Gráfico article from a Latin American elsewhere (“south of the Rio Grande”) to the Latino United States itself. The “negritos” of the Gráfico article inhabit Harlem, O’Farrill’s narrator says, and, if not “barefoot and naked,” they are covered in cork, contending with “African,” moreno, and animal identities.

The other “Pegas Suaves” I wish to discuss was published on June 11, 1927, in the same issue of Gráfico in which O’Farrill’s head shot appeared. It, too, meditates on otherness and performance. The narrator, as usual, is up at three a.m. He sings his valsesito, which prompts the boarding-house landlady to ask him to end his song: “porque a los vecinos les agrada ir al teatro pagando su dinero, y…yo les estaba dando una función gratuita” (because the neighbors like paying money to go to the theater, and…I was giving them a free show). With the theater-motif connection now openly admitted in the narrative, the “Pegas” manages Cuban blackface and raza hispana ideas through a crucial subject of Latino modernism in New York City: the Jew.

Taking into account what that good woman said to me, I headed out really early in the direction of Central Park. Arriving at the lake, I stopped and contemplated the ducks playing in the water. It made me feel so jealous, and unable to resist and thinking I could serve as an example and be the first one to do it, the happy thought occurred to me, of course, to wash myself down in that water, which, despite its appearance to what a Jew sheds after taking a bath, due to its clear black color [que aunque parecía la arrojada por un judío después de darse un baño, por el color de negro cristalino que le dejan], I couldn’t resist (and, naturally, I wasn’t prepared for it). I took off my clothes, down to my BVDs, dove into the water, stuck my face [caricatura] out quickly, and soon there were more than four hundred curious onlookers, watching me and full of envy. But since they’re such cowards, none of them decided to jump in. I was already considering myself a hero. I thought I would be given an award, like the aviators who went to Paris, when I noticed someone going for my pants. Thinking that the gentleman wanted to steal the nickel I carry around to trick others, I shouted at him, and since he wouldn’t let go of my clothes, I swam to the edge. I saw him rush toward me, and as his jacket flew open, I saw that the guy had a badge. I turned around and swam with hurried strokes to the other side, while everyone yelled, “Quick!” [English in original.] I got out and immediately I smash full-speed through the park, taking a tremendous lead on the guy. But I failed to realize that I was in my BVDs and that, of necessity, I would have to pass a policeman. And it wasn’t long, in effect, before one stopped me. I was already seeing two blows to the ribs with a nightstick, when he said, “Oh! You’re a boxer and you’re in training [English in original].” I let out a big, startled yes [English in original], which he wouldn’t have believed if it weren’t for all the running I’d done. And that’s how I was able to go free. But when I got home—oh, Lord!—what a huge mess [titingó] I got into with the landlady. She got it into her head [cayuca] that I was crazy and tried at all costs to find a policeman to put me in the hospital.⁹²

O’Farrill’s Harlem Meer comments on his situation in the negro-on-negro bufo through the anti-Semitic figure of a Jew off whom runs water the color of a “negro cristalino” (clear black), a sign of Jewish “pollution” suggesting blackface paint itself and, by extension, early twentieth-century U.S. Jewish minstrels such as Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and George Burns.⁹³ The narrator’s immersion in the negro cristalino run-off before hundreds of onlookers represents not only performance in general but a special kind of blackface routine, one in which the narrator’s blackface paint failed to take, leaving him exposed. The routine thus suggests a comparative canon of ethnicized, racialized minstrel practices in the early twentieth-century United States—the Jewish American judío on black, the Afro-Latino negro on negro—and, for the narrator, the difficulty of (imagining) movements between the two. His is not the fraught career in minstrelsy through which Jewish American performers managed an “assimilation” of their ethnicity in the anti-Semitic Anglo United States; at the same time, for the raza hispana, his immersion in Jewishness, however endorsed by an anti-Semitic feeling, suggests a problematic likening of the Afro-Latino with the Jewish, given how Jewish identity fissures the raza hispana in relation not only to the anti-Semitism of early-modern Spain but to the more recent conflicts between Latinas/os and Jews in Harlem during the Apolo era itself. If, for O’Farrill, the negro-on-negro bufo promises to tighten, but in fact loosens, his bond with the raza hispana, his association with the figure of the Jew troubles matters even more.

