The Dissertation Committee for Khamla Leah Dhouti Certifies that this is the

approved version of the following dissertation:

RECONFIGURING MESTIZAJE: BLACK IDENTITY IN THE WORKS OF

PIRI THOMAS, MANUEL ZAPATA OLIVELLA, NICOLÁS GUILLÉN AND

NANCY MOREJÓN

Committee:

César Salgado, Co-Supervisor

Sonia Labrador Rodríguez, Co-Supervisor

Enrique Fierro

Pablo Brescia

Lisa Sánchez González

Finnie D. Coleman
RECONFIGURING MESTIZAJE: BLACK IDENTITY IN THE WORKS OF

PIRI THOMAS, MANUEL ZAPATA OLIVELLA, NICOLÁS GUILLÉN AND

NANCY MOREJÓN

by

Khamla Leah Dhouti, B.A., M.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

the University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin

May 2002
 UMI Number: 3077526

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 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Sonia Labrador Rodríguez for her time and

patience in helping me to see this project through to the end. I am infinitely indebted

to Professor Finnie Coleman and Hassan Dhouti, Ph.D. for their invaluable insight,

suggestions, and encouragement throughout the writing and defense processes. I

would also like to express my appreciation to my parents, Lehad and Lynda Dhouti;

my siblings, De’Anna, Khalil, and Hassan; as well as Roger Martínez, Michelle

Kayhai and Leslyn Weekes for their comments, support, friendship and love. Finally,

I would like to thank my committee members for their time and guidance.

iii
RECONFIGURING MESTIZAJE: BLACK IDENTITY IN THE WORKS OF
PIRI THOMAS, MANUEL ZAPATA OLIVELLA, NICOLÁS GUILLÉN AND
NANCY MOREJÓN

Publication No. ________

Khamla Leah Dhouti, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin 2002

Supervisors: Sonia Labrador Rodríguez and César Salgado

Reconfiguring Mestizaje examines the expression of Black identity and

mestizaje in the works of four authors of Afro-Caribbean descent: Piri Thomas,

Manuel Zapata Olivella, Nicolás Guillén and Nancy Morejón. The study focuses on

the negotiations of racial and cultural identities, and how tropes of travel play a

central role in the processes of investigating and refiguring Blackness in literature.

The discussion involves a brief analysis of travel accounts as a literary trope that

enables these writers to represent not only a physical or geographical journey, but

also an imagined or metaphorical one. It also includes an historical review of the

cultural racist practices and ideologies prevalent throughout colonial and present day

American societies. This entails an examination of the different forms of race

iv
discourse and racialization practiced in both Latin America and the United States,

including theories of difference, double-consciousness, and passing, and most

importantly the construction of identity through literature. The study centers around

how expressions of racial difference are frowned upon in countries that espouse the

ideology of “racial democracy,” and how these four authors use literature as a means

of approaching, engaging, and contesting such ideologies, and in the process rewrite

themselves within the vision of their respective nations. It is my intention to lend

greater understanding to changing notions of race and identity and the negotiation of

these identities within American societies.

v
 Table of Contents

Introduction: [Re]Imagining Blackness: Mestizaje Revisited 1

1. Mestizaje and Racial Democracy: An Introduction 4

2. Contesting Images of the Other: Travel Writing Revisited 6

3. Double-consciousness: A Point of (Literary) Intersection 13

Between the Americas

Chapter One: “How to Be a Negro Without Really Trying”: Mestizaje 23

Meets Racial Difference in the United States

1. None of the Above: From Double-Consciousness to Multi- 27

Consciousness

2. Race versus Ethnicity: Two Divergent Systems 33

3. In Search of Safe Spaces: Out of the Home and Into the 53

World of Street Gangs

4. The South: Encounters and Resistance, or How to be “Esneaky” 67

5. Friends, Teachers and Others: Piri Comes Full Circle 76

Chapter Two: Négritude and Mestizaje: the Quest for a Black Identity 88

1. Race in Spanish America: the Myth of Democracy 93

2. Travel and Identity: He visto la noche 100

3. Racial Identity, Self-consciousness, and Passing: “Un extraño 113

bajo mi piel”

4. Autobiography and Identity in ¡Levántate mulato! 124

5. Mestizaje Redefined 134

vi
Chapter Three: Voyage to the Past: Displacement in the Poetry of 146

Nicolás Guillén and Nancy Morejón

1. Black and Cuban 149

2. José Martí and Cubanidad 153

3. From Negrismo to Négritude: Poetic Representations of Africa 162

in the Americas

4. Nicolás Guillén: Pre-Revolution (1902-1959) 168

5. Displacement in Nicolás Guillén 181

6. Nancy Morejón 199

7. Rewriting the Female Subject 208

Conclusion 223

Bibliography 229

Vita 245

vii
 INTRODUCTION

[Re]Imagining Blackness: Mestizaje Revisited

Nuestra cultura no es otra cosa que eso: una nueva cultura creada en
función de un irreversible mestizaje racial y cultural... Con un espíritu
altamente creador, en una búsqueda constante del ser nacional y
revolucionario, nos producimos como pueblo mestizo, heredero y
sustentador de ambos componentes, sin ser ya más ni africanos, ni
españoles, sino cubanos.
--Nancy Morejón, Fundación de la imagen

The above excerpt from Nancy Morejón’s Fundación de la imagen reflects a

prevalent belief that exists in many parts of Latin America of a culturally

homogenous nation. Morejón inextricably links racial mixing, or mestizaje, to

questions of national identity by defining the Cuban nation not in terms of African or

Spanish identities, but by the racial mixture of the two. Morejón presents mestizaje as

the inevitable end to the search for a revolutionary Cuban nation. In connecting

questions of national identity with mestizaje, Morejón becomes part of an intellectual

trajectory that dates back to the nineteenth century, when notions of mestizaje, or

racial mixture, permeated nationalist thought in Latin America and the Spanish

Caribbean. The project of writing the nations during the independence and

foundational eras can be seen in the writings of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José

Martí, Carlos Octavio Bunge, José Ingenieros and other Creole intelligentsia.1 In the

1
This, of course, spans a broad time frame from the nineteenth through twentieth centuries.
Nevertheless, similar projects of writing the nation took place over an expanded time period. Take for
example, Bunge’s Nuestra América (1903) and Alberdi’s Bases y puntos de partida para la
organización política de la Republica Argentina (1852). See also Winthrop Wright’s study of
1
projects of writing the nation(s) there were two basic camps of thought concerning

mestizaje. On the one hand, there was a view of the intersection of race and nation

typified by authors such as Sarmiento and Bunge, who espouse a deterministic

discourse about “naturally inferior” races based on notions of “survival of the fittest.”

This position considered mestizaje as the root of atraso, or backwardness in Spanish

America, and racial mixture was viewed as an impediment to the formation of a

successful nation-state. On the other hand, there was a train of thought, exemplified

in Martí, which considered mestizaje a source of strength in its unification of the

different cultures, and looked to this cultural amalgamation as a politically and

socially viable means to create the modern nation-state.2 The notion of a racial

democracy is founded on the belief that due to extensive racial mixture, race becomes

a moot point. In theory, in this view race cannot be used as a means of determining

citizenship, or who constitutes nation, for all are considered racially mixed to some

degree. A consequence of this discourse is that discussions of race become viewed as

taboo, socially and politically divisive, or are considered as an expression of anti-

nationalism.3 Nina Friedemann explains in her study of race in Colombia that

mestizaje in Venezuela, Café con leche: Race, Class and National Image in Venezuela (1990); and
John Burdick’s “The Myth of Racial Democracy” found in The Black Americas (February 1992).
2
See for example Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal for her re-reading and reconsideration of Martí’s “Mi
raza” in her essay, “‘Martí and Race’: A Re-Evaluation,” Re-Reading José Martí (Albany: SUNY,
1999) 115-126.
3
See for example Sonia Labrador Rodríguez’s examination of José Celso Barbosa’s strategies to
approach questions of race in turn-of-the-century Puerto Rico, “Mulatos entre blancos: José Celso
Barbosa y Antonio S. Pedreira” Revista Iberoamericana vol. LXV, July-December 1999. She states,
“La cuestión racial se invocaba para asustar a la población blanca y dejaba al sector de color en una
situación sin salida: si los intelectuales negros denunciaban la discriminación y se afirmaban
racialmente, la dirección política blanca invocaba el miedo, heredado de la revolución
2
mestizaje came to be equated with “democracy” based on the belief that equality of

rights is not compatible with the conservation of identity.4 In other words, to exercise

an equality of rights, “one must neither perceive nor declare oneself to be different or

belong to a different people” (Friedemann 66). Therefore, claiming a racial identity

can be seen to be divisive to the national image of homogeneity and solidarity. The

authors that I study suggest that there exists a chasm between the ideal of racial

homogeneity equating to political solidarity, and the reality of political inequity

predicated upon racial difference. How, then, in the face of such a prevalent

discourse of racial and political homogeneity, do they approach questions of race,

racism, and racial identity in societies where these issues are deemed irrelevant,

taboo, or the discussion of which is discouraged because of the supposed existence of

a “racial democracy”?

The authors that I study in this project, Piri Thomas, Manuel Zapata Olivella,

Nicolás Guillén and Nancy Morejón, use literature as a forum to broach questions of

racial and national identity, and to redefine themselves within the national body by

engaging and contesting ideologies of mestizaje.5 Key to their approaches of

haitiana...Afirmarse racialmente equivalía a una acusación de anti-nacional, de poner en peligro la

apariencia de igualdad necesaria para la consolidación de un proyecto nacional” (718).
4
Nina S. de Friedemann and Jaime Arocha “Colombia,” No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans
Today (London: Minority Rights Publications, 1995), 47-76.
5
Although the other authors that I study live(d) in the Caribbean and Latin America, I include Piri
Thomas in this study because he is similarly questioning and revising conceptions of race in his
narrative. The connection that I make between Thomas and the others is the re-evaluation of notions
of mestizaje and racial identity. As a first generation descendent of Puerto Rican and Cuban parents,
his cultural upbringing within the home embraces the idea of racial and cultural mixture, or mestizaje.
As a teenager he recognizes that mestizaje is at odds with the polarized racial politics of the United
States, and in his narrative he explores this meeting point of two divergent notions of racial identity, as
embodied by his own personal struggle of coming to consciousness.
3
redefining within the nation is the theme of travel. All four authors employ varying

tropes or motifs of travel, both actual and metaphorical journeys, to engage the racial

discourses in their respective countries of origin. In their respective works, each

complicates and challenges the conceptualization of mestizaje that equates racial

mixture to social and political equality.

Mestizaje and Racial Democracy: An Introduction

José Martí is perhaps the best-known advocate of “racial democracy” in Latin

America. In “Mi Raza” (1893) Martí enacts the notion of cubanidad, or Cubanness,

Cuba’s unique version of “racial democracy,” which implied the loss of the

importance of racial color due to the cultural amalgamation of all citizens: “En Cuba

no hay temor alguno a la guerra de razas. Hombre es más que blanco, más que

mulato, más que negro. Cubano es más que blanco, más que mulato, más que

negro.”6 In “Mi Raza” Martí subordinates questions of race to concerns of nation by

offering cubanidad as a means to “transcend the racial connotations of the

6
José Martí, “Mi raza,” Obras escogidas (Tomo III), (La Habana: Ciencias Sociales, 1992) 206. It
should be pointed out that Martí was addressing the lingering fears of whites of Afro-Cubans after the
Haitian Revolution and at the end of slavery in Cuba. Aline Helg gives us an insightful analysis of
Martí’s myth of racial democracy, which was based largely on two ideas: first that “Cuban slaves had
been freed by their own masters during the Ten Years’ War,” and hence white compensation to Afro-
Cubans for past mistreatments was not needed; and secondly that “racial equality had been achieved in
the Cuban military forces that fought against Spain.” See Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban
Struggle for Equality: 1886-1912, (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995) 16, 45. Sonia
Labrador Rodríguez has an intriguing study of the continued “miedo al negro,” or fear of Blacks, in
post-Revolution Cuba in her article, “‘El miedo al negro’: el debate de lo racial en el discurso
revolucionario cubano, ” Historia y Sociedad IX, 1997 (111-127).
4
‘civilization or barbarism’ paradigm by replacing it with an all-embracing model of

racial and social democracy” (Martínez-Echazábal 116). In other countries, such as

Colombia and Puerto Rico, both of which I study in this work, similar visions of

national homogeneity were embraced.7 The consistency in the various versions of

“racial democracy” is the suppression of questions of race, racism and racial identity.

Racial democracy subordinates racial identity to national identity, as seen in

the quotations of both Morejón and Martí, by replacing questions of racial difference

with the notion of cultural and racial homogeneity. With the acceptance of the idea

that “todos somos mestizos” there can be no racism, as Martí argues in “Nuestra

América” (1891): “No hay odio de razas, porque no hay razas.”8 Cultural and racial

amalgamation is looked at as erasing racial barriers, and hence racism is said not to

exist in Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba and Puerto

Rico that embrace this ideology. Consequently, people of African and indigenous

descent are stripped of their racial identity, lost in ideologies of homogeneity that

often subordinate or ignore the ethnic and ethno-social claims of subordinated groups.

Expressions of racial pride or racial politics are viewed as racist and damaging to the

vision of national cultural unity, regardless of who utters them, as Martí states in “Mi

Raza”:

El hombre blanco que por razón de su raza, se cree superior al hombre

7
In Chapter One I analyze more in depth the discourse around mestizaje in Puerto Rico, namely the
differing views of José Pedreira, Tomás Blanco and Luis Palés Matos. In Chapter Two, I focus more
broadly on the discourse in South America.
8
José Martí, “Nuestra América,” Letras fieras (La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1981) 167.
5
 negro, admite la idea de la raza, y autoriza y provoca al racista negro.

El hombre negro que proclama su raza, cuando lo que acaso proclama

únicamente en esta forma errónea es la identidad espiritual de todas las

razas, autoriza y provoca al racista blanco. La paz pide los derechos

comunes de la naturaleza: los derechos diferenciales, contrarios a la

naturaleza, son enemigos de la paz. (206)

The authors that I study in this project delve into questions of race, racism and

racial identity. Through the trope of travel, they appropriate a literary device

historically used to create the “Other” to break away from and contest images of

Blacks as “Other.” These authors invert and explode the device of travel writing for

radically different purposes than what it was originally used for in Western literature:

the justification of the exploitation and subjugation of their forefathers. They use the

trope of travel instead as a means of redefining themselves through their narratives

and poetry, and of crafting a discursive space for rewriting the Afro-Caribbean

subject in their texts and in the discourse of the nation.

Contesting Images of the Other: Travel Writing Revisited

Early (Western) travel writing was, as Mary Louise Pratt explains in Imperial

Eyes, one of the ideological apparatuses of empire, which “produced the rest of the

6
world.”9 Written by European explorers and colonists, early travel narratives detailed

encounters with “new” worlds, and were a discursive space for creating the “Other,”

or the domestic subject of European imperialism. Narratives of exploration and

conquest surged shortly after the “discovery” of the “New World,” and Columbus,

and other European “inventors of America” who followed, described their findings in

terms of European understanding, painting romantic visions of the Americas by

objectifying and dehistoricizing the terrain and indigenous populations (Pratt 126).

As Pratt explains in her insightful study of travel writing, these early explorers “wrote

America as a primal world of nature, an unclaimed and timeless space occupied by

plants and creatures (some of them human), but not organized by societies and

economies” (Pratt 126).

The narratives provided the European readership with a blend of fiction and

fact that captured their attention, depicting lands of savages and Utopia, a world

whose only history was the one about to begin. These writers were, in effect,

constructing their own versions of the “Other” and offering visions of lands and

people to exploited and colonized. In these early writings the aborigines were

described as primitive and barbaric, lacking in culture and religion, and easily

subjugated, as seen in Columbus’ letter of discovery: “…y allende desto se farán

cristianos, que se inclinan al amor y servicio de sus Alteças y de toda la nación

9
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992),
5.
7
castellana…”10 Evident in Columbus’ employment of “nation” is the use of the

difference of the “New World” Others to both consolidate a notion of a Castilian

nation, in opposition to the “New World” Others, and to expand the Spanish Empire.

The descriptions of the wildness of the land and of the people were means of

justifying the forthcoming conquest of the Americas and the enslavement of the

aborigines, as seen in Columbus’ second letter to the Spanish monarchs, in which he

proposes the colonization and enslavement of the aborigines, to be presided over by

himself:

Finalmente, para compendiar mi partida y vuelta,... prometo que con

pequeños auxilios que me suministren nuestros invictísimos Reyes, he

de presentarles cuanto oro se necesite, y tanta cantidad de aromas, … y

tantos esclavos para el servicio de la marina, cuantos quisieren exigir

Sus Majestades. (31)

Following the conquest or exploratory writers were the scientific or discovery

writers who wrote to detail the landscape, wanting to expand the knowledge of global

science and natural history. Writers such as Alexander von Humboldt who followed

the conquest, wrote detailed descriptions of the landscapes, labeling and categorizing

plant life, rock formations and the like, and leaving out almost completely the

descriptions of the native populace.11 This omission, however, was by no means

10
Cartas de Relación de la Conquista de América, (Mexico: Editorial Nueva España, 1946) 17,
emphasis added.
11
See, for example, von Humboldt’s Essay on the Geography of Plants (1804), and History and
Geography of the New Continent (1834). See also his Personal Narratives (1814, 1819, and 1825), a
8
accidental. The purpose of these writings was to show the commercial value of the

land as resources to be exploited. As Pratt explains, the eighteenth century

constructions of Nature and Man were a re-writing of America as a primal world of

nature as “an unclaimed and timeless space,” much like the earlier sixteenth and

seventeenth century writers (126). This re-representation of America as edenic and

primal, even after nearly three centuries of colonization, is proposing the [further]

transformative intervention of Europe (Pratt 127).

These descriptions, dating back to Christopher Columbus and later to other

travel writers such as Alexander von Humboldt, increased interest in the Americas

posing the new lands and people as ready for the taking. Following such narratives

were their likely and understandable successors: the capitalist vanguard of the

nineteenth century who continued the description of the Americas and her people in

terms of opportunity and possible profitability.12 These writers opened the door for

European economic and political expansionism, as Pratt explains: “Ideologically, the

vanguard’s task is to reinvent América as backward and neglected, to encode its non-

capitalist landscapes and societies as manifestly in need of the rationalized

exploitation the Europeans bring” (152). Central to the early travel writings was the

project of creating the “Other,” or the imperial subject, representations replete with

three-volume collection in which he reinvents popular imaginings of America. Benigno Trigo

examines Humboldt’s discourses on time and space, and his creation of the American subject in
Subjects of Crisis: Race and Gender as Disease in Latin America, (Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 2000) 19-
27.
12
See, for example, Joseph Andrews 1827 Travels, which he dedicated to the British Chancellor of the
Exchequer “for the political talent and foresight which opened to Great Britain the full commercial
advantages of the newly enfranchised states of South America” (Pratt 148).
9
negative images and stereotypes such as barbarity, cannibalism, paganism, and

lasciviousness.

These images of the “Other,” put forth as a justification for colonial

domination, have not gone uncontested. Conquest of the “New World,” for example,

was not told strictly through the eyes of the conqueror. As early as the sixteenth

century we see revisionist literature created by the subjugated or the subaltern, which

engages these representations. Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, a Peruvian of

aboriginal descent, wrote his Nueva Cr6nica y Buen Gobierno (1585), a bilingual text

fashioned after the Spanish chronicle, which engages the colonizer's representations

of colonial history and the subjugated indigenous populations. Nueva Cr6nica, an

autoethnography, appropriates the idioms and travel/exploration writing of the

colonizer and transforms them by "merg[ing] and infiltrat[ing] [them] to varying

degrees with indigenous modes" (Pratt 7). As seen with Poma de Ayala’s text, the

autoethnography can be used as a means of constructing new images in response to or

in dialogue with the metropolitan representations of the “Other."

Other forms of self-representation evolved such as the African American slave

narrative, which emerged as a new form of literature that gave the "Other" an

unprecedented voice in Western thought. Like Poma de Ayala’s autoethnography,

slave narrative authors appropriated literary tools of their oppressors, modeling the

slave narrative after the sentimental novel of the nineteenth century. The sentimental

novel consciously participated in specific political controversies of the late eighteenth

century including emerging arguments about the ethics of slavery. It developed as a

10
political tool of cultural significance because of its liberal and humanitarian interests.

Like the sentimental novel, the slave narratives were designed to elicit the sympathy

of white women in hopes that these women would use their moral influence over their

husbands to convince their husbands to call for political and social change.

The African American slave narrative became a valuable tool of abolition in

the nineteenth century, as it gave first hand accounts of the horrors of slavery. One

can conceive of slave narratives as being travel accounts that recount journeys of

escape and the quests for freedom of fugitive slaves, and also serve as an arena for

contesting Euro-American romantic racialization of African Americans.13 By

appropriating the language, literary devices, and most importantly the subject voice

(becoming the "I" in the re-representation of Black America), the authors contested

popular images of African Americans. In these narratives former slaves present

alternative representations in response to the dehumanizing portrayals of Black

America. For example, Frederick Douglass carefully constructs himself as a rational,

sentient person in order to challenge prevalent stereotypes of African Americans as

overly emotional, irrational beings.14 Noticeably absent in his narrative is highly

13
Romantic racialization is the assumption that African Americans are inherently different from
European American because of their race. These differences become the basis for racial stereotypes
that legitimize the separation of races, the oppression of the disenfranchised members of society, and
the exclusion of African Americans from economic and political participation.
14
See, for example, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), in which he constructs
an image of Black America based on pseudoscientific rationalizations of difference: "They are at least
as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which
prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. ...but love seems with them to be more an eager desire,
than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. ...In general, their
existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their
disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labor. An animal whose
body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. (Jefferson 265-66)
11
emotional language. Instead, Douglass relies on the graphic descriptions of the abuse

and murder of slaves to convey to his audience the inhumanity of the institution of

slavery, and contrasts his own humanity to his representation of the inhumane white

slaveholder.15 Paul Gilroy states in his reading of Douglass in The Black Atlantic that

"[it] is the slave rather than the master who emerges from Douglass' account

possessed of 'consciousness that exists for itself,' while the master becomes

representative of a 'consciousness that is repressed within itself" (60). Douglass'

dignified self-representation as an African American also constructs potent counter-

images to predominant Western myths of the inferiority of Blacks.

The history of writing the “Other” continued and continues, as does the

history of contesting the imagining of the “Other” in racial and national discourses.

Just as literature has historically been used as an apparatus of writing the nation in

Latin America, Thomas, Zapata Olivella, Guillén and Morejón use literature as an

arena for re-addressing and rewriting themselves as subjects (versus objects of

colonial and/or hegemonic rule) within the nation. Through the appropriation and

reconfiguration of the forms and tropes of travel writing, these authors find a means

to challenge the historical objectification or “Othering” common to much nationalist

discourse that sought to define the citizens of the nation in opposition to a racialized

Other that would be excluded from citizenship, or socially and politically

15
One example of Douglass choice not to portray emotion can be seen in the beginning of his narrative
which graphically depicts the horrific brutalization of his aunt Hester. Douglass witnesses the act as a
child, but chooses not to convey his personal feelings to his readership: "It was a most terrible
spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it" (258).

12
marginalized, but kept within the realm of the nation. This endeavor to rewrite

themselves inevitably leads to the questions of “who am I?”; “how do I (re)define

myself within the national image?”, and in the case of Nancy Morejón, “how do I

redefine the national image to be inclusive of the Afro-Cuban woman?” These are

questions that often bring about an “identity crisis” of seeing oneself through the eyes

of the oppressor, a phenomenon theorized by W.E.B. Du Bois as “double-

consciousness.”

Double-consciousness: A Point of (Literary) Intersection Between the Americas

The quest to re-imagine oneself in response to a predominant, national discourse

which locates you as the “Other,” will inevitably lead to seeing oneself through the eyes

of the colonial or hegemonic power. Just as the slave narratives demonstrate the need

and desire to represent the humanity and consciousness of Blacks in response to

predominant understandings of the slaves’ existence, Thomas, Zapata Olivella, Guillén

and Morejón endeavor to refigure themselves within the national images of their

respective countries. They do this by confronting hegemonic visions which locate them

either in a racial binary, as is the case of Thomas; or in a discourse of mestizaje which

disparages the African and indigenous cultures in Colombia, as is the case of Zapata

Olivella; or, in the cases of Nancy Morejón and Nicolás Guillén, the ideology of

cubanidad which refuses to acknowledge race as a relevant issue in post-Revolution

13
Cuba. Viewing oneself through the eyes of one’s oppressor is what W.E.B. Du Bois

theorized as the phenomenon of "double-consciousness" in The Souls of Black Folk

(1903). Double-consciousness is an identity crisis from which all African Americans

supposedly suffer as a result of recognizing themselves as the “Other.”16 Du Bois writes

of African Americans:

[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with

second-sight in this American world, --a world which yields him no true

self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation

of the other world.17 It is a peculiar sensation, this double-

consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes

of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in

amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, --an American,

a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; …The

history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, --this longing

to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better

and truer self. (Norton 615)

Double-consciousness, in theory, stems from the merging of two cultures and

16
The Souls of Black Folk is a collection of essays that focus upon the post-Reconstruction reality of
African Americans in the South, where local white rule and Ku Klux Klan terrorism had erased a
decade-long effort to bring democracy to all Americans following the Civil War. In this collection of
essays Du Bois sought to make a scientific analysis of the problems besetting African Americans as a
necessary first step in the resolution of the American racial dilemma. By providing reliable data based
on his scientific studies, Du Bois hoped policymakers would use the information and subsequently
bring an end to discrimination and injustice in the United States. See The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature (New York: W.W. Norton: 1997) 606-640.

14
identities within the soul of every African American. Du Bois would argue that

African Americans have a twofold, or dual, identity in the United States, as both

Americans and something, racially speaking, beyond American.

Double-consciousness is a common literary theme used to explore and

negotiate the politics of Black identity in the United States. More recent ideas

concerning double-consciousness include the notion of a mind in conflict -- a by-

product from the pressures of white society, or the “outer world,” looking at Blacks as

a “problem” and the need to resolve one’s place within American society.18 Part of

the process of reconciling this duality involves reclaiming and celebrating African

(American) history and culture, endeavors undertaken during the Harlem Renaissance

and the négritude literary and cultural movements of the 1920s through 1940s in the

United States, and in Francophone Caribbean and African nations.19 In a similar

fashion, the authors in my study raise questions of racial identity and call to attention

the continued practices of racism, especially seen in Zapata Olivella and Guillén, and

in doing so, these authors create a space for racial polemics in Spanish America.

Du Bois contributes to a long history of theory concerning race in North

America, where the polemic of race is a polarized construction of white and “Other,”

a polemic, nevertheless, that facilitates an open discussion of race. African-American

literary studies have been concerned with the issues of race canonicity and cultural

17
The veil is a metaphor that Du Bois uses to refer to the color line that cleaves American society,
specifically the Blacks and Whites.
18
See for example Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks in which he theorizes becoming aware of
one’s two-ness or conflicted identity.

15
identity from its inception, and out of this search has developed a critical vocabulary

that helps clarify the notion of racial categories.20 Although we do not see the same

type of polemic in Latin America and the Caribbean, due to the profound influence of

conceptual paradigms of cultural identity anchored in myths of racial harmony and

syncretism, such as mestizaje, as I will show in this study several Afro-Caribbean

authors are forging a ground to take part in a similar tradition of racial theorizing in

Spanish America.

Until relatively recently, few studies have attempted to link North American

and Latin American literary criticism. Gustavo Pérez Firmat however, attempts to

uncover a common critical heritage that links the literatures of North America and

Latin America in his introduction to Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?

He writes:

Unlike the contemporary literature of the hemisphere, whose breadth

of interest and ambition is well-known, the criticism of American

literature (using the adjective in its genuine, hemispheric sense)

remains largely confined to well-established and long-standing

disciplinary borders, with the result that contacts between scholars

working on different areas of the New World have been rare and

occasional. The most glaring instance of this institutional and

19
Refer to Chapter Three for a discussion of the Harlem Renaissance and négritude artistic
movements.
20
Edward J. Mullen, Afro-Cuban Literature: Critical Junctures, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1998), 25.
16
 scholarly isolation, perhaps, is the lack of dialogue between

“Americanists” and “Latin Americanists.” (Pérez Firmat 2)

The difficulty of making comparisons and searching for common threads between

North American and Latin American literatures is complicated further when questions

of race and class are introduced into the discussion. As stated above, the perceptions

of Blackness differ greatly in the two regions; while the North American vision of

race is polarized, the Latin American vision is much more complex. As Lorna V.

Williams notes, this difference lends to dissimilar critical approaches:

Critics who adopt the much-discussed North American posture of

racial polarization tend to regard Afro-Hispanic literature as culturally

autonomous, with its own style and themes deriving from the black

American’s history of oppression. According to this view, only Afro-

Americans have the necessary insight and mastery of the appropriate

techniques to depict their situation accurately. Advocates of the Latin

American ideal of racial blending believe that black and nonblack

writers share the same cultural context, and [that] therefore, given

comparable talent, both are equally equipped to overcome their

ethnocentrism.21

In my study, however, I believe that in order to interpret Afro-Caribbean literature,

which is replete with racial themes, it is helpful to incorporate apparatuses of literary

21
Lorna V. Williams, “Recent Works on Afro-Hispanic Literature,” Latin American Research Review
22 (1987): 246.
17
theory from schools of criticism that regularly address questions of race and identity.

It is a logical choice to adopt African American literary theory to Afro-Caribbean and

Latin American literature, if we consider the common experiences reflected in both

histories and bodies of literature.

If we understand the shared historical experiences of slavery, racism,

economic exploitation, and social and political oppression, and the literary production

that stems from the Afro-American experience, the application of African American

literary theory is extremely useful in understanding and interpreting this body of

literature.22 Afro-Hispanic literature, like African American literature, is used as a

powerful weapon for placing people of African heritage back into the history of

mankind, from which “slavery, racism, and exploitation have torn and fragmented

them” (Cobb 1976, 147). The translation of African American tropes such as double-

consciousness is especially instrumental in reading the works of Piri Thomas and

Manuel Zapata Olivella as it offers a better understanding of the ways in which Afro-

Hispanic writers treat themes such as race and class.

My research focuses on these authors’ negotiations of racial and cultural

identities, and how travel plays a part in the process of investigating and refiguring

Blackness in the Spanish speaking Caribbean. Although my discussion revolves

around travel as a point of connection between the authors and as a means of

engaging discourses of race, my point of departure is from an historical review of the

22
I use the term “Afro-American” to refer to people of African descent in the Western hemisphere,
versus African American, which specifically refers to Blacks (born) in the United States.
18
cultural racist practices and ideologies prevalent throughout colonial and present day

American societies. This entails an examination of the different forms of race

discourses and racialization practiced in both Latin America and North America,

including theories of difference, double-consciousness, and passing, and most

importantly the construction of identity through literature.

In Chapter One, I briefly explore the history and ideology of mestizaje in

Puerto Rican national discourse. I examine how late nineteenth and early twentieth

century Creole intellectuals worked to imagine or define Puerto Rican national

identity at the end of Spanish rule, and how José Luis González’s refigured national

identity in 1980 in El país de cuatro pisos. I use these configurations of national

identity, intricately tied to ideologies of mestizaje, as a backdrop to understanding Piri

Thomas’ conflicted identity in his narrative, Down These Mean Streets. I examine

how mestizaje comes into conflict with North American ideologies of racial

difference, and how Thomas, a bi-racial Puerto Rican raised in New York City, finds

himself at odds with the North American polarized system of racial classification that

defines people in terms of white/Other, and which labels him as “Black” despite his

cultural and ethnic identification as Puerto Rican and his cultural heritage of

mestizaje. I focus on the depiction of his struggle to come to grips with a racially

polarized society that attempts to impose a racial identity, and his journey to

discovering what it means to be Black in a North American context. I center my

analysis on how Thomas’ journey to the heart of Jim Crow in the South of the United

States acts as a type of initiation into African American cultural heritage and
19
American racism. I argue that Thomas’ journey is founded in the need to understand

a divergent system of identity politics where he cannot simply identify in ethnic,

cultural, or nationalistic terms, but where race acts as a strong social and political

marker and identifier. I propose that through his text, Thomas adds a new voice to

the discourse of race and identity, attempting to take the discussion of race in the

United States beyond the white-Black binary, and insisting on the inclusion of non-

racialized identities.

In Chapter Two I study three works by the Afro-Colombian writer Manuel

Zapata Olivella. I begin with an historical review of race in Colombia and how the

ideology of mestizaje was adopted as a focal point in nationalist discourse, and how

mestizaje eclipsed other race discourses by nullifying the importance of race. My

analysis centers on Zapata Olivella’s journeys throughout the Americas and Africa

and how his travels are an attempt to better define and identify himself within the

African Diaspora. I argue that Zapata Olivella’s investigations into Blackness, Black

culture, and racism in the United States, and later his journey to Africa enables him to

reconfigure the concept of mestizaje by allowing him to posit Black identity in a

positive, self-affirming light. Zapata Olivella’s revision of mestizaje reminds his

reader of the violent process of miscegenation and redefines racial mixture in a tri-

ethnic/racial vision that emphasizes and takes pride in the indigenous and African

components, rescuing, in a sense, their racial and cultural heritages from the

“melting-pot” of previous national discourse which sought to define the Colombian

citizen in sterile, homogenous terms.

20
 In Chapter Three I review the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and Nancy Morejón,

two of Cuba’s most famous poetic voices. I discuss how the triumph of the

Revolution in 1959 brought about a supposed resolution to the race problem in Cuba.

