Becoming Chocolate, a tale of racial translation

In the fall of 2006, an image (fig. 1) began to appear on the streets of Madrid and Barcelona, magnified on the sides of city buses, on marquees, bus stops, and telephone booths, and in two-page spreads in many major newspapers and magazines.

Entitled "Chocolate Possession," the image features Spanish actress Paz Vega in a montage both before and after she is "possessed" by the pleasure of Magnum's chocolates. Wearing a white lace bodice that is vaguely reminiscent of a wedding dress, Vega is white and demure before tasting the chocolate; she stares straight at the camera with her hand at her chin in thoughtful repose. After tasting the chocolate she is transformed: her hair is slightly loosened, eyes closed, head tilted back, and arms wrapped around her body and face in a portrait of chocolate-induced pleasure. Moreover, she herself has turned "chocolate," her skin having been altered to a deep brown. The chocolate has possessed her in more ways than one.

I found the image arresting though apparently for different reasons than my Spanish friends and colleagues. When I noted with some shock that Vega was in blackface and wondered to what racial logic such an ad belonged, I was repeatedly told that I was wrong: she is not in blackface, the image has nothing to do with race, and, they explained again more slowly, she is not "black"—she is "chocolate." I protested that even if the ad's conceit is to present her as having turned into chocolate, Vega had literally to darken her skin for the image, and now this otherwise well-known actress looks like a woman of color. Is this cross-racial frisson not also intended by the ad, a complement to the idea of sexual possession? No, they replied; to interpret this chocolate-possessed Vega as a blackface performance is simply a mistranslation, an imposition of a foreign racial logic on an unrelated scene.

Is it? To what extent can one translate representations and performances of race from one social or cultural context to another? What are the implications of doing so?

In their landmark 1986 text, Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant affirm that "racialization"—the extension of racial meaning to particular relations, practices (like blackface), persons, or objects (like chocolate)—is a culturally and historically specific ideological process. As practice, the act of blacking up means something different in Spain than it does in the United States—a lesson Paz Vega may some time learn the hard way if she achieves celebrity status in the US and this image follows her there. While racial meanings may be appreciably different depending on time and place, these meanings are neither fixed nor fully agreed upon in their own contexts. Race, Omi and Winant insist, is always "an unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle."³³ Arguments over what any racializing practice means—what it means for Paz Vega to turn "chocolate"—are always in part political arguments about the realities, the past, and the future of race.

Figure 1.

"Chocolate Possession," advertisement for Magnum ice cream, featuring Spanish actress Paz Vega.

For those interested in comparative studies of race or in the translation of texts, performances, or theatrical practices from one racial context to another, Omi and Winant offer the useful formulation of "racial formation" to name the specific ways in which race acts as an organizing principle of social relations in a given social and historical context. Any racial formation, they argue, is formed through the continual and overlapping interaction between micro- and macro-levels: on the micro-level, the formation of identity and patterns of social interaction with others; on the macro, the formation of economic, juridical, political, and cultural structures that give shape to race at the level of the collectivity.

With this in mind, we might say that my rendering of Paz Vega as a blackface performance was indeed a mistranslation, an interpretation that drew on signifying codes of a foreign racial formation. More firmly rooted...