The Harlem Meer “Pegas,” set in and around that particular liminal zone of Central Park and Harlem, invokes the relations among the Latino and Jewish barrios during the 1920s. The latter’s population was in decline by the end of the decade, particularly in East Harlem, where the Jewish population (poorer and more working class than the Jews of Central Harlem) had begun migrating to the Bronx, leaving behind “vacated tenements [that] were soon occupied by New York’s newest immigrants—the Puerto Ricans.”⁹⁴ Among the connections between the Jewish and Latino barrios was violence, particularly in the summer of 1926, when the “ill-feeling of recent weeks between young Porto Ricans and others of Spanish blood who have been moving into Harlem in large numbers recently and the older residents of the district broke out…in an attempt at riot, which was quelled by police reserves of four precincts before it got well started.”⁹⁵ The “ill-feeling” among Latinas/os and Jews in Harlem, according to observers of the period, was the result of “commercial rivalries” involving “disputes and bloody fights” and “much difficulty in renting shops,”⁹⁶ although others narrate Latino-Jewish amicability and coexistence, stating, for example, “we became friendly neighbors with Jews” and “the Hebrews or Jews” were the “race with which we, the boricuas [in original] coexisted for a brief time,” partly because of their being “persecuted and discriminated against as we were.”⁹⁷

O’Farrill’s negro cristalino run-off is significant for the way it orients bufo elements with anti-Semitism as a form of ideological consolidation.⁹⁸ For a raza hispana ideology in the Latino United States, the negro cristalino projects the social as constituted not simply by negros and indios “salvajes,” but by judíos, too: the Sephardim diaspora of New York City, which had migrated from the former Ottoman Empire, whose ancestors the Spanish Crown had expelled in 1492, and whose Ladino language, “based on early modern Castilian, with admixtures of Hebrew, Aramaic, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, French, and Arabic, and traditionally written in Hebraic letters,”⁹⁹ transforms further the racial politics of Latino language practices, representing here a “Spanish” that, in the form of a Hebrew alphabet, recollects an earlier, Peninsular raza hispana ideology itself stressed by “vile casts”—that “of the Jews and Muslims.”¹⁰⁰ The cultural signs of a negro cristalino at the time were multiple. At the Apolo, a bufo entitled Terremoto en Harlem o conflicto entre judíos e hispanos (Earthquake in Harlem or Conflict between Jews and Hispanics) featured O’Farrill himself and engaged the “recent conflict between Hispanics [hispanos] and Hebrews,” which the bufo represented as “a purely commercial issue” that, according to La Prensa, should motivate “all Spanish speakers [a todos los de habla española] to come and work together to elevate our race and avoid friction and unpleasant occurrences.”¹⁰¹ In Gráfico, O’Farrill contributed a drawing (called a “photograph” in the following quote) of a “Jew” in a discussion of the proliferation of venues for Spanish-language theater: “Alberto O’Farrill, our editor-photographer, armed with his camera, went to 125th Street and 7th Avenue and took the photograph we include here, which shows a Jew who, unable to find a theater in which to offer Spanish performances [representaciones españolas], goes to the roof [English in original] at the abovementioned corner, with the aim of renting it in order to put on Hispanic shows [funciones hispanas].”¹⁰² The drawing is of a corpulent man, seen from the back, who wears a checkered jacket and a straw boater, carrying a valise and smoking a cigar. The point of the piece, which may well have been written by O’Farrill himself, was that everyone was trying to get into the Spanish-language theater business, including “Jews.” The tone of a line in the following week’s Gráfico, however, was darker: “Spanish theater [El teatro Español] must, should, and will be the property of Hispanics [hispanos], for Hispanics, and by Hispanics. Never for the Jews [Nunca para los judios].”¹⁰³

