"Angelitos Negros": African Diaspora Meets Mestizaje in the Americas

Singing "Angelitos Negros": African Diaspora Meets Mestizaje in the AmericasAuthor(s): Theresa DelgadilloReviewed work(s):Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Jun., 2006), pp. 407-430Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068369 .Accessed: 29/09/2012 13:46

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Singing "Angelitos Negros": African Diaspora Meets Mestizaje in the Americas

Theresa Delgadillo

Singing "Angelitos Negros" I 407

her 1969 debut album titled First Take, Roberta Flack offers a

moving performance, in Spanish, of "Angelitos Negros." The lyric, adapted by Andres Eloy Blanco from his 1940s poem titled "Pintame

angelitos negros," decries the absence of blacks in representations of heaven

and, by analogy, their exclusion from full participation in the nation. Made famous by Pedro Infante in the 1948 Mexican film Angelitos Negros, the song critiques this exclusion as it mobilizes the discourse of race to challenge the

predominance of European-inspired aesthetics and neocolonial hierarchies of race. Flack was not the only U.S. artist to take up Infante's song; Eartha Kitt also recorded it in 1953. That a poem contests prevailing racial hierarchies

may not be surprising; however, what is unexpected is that this border-cross-

ing text would find such varied interpreters, all of whom further amplified its

critique.1 How does a Venezuelan poem about discrimination become a Mexican

song and film about mestizaje and then further metamorphose into an African American ballad of black power? Answering the question requires a combined

investigation into the technologies and historical circumstances that have en-

gendered transnational cultural contact in the Americas, the significance of African diaspora throughout the hemisphere, and the conceptualization of race within and between nations. An examination of the inter- American cultural and political movements of racially marked subjects in Venezuela, Mexico, and the United States identifies significant interplay between the national/ local and the inter- American/global in discursive and structural constructions of race.2 Tracing the circulation and transformation of Andres Eloy Blanco s

poem, therefore, leads to a deeper understanding of the Americas as historical,

geographic, linguistic, and political site of cultural production and illumi- nates the role of literature, film, and music in mediating race in the Americas.3 This essay is a preliminary exploration of particular cultural forms (for ex-

ample, bolero-ranchera, soul) and particular ideas and histories of race (mestizo, mulatto, diaspora) in the Americas as these take shape and influence one

©2006 The American Studies Association

408 I American Quarterly

another via the migration of performers, technologies of performance, and

political, historical, and socioeconomic circumstances and movements that

engender these migrations.4 These hemispheric discursive and material realities are constitutive of the literature, music, and film of the Americas. While we customarily regard African diaspora and mestizaje in the Americas as dis- crete formations, and generally consider each in relation to dominant racial formation, comparative analysis of these in relation to each other locates bor-

rowings, convergences, and unexplored points of contact (and tension) between diasporic and mestizo practices and concepts.5 As cultural, historical, and social formations, mestizaje and African diaspora, therefore, are less dis- crete than we typically acknowledge.

In interpreting multiple versions of "Angelitos Negros" across two decades, this study suggests that as writers and artists sought to create new understand-

ings of race and racial community in an era marked by the predominance of U.S. power (and rigid U.S. racial hierarchies), growing recognition of African

diaspora, and shifting notions of mestizaje in the Americas, they frequently crossed the color line as well as national borders. The terms mestizaje and

diaspora in this project signal both distinct historical conditions of racial mixture and dispersal and practices of solidarity and affiliation.6 The hemispheric discussion that I trace in this project is both popular and scholarly, couched in

religious and material discourses, fed by conceptions of subjectivity grounded in national as well as transnational spheres, and influenced by political and commercial-material realities.

Putting the discourses of borderlands, mestizaje, and diaspora into greater conversation in this work may deepen our understanding of both African

diaspora in the Americas and U.S. Latino/a cultural formations in relation to those of Latin America.7 This project engages artistic and critical voices across the Americas and decenters the U.S. as the principal site for the framing of a

hemispheric literature, art, or music. In contrast to work that examines the encounter between distinct cultural forms and racial formations in U.S. urban centers, this essay suggests that scholars push further in the direction of track-

ing multidirectional cultural flows in the Americas if we are to fully understand its many voices and their complexity. This essay also suggests that hemi-

spheric cultural production emerges from those who have traditionally been excluded from citizenship and "belonging" in nations.8

This story begins with sixteen lines of verse, roughly two stanzas of a ten- stanza poem titled "Pintame angelitos negros." Composed in the 1940s by Venezuelan poet, politician, and diplomat Andres Eloy Blanco, the poem pro- tests racial discrimination and asserts a Venezuelan multiracial reality. The


observation that opens the poem - "jAh mundo! La Negra Juana,/;la mano

que le paso!/Se le murio su negrito,/si seiior" - quickly gives way to the voices of the character Negra Juana, whose child has died, and her interlocutor, whose

protest about the absence of black angels in representations of heaven com-

prises most of the poem.9 "Pin tame angelitos negros" embodies features of the folk form of verse long present in Latin American African heritage communities and explored in the documentary Verso Negro.w The poem, however, quickly morphed into a five-sentence song drawn mostly from the verses of the third

speaker in the poem - the one who voices the protest about the absence of black angels in representations of heaven. While the poem also asserts a multiracial reality, the lyrics merely imply it. The lyrics, adapted from the poem, are as follows:

Pintor nacido en mi tierra con el pincel extranjero pintor que sigues el rumbo de tantos

pintores viejos. Aunque la Virgen sea blanca pintame angelitos negros que tambien se van al cielo todos los negritos buenos. Pintor si pintas con amor porque desprecias su color si sabes

que en el cielo tambien los quieros Dios. Pintor de Santos de alcoba si tienes alma en el

cuerpo porque al pintar en tus cuadros te olvidaste de los negros. Siempre que pintas iglesias pintas angelitos bellos pero nunca te acordaste de pintar un angel negro.11

Once the poem becomes a song lyric, it is no longer clearly marked as a discussion among African heritage speakers. Instead, the lyric employs the adjective "their" rather than "your," "my," or "our" before the noun "color." Nonethe-

less, the lyric maintains the core of both the poems demand and its critique and remains marked by the historical context of its emergence.

The circulation of these lyrics throughout the Americas attests to a dia-

logue about race conducted through transnational routes of commodity production and exchange. "Pintame angelitos negros" and the three interpretations of the song "Angelitos Negros" discussed here present a series of racial

projects in the Americas that attempt to create space for African heritage and mixed-race citizens both nationally and hemispherically. This midcentury border-crossing traffic in poetry, film, and music disrupts the assumed coher- ence of nation-states and the normalized racial projects that sustain them as it also gives rise to hemispheric cultural production.