I argue that the Revolution could not erase overnight Cuba’s racialized society. In

fact, Castro’s declaration that racism had ended in Cuba made it extremely difficult to

discuss race, racism and racial pride, as any expression thereof could be interpreted as

a criticism of the Revolution, and a suggestion that the Revolution had not in fact

succeeded in eliminating the problem of racism. As any cultural production that was

seen as being critical of the Revolution could lead to the censorship, imprisonment or

even exile of its author, I investigate how Guillén and Morejón find a means to

broach topics of race, racism and racial pride by temporally and geographically

displacing their poetry to pre-Revolution Cuba and to the United States.

Displacement, as I define it, is the metaphorical journey back in time (temporal

displacement) or to another geographic location (geographical), a discursive device

that the poets employ to displace their discussion to an era or location outside of

contemporary Cuba. As I argue, this device offers them a space in which to broach

“taboo” subjects without calling into question their allegiance to the Revolution, and

also allows them to avoid any censorship or other possible reprisal by the

government.

In the Conclusion, I briefly review my central argument. I also talk about how

mestizaje is continuing to be revised in Latin America by modern scholars. It is here

21
that I also discuss the need for continued research into the works of Afro-Caribbean

authors and how gente de color are defining themselves within nationalist discourse.

While a thoroughly developed, comprehensive study of the renegotiation of

racial identity in Afro-Caribbean literature is well beyond the scope of a dissertation,

I approach this work as an exploratory foray, a work in progress.

22
 CHAPTER ONE

“How To Be A Negro Without Really Trying”23:

Mestizaje Meets Racial Difference in the United States

If the main design of the dominant culture is assimilation, the

enforced melting-down of genuine cultural diversity, the most telling
effect of the Puerto Rican cultural presence in the United States
remains its emphasis on difference, and most notably on the distinction
between cultures of colonial peoples and that of imperialist society. It
is that core of resistance and self-affirmation that makes the Puerto
Rican case so deeply revealing of the true content of newly furbished
ideologies of pluralism for the colonized, whether at home or in the
heart of the metropolis.

--Juan Flores, Divided Borders

Resistance and self-affirmation in the presence of pressure to assimilate is

indeed what strikes us about Piri Thomas’ autobiographical narrative, Down These

Mean Streets (1967). Like many first-generation Puerto Ricans living on the

continent, Thomas discovers that the push to assimilate, especially in terms of racial

difference, contrasts sharply with Puerto Rican concepts of racial amalgamation. As

Juan Flores theorizes in Divided Borders, Puerto Ricans living stateside go through a

process better defined as transculturation than assimilation, and are resistant to

adopting a purely US identity.24 Clinging to a Puerto Rican nationalist or cultural

identity is a means of defying polarized concepts of identity that attempt to locate

everyone in terms of race or ethnicity within US society.

23
The title of this chapter is taken from the title of chapter 11 of Down These Mean Streets.
24
See for example his chapter entitled, “Qué assimilated, brother, yo soy assimilao.” Divided Borders:
essays on Puerto Rican identity (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993) 182-195.
 Racial difference as a binary (white/ Other) is so pronounced in the United

States, and has become ingrained within the African American community to such an

extent that many African Americans have become accustomed to seeing themselves

as “Other.”25 The acceptance of the status of the “Other” causes a breakdown in

cultural understanding between African Americans and people of African descent

from other parts of the world, especially from Latin America where ideologies and

practices of mestizaje have nurtured an “in-between” space where race is looked upon

as being of less significance. Many Latin Americans living in the United States fight

against this racial “Othering,” embodied in the term “Black,” in part because of their

cultural heritage of mestizaje, and also out of the desire to distinguish themselves

from Blacks/ African Americans who have a distinct racial and cultural history in the

United States. Black is a political as well as racial label that, in the United States,

carries particular historical connotations for African Americans that do not translate

to Afro-Latin Americans living in the United States. It is the collapsing of racial and

cultural identities into this binary that Piri Thomas fights against in his struggle to

come to consciousness, and writes against in Down These Mean Streets.

Born in Harlem in 1928 of Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban descent, Thomas

finds in his adolescence that his cultural teachings of mestizaje, embraced in both

25
I say that that many African Americans see themselves as the “Other” in their acceptance of these
racial binaries, and in some one even finds an unwillingness to accept, acknowledge, or even engage
discussion about any in-between categories of racial mixture. An acceptance of this in-between
category might be the Louisiana Creole, of French and African descent, but even within the Black
community, they are considered to be Black. This idea of seeing oneself through the eyes of the
colonial or hegemonic power as the “Other” is what W.E.B. Du Bois theorized as “double-

24
homelands of his parents, come into sharp contrast with the polarized system of race

in the United States. Thomas, like many young first-generation Puerto Ricans living

stateside, finds that his understandings of racial homogeneity differ from North

American concepts of racial difference. The first nineteen chapters of Thomas’

narrative explore the intersection of these two divergent systems of racial politics and

the struggle that Thomas, as an adolescent and young adult, faces when trying to

reconcile his racial identity in the United States. In this chapter I question how does

one reconcile the demands of society to racially identify as white/Other, in a system

where the “Other” is continuously discriminated against, with the cultural heritage of

mestizaje which embraces the idea of racial equality? When considering how

Thomas’ narrative demonstrates his personal attempt at resolving the conflict he

endures when confronted with these opposing ideologies of racial identity, we must

also question how literature is functioning as a forum to engage and contribute to the

racial discourse of the 1960s Civil Rights Era.

Recognizing the inability to meaningfully introduce the concept of mestizaje

to a North American audience, Thomas embarks on a journey of discovery and

initiation into the African American cultural tradition in an attempt to locate himself

within the North American polarized vision of race.26 In the end, Thomas does not

consciousness” and Manuel Zapata Olivella (Chapter Two) refers to as the “European mirror,” two
concepts that I elaborate in the Chapters One and Two of this study.
26
It should be made clear that Thomas’ narrative is an autobiographical novel. See Lisa Sánchez
González’s study in Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, (New York:
New York UP, 2001) 105. However, my study focuses on one particular aspect of the novel, his
journey to the South of the United States. I feel that this journey is the crux of the novel, in that it
represents a turning point in the way that Thomas expresses himself in terms of a nationalist and racial
25
resolve the conflicted space between racial ideologies, but attempts to bridge a space

in between by recognizing both a racial and national identity: Black and Puerto

Rican. His narrative serves as an arena to engage not only racial discourse in the

United States, but also nationalist discourse at an era when the nation was still

defining who was American [US] in terms of race and color.

One of the best-known Nuyorican writers, Thomas is the author of three

narratives, Down These Mean Streets; Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (1972); and

Seven Long Times (1974); as well as a poet, activist and street worker.27 In this

chapter I am discussing Thomas’ first narrative, Down These Mean Streets, an

autobiographical account of his childhood and early adult years. Thomas, a bi-racial

Puerto Rican, struggles with his racial as well as cultural identities and, as Juan Flores

states in the epigraph, we witness his insistence of "difference," based on his Puerto

Rican identity.28 Thomas’ narrative contributes to a body of protest literature of the

Civil Rights era, a literature that responded to “hegemonically endorsed versions of

history in circulation at the time” by tapping “cultural resources—their own idioms,

family histories, and narrative devices—for ways of signifying that could subvert

identity, questions that are not explored with as much emphasis in the latter half of the novel, after his
return to the North.
27
I use the term Nuyorican to distinguish English-speaking Puerto Ricans who were molded in New
York from Spanish-speaking immigrants and inhabitants of the island. I realize that the term is
rejected by some, but the need for the term has been recognized and embraced by poets like Miguel
Algarín and Miguel Piñero, as well as scholars and intellectuals such as Juan Flores. The term is used
to express the pride and dignity of those who have refashioned themselves into “bilingual, bicultural
people with a cultural definition all their own.” For further explanation see Eugene V. Mohr, The
Nuyorican Experience, xiv. The term street worker refers to Thomas’ work with gang members and
drug addicts in rehabilitation programs.
28
Although, as I stated earlier, Thomas’ father is Cuban, Thomas identifies himself as Puerto Rican
throughout his narrative.
26
what they understood as ‘Amerikkkan’ narratives that maligned, erased, or otherwise

misrepresented their communal histories” (Sánchez González 104). Down These

Mean Streets stands out from similar projects within the African American literary

community because of Thomas’ inclusion and discussion of race outside of a binary

white/ “Other” positioning. In my analysis of Thomas’ narrative I first introduce the

concepts of double-consciousness and multi-consciousness to situate my analysis of

the “identity crisis” that Thomas suffers because of the conflicting systems of racial

identification. Secondly, I look at the two systems of racial identity politics,

positioning the Puerto Rican ideology of mestizaje against US concepts of racial

difference. Finally, I enter into my analysis of the narrative, situating my reading,

first of the conflicted identity, then of Thomas’ journey South in attempts to find

some type of cross-cultural understanding of race. My study centers on Thomas’ use

of travel as a means to define himself culturally and racially as both Puerto Rican and

Black, and more specifically, how his travels act as a rite of passage, where his

experiences with Southern racism serve as a type of “initiation” into (the) African

American cultural heritage. With this text, Thomas adds a new voice to the discourse

of race and identity, attempting to take the discussion beyond the white-Black binary,

and insisting on the acknowledgement and inclusion of other non-racial identities.

None of the Above: From Double-Consciousness to Multi-Consciousness

According to some theorists "racist ideology" provides one system by which the
27
individual can order and unify his perception of society in the United States. In a racist

system one's status is determined on irrevocable factors, such as skin color and

physiognomy. In Die, Nigger, Die! (1969) H. Rap Brown indicts American society of

being such a racist order where systematic discrimination prevails, and where privilege

is based on race and caste:

[Black people] are born into a world that has given color

meaning and color becomes the single most determining factor of your

existence. Color determines where you live, how you live, and, under

certain circumstances, if you will live. Color determines your friends,

your education, your mother’s and father’s jobs, where you play, and

more importantly, what you think of yourself.

In and of itself, color has no meaning. But the white world has

given it meaning—political, social, economic, historical, physiological

and philosophical. Once color has been given meaning, an order is

thereby established. If you are born Black in America, you are the last

of that order.29

According to Brown, color has become a determining factor in society, leading some to

"racially" despise others, while at the same time effecting the caste system. This system

of privilege has trickled down and been adopted within some communities of color,

where there has historically prevailed a type of colorism, where distinctions are made

based on pigmentation and preferential treatment usually, although not always, is given

28
to the lighter complexioned individuals.30 According to Brown, who is writing during

the Civil Rights Era, African Americans as well as other "minorities" living in the

United States are living in a "white" world, and this ultimately affects self-images.

These images, or self-concepts have the power to shape our reality, as bell hooks relates

in the introduction of Black Looks, Race and Representation. She states:

And it struck me that for black people, the pain of learning that we

cannot control our images, how we see ourselves (if our vision is not

decolonized), or how we are seen is so intense that it rends us. It rips and

tears at the seams of our efforts to construct self and identity. Often it

leaves us ravaged by repressed rage, feeling weary, dispirited, and

sometimes just plain old brokenhearted. (hooks 3-4)

hooks refers to what has been theorized as “double-consciousness,” a clash of self-

definition with socially imposed racial identities. As hooks’ statement implies,

identities are not constructed on an individual basis, but are in great part social

formations, an idea that Louis F. Mirón explains in “Postmodernism and the Politics

of Racialized Identities.” He argues that contrary to “the governing psychologically

based definition of ethnic identity as a component of self-concept” which has

reproduced “modernist assumptions of a unitary, autonomous self,” racial and ethnic

identities are subject to social influence (Mirón 80). Mirón states:

29
H. Rap Brown, Die, Nigger, Die! (New York: Dial, 1969).
30
See for example, Louis Mirón’s study “Postmodernism and the Politics of Racialized Identities,”
where he states that the dynamics of racial formation have shaped the constitution of subjectivity for

29
 Ethnic identity is not a commodity that is formed naturally as a by-

product of descent, culture, and genetic transmission. Rather, like other

social realities, ethnic identity is socially constructed and reformed

owing to historical conditions. Ethnic identity is, itself, part and parcel

of a social formation, a process that is not fixed in time and that can

change over time. (Mirón 80)

This idea is particularly important in my study of Thomas’ narrative, which reflects on

Jim Crow America from within the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights era

opened the floodgates to questioning social conceptions of race and culture, and

afforded Thomas and other protest writers of the era the “historical conditions” in which

to challenge predominant discourses of racial and cultural identity. As Mirón details in

his essay, identities are not merely our self-perception nor are they a genetic inheritance,

but are heavily influenced by historical moments and social forces. Social perceptions

of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality play an important role in one’s self-definition.31

For example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver write in the preface to the

1999 edition of The Souls of Black Folk that the “African American’s attempt to gain

self-consciousness in a racist society will always be impaired because any reflected

image coming from the gaze of white America is necessarily a distorted one, and quite

probably a harmful one as well” (xxvi). The difference between one’s self-definition

racial and ethnic minorities by the essential trait of skin color: “the darker the skin, the greater the
subordination” (82).

30
and societal perceptions or classifications of an individual can result in a conflict of

identity, theorized by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as double-

consciousness, and later in 1967 by Frantz Fanon in Black Skins, White Masks (1967).

Double-consciousness, in theory, stems from the Black subject’s internalization

of negative definitions and stereotypes and the involuntary substitution of “‘white’

definitions of [B]lack subjectivity for the definitions of the self that exist as antithetical

to white aesthetics or for internal definitions of the self that the individual might have

previously constructed.”32 African Americans, after internalizing negative images and

stereotypes, have the cumbersome task of defining themselves in nationalist and

racial terms as both Americans and something, racially speaking, beyond American.

Although Du Bois spoke specifically of the African American experience, his theory is

applicable to other colonized peoples. In a similar vein, in 1967 Frantz Fanon wrote

about the continued struggle of colonized peoples to merge their “double self into a

better and truer self” in his analysis of the social aspect of identity formation in Black

Skin, White Masks. He states, “as long as the black man is among his own, he will have

no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others…

For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white

man” (109-110). Hence, a racial or ethnic identity only takes on meaning when in

opposition or held up against another, “mainstream” identity, for example the identity of

31
For further discussion see Louis F. Mirón’s article, as well as Will E. Cross, Jr., Shades of Black, and
Maria P. P. Root, “Multiracial Asians: Models of Ethnic Identity” in Race, Identity and Citizenship,
ed. Rodolfo D. Torres.
32
Kim Brown, “Revolutionary Divas, ” 35.
31
the colonizer. The racial, ethnic, sexual, or gender identity is then internalized and

manipulated as the “Other,” and the “Other” struggles to reconcile his/her own self-

perception with society’s view of this “difference.” Fanon’s insight into the colonizing

experience depicts the internal knowledge of self as “Other” or different [non-

white/European]. Du Bois’ and Fanon’s theoretical legacies and ideas of a divided

society and the subsequent divided identity continue to be explored and developed by

modern scholars such as Gates, Mirón, and hooks.

Using Du Bois’ theory of double-consciousness as a point of departure, we see

that with the introduction of more ethnic groups into the United States and the ensuing

racial, cultural and ethnic mixing, for many Americans a third identity further

complicates the equation, leading to the necessary reconciliation of an American [US]

(national), racial, as well as ethnic identity.33 The term that I use to show the further

complication of identity formation in these groups is “multi-consciousness.”34 “Multi-

33
In his essay “The Racialization of Puerto Rican Ethnicity in the United States,” (1997) Víctor M.
Rodríguez distinguishes race and ethnicity. Ethnicity refers to a category of people with 1) an assumed
common ancestry; 2) memories of a common historical past; 3) common cultural elements, symbolic
of their unique peoplehood; and 4) socially defined as a separate, significant entity by its members and
others. Race, on the other hand, refers to an ethnic category whose members are believed by
themselves and others to share common phenotypical traits. This category of people are differentiated
based on socially and culturally constructed perceptions that are in turn internalized by members of the
category. (I use the term “category” in following with Rodríguez’s usage. An ethnic group refers to
those who self-identify as such, whereas an ethnic category is more inclusive and encompasses those
who may not identify with the ethnic group). For further explanation see Rodriguez’s article in
Ethnicity, Race and Nationality in the Caribbean (237-239); Michael Omi and Howard Winant Racial
Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (1986); Robert A. Martinez “Puerto
Ricans: White or Non-White?” (1986); or Martha E. Bernal and George P. Knight Ethnic Identity:
Formation and Transmission Among Hispanics and Other Minorities (1993).
34
I recognize that terms such as “double-consciousness” and “multi-consciousness” are problematic in
that the very concept of consciousness suggests stagnant states of being. Identity, as I argue in this
chapter, cannot be located simply in race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality or nationality, etc., but is a
constant negotiation of all of these facets. Multi-consciousness is also a restrictive and somewhat
reductionist term, but it is the most appropriate term I can come up with to convey the multi-faceted
32
consciousness,” similar to Du Bois’ theory of “double-consciousness,” lends to a

broader understanding of the dynamics of identity formation by introducing a third

variable of ethnicity or culture, for those first and second generation people of color who

immigrate to the United States and who are forced to confront the system of polarized

racialization, as Thomas demonstrates through the portrayal of his family in Down These

Mean Streets.

Race versus Ethnicity: Two Divergent Systems

From the end of the nineteenth century, after the Spanish-American War and

the United States’ acquisition of Puerto Rico, changes in Puerto Rico’s economic

structure led to increased emigration to the continent.35 During the first decades of

North American occupation sugar once again became Puerto Rico’s primary crop,

and as Puerto Rico changed from coffee haciendas to sugar plantations, the

nature of identity development as witnessed in Piri Thomas’ narrative as well as Manuel Zapata
Olivella’s narratives (Chapter Two). Although I focus primarily on three components of Piri Thomas’
identity – the racial, cultural/ethnic and American – I am cognizant of other aspects of his identity
which are constantly at play in his identity formation, namely sexuality and gender.
35
For detailed studies of Puerto Rican migration, see Julio Morales, Puerto Rican Poverty and
Migration, Virginia Sánchez-Korrol, “Background of the Puerto Rican Migration to New York City,”
or Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, Puerto Rican Americans: The Meaning of Migration to the Mainland.
Sánchez-Korral traces early theorists of Puerto Rican migration such as Chenault (1938) and Handlin
(1959) who argued that overpopulation in Puerto Rico was the major factor inducing migration, and
that this overpopulation came about as a result of improvements in health and medicine made under
U.S. policies. Other scholars, such as Senior and Watkins (1966) and Perloff (1950) contributed the
pull of job opportunities in the North to the surge of migration. Still other, more micro-level analyses,
such as those conducted by Pantoja (1972), Rodríguez (1970), and Sánchez-Korrol (1983) looked at
economic push-pull factors, noting that when U.S. national income goes up and unemployment goes
down, Puerto Rican migration increases. Clara E. Rodrígurez’s study, Puerto Ricans Born in the USA
gives valuable insight into the different schools of thought concerning Puerto Rican migration, as well

33
introduction of new technology lessened the need for manual labor (Sánchez-Korrol

22). The result, according to Virginia Sánchez-Korrol, was “chronic unemployment

that found its social expression in intensive strike activity and in the emigration of

thousands of Puerto Rican workers” (22). Sánchez-Korrol states that between 1909

and 1940 over 71,000 Puerto Ricans emigrated from the island, in what is considered

by some scholars to be the first wave of migration from the island.

Clara E. Rodríguez, in her study, Puerto Ricans Born in the USA, identifies

three major periods of Puerto Rican migration. During the first stage (1900-1945) the

pioneros, or pioneers, settled in New York City. Many of these immigrants were

contracted industrial and agricultural laborers, who “provided the base from which

sprang many of the Puerto Rican communities outside of New York City” (C.

Rodríguez 3). The second phase of migration (1946-1964) is known as “the great

migration” because it was during this period that the largest numbers of Puerto Ricans

arrived (C. Rodríguez 3). During this period many Puerto Ricans settled in

surrounding areas of New York City, although the majority continued to migrate to

the now established Puerto Rican communities in the South Bronx, Brooklyn, East

Harlem (also known as “El Barrio”), and other sections of Manhattan (C. Rodríguez

3). The last period of migration is termed the “revolving-door migration” (1965-

present). It is so termed because of the fluctuating pattern of net migration and the

greater dispersion of Puerto Ricans to other parts of the United States (C. Rodríguez

as examines various factors that played into the reasons behind migration, such as labor recruitment by
U.S. companies and island unemployment rates.
34
4). Stateside, many of the first and second generation Puerto Ricans found their

ethnic and nationalist identities in conflict with the United States’ polarized system of

racial classification that categorizes people as “white” or “Other.”36 Many Puerto

Ricans, like Piri Thomas, found themselves at odds with a system of racial

classification that differed greatly from concepts of mestizaje that formed a central

component of Puerto Rican national and ethnic identities dating back to the

nineteenth century.37

From the 1850s young criollo students studying in Madrid endeavoured to

collect materials for a first history of Puerto Rico.38 Some of the young intelligentsia,

including Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1826-82), Eugenio María de Hostos (1839-1903),

and Salvador Brau (1842-1912), envisioned the island as a patria, a motherland separate

from Spain. At the turn of the century, Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States at

the end of the Spanish-American War.39 As a reaction to the change in colonial

powers, turmoil developed among the intelligentsia with the strong and pervasive efforts

36
See for example, Víctor M. Rodríguez, “The Racialization of Puerto Rican Ethnicity in the United
States.” For an example of a first generation Puerto Rican’s account of his encounter with racialization
in the United States, see Jesus Colon’s A Puerto Rican in New York.
37
Dr. Isar Godreau discussed the idea of a tri-ethnic identity in Puerto Rico in her lecture, “Perilous
Inclusions: Nationalist Celebrations of Blackness in Puerto Rico,” delivered Monday, February 5,
2001 at the University of Texas, Austin, Department of Anthropology. In her lecture, Dr. Godreau
discussed the notion of Puerto Rico as a mestizo culture, consisting of Taíno, African and Spanish
components. Norman E. Whitten, Jr. and Arlene Torres give an interpretation of the Puerto Rican
nationalist ideology of mestizaje in Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean (14-15). See also
Maxine W. Gordon, “Cultural Aspects of Puerto Rico’s Race Problem” American Sociological Review
vol. 15 (June 1950) 382-92.
38
Criollo, or Creole, refers to people of Spanish descent born in the American colonies.
39
On December 10, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed, in which Spain formally ceded Puerto Rico
to the United States. For a detailed history of Puerto Rico and the US colonial rule over the island see
Arturo Morales Carrión, Puerto Rico: A Political and Cultural History, or Alfredo López, The Puerto
Rican Papers.
35
to “Americanize” the island.40 In the 1920s a group of young intellectuals founded

Indice, a literary review, in which a renewed search for the ethos of Puerto Rico was

launched, and questions of “who are we?” and “what are we?” were put forth. Antonio

S. Pedreira proffered an interpretation of Puerto Rican reality in Insularismo (1934); and

Tomás Blanco (1897-1975) denounced colonialism and argued that “‘a people’ was

already taking shape in Puerto Rico when the American invasion occurred” in

Prontuario Histórico de Puerto Rico (1935, 1943) (García Passalacqua 125).

In their attempts to envision and define the new nation, questions of race entered

into the equation of national identity, and the debate about mestizaje surged. Race

became an integral part in the debates of national identity, a relationship that Darién

Davis theorizes in his study of the African presence in Latin America.41 Davis states:

An intimate relationship may exist between race and national identity,

and many Latin Americans have sought to define nationality in racial

terms or to interpret the region along cultural--that is, racial and ethnic--

lines. Cuban patriot José Martí, for example, attempted to distinguish

the Creole nature of Latin American societies in Our America. Mexican

nationalist José Vasconcelos referred to the people of Latin America as

the “cosmic race” … Other writers, from Brazil’s Gilberto Freyre to

Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén, have created positive national images of

40
Juan Manuel García Passalacqua, “Adriadne’s Thread: Puerto Rican Nationality in the Caribbean,”
Ethnicity, Race and Nationality in the Caribbean. (Rio Piedras, 1997) 122-23.
41
Darién J. Davis, Slavery and Beyond: The African Impact on Latin America and the Caribbean,
(Wilmington: Jaguar Books, 1995).
36
 mestizaje and melting-pot cultures. (173)

The idea of “melting-pot cultures” is what has come to be known (and contested) as

“racial democracies.”42 In Puerto Rico, as well as other parts of Spanish America, the

idea of “racial democracy” has been adopted as an integral part of national identity, an

idea that has been embraced on a rhetorical level to deny or downplay the existence of

racism. The supposed democracy results from profuse racial mixing (mestizaje) in

colonial Spanish America.43

Mestizaje was embraced in nationalist discourse as the intelligentsia strove to

define the nations at the end of Spanish colonial rule, and in the case of Puerto Rico, it

was also used as a means of vying for independence as the new North American

colonial power took control of the island. Building the national image was a project that

attempted to define the new nations as separate and unique, and mestizaje formed a

central component of the ideologies, as Darién Davis explains:

Defining nationality often requires the construction of some symbol or

metaphor that will reflect the contribution of its people. Symbols such

as the melting pot or the cosmic race recognize multiple ethnic and

racial contributions, including those of Africans, to the creation of

42
For further explanation of the adoption of mestizaje and nationalism, see Peter Wade, Race and
Ethnicity in Latin America (84-89), and Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Norman E.
Whitten, Jr. and Arlene Torres.
43
In Blackness and Race Mixture, Peter Wade critiques “racial democracy” and attempts to
demonstrate that race and class are not in fact separate factors in the socio-economic social stratum.
He argues that the fact that Chocoanos (Colombians who inhabit the predominately Black region of
Choco) have a “complex” about their Blackness or racial identity contradicts ideas of a racial
democracy. Theoretically in a racial democracy race would be of no significance as race and racism

37
 national identity… Writers in the 1930s, for example, included popular

and marginal social groups in their discussion of national identity.

Their contribution came not in the images that they presented but

rather in the fact that for the first time they inserted popular groups,

such as blacks, into the official history. (173-74)

Although mestizaje came to function as a symbol of Puerto Rican national and cultural

homogeneity, racism did not disappear from the island.

In fact, some of the intelligentsia who strove to define Puerto Rico as an

autonomous nation continued to advocate white superiority. In Insularismo, for

example, Antonio S. Pedreira positions himself as a “leader,” in his capacity as an

intellectual, of a society thrown into chaos with the change of colonial powers. His

discourse centers on the need to ‘complete’ the fragmented nation where poverty,

illiteracy, and chronic underemployment ran rampant, especially in the rural sector of

the island. In his discussion of the national project, he looks unfavorably on racial

mixture, stating that Blacks and whites are (racially and biologically) incompatible, as

demonstrated in the mulatto within whom two antagonist bloodlines are in constant

conflict: “El mulato, que combina en sí las dos últimas [white and Black races] y

generalmente no suele ser una cosa ni la otra, es un tipo de fondo indefinido y titubeante,

que mantiene en agitación ambas tendencias antropológicas sin acabar de perfilarse

have become non-issues (245). See also Winthrop Wright, Café con leche, and John Burdick, “The
Myth of Racial Democracy.”
38
socialmente”(29).44 Race is articulated as a problem to which a solution must be found,

and racial mixture is presented as problematic rather than as a solution to the question of

national identity. As Sonia Labrador Rodríguez points out in “Mulatos entre

blancos:” “el mestizaje representa una amenaza contra la herencia hispánica, una

obstrucción al proyecto de reorganización nacional, no solo por su potencial peligro

en su significación racial, sino también porque define a su generación como

mezclada, indecisa, confusa y discontinua” (723). For Pedreira mestizaje further

complicates the ambiguous situation in which Puerto Rico finds itself, rather than

offering a solution. Instead, Pedreira proposes his own solution: diplomatic

coexistence, where everyone has his place in society: “Nuestro deber estriba en una

amorosa comprensión de todas las clases que auténticamente valen, sin alimentar ese

horrendo y bestial sentimiento de los prejuicios sociales… He aquí el no man’s land

de nuestra vida social y una nueva razón para mantener en beneficio de todos una

diplomática cordialidad”(31).

Similarly, Tomás Blanco responded to the menace of North American

colonialism in his treatise El prejuicio racial en Puerto Rico. In his essay, Blanco

compares Puerto Rican racial politics to the United States, declaring that if any racism

does exist in Puerto Rico, it is because of the North American influence, and that

44
For detailed analyses of Pedreira and Insularismo, see Sonia Labrador Rodríguez, “Mulatos entre
blancos: José Celso Barbosa y Antonio S. Pedreira. Lo fronterizo en Puerto Rico al cambio del siglo
(1896-1937)” Revista Iberoamericana, v. LXV, July-December 1999, (713-731); Juan Flores, Divided
Borders (13-57); Eduardo C. Béjar, “Antonio S. Pedreira en Insularismo: figuración trópica triple de
Puerto Rico” Revista de estudios hispánicos vols. XVII-XVIII, 1990-91 (319-328); and Arcadio Díaz-
Quiñones, “The Hispanic-Caribbean National Discourse: Antonio S. Pedreira and Ramiro Guerra y
Sánchez,” Intellectuals in the Twentieth-century Caribbean, vol. II (MacMillan, 1995).
39
whatever racism there is does not compare in degree to North American racism:

...el inconsciente cretinismo espiritual de ciertos criollos tiende a

exagerar la existencia, el grado y la calidad o esencia de nuestro

prejuicio. A ello contribuye la confusión de términos que implica el

equiparar lo que en Estados Unidos se llama racial prejudice con lo

que vulgar y corrientemente llamamos nosotros en la isla prejuicios

raciales. Pero más que nada contribuye a ello la presencia importada,

con algunos ciudadanos continentales, del rigor del prejuicio

norteamericano… (137)

Blanco proposes that racism is not a question in Puerto Rico, as the process of

mestizaje has for the most part erased “pure” Blacks from the population: “Nuestro

pueblo tiene abundante sangre negra, aunque en general, casi no existen negros puros,

y aunque nuestra población de color está completamente hispanizada culturalmente y

son muy escasas la aportaciones africanas a nuestro ambiente, salvo en el folklore

musical” (132). Blanco proposes the mulatto as an emblem of racial harmony, for in

the mulatto lies proof of racial mixing, while at the same time he disparages the

African heritage as “un penoso obstáculo” (105). Blanco’s use of mestizaje is not an

altruistic embracement of racial hybridity, but rather a site to deny racial prejudice,

thereby distancing Puerto Rico not only from Spain, but it also functions as a site to

resist the North American cultural presence in Puerto Rico.45

In “El Que No Tiene Dingo, Tiene Mandigo,” Andrew Juan Rosa argues that

40
the concept of the mestizo came into existence as a means of downplaying the

importance of the African presence and influence in the Western Hemisphere:

In a calculated attempt to alienate and deny Africans from the

continually unfolding history of Africa and Latin America after the

dismantling of the enslavement system, the Europeans, in the same

manner in which they renamed the territories of the New World,

constructed the mestizo concept and declared the inhabitants

throughout Latin America to be a monolithic, sterile racial group of

mostly European, Indian, and minute African ancestry. As a result, the

Africans in Latin America became dislocated and alienated from the

African past, forced to look in vain at Europe for a reflection of

themselves and to become… ‘the peripheral dwellers in somebody

else’s unfolding historical panorama.’46

In fashioning Puerto Rico as a tri-ethnic or mestizo nation, the African contribution to

Puerto Rico’s national image is further diminished.47 The inclusion of the Taíno in

the national image is questionable as the native population in Puerto Rico was killed

off relatively early in the island’s colonial history. The presence of the Taíno in the

45
From a discussion with Sonia Labrador Rodríguez.
46
Andrew Juan Rosa, “El Que No Tiene Dingo, Tiene Mandingo: The Inadequacy of the “Mestizo” as
a Theoretical Construct in the Field of Latin American Studies—The Problem and Solution” Journal of
Black Studies, vol. 27, issue 2 (November 1996) 284.
47
See for example José Celso Barbosa’s proposal of a Puerto Rican tri-ethnic identity, where “Each
man of color in Puerto Rico is a conglomeration of blue blood (royal lineage), Indian blood and
African blood.” Problemas de razas (San Juan: Imprenta Venezuela, 1937) 42. Translation by Samuel
Betances in “The Prejudice of Having No Prejudice in Puerto Rico” part 1, The Rican, Winter 1972
(42).
41
national image helps to further dilute the African presence, in a system that continues

to privilege whiteness.48 This attempt to downplay the importance of the African role

in the national image of Puerto Rico is what makes José Luis González’s redefinition

of national identity as being founded in great part by the African contribution so

revolutionary, as I discuss below. 49

In the case of Puerto Rico, within the ideology of mestizaje the jíbaro came to

symbolize the Puerto Rican peasant, “the bearer of a nascent Puerto Rican identity

and culture that emphasizes a primary Spanish-indigenous heritage” (Whitten 14).50

48
As Peter Wade states in Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, “[Mestizaje] can be used to exclude
those considered unmixed, the more so because the ideology has a ‘tacit qualifying clause which ups
the price of admission [to the mixed nation] from mere ‘phenotypical mixture’ to cultural
blanqueamiento (‘whitening’, in terms of becoming more urban, more Christian, more civilized; less
rural, less black, less Indian)’”(84). See also Wade’s Blackness and Race Mixture, and Samuel
Betances, “The Prejudice of Having No Prejudice in Puerto Rico.” See also Aline Helg, Their Rightful
Share, Introduction.
49
Víctor Rodríguez explores the dialectic relationship between national identity and the nation-
building process in Puerto Rico in “The Racialization of Puerto Rican Ethnicity.” In his essay he
addresses the system of “pigmentocracy,” where race occupies a secondary position in reference to
color and class due to profuse racial mixing. In a pigmentocracy skin color and hair type serve as
cultural markers for identifying individuals, as Rodríguez states: “color becomes a subtle yet crucial
marker for boundaries that are more influenced by class than by race” (240). In Puerto Rico,
phenotypical traits were clustered in a number of categories that were points along a continuum, which
contrasts dramatically with the polarized vision of race in the United States (242). The phenotypically
constructed categories still had whites as a reference point, but class position also played a role in the
label assigned to individuals. As class was more important than race, people of mixed heritage could
legally have the “racial status” changed if they had the economic means to finance it (242).
50
In 1849, for example, Manuel Alonso published El gíbaro, which some consider to be the first
literary expression of Puerto Rican national identity. The figure of the jíbaro often embodied the ills
of the country, a negative image that represented the thought of many of the young intellectuals who
viewed Puerto Rico as an “ill” society, not ready to govern itself. Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, for
example, spoke of his country in his Memorias: “Mis compatiotas…están enfermos. La inercia moral,
la indiferencia, el egoísmo se los comen. Todo esto lo maldicen unos pocos, sin poderlo remediar.
Muchos lo conocen, pero se contentan con maldecir; no piensan que lo principal de las reformas por
que suspiran sin hacer nada por ellas, está en reformarse a sí mismos.” Tapia y Rivera, Mis memorias,
(San Juan, Editorial Coquí, 1967), 89. Benigno Trigo studies the conception of the infirm jíbaro in the
discourse of national identity in chapter three “Anemia, Witches, and Vampires” of his study Subjects
of Crisis: Race and Gender as Disease in Latin America (69-89). See also José Luis González,
“Literatura e identidad nacional en Puerto Rico,” El país de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos (43-84); and
42
With the embodiment of the jíbaro as the national figure there was little “national”

emphasis on the African component of Puerto Rican heritage in the conceptualization

of the population, something that was to change in the 1930s and 1940s, with Luis

Palés Matos’ poetic response to Pedreira’s call to define Puerto Rican national

identity.

