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Conclusion: “Write the Word Black Twice”
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Conclusion: “Write the Word Black Twice” A few years ago, I discovered an article in a Spanish-language newspaper in Washington, DC, that, returning to it now, I realize connects to my work in a way I had failed to anticipate. It describes the lives of Latinas /os of African descent in the area, and it makes a striking claim: while “in some studies” they are known “as Afro-Latinos [afrolatinos] or Afro-Hispanics [afrohispanos],” in “our community” they “are called ‘morenos’ [in original].”1 I place my work among those “studies” that, as the article says, view Afro-Cuban Americans as “Afro-Latinos” (if not as “Afro-Hispanics,” a term that, in any case, at least modifies the compromised “Hispanic” in the direction of an African-diasporic meaning). The acknowledgment of a category of “afrolatinos,” and hence the tacit validation of an (academic) inquiry into afrolatinidad, comes with a catch: those who “mention afrolatinos” seem to stand for a “them,” a gathering whose implied outsider status puts it (and its forms of knowledge) in contrast with those on the inside, a favored location from which the newspaper speaks as an “us.” And that “us” is “our community” (nuestra comunidad), a pan-Latino grouping with its own way of “calling” AfroLatinas /os: as “morenos.” I am a white Cuban American who lives in Adams Morgan and teaches in the English department at George Washington University, so I find myself in both places, an author of “some studies” (algunos estudios ), a member of nuestra comunidad. I remark how a Latino print culture in the early twenty-first century surfaces the very same word for 214 / conclusion Afro-Latinas/os in “our community” that La Prensa used in the 1920s to describe Alberto O’Farrill’s teatro bufo at the Apolo, descriptions in which the word did the work of a double euphemism: moreno as a nicer negro, moreno as a nicer negrito. The DC newspaper displaces the negro in favor of the moreno in order to intimate that the proper subjects of a negro identification are others: African Americans. Morenos, in contrast, is the word “we” use for “our blacks,” who are not (in their identity, in their social and cultural practices) related to African Americans. Such expressions of an unbecoming blackness in the Latino United States— here as an insinuation of a moreno superiority over the negro—is what the figures in this book, from Alberto O’Farrill and Eusebia Cosme to Cuban Link and Esteban Luis Cárdenas, have engaged, offering, if not a definitive example of what they would “call themselves,” then an array of texts on the experiences of Afro-Latino racialization in the United States. The temporality of moreno—its past in La Prensa and present in an early twenty-first-century DC newspaper—confirms the (un)timeliness of my project: the way I have located the Afro- in Cuban America (and, along the way, the whiteness of Cuban America, too) in and beyond the archives of literature and performance. A prime example of the past and the present of race and latinidad in Afro-Cuban American literature is Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir (2000), by Evelio Grillo (1919–2008). Black Cuban, Black American recounts events in Grillo’s life occurring largely from the 1920s to the 1940s—his youth and adolescence in Ybor City, Florida, and at Dunbar High School in DC, his army experiences in South Asia during World War II—a stretch that aligns Grillo with the major periods of O’Farrill and Cosme, even as the memoir’s date of publication marks it as a text of contemporary Latino literature. Indeed, the question of the past and the presentisverymuchattheheartofthepublicationhistoryofBlackCuban, Black American. The book was published by the discipline-altering Arte Público Press as part of its Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage series, under a subimprint, Hispanic Civil Rights. The back of the book suggests more: “Arte Público Press’s landmark ‘Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage’ series has traditionally been devoted to longlost literary and historical works by Hispanics of many decades—even centuries—past. Publication of Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir marks the first work by a living author in this series. The reason for this unprecedented honor can be seen in Evelio Grillo’s path-breaking life.”2 Grillo’s relation to Latino recovery is anomalous: the work of an AfroCuban American “living author,” his text was never lost to begin with. [44...