The Making of a Protest Poem

The poem "Pintame angelitos negros" and, even more forcefully, the song "Angelitos Negros" suggest that excluding blacks from representations of heaven contradicts Christian belief in God s inclusive love. The critique of the painter


and/or those with the power to represent draws strength from a shared Chris- tian tradition. The poem thereby juxtaposes competing racial projects that claim the same faith. The dominant project excludes blacks from the riches of the afterlife as it denies syncretisms of black religious life, while the multiracial

project suggests a faith that sees through the gaps in representation and em- braces the transcultural experience of black Christians. Together they contrib- ute to the poem's dynamic of contrasting visions of black participation in

religious and national life, if we read the painter as also symbolic of the politician. Blanco's lyric for the 1946 song directly reverses a popular Venezuelan

proverb that "blacks do not enter heaven" by asserting, instead, that blacks "also go to heaven" (my translation).12 Both poem and lyric intervene in a

contemporaneous Venezuelan discussion about race, national identity, and

religious subjectivity. Andres Eloy Blanco, born in 1 897, was a mixed-race poet who participated

in the era's influential movement for greater representation for Venezuela's mixed-race and black populations, Accion Democratica (AD).13 Blanco became an important poet of national life as he also pursued political and diplo- matic careers. He served in numerous offices, including the municipal government of Caracas, the legislature, and the Constitutional National Assembly in 1946, which approved a constitution for a democratic Venezuela. He was a senator and foreign minister in 1 948 when the Mexican movie Angelitos Negros was made. Soon thereafter, he would find himself exiled to Cuba and then Mexico, where he died in 1955.14

Venezuelan literary critic Rafael Angarita Arvelo lauds "Pintame angelitos negros" as a Venezuelan corrido in that it formally echoes the lyric and epic romance that is a precursor to the corrido and thematically asserts the rights of the people.15 This engagement with popular cultural forms and interest in the national civic conscience leads Arvelo to recognize the poem as kin to other of Blanco's poems that he views as more directly participating in traditions of black poetry in the Americas (the son of Nicolas Guillen in Cuba, for ex-

ample).16 Arvelo's observation, nonetheless, situates the poem's folk elements in the context of an early-twentieth-century movement in the Americas that

sought to valorize African diasporic cultures. This dovetails with an aspect of the AD's work that historian Winthrop R. Wright's study notes: the AD took nationalist pride in the contributions of Africans to Venezuelan culture and strived to make these more widely known.17 "Pintame angelitos negros" is an

example of Blanco's attention to the racially and culturally mixed character of the Americas, which, according to Venezuelan critic Luis Beltran Prieto

Figueroa, also surfaces in his other work.18


The proliferation of chapters of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improve- ment Association in the Americas (151 chapters) coincides with the time of the AD s greatest activity and is further indication of the routes by which ideas about race traveled.19 According to Rev. Ernie P. Gordon, the black nationalism voiced by Marcus Garvey was integrally linked to a black liberation theol-

ogy that encouraged replacement of images of a white Christ and white Virgin Mary with black Madonnas and black Christs. The UNIA's promotion of revisions of Christian iconography derived in part from the view that Africa had given rise to Christianity in significant ways.20 Garvey's insistence "that black men should depict a God in their own image and likeness"21 finds an echo in Blanco s poem - on the insistence of black angels - and suggests a

dialogue about race in the Americas circulating, in part, through the pan- African and Afro-Creole consciousness movements of the early twentieth century.

Darien Davis notes that in this era "black intellectuals became intent on

exposing the racist attitudes that excluded black people from mainstream so-

ciety, and they were determined to educate society about the African contributions to American civilization." Guillen in Cuba and Blanco in Venezuela were among those who championed this movement.22 Knowledge of the exclusion and devaluation of racially marked subjects in the United States in- formed Accion Democraticas project of redefining the Venezuelan imagined national subject in ways that would include the country's significant mixed-

race, black, and Indian populations.23 For some prominent African Americans who visited Venezuela in the first half of the twentieth century, such as James Weldon Johnson, and even to historian Wright himself more than thirty years later, Venezuela appeared more accepting of blacks.24 For others, such as well- known African American singer Robert Todd Duncan, Venezuela was less

welcoming. The race-based denial of hotel accommodation to Duncan in Caracas inspired a successful AD-led campaign to implement local and national legislation against such discrimination, which had, theoretically, been eliminated in 181 1.25

However, as Wright notes, despite a diverse population with numerous blacks and mixed-race individuals in positions of social and/or economic power, racism thrived and was perpetuated in Venezuela via the circulation of "folklore" about blacks in print media that catered to a white elite. Wright cites the

previously discussed proverb about the absence of blacks in heaven as an ex-

ample of this popular lore.26 Andres Eloy Blanco addresses this popular "wis- dom" in both the poem "Pintame angelitos negros" and the lyric for "Angelitos Negros." A key tension in the poem is the interrelationship between visibility and equality. The poem and song both address a painter who relies too heavily


on a foreign tradition rather than discovering a native Venezuelan one, casting the denial of a multiracial Venezuelan reality in art as a Euro-centric and un-

patriotic action. These lines echo Jose Marti s famous call for immersion in the knowledge of the Americas as they paradoxically assert nationalist pride.

In his study of elite views on race in Venezuela, Wright observes that Blanco and the AD, while a vocal minority for black rights and equal opportunity, and an effective force on these issues when in power (1945-1948), nonetheless accommodated dominant racism in Venezuela.27 Andres Eloy Blanco and other leaders of the AD accepted the predominant view that the whitening of the population or blanqueamiento through racial mixture over time had im-

proved Venezuelan culture, society, and politics. This "cafe con leche" ideol-

ogy, as Wright dubs it, had a significant impact on the cultural project that was a corollary to their political investment in black rights.28 Here, the cri-

tique of AD's limitations parallels Frances R. Aparicios discussion of another Blanco, namely Tomas, a prominent Puerto Rican intellectual of the 1930s who both decried racial prejudice and took "a conciliatory stance toward racial conflict in Puerto Rico." Aparicio questions the nationalist displacement of racism onto the United States, instead emphasizing how the language that Tomas Blanco excuses contributes to constructs of race and gender.29 In Ven- ezuela, prevailing norms allowed successful blacks or mixed-race individuals to share equality with whites. However, in the absence of equal opportunities for all blacks and Indians, and their long-standing relegation to the lowest classes, this appears to have meant only that a few might symbolically achieve whiteness, keeping the myth of racial democracy intact rather than displacing whiteness as a preferred goal or national identity. The song "Angelitos Negros" embodies these contradictory leanings, and its circulation, as we shall soon see, owes much to cultural flows in the Americas fed by the particular juncture of technology, war, migration, civil rights, and economic interests in the 1940s.

As this brief glimpse into 1940s Venezuela suggests, the political and cultural movement that sought to redefine citizenship and nation did not occur in isolation but instead participated in the conversation among diasporic communities across the Americas, including artists and activists in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. While Blanco s poem speaks to a particular moment in the Venezuelan nation, a significant factor in its appeal beyond the borders of Venezuela lies also in that, from the start, it emerges in two con- texts: that of the nation and that of the African diaspora in the Americas.30 This latter context endows it with a powerful resonance throughout the hemi-

sphere.


Pedro Infante, Mexican Cinema, and Mexican National Notions of

Mestizaje

The 1948 Mexican film Angelitos Negros features a sentimental and melodramatic performance of the title song by the film's star, Pedro Infante. A film and singing sensation, Infante's prolific career in movies has recently been

reprised by Chicana author Denise Chavez in her 2001 novel Loving Pedro

Infitnte.M Directed by Joselito Rodriguez and filmed and released in 1948,

Angelitos Negros is based on the Fannie Hurst novel Imitation of Life. An osten-

sibly antiracist melodrama, Angelitos Negros was also produced in Mexico a second time, again under the direction of Joselito Rodriguez in 1969. Hurst's novel gave rise to two U.S. film versions as well, the first in 1934 directed by John M. Stahl and the second directed by Douglas Sirk in 1959.32 While

Hollywood influence on the Mexican film industry of the 1940s was significant, Angelitos Negros \s not merely a copy of a U.S. film hit.33 Instead, it offers a uniquely Mexican perspective on mestizaje and diaspora.