But it was in Gráfico’s Spanish-English editorials that such Latino-Jewish signs were most strikingly apparent, revealing a raza hispana under stress. Consider the following example: “One of the arguments that our detractors use constantly with the intention of insulting us,” a 1927 editorial begins, “is to accuse us of belonging to the colored race [raza de color]. According to the opinion of these enemies, it is only Indians and blacks [indios y negros] without culture and education that exist in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Hispanic countries [países hispanos].” The charge of being “de color,” according to the editorial, arises from the way in which “we Spanish speakers [los que hablamos español]” have a “spirit of tolerance” and “don’t distinguish among ourselves on account of race hate [odio de razas] in the neighborhoods and towns where we live.…There are in all our countries whites and blacks [blancos y negros], just as in the United States,” and “if on account of having this liberal, altruistic, and human feeling we should be considered as blacks [hemos de ser considerados como negros], then let it happily be so.” What begins with the promise of an acknowledgment of an Afro-Latino identity concludes instead with a figurative admission: that the newspaper’s Latino voice considers itself, in fact, “como negros” (as blacks), which thus instances afrolatinidad as an attitude toward Afro-Latinas/os, the practice of which, as a “feeling” (sentimiento), constitutes here an element of raza hispana ideology. In the English version, the first paragraph reads differently from its Spanish counterpart, dropping “negro” entirely and replacing it with “colored race”: “One common argument heard often among some individuals in Harlem,” begins this English-language version, “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, but he also played the clarinet and alto and soprano saxophones. He was born in the town of Manzanillo, Oriente, in 1903, and he was a prodigy. He performed musical accompaniments to the silent movies at a Manzanillo theater, where he was discovered by Pous in 1920. Pous hired him to play in his company’s orchestra. Socarrás’s earliest professional experiences, then, were linked to Cuba’s early-republican bufo cultures—and not just any, but its most successful. Socarrás not only played for Pous’s stage shows; he eventually began arranging pieces. He traveled with Pous from Manzanillo to Santiago, and from there to Havana, remaining with the company for nearly three years.¹²² In Havana, among his gigs, Socarrás played in Moisés Simóns’s band at the Plaza Hotel. During this time, he recognized racism in music hiring practices. “I noticed about some places where they don’t want in this house, negro,” Socarrás said in an interview. “They start all those things, Cubans.”¹²³ Socarrás resolved to go to New York, where he arrived in 1927, at the height of the Apolo era. He was met at the pier in Manhattan by Justo Barreto, an Afro-Cuban musician. The two rode the IRT together to Harlem, getting off at the 125th Street and Lenox Avenue station, where Socarrás was amazed by the majority-black population.¹²⁴ One of his first jobs was with the orchestra of the white Cuban Nilo Menéndez at the Harlem Opera House, where the Teatro Apolo was located.¹²⁵

Early on in New York City, Socarrás rented a room with an African American family in Harlem to learn English and immerse himself in the everyday cultures of jazz.¹²⁶ His career in African American music and among African American performers during the 1920s and 1930s is well-known: he recorded with the Clarence Williams orchestra, including what is considered the first-ever jazz-flute solo in “Have You Ever Felt That Way”; he was in the orchestra of the Rhapsody in Black and Blackbirds revues; he played with King Oliver, Sam Wooding, Allie Ross, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie; and he led orchestras of his own at the Savoy, the Cotton Club, Small’s Paradise, and Connie’s Inn. He was “also playing Cuban music at El Campoamor, El Cubanacán, and [the] Park Plaza.”¹²⁷ It was a career not only with origins in the island-Cuban bufo circuits of Arquímedes Pous, therefore, but unfolding still in the cultures of the belated bufo of New York City. Socarrás was Marcial Flores’s personal choice to direct the Campoamor orchestra; “he want me there, because he want to have show from Mexico, American shows, from everywhere,” Socarrás said, “and he didn’t have a conductor there,” so “he send somebody to talk to me.”¹²⁸

Nearly every performance of O’Farrill’s at the Teatro Campoamor around 1935 happened to the accompaniment of Socarrás’s band, as La Prensa’s theater coverage between December 1934 and December 1935 demonstrates. As the theater’s “popular and applauded negrito,” O’Farrill, it seems, had expanded his repertoire in negrito characterization at the Campoamor; in one instance, not surprisingly, he did so through still further racial performance, in relation to a stereotype of gender and Chinese identity in a Warren and Dubin song: the “likeable negrito Alberto O’Farrill again steals all the applause, especially in a parody of ‘Shanghai Lil,’ with an appropriate lyric [poesía], in which O’Farrill shows himself as a magnificent character actor.”¹²⁹ In another show, he appeared with Antonio Machín, “the theater’s chorus, and the orchestra of Alberto Socarrás.”¹³⁰ Finally, in what was again an instance of ideologies of circum-Pacific race informing Latino performance, he appeared in a Fernando Luis production called Hawaiianerías (Hawaiianities) alongside the gallego of Guillermo Moreno—formerly of the Arango-Moreno.¹³¹ O’Farrill’s collaboration with Socarrás thus represented a palimpsest of Pous-era, Apolo-era, and now Campoamor-era bufo expression, theatrically and musically, which Moreno’s contributions inscribed further in relation to the memory of O’Farrill’s Key West arrival.

The African American uprising in Harlem of March 19, 1935, that resulted in the deaths of three African Americans matters here as well, as text and context of the racial performance of the O’Farrill-Socarrás Campoamor. In the experience of the Afro–Puerto Rican Lino Rivera, the uprising contained an implication of the negro-on-negro bufo: that Afro-Latino blackface performance signifies how an “African” identity in the United States exposes Afro-Latinas/os to Anglo-white violence, including lynching. La Prensa identified Rivera as both a “Puerto Rican youth” (joven puertorriqueño) and a “Hispanic young man” (muchacho hispano), side-stepping his African diasporic identity. Yet the newspaper had to come to terms with it somehow. It did so by “quoting” the African American woman who, as a witness to the detention of Rivera, “misrecognized” him: what began the “riot” was “the shout of an alarmed woman of the colored race that ‘they’re beating to death a colored boy [un muchacho de color] in the basement of this store!’”¹³² Bernardo Vega uses a similar approach in his account of the uprising in the Memorias: Rivera was a “young man” (un muchacho) whom “various women…took for a young black North American [joven negro norteamericano], even though he was Puerto Rican.”¹³³ Both narratives burden African American women with an “African” and African-diasporic mis/recognition of Rivera, a racialized and gendered division of representational labor that offers La Prensa and Vega a subsequent opportunity to disabuse their informants of the idea.

