Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America by Antonio López (review)

With the publication of Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America, Antonio López makes an important intervention in Cuban American studies through his focus on the fluid discourses of blackness and whiteness in which Afro-Cubans participate in the United States. Examining literature and performance, he argues that the cultural productions he investigates are examples of “afrolatinidad: the Afro-Latino condition in the United States” (4), determiners of which include language, physical appearance, and relationship to Cuba itself. The Afro-Cuban American writers and performers López examines not only negotiate the definitions of race and ethnicity imparted by the United States but also carry the lingering legacy of Latin American definitions of those categories. As members of “overlapping African and Cuban diasporas” (5), they articulate a distinct national and racial identity that undercuts prevailing definitions of cubanidad, which perpetuate a normative discourse of whiteness in spite of proclamations of mestizaje.

In his introduction, López masterfully establishes the necessity of his project. Carefully laying out his argument, he emphasizes how Afro-Cuban Americans have historically traversed a precarious landscape in the United States: potential alliances with the African American community might lead to charges of betrayal of the Cuban race, and English fluency may lead to suspicions of linguistic impurity. Loyalty to the island meant (and for many immigrants, still means) a retention of the original language as well as the preservation of stratified intergroup relations between white, mulato, and Afro-Cubans, excluding associations with other black communities. Insisting on a recognition of blackness in Cuban American identity, López dislodges hegemonic constructions of Cubanness and latinidad more generally.

In the first chapter, “Alberto O’Farrill: A Negrito in Harlem,” López analyzes a decade in the life of the Afro-Cuban blackface performer Alberto O’Farrill. A celebrity of the teatro bufo tradition, O’Farrill only achieved fame in the United States on stages in Harlem, where immigrant communities from the Spanish Caribbean lived in the early decades of the twentieth century. Examining newspaper clippings and photographs, López asserts that O’Farrill takes part in what he terms “blackface print culture” (21), which undercuts contemporary discourses of a unified Hispanic race.

In “Re/Citing Eusebia Cosme,” López analyzes the career of Eusebia Cosme, a recitadora or reciter of poesía negra, black poetry produced during the 1930s in the Spanish Caribbean. An Afro-Cuban woman, she gained fame for performing the poetry of white and mulato poets such as Nicolás Guillén and Luis Palés Matos. In one passage, López juxtaposes an essay written by famed white Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz introducing Cosme to a mostly white upper-class Cuban audience with essays printed in both the Afro-Cuban and the African American press about her appearances in the United States. Ortiz’s apprehension is striking in that it highlights his apparent discomfort with welcoming this gendered and racialized body into a seemingly white performance space. López moves on to recover Cosme’s radio broadcasts from the 1940s, in which he focuses on the addition of African American poetry in translation to her repertoire, as well as her appearances in film later in her career. Both underscore the divergences in the reception of the black female body.

The third chapter, “Supplementary Careers, Boricua Identifications,” speaks to the relationship between two prominent men, Rómulo Lachatañeré and Piri Thomas, and the New York Puerto Rican community. Known for his writings about the African diasporic religion of Regla de Ocha or Santería published in the 1940s, the Afro-Cuban Lachatañeré was also a skilled photographer. His writings about the practice of this religion by immigrant Puerto Rican populations in New York City, as well as his photographs on the island of Puerto Rico itself, underscore his rapport with this community. López next turns to Thomas, whose Down These...