In the film Infante plays a well-known brown-skinned performer named

Jose Carlos Ruiz who falls in love with and marries a light-skinned, blonde school principal, Ana Luisa de la Fuente, played by Emilia Guiu. Unbeknownst to her, Ana Luisa's lifelong black Nana (nanny and maid), played by Rita

Montaner, is her mother. This becomes known to Jose Carlos only when Ana Luisa gives birth to their dark-skinned daughter, Belen. Hysterically preju- diced, Ana Luisa rejects her daughter while Jose Carlos assumes the "blame" for their daughter's skin in order to prevent a nervous breakdown in Ana Luisa.

Upon the death of Nana, brought about by an angry slap from Ana Luisa that sends Nana tumbling down the stairs, the truth emerges and Ana Luisa ac-

cepts her parentage and, finally, her daughter. Angelitos Negros takes place in a history of racial difference distinct from

that of the United States. Mexico inherits the legacy of eighteenth-century New Spain's delineation of difference in the form of sixteen racial castas, described by Magnus Morner.34 Writing about modern Mexico in The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz argues that "the Mexican does not want to be either an Indian or a Spaniard . . . And he does not affirm himself as a mixture, but rather as an abstraction: he is a man." Paz's emphasis on the "abstract and universal conception of man" implicitly contrasts with the colonial enumera- tion of the varieties of men and women that Morner documents.35 We might, therefore, read Paz as putting forward a decolonial argument to distance the Mexican nation from the colonial legacy of the racial stratification. Yet, de-

spite Paz's assertion, this thought remains tellingly incomplete in his own es-


say, which repeatedly invokes the Spanish and Indian dyad at the heart of Mexican subjectivity.

A confusion between the so-called genetics of race and race as social formation emerges out of colonial Mexico and continues, according to Agustin F. Basave Benitez, to influence the development of Mexican national identity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Benitez suggests that "mestizofilia" in the nineteenth century serves criollo needs and desires to absorb, and thereby uplift, Indians via racial mixture, while in the twentieth

century it marks out a new nationality, in the words of revolutionary era theo- rist Andres Molina Enriquez, "energetic with Indian blood."36 The twentieth

century quasi-indigenism characteristic of both Enriquez and Manuel Gamio, director of the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, Benitez suggests, not only differs from the Vasconcelian notion of a fifth race, a union of all races nonetheless indebted to superior white European cultures, but was also more influential.37 However, at midcentury, as Benitez notes, mestizaje "ceases to be seen as a goal to be reached and becomes a historical fact," a fact supported by census data.38 This is the moment that informs the racial politics of Angelitos Negros.

The creation of a Mexican version of a U.S. novel and film is not surprising given the collaboration between the U.S. and Mexican film industries in the era of the Good Neighbor policy. In its Golden Age, film production in Mexico soared and the nation rapidly became a "Spanish-language Hollywood" to Latin America.39 Carlos Bonfil has observed that the star system of this new

industry created easily identifiable and marketable products in the form of actors who embodied national myths, thereby reducing "the distance between the local products and their spectators" (my translation). In this system Pedro Infante represented both virility and humility as a true man of the people.40 Movies, therefore, became mediums for stars and stars became mediums for national myths, usually via song in what studies of Mexican cinema refer to as its "musical vocation."41 Angelitos Negros participates in this national cultural

project, one made possible by the rapid development of Mexican media and its expansion to Latin America between 1920 and 1940, according to Joy Elizabeth Hayes. Building on the work of Moreno Rivas, Hayes notes that one Latin American musical style that was "Mexicanized" in this process was the Cuban bolero. By the 1950s this musical style had transformed into "a ranchera-bolero hybrid that was associated most directly with the songs of Pedro Infante," whose long and productive career as a film actor was always intimately linked to his career as a singer/performer.42


The regional influence of Mexican media is overtly incorporated into the

plot of Angelitos Negros. Jose Carlos, who is a well-known singer in the Ameri- cas, represents Mexico in the diversity of his musical repertoire - including conga, ranchera, and popular ballad forms - and the Mexican film industry's dominance in Latin America when he and his new bride, Ana Luisa, meet

adoring audiences throughout Latin America. Their six-month concert tour takes them to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires,

suggesting both African diaspora in the Americas and Mexican regional predominance. Coupled with the films thematic focus on responsibility, the tour

suggests that Angelitos Negros is, in part, animated by the desire to fully represent Latin America.

Julia Tunon Pablos, Carlos Bonfil, and others note that while Mexican films were influenced by U.S. technologies, themes, and forms of expression, they embraced distinctly Mexican ideals, especially sacrifice, death, and modesty over upward mobility.43 Angelitos Negros represents this populist ethos in the character of Jose Carlos, yet a critical analysis cannot avoid an examination of what is being sacrificed. In several musical performance scenes Jose Carlos

appears in blackface, visibly enacting the film's goal of representing Latin America and in contrast to Ana Luisa's wish for distance from blackness. The role of blackface in the film is the inverse of its function, according to Michael

Rogin, in facilitating Jewish assimilation into the American mainstream.44 In

Angelitos Negros blackface represents the desire to absorb blackness into the Latin American ideal of mestizaje rather than, as in the case of U.S. Jewish immigrant performers, to overcome marginality. However, this technique for

representing a Latin American ideal bears examination. As Eric Lott observes, the "instability or contradiction" in minstrelsy generates plural political effects.45 Rogin, too, notes that it provided "not only the possibility of changing identities but also a dark, racially exclusionary side."46

Angelitos Negros effects this exclusion repeatedly - when, for example, Jose Carlos's closest friends, Fernando and Isabel, who are black, are exiled from his married life - underscoring Rogin's observation that "racial masquerade may be generated and contaminated by the rigid boundary itself."47 Jose Carlos's "sacrifice" in maintaining the lie that his mother was of African heritage in

hopes that Ana Luisa will one day accept her daughter and the "truth" can then be revealed extends his blackface performance into his daily life sans the burnt cork, but again with the aim of eventual incorporation.

While the movie makes much of Jose Carlos's fortitude in bearing the de- ceit, the biggest sacrifice is made by Nana, the black mother posing as her


daughter's servant, who forgoes pleasures of being recognized as a mother in

exchange for securing her daughters financial and material wealth. The burden of keeping her true relation to her daughter a secret while that daughter daily and cruelly rejects her own dark-skinned daughter, Belen, contributes to Nana's deteriorating health as the film progresses. When Nana, overcome with

grief, can no longer care for Belen, Ana Luisa abandons the family home and Isabel fortuitously appears to care for the sick child. The films critique of Ana Luisa's denial glosses the fact that everyone participates in the denial. Its lib- eral plea for inclusion does not overcome this. Jose Carlos's insistence that difference is irrelevant never manages to erase the racial hierarchy that keeps Nana in the role of servant, casts Fernando and Isabel as loyal subordinates, unconsciously propels Ana Luisa's desire for incorporation, and leaves him the role of star.