In an interview with Angela Negrón Muñoz (1932), Luis Palés Matos (1898-

1959) comments on the jíbaro figure in Puerto Rican literature. Palés Matos finds

that the image of the jíbaro is not inclusive of the African component of Antillean

identity, as he states in his critique of Luis Lloréns Torres51:

Lloréns, sin embargo, se limita a la pintura del jíbaro, campesino de

pura descendencia hispánica, adaptado al trópico, y hace abstracción

de otro núcleo racial que con nosotros se ha mezclado noblemente y

que por lo fecundo, lo fuerte y lo vivo de su naturaleza, ha impreso

rasgos inconfundibles en nuestra psicología, dándole, precisamente, su

verdadero carácter antillano. Me refiero al negro. Una poesía

antillana que excluya ese poderoso elemento me parece casi

imposible.52

As a response to the nation-building imperative, and as a reply to Pedreira’s

Insularismo, Palés Matos undertook the project to “write” the African back into the

Mariano Negrón-Portillo, “Puerto Rico: Surviving Colonialism and Nationalism,” Puerto Rican Jam
(39-56).
51
Luis Lloréns Torres (1878-1944) was a Puerto Rican poet, essayist and journalist.

43
national image in the Spanish Antilles. Palés Matos is often associated with the

founding of the negrista poetry movement, a movement that celebrated “the African-

European encounter as felicitous and mutual assimilation,” thereby expanding the

vision of national identity and embracing more readily the mestizo culture of the

Antilles, as Claudette Williams explains in Charcoal and Cinnamon53:

Promotion of the concept of creolization was part of a nationalist effort

to revise the interpretation of the racial heterogeneity of Caribbean

societies. Creolization places emphasis on the interactive process by

which the original encounter of Africa and Europe has produced a

hybrid race and culture. (Williams 82)

Palés Matos’ Tuntún de pasa y grifería presents the Hispanic Caribbean as a

birthplace of a new culture, arising from the fusion of European and African cultures,

best exemplified in his poem “Mulata-Antilla,” in which Palés “symbolizes the future

harmony of a racially mixed Caribbean in the lyrical figure of the mulatto woman.”54

This new mulatto culture would be a synthesis in which the disparate cycles of

European and African history and society would “mesh in a harmonious cycle of

cycles” (González Pérez 288). In contrast to Pedreira’s portrayal of Puerto Rico as an

Hispanic-rooted culture, Palés Matos presents mulatez or mestizaje as a celebration of

52
Angela Negrón Muñoz,“Hablando con don Luis Palés Matos,” El Mundo, (San Juan: Puerto Rico,
November 13, 1932), 299.
53
I discuss the negrista poets more in depth in my chapter on Nancy Morejón and Nicolás Guillén. As
I explain in Chapter Three, the image of the African component in negrista poetry was oftentimes
filled with stereotypical depictions and eroticized/ exoticized images of Blacks, especially the mulata.
See also Claudette Willaims, Charcoal and Cinnamon (82-84).

44
African-Antillean heritage.

Several decades later, José Luis González, a self-exiled Puerto Rican living in

Mexico, “revolutionized” Puerto Rican intellectual life by (re-)examining questions of

race, nation and culture in his essay “El país de cuatro pisos” (1979), and offering an

alternative interpretation of Puerto Rican history, life and people. González contributes

to the discourse of Puerto Rican national identity by offering, similar to Palés Matos, a

view of Puerto Rico as an “Afro-Antillean” island, a view that radically differed from

Pedreira’s Insularismo. González traces the presence of Africans in Puerto Rico to the

beginning of slave importation to the island in 1520, and offers a revised vision of

Puerto Rican national identity based on the racial makeup of the population. His

argument is founded on nineteenth century demography, and he devises a stacking

metaphor consisting of four floors, representing the heterogeneous construction of

Puerto Rican society. The first floor (the largest segment) is the Afro-Caribbean popular

base of national culture; the second floor consists of the immigrants from South America

and Europe; the third floor began with the United States occupation of the island in

1898; and the fourth dates from the 1940s industrialization plan and carries over to the

present. González argues that the first floor is historically the oldest and largest, and

therefore must be considered an integral part of the national makeup.55 González’s

54
Anibal González Pérez, “Ballad of the Two Poets: Nicolás Guillén and Luis Palés Matos” Callaloo,
(Spring, 1987) 290.
55
González’s analysis goes well beyond the racial makeup of the population. His study closely
critiques the socio-economic and political forces at play in the constitution of national culture and
ideology. For a study of González’s essay, see Juan Flores, Divided Borders (61-70) or Juan García
Passalacqua “The dilemmas of Puerto Rican intellectuals” in Intellectuals in the Twentieth-century
Caribbean, vol. II (122-131). I do, however, disagree with García Passalacqua’s interpretation of
45
position is that the Afro-Caribbean popular base is fundamental in the construction of

Puerto Rican national identity as a mestizo culture.

At a difference to this idea of an (ethnically) homogenous nation, Puerto

Ricans who migrated to the continental United States found themselves at odds with a

system that differentiated along racial lines, as Clara Rodríguez explains in

PuertoRicans Born in the U.S.A.:

The racial context that Puerto Ricans encountered when they entered

the United States was at once contradictory and ironic. Puerto Ricans

entered a heterogeneous society that articulated an assimilationist,

melting-pot ideology, but that, in fact, had evolved a racial order of

dual ethnic queues, one White and one not-White.56 It was a society

that denied that difference should exist, while at the same time it

tolerated, and sometimes supported, separate schools, jobs, and

housing for those who were racially and/or ethnically ‘different.’ This

race order was quickly and clearly perceived by Puerto Ricans. The

irony was that Puerto Ricans represented the ideal of the American

melting-pot ideology--a culturally unified, racially integrated people.

However, this presented a problem to their acceptance in the United

González’s essay as a first and “daring” emphasis on the African element as defining Puerto Ricans as
a people (129). As I argue in chapter three, Negrista poetry attempted to redefine Puerto Rico as part
of the Caribbean in its mulatto essence.
56
In an endnote, Rodríguez explains that the term dual queues “refers to the hierarchical ordering of
ethnic-racial groups that has historically characterized the United States. These dual job and mobility
queues are the result of successive waves of immigrants into a White/not-White racial order.” Clara
Rodríguez, Puerto Ricans Born in the U.S.A. (Winchester: Unwin Hyman, 1989) 77, note 1.
46
 States. The dilemma that Puerto Ricans faced early on was essentially

the need for them to regress to a more racist society. (49)

It was not only the Puerto Rican migrants who were confronted with a polarized

racial system that treated them as foreigners and attempted to classify them along

racial lines, but also the first and second generation Nuyoricans.57 Piri Thomas’

narrative centers around this clash of racial/national ideologies and his struggle to

locate himself, both racially and nationally within the continental US society.

Samuel Betances, in his study of Puerto Rican identity in the United States,

“Race and the Search for Identity,” states that many Puerto Rican youths who attempt to

define themselves in terms of an ethnic identity have often faced the stark reality of

having to relate to critical issues of identity solely on the basis of Black and white (277-

8). In other words, according to Betances, it becomes impossible to simply be “Puerto

Rican,” “Latin,” a “Third World Type” or “Spanish” in a society that demands

categories based on race (278). Many of the youths who come from a racially mixed

background believe they can choose whether they want to be white or Black, or to defy

categorization as either, but in so doing, find resistance from the race-based mainstream

society.

In the United States the imposition of the race order has meant the dominance of

racial over cultural classification, and the result has been the division of the Puerto Rican

57
In Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives, Suzanne Oboler explains the treatment of Puerto Ricans and Mexican
Americans as foreigners in the United States, even after both groups became legal citizens of the
United States (17-44). The 1917 Jones Act imposed U.S. citizenship on Puerto Ricans. Nevertheless,

47
community into whites and not-whites (Rodríguez 1989, 59). American society has

historically been racially divided. Whereas the Spanish and Portuguese explorers and

conquerors intermarried with the indigenous and later African women, the early settlers

of the United States brought women with them to ensure the propagation of their people.

Hence, the trend of mestizaje began in Latin America, while in the United States there

was less “racial” intermixing, and racial lines were drawn.58 From the times of the

abolition of slavery “race” has been used as a means of creating the “Other” and

justifying European dominance over peoples of non-European descent, most especially

the free and soon to be freed slaves, as Jan Nederveen Pieterse explains in White on

Black:

Racial thinking means attributing inferiority or superiority to people on

the basis of their racial characteristics, that is on the basis of biological

traits. This is a modern notion, because thinking in biological terms only

took shape in the eighteenth century… racial thinking developed not in

spite of abolitionism but rather because of its success, and in response to

the situation created by the questioning of the legal status of slavery.

(Pieterse 45)

Pieterse traces the beginnings of biological racism to the late eighteenth century, from

many still were treated as foreigners and were denied their full rights of citizenship (such as voting).
See Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives (36-40).
58
This is not to imply that no racial lines were drawn throughout Spanish America. To the contrary,
the practice of “miscegenation” was often in truth the violation and rape of indigenous and African
women. Intermarriage and interracial relations did not eliminate the rigid hierarchies of colonial
Spanish America, as mestizos came to be synonymous with illegitimate. See Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic
Labels, Latino Lives 20-23.
48
about 1790 to 1840 when British abolitionist propaganda predominated (Pieterse 45).

One example is Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) in which he

dedicated attention to the question of slavery and Africans, delineating the supposed

physical, emotional, rational, intellectual and moral inferiority of Africans, and proposed

segregation as the only viable answer to the “Black problem.”59 Racial segregation was

legally mandated only a century later with the Supreme Court ruling of Plessy v.

Ferguson (1896) which proclaimed the doctrine of “separate but equal.”60 “Separate but

equal” did not formally end in the United States until 1954 with the Supreme Court

ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, and with the Civil Rights movements. It was

during this time period when many Puerto Ricans migrated to the continent and came

into conflict with racialization and the subsequent systematic segregation.

There are two general ways Puerto Ricans respond to the inequitable treatment

of people of color in the United States, specifically African Americans: to either

distance themselves from, or establish closer ties with the African American community.

Many Puerto Ricans distanced themselves from African Americans in hopes of

receiving more equitable or less racialized treatment, as Jay Kinsbruner explains in his

59
Jefferson states for example, “The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether black of
the Negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself;
whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other
secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to
us…Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less
suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that
immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?…Besides those of colour,
figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race…” (Jefferson 264-265)
60
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) involved the claim of Plessy, whose heritage was seven eights Caucasian
and one eighth African, “… that the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him, and that he
was entitled to every recognition, right, privilege and immunity secured to citizens of the United States

49
study of race in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, Not of Pure Blood. Kinsbruner

theorizes that many Puerto Ricans and other Caribbean peoples who come to the United

States often disassociate themselves from African Americans. He states:

More than any other factor the nefarious impact of United States racial

attitudes caused Puerto Ricans of obvious African descent to disdain

association with the civil rights movement and the quest among African

Americans for self-identity. Puerto Ricans with visible Negroid features

routinely declaimed themselves to be "Latin" (which they are) rather

than Negro, African American, or Afro-Puerto Rican (which they also

are). (Kinsbruner 11)

Still, while many people of African descent coming to the United States are hesitant to

self-define as Black, it is often with the Black or African American culture that they

identify in their process of assimilating to American culture. Juan Flores, in his essay

"Qué assimilated, brother, yo soy asimilao," questions the conception of Puerto Rican

assimilation to North American culture, in an attempt to explain the cultural experience

of early generation Puerto Ricans living stateside. Flores examines the relationships

between Nuyoricans and other "minority" communities, namely African Americans and

other peoples of Caribbean decent. He theorizes that rather than assimilating, these

communities share a colonized culture, and through their interactions we see processes

of the white race.” The Supreme Court upheld Louisiana law defining Plessy as Negro and at the same
time sanctioned the constitutionality of “separate but equal.”
50
of transculturation, but not true assimilation.61

The myth of the "great American melting pot," one of the metaphors of national

identity as explained by Darién Davies, does not apply to any of these minority

communities, in that true assimilation is rarely if ever achieved. The idea of a "melting

pot" is indeed faulty, in that it assumes one of two things: either the culture of people

entering the proverbial pot is absorbed and is reflected in the mainstream culture; or said

culture is discarded and the mainstream culture is adopted. Neither of these alternatives

is plausible nor a viable option. Flores proposes that the "assimilation" of Nuyoricans is

a process that does not lead to true assimilation, but is a response to forced incorporation

into the prevalent surrounding society, and that rather than assimilation it is a process of

self-affirmation and re-definition.

According to Flores, there are four phases in this process, which happen in no

particular order: 1) the state of abandon or estrangement where there is no access to

political or economic opportunity, and day to day life consists basically of conditions of

"hostility, disadvantage and exclusion" – seen in Piri Thomas’ father; 2) the stage of

enchantment, which entails idealization of Puerto Rico and the island life compared to

continental reality – figured in Thomas’ mother; 3) cultural recovery and awakened

cultural consciousness, or the reinforcement of Puerto Rican cultural identity in self-

definition; and 4) branching-out, the selective connection to and interaction with

61
Transculturation, as opposed to assimilation, implies that the subjugated peoples control, to varying
extents, what they absorb into their own culture and what they use it for. Assimilation, on the other
hand, assumes the absorption of the subjugated people into the cultural tradition of the dominant
(mainstream) group, and therefore the loss of the subjugated people’s cultural tradition.
51
mainstream society. The third and fourth concepts, especially the idea of “branching

out” are the most important in my study of Thomas. As Flores states, Puerto Ricans first

“branch out” towards the groups with which they [both Puerto Ricans and Nuyoricans]

are in closest proximity, both spatially and culturally speaking, namely Blacks in New

York and other Caribbean migrants (Flores 187-92). These groups may share similar

experiences in dealing with mainstream society, and share a "working class reality" at

the popular level. There is fusion among these groups, but it is still not assimilation or

incorporation into the dominant culture. Puerto Rican culture thus is not erased or

overshadowed, but rather it contributes "to a new amalgam of human expression"

(Flores 192). Thus many Nuyoricans and Puerto Ricans coming to the mainland may

identify with Black culture and their shared oppression, but are not readily adopting the

term Black. Black is, rather, a racial label imposed by society, and guarding a Puerto

Rican identity while rejecting a Black or even mainstream identity is a strategic response

to hegemonic rationality, i.e. the press to "assimilate" (Flores 10).

It is precisely this process of self-affirmation and/or redefinition described by

Flores that is demonstrated in Down These Mean Streets. Piri Thomas forges what Jean

Franco terms a "counter-hegemonic" identity in defiance to this rationalization, and he

does this by clinging to his culture, Spanish language, and Puerto Rican identity in

general.62 At the same time, however, we witness Thomas' struggle with society's

imposition of the Black racial label. Initially rejected, this identifier later becomes a

political tool and statement for Thomas. Nevertheless, accepting the term “Black” does

52
not necessitate the abandonment of the Puerto Rican cultural identifier/identity. After

his journey, with a new understanding of race and racism in the United States, Thomas,

through his narrative, undertakes a project to expand the discourse on race, by including

an ethnic dimension to the equation, and opening a discourse of “multi-consciousness.”

In Search of Safe Spaces: Out of the Home and Into the World of Street Gangs

Down These Mean Streets describes Piri Thomas’ life from adolescence

through young adulthood (the late 1930s through early 1960s).63 Piri grows up during

the depression and war years, conscious of his family’s struggle to survive the

oftentimes hostile environment of New York City. He witnesses his father’s

struggles to keep steady employment and provide for his wife and five children

[Flores’ first stage], and he is intrigued by his mother’s nostalgia for life on the island

she and “Poppa” had left to search for a better life [Flores’ second stage]. Thomas

draws on his own experiences growing up in the streets of El Barrio—his problems in

school, street violence and the need to be “hombre” and show “heart,” gang life,

drugs, sex and crime. This life of poverty and fighting for survival is underscored by

the unifying theme that runs throughout the narrative: the painful recognition and

62
From Jean Franco’s introduction to Divided Borders (10).
63
Although the book is autobiographical I propose a distinction between author and persona. As
Eugene Mohr comments in The Nuyorican Experience, Thomas does not always “achieve the
necessary disengagement from his past to handle his earlier life with complete objectivity” and his
narrative is “flawed with inappropriate editorializing” (Mohr 43). Thomas uses the data of his life as a
“text on which to base an increasingly impersonal parable on the poor and the marginal in the United

53
then acceptance of oneself in a world of “confusing norms and tangled ideologies”

(Mohr 44). The confusion that Piri encounters, due to his cultural self-identification

as Puerto Rican and a socially imposed racial identity, lead him to undertake a

journey in hopes of better understanding the dynamics of race in the United States

and reconciling his conflicted identity.

In El Barrio poverty and prejudice reign, and Piri is also burdened with being

both “spic” and “nigger” at a time when many did not yet discuss ethnic

consciousness and minorities’ rights. Ironically it is not his home, but the violent

streets that offer Piri a safe space of refuge, and belonging in the ethnically organized

gangs offer a space of rigorous, clearly defined codes that provide a needed sense of

belonging and identity. His home, on the other hand, is a space of conflict. Piri is the

eldest child in a bi-racial family, and is the only child to be born with predominately

Negroid features: dark skin and coarse hair. Piri is confused and hurt by Poppa’s

preferential treatment of his siblings, all of whom take after “Momma,” who is a

“white” Puerto Rican.

Thomas’ reflections on his youth show his feelings of alienation within his

own family, such as the opening scene where he feels that he has been unjustly

punished by Poppa: “Poppa ain’t ever gonna hit me again. I’m his kid, too, just like

James, José, Paulie, and Sis. But I’m the one that always gets the blame for

everything” (3). Throughout the narrative relations with his father as well as with his

States” (Mohr 44). In order to keep the author-persona relationship clear, I will refer to the author as
Thomas, and the persona as Piri.
54
brothers are strained. As the only "trigueño," or dark complexioned child in the

family, he feels alienated from the others in his family who do not identify as Black.64

His father does not want to be identified as Black, but instead emphasizes his

Caribbean heritage, exaggerating his accent when talking to Whites, to distinguish

himself from African Americans. His brothers also reject the Black label, choosing to

self-identify in ethnic terms as Puerto Rican.65 In Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting

Together in the Cafeteria?, a study of identity formation, Beverly Daniel Tatum

discusses Latino identity in North America. According to Tatum, many Latinos and

islanders resist being labeled as "Black" because they view Blacks in the United

States as being discriminated against.66 Thus, Latinos and islanders may resist the

connection by stressing accents or ancestry, to gain what they might consider a

slightly better social positioning, as is played out in Thomas’ description of his family

in various scenes of conflict and confrontation.67

Piri's family self-identifies in cultural terms as Puerto Rican which, according

64
“Trigueño” literally means wheat-colored, and is used euphemistically to refer to someone of color
in avoidance of saying dark or Black.
65
In his study, “Race and the Search for Identity,” Samuel Betances comments on the desire of many
young Nuyoricans of mixed heritage to identify as white or Latino, but not Black, as he states that “To
a large degree, Puerto Rican youth who come from a racially mixed background believe that in
America they can choose whether they want to be black or white. Some have decided not to suffer the
plight of becoming black. It is hard for them to be Puerto Rican without becoming black as well, the
assumption being that one can choose with which group to relate” (278).
66
Samuel Betances (“Race and the Search for Identity”) and Jay Hinsbruner (Not of Pure Blood) arrive
at the same conclusion in their respective studies of early generation Puerto Ricans living stateside.
67
Even though they may choose to distinguish themselves from Blacks in hopes of attaining a better
social status, Puerto Ricans nevertheless have one of the highest rates of poverty in the United States,
which brings into question other issues of discrimination and social access/ mobility. See Clara
Rodríguez, Puerto Ricans Born in the U.S.A. and Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, Puerto Rican Americans for

55
to Piri's brother, James, is not the same as being Black: "I don't give a good shit what

you say, Piri. We're Puerto Ricans, and that makes us different from black people"

(144). This is seen in many other confrontation scenes, such as with Piri‘s other

brother, José, who also rejects blackness: "I ain't black, damn you! Look at my hair.

It's almost blond. My eyes are blue... My skin is white. White, goddamit! White!

Maybe Poppa's a little dark, but that's the Indian blood in him. He's got white blood in

him and--" (144). “Black people” in this case refers to African Americans, who are

identified in racial terms in the United States, and who also have a distinct history and

cultural legacy from Puerto Ricans. Although, as Flores states in Divided Borders,

Nuyoricans may identify with African Americans on a popular level or share a

“working class reality,” this does not entail the adoption of an African American

identity. Thus, because Piri is unable to escape the societal labeling of Black he

begins to develop a greater affinity towards African Americans, with whom he shares

the burden of his skin and racial oppression. Down These Mean Streets details Piri’s

process of coming to consciousness in a racially divided society – his growing

understanding of the dynamics of race and racism, as well as his own shifting identity

as he learns to manipulate and maneuver a multi-faceted identity.

Thomas’ narrative demonstrates the extent to which racialization and colorism

exist within society, and the depth that these social forces penetrate into the daily lives of

people of color. A key scene that demonstrates Piri’s changing consciousness is his

further information on the high rates of poverty and unemployment in the Puerto Rican communities
stateside.
56
confrontation with his father. This scene makes evident the intersection of race and

ethnicity and the choice that young Puerto Ricans are forced to make about their

identities: “Cause, Poppa… him [José], you and James think you're white, and I'm the

only one that's found out I'm not. I tried hard not to find out. But I did, and I'm almost

out from under that kick you all are still copping out to... what's wrong with not being

white? What's so wrong with being tregeño [trigueño]?" (147). The importance placed

on "racial" identity overshadows ethnicity and national identity, relegating the latter two

to secondary (and tertiary) importance. Poppa’s response to Piri, on the other hand,

illustrates the desire of many Puerto Ricans and foreign nationals to maintain a

nationalist or ethnic identity in order to subvert the system of racial politics in the United

States:

I'm not a stupid man. I saw the look of white people on me when I was a

young man, when I walked into a place where a dark skin wasn't

supposed to be. I noticed how a cold rejection turned into an indifferent

acceptance when they heard my exaggerated accent. I can remember the

time when I made my accent heavier, to make me more of a Puerto

Rican than the most Puerto Rican there ever was. I wanted a value on

me, son. (153)68

68
In an interview with Wolfgang Binder (1980) Thomas further elaborated on the invasion of race in
the bi-racial Puerto Rican family and the attempts to escape being thought of as “Black”: “And it got
so very heavy that they [his siblings] would take the baby and pinch its nose continuously to make it
aquiline in structure. Many times when they could not afford to buy a bleaching cream they would
take lemon juice and rub it on their face. They couldn’t actually get it white but it would become
yellower. And there was also this very painful feeling of people telling you, ‘When you marry, you
57
Poppa’s exaggerated accent not only distinguishes him from African Americans, but

it also functions as a tool – it is an identity marker and a means of defining himself as

“different.” Thomas, who intermixes his English text with Spanish words and

phrases, also uses language as a definer, using language to position his text and

himself culturally and politically. His insertions of (often misspelled) Spanish words

and phrases are a constant reminder to his reader that he is situating himself as a

Puerto Rican and as a Spanish speaker, two identity components that set him apart

from being African American.69 Hence, questions of race and identity are not limited

strictly to the story being told, but are signified and expressed on another level with

the language of the text itself.70

The racial chasm that exists within Piri’s family is a mere reflection of a greater

social issue. Throughout the first half of the narrative Thomas delineates Piri’s

conflicted ethnic and racial identities both within his family and in the streets of New

York. Within the Puerto Rican community, and especially in the ethnically divided

marry white and that way you bring the race up.’” Wolfgang Binder, “An Interview with Piri Thomas”
Minority Voices 4.1(66)
69
Thomas’ use of misspelled Spanish words might be interpreted as a reflection of his working-class
upbringing. Juan Flores proposes that when considering bilingualism within the Puerto Rican
community that: “Bilingualism that makes use of nonstandard and class-based vernacular speech is
qualitatively different from separated bilingualism comprised of literate standards. Interpretation of
the socio-linguistic situation of Puerto Ricans in the United States must therefore be placed within the
context of working-class culture and language practice,” “La Carreta Made a U-Turn’: Puerto Rican
language and Culture in the United States,” Divided Borders (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993)
163..
70
As Frances R. Aparicio explains in “La Vida Es un Spanglish Disparatero: Bilingualism in
Nuyorican Poetry,” the use of popular language, the everyday speech of la gente, and the intermixture
of Spanish and English represents a response to the political oppression and discrimination on the part,
among many, of the educational institutions in the United States. This language usage is a means of
voicing protest “against the negative attitudes of the educated, literate upper classes in a very creative
and original way: by using their ‘incorrect’ or ‘vulgar’ language as poetic discourse and, moreover,

58
street gangs, Piri is accepted in terms of his ethnicity. Nevertheless questions of race

penetrate this “safe space,” as witnessed in conversations between Piri and Brew, an

African American friend, as I will explain in more detail below. Outside of this space,

however, Piri is forced to confront the colorline, whether in school, in the workplace, or

when entering the neighborhoods of other ethnic groups, namely the Irish and the

Italians.

Thomas describes several incidents of racism and discrimination that act as

defining moments in Piri’s encounter with the colorline. He experiences social

discrimination and racism at a school dance, when a white girl who is offended that a

“Black” boy would ask her to dance repulses his advances. Piri overhears her comments

to her friends: “Imagine the nerve of that black thing…Ha—he’s probably passing for

Puerto Rican because he can’t make it for white” (85-86). Her use of the word “thing”

reduces Piri to a status of less than human, or even animal, to an object describable only

in terms of color/race. The idea that he would “pass” for Puerto Rican demonstrates the

(slightly) elevated social status of Puerto Ricans over African Americans in mainstream

society, the status that Poppa strove to attain by stressing his accent. In another scene,

Piri is victim to job discrimination when he and Louis, a “white” Puerto Rican go to

apply for positions in the same company. After his interview, Piri is told that he will

be contacted as soon as there is an opening for him, whereas Louis is told to come

back Monday to begin training. In other “encounter” scenes, Thomas shows Piri’s

within a literary context, as words in print…Writing and reading bilingual [poetry] are acts of cultural
differentiation and reaffirmation” (147-8).
59
shifting self-identification, and chapter 13, “Hung up between two sticks,” is key in this

portrayal. In this chapter Thomas demonstrates the beginnings of the attempt to

reconcile racial and ethnic identities, something that does not come about fully until

after Piri’s journey. A significant scene takes place when Piri and Louis clash with

several “paddies,” or whites, after a movie. After fighting, one of the boys yells racial

epithets at Piri. Piri’s response shows the beginnings of his changing self-image: “‘Your

mammy got fucked by one of us black bastards.’ One of us black bastards. Was that

me? I wondered” (119). Reflecting on his response to the “paddy,” Piri begins to

question his identification, and realizes that race is becoming a central component of his

identity, something that he is not yet ready to accept: “It really bugged me when the

paddies called us Puerto Ricans the same names they called our colored aces...Why did

it always bug me?” (120).

Race, however, is not only imposed by mainstream society but is also an

important factor within the African American community. Through various

conversations with Brew and Crutch, Piri’s closest Black friends, Thomas shows

Piri’s negotiations of conceptions of race and his own changing identity. While

playing the dozens with Brew, Piri asserts his Puerto Rican identity over the racial

identity that Brew attempts to impose: “‘I’m a stone Porty Rican, and—‘ …Was I

trying to tell Brew that I’m better than he is ‘cause he’s only black and I’m a Puerto

60
Rican dark-skin?” (122) [my stress].71 Brew, however, does not allow for this

difference: “Wha’ yuh mean, us Negroes? Ain’t yuh includin’ yourself? Hell, you

ain’t but a coupla shades lighter’n me, and even if yuh was even lighter’n that, you’d

still be a Negro” (123).72 In another scene, Thomas again uses Brew to represent an

African American conception of race: “Sure he's a Porty Rican, but his skin makes him

a member of the black man's race an' hit don't make no difference he can talk that Porty

Rican talk. His skin is dark an' that makes him jus' anudder rock right along wif the res'

of us, an' tha' goes for all the rest of them foreign-talkin' black men all ovah tha' world”

(159). The North American conception of race, defined by “one-drop,” is not limited to

mainstream perceptions of biological race.73 The “one-drop rule” has been adopted in

great part within African American society as a defining parameter of race, and Blacks

have accepted mainstream demarcations of “Other,” as Stuart Hall explains in “Cultural

Identity and Diaspora”: “It is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the

Other of a dominant discourse. It is quite another to subject them to that ‘knowledge’,

not only as a matter of imposed will and domination, but by the power of inner

compulsion and subjective conformation to the norm” (Hall 395). This is the very

71
The dozens is a verbal game of signification, where one uses innuendo and insults, making
derogatory, often obscene, remarks about another’s mother or family members (“Yo’ mama” jokes).
For a more detailed explanation of the dozens, see Henry Louis Gates, The Signifyin’ Monkey (52, 69).
72
Once again, Thomas’ choice of language is important in his representation of Brew. He embodies a
culture and experience with his written interpretation of Brew’s spoken language. Brew, in fact,
represents the South, which is transmitted to the reader via the spelling and diction that Thomas uses.
73
The “one-drop rule” dates back to a 1662 anti-miscegenation law in the state of Virginia. The law
determined race and legal status (free or slave) based on the condition of the mother, reversing the
English common-law precedent that children took on the status of their fathers. “In light of the
increase in the number of children born of Black mothers and white fathers, Virginia passed legislation
providing that children would take on the status of their mother – bond or free. Therefore, children

61
lesson that Frantz Fanon imparts with his insights into the colonizing experience in

Black Skin, White Masks, and it is also what Thomas details with his firsthand account

of the result of the colonizing experience. Thomas’ depiction of himself as an

adolescent shows the process of adopting and conforming to mainstream notions of

race and social position within the racially polarized U.S. society. Brew aids in this

process by acting as an “authentic” cultural voice of the (southern) African American

experience. He does not, however, represent all African Americans or all

interpretations of Blackness. Thomas uses other characters to portray varying

conceptions of race, culture, identity, and difference.

Alayce, an African American woman from the South, for example, speaks to the

difference between racial and cultural identity:

What the hell you-all talkin' about, Brew? ... He's a Porto Rican and

that's whar he is. We's Negroes and that's whar we're at...Porto Ricans

act different from us. They got different ways of dancin' an' cookin', like

a different culture or something. Ah've met a whole lot of dark Porto

Ricans, an' I ain't met one yet who wants to be a Negro. An' I don't

blame 'em. I mean, like anything's better'n being a li'l ole darkie. (159)

In contrast to Brew’s reductionism of Black(ness) to phenotype and the one-drop rule,

which does not allow for cultural differences and differing conceptions of race, through

Alayce and Piri, Thomas opens the discussion to cultural difference and ideas of racial

born of African slave women and free white men would be enslaved.” Charles M. Christian, Black
Saga: The African American Experience, (Washington: Counterpoint, 1995) 16.
62
democracy versus the “one-drop rule” of racial difference. Thomas indirectly broaches

the topic of racial democracy through conversations between Piri and Brew, when Piri is

put on the defensive about dating a “white” Puerto Rican woman. Racism, according to

Piri, is a North American institution: “But they [Puerto Ricans] caught that played-out

sickness [racism] over here…I’d like to believe it, Brew” (167). Piri’s argument

resonates of Tomás Blanco’s argument against US imperialism when he states in

“Elogio de la plena” that “the notion of the essential inferiority of certain races is no

more than an imperialist pretext, held only by ridiculous Nazis or picturesque retired

colonels in the South of the United States, examples which we have no interest in

emulating” (Blanco 100).74 Puerto Rico is looked upon as a utopian island, from

Momma’s idealization of life on the island full of green plants to Piri’s belief that racism

does not exist there.75 Brew, who acts as Piri’s instructor in the realities of racism,

counters Piri’s romanticization of island life with questions of other forms of

discrimination: “Don’t git too hung on that idea, man. They may have a different

culture, but they’s probably got some different way of discrimination. Maybe them that

got bread are down on them that got none. Dig it?” (167). Thomas leaves the question

unanswered and the issue unresolved for his readers, focusing solely on the issue of

racial identity on the continent.