The mis/recognition of Rivera’s afrolatinidad explains, in part, the dismissive attitude noticeable initially in the press regarding the uprising’s beginning at the Kress on 125th Street. Accounts of Rivera’s detention as a “simple incident” and an “incident of no importance,” and of the uprising as a result of “deceitful circumstances”¹³⁴ and a “false report,”¹³⁵ reflected the apparent facts: that Rivera’s brief detention for shoplifting had somehow become, in the imagination of African American women, an act of police brutality and murder. In fact, such a coding of the uprising’s origins implicates the mis/recognition of Rivera itself: what was dangerously “false” and thus in need of a hasty dismissal was the Afro-Latino Rivera’s interpellation as an African American. Such was the power and perplexity of the mis/recognition that some believed Rivera “had been substituted for the Negro boy” who, according to rumor, had actually been murdered.¹³⁶ The performance logic particular here to Rivera imagined as an Afro-Latino stand-in for an African American corpse was reproduced in more general terms in Alain Locke’s “Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane,” his account of the uprising that appeared in Survey Graphic eleven years after his editing and publishing the New Negro materials in that same journal. Locke, calling Rivera “a Negro lad of sixteen,” described the uprising as “the first scene of the next act,” a “curtain-raiser,” and a “dress rehearsal” for Harlem’s future.¹³⁷ The stage language also signified literally: “The publicity [Rivera] received from the riot has brought him two offers to go on the stage, his friends revealed.”¹³⁸

Miguel Conteras Torres’s No Matarás and O’Farrill’s performance in this Campoamor-centric film invoke the 1935 Harlem uprising in a raza hispana narrative of belated bloodshed (here in the film’s Prohibition-era setting and bootlegger plot) that would seal off the film from the violence and racial mis/recognition of the recent uprising. The film was very much a primary text of the Campoamor. Not only did it premiere at the theater in November 1935 (and, as we shall see, include its exterior in an opening scene); it featured two of the Campoamor’s primary figures, O’Farrill in a supporting-actor role and Fernando Luis in a smaller part, in addition to two amateur performers who had won a contest sponsored by the theater. For O’Farrill, appearing in No matarás was likely the highlight of his career. He was credited third, after the film’s two stars, Ramón Pereda and Adriana Lamar, and he played a character that, “straight” and in blackface, won over the public at the Campoamor—a character that reprised the limits and possibilities of O’Farrill’s nearly decade-long career in negro-on-negro negrito performance in the United States.

No matarás was “the second and final ‘Hispanic’ film” (that is, film set in the Latino United States) of Miguel Contreras Torres’s career, which dated to the early 1920s; Contreras Torres was its writer, director, and coproducer.¹³⁹ The film was made in August and September of 1935, on location in New York City and at the Talisman Studios in Hollywood; it was produced by Hispano International Film Corporation and distributed by Film Selectos and 20th Century Fox.¹⁴⁰ The cast included the Spanish-born Pereda, its leading man; the Mexican Lamar, his wife and leading woman; and, in a supporting role, the Argentinean Paul Ellis.

No matarás begins in Spain, with views of Madrid, where the brother of the film’s protagonist muses on the “one hundred million souls of the same race [misma raza]” that inhabit the Americas.¹⁴¹ The protagonist himself, Antonio Guerra (Pereda), is one such soul, a Spanish immigrant in New York City, and he is down on his luck. On the street one day, he meets Edmundo (O’Farrill), an Afro-Cuban shoeshine who takes him in. Antonio ends up bootlegging, despite Edmundo’s reservations. To protect his identity, Antonio changes his last name, going as Antonio “López.” Antonio eventually rises in the criminal organization, supplanting the boss. The rise, however, was a ruse: Antonio’s promotion was orchestrated by the gang in order to make him the fall guy, with the boss now working behind the scenes. It is only after the boss is murdered that Antonio truly ascends in the organization. Meanwhile, he woos Amapola (Lamar), a Mexican singer at a Spanish-immigrant-owned nightclub managed by a Cuban, Fernando (Luis). Amapola spurns Antonio at first, suspicious of his illegal activities. Eventually, though, she grows fond of him. With Edmundo confiding in her, she learns of Antonio’s participation in a kidnapping plot and alerts his brother, who comes from Spain to rescue Antonio from a life of crime. Amapola also helps Edmundo find a job with Luis’s nightclub, where he performs a “rumba” in blackface. The climax sees Antonio nearly going through with the kidnapping, only to be prevented by his brother, whom he nearly assaults. Appalled at his own behavior, Antonio has a change of heart. The final scene shows him aboard a ship bound for Spain with his brother. They are joined by Amapola, who is embarking on a performance tour of the Spanish peninsula, and by Edmundo, now her “empresario.”

