Singing "Angelitos Negros": African Diaspora Meets Mestizaje in the Americas

This essay examines interpretations of the ballad "Angelitos Negros" by Pedro Infante, Eartha Kitt and Roberta Flack as well as the Mexican film of the same title. Based on the Venezuelan poem "Píntame angelitos negros" by Andrés Eloy Blanco, "Angelitos Negros" protests racial discrimination and demands recognition of a multiracial population. In tracing the circulation of this ballad throughout the hemisphere, its performance by these varied artists, and the contexts for these performances this essay examines the significance of multidirectional cultural flows in the hemisphere; explores the Americas as historical, geographic, linguistic, and political site of cultural production; and sheds light on the role of literature, film, and music in mediating race on the American continent. This examination of the inter-American cultural and political movements of racially marked subjects in Venezuela, Mexico, and the United States identifies significant interplay between the national/local and the inter-American/global in discursive and structural constructions of race. Specifically focused on the discourses, material realities, and practices of mestizaje and diaspora in the Americas as these are enacted in each version of "Angelitos Negros," this essay finds that although we customarily regard mestizaje and diaspora in the Americas as discrete formations, and generally consider each in relation to dominant racial formation, comparative analysis of these in relation to each other locates borrowings, convergences, and unexplored points of contact (and tension) between diasporic and mestizo practices and concepts.