Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance by Brian Eugenio Herrera (review)

Winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism in 2015, Brian Eugenio Herrera's Latin Numbers is a thoroughly compelling book. To start, Herrera is an excellent writer whose sharp style is both insightful and imaginative: "The conga made Danny Kaye a star" (18). Herrera's core argument is likewise rich and generative, namely, that US popular performance has historically been a critical site for the racialization of Latinos. In his own words, popular performance is "a rehearsal space, a cultural platform on which ideas about raciality are practiced and enacted" (16), and through which Latinos are produced as "a distinct—and distinctly nonwhite—aggregate ethnoracial group in the United States" (16).

Equally relevant, Herrera fruitfully argues that the commonly used frameworks of diversity and inclusion are inadequate for understanding the intermittent visibility of Latino performance in US popular culture. In order to grasp this phenomenon, Herrera proposes instead the concept of "Latin numbers." This notion aims to simultaneously describe the "stylized mode of musical-theatrical presentation that deployed a shifting constellation of visual, musical, and linguistic cues to enact a distilled fantasy of Latin American peoples, places, and traditions, presumably for US audiences" (20) and theorize the cyclical American fascination with "all things Latin" that constitutes less a recognition of expanded Latino cultural impact than "its own form of recurring, spectacular entertainment" (4). Made possible by the assumption that Latinos are always recent immigrants without deep roots in the US, Herrera suggests that audiences move from the excitement of discovery to sophisticated familiarity and, finally, to disinterest as attention drifts to "anything else" (4)—until a new cycle begins.

To sustain his arguments, Herrera organizes the book in seven parts: a theoretical prologue, a short epilogue, and five chapters. Chapter one, "Conga! Latin Numbers and the Good Neighbor Era," delves into the conventions of the "Latin" musical during the 1930s and 1940s, and how it imagined "Latinness" in contrast to "Americanness" through cultural (rather than racial) difference; chapter two, "Stealth Latinos: Casting the Limits of Racial Legibility at Midcentury," examines what different forms of ethnoracial "legibility" meant for working actors such as the Mexican-American Ricardo Montalbán, Afro–Puerto Rican Juano Hernández,and Cuban-American Mel Ferrer during the 1950s; chapter three, "How the Sharks Became Puerto Rican," historicizes the genesis and impact of West Side Story (1957–1961), the first major musical to place Puerto Ricans at the center of the narrative; chapter four, "Executing the Stereotype" notes the work of Latina/o performers and playwrights since the 1960s and how they enacted and theorized stereotypes to "eliminate" them. The final chapter, "Carlos Comes Out: Gay Latin/o Lovers in the AIDS Era," considers how Latino characters provided a site for queer difference in Hollywood and independent cinema during the 1990s.

Overall, the book makes several fundamental contributions to various fields, including Latino, queer, performance, and media studies: first, it expands and complicates the archive and history of "playing" Latino. Instead of dismissing "Latin"-themed spectacle as irrelevant or stereotypical, Herrera underscores how Latin numbers are pivotal to the process of imagining Latinos as a distinct racial group. In addition, although Herrera largely focuses on (visible) popular culture, his nuanced attention to behind-the-scenes decision-making produces a critique of "common sense" or how certain choices, whether public or private, artistically successful or not, are also part of the racialization process and have consequences for Latinos and performance. Furthermore, Herrera engages with the complex productivity of Latin numbers and how these periods of sustained attention make history through the careers of Latino performers who are rarely compared to each other such as Montalbán, Hernández, and Ferrer. In this way, Herrera claims not only Hollywood and Broadway for Latino performance studies but Mexican movies, independent films, and black cinema as well.

Second, Herrera...