The production and release of No matarás were very much identified with Latino Harlem and, in particular, the Campoamor. During the summer of 1935, Contreras Torres appeared there during a showing of an earlier film, Tribu, announcing that he would soon be directing a new film with an “inter-Hispanic flavor [sabor intra-hispano], for which he wishes to cast actors of all nationalities, and, naturally, he hasn’t forgotten about New York.”¹⁴² The Campoamor-sponsored contest to “find young people of both sexes” to appear in the film even spilled onto the Campoamor stage, with some of the contest participants appearing in a bufo with O’Farrill himself.¹⁴³ It seems likely that Contreras Torres “discovered” O’Farrill and cast him in the film during this time; it is likely he even wrote the part of Edmundo specifically for him. By the film’s Campoamor premiere in November 1935, No matarás was known as the film with “the soul of the Hispanic-American colony of New York [la Colonia Hispano-Americana de New York]” and as the “magnificent film on the life of the Hispanics [los hispanos]” in the city.¹⁴⁴ Its reception underscored the importance of technology matters to understandings of Hispanophone cinema during the period. The film programming at the Campoamor had already prompted discussions regarding the technological successes of the film industry in Spain, which had improved in “lighting, photography, and sound.”¹⁴⁵ With the release of No matarás, such discussions continued, weaving together in praise the film’s technological features and Latino-Harlem content: No matarás was claimed as the “Spanish-language film that has surpassed the precedents established up until now in its impeccable technology and the way in which, in the film, the real character of the Hispanic colony in New York vibrates.”¹⁴⁶ The Anglophone press, with little advocacy interests in the representation of Latino Harlem, offered a response more attuned to elements of the film as a text of the 1935 uprising: its violence and belatedness. No matarás was a “well-made gangster picture,” “shot in New York and assembled in Hollywood,” that “is outdated by being timed during the last months of the dry era and dealing with the activities of bootleggers instead of policy racketeers and the like”—“policy racketeers,” one hastens to add, such as Marcial Flores.¹⁴⁷ In another review, No matarás was a film in which “some good acting and a satisfactory production offset the rather outdated theme.”¹⁴⁸ Such a lag would have been apparent to O’Farrill, if for only one reason: nearly ten years earlier, during Prohibition, he had appeared on the Apolo stage as the negrito in a bufo entitled En el país de los secos, o el efecto de la prohibición (In the Country of the Dry, or the Effects of Prohibition).¹⁴⁹ Finally, the attention and praise received by O’Farrill for his performance in the film was noticeable. His return from California was hailed as “triumphant,” and an advertisement for the premiere (which included an O’Farrill bufo and the regular performance of the Socarrás orchestra) featured a still of him in blackface next to Adriana Lamar.¹⁵⁰ Indeed, in a review of No matarás, La Prensa remarked how O’Farrill, the “popular negrito and idol of the Hispanics [los hispanos], nearly ‘steals’ three quarters of the film.” “Never before had he played a part in films,” it remarked and then added, in a comment of unintentional, bitter irony regarding the situation of theater (and now film) work among Afro-Cuban performers, “yet he acts as if he had been working on screen for years.”¹⁵¹

O’Farrill’s performance as Edmundo in No matarás both revisits and goes beyond his earlier print and performance bufo work. Edmundo, for example, appears out of blackface for a majority of the film, which thus imagines him as a Harlem Afro-Cuban identified with servant work and hard times, with the latter representation reminiscent of Simón Jou’s Gráfico micronarratives of O’Farrill’s lean years during the late 1920s. It is also out of blackface that Edmundo briefly participates in the plot’s criminality and violence. His one blackface scene, which takes place at Fernando Luis’s cabaret, suggests a metacinematic moment: Edmundo appears in a film image that, at the premiere, was projected on a screen above the actual stage on which O’Farrill performed regularly as the negrito. Meanwhile, from start to finish, No matarás draws on a raza hispana ideology that, with Edmundo’s trip to Spain at the end, is rendered literal: the Afro-Latino is finally “back” in Hispania/España.