Infante s version of the song suggests the incompleteness of the films at-

tempt to embrace African diaspora. In his performance of "Angelitos Negros," accompanied by an orchestra in which piano and strings feature most promi- nently, Infante as Jose Carlos pleads for the depiction of black angels, figures clearly missing from the otherwise beautiful representations of angels and vir-

gins in religious iconography. While Infante s song conveys sympathy for those

subjected to discrimination, its religious appeal masks the film's contradictory religious view that blackness is a curse and burden to be borne. His performance ends with a melodramatic rendition of the song's closing rebuke, which

neatly packages its sentiment, signaling stasis rather than change. The fact that the song is a ranchera-bolero hybrid contributes, in part, to this stasis. As

Aparicio notes, the bolero "as sociomusical practice is closely linked to patriar- chy and to its male-gendered voices and lyrics" and frequently addresses the

"pain, love, solitude, and desire" of the male singer for the absent idealized and/or heartless woman.48 Although "Angelitos Negros" directs itself to the

painful quest for racial equality, the latter remains idealized and absent, while the figure of the black angel is feminized in Infante's performance.

The visual scene, however, disturbs the musical suggestion of containment and incorporation, suggesting instead ruptures and gaps. Infante, as Jose Carlos, performs "Angelitos Negros" following the end of his daughter's birthday party, brought about abruptly by Ana Luisa's cry of shame when one of the invited

girls refers to her daughter as "la negrita." Jose Carlos sits Belen atop the piano and sings the title song to her. In the background, Nana moves about the room, picking up after their recently departed guests, but approaches the piano as Jose Carlos sings, putting her hand on his shoulder. For a fleeting second, the father, daughter, and grandmother appear together before Nana reaches


to collect Jose Carlos s glass atop the piano and carries it offon her housekeepers tray while he continues singing. The film thereby visually undercuts Nana's

incorporation into the Mexican family. In discussing race and the rhetoric of

injury, Carl Gutierrez-Jones observes that "when inclusion too quickly glosses the nature of an injury" it can become a "pacifying inclusion."49 If we consider the visual scene and Infante's rendition of the song together, we see precisely that danger as it unfolds - the elision of racial hierarchy.

Angelitos Negros displays contradictory impulses related in many ways to the convergence of visual and auditory technologies and their particular roles in mediating Mexican identities and social relations. The movie champions the cause of the marginalized, asserts that race does not bar social mobility, and engages in the process of further hybridizing the music it deploys, yet it reinforces a national myth of mestizaje in which the mestizo is innately ethi-

cally and morally superior. The films racial politics also play with a foundational narrative of the Mexican nation wherein Ana Luisa becomes a Malinche

figure - the much-maligned original mother who supposedly betrays her own race - in her desire for the racial other. The narrative displaces the policing of the color line onto the characters of Ana Luisa, Nana, and women generally, while its male mestizo characters represent the voice of racial acceptance. This assertion of mestizo masculinity dislocates gender in favor of race, a danger that Stuart Hall, writing about black popular culture, cautions against.50 Valerie Smith suggests that this type of disarticulation ignores the historically constructed meanings that attach to the intersection of race and gender, meanings that, in this case, create the premise for this story/Nana's predicament.51

In reading the film as adhering to both the historical fact and the prevailing discourse of mestizaje, I agree, in part, with Joanne Hershfield's assessment, which argues that "film melodrama is able to accommodate cultural uncer- tainties surrounding issues of race in ways that fit within the limits of pro- scribed social attitudes and beliefs."52 However, in contrast to Hershfield, I

suggest that in the mestizaje of Angelitos Negros it is the brown-skinned mestizo Jose Carlos whose absorption of mulattas renews mestizaje. The film, therefore, does not completely endorse notions of "whitening," but in this critical

reading its mestizaje is contaminated by racial masquerade. The tension among mestizaje, melodrama, and minstrelsy in the auditory and visual work of

Angelitos Negros has the effect of unfixing racial categories and national identities as it tries to reframe them, an effort not unrelated to Mexico's role in the 1940s as exporter of films to Latin America and audience for African Ameri- can performers and athletes who sought career opportunities abroad.53


Performing Diaspora

The economic and social shifts engendered by World War II that brought Mexican and U.S. film industries and racial formations into greater conversation also led to greater recognition among African Americans of international

diaspora. Penny M. Von Eschen notes that African American interest in anti- colonial movements around the globe, but particularly in Africa and the Car- ibbean, activated this shift in consciousness. As she observes, Walter White of the NAACP famously commented in 1945 that "World War II has given to the Negro a sense of kinship with other colored - and also oppressed - peoples of the world."54 However, in the cold war era this anticolonialism and progres- sive social movement in the United States came under fire.55

Eartha Kitt came of age as a performer in this period, and an analysis of the

professional persona she developed and musical career she pursued - with

particular attention to her recording of "Angelitos Negros" - is most fruitfully considered in this context. Kitt s performances and politics were intermeshed in ways that have not been much examined, as, for example, when she commented that "the Dunham company meant something in many ways. It stood for progress for the Negro, a step forward in the eyes of every audience that saw us."56 Kitt spent several months in Mexico when the Dunham revue Bal

Negre traveled there in 1948.57 In 1953 Kitt recorded her version of "Angelitos Negros" in New York, and

it remains present in later reissues of her recordings.58 The lyric appears to have been part of her regular performance repertoire and is one of twenty- two

songs included on Eartha Kitt Purr-feet: Greatest Hits.59 The arrangement, led

by Henri Rene and his orchestra, opens with Spanish-inspired acoustic guitars then shifts into a playful melody evocative of movement, rumba, riding. We can read in the combination of these distinct sounds the attempt to signal the cultural/racial/ethnic conflict that the lyric addresses. In contrast to the sensu- ous voice Kitt employs in many of the romantically themed songs she recorded, in "Angelitos Negros" Kitt s vibrato is subdued and she sounds, for brief moments, angry. Although she neither departs from nor adds to the

lyric, Kitts version repeats the second half of the song - that part of the lyric that condemns racism and discrimination.

Known as a song stylist and frequently associated with "exotic" in the national imagination, Eartha Kitt pursued a dancing, singing, and acting career when segregation limited advancement for U.S. blacks in all areas of life. Be- tween the time of Marian Andersons famous 1939 Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial, after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred


her from performing at Constitution Hall because of her race, to Anderson's 1955 concert at the Metropolitan Opera, another first for her personally and for black singers generally, African American artists increasingly sought and won broader audiences.60 As Donald Bogle observes, pursuing a performance career for some meant an emphasis on refinement for the good of the race, while for others, especially those in the 1950s, "a period hungry for sexy rebel- liousness," and particularly for Kitt, this meant crafting the image of the sex

symbol over that of the sex object.61 Yet, Kitt's self-fashioning occurs against the backdrop, as Farah Jasmine Griffin observes, of the prevailing "stereotype of the oversexed, over-ambitious, 'tragic mulatto' epitomized by the character of Peola in the 1934 version of Imitation of Life."62

Her international travels helped to establish Kitt as a singer, dancer, performer, and actor abroad before she found such professional acceptance in the United States. Yet the trajectory that led to her choice to select, perform, and record "Angelitos Negros" was not just a coincidence of travel; the fact that it so effectively melded the persona of international songstress that Kitt culti- vated with issues of race in the Americas indicates the particular confluence of

politics and popular culture for people of color in the Americas at midcentury. Bogle argues that the lives of black female superstars have long been of fasci- nation precisely because they "told us something about Americas attitudes on race and sex" and that Kitt, in particular, "seemed desperate to discover herself

by means of another cultural experience, one free of American prejudices and

pruderies."63 Where Bogle reads desperation, I read awareness and suggest that Kitt's attentiveness to diaspora and the multiplicity of racial, social, and cultural experience contained within the category of black, and of black woman, in the Americas is evident in her autobiography, her repertoire, and her professional career.