74
“Elogio de la plena” Revista del Atenia Puertoriqueño, I, 1935 (97-106), trans. Juan Flores. It must
be kept in mind, however, that Blanco was writing against the North American colonial presence in
Puerto Rico.
75
As Flores theorized in “Qué assimilated brother…” one of the stages of the process of fusion/
assimilation is the idealization of life on the island versus the reality of continental life. Thomas gives
examples from his early youth through his process of consciousness of the idealization of life in Puerto

63
 These and other encounters are examples of Piri’s initial recognition and

understanding of racism and racial discrimination, and demonstrate how social forces

impact and control identity formation, as Juan Flores describes in Divided Borders.

As Flores argues, identities are not fixed in some “authentic” place, nor are they tied

to evolutionary history (a working class movement or popular culture) (Flores 10).

Identities are subject to historical moments and social forces, and rather than being

static, undergo transformations and adaptations to the historical moment or situation,

which is precisely what Thomas portrays in his narrative.

Piri’s initial rejection of the Black label is in part a response to what Stuart Hall

terms an “imaginary coherence,” or the idea of an underlying unity of the Black people

whom colonization and slavery distributed across the African Diaspora (Hall 394). Hall,

in his article “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” talks about “difference” -- or what people

of African descent have become across the Diaspora. According to Hall, it is impossible

to speak with exactness about “‘one experience, one identity’ without acknowledging its

other side” --the ruptures and discontinuities which constitute the “uniqueness” of all

sectors of the Diaspora (Hall 394). There is no singular "Black" culture, but rather

elements of African cultures, beliefs and traditions have spread across the Diaspora,

evolving in different forms. This, coupled with the different legacies of slavery in the

United States and Latin America, and the ways that different parts of the Western

Hemisphere dealt with "Black problems" contribute to differing concepts of "Blackness"

Rico as a means of coping with the harsh reality of poverty, struggle, and racism encountered in New
York.
64
and identity development. Thomas makes evident his resistance to this assumed

coherent Black identity throughout (and through) his narrative. He rejects the idea that

physiognomy defines one and that dark skin should be assumed to be African American.

He does, however, show the process of identity formation and how identities shift and

change to adapt to the historical and social moment. Cultural identity is as significant as

racial identity, and neither cultural nor racial identities are static or fixed. As both Flores

and Hall argue, (cultural) identity is a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being.” It is

not, in other words, something that exists, transcending place, time, history and culture;

but a process of constant transformation (Hall 394). This is evidenced in Piri’s shift

from a strictly cultural identity to the incorporation of a racial identity: "I'm trying to be

a Negro, a colored man, a black man, 'cause that's what I am. But I gotta accept it

myself, from inside" (125). There is not total assimilation of one (Puerto Rican) culture

into the other (African American), but rather, as Flores argues, a fusion, where Puerto

Rican culture maintains its own identity, just as Piri, who gradually accepts his

"Blackness," does not lose his Puerto Rican identity. Society relegates Piri's cultural

identity to secondary significance after a racial identity, and herein lies the source of

Piri's dilemma. He does not completely identify with African American culture, but he

does recognize the shared oppression of Blacks and Puerto Ricans by mainstream

society.

Puerto Ricans also endure discrimination and oppression dealt them by

mainstream society, as Piri expresses in his frustration: “I hate the paddy who's trying to

keep the black man down. But I'm beginning to hate the black man, too, 'cause I can
65
feel his pain and I don't know that it oughtta be mine. Shit, man, Puerto Ricans got

social problems, too. Why the fuck we gotta take on Negroes', too?” (124). The

imposition of the race factor becomes an added cause of ostracism and confusion to

those who are attempting to adjust to a system of racial difference. Ironically, while

mainstream society and even Piri’s African American friends impose a racial identity on

Piri, the legitimacy of his right to “hate the paddy” is questioned because of his limited

experience with northern racism. For example, after playing the dozens with Brew,

Brew questions Piri’s claim to cultural authenticity:

Yuh talking all this stuff, and yuh ain’t evah been down South…So yuh

can’t appreciate and therefore you can’t talk that much…Yuh ganna jaw

about the difference and sameness up here and down there. Man, you

think these paddies up here are a bitch on wheels. Ha! They ain’t shit

alongside Mr. Charlie down thar. (126)

Brew essentializes racism, equating it with the southern experience, and in effect he

negates Piri’s claim to cultural authenticity by calling into question the fact that Piri does

not have first hand experience with southern racist practices. To remedy this, Piri

decides to gain a better understanding of the African American experience by traveling

to the South with Brew, where Jim Crow laws are still in effect: “You know, Brew?

I’m going down South… It might just set me straight on a lotta things. Maybe I can stop

being confused and come in on a right stick” (127).76 The South is a space for

76
Jim Crow laws were named for an ante-bellum minstrel show character. The laws were statutes
enacted by Southern states and municipalities, beginning in the 1880s that legalized segregation
66
understanding racism in the United States and, more importantly it is the site of initiation

into African American cultural literacy.

The South: Encounters and Resistance, or How to be “Esneaky”77

Piri’s journey to the South is a rite of passage where his investigation of and

experiences with racism under Jim Crow serve as an initiation into African American

cultural literacy. Farah J. Griffin defines the South as “an obligatory site of cultural

sojourn” in her discussion of the journey to the South undertaken by the Black

intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "Who Set You

Flowin’?”78 African American intellectuals and writers such as Du Bois and Jean

Toomer embraced the idea that a journey of immersion to the South is a necessary stop

between Blacks and whites, creating a racial caste system in the American South. In 1883 the U.S.
Supreme Court began to strike down the foundations of post-Civil War Reconstruction, declaring the
Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. The Court also ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment
prohibited state governments from discriminating against people because of race but did not restrict
private organizations or individuals from doing so. With the 1896 ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson the
Court upheld separate but equal, thereby giving way to a profusion of Jim Crow laws. Not until 1915
did the Supreme Court begin to rule against Jim Crow legislation with the case of Guinn v. United
States, which ruled an Oklahoma grandfather clause unconstitutional in its denial of voting rights to
those citizens whose ancestors had not been enfranchised in 1860.
77
“Esneaky” is a term coined by Lisa Sánchez González. The term is spelled according to how a
Spanish speaking person might pronounce the English word “sneaky.” Sánchez González signifies on
the concepts of resistance and subversion by adding a definitive Puerto Rican connotation to the idea
of being “sneaky.”
78
Farah J. Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’”?: The African-American Migration Narrative (New York:
Oxford UP, 1995) 146. Griffin’s study focuses on the migration motif in African American literature,
looking at early literature that portrayed Black migration to the North to escape the evils of southern
racism, the navigation of the (northern) urban landscape, and later, the return to the South in search of
cultural literacy and a lost/ignored heritage. Her study of this latter is extremely insightful and useful
for my study of travel motifs in Latin American literature, as it helps ground my theory of the South as
a cultural homeland.
67
for the African-American intellectual (Griffin 146).79 This journey to the South was not

a reverse migration, where African Americans would stay and make their homes.

Rather, it was a necessary experience for northern Blacks to witness the situation of the

life under the oppressive system of Jim Crow. After the sojourn, the intellectual’s work

was to be accomplished in the North, where the conditions witnessed and the racism

experienced in the South were later reported. Piri's journey to the South is in line with

this earlier intellectual vision -- the South must be experienced firsthand in order to

understand, analyze, and comment on the state of racism and the Black situation in the

United States. Thomas adds to the tradition, by introducing the idea of multi-

consciousness. Piri’s identification as a Puerto Rican is conflicted because of the

imposed racial identifier, something that he must come to better understand in order to

mediate the conflict he feels, and in order to do this he must gain what Robert Stepto

terms “tribal literacy”80:

[The journey of immersion is] a ritualized journey into a symbolic South,

in which the protagonist seeks those aspects of tribal literacy that

ameliorate, if not obliterate, the conditions imposed by solitude. The

79
Even as late as the 1960's we witness this idea of the South as a site of cultural sojourn in Amiri
Baraka's The System of Dante's Hell. In the 1970s and 1980s there was a shift in how the South was
viewed, from a place of sojourn to a site of return. Writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker wrote
of their views of the South as a place to stay, as a "site of racial memory and redemption" (Griffin 146)
80
I find the term “tribal” problematic and choose in my discourse to use instead the term “cultural.”
As my discussion deals with moving away from envisioning race and racism as monolithic concepts, I
feel that it is necessary to speak of race and racism in cultural terms. As I use the term Black as a
wide-sweeping, inclusive term to refer to people of African descent across geographical and national
boundaries, I speak of racism as cultural in that it reflects different experiences of colonialism,
racialization and oppression. Thomas is not attempting to become part of an African American “tribe”
but is trying to gain an understanding of the cultural heritage of racism stateside, and hence the

68
 conventional immersion narrative ends almost paradoxically with the

questing figure located in or near the narrative's most oppressive social

structure, but free in the sense that he has gained sufficient tribal literacy

to assume the mantle of an articulate kinsman.81

By going South Piri “legitimizes” himself in his own eyes (as well as Brew’s) by

witnessing and experiencing firsthand the racism, hatred and fear that reign in the South,

and thereby gaining claim to “Blackness” and a “Black” identity. This experience fuels

his revision of himself in the latter half of the novel, where he uses both Black and

Puerto Rican as terms of self-identification. Piri’s rite of passage into Blackness does

allow him to become an “articulate kinsman,” in a sense gaining self-awareness and

immersing himself in group-consciousness.

Thomas relates Piri’s transition from his lack of understanding of the dynamics

of racism, to his initiation into African American culture and the adoption of a Black

identity. Piri’s initiation begins via various encounters with racism in the South. The

first encounter occurs at the beginning of the trip, with Piri’s introduction to segregation.

Brew’s insistence that they sit in the back of the bus sets the stage for the Jim Crow

South. Piri, who is still grappling with his multi-consciousness, is unprepared for his

new status: "I laughed and said, 'Dig it.' but in my mind I hadn't thought it was gonna

apply to me" (166). In Washington, D.C. all of the Black passengers move to the back

of the bus, in preparation of crossing the Mason-Dixie line which divides the North from

reasoning behind his journey to the South instead of traveling to Puerto Rico where he might find
collaboration of his views of mestizaje.

69
the South. Piri, however, is still resistant to accepting his status as a Black in the South:

“Who the fuck can get used to any shit like this, man?” (166). The next encounter

occurs at the Merchant Marine union headquarters in Norfolk where Piri and Brew are

confronted with an indifferent "paddy with a colored voice" who is unwilling to offer

employment to the two “boys”(167). Although this is not Piri’s first experience with job

discrimination, the use of the term “boy” is an added insult. This, however, is Piri’s

second lesson in living with Jim Crow, as Brew explains to Piri: "It's jus' part of they

vocabulary" (168). At this point in the narrative, Piri has not yet learned to “mask,” or

hide his emotions behind a veil of indifference and acceptance.82 With the continuing

encounters with racism, however, he soon learns tactics and tools of survival, such as

masking and being “esneaky.”

In his third encounter, a first-mate on the ship also uses the disparaging term

“boy.” This time Piri chooses to employ tactics of resistance, continually serving the

first-mate cold coffee. After the meal the first-mate questions Piri about the cold

coffee, to which Piri replies, “If Momma is right, and I believe she is, I ain’t no

longer a boy” (185). The chief mate does not overtly acknowledge Piri's demand for

respect, but grudgingly decides the better course of action would be to not speak to

him, rather than continue to receive cold coffee. In other attempts to subvert the

system of segregation, Piri begins to manipulate his racial and cultural identities, at

81
Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil (Urbana: U of Illinois, 1979) 167.
82
To “mask” is to veil one’s feelings and thoughts, a tool of survival adopted by slaves and African
Americans in their dealings with white America. Masking can perhaps best be understood in Paul
Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” (1896): “We wear the mask that grins and lies,/ it

70
times melding the two and at other times using them separately to maneuver through

an encounter. Piri is successful with his tactics of resistance with the chief mate, but

in other instances he finds himself powerless. In Mobile, for example, Piri once again

comes into contact with the system of segregation when he enters a restaurant that

prohibits Black patronage. During this fourth encounter a white waiter tells him that

Blacks are not served in the restaurant. In response Piri begins to curse and rant in

Spanish and English, slamming his fist down on the counter with all of his “Puerto

Rican black man’s strength” (186). Although Piri begins to gradually identify with

African American culture and takes on the “Black” identifier, he at the same time

attempts to use language as a tool of resistance as did his father. The use of Spanish

is a means of distinguishing himself from African Americans in an effort to gain

acceptance as well as to subvert the racist system of segregation. Although some

might argue that Piri is in fact trying to “pass” in his efforts to distinguish himself

from African Americans, I hesitate to use the term in this instance as the situation is

much more problematic. “Passing” denotes moving away from “Blackness” or a

Black identity to embrace another that affords some type of privilege or elevation in

social status.83 Piri is asserting his Puerto Rican identity, which is not the same as

passing. From the beginning of his narrative he identifies in cultural terms and resists

racial categorization by others. Piri is at a stage of racial consciousness where his

hides our cheeks and shades our/ eyes, -- This debt we pay to human guile;/ with torn and bleeding
hearts we smile,/ and mouth with myriad subtleties” (Norton 896).
83
This of course is an oversimplification of the concept of passing. I elaborate on the notion of
passing in Chapter Two in my analysis of “Un extraño bajo mi piel.”
71
world view, his internal view, and the external view of race are shifting, and the

manipulation of his multiple identities is in fact a strategic construction of identity.

Piri is fighting to create agency by asserting his multi-faceted identity. As he fights

against the racial binary he opens a space for himself where he is socially

indeterminate, and by creating agency he achieves fluidity (of identity) where he has

access to more options and mobility. His use of the terms “Black” and “Nigger” are

part of the strategic essentialism of identity politics – a form of self-protection. At the

same time, however, he resists the racial binary by asserting his Spanish language and

Puerto Rican identity.

Piri finds other subversive tactics, using his Puerto Rican identity, not only as a

buffer as his father did, but also to resist the racial binary of Black-white. This incident

marks a major step in Piri’s initiation into Southern racism, as well as a moment of

shifting identities, as he begins to understand the Black plight in the South and identifies

himself culturally with African Americans. As Piri continues to encounter

discrimination and racism in the South, he begins to further develop his subversive tools,

such as masking and his choice of language usage. One area where we see a shift in his

identification is in his dealings with white women. In the first half of his narrative,

where he recounts his pre-journey identity angst, Thomas relates his quest for whiteness

via white (non-Puerto Rican) women.84 The first example, given earlier, was his desire

84
Trying to date white women was only one area in which Piri attempted to attain whiteness. Thomas
relates a scene of a young Piri who goes to a barbershop in the Bronx in order to straighten his hair.
Straightening hair illustrates the manner in which Black people’s bodies become inscribed with the
power of their oppressors. Piri’s willing submission to this process shows his unwillingness to reject
72
to dance with the young white girl at the school dance, and the anger he felt at her

rejection. The second involvement takes place shortly after the first, when Piri takes a

job at a hospital in Long Island, where he meets and begins to date a white woman. He

is again confronted with prejudice when he is with her – people stare and murmur,

making it uncomfortable for them to be together in public. He eventually rejects her,

choosing to return to Harlem and his “safe space” among the street gangs and his

familiar Puerto Rican community. Once he enters the South, however, he gains new

insight into the dynamics of race relations and acts out against the system of prejudice

and discrimination using the white woman as part of his plan of subversion. Piri is well

aware of the existing taboos about interracial relationships, and he uses the mythology

surrounding white women and Black male sexuality as a point of resistance. White

women have historically been considered by mainstream society to embody civilization

and beauty, and Black men were seen as a threat to the virtue of white women as well as

to the (sexual and political) dominance of white men, as explained by Jan Nederveen

Pieterse:

…it was black men and white women who were restricted in their sexual

choice. To justify these restrictions, certain myths were propagated, such

as that of the black male as being hypersexed and of the white woman on

the pedestal – the idolization of the white female in the American south.

Black men were said to have…insatiable animal sexuality…[and to be]

the standards of white society, as does his desire for white women. The ultimate fulfillment of the
quest for whiteness is the acquisition of the white woman, held up by mainstream (white) society as the

73
 possessed with insatiable sexual appetites. (175)85

At this point in the narrative Piri has developed to some degree subversive tools that not

only allow him to survive in the South, but also afford him the opportunities to rebel

against the racist system. This is perhaps best demonstrated in his changing vision of

white women. Unlike the first two intersections with white women that Thomas

describes, the third marks a shift in identity and ideology, as his opinions of white

women become more and more negative. He befriends a Mexican (who remains

nameless) who facilitates Piri's ultimate plan of resistance in the South. Using Spanish

once again as a tool, he enlists the aid of his Mexican friend to help him gain entrance to

a brothel. By speaking Spanish, Piri can "pass" culturally or ethnically, gaining access

to a sector of society otherwise prohibited to him because of his color. Thomas shows

the arbitrariness of race in the United States through the voice of the brothel proprietor:

“…we got all kinds of people coming in, all kinds of foreigners, and Spanish people

who come from Argentina and Colombia and Peru and Cuba, and that’s all right, but we

got to keep these damn niggers down”(188). As Thomas demonstrates, culture and race

become malleable concepts as “niggers” is a term reserved for African Americans and

epitome of beauty and desireability, while at the same time interracial relations are shunned.
85
Sexual politics and racial politics became tightly connected during and post-slavery. Since the
seventeenth century, European migrants to America had merged racial and sexual ideology in order to
differentiate themselves from Indians and Blacks and to strengthen social control over slaves (Pieterse
175). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sexuality continued to serve as a powerful means by
which white Americans maintained dominance over people of other races. Both scientific and popular
thought maintained that whites were rational and civilized, while members of other races were savage,
irrational and sensual (Pieterse 175). For a more concrete example, see Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on
the State of Virginia where he elaborates contemporary thought of Black sexuality: “Add to these…
their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the
preference of the Oranootan for African women over those of his own species” (Jefferson 265).
74
has little to do with “race.”86 There is some recognition of cultural identity and

“difference” in the polarized racial system, but skin color remains significant. Piri is

allowed entrance into the brothel because he can “pass” as Puerto Rican, but is still

subject to discrimination when he is charged five dollars more than his Mexican amigo

(188). Piri, however, does not desire to be with a white woman, but uses the prostitute

as a way of striking back against society. Piri’s plan of subversion takes place after the

services have been rendered, when he reveals to the prostitute that he is Black: "I just

want you to know, that you got fucked by a nigger, by a black man!" (189). Piri’s

adoption of the most derogatory term used to refer to Blacks, “nigger,” demonstrates the

strategic construction of his new identity. His choice of the terms “Black” and “Nigger”

are used tactically to maneuver through encounters and dilemmas, usually as forms of

expressing his resistance, or as in this case, to subvert social barriers and constructions

of race.

Piri continues to travel throughout Europe, and South America, discovering that

he is continually subjected to racialization wherever he goes: “It was like Brew said: any

language you talk, if you’re black, you’re black. My hate grew within me…Brew, baby,

you were right!”(191). As Piri's journey continues, there is a growing realization of the

enormity of racism and racist practices on a global scale, which further fuels his feelings

of anger and Black consciousness. After traveling throughout the Western Hemisphere,

86
There is in fact a misconception about race, where African American is viewed as a racial classification
instead of as a political classification. The brothel owner’s comment reduces ad absurdum the very
concept of race in the United States, showing the arbitrary distinctions of race, based not on any biological

75
Piri returns to his hometown of Harlem, where he reenters his life in the streets of El

Barrio, filled with anger and hate. He continues to be a resisting subject, now rebelling

against society in general by entering into a life of crime, drugs and addiction that

ultimately ends with his incarceration at Comstock.

Friends, Teachers and Others: Piri Comes Full Circle

Although his Mexican amigo briefly enters the narrative towards the end of

Piri’s process of initiation into African American culture, he aids Piri in his plan of

resistance, a point that marks the shift in Piri’s character and identity. Similarly, others

aid in Piri’s process of initiation, and like the Mexican, their characters disappear from

the narrative after their purpose has been fulfilled. Two of the most influential

characters that act as friend and teacher to Piri are Crutch and Brew. It is with their

assistance and guidance that Piri gradually becomes more understanding of race

relations and the racial paradigm of the United States. Both Crutch and Brew are

information sources for Piri, who impart cultural and racial knowledge to Piri, as

demonstrated in Piri’s musings about Crutch: “Crutch was smart and he talked a lot of

things that made sense to any Negro. That was what bothered me—it made a lot of

sense to me” (120). Crutch and Brew encourage Piri to travel to the South in order to

gain cultural literacy and a greater understanding of the dynamics of racism in the

determinants but on political variables. His slippage and confusion between racial and ethnic identity
strengthens Thomas’ argument for a reconsideration of the language and politics of race.
76
United States. They function as teachers in the North, and they also act as Piri’s

alternate consciousness. Piri’s struggle with understanding and embracing a Black,

racial identity is most clearly seen in his dealings with Crutch and Brew, who are, to

Piri, the embodiments of African American identity. Both are from the South and

possess the cultural literacy that Piri wishes to gain. Thomas’ preservation of Crutch

and Brew’s southern accents in his text imparts their statuses as representatives of

African American culture. Thomas views the South as the cultural homeland of African

Americans, as it is the site to which Piri must travel to gain cultural literacy. Brew is

especially instrumental in Piri’s process of initiation, as he accompanies Piri on his

journey of immersion, acting as teacher, counselor, and referee between Piri and Jim

Crow. Like the Mexican friend, Crutch and Brew disappear from Thomas’ narrative

after they have served their usefulness. Crutch is dropped from the narrative before Piri

embarks on his journey, and Brew vanishes in New Orleans shortly after reminding Piri

that he is just another player in the race game: “Why don’ yuh unnerstan’ that you ain’t

nuttin’ but one mudderfuckin’ part of all this hurtin’ shit?” (186). After Brew imparts

his last lesson, Piri’s initiation into southern racism is complete. Thomas portrays other

characters who help Piri in his plans of subversion, such as the Mexican, and those who

offer other lessons in racism on a more global scale.

Isaac, a Black West Indian shipmate who travels throughout the Caribbean and

Europe with Piri, represents the Caribbean Black. Isaac teaches Piri that racism exists

beyond the United States, and that contrary to Piri’s earlier idealization of Puerto Rico as

a racial democracy, racial discrimination is prevalent throughout the world, including

77
the Caribbean: “You’ll learn, boy, this is a hard life for a black or brown man…Unless

you’re willing to kill at the exact moment you have to, you’ll be a pussy bumper for the

rest of your life. You got to have the heart not only to spare life but to take it”(191).

Isaac teaches Piri the tenets of survival in preparation for his return to New York where

his rage leads him into a life of drugs and crime.

Piri’s introduction to African American culture began as an adolescent in New

York, through his interactions with Crutch and Brew. His initiation into African

American cultural literacy began with his travels to the South and his firsthand

experiences with Jim Crow. As Farah Griffin describes in Who Set You Flowin’?, the

process becomes complete with the return to the North and with the synthesis of the

information/experience gained while in the South. For Piri the process comes full circle

during his incarceration. His final investigation into African American culture takes

place in prison when he discovers the Nation of Islam. Although Piri interacted with

other African American prisoners, it is Muhammad, the leader of the Muslims, who acts

as imam (teacher) and counselor to Piri. Although Piri later returns to Christianity, his

exploration of the Nation of Islam marks a point of resolution. Through his association

with the Nation of Islam, Piri further reconciles his conflicted identity and his instruction

in African American cultural literacy comes to an end with an important lesson from

Muhammad: “No matter a man’s color or race, he has a need of dignity and he’ll go

anywhere, become anything, or do anything to get it—anything…” (297). After his

release Piri heeds Muhammad’s advise, struggling to construct for himself a life full of

dignity, with his never-quite-resolved multi-consciousness as he melds both (Puerto

78
Rican and Black) identities.

Another important character that Thomas uses does not function as teacher or

counselor to Piri, but serves instead as a point of reference for Piri’s shifting identity.

Thomas spends a large section of his travel account relating a meeting with Gerald, a

light-complexioned, biracial man from Pennsylvania. Gerald, like Piri, is in the South to

study the "Black situation," or as he explains, "for the sense of personal involvement"

(170). Gerald’s aim is to understand what it means for a Negro to live in the South, and

the mechanisms Blacks have developed to deal with racism. Gerald grew up in a

predominately white society, attended schools with whites, socialized with whites and

was socialized as white. Still, in the United States with the one-drop rule, any traceable

amount of African heritage was enough for one to be considered Black. The purpose of

Gerald’s journey is to observe Black people and Black culture in an oppressive

environment. His personal distance from this community is evident in his manner of

speaking --"their wonderful capacity for laughter and strength, their spiritual closeness

to God...[my stress]" (170). His overtly essentialist and over simplified view of Blacks

mirror Piri’s earlier understanding of African Americans:

I'm not seeking violence but rather the warmth and harmony of the

southern Negro, their wonderful capacity for laughter and strength, their

spiritual closeness to God and their way of expressing faith through their

gospel singing. I want to capture on paper the richness of their poverty

and their belief in living. I want the words I write to blend with the

emotions of their really fantastic ability to endure and absorb the anguish
79
 of past memories of the slavery that was the lot of their grandparents. I

want to write that despite their burdens they are working with the white

man toward a productive relationship (170).

By reading Gerald as a point of contrast, the reader sees the shift that Piri has undergone

in comparison to Gerald, and Piri’s new insight into African American culture. Gerald

expresses his desire for cultural literacy and entering the tradition of Du Bois and

Toomer, who saw the southern sojourn as a necessary cultural experience, but

apparently does not gain a true understanding of the plight of southern Blacks: “You

see, I really feel the large part of the publicity being given the southern situation is

adverse and serves only to cause more misunderstanding. I realize that there have been

incidents, and white men have been cruel and violent toward the Negro, but only an

ignorant and small minority” (171). Thomas’ sardonic portrayal of Gerald is told

through the oftentimes mocking voice of Brew, Piri’s alter-consciousness.

Gerald initially tries to explain his accepted status as “Spanish,” or what Elaine

K. Ginsberg refers to as the “Spanish Masquerade.”87 When Brew persists, asking again

if he has ever been mistaken for Caucasian, Gerald insists on the Spanish interpretation,

equating it to Caucasian: “I’ve seen looks of doubt, and I’ve had some rare unpleasant

experiences. But I find that I am mostly taken for a Negro by Negroes. I guess there are

many like myself who, because of their racial blends find themselves in the same unique

87
The Spanish Masquerade is the concept Ginsberg uses to describe when Blacks, such as Gerald,
passed for Spanish in order to avoid possible questions about skin tone. Passing for Spanish meant not
only racial passing, but also national passing, thereby avoiding the white-Black racial paradigm of the
United States (Ginsberg 3, 11-12)
80
position” (175). Thomas’ satirical relation of this encounter engages the ideas of racial

passing as well as the arbitrariness of racial categorization. Like Piri’s siblings, Gerald

insists on a white or Spanish identity: “I believe in the right of the individual to feel and

think—and choose—as he pleases. If I do not choose to be a Negro, as you have

gathered, this is my right, and I don’t think you can ask or fight for your rights while

denying someone else’s… I look white; I think white; therefore I am white. And I’m

going back to Pennsylvania and be white” (176-7). The insistence on the ability to

choose how one identifies begs the question: “At what point does one become white?”

Gerald, who is one-eighth Negro, reminds the reader of the 1896 decision handed down

by the Supreme Court of the United States, Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy v. Ferguson

confirmed that a person with one-eighth Negro ancestry could be legally defined as

Negro under Louisiana law, even though, as in the case of Plessy, that ancestry was not

physically visible. Gerald, who looks white and who was socialized as white, offers an

alternative voice to Piri – both desire to choose their racial definition, thereby rejecting

the “irrational absolutes of racism” (Mohr 50). Because race in society is based on the

one-drop rule, there is no space left for “feeling” white or Black. On the contrary,

society at large insists that you “feel” your difference or “otherness.”

Thomas uses Gerald’s character to complicate the discussion of race in his

narrative. At the time that Gerald and Piri meet, Piri is only seventeen years old and

is still struggling with his conflicted identities. Gerald lends a voice to the discussion,

not only broaching the topic of race in the United States, but also reopening and

complicating the discussion further by including the cultural/national identity

81
question. Gerald’s inquiry as to whether Puerto Ricans consider themselves to be

Negro, elicits a response from Piri which is full of signification: “I can only talk ‘bout

me, but como es, es como se llama…I’m a Puerto Rican Negro” (173). I use

signification in the sense of Black vernacular signifyin(g), as explained by Henry

Louis Gates, Jr. in The Signifying Monkey. As Gates explains, there exists a

difference in cultural understanding of the term signification as used in African

American culture and American culture at large. As Gates explains:

The relationship that black ‘Signification’ bears to the English

‘signification’ is, paradoxically, a relation of difference inscribed

within a relation of identity. That, it seems to me, is inherent in the

nature of metaphorical substitution and the pun, particularly those

rhetorical tropes dependent on the repetition of a word with a change

denoted by a difference in sound or in a letter (agnominatio), and in

homonymic puns (antanaclasis). These tropes luxuriate in the chaos of

ambiguity that repetition and difference (be that apparent difference

centered in the signifier or in the signified, in the ‘sound-image’ or in

the concept) yield in either an aural or visual pun. (45)

The signification lies in the innuendo, pun or underlying meaning often expressed

through tone of voice or semantic construction. Piri’s response to Gerald shows that

signification (in the African American cultural sense) is not just a question of double-

voiced discourse (saying one thing and meaning another), but can be more complex,

or multi-voiced (saying one thing in another language that has multiple meanings.)
82
His use of Spanish has double signification. Looking at Piri’s response to Gerald one

can read his mixture of languages in a variety of ways. The anglicized reading of the

text would be a syntagmatic reading, loosely translated as “What you see is what you

get,” which one would read literally. A paradigmatic reading, understanding the

multiple levels of signifyin(g), would render a different interpretation of Piri’s words,

beyond the literal meaning. On one level he’s signifyin(g) on Gerald’s passing as

Spanish. If, in fact, race is located in “one-drop,” Gerald’s choice to pass is

meaningless, as he is what he is: Black. In other words, Gerald is seen as Black and

therefore he is Black. On another level Piri is indirectly communicating to Gerald

that Negroes do not use Spanish, and therefore Piri’s choice to use Spanish in his

answer signifies his identification as a Puerto Rican. At the same time it critiques

Gerald’s choice to pass as Spanish, as Gerald does not possess the linguist tools. On

yet another level, Piri signifies that language and color are not enough to define

oneself as different, a point that Thomas demonstrates through Piri’s struggles with

identity throughout the narrative.88

Thomas’ choice to use Spanish as a mode of signifyin(g) is important in other

scenes as well. As the spoken word is delivered through multiple vectors (the word is

the vector for meaning; the phrase is the vector for ideas) his choice to communicate

bilingually adds another element: he not only uses the African American trope of

signification, but he signifies in Spanish. With this understanding of signifyin(g) re-

reading scenes in the narrative, such as the brothel scene, where his use of Spanish to

88
As discussed with Dr. Finnie Coleman, August 2001.
83
gain entry and his choice of words (the vectors of meaning) in identifying himself as

Black before fleeing, take on added meaning. Signification occurs in other scenes as

well, such as his use of Spanish (moyeto, panín, trigueño, etc.) throughout the

narrative with African Americans to distinguish himself as Puerto Rican; as well as

his use of the terms Black and nigger to identify himself to whites during racist

encounters. The mastery of signifyin(g) in Thomas’ narrative reflects Juan Flores’

schematic of assimilation, in his adoption of African American cultural traditions

while maintaining a separate cultural identity. Piri does not assimilate to mainstream

society, but rather goes through a process of transculturation. Transculturation, as

defined by Mary Louise Pratt, is “how subordinated or marginal groups select and

invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (Pratt

6). Transculturation is the phenomenon that takes place in the contact zone of two or

more cultures, and as Juan Flores observed in New York, it is the result of the sharing of

colonized cultures between Puerto Ricans and other surrounding communities, namely

African Americans.

Piri Thomas finds himself caught amidst multiple cultures and identities –

Puerto Rican, Black, American, as well as male and heterosexual.89 Within US

society he is pressured to assimilate and adopt a Black identity, based solely upon his

89
As I mentioned earlier, it is important to keep in mind that identity cannot be located in a fixed
concept, such as “Black” or “heterosexual” or “female.” Personal identity is multi-faceted, and there
are constant negotiations of differing aspects of one’s identity. This is a key concept in understanding
that identities are not static and cannot be limited to or defined by one factor, such as race, social class,
or gender, nor can they be assigned to a particular historical moment. For further explanation of
personal identity, see William Cross, Shades of Black. See also, Stewart Hall’s study of cultural
identity, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.”
84
physiognomy. He realizes that he will continue to be marginalized by mainstream

society, regardless to whether he stresses his accent or speaks Spanish. His “Puerto

Ricanness” will allow him some limited access into mainstream society, but his

Blackness along with his Puerto Rican heritage will preclude him from ever being

totally accepted as anything besides “Other.” Nevertheless, Piri begins to take pride

in his Otherness and embraces not only his Puerto Rican heritage, but also a Black

identity. Black is no longer simply a racial demarcation, but rather a political

statement, and in accepting the term Black, he is identifying himself with the

oppression, ostracism, and plight of African Americans in the US, while maintaining

his Puerto Rican identity. Once Piri embraces a Black identity, "Black" is no longer a

derogatory, limiting racial term imposed by society, but rather a political statement,

and also a term of pride and identification. His desire or need to accept his Otherness

changes in part our conception of (cultural) identity. For cultural identity, as Stuart

Hall explains:

[Is] not some universal and transcendental spirit inside of us on which

history has made no fundamental mark. It is not once-and-for-all. It is

not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute

Return ... It is something ... It has its histories - and histories have their

real, material and symbolic effects ... It is always constructed through

memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the points

of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which

85
 are made within the discourses of history and culture ... Hence, there is

always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no

absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental ‘law of origin.’