In fact, in the film’s opening Madrid scene, what prompts the protagonist’s brother to muse on the “one hundred million souls of the same race” that inhabit the Americas, and on the possibility of “uniting [them] with Spain…on practical, moral, and racial foundations,” is an altogether different project, one that hinges on a kind of raza uncanniness: that of “uniting Spain and Africa,” which the plot implies is strictly a business proposition, involving the construction of a physical link between the peninsula and North Africa. Such “African” refractions of raza carry over into a following scene, Edmundo’s first, which features him plying his trade on a Harlem sidewalk—in front of the Teatro Campoamor itself, at 1421 Fifth Avenue—and calling out in English to a passerby who happens to be the protagonist, Antonio: “Shine? Shine? Shine, mister?” The first words we hear O’Farrill speak in the film are in English; after encountering him for so long on the print-culture page, it is a moving experience to hear his voice. The English-language utterance renders Edmundo’s afrolatinidad uncertain: is this shoeshine an African American, or is he an Afro-Latino who learned English? Edmundo soon clarifies the matter, speaking in a Cuban-accented Spanish that facilitates a public show of Latino racial (and national) identification. He begins by confirming Antonio’s white latinidad, telling him, “Usted parece español” (You look like a Spaniard), before asking him, “¿De dónde es Usted?” (Where are you from?). In that same scene, Edmundo also mocks the film’s raza hispana inclinations, here as a concept deriving from Spain as the “motherland.” Having gotten Antonio to say that he comes from Castilla la Vieja (Old Castile)—a historic region of the Medieval Kingdom of Castile, which thus intensifies the script’s Hispanicity—Edmundo replies, “¿La vieja? ¿Qué vieja?” (The old woman? What old woman?). It is a reply in which Edmundo disrupts Castilla la Vieja’s possible grandeur, and he takes it further still: “¡Entonces somos casi paisanos! Yo también soy de Santiago. Santiago de Cuba. Pero mi padre era catalán. Catalán, ya Usted ve. Casi callestano [sic]” (Then we’re almost compatriots! I’m also from Santiago. Santiago de Cuba. But my father was a Catalan. Catalan, you see. Almost callestano [in original]). The play of Edmundo’s Cuban-accented voice—the “catalán” is “casi” the “castellano,” which, in fact, Edmundo “corrupts” further, as “callestano”—not only further disrupts Hispania, satirically disintegrating Spain and its modern, disparate provinces in an ominous gesture on the eve of the Spanish Civil War; it invokes, too, the Afro-Latino uncanny in raza hispana ideology, with Edmundo revealing himself as an Afro-Cuban from Santiago, even as he assumes a Spanish identity through a Catalan father—a form of Cuban colonial-plantation filiation typical for its strategic elision of a mother figure (possibly African diasporic, possibly the subject of sexual violence) in favor of a white, Spanish father.

Central to No matarás’s characterization of Edmundo is his servant identity. Yet the film complicates this, too, imagining a servant Edmundo as a possible Afro-Latino agent of violence through his very service to Antonio. This happens in an important sequence. Antonio has just embarked in organized crime and comes to share the news with Edmundo, greeting him in English: “Hello, boy!” The Spaniard-as-white-Latino Antonio (the gallego, as it were) adopts an Anglo-white form of belittling, racist address in his greeting of Edmundo (the “negrito”), a complement to the latter’s own Anglophone “shine, mister” in the opening scenes. Indeed, “boy” resonates with the phrase “Negro boy” used for Rivera as well as the diminutive ‑ito in negrito. Distressed at the news, Edmundo responds with a plea: “I’ll be your driver, your servant [criado], your shoeshine, but take me with you.” Later, Edmundo decides to make a bomb to protect Antonio. “How to make a dynamite bomb,” he reads from a book, as he dissolves black powder in water, here calling to mind the negro cristalino of the Harlem Meer “Pegas.” The film then trades in the comic value of the scene: Edmundo lights a cigarette, which, in a minor flash, sets off the explosive, thereby defusing for now the servant “boy’s” violent practice. Shortly thereafter, Edmundo interrupts a meeting between Antonio and the other gangsters by producing the fully made bomb. It turns out to be a coconut with a fuse sticking out—an exoticist prop that, yet again, relegates Afro-Latino violence to the place of comic relief. Edmundo goes on to demonstrate the “bomb’s” capability by setting off still another minor flash. Antonio asks him where he got the bomb. “Oh, I make them,” Edmundo replies. “I’m preparing to become an anarchist.” It is a joke that works because Edmundo’s threat of political violence appears so unrealistic.