Perhaps not as radical as Billie Holidays "Strange Fruit" years earlier (a 1938 song that also began as a poem) or Nina Simone's 1964 "Mississippi Goddam" years later, Kitt's 1953 "Angelitos Negros," nonetheless, condemns racial discrimination in the conservative cold war era.64 At midcentury, as Von Eschen notes, the U.S. government's attempt to shape the entry of civil rights issues in African American performance played a role in State Department cultural exchange projects that sent numerous jazz musicians abroad as ambassadors of U.S. democracy (Katherine Dunham, whose repertoire included a ballet against lynching, applied and was rejected).65 Von Eschen observes that these State Department cold war cultural "efforts to shape perceptions of America" stood in stark contrast to inaction on discrimination and violence

against blacks in the United States.66


Kitts two autobiographies, Thursdays Child (1956) and Alone with Me

(1976), suggest the workings of racialized social structures in Kitts self-creation. In describing her race, Kitt states:

There are no records of my birth, which isn't at all surprising since I was born of mixed racial

parentage on a plantation in South Carolina. I know only that I'm two or three years older than my half-sister, Pearl. And I know that my father was white and my mother was black, with Cherokee Indian blood.67

Linking the absence of an official record with her mixed-race suggests that her

presence, her mixture, her multiracial background made her legally illegible. In this telling commentary about her origins, she situates herself as a subject of the Americas and its racial mixtures as she contests racial binaries. Kitt describes her mixed-race background as one that frequently created tensions in a manner not unlike that described by Omi and Winant, who have sug- gested that individuals seen as anomalies to prevailing racial paradigms, such as mixed-raced persons, provoke "discomfort" and generate "a crisis of racial

meaning."68 Kitt encounters this "discomfort" throughout her life. As a child she is turned away from her mother s uncle s house when he declares, "I don't want that yalla gal in my house."69 Her cognizance of racial formation comes into play in her later self-fashioning through contact with Latino/as and Latin Americans. While black women in the media were still confined to "categories based on their individual colors," the 1940s and 1950s, Bogle suggests, were eras that welcomed "mulatto looks" in the figures of Lena Home, Katherine Dunham, and Eartha Kitt.70 If Kitts mixed-race background made her more

acceptable to some later in life rather than earlier, she appears, in part, to have

leveraged this fluidity to create a self-identity grounded in diaspora - the very historical condition informing both her rejection and acceptance - thereby expanding and enriching the meanings of black in the United States.

In her autobiography, Kitt's entrance into the world of Latino/a New York as a young woman becomes another step in her appreciation of diaspora. In her high school neighborhood "people spoke a language I did not understand -

most called it Cuban, though some called it Puerto Rican."71 During these

years, Kitt learned from her schoolmates as she joined in the weekly dances at local halls: "they were willing to teach me their way of dancing as well as their

way of talking."72 She contrasts her entry into Latino/a life with her aunts narrow insistence that she abide by a narrative of black womanhood defined

by self-abnegation and respectability.73 In Thursdays Child Kitt describes her

professional path as being influenced by both her Latino/a experience and her work with the Katherine Dunham dance company. Upon exiting the theater


where she has just seen Carmen Miranda perform, Kitt fortuitously meets a member of the Dunham group, who invites her to audition.74 In discussing her eventual success as a performer, she tells us: "The truth of the matter was I knew nothing whatsoever about dancing, except what I learned in the Cu- ban dance halls."75 But her narrative suggests that her acquisition of that knowl-

edge/skill grew through extensive practice at Latino/a dances in New York. The convergence of Latino/a and African heritage worlds in her life, and of the intersection between race and gender, deepens for Kitt with a scholarship to study with Katherine Dunham's company, a group dedicated to exploration of the cultural legacy of African diaspora in the Americas.76 With Dun- ham Kitt performs Spanish language songs about African spirituality in the Americas.77 Her experience with the company also strengthens her resolve to alter the script of the tragic mulatta from one who is doomed by her "mixed blood" to one who succeeds in upsetting reigning racial and gender paradigms to achieve equality of opportunity.78

The limiting effects of prevailing narratives of race and gender are ever-

present in Kitt s story. In Thursdays Child, Kitt repeatedly describes her travels, performances, and life in Mexico, France, Sweden, Germany, England, and Turkey in glowing terms, reveling in the ease and mobility she experi- enced there as well as her agency in shaping her performances. However, when she returns to New York, anxiety, dread, and powerlessness take center stage in her narration of her first nightclub performance.79

Kitt s unique multilingual repertoire and professional persona as a woman with bite and worldly sophistication transgressed prevailing racial, ethnic, and

gender boundaries by embracing a diasporic identity and practice that inter- sected with a mestizo one. Her autobiographical self-presentation and musical choices in the context of cold war and early civil rights activism suggest Kitt's active participation in fashioning a popular music career through which she could participate in dismantling those boundaries. Her version of "Angelitos Negros" speaks to this resistance and foreshadows a more overtly political rendition sixteen years later, in the midst of the black power movement, by Roberta Flack.

Black Angels and Black Power

"Painters, why do you always paint white virgins? Paint beautiful black angels." - Roberta Flack, introducing "Angelitos Negros" in performance80

Roberta Flack's version of "Angelitos Negros" virtually explodes with energy, offering a soulful assertion of black rights. The combination of Flacks power-


ful and resonant voice, musical arrangement, and altered emphasis in the repetition of lyrics creates a protest song worthy of its era. Rather than the brief musical prelude to lyrics that versions by Infante and Kitt offer, in the ar-

rangement Flack performs we hear an extended instrumental opening that moves from piano to guitar to snare drums, establishing the rhythms of a march to which her voice is joined. Her arrangement and vocal skills alter-

nately evoke a haunting sense of loss and an emphatic assertion of racialized

identity. Flack extends the ballad as Kitt did by repeating the second half of the lyric, then, in rising crescendo, thrice singing "angelitos" capped by "negros" - the song's dramatic high - followed by a vocal riff that blends into instrumentals. An accumulation occurs in this particular repetition, as the tone and timbre of Flack s phrasing shifts and builds. As the song closes faint snare drums continue, suggesting a movement beyond lyrics and music. Flacks version, with its emotional climax centered on the final repetition of the phrase "angelitos negros," shifts both the subject of the song from the painter to the black angels and the emotional center from lament to protest.

Flacks transformation of "Angelitos Negros" from an unsettling but still sentimental song into a soulful ballad, infused with the consciousness and

memory of its age owes much to both her personal trajectory and newly form-

ing musical movements. As Manning Marable notes: "In the 1960s the mili- tant awareness of identity and collective energy was captured by the term soul.