(Hall 395)

The complexity of identity cannot be simplified or reduced to a question of

phenotype, skin color, sexuality or gender. Piri’s struggle with the imposed racial

identity is tightly connected to differing cultural conceptions of Blackness, as well as

to the fact that in the United States, “Black” is for the most part limited to the

experience, history and cultural expression of African Americans. It is not a term that

is inclusive of the varying experiences of other peoples of African descent, and it

makes no room for ideologies of racial mixture. As it is, the problem remains that

“Black” in the US sense may be considered a term of affirmation, unity or bonding

for a people of similar heritage, whereas within the Puerto Rican community, which

embraces ideas of racial democracy, it can be seen as divisive and exclusionary.

Down These Mean Streets is a fitting title to Thomas’ narrative, as it invokes

the idea of the journey down the “mean streets” of racism and racial segregation in

the United States. The journeys that he narrates depict an attempt to define his own

parameters of race and ethnicity, while engaging US systems of racial classification.

His various journeys, from Spanish Harlem (Puerto Rico reconfigured) to Long Island

where he “passes” for Puerto Rican, to the South, where he takes on a Black identity,

all reflect varying facets of his multi-consciousness. Rather than adopting the
86
“Black” label that society attempts to impose on him, Piri maneuvers his multi-

faceted identity, and alternately manipulates these identities to gain access to

mainstream society or to subvert and resist cultural assumptions and categorizations

imposed by society.

Thomas’ narrative follows a tradition of revisionist writings which challenge

European and colonial representations of the “Other.” In a similar fashion, Manuel

Zapata Olivella, whose works I study in Chapter Two, uses literature as a forum to

contest predominant racial ideologies of mestizaje in Colombia. His work shares

several points of intersection with Thomas’: both embark on journeys to investigate

“Blackness” in the Jim Crow South; both use multiple facets of their identities,

whether racial, cultural, or ethnic, to maneuver through a society in which their

cultural understandings of mestizaje are at conflict with a society invested in a

polarized vision of race; and in doing so, both use language as a means of signifyin(g)

and as a tactic of resistance.

87
 CHAPTER TWO

Négritude and Mestizaje: The Quest for a Black Identity

As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no

occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being
through others…For not only must the black man be black; he must be
black in relation to the white man…Overnight the Negro has been
given two frames of reference within which he has had to place
himself. His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the
sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were
in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed
itself on him.
The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not
know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the
other.

--Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

In his treatise on the Black psyche, Black Skin, White Masks (1967), Frantz

Fanon explores the notion of a fragmented identity, an idea that W.E.B. Du Bois had

theorized in 1903 as “double-consciousness.” “Double-consciousness,” or seeing

oneself through the eyes of another, a legacy of both slavery and colonization,

undoubtedly lends to a distorted vision of self, especially if the gazing eye is that of a

colonizing or hegemonic power which is attempting to fashion the colonial subject

within the image of national identity. The colonial subjects’ culture is subordinated

to the colonizers’, as the colonial power endeavors to construct itself at the center of

the national image, a process which inevitably leads to the dislocating and alienation

of the colonial subject from his past, as he is forced to look to the colonial power to
88
define him within the image of the new nation.

These theories of the fragmented self have transcended international, cultural,

and language boundaries, as it has been explored in North American, Francophone

Caribbean and African, as well as Latin American contexts. In Colombia, Manuel

Zapata Olivella rearticulates this discussion in terms of the “European mirror” that he,

as an Afro-Colombian, is forced to gaze into when defining himself within

Colombian society. In a society that embraces the ideology of mestizaje, Zapata

Olivella acknowledges his racial hybridity, but at the same time is acutely aware of

the original meanings of the term mestizo: bastard, illegitimate. This illegitimacy is

what is reflected back to him as he gazes into the mirror, ever cognizant of the

continued derision of his “oppressed bloods.” Zapata Olivella sets out to break this

“European mirror” by redefining himself through his own mirror, and vindicating his

“oppressed bloods.” He travels to the United States and Africa where he examines

racial identity in clearly defined binaries and participates in Civil Rights and Pan-

African movements. Through his experiences in North America and Africa he gains

a cultural understanding of Blackness and Black pride that enables him to refigure the

Black (and indigenous) images and contributions to mestizaje in the formulation of

Colombian national identity. His literature serves as a site that revalorizes and

legitimizes both African and indigenous heritages within the Colombian national

image.

It is through his travels, recorded in literature, throughout Colombia, the

United States and Africa that Zapata Olivella is able to explore questions of race and
89
racial identity in Colombia. Many Latin Americans and Antilleans viewed the United

States (at the time of his writing) as the quintessence of racial discrimination,

classifying it as such because of its numerous lynchings and the practices of

segregation.90 However, by investigating race in the United States and a Pan-

Africanist setting (the purpose of his pilgrimage to the “motherland” of Africa)

Zapata Olivella is able in turn to examine ideas of Blackness, racial identity and

racism in his native land. His work opens a forum for racial theorizing in a Caribbean

and Latin American context that contradicts or questions ideas of “racial democracy”

and mestizaje. Zapata Olivella’s works show that there exist notions in Caribbean

and Latin American societies of what W.E.B. Du Bois theorized as “double-

consciousness” and that Afro-Antilleans and Afro-Latin Americans are attempting to

reconcile their identities in terms of race, ethnicity and nationality within the realm of

mestizaje.91

Manuel Zapata Olivella (1920- ) an author, psychiatrist, anthropologist,

musicologist and intellectual is the best-known Black writer in Colombia, and

perhaps in the whole of Latin America. Zapata Olivella’s most famous work is the

90
See for example Carlos Octavio Bunge, Nuestra América (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1926) 142-145. As
Bunge writes: “En vano se protesta con miras políticas inmediatas en los estados del Norte; la
Suprema Corte reconoce como constitucionales esas calificaciones del voto. Y ahora, en los mismos
estados nortistas se aprueban las medidas contra la influencia del negro; en todas partes, a pesar del
carácter pacífico y disciplinado de los yanquis, se le desprecia, se le odia, se le ataca…Unos proponen
que se le recluya en un solo estado de la Unión; otros, que se le exporte a Filipinas…” (145). Another
example can be found in the works of Nicolás Guillén such as “Del problema negro en los Estados
Unidos” (Reprinted in Prosa de prisa, tomo II, La Habana: Editorial Arte y Literature, 1975 (67-74);
originally published in Hoy, March 30, 1950).
91
As I explain in Chapter One, I use the term “multi-consciousness” rather than “double-
consciousness” to expand on Du Bois’ theory of two-ness, and to acknowledge the multiple facets of
identity.
90
novel Changó, el gran putas (1983), but he has also written several other novels,

plays, an autobiography and two travel narratives. His work, which advocates social

change, largely focuses on the Black experience, recording the plight of both Blacks

and aborigines in his homeland. The majority of his literature deals with the Black

experience in Colombia, but he also expresses an awareness of racial issues in other

parts of the world, especially the United States.92

In this chapter I first review the construction of mestizaje as part of the

nationalist project in Latin America. Secondly, I examine Zapata Olivella’s travel

narrative, He visto la noche (1953), which details his journey through the United

States. In this section I examine how travel is used as a means of investigating racial

identity and conceptions of Blackness, and I propose that Zapata Olivella shifts from

an essentialized vision of Blackness, which reduces African Americans to Sambo-

type figures, to a more comprehensive understanding of racial difference in a North

American context. Thirdly, I read his short story “Un extraño bajo mi piel” (1967) as

a reflection of his conception of race in the United States, and as a site for racial

theorizing, in which he proposes a redefinition of the concept of mestizaje, from a

homogenous vision of the nation to one that celebrates racial difference within

mestizaje. Finally, I look at his autobiographical novel, ¡Levántate mulato! (1988) as

a site for synthesizing his different understandings of race gained through his travels.

In this narrative we witness Zapata Olivella employing his new conceptions of racial

92
In Chambacú, Corral de negros (1963), for example, he recalls the civil rights activists in the United
States. See Richard Jackson, The Black Image in Latin American Literature (1976) 120.
91
identity and pride in a project of reconfiguring mestizaje, which calls for people of

African and indigenous decent to take pride in their non-European heritage.

Zapata Olivella actively partakes in the quest for vindication and affirmation

of Blacks in the Americas, most specifically in Colombia, through his writings and

his cultural studies. In Levántate mulato for example, Zapata Olivella rejects

whitewashed versions of history and challenges mulattos to accept their Black

identities and recognize the history of miscegenation in Latin America as a violent

process. Zapata Olivella is a doctor of medicine as well as a self-proclaimed doctor

of society, one who studies the ills of society, namely racism and poverty, in a

country that embraces the ideology of “racial democracy.” Zapata Olivella defines

Colombian society as a tri-ethnic society in ¡Levántate mulato!, but his focus on

racial issues in earlier works, such as He visto la noche and “Un extraño” speaks of

lingering questions of racial identity and racism in a society where race is said to be

of little importance, but where in reality, Black identity is under siege.

The majority of the criticism on Zapata Olivella centers on his works of

fiction, two of the exceptions being Richard Jackson’s chapter in Black Writers and

Latin America, and Marvin Lewis’ article, “Manuel Zapata Olivella and the Art of

Autobiography.” My study diverges from other critics’ in that my focus primarily

centers on his travel narratives, and how his experiences as a vagabond influenced

both his fictional and autobiographical self-portrayal and his refiguring of Black

identity and race in a Caribbean and Latin American context. In order to comprehend

Zapata Olivella’s project, it is imperative to have an understanding of the dynamics of

92
racial discourses and the subsequent conceptions of mestizaje in Spanish America.

Race in Spanish America: the Myth of Democracy

There has been a long-standing tradition of a "racial democracy" said to exist

in many Latin American countries, including Colombia. This idea was propagated as

early as the eighteenth and through the early twentieth centuries, at the era of

independence from Spain and other metropolises, and the self-fashioning of nations

throughout Latin America. The intellectuals and the criollo elite, in their attempts to

define nationhood, analyzed the hierarchical caste system that existed in Latin

America at the turn of the century. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Martí, Carlos

Octavio Bunge, José Ingenieros, Juan Bautista Alberdi and other intellectuals

theorized on the unique makeup of their countries' respective populations. Most

times these arguments of racial democracy are self-contradicting, arguing that Latin

America is unique from Europe because of its heterogeneous makeup, but at the same

time arguing for white or European supremacy. Bunge, for example, in his work,

Nuestra America (1926), examines the three coexisting racial factors of the makeup

of Latin America in general. Using a biological determinist argument he depicts the

three races, Black, white, and indigenous, attempting to justify the hierarchical

system that existed in the early twentieth century:

La composición psíquica de sus ingredientes puede representarse así:

los españoles nos dan arrogancia, indolencia, uniformidad teológica,

93
 decoro; los indios, fatalismo y ferocidad; los negros, servilismo,

maleabilidad, y cuando entroncan con los blancos, cierta

sobreexicitación de la facultad de aspirar que podría bien llamarse

hipertesia de la ambición. (Bunge 127)

Although he argues that Latin Americans in general lack the drive and motivation of

the Europeans, which contributes to their lack of progress and development, he does

argue that the existing hierarchy should naturally encompass at the top of the system

the criollos, the direct descendents of Europeans who “brought civilization” to the

“New World.” He points out the “apparent” biological inferiority of the indigenous

and Black populations, promoting the continuation of the existing hierarchical caste

order. Using a truistic argument he proposes that Blacks are intellectually inferior to

whites, for they invented neither the telegraph nor the train (Bunge 145). The caste

system is envisioned as a triangle, with the larger Black and indigenous populations

forming the bottom portions of the triangle. At the apex are the Euro-Americans,

smaller in number, but biologically or innately "superior", and therefore “rightfully”

in their place of rule. The rhetoric of the era, viewing the indigenous peoples as

"natural slaves" and Blacks as inherently inferior reinforced criollo ideas of rightful

rule and the perpetuation of the established order.

Bunge goes on to compare the development of race relations in Latin America

to the United States. In the United States there was less mixing of the races, which

Bunge attributes in great part to Puritanism. Many of the initial settlers in North

America came to escape religious or political persecution, and women came in

94
sufficient enough numbers to continue the propagation of the people. In Latin

America, on the other hand, the first to arrive were the explorers and conquerors that

did not bring women with them. Those of the conquerors who stayed in their

newfound homes chose indigenous brides, not to mention the violations and

concubinage of these women, and thus began the trend of mestizaje. This is not to

say that there was no mixing of the races in North America, but, according to Bunge,

it did not exist to the extent that it did in Latin America (Bunge 126). In parts of

Latin America racial mixture was actually encouraged in campaigns to “whiten”

(blanquear) the population, as Winthrop Wright explains in his study of Venezuela,

Café con leche:

With the acceptance of positivism, Venezuelan elites began to

formalize their view on race, while making modifications to

contemporary European racist theories. As in the past, their folklore

conveyed their long-standing dislike of blacks and doubts about the

blacks’ ability to form an integral part of a stable and modern society.

During the last half of the century, cities did more than openly attach

positive values to whiteness and negative images to blackness. They

actually called for the whitening of the population, by attracting

European immigrants to Venezuela, and by effecting the virtual

disappearance of blacks over an extended period of time. This

movement, while not overt or institutionalized as in the United States,

slowly led the Caracas-based elites who ruled most of Venezuela to

95
 agree that they could indeed improve their nation’s population by

whitening. (43)

There were similar practices in Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia and Argentina.93

Bunge also contributes the high degree of miscegenation in Latin America to the

predisposition of the Spaniards to mixing with the "gente tan caliente como lo eran

las indias y las negras,” a supposed predisposition that resulted from the eighth

century conquest of Spain by the Muslims and the subsequent African and Arab

presence in Spain that lasted well into the fifteenth century (Bunge 126).

The widely accepted ideas and practice of mestizaje in Latin America is the

foundation for the ideas of a supposed racial democracy said to exist in many parts of

Latin America.94 Many intellectuals, such as José Martí, have argued that

miscegenation gives Latin America its unique makeup, and this makeup, or mixture

of the people and cultures, is argued and embraced in national and foundational

literatures as the defining quality of the new nations. This idea is elaborated in Doris

Sommers’ study of foundational fictions.95 As she states:

Content to construct personal and public discourse ‘upon each other in

93
For a study of blanqueamiento in Argentina, see Aline Helg’s chapter “Race in Argentina and Cuba:
1880-1930” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940, ed. Richard Graham (Austin: Univ. of
Texas Press, 1990) 37-69. In the case of Argentina, as Helg explains, social/racial theories such as
those written by Bunge, Sarmiento and José Ingenieros, were shortly replaced by themes of
immigration as a wave of European immigrants flooded the country greatly reducing the overall
percentage of Blacks and aborigines in the racial makeup of the country (43-4).
94
Racial democracy is the idea that mestizaje brings about racial harmony as, according to some racial
democrats, “the presence of so many mixed-bloods promotes mild, fraternal race relations.” John
Burdick, “The Myth of Racial Democracy,” Report on the Americas 25(4): Feb. 1992, 40-49. See also
W. Wright, Café con leche, chapter 1 “The Myth of Racial Democracy;” and Aline Helg, Our Rightful
Share, Introduction.
95
Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions (Univ. of California Press, 1991).
96
 a circle without end,’ …foundational novels are precisely those

fictions that try to pass for truth and to become the ground for political

association… Erotic interest in these novels owes its intensity to the

very prohibitions against the lovers’ union across racial or regional

lines. And political conciliations, or deals, are transparently urgent

because the lovers “naturally” desire the kind of state that would unite

them. (45-47)

During the nationalist eras in Latin America, there surged a desire to define not only

the new nations, but also within these definitions of the new nations, a type of cultural

independence from the metropolises, often depicted as “desire” manifested in the

nationalist and foundational literatures. Many intellectuals sought to answer a

question that had tortured them for some time: ¿Quiénes somos? [Who are we?].

The traditional answer to the question would have come from a negative response; by

answering what they were not: "We're not Europeans nor are we natives." Many

looked to derive an affirmative answer instead, citing what they were: "We are…"96

José Martí shed some light on how to answer the question in the affirmative in his

essay "Nuestra América" -- America should look within itself for the answer.97 Later,

towards the end of the nineteenth century, Latin American artists searched for a

96
Simón Bolívar struggled with this aspect of the question of Latin American identity in "Carta de
Jamaica" (1815): "Nosotros somos un pequeño género humano; poseemos un mundo aparte; … no
somos indios ni europeos, sino una especie media entre los legítimos propietarios del país y los
usurpadores españoles" (Bolívar 10).
97
"…el buen gobernante en América no es el que sabe cómo se gobierna el alemán o el francés, sino él
que sabe con qué elementos está hecho su país, y cómo puede ir guiándolos en junto, para llegar, por

97
manner in which to express in a positive fashion/manner who they were. Their art

and literature was to be the path to realizing their goal of self-definition.98

Debates over nationalism raged, and the race question was often a crucial

dimension in the discussion. Although nationalism was about being distinctive and

defining the new nations as separate and autonomous from the colonial power, the

burgeoning nations were looking to Europe where “political philosophies, especially

late nineteenth-century positivism, had achieved common-sense status among

intellectual and political elites in much of Latin America” (Wade 1993, 10). Essential

concepts such as freedom, liberty, progress, industry, science, reason, and education,

all part of modernity and progress in European nations, were accepted as self-evident

in Latin America, but the key factor of race, (which was not so much in question in

Europe where most modern nations were comprised predominately of whites), had to

be taken into consideration. The compromise consisted in the celebration of the

mestizo and the adoption of indigenismo, which later was adopted into a broader

vision of mestizaje.99

métodos e instituciones nacidas del país mismo… El gobierno ha de nacer del país. El espíritu del
gobierno ha de ser el del país” (Martí 161-2). See also footnote 133, Chapter Three, page 146.
98
Take for example, regionalismo in literature that distinguished the aspects of Latin American life
from Europe. The indigenous and African cultures along with nature -- the land, flora and fauna--
offered them their answer. The vision of the African and indigenous man held up against nature served
for them as a way of distinguishing themselves from the Europeans as the American people and
culture. In this new vision, the earth, flora and fauna and other elements, are not simply objects, but
rather, they serve as sacred manifestations of life; and in some cases are seen as super-natural beings.
99
Mestizo was a term originally designating a person of mixed heritage, having a white or European
father and an Native Indian mother. The term later became used more widely to refer to a person of
mixed heritage, although the original sense of the word is still preserved. Indigenismo recognizes and
celebrates mixedness, embracing the indigenous population as part of the nation-state. The
glorification of blackness, on the other hand, was generally more muted, and received far less attention
in nationalist discourse. See Wade, Blackness 10-11.
98
 The adoption of the ideology of mestizaje in the political sphere became an

important basis in the nation-building project of Colombia as well as elsewhere in

Latin America and the Caribbean. Benedict Anderson’s widely cited definition of the

nation as an “imagined community” is key to understanding the inclusion of Blacks

and Indians in the “image” of the nation.100 According to Anderson the emergence of

nationalism in Latin America was mediated by the criollos, or the Creole elite, who

had themselves been excluded by the Spanish and Portuguese from political control

during the colonial period by virtue of their American birth (Anderson 50). It was the

criollos who defined national identity, and in so doing, argues Anderson, they

consciously defined the subordinate masses as “fellow-nationals” (52). Nevertheless,

this grouping of all racial and ethnic groups as mestizos did not erase prejudice or

racism in Colombia or elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America. The idea of

mestizaje coexists with the concept of blanqueamiento, or whitening, which

privileges whiteness, as discussed by Peter Wade in Blackness and Race Mixture:

Compromise resulted in the coexistence of two variants on the

nationalist theme: on the one hand, the democratic, inclusive ideology

of todos somos mestizos—everyone is mestizo, and herein lies the

particularity of Latin American identity; on the other hand, the

discriminatory ideology that points out that some are lighter mestizos

than others, prefers the whiter to the darker, and sees the consolidation

of nationality in a process of whitening. In both variants, actual blacks

100
Benedict Anderson, Immagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).
99
 and indians are disadvantaged, but less so in the more democratic

variant that tries to be inclusive. The problem lies in the coexistence

of the two variants and the possibility of slipping from one into the

other. (Wade 1993, 11)

It is precisely the complex ideologies of race and identity that Zapata Olivella strives

to unravel in his travels. By attempting to define “Blackness” in North American

terms and partaking in Black power and consciousness movements, Zapata Olivella

endeavors to rework ideas of race and Black identity from a Colombian perspective,

translating his racial experiences in the United States to an Afro-Hispanic context.

Travel and Identity: He visto la noche

Marvin Lewis, in his assessment of Zapata Olivella in “Manuel Zapata

Olivella and the Art of Autobiography,” defines He visto la noche as an

autoethnography or as an autobiography rather than as a travel narrative, and

interprets Zapata Olivella’s trek as more a physical than spiritual journey.101 He

states that, “we do not receive the testimony of a person in contention with his own

101
IX Congreso de La Asociación de Colombianistas: Colombia en el contexto latinoamericano.
Santafé de Bogotá, July 26-29, 1995, 279-291. In his article, Lewis argues that He visto does not fit
within the parameters of an autobiography or a travel narrative, as he states that, “to regard these texts
as mere ‘travel literature’ is questionable, since Manuel Zapata Olivella is concerned primarily with
the assertion of an individual and ethnic identity within racist societies” (283). Although I agree with
Lewis’ assessment of He visto as a text that deals with the assertion of an individual and ethnic identity
within racist societies” my reading of the text differs from Lewis’ in that I read He visto as having a
greater scope than just his personal process of racial consciousness. As I demonstrate in this chapter, I

100
society, but rather the perspective of an outsider assessing other cultures and

exemplifying varying degrees of estrangement and alienation” (Lewis 1995, 284). I,

however, tend to agree with Richard Jackson’s assessment of the work as a

diary/travelogue.102 Although Lewis makes a valid argument in his reading of the

text as an autoethnography, I argue that we can still read it as a travel account and that

there is value in assessing it as such. In the narrative well see not only the relation of

Zapata Olivella’s journeys but also how these travels help form his new conceptions

of identity. Although Zapata Olivella comes into conflict with a distinct version of

racialization, what Lewis fails to note is Zapata Olivella’s subsequent incorporation

of racial pride and Black consciousness gained during his Black odyssey in the

United States into his refiguring of mestizaje in Colombia. As I propose, it is through

his experiences in the United States that he develops a new understanding of his own

Blackness, which later will be used in his redefinition of mestizaje. His encounters

with racism in the United States and his interactions with African Americans aid in

the molding of his new vision of Blackness and racial identity, as reflected over thirty

years later when he relates his experiences with race as the basis of his new

understanding of négritude in Levántate mulato.103

He visto la noche chronicles Zapata Olivella’s trek through Central America

believe that He visto is one segment of a larger project of redefining concepts of mestizaje and racial
identity in Latin America.
102
See Richard Jackson, Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America, 98-104.
103
Négritude was originally envisioned as a movement, “formulated to awaken and to encourage self-
esteem and confidence in the strength of the social groups that slavery had reduced to the status of
beasts of burden…” René Dépestre, “Hello and Goodbye to Negritude” (251). Dépestre goes on to

101
and the United States in the early 1940s, and focuses primarily on his encounters with

US societal conceptions of race and class. By the 1940s the beginnings of his Black

identity were so entrenched that he decided to come to the United States to test,

witness, and gain firsthand experience of the trials and tribulations of his African

American “brothers,” as he termed his hermanos de raza. It is during these journeys

that we see his negotiations and manipulations of multiple identities (racial as well as

national) in his interactions with various racial and class groups, alternately

identifying with Latin Americans and Blacks, and at times defining himself in

nationalistic terms, depending upon the situation in which he finds himself. Zapata

Olivella discovers during his stay in the United States that concepts of mestizaje and

mulatez do not apply as racial demarcations, and that he is perceived as Black by

most of society.

At the beginning of his trip, Zapata Olivella has a romanticized notion of the

United States and Blacks, based largely on his readings of Langston Hughes, seen in

his description of his first encounter with African Americans:

Estaba en presencia de negros puros y robustos que respiraban alegría

y vida por todos sus poros. Un indefinible ritmo interior inspiraba

todos sus movimientos: la manera de agarrar el cigarrillo, de portar el

sombrero, de arreglarse el cuello de la camisa, sus movimientos en el

baile y en la canción. La música, el swing y el blues, parecía

explain that négritude was a literary and artistic device by which people of African descent opposed
deculturation and assimilation to the colonial West (251).
102
 enardecerlos de sensualidad y sentimentalismo, golpeándolos mucho

más fuerte que los mismos tragos de whisky y cerveza que libaban con

ardor. (HV 17)104

His use of the terms “pure,” “robust,” and “happy-go-lucky” to describe Blacks who

also possess an “interior rhythm” simplifies or essentializes African Americans to

common stereotypes, such as the “natural” affinity of Blacks to music and an innate

sense of rhythm. One of the more dangerous stereotypes is that of the happy-go-

lucky Black, an image which is reminiscent of early ideas of slaves (and later freed

blacks) being oblivious and uncritical of their condition. The above citation also

demonstrates a lack of understanding of the dynamics of racialization in the United

States, as well as reflects Zapata Olivella’s reasons for traveling to the United States -

- his essentialized understanding of African Americans as a “purer” form of

Blackness, versus the continued encouragement of racial mixture in Latin America.

The idea of “purity” also shows a misunderstanding of the process of miscegenation

in the United States, where racial mixture was not as widely accepted or embraced as

in Latin America. The one-drop rule, which locates race in anyone with as little as

one-thirty-second African ancestry, ignores the degree of race mixture and the

process of miscegenation that actually took place in the United States. Zapata

Olivella’s essentialized vision of Blackness soon changes when he discovers that the

same racism from which African Americans suffer will apply to him as well, as I

104
I will refer to He visto la noche as (HV); Levántate mulato as (LM) and “Un extraño bajo mi piel as
(Un extraño).
103
elaborate below with the example of his demotion to cleaning bedpans in a Los

Angeles hospital for correctly diagnosing a patient, and essentially forgetting his

“place” in society (HV 43). When confronted with new contexts of racial difference

and with racism, Zapata Olivella begins to search for a greater understanding of

Blackness, and throughout the text and his travels we see his negotiations of racial

identity that will ultimately contribute to his redefined ideas of race in Colombia.

Zapata Olivella’s ultimate destination in the United States is the South, or “Ku

Klux Klan territory,” as he terms it, where he plans to investigate racism at its worst.

Zapata Olivella writes, “Ya en el centro de El Paso me fue fácil escoger la ruta hacia

el interior. Al Oriente las tierras del Ku-Klux-Klan que no osaba desafiar sin previo

conocimiento de las prácticas discriminatorias y al Occidente, Los Angeles, con su

famosa Meca del Cine, Hollywood” (HV 23). Zapata Olivella takes a circuitous route

in his pilgrimage to the “Mecca.” His journey centers around his investigations into

“Blackness” in the United States, and the South is looked upon as a Mecca, or

cultural homeland of African Americans. It is to the South that he must trek to gain

true insight and understanding of the dynamics of race in the United States. His

journey into the South is delayed, however, as he decides that it would be better to

experience racism in lesser forms in other parts of the country in order to prepare him

for the South. As stated earlier, the South represents the epitome of racism and

segregation, and at the same time it is looked upon as a cultural homeland of African

104
Americans.105 In order to understand racism in its most nefarious form, Zapata

Olivella feels that he must witness firsthand the discrimination and Jim Crow laws

that many Blacks are forced to endure.

During his sojourns throughout the United States Zapata Olivella encounters

various forms of racism, including housing and employment discrimination, as well

as other more blatant forms of intolerance and prejudice. Although initially confused

and horrified at the discrimination he witnesses, many of his personal encounters with

discrimination reinforce the pride in Blackness that he came with: “Me sentí

orgulloso de ser negro” is a phrase that he often repeats when faced with bigotry.

Analyzing his adventures, Zapata Olivella sees that much of the racism at the time

was retaliation by white racists to his (and other Blacks’) refusal to bow to white

domination (i.e. mask, dissemble, or “know their place”).106 He quickly comes to

understand the humiliation of Blacks, especially Black intellectuals like himself, is

the aim of white racists.

During his encounters with discrimination and racism, we witness Zapata

Olivella’s fluid or negotiable identity. He alternately identifies himself with African

Americans and Latinos, and often changes his terms of self identification, at times

adopting the racial term Negro, or identifying broadly as a Latin American, and often

specifically in terms of nationality, as a Colombian. His multi-faceted identity allows

105
See footnote 78, Chapter One, page 67 for a discussion of the South as a cultural homeland.
106
As I discuss in chapter one, masking refers to hiding one’s true feelings, showing only indifference
or acceptance of segregation, discrimination and racism. Masking was a necessary survival tool of
African slaves and later African Americans who had to endure severe systems of oppression.
105
him to identify in numerous ways, maneuvering and manipulating his identities

usually in response to discrimination. The different facets of his identity are seen at

different junctures in the narrative, and reflect his reactions to his encounters with the

US system of racialization. Zapata Olivella’s first step in his nationwide odyssey is

Los Angeles, where he is unable to interest “Jim Crow Hollywood” in his ideas for

movies that would detail Black protagonists, unheard of at that time in American

movies.107

By the time he leaves Los Angeles Zapata Olivella has already begun to feel

an especially close affinity with Blacks whose economic situation parallels his own.

This affinity is cemented after an incident in a Los Angeles hospital where he worked

as an attendant. Having studied medicine in Bogotá before beginning his journey,

Zapata Olivella thinks finding a job in a hospital will be perfect. He soon discovers

otherwise when he realizes that Blacks are relegated to menial tasks such as changing

bed linens and cleaning bedpans. The situation became intolerable for him after he

offers a diagnosis of a patient to a medical student. Although the physician who is

testing the student humiliates him, and he is demoted from his position as attendant to

bedpan washer, Zapata Olivella is held up as a hero among his Black co-workers:

“Por muy amarga que hubiera sido la noticia, me sentí orgulloso de ser negro” (HV

43). The experience lends Zapata Olivella new understanding of the discrimination

107
Zapata Olivella’s script, “El Rey de los Cimarrones,”portrayed Benkos Bhios, an African slave who
led a rebellion in Cartagena and gained his freedom, was rejected by the movie industry: “Su
argumento no gustó. Hay un grave inconveniente por el cual apenas creo que fue considerado. En él la

106
and humiliation inflicted on Blacks in the United States and also to methods of Black

resistance:

Era así como se pagaba toda violación a las fronteras raciales, había

comenzado a experimentar en carne propia el exquisito refinamiento

con que los blancos humillaban a los negros que trataban de empinarse

intelectualmente…levanté bien alto la cabeza cuando llegué al grupo

de amigos que me esperaban en el comedor. Evocaba las frases de

Betty: ‘Eres un héroe de la raza y mientras más traten de humillarte,

mejor’. Comprendí por qué no debía doblegarme: una lucha sorda,

subterránea, mantenían los negros a base de orgullo. (HV 43-44)

Encounters such as the one at the hospital, lend to Zapata Olivella’s growing

understanding of racial dynamics in the United States and this new understanding in

turn provides the foundation for a new outlook:

…era mi alma la que se sentía egoísta y engendraba un sentimiento

patriótico o tal vez, mi antigua mente de campesino que se sintiera

átomo vivo del cosmo, comenzaba a tener conciencia de las

discriminaciones humanas, del fermento entre el tuyo y el mío, del

blanco y del negro, del rico y del pobre, del inglés y del latino y esta

conciencia tomaba raíces en mi nueva mentalidad. (HV 51)

Zapata Olivella begins to align himself more with the victims of discrimination, based

figura principal es un negro y en Hollywood no se filman películas en donde alternen blancos y negros
en los papeles principales” (HV 36).
107
largely on race, but also on socio-economic factors. Half-starving in the United

States, he begins to realize the nefarious manifestations of discrimination and racism,

not only in the United States, but also in his homeland. His new understanding of the

racial dynamics in North America is furthered in Chicago and New York where he

interacts with Black intellectuals and witnesses new elements of African American

culture. Disgusted with his treatment in the Los Angeles hospital, he decides to move

on to Chicago where he hopes to meet and reside among economically strong Black

communities that will support and appreciate his creative and journalistic endeavors,

as he writes: “Volví a tener apego por mi novela que había olvidado del todo en el

fondo de la maleta y se me acrecentó el firme propósito de buscar a los de mi raza”

(HV 36).108

Although throughout his narrative the author primarily identifies with Blacks,

he at times identifies with other Latin Americans, or nationalistically as Colombian.