In the judgment of the New York Motion Picture Division, however, it was not so unrealistic. The division decreed that among the “eliminations…to be made in all prints to be shown in New York State” of the film were “all views of Edmundo making bomb, all views of the bomb, and the explosion.” The reason, it stated, was that such scenes “would tend to incite to crime.”¹⁵² The elimination of the threat of Afro-Latino violence in No matarás represents a practical application of a kind of cultural theory on the part of the state, which deems the relation between the cinematic staging of a bomb-making Edmundo and the scene’s reception determinative: seeing the bomb-making Edmundo on screen would “incite” the people, with effects the state presumes are criminal. The censored scene thus shares a political occasion with the arrest of Lino Rivera at the Kress on 125th Street: Edmundo’s criminality and afrolatinidad, not unlike Rivera’s mis/recognized criminality and afrolatinidad, threaten to “stir up” Harlem, a possibility that the state (as the police, as the Motion Picture Division) would prefer to eliminate.

Edmundo’s appearance in blackface in No matarás, as I suggested, comments on O’Farrill’s career in the negro-on-negro bufo. Set in a cabaret managed by Fernando Luis, the scene imagines an origin for O’Farrill’s career—one that, no doubt, amounted to an in-joke for the audience at the Campoamor, accustomed as it was to seeing him as a veteran performer at that theater over the past year and even earlier in other venues. Amapola tells Edmundo, “you could be a performer [artista], too,” and introduces him to the Spanish-immigrant cabaret owner as “a great dancer.” Edmundo seizes the opportunity, though not without again revising the raza hispana, telling the owner that he “parece gallego” (looks like a Spaniard/Galician/gallego), to which the owner responds, in a huff, that, in fact, he is “a Spaniard.” The owner then adds, “How can you tell I’m a gallego [in original]?” The exchange foregrounds how Edmundo throws into crisis the matter of a Spain-derived raza hispana, making it a matter of Hispanicity’s own unresolved internal differences (as gallego, español), here provoked (and, what is more, uncustomarily rendered as an object of discourse) by the Afro-Latino character: indeed, appropriately enough, by the film’s would-be negrito. Edmundo’s reply to the owner—“Oh, I know a lot about that, quite a bit. You see, my father was a gallego [in original]”—signifies yet again on the raza hispana, showing Edmundo as he plays the part of the self-denying Afro-Cuban American in an even more incredible (which is to say, unbelievable) way, as he presents himself now not as the son of a catalán, as he did in the earlier scene, but as the son of a gallego. Here, in other words, the Afro-Latino’s assimilation to a raza hispana—an assimilation necessary for Edmundo to receive a job offer in performance—is made a mockery of: the Afro-Latino, in fact, interrupts a raza hispana identification at every turn.

When Edmundo finally appears in blackface, he revisits elements of O’Farrill’s earlier negrito work in print and performance. Back at the Fernando Luis cabaret, he peeks into Amapola’s dressing room and asks her, “Do you recognize me?” Edmundo’s face is covered in blackface paint, down to his neck. He wears a wig underneath a fedora, which is on backward. His costume suggests a stylized stage “rumba” outfit, with a scarf, sash, and many-ruffled shirt. “How funny,” Amapola replies. “You look like a Cuban Al Jolson.” Edmundo affirms that, yes, “that’s exactly who I want to be like. All I need now is the voice. But—I don’t know. I’m nervous. I’m not sure if people will like me.” Luis then introduces Edmundo to the audience: “I now have the pleasure of introducing to you a new performer, a creator of Cuban dances, who with his partner, Estrella, is going to dance a hot rumba [rumba sabrosa].” Edmundo appears on stage with his partner, a white Latina named Estrella, herself wearing stylized stage “rumba” attire, including a dress with a long, ruffled train and a scarf around her head. Edmundo begins by singing the verse of a son about a slaughtered goat, accompanied by a quartet (violin, piano, bass, accordion), and then, with the montuno section, he dances the “rumba” with his partner: a dance suggestive of the mannered, often commercialized version of that popular Afro-Cuban dance form.¹⁵³ Edmundo’s negrito is limited here to performing a version of the bufo’s “final rumba” with Estrella, who was played by Estrella Segarra, a winner of the Campoamor contest. Appearing with such a local-girl-done-good intensifies the Latino-Harlem associations of the negrito Edmundo, whom the audience already knew, of course, as the negrito O’Farrill. But it is the likening to Al Jolson that most significantly renews the film’s and O’Farrill’s relations with a Latino-Harlem locality. A “Cuban Al Jolson,” here in the film’s belated Apolo-era/Prohibition setting, figures anew the central image of O’Farrill’s Harlem Meer “Pegas Suaves.” In his big, blackface break, identifying with a renowned Jewish-blackface performer, Edmundo is awash, like the “Pegas” protagonist, in the negro cristalino run-off of a Jew—an identification that, again, compromises the raza hispana.