Engaging in the struggle to redefine the world and one's community meant that each person had an obligation to history and memory."81 Gayle Wald

suggests that soul was not only a musical practice but a movement, a view also

expressed by Paul Gilroy, that involved "style, politics, ideology, subjectivity, and spirituality."82 Wald's recognition of soul as a "diasporic black cultural

practice" that affirms black difference and joins together the spheres of the sacred and the secular links soul with spiritual traditions and emphasizes soul's debt to the black church, especially its revision of gospel's "dynamic, devo- tional energy," but also its embrace of vocal singularity and distinctiveness as well as its "ability to articulate the needs and aspirations, both spiritual and

profane, of its audience."83 In contrast to Infante's sentimental song against discrimination and Kitt's

subdued anger, Flack asserts pride in blackness and a haunting sense of loss. Her rendition - one of eight songs included on her debut album, First Take -

aligns itself with the social protest movements of the 1960s. Flacks version claims both a spiritual ground and a critical agency with respect to religion, as does her arrangement of the traditional "I Told Jesus." Like the civil rights and United Farm Workers movements, which had drawn upon religious inspira-


tion in organizing marches, rallies, and campaigns for social justice, Flack's

"Angelitos Negros" links march, cause, and faith in its critique of racist exclusion and affirmation of black pride. Not surprisingly, music and religion went hand in hand in Flacks life. Raised by a father who was a pianist and a mother who was a church organist, Flacks early interest in music was nourished by her participation in the AME Zion Church and evident in her appetite for the

gospel tunes of a local Baptist church.84 Her musical training continued at Howard University, followed by a short teaching career and then a regular engagement in Washington, D.C., at Mr. Henry's, performing a repertoire that included blues, jazz, folk, and traditional spirituals in a club remodeled to resemble a church.85 While Flack made thirty-nine demos for the first album, she ultimately chose only six of these, among them "Angelitos Negros," a song that had been a part of her regular repertoire at Mr. Henrys.86 Given Flacks

personal history as well as the significance of religious inspiration in the social movements of the 1960s, it is not surprising that her first album creates a

spiritually infused musical engagement with the compelling issues of the era and centrally features a Venezuelan/Mexican song that addresses race, reli-

gion, and diaspora in the Americas. The quote from Flack's performance that serves as epigraph to this section

further extends her project of resignification. The ambivalent Spanish lyric of

"Angelitos Negros," "aunque la Virgen sea blanca pintame angelitos negros," translates into English as: "the Virgin may be white but paint me little black

angels." Is this a multicultural compromise? Or conformity with the ideology of blanqueamiento, or whitening? Flack does not adhere to either possible read-

ing in her translation, instead questioning as she repeats and alters the phrase. Her change builds on the demand for recognition in the song's lyrics. In Flack's translation of the song's Spanish-language lyrics, the image of the white Virgin cannot go unchallenged, suggestive as it is of a racialized and patriarchal discourse mobilized to ensure the subordination and invisibility of blacks, in-

cluding a long history of violence against blacks in the United States.87 Her translation also, significantly, contests the "en-gendering of race" and constitution of the black female body as the locus of violence and lasciviousness

that, as Saidiya Hartman notes, underwrote the captivity of blacks and the containment of white women.88 Her question about images of the divine fore-

grounds a racial ideology built upon a particular sign of divinity, and her

query inserts itself in a contemporary political debate and movement aimed at

dismantling the effects of that racial ideology. Flack's linkage of "beautiful" and "black" insists on visibility and grace.


Brian Ward notes a heightened interest in songs about racial harmony in the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet finds that the greater emphasis was on black pride, black disenfranchisement, and the dangers of contemporary urban life - all topics that crystallize on First Take.89 Five of the eight songs on First Take address the social unrest and shifting mores of the era, including Gene McDaniels's "Compared to What," Donny Hathaway and Leroy Hutson's

"Tryin' Times," and Frances Landesman and Thomas J. Wolf Jr. s "Ballad of the Sad Young Men." First Take combines three important elements of the

emergent soul music experience - social and political commentary, spiritual engagement, and romantic/sensual themes rendered in a style in which the voice and its beauty, power, and modulations were primary.

Flack's adaptation of the song represents not simply another remake of a

popular song but what Gilroy terms "a truly compound diaspora."90 She offers a music that embodies the reflections and actions of those in the Americas who have sought to resignify "black" and "mestizo" to account for both the

experience of African diaspora in the Americas and the transcultural exchange that uniquely characterizes the Americas. Performing in an era when the previous decade's battles over voting rights and an end to segregation gave rise to movements for equality in housing, education, and employment opportunities, a situation that made greater coalition between African Americans and Chicano/as and Puerto Ricans possible, Flacks song mobilizes the experience of African diaspora to contest the marginalization of blacks as a "minority."91 In doing so she conveys an awareness of hemispheric inequalities and movements to contest them, of mestizaje in diaspora, and, I believe, of the possibility for alliance based on an understanding of one's social location in both

hemispheric and national cultural, political, and economic flows.

Conclusion

The desire for equality and justice voiced in these interpretations of "Angelitos Negros" via the request for images of black angels contrasts with the recurring Hollywood film image of the black angel who, according to Krin Gabbard, smoothes over racial tensions.92 The black angel of Hollywood deflects attention from those structures and ideologies that support inequality while pro- viding a harmonious image of black/white relations for some viewers. Yet this, Gabbard notes, "reflects a serious racial crisis in American life so unpleasant that it must be replaced by fantasy."93 That crisis clearly has deep roots in the Americas, but it is also from the Americas that it is answered. As Kirsten Silva Gruesz notes, shifting our interpretive focus to one that considers "the United


States as it belongs to the Americas' as well as hemispheric "patterns of migration, diaspora, and exile" leads toward a transamerican cultural history.94

Even in its most sentimental version, "Angelitos Negros" asks a question about representation and inclusion - in nations, religions, art - that brings the colonial legacies of race to the fore as it challenges the exclusion of blacks and mestizos from nations. Recognizing the historically contingent and cul-

turally formed meanings of race in this analysis as well as the interplay among them sheds light on the significance of hemispheric exchange in creating af- filiations, alliances, and experiences that give rise to new meanings of race. Far from sharing in a transcendent blackness, the consciousness and identity activated in the poem, film, and particular performances of the song cannot be

separated from their unique local/national literary, musical, cultural, and political spheres, yet they also clearly speak to each other across borders of the shared conditions of mestizaje and diaspora in the Americas.

Stuart Hall notes that black popular culture is always a "product of partial synchronization, of engagement across cultural boundaries, of the confluence of more than one cultural tradition, of the negotiations of dominant and sub- ordinate positions."95 While Hall and Gilroy center on cross-Atlantic cultural flows, this essay's focus on inter-American movements and dialogues aims for an understanding not only of U.S. black, Latino/a, or Latin American popular cultures and literatures but of their interaction in creating a hemispheric literature and popular culture, with multiple antecedents, that grows from the

place where mestizaje and diaspora meet. Both diasporic and mestizo racial formations at midcentury clearly shared an understanding of the multiplicity or heterogeneity they contained as well as the hemispheric historical, material, and discursive realities they shared. In tracking these versions of "Angelitos Negros" as it is interpreted by performers situated outside of national citizen-

ship or, in the case of Mexico, in subordination to the United States, we can see the emergence of a literature, film, and music of the Americas that is

grounded in the experiences and practices of diaspora and mestizaje.

Notes 1. With gratitude to those whose comments, suggestions, and research assistance have enriched this

work, including participants in the University of Arizona Sex, Race, and Globalization Seminar Se- ries; the UCSB Center for Chicano Studies Conference on Hybridity, Mobility, and Literacy; the Princeton University African American Studies Program Works-in-Progress Series; the UIUC Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society "Imagining Bodies" Symposium; and the anonymous readers


of American Quarterly. My thanks also to the University of Notre Dame for library support and research funding.