He learns to manipulate his multiple identities –Colombian, Afro-Colombian, Black,

and Latin American—demonstrating his multi-consciousness. The manipulation of

his multiple identities allows him access to different social groups or sectors of

society, and demonstrates that identity is not fixed or located strictly in race,

nationality, ethnicity, gender, culture, etc. Identities are malleable and constantly

undergo change, as Stuart Hall explains:

[Cultural identity is] not some universal and transcendental spirit

inside of us on which history has made no fundamental mark. It is not

108
He refers to his first novel, Tierra mojada.
108
 once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some

final and absolute Return ... It is something ... It has its histories - and

histories have their real, material and symbolic effects ... It is always

constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural

identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of

identification or suture, which are made within the discourses of

history and culture …(Hall 395)

Zapata Olivella shows the arbitrariness of social identity, as we cannot locate him as a

“racial” being. His continual manipulation of the various facets of his identity in

response to society’s polarized vision of racial identity is the manifestation of his

multi-consciousness. An example of his multi-consciousness occurs after an incident

at the hotel where he and the “Latino group” reside, he uses the term “sus hermanos

de raza” (my stress) to refer to Blacks in the hotel, instead of his customary “mis,” or

even “nuestros” (HV 88). He does not, however, disassociate himself from Blacks,

but rather uses his Latin American identity as a method of resistance, especially when

in the South. His use of Spanish and his identification as Latin American and

Colombian set him apart from African Americans, while at other times he identifies

as Black to demonstrate his solidarity and identification with African Americans.

There are two incidents that demonstrate Zapata Olivella’s implementation of his

native Spanish language as a tool of resistance. The first instance is on a bus when he

refuses to give up his seat to a white woman, and refuses to speak English when

109
addressing her (HV 121). The other incident happens when he returns to Texas on his

way back to Mexico. In a restaurant in the bus station he is refused service because

he is Black: “De nuevo comprendí que no debía callarme aquella ofensa; que debía

protestar en alguna forma e hice hincapié en que me sirvieran, hablando en español,

pues este idioma no era extraño para nadie allí” (HV 124-25). Language is used in

both of these cases as a tool of resistance, and also to set him apart from African

Americans. By showing himself to be Latin American or Colombian, he expects to

be able to cross the colorline and be treated differently from African Americans.

Other instances of his attempt to manipulate his multi-faceted identity occur in

the South, where he identifies himself as Colombian and feigns ignorance of English,

using Spanish to both distinguish himself from African Americans and to join in

solidarity with Blacks in the United States. He joins the fight against discrimination,

using his own subversive tactics, but does so as a Black Colombian, identifying

racially with African Americans while retaining his national identity as a Colombian.

He is now dissatisfied with simply observing the struggles of African Americans and

is willing to partake in the battle:

Acosado por la tensión del hogar humilde donde había visto tanto

dolor y estimulado por la decisión de Joe, asumí una actitud combativa

ante los prejuicios raciales. Me avergonzaba ser un observador

imparcial, sentía la necesidad de actuar, de combatir. (HV 121)

In the South we see a definite shift in his consciousness, as he recognizes the need not

to simply observe the segregation that Blacks are subjected to, but decides that he
110
must act.

The complications and difficulties of identification – political, national, class,

and racial difference – are compounded for Zapata Olivella in a US context. Familiar

notions of mulatez or mestizaje are rejected in the United States, where race is seen as

a binary. Nevertheless, Zapata Olivella attempts to negotiate rigid racial boundaries

by identifying himself alternately in racial, ethnic and/or nationalistic terms. As

Kadiatu Kanneh points out in his study of identity politics and hybridity, conceptions

of race and culture are often limited to “a rigidly coded set of behaviour, appearances

or lineages,” and in order to have an “‘authentic’ voice within or of a community one

must have a keen awareness of repressions, contradictions and uncomfortable realities

at the edge of identity politics,”109 Kanneh states:

The borders between cultures, falsely reified, or races, flagrantly

imagined, or sexes, socially constructed, blur or disappear under

scientific or theoretical analysis. Those living on the margins, crossing

the boundaries, ambiguously placed – as postcolonial or second-

generation migrants, or refugees and mixed race people – are often

seen as proof of the unhinging of static differences. The insistence on

hybridity as a dislocating term points not only to a critical trend, but

also to an awareness of recent (and less recent) histories of cultural

change. Challenging the dictated limits of a communal identity and its

official ‘interpretative devices’ is vital and necessary, precisely

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 because those limits are not always dictated internally, and often

prescribe as much as they describe. (Kanneh 180)

Zapata Olivella’s odyssey throughout the United States was a means of gaining a

different perspective and understanding of “Blackness.” His ideas of Blackness in the

United States and racism move from a romanticized and essentialist vision formed

from his readings of African American intellectuals and writers, such as Du Bois and

Hughes, to a more rounded insight gained from his personal experiences in the United

States. His experiences with racism, most especially in the South, lend him new

insights into Blackness in the United States, which he later translates to activism in

Latin America. It is important to note, however, that while he is gaining cultural

literacy of the African American experience, we continue to witness his conflictive

approach towards a personal identification, with his constant maneuvering of terms of

identity. Zapata Olivella investigated his personal identity and conceptions of

Blackness through his travels throughout the United States, and in his fictional

account, “Un extraño bajo mi piel,” he theorizes race in North America. His story

recounts the metaphorical journey of an African American into whiteness, and

through this story he opens an avenue to discuss racism and racial identity as he came

to understand them in the United States.

109
Kadiatu Kanneh, African Identities (London: Routledge, 1998) 180.
112
Racial Identity, Self-Consciousness, and Passing: “Un extraño bajo mi piel”110

Manuel Zapata Olivella's "Un extraño bajo mi piel" is a short story published

in 1967, which takes us to Atlanta during the Jim Crow era, where the South is used

as the Mecca metaphor for Black culture and racism. He situates the story in Atlanta

to call attention to the Black racial situation, showing the Black struggle with race,

racism and racial identification, delving into issues such as passing, colorism and

racial self-hatred.

“Un extraño” deals with issues of racial identity, passing and coming to

consciousness. The title, which translates to “A Stranger Under My Skin,” aptly fits

the exploration of the concept of passing, and reflects the “racial dualism” theorized

by Du Bois and adopted by other Black intellectuals, such as Frantz Fanon.111 To

“pass” is to undertake a new identity (i.e. a person of African ancestry lives as a white

person), an idea that plays upon the ambivalence of race. Passing, according to

Elaine Ginsberg in the introduction to Passing and the Fictions of Identity, is a

metaphysical journey undertaken to "trespass" into another identity. Passing can

take form in different ways, in terms of race, ethnicity or gender. Racial passing is a

well-known African American phenomenon (both in literature and in reality), where a

light-complexioned Black "leaves behind" his "race" to adopt the identity of a white

110
“Un extraño bajo mi piel” is found in a collection of short stories entitled, ¿Quién dió el fusil a
Oswald? (Bogotá: Editorial Revista Colombiana, 1967), 57-71.
111
See for example, “The Fact of Blackness,” the fifth chapter of Black Skin White Masks, in which
Fanon elaborates on his own discovery of himself as the racial “Other” (109-140).
113
person. One interesting aspect of passing is that it does not have to be a permanent,

or even long-term transformation. One can pass for a particular circumstance or for

close to a lifetime. Passing is part of the African American literary tradition, as seen

in Nella Larsen's novel Passing (1929), and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography

of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). Passing necessitates travel, in that one must leave the

home where one's identity is known and take up residence elsewhere in order to

establish a new identity.

The theme of journey manifests in various forms in this short story – primarily

as passing and the journey home, a metaphorical reverse middle passage. The first,

and most prominent is the phenomenon of passing, or the metaphysical journey to

"the other side." The “journey to the other side” can also be connected to Du Bois’

concept of the “veil.”112 Elder, the protagonist, wanting to escape the prejudice and

oppression he suffers in the South, rebels against society, breaking curfew laws for

Blacks, which he knows could possibly lead to harm, if not death. His anger against

the oppressive, race-divided society he lives in leads him to make choices that he

feels will liberate him, such as walking in the "wrong" side of town after dark. But,

these choices have dire consequences. The journey that Elder undertakes has several

different dimensions. First, there is the literal journey to the other side of town,

where he dares fate to repeat itself (his grandfather was lynched for breaking curfew

112
The veil is a metaphorical representation of the colorline, which Du Bois himself attempts to lift (or
cross) in The Souls of Black Folks. The idea of lifting the veil or crossing the colorline is an
empowering act which suggests the experiential knowledge of both white and Black life, and the
ability of Blacks to assimilate into white society.
114
and being in the white section of town after dark.) Secondly, when he is captured,

beaten and about to be lynched, he embarks on a "Twilight Zone" journey, where he

(tres-) passes into the world of the whites, and takes on a new identity as Ham. The

final journey is his trip back to his birth home of Atlanta in search of his

grandmother, his heritage and ethnicity, during which we witness the two sides of

Elder/Ham fight for existence.

The short story takes the reader through the identity struggles of the

protagonist who desires to be white in order to escape the racism and oppression that

he encounters as a Black man in the oppressive South. Elder’s conflicted identity is a

product not only of the racist environment in which he lives, but is also a

consequence of his mother’s own desire for his whiteness. His mother, Mattie, in her

personal quest to “improve the race,” desires to have a child of mixed heritage in

hopes that he will not suffer as she does: “Mi hijo no sufrirá por negro lo que yo…Te

agradezco [God] que hayas hecho que el viejo cartero Jim pusiera en mí sus

asquerosas manos” (61). Her desire to escape her situation as a Black woman is in

sharp contrast to the grandmother’s, who prays that God will provide a white mother

for the unborn child (61). Elder, however, was not born white: “Mi madre se

equivocó en sus cálculos: nací negro. Tan oscuro que si tuviera un hijo con una rubia

no alcanzaría a ser mulato” (61). Elder situates the two contrasting views in his

remembrance of his childhood visits to church, and his desire as a child to have two

voices for prayer: “La una, con su abuela, que reclamaba a Jehová liberara al pueblo

oprimido de Israel, su propia raza disfrazada. La otra con su madre, que pedía se le
115
abrieran las puertas falsas para adentrarse al mundo de los blancos. No siempre era

fácil orar con dos pensamientos” (68-69). The desire for whiteness expressed by

Elder’s mother, Mattie, can be viewed as a desire to escape what Zapata Olivella

terms the “European mirror,” or seeing oneself in a negative light through the eyes of

one’s oppressors (LM 18). This same desire to escape the denigrating gaze of white

society is expressed by Elder, as seen at the beginning of the story.

The story begins with Elder in a church, caught up in the rapture of a gospel

song, "I'm white as snow -- settin' in Jesus' hand" (60). The song reflects Elder's

greatest desire – to be white, and to escape the racism he suffers on a daily basis.

Upon re-entering reality, brought back from his euphoric state, he yells out in the

church "¡Estoy harto de ser negro!," leaves, and wanders into the white section of

town (60). He knows that it is prohibited for Blacks to be there after 6 p.m., and as he

contemplates his next move, four white men accost him, beat him and plan to lynch

him. They leave him tied up on the floor of the train station bathroom, and when they

return to lynch him, they discover that he is not Black, as they originally thought. He

has, in fact, "turned" white, and they leave him for dead. His new status as "white" is

still unbeknownst to Elder, until the now solicitous attitude of the whites and the

bewildering hostility of the Blacks that he encounters force his awareness:

Ahora lo estrechan media docena de negros con los puños

cerrados…No esperan que los toque y con asco le abren camino a su

paso. Antes de llegar a la puerta una fuerza compulsiva lo levanta por

el cuello de la chaqueta, le hace volar por el aire y cae despatarrado en

116
 la calle…Un zapato ha saltado de un pie y puede ver sus dedos

asomados por entre la media rota. Los flexiona y extrañamente ceden

a su voluntad. Se frota los ojos pero allí persisten los dedos blancos.

(66-7)

After discovering the change that has taken place, where he is (mis)taken for white,

he decides to take it as an answer to his prayers and takes advantage of the situation,

by entering white society.

When this desire for whiteness is granted through a fantastic occurrence at

the attempted lynching, and he actually turns white, he takes advantage of the

opportunity to enter white society, now having access to the privileges and power

held by whites.113 He moves from Atlanta to Missouri, where he does not have to

fear recognition as Elder. He takes on a new identity in society as a white man, along

with a new name, Ham Leroy, which is demonstrated through the use of a distinct

narrative voice, as seen in the scene when he discovers his new identity and the reader

is given a first person view of his thoughts, as he mentally rejoices with his mother

for his passing over: “(‘¡Mattie! ¡Mattie! ¡Tu hijo está del otro lado!’ Me siento feliz.

Puedo penetrar a un restaurante y solicitar una mesa como cualquier blanco. El mozo

me sirve ceremoniosamente. ¡Si supiera que soy un negro!…Sí, entro a los teatros y

puedo permanecer gozoso en medio de los vecinos blondos)” (67). There is a certain

113
It is interesting to note a parallel with Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In
Johnson’s work the protagonist decides to pass as white after witnessing the horrors of a lynching in
the South. Similarly, Zapata Olivella’s protagonist turns white after several whites attempt to lynch
him for breeching the color barrier.
117
irony in his choice of names, for Ham is considered by many to be the Biblical

ancestor of Blacks, and Leroy (or le roi), a Frenchified name he chose to ward off any

questions about his physical appearance (hair or skin tone), means the king.114 Thus,

his new identity as a white man signifies him as the king the Blacks.

Although he enjoys the privilege and access he has been granted as Ham, he

soon begins to fear discovery, even away from his hometown. He fears that anything

from his voice to his smell will lead people to suspect his true identity, and the weight

of his secret becomes too much to bear. Living in fear, he begins to feel Elder, or his

Black identity, dying within him, and decides to return to Atlanta to visit his

grandmother, his only connection to his roots. He chooses to return to his

grandmother rather than his mother because it is the grandmother who has the

stronger identification with the African American community, as seen in the

previously described scenes when Elder’s mother confronts the grandmother with the

news that she has been impregnated by a white man and also in his description of the

warring ideals and prayers in church. Hence, after his excursion into whiteness, Elder

seeks out the grandmother, his connection to the African American community, and

thus begins the passage home, and the rediscovery of his heritage.

On his journey home, where he hopes to reencounter his heritage and roots,

we witness the struggle between the two selves, Elder and Ham. Ham's passage into

114
Perhaps it is not even a question of irony, but rather of a calculated choice in which he triumphs his
passing over the Black race, in effect anointing himself as "king." Also of note, is that Leroy is a name
with strong ties to the African American community, which would once again demonstrate a calculated
choice on the part of the author to demonstrate the impossibility of escaping a racial identity in the

118
whiteness, as well as the struggle between Ham and Elder for the dominant identity

show the arbitrariness of race and the social imposition of racial categories, as he can

easily pass for white and live accordingly in society, as well as return to his life as a

Black man. In the end, neither Ham nor Elder exists, but from the two has surged a

third identity, a mulatto identity who does not identify as white or Black, but has

melded his own identity from the two.

Ham/Elder's return to the South is a type of reverse middle passage. The

middle passage was the journey between Africa and the Americas when the Africans

were brought over in the slave ships. The passage represents a change in status and

identity for the Africans brought to the Americas, during which they literally went

from being free people to chattel, or property, losing in many respects their

autonomy, heritage, and identity. The reverse middle passage, usually expressed in

the journey from the Americas to Africa, or in this case to the South, the symbolic site

of the cultural homeland of Africans Americans, represents a reclaiming of this stolen

identity. As Farah Griffin explains in Who set you flowin’?, the journey South is a

trope in African American literature, where the protagonist travels in search of his/her

roots and heritage, returning to the site of the ancestors to reclaim a lost identity.

The South represents for Zapata Olivella a homeland for Black culture and

identity, as witnessed not only in this short story, but also in He visto la noche and

Levántate mulato, both of which chronicle his journeys of discovery that ultimately

United States (i.e. the one-drop rule which classifies someone as Black with as little as 1/32 African
ancestry.)
119
lead him to the South and to Africa to investigate conceptions of Blackness and to

remold his understanding of racial identity. In both texts the journeys to the South

and Africa also represent a type of reverse passage, an attempt to reclaim and

understand a lost heritage and identity. Farah Griffin’s study of African American

literature defines the South as the site of the ancestor in migration narratives. As

Griffin states, the South “becomes a place where black blood earns a black birthright

to the land, a locus of history, culture, and possible redemption” (5). The South is a

symbolic space, a place not only of the ancestor, or of African American heritage, but

it also functions as a source of inspiration and tribal literacy. As Griffin points out,

returning to the South is a common theme in African American literature, as seen in

the works of Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois (146-8). As

I discussed in Chapter One, the South is a haven of African American history,

community and culture, and the return to the South, or the countermigration motif,

exemplifies the desire to reclaim African American cultural heritage or to gain tribal

literacy. Ham/Elder's return to the South is thus a reverse passage, or the reclaiming

of his lost Black identity, embodied in his grandmother.

On the train heading towards his original home of Atlanta, and still fearing

discovery, Elder/Ham stands in the corridor watching the passing cities. While going

through a series of tunnels his image is reflected in the window and he sees the return

of the Black face of Elder, symbolic of Elder's resurrection: “Prefirió irse a la

ventanilla del pasadizo a mirar el paso del tren por las ciudades dormidas. Cuando

cruzaban el tunnel veía su piel otra vez negra. Resucitaba Elder. Las luces
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descubrían a Ham y entonces Elder moría nuevamente” (69-70). When the train

passes again into the light, Ham is once again reflected in the window, and Elder

begins to die/pass again. There is a play on the dark of the tunnels and the

protagonist's Black identity and the light of day, which corresponds to his white

identity. It was in the dark of night that he was taken to be Black and accosted by his

assailants, and it was in the light of day that he was (mis)taken to be white and was

able to pass as such. When Ham/Elder arrives in Atlanta at midnight, he realizes that

he has come full circle and that he is in the very station where his journey began, the

spot where they were going to lynch him.

The story, which until this point has been related in the first person, changes

voice to show that a new, distinct voice and identity has emerged. This voice melds a

mulatto or mixed identity from the dual-identity protagonist, which traces the steps of

the infamous night of Elder's abduction: “La puerta de la iglesia. ‘I’ll have you

know—I’m white as snow—Settin’ in Jesus’ hand’. Todavía guinda el letrero:

‘Prohibido andar a los negros después de las seis de la tarde’…Es Ham quien tiene

humor para eso” (70). Ham finds irony in the sign, knowing that he is Black, passing

for white, whereas Elder wants to destroy it. Ham stops him from destroying the

sign, reminding him that if there were no color line, there would be no need to be

white, and therefore no need for Ham's existence. The three-fold character goes to a

Black bar from which he had been ejected after his change to Ham and hesitates at the

door. "Elder" enters while Ham and the new voice remain at the door, watching as

Elder re-immerses himself in his (old) world:

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 Ham se impacienta. Tiene la impresión de que estoy dispuesto a

traicionarlo…Quiero entrar [to the Black bar] pero Ham me retiene.

Elder grita: ‘¡Vamos!.. Me agrada sentir que Elder no se resigna a que

le hayan pintado el rostro de blanco…Ha entrado [Elder] aunque Ham

se quede conmigo aquí en la puerta. Lo siento reír, charlar

gozosamente con todos. La alegría de conquistar su puesto de

negro…[Ham] Siente que Elder al fin se ha enraizado y que no podrá

arrancarlo de los suyos. Rechazo la temerosa actitud de Ham y

penetro a la cantina...Al mirarme al espejo veo mis cabellos oscuros,

mi rostro tiznado. Ham ha muerto. Experimento la alegría

desbordante de ver a Elder sentado a la mesa, agitando los dados entre

los amigos. No quiero importunarlo y decirle que salgo a comprar un

ramo de flores para la abuela. (71)

The new protagonist, the “yo” in the above citation, is not identified by name in the

end and has redefined his identity in the South, using the passage, or journey, back to

reconcile the two "halves" of his persona. The third identity that emerges at the end

of the story has reconciled his racial ambivalence and ambiguity, and has chosen to

identify with the Black community. This is not to say that he necessarily identifies as

Black, but in the binary system of race that exists in the US, where one is white or

"Other," it is nearly impossible to identify as white when there are any discernible

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"Other" characteristics.115

This story, written after Zapata Olivella's travels throughout the United States

reflects his struggle with the distinct racial discourse that exists in the United States,

as opposed to the rhetoric of “racial democracy” of Colombia. When looking at his

travel narrative, He visto la noche, we see a similar negotiation of the race line and

racial identity as experienced by the author in different parts of the United States. He

consistently shifted and negotiated his multiple identities of Black, (Afro-)Latino,

mulatto and Colombian, calling into question the notion of a fixed or “true” identity.

As reflected in the short story, if it is so easy to cross the racial "tracks" or barriers,

how does one delineate a "true" or natural identity, and where do you locate race?

Passing invokes this question, for, as Elaine Ginsberg argues, in order to be able to

pass for something one is not, there must be an intrinsic, natural defining quality that

defines who or what one is. Delineating a racial identity becomes problematic when

dealing with multiple identities, such as Zapata Olivella and his character Ham/Elder,

where we see that race is a malleable and often arbitrary identifier. What must also

be considered is the author's displacement of the story to the United States. By

locating the story outside of Colombia, he possibly opens a venue in which he can

more easily broach questions of racial identity that are befuddled in the discourse and

ideology of "racial democracy" in Colombia. Looking at Colombia at the time the

author was writing, and even today, we know that this is not the case. Power and

115
Take for example the Plessy v Ferguson ruling of 1896 which reinforced the "one-drop" rule and
established "Separate but equal" policy in the United States.
123
privilege may not be based strictly on race, but there is a definite colorism that

continues to exist throughout Latin America.116 Zapata Olivella's investigation into

passing in a North American context questions and critiques similar practices in

Colombia of blanqueamiento and the idea of “bettering the race” through racial

mixture. The practice of blanqueamiento has been embraced by many Black

communities as a means of social mobility, as the sliding-scale system of color that

exists in Colombia encourages people of African and indigenous descent to try to

leave behind their "racial" and cultural heritage in an attempt to "mejorar la raza."

This question is also addressed and answered in his autobiography with his

encouragement for the mestizo and mulatto populations to embrace their indigenous

and African heritages with pride, and to recognize that mestizaje began with the

sexual violation of their foremothers, and rather than being the founding for a “racial

democracy” it was in fact a system of exploitation, a system which continues.

Autobiography and Identity in ¡Levántate mulato!

First published in French in 1988, ¡Levántate mulato! delineates Zapata

Olivella’s earlier travels and investigations into Western conceptions of Blackness

and identity, and reflects his continued pondering of identity in terms of race, in a

newly defined “tri-ethnic” terminology. Zapata Olivella addresses questions of

116
See for example, Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture,or Whitten and Torres, Blackness in
Latin America and the Caribbean.
124
choice in racial identity by setting out to discover and redefine self, while at the same

time he challenges mulattos to accept their Black identity.

¡Levántate mulato! reflects the author’s reconstruction of race in Colombia

based largely on his travels in Latin America and the United States, and his

anthropological studies of class and race in Colombia. The autobiography

demonstrates and reflects the knowledge gained through his travels both inside and

outside of Colombia, and is his arena for developing a revised Colombian racial

discourse. Although he looks to the United States and Africa as sites for gaining

racial and cultural literacy, he discards North American and African polarized

conceptions of Blackness, and uses his racial-political consciousness gained during

his travels to reformulate ideas of race in Colombia. Zapata Olivella, while not

rejecting ideas of mestizaje, restructures the idea of the mestizo in Colombia, by

critiquing and reformulating earlier ideas of mestizaje developed during the

postcolonial and independence periods. His reconstruction of the mestizo image is of

a tri-ethnic (versus bi-racial) identity that includes Spanish colonial ancestry along

with its aboriginal and African counterparts, giving preference to the latter two, as

seen in his introduction to the narrative: “¿Híbrido o Nuevo hombre? ¿Soy

realmente un traidor a mi raza? ¿Un zambo escurridizo? ¿Un mulato entreguista? O

sencillamente un mestizo americano que busca defender la identidad de sus sangres

oprimidas” (LM 21). His desire to define himself in new terms by reworking old

terminology (i.e. mestizaje) is intertwined with négritude, a movement that strove to

redefine conceptions of Blackness and stressed pride in Black heritage.

125
 Zapata Olivella speculates on the meaning of négritude in the Americas,

oftentimes based in negative perceptions: “En América la palabra negritud tiene sus

propias resonancias: negro, indio, razas pigmentadas e impuras, silver roll, black,

nigger, etc. Así lo comprobé en mi país desde la infancia y fue el repetido estigma de

los racistas contra el indio, el mulato, el zambo y aún para el blanco sin pergaminos”

(LM 329). Négritude, a term introduced into French literary being by the Black

Martiniquen poet Aimé Césaire, denotes the positive features of Blackness among

people classed as or self-identifying as “Black.” Zapata Olivella’s adaptation of the

definition into a Spanish American context encompasses a tri-ethnic dimension,

including the indigenous peoples, (and even whites), who shared a history of

oppression and subjugation to colonial Spanish rule and later to criollo rule117:

Negritud en América es indianidad, africanitud, americanidad,

todas las connotaciones que quiera dársele menos el de colonización:

doblez, mimetismo, castración, alienación, imitación.

La negritud, conciencia del violentado, del rechazado, del

heroísmo y la resistencia total, nació en América en la flecha

envenenada del Caribe, en la palabra insumisa de todos los indios, en

la defensa de la mujer y la tierra, sean cuales fueren el origen, la etnia

y la cultura del colonizador...

América se hizo negra por la fusión de las sangres llamadas

117
This by no means is to say that he was the first or only Afro-Caribbean/Latin American intellectual
to do so. As I discuss in chapter four, Nicolás Guillén, an Afro-Cuban poet, actively embraced the

126
 impuras. El mestizaje igualó biológicamente a la india y a la negra

con su violador blanco. Desde entonces la mezcla de las sangres fue

superior a la pureza racial proclamada por los conquistadores. (329-30)

Zapata Olivella’s definition of négritude reflects the Colombian nationalist ideology

of mestizaje, which defines Colombians not in terms of race but in terms of

mixture.118

From the beginning of the autobiography, Zapata Olivella defines himself

(and muddles this definition) in terms of a tri-ethnic identity by expounding upon his

tri-racial heritage. While he acknowledges his Catalan ancestry in a rather peripheral

manner, the first few chapters of the autobiography focus on his indigenous and

African heritages. His explorations of the customs and traditions of his ancestors

passed down through the generations is a revision of historical perceptions of the

indigenous and African peoples in Colombia. Zapata Olivella undertakes the task of

rewriting the history of the indigenous and African peoples in Colombia (and Latin

America in general), based upon his own “identity crisis” that he suffered under what

he calls the “European mirror:” “Influido por estas lecturas, mi rostro oscuro no

podia mirarse sin miedo en el espejo del conquistador europeo” (LM 18). His use of

the term “European mirror” reflects very closely Du Bois’ concept of double-

consciousness and Fanon’s “being for others,” the idea of seeing oneself through the

notion of négritude and expresses pride in his Black heritage in his poetry.
118
It is important to note that Zapata Olivella clearly points out that practices of miscegenation were
not based on love or affectionate relationships, but was a continual process of sexual violation by the
Europeans against the indigenous peoples, and later Africans. This idea of violation is key to his call

127
eyes of one’s oppressor (Fanon 1967, 109).119 As discussed earlier, double-

consciousness is based on the idea that the Negro sees himself through the eyes of

white America and feels his “otherness” or “two-ness” as he struggles with the

negative images of Blackness that prevail in white society. Zapata Olivella strives to

refigure this “mirror” by revalorizing and vindicating Blacks and aborigines in his

reconstruction of mestizaje. In doing so, he translates this concept into the

Colombian context by complicating the idea of double-consciousness into a multi-

dimensional, multi-consciousness paradigm. The ideas of hybridity and mixture

enforced feelings of inferiority to those of non-European descent, as Zapata Olivella

states in his introduction:

Para entonces, ya tenía veinte años y plena conciencia de mi hibridez.

Pero este convencimiento me despertaba angustiosas respuestas. Los

términos mestizo, bastardo, mulato, zambo, tan despreciados en la

historia y sociedad americanas, me reclamaban una actitud

consecuente conmigo mismo, con mi sangre, con mis ancestros. (LM

17)

His inclusion of the term “bastardo,” or bastard, with the other racial terms

demonstrates Zapata Olivella’s idea of conflicted identity and seeing oneself through

the eyes of Europeans. Although the term mestizo was originally used to mean half-

for mulattos and mestizos to move away from Eurocentric notions of mestizaje and to embrace their
aboriginal and African heritages.
119
As Fanon states, “As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in
minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others… For not only must the black man be

128
Spanish and half-Indian, it was often used to mean “illegitimate” or “bastard,” and

eventually came to represent the entire mixed population regardless of the degree of

mixture.120 Mestizo then takes on a double meaning – of mixed ancestry and

illegitimate. Other negative notions of mestizo were also propagated, as seen in

Carlos Octavio Bunge’s Nuestra América: “Aplicado este criterio a las razas

humanas, llegamos a la consecuencia de que el mestizo tiende a reproducir un tipo de

hombre primitivo, o, por lo menos, antiguo y precristiano...Tal es el principio del

atavismo en el mestizaje humano” (149). Although the example given of Bunge is a

relatively mild example, there existed stronger, more damaging images of aborigines

and Blacks in the nascent nations, as reflected in the words of José Vasconcelos of

Mexico:

Nada destruyó España porque nada existía digno de conservarse

cuando ella llegó a estos territorios, a menos que se estime sagrada

toda esa mala yerba del alma que son el canibalismo de los caribes, los

sacrificios humanos de los aztecas, el despotismo embrutecedor de los

incas.121

The collapsing of multiple identities (Aztec, Carib and Inca) to be representative of

all indigenous populations and representing only negative perceptions of the different

black; he must be black in relation to the white man… The black man has no ontological resistance in
the eyes of the white man” (Fanon 1967, 110).
120
The use of the term to mean illegitimate or bastard derived from the process of miscegenation.
Whether through the rape or concubinage of the indigenous women, and later the African women, the
offspring of the encounters were often not acknowledged by the European father. See F. James Davis,
Who is Black? (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1991) 88.
121
As cited by Zapata Olivella in his introduction to Levántate mulato (17).
129
cultures is superficial. The reductionism and disparagement of the indigenous

cultures, reducing the aboriginals to cannibals and partakers in human sacrifice, and

the propagation of the idea that the indigenous cultures and peoples had no value

before European “discovery” or conquest, aided in the Spanish conquerors’ and later

the criollos’ justification of the Spanish presence in the Americas and their position

as colonizers and rulers over the conquered peoples. Africans were later portrayed in

similarly overly generalized terms as lazy, lascivious, over-sexed, etc. Both the

aborigines and Africans, who began to see themselves through the eyes of Europeans

– the “mirror” to which Zapata Olivella refers, gradually internalized these negative

notions. Getting the subjugated populations to see themselves in this negative light

was what Frantz Fanon referred to in his treatise on colonialism, The Wretched of the

Earth (1963). As Fanon explains, the strongest tool of the colonizer is the mind of

the colonized, or to get the indigenous populations to buy into these stereotypes and

negative images and use it against them to maintain the power dynamic of

colonizer/colonized. The negative images of the indigenous and Africans, referred to

above, were proliferated through national literature, such as in the portrayal of the

gaucho in Argentine literature.

The tide of thought began to shift for some, such as Victor Haya de la Torre

and other intellectuals, who attempted to vindicate the aborigines by recognizing and

embracing the indigenous peoples’ heritage, and thereby also affirming that the

American (in the hemispheric sense) revolutions (for independence) would be

realized by the indigenous campesinos and not the European proletariats. Blacks,
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however, were not considered in the new proffered image of the burgeoning nations.

The endeavors by writers and intellectuals such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

depicted romanticized images of the aborigine. In the case of Argentina, the gaucho

came to symbolize for many Argentine nationalism in their crusade to break away

from Spanish rule.

Still, these portrayals of the gaucho and aborigine were laden with images of

savagery and barbarity, and foundational fictions such as María (1887) by Jorge

Isaacs portrayed Blacks with even less favor.122 Blacks were portrayed, according to

Zapata Olivella, as having “tainted” the purity of the aborigine, “con el crudo y

viviente influjo de su barbarie” (LM 17-18). Blacks were looked upon as savage and

uncivilized, and were purposely omitted from the history books of many Western

nations, and their contributions to the new nations were seen only in terms of the

manual labor they provided during slavery. In short, Blacks were not looked upon as

founding figures in the new nations. Later, movements such as indigenismo and

négritude fought to correct the negative portrayal of Blacks and aborigines.

Zapata Olivella revises these images of aborigines and Blacks in his

autobiography, filling in previous omissions of their contributions as well as

celebrating the cultural legacy of both peoples in Colombia, and in so doing he sets

out to vindicate the oppressed, as seen in the previous citation: “¿Híbrido o Nuevo

hombre? ¿Soy realmente un traidor a mi raza? ¿Un zambo escurridizo? ¿Un mulato

122
See Doris Sommer’s study of foundational literature: Foundational Fictions (Berkeley: U of
California Press, 1991).
131
entreguista? O sencillamente un mestizo americano que busca defender la identidad

de sus sangres oprimidas” (LM 21). His toying with terminology used to describe

different mixtures of races, (e.g. a zambo is someone of Black and indigenous

ancestry), represents his attempt to redefine identity with a tri-ethnic vocabulary, and

at the same time rescues the terms mestizo and mulatto from their negative

connotations. He is at once zambo, mulatto (Black and white), and mestizo (white

and aborigine). There are three facets to his racial identity, and none of the readily

used terminology encompasses this mixture adequately. Although he delineates all

three components of his ancestry, he centers his treatment on the aboriginal and most

specifically on the African, thereby rejecting ideas of blanqueamiento or whitening,

still very prevalent in modern Colombia, by focusing on his “oppressed blood.”123

His purpose in writing his autobiography, however, is not simply to focus on any

particular phase or aspect of his own life, but rather to contribute to the discourse on

identity and to call attention to the continuing oppression of certain sectors of

Colombian and Latin American society. As he states:

A ello se debe que partiendo de los mismos principios reivindicadores

de mi padre, yo hubiese iniciado un salto atrás, pero adelante en la

lucha, cuando llevado de la antropología he buscado las fuentes de la

africanidad y la indianidad como fundamentos de la liberación de los

pueblos mestizos y mulatos de América. (LM 98)

123
I say that the idea of whitening is still prevalent in modern day Colombia due to the continued
privileging of whiteness, in what Gordon Lewis termed a “multi-layered pigmentocracy.” See Lewis,

132
 As stated previously, part of Zapata Olivella’s project is to revamp the

understanding of the history of racial mixing in Latin America by stressing the fact

that mestizaje was the result not of tolerance but of sexual violence during conquest

and colonization. Zapata Olivella is adamant that both mestizos and mulattos accept

their non-European heritages as an integral part of their identities, as Richard Jackson

explains:

What is important here is that he is not talking about theory or a

symbolic or philosophical identification but a real one. The height of

inauthenticity, in his view, would be to identify in the abstract but

without accepting the biological links and the social responsibility of

solidarity. To him, identification is more than an intellectual exercise.

