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49 Carmen Miranda: You do not understand me when I’m talking? Charlie McCarthy (Edgar Bergen): No. I understand you better when you’re not talking. —The Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Show (1941) Carmen Miranda is a Hollywood icon—a swirl of tropical fruit and Technicolor, the Good Neighbor who taught the United States that Brazil was ripe for the picking. Her whirling celebrity spanned over two decades: one decade in Brazil (1929–1939), and nearly fifteen years in the U.S. spotlight (1939–1955). While Miranda epitomized Latin America for her Hollywood audiences, she was in fact a Portuguese émigré. In Brazil, Miranda was a white working-class woman who embraced and commodified the traditional black styles of Brazilian music and performance; in the United States, however, this complexity was reduced to an amalgamated Latin American-ness that helped the United States negotiate its own racial and national hierarchies. As the opening epigraph from the Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy radio program suggests, Miranda’s U.S. audiences did not prioritize her speech (“Ventriloquism, Carmen Miranda” 1941); in the United States, as in Brazil, her allure was widely read and interpreted through her exoticized body. In both countries, Miranda embodied an in-betweenness; her body, image, and persona existed between the representational poles of blackness and whiteness. But Miranda’s in-betweenness served Brazil and the United States in radically different ways, unifying one nation through a hybridized sonic sameness and the other through an exoticized visual difference. In Brazil, Miranda bridged the gaps of race and class and united the nation through samba, an Africanbased Brazilian musical form that established Miranda as a recording and radio Carmen Miranda Shakes It for the Nation chapter 3  star early in her career. The image of Miranda’s white working-class female body performing traditionally black music provided an early symbol of national unity in Brazil, even though she did not appear in many films before going to Hollywood. In the United States, Miranda continued her musical career, but her celebrity was heavily dependent on her spectacular physical appearance as a light-skinned woman bearing an excess of Latin American emblems. Miranda’s colorful costumes, heavily accented English, and performative body parts (hips, arms, and eyes) became a generic, if exaggerated, Latin American Other against which white Americanness could be defined. Miranda’s flamboyant in-betweenness—as a Latin American fashion icon, dancer, and performer—helped the United States negotiate its own domestic tensions around race, gender, and nation by commodifying and compartmentalizing in-betweenness.1 Unlike many of the women in this volume, Miranda displayed an in-betweenness that initially benefited from whiteness (in Brazil), but ultimately she was not white enough (in the United States); in effect, her Hollywood career was aligned more closely with blackness, preventing the greater access to narrative opportunities that whiteness afforded. While Miranda’s style was quickly co-opted by white women (and men), its black roots were increasingly obscured in the United States and insistently framed as solely Latin in U.S. publicity (a precariously racialized position not unlike that of Jennifer Lopez in later years). Unlike Rita Hayworth, Rita Moreno, or Jennifer Lopez, with their more heavily choreographed legacies, Miranda was an untrained dancer and rarely danced with a partner or traveled across the floor. Yet she was associated with constant movement, especially of her hips, hands, and eyes—gestures that largely incited others to dance. As a shining screen star of the 1940s, Miranda, through her U.S. career, exemplifies how in-betweenness and movement were transformed into a generic yet marketable commodity known as the Hollywood Latina. By popularizing a so-called Latin style in film, music, and fashion during the 1940s, Miranda facilitated the U.S. importation of an exotic nonwhiteness as though it were a raw material like coffee or sugar. Although Hollywood’s emphasis on Miranda as a wholly Latin American figure erased the black roots of her performance style, her presence helped mediate the commodification of blackness within U.S. popular culture. Subtle repercussions of the Afro-Latino/a lineage and transgressions of Miranda’s image and movement arose, however, and the particular sexualization of Miranda’s restricted representation in Hollywood film illustrates the complex hierarchies of class, race, and gender operating within both the United States and Brazil. Although Miranda’s profits from live appearances, film roles, and musical recordings with Decca allowed her to dance all the way to...

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