2. This complements a previous essay on Chicano/a racial formation that seeks to address what Carl Gutierrez-Jones has observed in Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Dis- course {Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) as the centrality of racism in the United States and the complicated Chicano/a relationship to it - legally, socially, historically, and representationally. See '"Angelitos Negros' and Transnational Racial Identifications," in Rebellious Reading: The Dynamics of Chicana/o Cultural Literacy, ed. Carl Gutierrez-Jones (Santa Barbara: UCSB Center for Chicano Studies, 2004), 129-43.

3. This discussion is based on race as theorized by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).

4. For more on transculturation see Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar ( 1 947; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).

5. This essay follows Jose David Saldivar's call in The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History for a hemispheric perspective: "a new American literary, cultural, and critical cosmopolitanism" (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 4, and his research on material hybridity and intercultural exchange in Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). I am also indebted to Frances R. Aparicios work in Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998) on the influence of African heritage musical forms in the Americas and the racial, class, and national identities embodied in these forms. Aparicio identifies "Angelitos Negros" as one of the most popular songs of Mexican performer Tona La Negra. George Lipsitz's Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (London: Verso, 1994), as well as his Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minne- sota Press, 1990), considers the agency of racialized working-class subjects in creating "diasporic inti- macy" through which "shared social realities" can be addressed. I am mindful of Lipsitz's question: "Which kinds of cross-cultural identification advance emancipatory ends and which ones reinforce existing structures of power and domination?" {Dangerous Crossroads! , 12, 36, 56). In answering this question I follow Rafael Perez-Torres's suggestion that "one must understand a different history in order to understand the modes of exchange within different cultural communities," in Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 39. Josh Kun also suggests analyses of "black and Latino intercultural identification and performance" in "Against Easy Listening: Audiotopic Readings and Transnational Soundings" in Everynight Life: Cul- ture and Dance in Latino/a America, ed. Celeste Fraser Delgado and Jose Estaban Munoz (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 293-94.

6. For more on diaspora as practice, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Trans- lation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

7. Gloria Anzaldua theorizes the borderlands as the site born/made "wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory." Grounded in a specific history and geography, Anzaldiia's concept of the borderlands is a social space that includes "Chicanos, Indi- ans, or Blacks" and where racial formations emerge from the tension between existing racial/national borders. Anzaldua transforms mestizaje from static biology to practice of consciousness. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), Preface, 3. For more on mestizaje as biology versus practice, see Rafael Perez-Torres, "Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice," American Literature 70.1 (1998): 153-76.

8. I employ Arjun Appadurai s notion of cultural flow, though I do so with some qualifications. Appadurai s displacement of the primacy of the nation-state in considering the "everyday cultural practice through which the work of the imagination is transformed," his appreciation for electronic media as a vehicle for the transnational imaginary and analysis of the dialectic among technology, migration, global capital, media, images, and ideology in creating new cultural formations in the late twentieth century provides a useful lens for this study of midcentury traffic in poetry, music, and film despite the distance between the periods. However, where Appadurai examines the convergence of mobile text and massive migration in the creation of new localities in a transnational context, I focus instead on migrations of artists, politicians, and practices and the mobile texts they create. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 9, 33.


9. Andres Eloy Blanco, "Pintame angelitos negros," in Apreciacion de Andres Eloy Blanco con apendice de textos del poeta, ed. Romulo Gallegos (Los Teques, Venezuela: Ediciones del Gobierno del Estado Miranda, 1985), 67-69, quote on 67.

10. Leita Lucchetti and Ben Levin, Verso Negro: Black Verse Poetry of the Spanish Caribbean (New York: A Folk Arts Production/Cinema Guild, 1999).

11. "Angelitos Negros," words by Andres Eloy Blanco, music by Manuel Alvarez Maciste [1946] in Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine, January 1 967, 2-3. © 1 946 Editorial Mexicana de Musica Internacional, S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

12. Winthrop R. Wright, Cafe con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1990), 45; Blanco, lyric.

13. Francisco Javier Perez Hernandez, "100 Anos: Andres Eloy Blanco" Available at Universidad Nueva Esparta: http://www.une.edu.ve/eloy/blanco.htm. Accessed April 11, 2006.

14. Cesar Aira, "Blanco, Andres Eloy," in Diccionario de autores Latinoamericanos (Buenos Aires: Emece, 2001), 87; Luis Beltran Prieto Figueroa, "Andres Eloy Blanco: El Poeta y El Hombre," in Apreciaciones criticas sobre la viday la obra de Andres Eloy Blanco, ed. Efrain Subero (Caracas, Venezuela: Ediciones Centauro/AVILARTE, 1974), 431-42, see 437-38.

1 5. Corridos are a form of sung verse common in Mexico and in the Texas-Mexico borderland. Driven by narrative, frequently of an epic character, they are associated with lo popular, that is, of the people, mass, or "folk," and tell the stories of the people, hence Arvelo's observation. For further information see Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958); Maria Herrera-Sobek, The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and Ramon Saldivar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

16. Rafael Angarita Arvelo, "Andres Eloy Blanco y La Generacion Poetica del Ano 18," in Apreciaciones criticas, ed. Subero, 13-38, see 35-36.

17. Wright, Cafe con Leche, 98-99. 18. Fieueroa, "Andres Eloy Blanco," 434-35. 1 9. Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Univer-

sal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976), 16. 20. Rev. Ernie P. Gordon, "Garvey and Black Liberation Theology," in Garvey: His Work and Impact, ed.

Rupert Lewis and Patrick Bryan (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1991), 135-43, see 136-39. 2 1 . Tony Martin, Race First, quote on 69. 22. Darien J. Davis, Slavery and Beyond: The African Impact on Latin America and the Caribbean

(Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1995), 195-96. 23. Wright, Cafe con Leche, 2, 98-99. 24. Venezuela's multiracial appearance elicited favorable comments by African American writer James

Weldon Johnson in 1906 (Wright 1990, 70-71, 94). Positive views of race relations in Venezuela were not without basis; as Morner notes, Venezuelan independence in 1811 and Mexican independence in 1810 embraced the end of legal discrimination against Indians, free blacks, and mixed-race individuals (82).

25. Wright, Cafe con Leche, 2, 98-99; Magnus Morner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America

(Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 82. 26. Winthrop R. Wright, "Black Images in White Minds: Racial Stereotypes in Venezuela, 1890-1940"

in MAC LAS Latin American Essays, vol. 5, ed. Alvin Cohen, Juan Espadas, Vincent Peloso (Bethlehem, Penn.: Lehigh University, 1991), 1 16-31, see 116, 118-19; Wright, Cafe con Leche, 45.

27. Wright, Cafe con Leche, 104, 121-22. 28. Ibid., 1-2, 119. 29. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa, 38-39, quote on 38. 30. Coco Fusco observes that "although it is true that the independence struggles and nationalist dis-

courses of the Spanish Caribbean stipulated racial equality whereas the American Revolution did not, it is also true that no multiracial Latin American society has eliminated racial inequity. Often left out of these equations are the similarities between northern and southern segregationist legislation, social practices, and economic hierarchies." English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas

(New York: New Press, 1995), 23-24. 31 . Denise Chavez, Loving Pedro Infante (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001). 32. Emilio Garcia Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano, vol. 3, "Epoca Sonora, 1 945-1 948" (Mexico,

D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1971), 284.