In his search for Afro-Hispanic identity, he is also searching for what

he considers to be an American truth. Zapata Olivella calls for a

radical change in attitude toward race in America.124

In his interview with Captain-Hidalgo, Zapata Olivella contributes his dedication to

cultural anthropology to his travels and contact with populations that fervently

embraced their racial identities (31).125 His journeys throughout the Americas, and

most especially to the United States, as well as to Africa, and his interaction with

racially politicized groups played a key role in his redefinition of Colombian racial

Main Currents in Caribbean Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 1983) 9.

124
Richard L. Jackson, Black Writers and the Hispanic Canon (New York: Twayne, 1997) 59.
125
An example of his anthropological studies can be seen in the chapter entitled, “Delia: yo soy el
folclor,” which describes his travels with his sister, Delia, into the interior of Colombia to record

133
identity. It was in the United States that he first confronted overt racism and where

we see most clearly his negotiations of a newly defined racial identity, as I discussed

in my analysis of He visto la noche. In Africa, on the other hand, he discovers that

the idea of “returning home,” or undertaking the reverse middle passage back to

Africa, is unnecessary, as Africa does not offer answers to Blacks in the Western

hemisphere who are searching for a redefined racial and cultural identity.

Mestizaje Redefined

Zapata Olivella’s greater awareness of his racial identity comes about in great

part due to his travels that begin as a young man when he first leaves home in Lorica,

in the region of Córdoba, for medical school in Bogotá (Captain-Hidalgo, 1985

31).126 It is in Bogotá that he first becomes aware of the “invisible” racist barriers

that keep Blacks and aborigines out of positions of prestige and political power.

Although he is a mulatto, in Bogotá he recognizes that he is considered “el negro”

[the Black], although in predominately Black areas of the country he is light enough

to be considered white, and also that those barriers apply to him as well as other

Blacks despite his education or economic status (LM 178). In response to his raising

racial consciousness, he joins other students to protest racism and call for the

remnants of African music and folklore among the mestizos and mulattos in the Upar Valley (LM 320-
28).
126
The heaviest Black populations of Colombia reside in the coastal regions, especially the Pacific
Coast (Wade 1993, 4-5).
134
equitable treatment of Blacks in the United States and elsewhere and to celebrate the

“día del negro” (LM 187). His adoption of the term Black for himself is met with

surprise from other students:

Las actitudes asumidas por mí y mi hermana Delia, afirmando nuestra

identidad, constituían duras lecciones. A partir de las miradas

burlonas y sorprendidas de las jóvenes a nuestro paso, fuimos

descubriendo las cerradas de puerta, los comentarios elogiosos pero

ineficaces cuando se trataba de cambiar los rígidos esquemas de la

sociedad discriminadora. (LM 178)

This surprise is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that Black is usually a term reserved

for those of unmixed or scarcely mixed heritage, most especially Blacks who live in

the coastal regions, and carries pejorative connotations.127 Zapata Olivella’s racial

awareness continues to grow, sparking his decision to investigate firsthand the effects

of racism in the Americas, as he states:

De golpe las ideas políticas entraron de lleno en mi concepción

revolucionaria de la medicina. Desde entonces dejé de ver los

pacientes como simples víctimas de bacterias, conejillos de laboratorio

127
See Peter Wade, “The Language of Race, Place and Nation in Colombia” America Negra December
1991, no. 2, (41-65). “Blackness is a significant aspect of the meaning attached to the Atlantic coast
region by Colombians in general. It is an even stronger element from the perspective of the interior.
Closely connected with its blackness, seen from this highland perspective, are a series of pejorative
evaluations which are made of Costeños by people from the interior. They are said to be lazy and
dejado (literally, left behind, and figuratively, slipshod, unkempt, negligent), they are said to be
religiously rather lax and impious, their family organization is reputedly relaxed and improper –
involving unmarried cohabitation, changes in partner, illegitimate children, etc… (49). See also Nina

135
 y anfiteatros. El enfermo era también, y más frecuentemente, una

víctima social. El virus inoculado por el profesor me compulsaría a

buscar la etiología de la enfermedad más allá de los laboratorios. La

crisis haría explosión cuando decidido a conocer la sociedad

americana que gestaba a los enfermos –el feudalismo y las dictaduras

militares- abandoné la universidad para recorrer a pie los caminos de

Centro América, contaminado por la fiebre de los grandes

vagabundos... (LM 182-3)

With the determination to make the world his classroom for study, he sets out to study

the social causes for infirmities: poverty, discrimination, feudalism, etc. His journey

begins in Colombia and later he ventures into Central America and up into the United

States.128 His goal is to reach the South of the United States, where he plans to

observe racist practices in some of their most nefarious forms, as I discussed in my

analysis of He visto la noche.

Although he includes the aboriginal people in his redefinition of mestizaje, we

do not witness a great affinity with the aborigines. He observes traditions, dress,

mannerisms and customs, much like an anthropologist studying a target group. On

his way to the United States he aligns himself with the exploited workers, the day

workers in the United Fruit Company’s “Banana Republics,” and the migrant farm

S. de Friedemann, “Negros en Colombia: Identidad e Invisibilidad” America Negra, June 1992, no. 3,
(25-35).

136
workers in Mexico. His feelings of solidarity seem to be more inspired by his

Marxist affinities rather than any racial or cultural commonalities: “Pero este hecho

elemental de identidad con el indio, me obligaba a rememorar mis ancestros

africanos: indio mas siempre negro” (LM 257). His identification as a Black (Afro-

Colombian) is most salient in his narratives and is, in fact, the reason behind his

travels to the United States and Africa.

In 1974, years after traveling in the United States, Zapata Olivella received an

invitation to attend a Pan-African conference in Dakar convoked by then president

Léopold Senghor. The conference was to address questions of négritude (both artistic

and Africanity) in post-colonial Africa and the Americas, and Zapata Olivella looked

on it as an opportunity for Afro-Latin Americans to redefine themselves within the

vision of Africa in the Americas (334-35). What he encountered, though, was a

rejection on the part of many Africans of people of mixed heritage: “Uno de los

jóvenes africanos en la conferencia, obsesionado por la pureza de la negritud,

denunció la ausencia de representantes de su raza entre las delegaciones

latinoamericanas… Contrariamente, ante el daltonismo étnico, al lado de los

africanos, yo fui asimilado como ‘blanco’” (LM 335). Similar to Langston Hughes’

experiences in Africa, Zapata Olivella was seen as less than “pure” by many

128
In another travel narrative, Pasión vagabunda Zapata Olivella details his travels in Latin America.
My focus, however, is on his travels in the United States and Africa, depicted in the texts He visto la
noche and Levántate mulato.
137
Africans.129 Only those with little or no racial mixture were considered to be

“Black,” an idea that dramatically contrasted the acceptance of notions of mestizaje

prevalent in Latin America. Négritude, in the Pan-Africanist sense, was a movement

aimed towards the vindication and liberation of Africans and people of African

ancestry throughout the world and the rejection of the colonial orders.130 As Zapata

Olivella explains:

Para estos la negritud presupone luchar por la sobrevivencia biológica

de la raza, rechazando todas las formas de fusión étnica que

contribuyan a la miscegenación y suicidio del negro. Es explicable

este terror que mordió durante siglos el corazón de los africanos que

veían destruir sus familias, sus culturas y sus pueblos. (LM 335)

Pan-Africanism began as an idea in the nineteenth century and developed into a

movement in the twentieth century (especially after World War II), which called for

cooperation and unity among African countries, autonomous rule and the elimination

of white supremacy. The premise of Pan-Africanism was that Africans and people of

African descent shared common experiences with racism, as well as a common

129
See Langston Hughes’ autobiography The Big Sea, in which he depicts his experiences traveling in
Africa and his feelings of rejection by the Africans who considered him to be “white.”
130
As Frantz Fanon postulates in The Wretched of the Earth, the Pan-Africanist version of négritude
responded to colonial/imperial literature. In the same vein that Zapata Olivella appropriates the travel
narrative, négritude writers took colonial forms and merged them with their own to produce a counter-
hegemonic literature. In his chapter “On National Culture,” Fanon defines the role of colonialism in
the destruction of indigenous cultures. Colonial writers took the history of the native population,
distorting, disfiguring and destroying it, and thereby devaluating pre-colonial history. Négritude
writers appropriated the literary tools of the colonizer and re-imagined themselves within the national
framework. It should be noted that Fanon criticized the fashioning of “national culture” according to
European designs, and warned against the fetishization of traditional cultures in the attempt to

138
cultural heritage. Based on these commonalities, there was a call to all people of

African descent to associate, both socially and politically, and to work toward the

political advancement of all Blacks.131

During his trip to Africa the author encountered resistance on the part of many

Africans to his attempts to identify with them both racially and culturally. For some

of the African people with whom he had contact, racial mixing was viewed as yet

another form of racial and cultural “suicide,” to use Zapata Olivella’s term. Similar

to many négritude writers of the early twentieth century, Zapata Olivella has a

romanticized notion of Africa, as seen in his description of his first impressions:

“Africa convertida en un puño fuerte golpeaba día y noche mi corazón como si fuera

un viejo tambor, probado para resistir sus puños” (LM 336). Zapata Olivella and

many other Black intellectuals, such as Marcus Garvey, looked to Africa as a

motherland. In the négritude movement Africa was also represented as a site of

cultural heritage, but was often portrayed in contradictory images. For example,

Africa was oftentimes envisioned as a primitive place in its representation as the site

of Black nascence. African American intellectuals and artists, such as Langston

Hughes, as well as Afro-Antilleans journeyed to Africa but often found that they were

refashion and re-imagine the colonial subject. See The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove
Press, 1963) 206-248.
131
The Pan-Africanist movement began with African American and Afro-Caribbean intellectuals in the
“New World” based on their racial understanding of Africa (i.e. they thought of themselves as
members of a single, “Negro” race). Their mission was to link together the whole “Negro” race for
political purposes. The movement can be traced back to W.E.B. Du Bois who used the term “Pan-
Negroism” in a lecture entitled “the Conservation of Races,” published by the American Negro
Academy in 1897. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Pan-Africanism.” Africana Online. 21 April 2001
<<http://www.africana.com/Articles/tt_658.thm>>.
139
mistaken in their essentialized and romanticized notions of Africa and Africans. The

romanticization of the lost homeland or culture is not uncommon among people of

diasporas as Thomas Sowell explains in Race and Culture: A World View:

Conversely, people who have in fact lost contact with their cultural

roots, and who have shared little or none of the social experience of

their group, may not only “identify” with their group, but even do so in

a highly vocal and exaggerated form. It has, in fact, been a common

social phenomenon around the world that those who have lost a culture

have often been its most strident apostles. Africans educated in

Europe and America, and thoroughly Westernized in their thinking and

values, have been among the most extreme apostles of pan-

Africanism. (Sowell 28)

Zapata Olivella’s idealized vision of African unity, the idea that he will share an

automatic solidarity with Africans, and of a shared cultural heritage is soon lost, due

in great part to some of the African’s refusal to look at people of mixed heritage as

equally “African,” and the polarized vision of race in terms of Black and white that he

encounters among many of the Africans. Zapata Olivella also finds that the Africans

with whom he has contact do not all look at Americans as “hermanos de raza.” For

example, in an interview with a Serere King, Zapata Olivella uses the term “brother”

to express his feelings of solidarity with Africans, which brings about an angry

response from the King:

-‘El rey le responde que usted y él no pueden ser hermanos: en sus

140
 ascendientes reales jamás ha existido alguien esclavo.’

Rememoré las palabras de mi madre, ya fallecida, cuando me vaticinó

que pese a mi sangre mulata, si llegaba algún día al Africa, no me

reconocerían como negro. (LM 336)

Zapata Olivella finds himself very much a foreigner in Africa, rather than a “lost

child” returning home. His experiences in Africa lead him to reevaluate his earlier

conceptions of négritude, and he in turn embraces more fully his tri-ethnic conception

of mestizaje. We sense a certain anger or disgust in his remembrance of Africa, as he

unhesitatingly reminds his reader of the colonial legacy within the African continent,

something the Africans that he encountered were remiss to acknowledge:

El Diálogo de la Negritud y la América Latina, en Dakar…, sembró

profundas resonancias en mis ya revueltos sentimientos de

descendiente africano. La visión de una América dividida por los

intereses y uñas de los colonizadores me obligaban a meditar en lo

ocurrido al Africa, olvidadiza de mirarse en el manantial de su historia

y de su cultura. (LM 338)

Hence, the rejection is mutual. Although he still feels solidarity with Africans,

Zapata Olivella no longer looks to Africa as the answer to understanding and defining

the racial and cultural heritage of Africans in the Americas. Instead, he turns his eyes

to Latin America to redefine itself within its post-colonial context:

La historia de los desmembramientos de Africa, escuchada en las

múltiples lenguas que hablaban mis hermanos, reafirmó mi decisión de

141
 convocar en América… un escenario, una gran ágora de los negros de

América cualesquiera que fuesen los idiomas colonizadores, donde

tuvieran su lugar los hermanos de Africa y de todos aquellos

continentes a donde se extendió y floreció su semilla…nos reunimos

por vez primera en la historia de nuestros pueblos a debatir el

problema de la cultura negra en las Américas con la mirada

descolonizadora que nos hermanaba y unía. (LM 340)

Four years after the conference in Dakar, Zapata Olivella presided over a meeting of

people of African descent in Cali, Colombia, the First Congress of Black Culture of

the Americas (1978). During this congress, as well as during a second, which took

place in Panama City (1981), Zapata Olivella and other intellectuals, artists,

politicians, etc., met to denounce racism and discriminatory practices that continue to

exist in the Americas. With the end of colonial rule in the Americas, the people of

African descent found themselves at a unique moment in history with the ability to

redefine Afro-Americans, culturally and politically, in what Zapata Olivella terms

“the rebellious spirit of the ancestors” (LM 341).

After his experiences in Africa, Zapata Olivella is better able to redefine his

conceptions of mestizaje and Black identity, in fact rejecting the idea of looking to

Africa as the (primary) cultural heritage of Afro-Americans. Remnants of African

traditions and customs are still visible in the Western Hemisphere, as seen in the

previous citation: “…una gran agora de los negros de América cualesquiera que

fuesen los idiomas colonizadores, donde tuvieran su lugar los hermanos de Africa y
142
de todos aquellos continentes a donde se extendió y floreció su semilla” (LM 340).

Zapata Olivella recognizes the link to Africa, but also acknowledges the need to look

to the Americas as the new home of Afro-Americans and it is in the Americas where

people of African descent have to (re)define themselves.

Zapata Olivella’s journey in the United States is not simply a process of

“discovering” a Black identity, but is rather an attempt to construct a new Colombian

identity, based in great part on newly redefined conceptions of Blackness, racial

pride, resistance and militancy. The plural identity that he employs in the United

States as a means of resistance also reflects his developing discourse of racialization,

which he would later advocate in Colombia.

His travel narrative He visto la noche, as well as his short story “Un extraño

bajo mi piel” reflect this reconceptualization of race in a broader sense of mixture,

which in turn is expressed in his autobiography Levántate mulato. Through his

travels both inside and outside of Colombia, Zapata Olivella is able to investigate and

gain a new appreciation and understanding of his aboriginal and African heritages, as

well as develop a broader racial consciousness, for as James Clifford states, “a

journey makes sense as a ‘coming to consciousness’; its story hardens around an

identity.”132 Zapata Olivella’s coming to consciousness is perhaps best demonstrated

in Levántate mulato, which synthesizes his travels and subsequent negotiations of

both his racial and political identities as he encountered other systems of racialization

143
and conceptions of racial identity. His shift from idealizations of African and African

American cultures to a deeper, more mature understanding of the politics of race that

he later applies to a Latin American context, demonstrates marked development in his

evolution as an intellectual and activist. His travels to the United States and Africa

contribute to Zapata Olivella’s revision of mestizaje. The United States did not

answer all of his questions concerning racial identity, as Zapata Olivella discovered

the polarized system of race to be too limiting to be translated to a Spanish American

perspective. His trip to Africa, on the other hand, led to the debunking of the myth of

the return “home” embraced by many négritude writers and Black intellectuals of the

early to mid-twentieth century, such as Aimé Césaire. In Africa Zapata Olivella

realizes that he is not in fact African, and that the pilgrimage to the “homeland” does

not offer the solution in the quest to defining self. In the end, as described in his

autobiography, Zapata Olivella discovers that there is no need to look outside of Latin

America to establish one’s identity.

Zapata Olivella contributes not only to the expanding list of Afro-American

(in the hemispheric sense) autobiography with Levántate mulato, but his travel

narrative, He visto la noche, and the short story “Un extraño bajo mi piel” contribute

to an often unrecognized Afro-American tradition of travel literature. He belongs to a

tradition, not of exploration and conquest, but of the quest to relocate and redefine

self as a subject rather than object or “Other;” and of engaging predominant racial

discourses and attempting to redefine and vindicate Blackness within the national

132
J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 167.
144
image. Zapata Olivella’s undertaking to re-envision the representations of the mestizo

“Other” in a more affirmative light within nationalist discourse intersects with similar

projects in Cuba. The act of rewriting self within the national image is also manifest

in the poetry of two Afro-Cuban poets, Nicolás Guillén and Nancy Morejón, whose

poetry, as I argue in Chapter Three, serves as a site for reintroducing the Afro-Cuban

into the image of cubanidad.

145
 CHAPTER THREE

Voyage to the Past: Displacement in the Poetry of Nicolás Guillén and Nancy
Morejón

"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our
individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.”
-- Langston Hughes

“We're simply /done/ in Africa/ in America/ with being/ your negroes/

your niggers/ your dirty niggers/ we won't take it anymore...”
--Jacques Roumain

Shortly after the triumph of the 1959 Revolution in Cuba, Fidel Castro,

espousing José Martí’s ideology of cubanidad expressed in “Mi raza,” declared Cuba

to be “más que blanco, más que negro.”133 Cubanidad, an ideology similar to

mestizaje, defines Cubans along nationalist, rather than racial lines. By taking this

stance, Castro in effect called for a halt to all discussions of race and racism in Cuba,

by not only bridging economic divisionary lines with the implementation of a

socialist government, but by also calling for social equality for all Cubans. As the

official government stance was to discourage broaching racial topics, it became

133
Cubanidad, or “Cubanness” is another form of “racial democracy” particular to Cuban national
identity. As Aline Helg states in the introduction to Our Rightful Share, Cuba’s myth of racial
democracy was “founded principally on José Martí’s pre-1895 separatist propaganda” and that the
myth was twofold. “First, it diffused the idea that Cuban slaves had been freed by their own masters
during the Ten Years’ War… Second, the myth inculcated the idea that racial equality had been
achieved in the Cuban military forces that fought against Spain” (16). Helg also comments on the
Castro regime’s adoption of the rhetoric of racial equality, a strategy taken to gain and keep the support
of the Afro-Cuban population: “The revolution proclaimed racial equality and declared racism and the
‘black problem’ issues of the past, related to capitalism and U.S. imperialism…With the coming of
socialism, Afro-Cubans supposedly became equal, and the ‘black problem’ was solved” (8-9). Hence
any discussion of race would be viewed as divisive as it would call into question the effectiveness of
the Revolution.
146
difficult to address questions of race and racism in a country that summarily denies

their existence. The continued discussion of race in Cuba carried the threat of severe

sanctions by the government, such as censorship or imprisonment. However, cultural

workers did not cease to approach racial themes, but rather searched for methods that

would allow them to broach racial questions without calling into question their

political allegiance and support of the new government.

In this chapter I am examining the works of two cultural icons, Nicolás

Guillén (1902-1989) and Nancy Morejón (1944- ), two of Cuba’s most noted and

famed poets of the twentieth century. Guillén is well known for his pre-Revolution

poesía negra collected in works such as Motivos de son (1930), Sóngoro cosongo

(1931), and West Indies, Ltd. (1934), as well as post-Revolution works such as Tengo

(1964). Morejón is known for her Black womanist poetry written after the

Revolution. Both poets address issues of Black pride and embrace not only their own

Black ancestry, but also use their poetry to function as a reminder to Cuba of its

Black heritage by rewriting the role that Blacks have played in the social and political

development of the island. By discussing race in a supposedly raceless society, both

poets expose themselves to possible government sanctions.

There are several questions that need to be raised when examining the poetry

of Guillén and Morejón. First and foremost is why they feel the necessity to continue

to approach questions of racism and racial pride in post-Revolution Cuba. Secondly,

how do they introduce racial questions in their poetry without exposing themselves to

147
censorship or other government sanctions? In the case of Guillén, whose

appointment as national poet and president of UNEAC (Unión Nacional de Escritores

y Artistas Cubanos), as well as his affiliation with the communist party, placed him in

a position of being a spokesperson for the regime’s racial positioning, it is particularly

interesting to note his continued discussion of race in post-Revolution Cuba. Equally

remarkable is Morejón’s return to racial themes in her poetry after she suffered

twelve years of censorship because her early poetry was deemed as not being in line

with revolutionary thought. Although both poets seem to unquestionably support the

new government in their poetry, such as Guillén’s poem “Tengo,” and Morejón’s

“Mitologías,”134 why, we must ask, do they also incorporate poems that return to

questions of racial pride and racism such as “Vine en un barco negrero” (Guillén) and

“Mujer negra” (Morejón) in their collections? As I will discuss in this chapter, they

revisit racial themes in their poetry in part as a response to residual racism in Cuba, as

well as from the desire to re-envision and rewrite the role of Afro-Cubans in past and

present day Cuba. The means by which they broach these issues is through the trope

of displacement, the historical and/or geographical relocation of the topic to pre-

revolutionary Cuba and to the United States. Displacement serves as a means of

subverting censorship and also of creating a forum to discuss issues of racial pride

and identity in the supposedly raceless, post-Revolution Cuban society. By

metaphorically traveling back in history (temporal displacement) to pre-Revolution

134
I discuss “Tengo” at length later in the chapter. “Mitologías” is written in honor of Camilo
Cienfuegos, one of the most popular heroes of the Revolution.
148
Cuba and by locating their discussions to the United States (geographical

displacement), both Guillén and Morejón find a means by which they can safely

discuss race in a period when all cultural production deemed not in line with the

Revolution (as was any discussion of race) was highly censored.135 As I will

demonstrate, Guillén’s transformation from a poet of négritude to a voice and cultural

worker of the Revolution did not deter his expression of racial questions in his poetry;

nor did censorship of Morejón’s poetic voice deter her from reexamining the role of

Afro-Cuban women in society.

Black and Cuban

With the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, the government took a new stand

on race and declared Cuba to be a racial democracy.136 Cuba's history, however, has

always been racialized, from the very "discovery" of the island to the enslavement

and subsequent decimation of its native Taino and Arawak populations and the

subsequent importation of African slaves in the sixteenth century to the coolie

trafficking in the 1860's. Well into the nineteenth century there existed a “racial

135
My discussions of spatial and temporal displacement depart from professor Sonia Labrador
Rodriguez’ class “Blacks and National Discourse” (Fall 1994).
136
Today Cuba espouses the rhetoric of racial equality, where race is said to no longer be of issue or
importance. With the advent of socialism, Afro-Cubans supposedly became equals to whites and the
"black problem" was solved. In essence, the question of race was subordinated to build socialism and
fight against United States imperialism. Socialism, nevertheless, is incapable of erasing the historical
and cultural reality of racism that has developed over the past four centuries. Although today Afro-
Cubans may enjoy more social and economic “equality” their position in Cuban history has long been
one of marginalization and oppression. See also Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share, introduction.
149
dictatorship” that segregated the island's political, social, and economic structures and

unified power in Spanish/ criollo society.137

Afro-Cubans achieved greater recognition as members of the Cuban nation,

due to their involvement in the Wars of Independence (1868-1878, 1879-1880,1895-

1898).138 Afro-Cubans took up arms alongside white Cubans against Spain, fighting

not only for the freedom of their nation, but also for their own personal emancipation.

Although Blacks and mulattos comprised only about a third of the population in the

late nineteenth century, they joined the insurgents in large numbers, comprising over

half of all troops deployed (R. Moore 21). Among the senior commissioned ranks of

the Liberation Army, over 40 percent of the posts were held by Afro-Cubans after

1895 (Pérez 160). The heroism of Black and mulatto war leaders, such as Antonio

Maceo and Quintín Banderas, put a strain on dominant and exclusionary conceptions

of "white nationalism" and called into question the place of Afro-Cubans within the

nation (R. Moore 22). The emancipation of slaves in 1886 and the call to fight for the

137
Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960's to the
1990's. New York: Routledge 1994, 65. Omi and Winant define a racial dictatorship as a form of
government in which the "Other" is prohibited from participating in the sphere of politics. Although
Afro-Cubans have participated in Cuba's government, their numbers have been unrepresentative of the
population makeup. See also Aline Helg, “Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930: Theory, Policies,
and Popular Reaction,” The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940, ed. Richard Graham. (Austin:
U of Texas Press, 1990). In this article Helg discusses the policies aimed at segregating Afro-Cubans
in social, economic and political spheres (53-57). It should be noted that the constitutional president,
and later dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista was a mulatto. Batista ruled Cuba, first through “puppet”
government officials, and later as president (1940-1944), (1952), and (1954). For further details of
Batista’s rule of Cuba, see Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform & Revolution (New York:
Oxford UP, 1995).
138
By greater recognition I refer to their change in status from slaves to free people. Those who were
not enslaved received some recognition as contributors to Cuban society due to their efforts in the fight
for independence from the Metropolis.
150
insurgents' cause was not well accepted by all, and the heroism and leadership shown

by the Afro-Cubans during the wars did not decrease racial tensions (Carbonell 93;

Helg 69). In fact, by accepting Afro-Cubans as soldiers, and even military leaders,

the plantation owners created a situation, in theory, where Afro-Cubans were raised to

the level of equal members of the free Cuban Republic for which they were fighting;

or so were the expectations created by their incorporation in the war.

The Republic of Cuba was founded on May 20, 1902, and for the next fifty-

plus years following independence Cuba experienced a period of national

consolidation that was characterized by political instability. Various regimes rose and

fell as the nation attempted to form its national and political identity independent of

Spain and the United States.139 The Constitution of 1902 conferred full legal rights to

Afro-Cubans and made discrimination illegal.140 Nevertheless, Cuban society

remained structured upon racial difference. The racial dictatorship persisted in Cuba,

evident in the fact that even though Afro-Cubans comprised roughly one-third of the

population at the turn of the century, they were unable to achieve full and equal

social, political and economic power (Helg 3).141 The success of free people of color

aroused suspicion and enmity amongst the White Cubans. There was official

discrimination that kept people of color out of the University of Havana and other

139
The Platt Amendment (1901-3) made Cuba a US protectorate, giving the US the right to intervene
in Cuban affairs as necessary to "preserve order" or Cuba's independence.
140
See Article 20 of the Cuban Constitution of 1902.
141
Despite their numbers, Afro-Cubans never gained their potential social, economic and political
power at the turn of the century due to the US occupation of the island, high Spanish immigration, and
the Cuban administration. See Helg, Our Rightful Share, introduction.
151
educational institutions, denied them access to ranks within the Catholic clergy, and

blocked their participation in public affairs of the colony (Pérez 96). When Afro-

Cubans mobilized in an effort to gain full equality and equal representation, their

efforts were squashed.142

According to Helg, the rise in Afro-Cuban consciousness and their challenge

for autonomy threatened the white elite, who in turn made more explicit their

ideology of white supremacy: "Whites produced myths and icons of fear in order to

justify the subaltern position of Afro-Cubans in society and to promote repression

when necessary. Social Darwinism and positivism provided the intellectual

framework in which the elite reflected about race and Cubans" (Helg 16). Afro-

Cubans were viewed as biologically and racially inferior to whites, and it was thought

that they would eventually become demographically insignificant (Helg 16). By

marginalizing the Afro-Cubans and encouraging Spanish immigration, the white elite

sought to systematically reduce the Afro-Cuban population and leave a white or

Spanish population on the island.143 Using a biological determinist argument, or

Social Darwinism, the white elite cast the blame on Afro-Cubans themselves for their

lack of progress and mobility within Cuban society. Hence, racism was not

142
See Helg, Our Rightful Share on the massacres of Blacks and mulattos who mobilized and joined
organizations such as the Partido Independiente de Color, which were formed to give Afro-Cubans a
political voice, and the "Race War" of 1912 in which more than 3,000 Blacks were slaughtered by
military forces.
143
European immigration was encouraged in a practice known as blanqueamiento, or whitening. By
encouraging miscegenation between the existing Afro-Cuban population and the influx of Europeans
of all classes and social stature, the idea was to eventually whiten the population. See Aline Helg,
“Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930.”
152
considered to be an issue, as the "inferiority" of the Black race was seen as

biologically inherent and not a cultural or social phenomenon. Ironically, while using

such determinist arguments to incite fear and promote repression of Blacks in Cuban

society, the elites at the same time espoused a contradictory argument of equality,

embracing a vision of cubanidad.

José Martí and Cubanidad

José Martí (1853-1895) was a [white] Cuban intellectual, revolutionary and

writer who died early in the final war of independence against Spain. Martí

advocated the acceptance of Afro-Cubans as equal members of society, and even

collaborated with Afro-Cubans while in exile in the United States (R. Moore 27).

Martí's vision of Cuba was of a country of racial harmony. This vision was used as

political propaganda for the insurgency in their fight against Spain, as it solidified the

notion of a free Cuba by uniting Cubans with a common vision of an autonomous

state. As Pérez argues Martí's vision took the struggle beyond the simple notion of

free Cuba as it evolved into the struggle not simply for independence, but into the

dream of a nation (147). Martí's assertion was that as a result of the common

struggle of whites and Afro-Cubans against imperial Spain, whites had overcome the

biases that they inherited from three centuries of slavery under Spanish rule (R.

153
Moore 28). Reality, however, was far from this utopian vision.144

Paradoxically, when Afro-Cubans mobilized and voiced objections to the

established order or called for equality, they were viewed as unpatriotic and as going

against the vision of (Martí's) antiracist social agenda. White Cubans feared an

insurrection similar to Haiti (1794-1804), as Afro-Cubans comprised approximately

thirty percentage of the population at the turn of the century.145 When Afro-Cubans

did mobilize and attempt to join forces to have a stronger political voice, white Cuba

reacted with violence. In a campaign to extinguish the Afro-Cuban campaign for

equality and political clout, several thousand Afro-Cubans who were members of the

Partido Independiente de Color were massacred and lynched in May 1912, an event

that even today is still little talked about (C. Moore 29). Hence, the desire to redefine

Cuba as a nation of racial democracy or equality basically consisted in the

suppression of the Afro-Cuban population. The voice of the gente de color was

suppressed in order to maintain the hegemonic order of Criollo rule and to proliferate

the ideology of cubanidad. However, racist practices continued in Cuba, with

systematic segregation. Even the president of the Republic, Fulgencio Batista who

was a mulatto, could not enter into certain social realms, namely the Havana Yacht

Club, because of segregationist practices.146 Many Afro-Cubans looked to the

144
One must also keep in mind that part of the reasoning behind Martí’s idea of cubanidad was to
assuage fears of Black reprisal or insurgency, the basis of the fears being the Haitian Revolution. See
Robert L. Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood, Wesleyan UP, 1988.
145
Hugh Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
146
See Lourdes Casal “Race Relations in Contemporary Cuba,” for a discussion of systematic racial
discrimination in pre-revolutionary Cuba (477).
154
Revolution to put an end to racism and discrimination, believing that a move towards

socialism would bring about racial, social, and economic equality.

Still, the 1959 Revolution and change to a socialist form of government did

not end racism. Instead it made it even more difficult for Afro-Cubans to discuss

issues of race and racism and to identify as Black. The history of race in Cuba began

long before the Revolution, as stated above, with the "discovery" of the island. The

suppression of Black self-expression and the call for racial equality that had existed in

the nineteenth century continued into the new government and the twentieth century.