It is no surprise, then, that No matarás concludes with the principal characters aboard a ship bound for Spain. It is an Americas-phobic ending that would take the cast to the Hispanic “source” of the raza (in the case of O’Farrill, as a maritime “Hispanic” departure that reverses the meaning of his “African” Key West arrival on the Governor Cobb). Yet, because the film gives Edmundo the last word, the ending takes a different course. At one point, Edmundo claims to have seen a whale and is accused of having “visions.” “And what is life?” he replies. “A vision.” He then paraphrases a few lines from the poem “Dolora XXXV: Las dos linternas” (The Two Lanterns), by Ramón de Campoamor, the nineteenth-century Asturian poet. A sign of Campoamor’s popularity at the time, Edmundo’s reference is also more: as the namesake of the theater on 116th Street and Fifth Avenue—even as the film abandons Harlem and the Americas—Campoamor allows O’Farrill to pay tribute to the theater, the site of his greatest professional success.

Off screen, where O’Farrill ended up was a different story. Most immediately, in late November 1935, he was the subject of an homage at the Club Atlético y Social Pomarrosas on Eighth Avenue between 116th and 117th Streets: “No one deserves such a tribute better than Alberto after triumphing in his first film, Mi hermano es un gangster. O’Farrill’s work has been well appreciated by the public wherever he has performed, and tomorrow night a supportive crowd will applaud the honoree, offering thanks for the happy moments he has spread throughout the city’s Hispanic theaters [teatros hispanos].”¹⁵⁴ Among the scheduled participants were Alberto Socarrás, Marcial Flores, and Fernando Luis, together with the Campoamor chorus. Augusto Coen and his orchestra and Davilita were also scheduled to appear, along with Guillermo Moreno and Antonio Machín. The Puerto Rican poet Ángel Manuel Arroyo was also in attendance, and Erasmo Vando served as the master of ceremonies. The event, billed as a “dance-show [función baile]” on behalf of the “popular ‘negrito’” and “great Hispanic actor [gran actor hispano],” went off in an “atmosphere of great warmth,” lasting until well after two in the morning.¹⁵⁵

Return to Havana, 1936

But soon O’Farrill ended up still farther away: not in Spain but in Cuba. In February and March 1936, a year after the Harlem uprising and the collapse of the Alhambra, O’Farrill parlayed his success with No matarás into producing, directing, and performing in The O’Farrill’s Scandals (in English in original), a revue at the Teatro Prado on the corner of Trocadero Street and the Paseo del Prado in Havana, two blocks from the site of the Alhmabra. The Prado was not on the list of “the most prominent theaters in Havana” during the period—a list that included the Nacional, the Regina, the Principal de la Comedia, the Martí, the Encanto, the Fausto, and, of course, the late Alhambra¹⁵⁶—which is in keeping with O’Farrill’s hardscrabble career narrative in literature and performance between 1925 and 1935. Clearly modeled on George White’s Broadway Scandals, The O’Farrill’s Scandals traded on, among other things, O’Farrill’s recent experience in the film industry and familiarity with popular African American music and dance. Likely performing in blackface, O’Farrill was billed as “the star of the film No matarás,” and the initial week of the Scandals featured a series of “Hollywood Revues” (in English in original), with sketches such as “Mi vida en New York y Hollywood” (My Life in New York and Hollywood), “Lindy-Hoop” (sic; Lindy Hop), “De México a Hollywood” (From Mexico to Hollywood), “La boda de Minnie de Mooker” (sic; The Wedding of Minnie the Moocher), and “En un studio de Hollywood” (In a Hollywood Studio).¹⁵⁷ The Scandals cycled through two other original stagings during its month-long run at the Prado, where O’Farrill was described as “keeping the audience constantly roaring with laughter” and even engaging it personally “on the origin of the dances” appearing in the show.¹⁵⁸ It was the return to Cuba (if not triumphant, then at least with a professional project of his own design) of the barrio afrolatino negrito, here outliving the early twentieth-century Havana bufo at its most institutional: the fallen Alhambra. O’Farrill returned to New York City soon after the Scandals closed, and it was another ship’s “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers”—the Pennsylvania’s this time—that again identified him officially upon his rearrival in the United States. Now, under the column “Race or People,” O’Farrill was not called “African,” as was the case in Key West ten and a half years before. Rather, his “Race or People” was “Cuban.” The Afro-Cuban American negrito, once and still an “African,” could now add “Cuban” to his repertoire of racial and national performance in the Americas.¹⁵⁹