33. For critical analyses of both U.S. film versions, see Valerie Smith, "Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing," Diacritics 24.2-3 (Summer-Fall 1994), 43-57; Lucy Fischer, ed., and Douglas Sirk, din, Imitation of Life (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991); and Lauren Berlant, "National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life," in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. Hortense J. Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991), 110-40.

34. Morner, Race Mixture, 58-59. 35. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp (1961; New York: Grove Press, 1985),

86-87, 88. 36. Agustin F. Basave Bem'tez, Mexico Mestizo: Andlisis del nacionalismo mexicano en torno a la mestizofilia

de Andres Molina Enriquez (Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1992), 25-28, 58, 65. 37. Ibid., 78, 80, 128; Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption

(Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1 999), 33; Jose Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race/La raza cosmica, trans. Didier T. Jaen (1925; Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 5, 25.

38. Bem'tez, Mexico Mestizo, 136; Joanne Hershfield, "Race and Ethnicity in the Classical Cinema," in Mexico's Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers, ed. Joanne Hershfield and David R. Maciel

(Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 85. 39. Charles Ramirez Berg, Introduction, Cine Mexicano: Posters from the Golden Age, 1936-1956, ed.

Rogelio Agrasanchez Jr. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001), 8-22, see 16-18, quote from page 18.

40. Carlos Bonfil, "De la epoca de oro a la edad de la tentacion" in A Travis del Espejo: El Cine Mexicano

y Su Publico (Mexico: Ediciones El Milagro/Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografia, 1994), 9-47, see 22, quote on 36.

41. See also Carl J. Mora, Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896-1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); quote from Juan Arturo Brennan, "La miisica en el cine mexicano," in Gen anos de cine mexicano: 1896-1996, CD-ROM (Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografia and Universidad de Colima, 1999).

42. Joy Elizabeth Hayes, Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920- 1950 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 11,116, 70, 71-75, quotes on 70 and 75-76.

43. Julia Tunon Pablos, "Sensibilidad y cine mexicano en la £poca de Oro," in Gen anos de cine mexicano. 44. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1996). 45. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1992), 15, 20. 46. Rogin, 55. 47. Ibid., 32. 48. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa, \27-28. 49. Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury (New York: New

York University Press, 2001), 22, 72. 50. Stuart Hall, "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" in Representing Blackness: Issues in Film

and Video, ed. Valerie Smith (1992; New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 123-33, see 131-32.

5 1 . Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1 998). 52. Hershfield, "Race and Ethnicity," 96. 53. For further information on African American participation in the newly formed Mexican League of

the 1940s, see William F. McNeils Cool Papas and Double Duties: The All-Time Greats of the Negro Leagues (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2001), and Baseballs Other All-Stars (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2000). See also "Learning Americas Other Game: Baseball, Race, and the Study of Latinos," by Adrian Burgos Jr., in Latino/a Popular Culture, ed. Michelle Habell- Pallan and Mary Romero (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 225-39.

54. Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1 957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 7.

55. Ibid., 114, 127. 56. Eartha Kitt, Thursdays Child (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1956), 85. 57. Earth Kitt, Alone With Me (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1976), 117.


58. Joseph F. Laredo, liner notes, from Eartha Kitt's Eartha Kitt Purr-feet: Greatest Hits, DRC 1-2241, 66748-77001-2 (Warwick, N.Y.: House of Hits Productions and BMG Special Products, 1998).

59. Kitt, Eartha Kitt Purr-feet. 60. Nellie Y. McKay, Introduction, My Lord, What a Morning, by Marian Anderson (1956; Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), ix-xxxiii, see xxii; Allan Keiler, Marian Anderson: A Singers Journey (New York: Scribner, 2000), 274.

6 1 . Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in Ameri- can Films (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 124; Donald Bogle, Brown Sugar: Eighty Years of Americas Black Female Superstars (New York: Harmony Books, 1980), 16.

62. Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery (New York: Free Press, 200 1 ), 29. 63. Bogle, Brown Sugar, 13, 126. 64. See Joel Katz, producer and director, Strange Fruit, VHS, DVD (2002), for more on the history of

Holiday's song and its place in the anti-lynching movement. For more on Nina Simone's music and the civil rights movement, see Ruth Feldstein, "'I Don't Trust You Anymore': Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960s," The Journal of American History 9\ A (March 2005): 1349-79.

65. Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 22. For more on jazz music in this era, see Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

66. Von Eschen, Race Avainst Empire, 1 26. 67. Kin, Alone With Me, 7. 68. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 59. 69. Kitt, Thursday's Child, 9-10. 70. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, 14; Bogle, Brown Sugar, 91. 71. Kitt, Thursday's Child 45. 72. Ibid., 46. 73. For more on sexuality and respectability, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Griffin, If You Can't Be Free, E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia: Temple Uni- versity Press, 2001).

74. Kitt, Thursday's Child, 70. 75. Ibid., 69. 76. Kevin A. Yelvington, "The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic Di-

mensions," Annual Review ofAnthropobgy?>Q (2001): 227-60. Yelvington suggests that along with W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, Katherine Dunham engaged in "foundational schol-

arship on the anthropology of the African diaspora in the Americas" (227). 77. Kitt, Thursday's Child, 131-32. 78. Ibid., 72. 79. Ibid., 207. 80. Liner notes, First Take, by Roberta Flack, produced by Joel Dorn, originally released as Atlantic #8230

on June 20, 1 969 (New York: Atlantic Recording Corporation for US and WEA International), 82792- 2.

8 1 . Manning Marable, "From Freedom to Equality: The Politics of Race and Class," in Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure, ed. Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 95-104, see 102.

82. Gayle Wald, "Soul's Revival: White Soul, Nostalgia, and the Culturally Constructed Past," in Soul, ed.

Guillory and Green, 139-58, see 147; Paul Gilroy, "Question of a 'Soulful Style': Interview with Paul

Gilroy," in Soul, 250-65, see 252. 83. Wald, "Soul's Revival," 140, 147-48. 84. David Nathan, The Soulful Divas: Personal Portraits of Over a Dozen Divine Divas, from Nina Simone,

Aretha Franklin, and Diana Ross to Patti LaBelle, Anita Baker, and Natalie Cole (New York: Billboard Books, 1999), 319-20.

85. Ibid., 320-21. 86. Ibid., 323. 87. For more on relationships among slavery, white womanhood, lynching, and other violence, see Hazel

V. Carby, "'On the Threshold of Woman's Era': Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist


Theory," Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 262-77, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," in We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women's History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1995), 3-24.

88. Saidiya Hartman, "Seduction and the Ruses of Power," in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 1 1 1-41.

89. Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Ber- keley: University of California Press, 1998), 363.

90. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1993), 108. 91. In Dangerous Crossroads George Lipsitz suggests that Queen Latifah is a performer who draws upon

images of black women around the globe to show "that the 'minority' populations of the U.S.A. are part of the global majority who have been victimized and oppressed by Euro-American racism and imperialism" (25).

92. Krin Gabbard, Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

93. Ibid., 144. 94. Kirsten Silva Gruesz, "The Occluded History ofTransamerican Literature," in Critical Latin Ameri-

can and Latino Studies, ed. Juan Poblete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1 2 1-37, see 128, 130. In Grueszs project the term "transamerican" signals primarily contact between Spanish- speaking populations of the Americas, an aspect of my own project but not its exclusive focus.

95. Hall, "What Is This 'Black,'" 129.

"Angelitos Negros": African Diaspora Meets Mestizaje in the Americas

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