After the Revolution Cuba became a populist state, resulting in changes of resource

redistribution under egalitarian policies of the new government. The supposed result

was the "resolution" of the "race problem," for the government deemed race a non-

issue in Cuba.147 Under the new regime all citizens of the island were made equal

under law, as Castro declared that the only race in Cuba was the Cuban race.148 In

one of several speeches in which he deals with the notion of race, Castro reiterated

José Martí's words from "Mi Raza," stating, "to be Cuban is more than being white,

more than being Black. A Cuban is someone who belongs to no race

147
It should be noted that Article 20 of the Cuban Constitution of 1902 also made discrimination
illegal.
148
Guillén, Prosa de Prisa III, 303. In chapter XI of his study of Blacks in Cuba, El problema negro
en Cuba y su solución definitiva, Pedro Serviat writes, “...al producirse la expropiación de las clases
que siempre estuvieron interesadas en mantener la discriminación como un medio de agudizar la
competencia y división entre el obrero negro y el blanco, y obtener así más ganancias, se eliminaba el
principal factor económico sobre el que se sustentaba la discriminación por motivo de raza o de sexo.”
(165) See also, Carlos Moore, Castro, the Blacks and Africa and Tomás Fernández Robaina, El negro
en Cuba.
155
in particular!"149 The Castro government had begun tackling the race problem in

Cuba by demolishing the color barrier in civil institutions, as well as nationalizing

private arenas, such as schools and clinics. With the erasure of the color barrier in

civil institutions and the public arena, the government “affixed the taboo of

counterrevolution and divisionism upon any attempts at raising the race question

again, even in debate” (Taylor 23).

As the regime had “postulated institutional eradication of racism,” discussion

of the race problem was discouraged (Howe 55), and the regime was able to

“whitewash Black issues with egalitarian rhetoric that did not correspond to the

reality of prevalent racism and its negative effect on cultural production” (Amaro

350-53). With the rhetoric of racial and social equality, and the ongoing punishment

of the intellectuals and artists whose productions were thought to be not in-line with

the Revolution, Nicolás Guillén, Nancy Morejón and other “cultural workers” found

themselves in a position from which it was nearly impossible to openly discuss

racism, racial pride, homosexuality, and other issues not officially sanctioned by the

government and “cultural officials.”

The quality of life did improve vastly for a great deal of the Cubans of color,

who by some accounts comprised up to seventy percent of the population by the mid-

twentieth century (H. Thomas 335). People of color were given the right to

education, health care, and employment, as there was a desegregation of three sectors

of society: labor, education, and recreation. However, the structural changes that

149
Fidel Castro-- "Cuba es más que blanco, más que negro," Hoy March 28, 1959:1-3.
156
occurred with the Revolution did not change the pre-revolutionary ideologies, or

psychologies, which continued to exist in post-revolutionary Cuba. These ideologies

continued to operate, and perhaps even continued to affect, to some mitigated extent,

the structures in post-revolutionary Cuba. The structural changes that did occur,

however, were also racialized, although there was marked improvement over the pre-

revolutionary structures, as they related to Afro-Cubans.

The regime replaced one set of racialized structures with another set which,

while racialized, was not obviously racist as were the pre-revolutionary structures

(Howe 123). The regime's attempt at color blindness called for the outlaw of Black

study groups whose object of study was not considered to support the Revolution. As

historian Leslie Bethell writes in Cuba: a Short History:

...Since the government claimed to have solved racial problems, it

became subversive to argue that they persisted even if in modified

form. The government banned associations of black intellectuals and

politicians that had existed before the Revolution. A number of those

who insisted there were still serious racial problems in Cuban society,

or distinctive intellectual issues among Afro-Cubans, became exiles.

(119-20)

This is not to suggest that the discussion of race was not allowed in Cuba. In fact, the

regime did support the study of elements of race, and in particular Afro-Cuban

themes. These studies were limited, however, to the realm of anthropology and

157
historiography in that the studies were to support the historical and cultural

contributions of Afro-Cubans to Cuban society. In order to avoid divisiveness within

the nation, a moratorium was placed on studies or productions which dealt with the

contemporary situation of Afro-Cubans regarding race and with respect to the regime

(Pérez-Sarduy 11). Two examples are Walterio Carbonell's Como surgió la cultura

nacional, and Tomás Fernández Robaina’s El negro en Cuba: 1902-1958. In his

treatment of the African element in Cuba, Carbonell has to revert to displacing his

argument to the nineteenth century in order to support the Castro regime and it's

official position, while at the same time reconstruct history from a Black

perspective.150 Robaina’s extremely insightful study of the role of Afro-Cubans in

early twentieth century Cuba curiously ends at the eve of the Revolution, which

theoretically marks the end of racial discrimination in Cuba.

In March 1959, Castro spoke to the divisive nature of racial politics with

relation to national unity:

We are a small country. We have all kinds of enemies, inside and out.

The international oligarchy slander us and try to present us to the

world as a pack of wild wolves, to weaken us. Are we a small people

who need each other, need the effort of all, and are now to be divided

150
See, for example, Sonia Labrador Rodríguez, “‘El miedo al negro’: el debate de lo racial en el
discurso revolucionario cubano” in Historia y Sociedad, 1997. Labrador Rodríguez states that
Carbonell’s return to the 19th century to reevaluate the foundational myths and figures is a point of
departure for denouncing (contemporary) racial discrimination, and that Carbonell’s discursive
strategies (i.e. temporal displacement) are a paradigm for future productions or commentaries by other
Afro-Cuban intellectuals (119).
158
 into black and white? ... To what end if not to weaken the nation, to

weaken Cuba? Are we few and yet to be divided? Are we to be weak

and also divided by color?151

Cultural production that was viewed as not supporting the Revolution was not

tolerated. Artists were censored or punished, and in some cases marginally tolerated,

for production deemed to be not aligned with the official position. Resolution

number twenty-one of the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba clarifies

the position: "The Revolution has the duty to reject any effort to use the work of art

as an instrument or pretext for spreading or legitimizing ideological positions adverse

to socialism."152 At the closing of the First National Congress of Education and

Culture, Castro spoke, further elucidating the need of literature to be in line with the

regime's philosophy: "Literature must be firmly rooted within the revolutionary

struggle, fulfilling its function as a 'weapon of the Revolution.'"153

In 1961 Castro gave his famous speeches to the intellectuals in which he

called for their obligatory commitment to the Revolution. Although there were

certain freedoms in publishing, such as a variety of literary themes and genres,

“official media sources began to echo Castro’s ideas and promote literature with

specifically revolutionary content” (Howe 234). Although the Cuban literary

tradition before the Revolution allowed some place for the expression of African-

151
Lourdes Casal, trans. From Fidel Castro, “Discurso del 22 marzo de 1959,” Revolución (March 23,
1959), 24-27.
152
Documentos del Primer Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba, Resolución 21.

159
based cultures, “the treatment of Black people in written literature was almost

invariably filtered through the eyes of castizo (European-ancestored) writers.”154

Both before, and especially after the Revolution few Black poets managed to

gain a voice that allowed them to fully express their experiences, for as Josaphat

Kubayanda explains in his study of Afro-Cuban poetry: “in all oppressive societies,

the writer has in general three options if he is to avert incarceration or death: self-

exile, silence or the cultivation of a personal and controlled style.”155 In post-

Revolution Cuba, any expression or discussion of race or racial pride could be

considered to be divisive, as Sonia Labrador Rodríguez states in her article, “El

miedo al negro...:”

Reclamar el derecho a la cubanidad desde lo racial es divisorio,

anticubano. Definirse racialmente queda definitivamente semantizado

en el discurso oficial como un gesto anticubano, que atenta contra el

futuro de la nación y de la revolución... En Cuba, como en la mayoría

de los países latinoamericanos, enfatizar lo racial (entiéndase como lo

no-blanco) se ha percibido como gesto que amenaza la identidad y

unidad nacional. Es en el siglo XIX que se gesta la conciencia

nacional cubana y desde este momento, particularmente desde la

independencia haitiana, el miedo al negro se convirtió en el fantasma

153
Ibid.
154
Dellita L. Martin-Ogunsola, “Africanity and Revolution: The Dialectics of Ambivalence in the
Poetry of Nancy Morejón,” 224.

160
 que más ha atemorizado a Cuba. (115)

As Labrador Rodríguez asserts, raising questions of racial identity threatened (white)

Cuba’s vision of nation unity founded in the nineteenth century notion of a racially

harmonious Cuba.156 Therefore cultural officials left little room for cultural

production that could be viewed as weakening the united and egalitarian façade put

forth by the Castro regime. Cultural workers had to be extremely cautious in their

approach to issues such as race, racism and homosexuality. Directly addressing these

issues could lead to censorship or worse, as was the case of Walterio Carbonell, Sara

Gómez and other contributors to the “Black Manifesto.”157

Cuba's official rhetoric became one of a "color-blind" society, where Cubans

were to be defined in nationalistic terms rather than along racial lines. In actuality,

however, Cuba's "race problem" was far from being resolved despite the vast change

in the discourse on race. In order to address such question of race and the continuing

racism, intellectuals would necessarily have to change their means of cultural

production to survive the scrutiny of the regime's censorship as well as the

accompanying punishment, in the forms of social ostracism, loss of employment, or

155
Josaphat Kubayanda, The Poet’s Africa (New York, 1990) 357.
156
This idea, once again, is highly attributed to José Martí and his attempt to assuage fears of a Black
uprising in Cuba, similar to the Haitian Revolution. Whites feared losing political control to Afro-
Cubans, and suppressed, often violently, any move by Afro-Cubans to form (race based) political
groups. See Helg’s Our Rightful Share, particularly chapter 6 where she discusses the suppression of
the Partido Independiente de Color.
157
The “Black Manifesto” came out of a Black Power Movement in Cuba in the late 1960’s, when
young Black intellectuals gathered to read works that pertained to their Black heritage. Many of the

161
even imprisonment.158 A careful reading and study of the evolution of both Guillén

and Morejón’s poetry will show how they adapted their poetic voices to avoid

censorship while continuing to address racial topics in their poetry. Guillén’s

transformation from a poet of négritude to the national poet, and hence cultural

worker and spokesman for the Revolution, did not deter his expression of racial

themes; nor did censorship of Morejón dissuade her from refiguring the image of the

Afro-Cuban woman. 159

From Negrismo to Négritude: Poetic Representations of Africa in the Americas

Langston Hughes and Jacques Roumain, quoted above in the epigraphs, are

two voices representative of contemporaneous movements in the United States and

the francophone Caribbean, the Harlem Renaissance and the négritude movement,

respectively. The Harlem Renaissance (1919-1939) reached beyond the borders of

activists were imprisoned. See Carlos Moore’s Castro, the Blacks and Africa (Los Angeles: Center for
Afro-American Studies, Univ. of California, 1988), 21.
158
For some specific examples of punishments of intellectuals whose work was interpreted as being
against the grain of the regime and its newly espoused philosophies see Cabrera Infante's Mea Cuba,
Linda Howe's Afro-Cuban Cultural Politics and the Aesthetics in the Works of Miguel Barnet and
Nancy Morejón, or Dopico Black's "The Limits of Expression: Intellectual Freedom in Post-
revolutionary Cuba." I will also discuss Nancy Morejón’s experience of censorship later in this
chapter.
159
As I explain on pages 169-170, I am defining Guillén as a poet of négritude even though he was not
from any of the Francophone countries. His poetry falls more in line with the négritude poets than the
negrista poets because of his position as a Black writer who speaks from the perspective of the “Other”
reclaiming his heritage and expressing pride in his African culture. I make the distinction between
negrismo and négritude to point to the significance of Nicolás Guillén’s later poetry that went beyond
the stylistics of onomatopoeia, the adoption of African sounding language and envisioning of Cuba as
a mulatto nation, but followed the négritude poetry which was self-affirming and attempted to
revalorize Blackness, rather than losing it in racial mixture. See also Josaphat B. Kubayanda, The
Poet’s Africa, where he situates Guillén as a poet of négritude.
162
Harlem throughout the United States as a movement of Black pride expressed in

literature and the arts.160 Well renowned Black American writers such as Langston

Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer, amongst others,

influenced writers throughout the African Diaspora.161 In France, Africa, and in the

French Caribbean writers of African descent looked in part to the artistic creations of

these influential Harlem Renaissance writers as well as their own Black intelligentsia

for inspiration in their own works. The expression of the positive nature of Blackness

in the Renaissance writings was translated as Black pride and individuality. In the

poetry of Claude McKay and Langston Hughes we witness an acceptance of African

American culture, a celebration of the blues and jazz, and pride heretofore not seen in

African American culture and traditions. The 1930s witnessed a call to return,

figuratively and literally, to Africa, to reclaim a lost and stolen heritage.162 There was

also a literary “Back to Africa” movement, in which Africa began to be looked upon

as the “motherland”, the cultural home of African Americans, as seen in Langston

160
There is some debate over the exact date the Harlem Renaissance is considered to have ended,
whether in the mid-1920’s or as late as the 1940’s.
161
As O. R. Dathorne explains in Dark Ancestor, the Harlem Renaissance was the “midwife to a host
of Black literary movements” throughout the Black pluriverse (Dathorne 172). As I also discuss in
chapter 2, Manuel Zapata Olivella was a great admirer of Langston Hughes, and sought him out during
his journeys in the United States. Nicolás Guillén also had interactions with Hughes who translated
some of Guillén’s poetry. I am by no means asserting that the contemporary Black literary and artistic
movements were all one. Different impulses could be credited with giving birth to any one movement
in a specific geographical area. For a further discussion of some of these possible impulses, see O.R.
Dathorne, Dark Ancestor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981 (172-73).
162
Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land,]
published in 1929, is an example of the effort to reclaim the (lost) African roots, and to return to the
past and to the African continent to revalorize the African heritage repressed during centuries of
slavery and oppression under European and criollo rule in the Americas. See Jorge Ruffinelli,
introduction to Poesía y descolonización, Viaje por la poesía de Nicolás Guillén, Dathorne, Dark
Ancestors, or Rene Depestre, “Hello and Goodbye to Negritude.” There were also Pan-African and

163
Hughes’ poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Danse Africaine.” In a similar

vein, francophone African and Caribbean writers initiated the négritude movement,

not only as an expression of Black pride, but also as an expression or claim of

autonomy as a backlash to colonialism, as seen in Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to

the Native Land, as well as Léon Damas’s poem “Hiccups.” Meanwhile, in the

Spanish-speaking Caribbean there was a negrista movement, but what distinguished

this movement from the Harlem Renaissance and négritude movement was that the

primary artists were white.

The negrista movement began in Cuba and Puerto Rico at the end of Spanish

colonial rule, flourishing in the 1920s and 1930s. As an attempt to define themselves

both nationalistically and as separate from the metropolis, the negrista writers

claimed their difference to the world by recognizing the African influence in their

burgeoning nations.163 Luis Palés Matos of Puerto Rico, for example, published Tún

tún de pasa y griferia in 1937, a collection of poetry that included “Ñáñigo al cielo,”

a challenge to the homogeneous perspective of society that tended to view Puerto

Rican culture as predominately Hispanic or white. “Ñáñigo al cielo” depicts the

ascent of a ñañigo, a member of an Afro-Cuban religion, to a white, previously

Back-to-Africa movements, one of which was led in the United States by Jamaican born Marcus
Garvey.
163
For a detailed discussion on the negrista poetry movement, see Mónica Mansour, La poesía
negrista. Mansour explains the negrista movement was so short, due to the fact that the poetry “no fue
sino un elemento en la búsqueda del carácter nacional de muchos países hispanoamericanos, dentro de
una protesta contra la injusticia social y la explotación extranjera. Esta poesía solo tuvo un momento
racial en la corriente nacional, latinoamericana y social. La obra de Nicolás Guillén, además de ser la

164
homogenous heaven164:

El ñáñigo asciende por

la escalinata de mármol,

con meneo contagioso

de caderas y omoplatos.

--Las órdenes celestiales

le acogen culipandeando--

By introducing the African, indigenous and popular elements into their poetry, the

negrista writers forged a new vision of their respective nations and even of the

Antilles. In the case of Palés Matos, his vision is not limited to Puerto Rico, but

rather, according to Mansour, he attempts to envision all of the Antilles as

homogenous, using the mulata rather than white or Hispanic culture as a basis for

defining the Caribbean. As Palés Matos states:

La vida espiritual de nuestras islas, por su comunidad de origen, puede

sintonizarse en un acento, en un modo, en un ritmo peculiar y

homogéneo… Este acento, traducido a términos de cultura, no es ni

puede ser ya español ni africano. Porque si la cultura, en última

instancia, ha de tener un valor substancial y no meramente externo,

cumbre del movimiento negrista hispanoamericano, representa claramente el proceso de

transformación del negrismo al ‘latinoamericanismo’” (142).
164
From a conversation with Dr. Sonia Labrador Rodríguez (Fall 1997). Palés Matos began publishing
poetry in 1912 with his first collection Azaleas. Mansour attributes the beginnings of the negrista
movement to Palés Matos around 1926, a movement which grew and gained popularity in the 1930s

165
 habrá de ser un constante fluir, un perenne producirse del ser o de la

raza, en armonía con el paisaje que los rodea.165

The negrista poets were not the first to envision the Caribbean as nations of racial and

cultural mixture. According to Vera Kutzinski in her study, Sugar’s Secrets, the idea

emerged in the 1890s when José Martí popularized the idea of “our half-breed

America” (nuestra América mestiza), and mestizaje became Cuba’s “principal

signifier…of national identity.”166 The Antilles became the mulata islands,

comprised of both European and African, (as well as indigenous) peoples. This idea

of mulatez was an idea espoused by many of the negrista poets and other intellectuals

in their efforts to (re)define the Cuban nation after independence.167 The adoption of

the idea of mestizaje was a complicated discourse that attempted at one time to define

the nation as different from the Spanish metropolis, by claiming Cuba’s unique

“mixed” cultural heritage, and at the same time clinging to “whiteness.” The claim of

being a mestizo culture did not automatically assume the mestizaje of the people, as

many clung to their Hispanic heritage, identifying as white or European. In fact, as

Miriam DeCosta comments, the negrista poetry in Cuba and Puerto Rico often

with the publications of Nicolás Guillén, Emilio Ballagas, Regino Pedroso, Manuel del Cabral and
their followers (9).
165
From El Mundo, November 26, 1932 (San Juan), quoted in Mansour (139). It is important to note
here that Palés Matos’ vision of the Antilles was of a cultural amalgamation rather than a racial one. I
see his stance as different than Guillén’s because Guillén’s vision of cubanidad incorporates racial
admixture as well as gives a vision of racial harmony.
166
Vera M. Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993 (5).
167
For a greater discussion of the movement see Mónica Mansour, La poesía negrista, and Kutzinski,
Sugar’s Secrets. The discussion of names of poesía negra, Black poetry, negrismo and négritude is
extremely complex, and it is not my desire to gloss over the debate. However, to clarify my use of
terms, I am limiting my discussion to what I view are the two predominant terms used to refer to Black

166
essentialized Blackness and African heritage:

In 1928, the publication of “La rumba” by José Tallet and “Bailadora

de Rumba” by Ramón Guirao introduced “negrismo” to Caribbean

literature. The next decade saw a plethora of “negristas” writing about

Black dancers, songs, rites, rituals and customs with resonances of

sentimental romanticism, decadent naturalism, and a touch of

“costumbrismo” at its worst. Poets reproduced exotic scenes, colors,

sounds and rhythms, selecting Spanish words for sounds rather than

meaning and inventing nonsense words (jitanjáfora) for their

onomatopoeic value. Writers familiar with the works of Fernando

Ortiz, the social anthropologist, and Lydia Cabrera, a folklorist,

incorporated African folklore and mythology—the orishas or deities of

Santería and Nañiguismo—into their poetry. This early period can be

characterized as one in which whites mimicked Blacks without even

an elementary understanding of the nature of the Black experience. It

was poetry about people viewed from without, superficially, from the

perspective of the Sartrian “Other.” The “negrista” poets were

essentially European in their point of view, their values and their

esthetic, while they considered everything African to be “savage” and

poetry of the Spanish and French speaking Caribbean, negrismo and négritude, respectively. For a
detailed discussion about nomenclature see Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets.
167
 “primitive.”168

Blackness or mulatez/mestizaje, in fact was objectified, and although the negrista

poets seemingly embraced the African (cultural) element in Cuba on a rhetorical

level, by historicizing Blackness they in fact distinguished themselves in their

Europeanness or whiteness. Blackness is encapsulated, essentialized, and limited to a

concept or idea that leaves little room for a Black reality. Nevertheless, this mulatto

cultural identity was embraced on a rhetorical level, and was even perpetuated by

Black writers, most notably the mulatto poet Nicolás Guillén, who began his literary

career during the negrista movement and went on to become the national poet of

Cuba. Later, Nancy Morejón would use her poetry as a forum to contest the

stereotypical images proffered in the negrista poetry of the 1920s and 1930s, while at

the same time she strove to refigure the image of the mulata and the Black woman

and their position in Cuban society.

Nicolás Guillén: Pre-Revolution (1920-1959)

Long before the Revolution Nicolás Guillén manifested in his poetry the one

race ideology that Martí had espoused in “Mi raza” and that Castro later reiterated in

168
Miriam DeCosta, “Social Lyricism and the Caribbean Poet/Rebel,” CLA Journal 23.2 (1979): 158-
59.
168
his “Cuba es más que blanco, más que negro” speech. As early as 1930 we witness

Guillén’s re-evaluation and acceptance of Afro-Cuban heritage in Cuba’s national

image in his collection of poetry entitled Motivos de son. Shortly following, in 1931,

with his subsequent publication of Sóngoro Cosongo, we see a change in focus from

the simple appreciation of the African element in Cuba to the inclusion of the

common history, genealogy, and contemporary condition of all Cubans, white as well

as gente de color, as seen in the prologue:

Diré finalmente que estos son unos versos mulatos. Participan acaso

de los mismos elementos que entran en la composición étnica de Cuba,

donde todos somos un poco níspero. ¿Duele? No lo creo. En todo

caso, precisa decirlo antes que lo vayamos a olvidar. La inyección

africana en esta tierra es tan profunda, y se cruzan y entrecruzan en

nuestra bien regada hidrografía social tantas corrientes capilares, que

sería trabajo de miniaturista desenredar el jeroglífico.

Opino por tanto que una poesía criolla entre nosotros no lo será

de un modo cabal con olvido del negro. El negro –a mi juicio—aporta

esencias muy firmes a nuestro cóctel. Y las dos razas que en la Isla

salen a flor de agua, como esos puentes hondos que unen en secreto

dos continentes. Por lo tanto, el espíritu de Cuba es mestizo. Y del

espíritu hacia la piel nos vendrá el color definitivo. Algún día se dirá:

<<color cubano>>.
169
 Estos poemas quieren adelantar ese día. (114) 169

Guillén acknowledges the African influence as well as mestizaje in Cuban culture, a

mixture that can perhaps best be described as “transculturation.” Coined by Fernando

Ortiz, transculturation was a term used to contrast the term “acculturation,” which

refers to or describes the cultural impact of one civilization on another in which one

group is assimilated into another, thereby losing its identifiable characteristics.170

Ortiz viewed the term and theory of “acculturation” as inadequate, and instead opted

to use the term transculturation, which contains the sense of a dynamic two-way

interaction in which a transmutation-of-sorts occurs between both groups resulting in

a third.

The ideas of mestizaje and transculturation formed an essential element in

Guillén’s literary and social projects. His project in the pre-Revolution years, was to

recast Cuban national identity, in both his poetry and journalistic prose, rewriting as

well as avoiding the view of Cuban society as racially separated into Black and white

components (as was the United States, a country he criticized highly in pieces such as

“El camino de Harlem”) and to present a culture resulting from the processes of

transculturation. Through his literary endeavors he viewed Cuba as homogenous in

its (cultural) heterogeneity, as witnessed in his collections Motivos de son (1930),

Sóngoro cosongo (1931), and West Indies, Ltd. (1934).

169
Unless otherwise noted, all poems are taken from Nicolás Guillén: Obra Poética 1920-1972.
(Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1973).
170
Fernando Ortiz was a white Cuban ethnologist who studied the African presence in Cuba and the
legacy of the culture and traditions of Afro-Cubans. For a more detailed account of transculturation

170
 The sense of mestizaje or cubanidad is perhaps best expressed in the

collection West Indies, Ltd. In this collection Guillén broadens the scope of his

interest from Cuba to the entire Antilles and includes a critique of the pervasiveness

of imperialism, as personified by the United States’ presence in the Caribbean. In

the poem “El abuelo” (West Indies, Ltd.) we see an example of Guillén’s notion of

cubanidad: 171

Esta mujer angélica de ojos septentrionales,

que vive atenta al ritmo de su sangre europea,
ignora que en lo hondo de ese ritmo golpea
un negro el parche duro de roncos atables.

Bajo la línea escueta de su nariz aguda,

la boca, en fino trazo, traza una raya breve,
y no hay cuervo que manche la geografía de nieve
de su carne, que fulge temblorosa y desnuda.

¡Ah mi señora! Mírate las venas misteriosas:

boga en el agua viva que allá dentro te fluye,
y ve pasando lirios, nelumbios, lotos, rosas;

que ya verás inquieta junto a la fresca orilla

la dulce sombra oscura del abuelo que huye,
el que rizó por siempre tu cabeza amarilla. (149)

“El abuelo” demonstrates Guillén’s project of representing Cuban identity as mestizo,

neither white nor Black, European nor African, but rather a fusion of various African

and European forms and images. The representation in the poem is of a near-white

woman, blond with “northern” eyes who, although endowed with European features,

see Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, Consejo Nacional de Cultura, La
Habana, 1963, p. 99.

171
has African ancestry. She lives “attuned” to her European features, and is admonished

by the poetic voice to “look within” and discover her African grandfather who forever

curled her “yellow head.” Guillén, in fact, denounces the poetic subject’s resistance

to recognizing her African ancestry.

Two points that distinguish Guillén from the negrista poets are the point of

view expressed in his poetry, and his vision of mulatez as not only cultural

amalgamation, but also racial mixture. His voice as an “insider,” as a mulatto, is very

distinct from the voices of many of the negrista poets who speak with the voice of the

“observer,” manipulating their ideas of Blackness in verse, and relegating Afro-

Cubans to the position of “Other.” Using onomatopoeia and so-called primitive

rhythms, the negrista poets commonly depicted a figure of the stereotypical Black,

especially the mulata, a dancing, sensual, mysterious figure. Take for example

“Trópico suelto” by Manuel del Cabral:

A ratos,
machacas rumbas con tus zapatos,
y tu cadera,
que padece una vieja borrachera,
y tu aliento
que a veces quema hasta el fular del viento,
saben a la locura de tu barro mezclado
de mula tropical, de sol quemado.

Mulata que te hicieron de la noche y del día,

en el café con leche
bebo tu carne de fantasía.
Tabaco para hacerlo picadura
con el cuchillo de la dentadura:

171
Unless otherwise noted, I am referring to the collections of poetry in Nicolás Guillén, Obra Poética,
1920-1958, Tomos 1 and 2, ed. Angel Augier, La Habana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1972.
172
 tu talle
que le roba los ojos a la calle.

[…]

Voy a decir que te metiste en mí

como si fueras una calentura.172

“Trópico suelto” is filled with sensual images of the mulata temptress, whose dancing

to “Haitian,” or African rhythms hypnotizes and entices the poetic voice. As can be

seen in “Trópico suelto” the incorporation of Africa in the vision of mulatto islands is

of Africa’s cultural contribution, mostly limited to music and dance. Hence, the focus

on body parts and musical rhythms that predominates throughout the poetry. Guillén,

as a poet of the négritude, offers a much more provocative picture from the inside.173

Although Guillén’s early poetry fell more in line with the negrista poets, with the

linguistic imitation of Afro-Cuban speech and Afro-Cuban rhythms; his poetry

incorporates political and social criticism. As George Irish states,

Guillén saw himself as a missionary with a specific calling to vindicate

the cause of the Negro and mulatto in Cuba. This profound sense of

mission firmly contradicts the accusation that his earliest poetry on the

Negro theme tended to be comical, frivolous and picturesque. Any

such negative comment on Motivos de son based on its picturesque

172
Manuel del Cabral, Antología Clave (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1959) 74-75.
173
For a discussion of Guillén as a poet of negritude, see Josaphat B. Kubayanda, The Poet’s Africa,
and Ian Isidore Smart, Nicolás Guillén: Popular Poet of the Caribbean. Smart gives a particularly
insightful description of the change in Guillén’s poetry from his early, negrista poetry to his evolved
(Black) consciousness (100-107).
173
 scenes, its direct social realism, its use of dialect forms and its

treatment of attitudes and relationships in slum areas, loses sight of the

poignant message of protest, the penetrating insights into the

psychology of poverty and survival and the tragedy of dispossession

which arise out of those early poems of strong racial passion.174

Guillén’s négritude poetry depicts the Black inhabitant of Havana’s slums, using

argot and nonstandard pronunciation, and sketching daily life of the oppressed, the

poor, the hungry, and the color-struck. However, Guillén’s poetry does not simply

depict the life of Havana’s Black population, as there is an underlying, implicit social

criticism in much of his poetry, such as “Sabás,” and “Maracas,” (West Indies, Ltd.).

In fact, what distinguishes Guillén from the negrista poets is the criticism not of the

people who suffer in poverty and from color discrimination, but rather of the

unpleasant reality in which they are forced to live.175 “Sabás” is a poem that captures

the shift in Guillén’s positioning as a Black poet:

Yo vi a Sabás, el negro sin veneno,

pedir su pan de puerta en puerta.
¿Por qué Sabás, la mano abierta?
(Este Sabás es un negro bueno.)

[...]

Coge tu pan, pero no lo pidas;

coge tu luz, coge tu esperanza cierta
como a un caballo por las brindas.

174
J. A. George Irish, “Nicolás Guillén’s Position on Race: A Reappraisal.” Revista/Review
Interamericana 6(3) Fall 1976 (336-37).
175
See also Robert Márquez and David A. McMurray, eds., Man-making Words, (Univ. of
Massachusetts Press, 1972).
174
 Plántate en medio de la puerta,
pero no con la mano abierta,
ni con tu cordura do loco:

[...]

¡Caramba, Sabás, no seas tan loco!

¡Sabás, no seas tan bruto,
ni tan bueno! (140-1)

“Sabás” is a mixture of revolutionary zeal and social criticism. The poem is imbibed

with heavy sarcasm, a “therapeutic and politically conscious humor” (Smart 104).

The poet questions Sabás’ complicity in his own oppression, and exhorts him to

revolutionary action. Guillén calls for Blacks to break out of their roles as “good

Negroes” and act to liberate themselves from oppression and poverty.

Guillén’s use of language and onomatopoeia is decidedly different from that

of the negrista poets, as Richard Jackson points out in The Black Image in Latin

American Literature: “Negrismo was easily accomplished by several good

practitioners or skilled manipulators of language who tried to talk ‘real black talk,’ or

en negro de verdad, and to beat black drums in poetry, using African-sounding words

for rhythmic and musical effect” (41). Guillén attempted to capture Black life in his

poetry, but he also added a political and social critique to the sensuality and rhythmic

nature of the poetry by bringing to the forefront the reality of Black poverty,

oppression and suffering in Cuba.176 In Prosa de Prisa, Guillén’s first collection of

176
As Mansour notes in her evaluation of negrista poetry, the poetry attempted to revalorize the
customs and traditions of Afro-Americans, through descriptions of rhythmic dancing, musicality and
sensual imagery; while also protesting the socioeconomic situation of many Afro-Americans. She
175
prose writings, he comments on the false image of Blacks in Cuba in an article

entitled, “¡Negra, mueve la cintura!”177:

El negro es, no hay que negarlo, ardiente y sensual. Sus bailes

participan, pues de ese carácter…Sin embargo, el negro dista mucho

de ser todo baile, ni éste ha constituido su total influencia en el

desarrollo de nuestra sensibilidad.

No vamos a dejar de sonreír, pero diremos ahora que nos

parece excesivo honor atribuirle al negro, como única calidad de su

espíritu, la calidad coreográfica; verle siempre el alma en los pies.

Claro que eso quisieran sus verdugos, y eso han querido siempre,

porque mientras él da vueltas, ellos lo entretienen y desorientan, y

mejor se aprovechan de su invalidez… sin dejar de bailarle y cantarle

su música. (211)

Guillén criticizes overly essentialized representations of Afro-Cubans, reduced to

dancing, singing, sexualized creatures, and, as in the poem "Sabás,” he exhorts Afro-

Cubans to no longer be complicit in their own oppression. This concern for the

advancement of Afro-Cubans and the call for consciousness and action is why it is

necessary to distinguish Guillén as a poet of négritude versus negrismo.

Although some scholars such as Vera Kutzinsky disagree, my reading of

does point out, however, that the Black theme in the literature was more a protest of the social situation
that Afro-Americans faced, rather than of the racial situation. Few, she states, paid attention to the
sufferings of Blacks throughout the world (137).
177
Originally published in Hoy, 6 December 1941.
176
Guillén’s poetry makes the distinction of his later poetry from the negrista poetry,

which Richard Jackson terms “false black poetry.”178 Guillén falls in line more with

the poets of the négritude movement because of themes expressed in his poetry, not

simply stylistics as some critics would argue.179 Martha Cobb describes the writers

of the négritude, specifically Guillén, Jacques Roumain of Haiti, and Langston

Hughes of the United States, as writers who were “beginning to achieve spiritual

liberation in their quest for identity” (Cobb 1979, 136). She goes on to remark on the

difference in point of view of the Black writers:

Undisturbed by the pejorative outside valuations of black culture,

whose point of departure was white myths, white history and white

heroes and heroines, they wrote from within the hidden reality of black

people – their deepest suffering, their strengths, their aspirations –

accepting the good and the bad of what they saw, heard, felt and

communicating this in their writing…This shift in point of view I

178
See Richard Jackson, The Black Image in Latin American Literature, (Albuquerque: Univ. of New
Mexico Press, 1976) 41.
179
For example, Kutzinski does not even distinguish between négritude and negrismo (Against the
American Grain), nor does Janheinz Jahn (A History of New-African Literature); and Linda Howe
groups Guillén with negrista writers such as Emilio Ballagas. Kutzinski also argues in Sugar’s Secrets
that there is no need to distinguish between the white and black poets (153). However, I think that
Kutzinski does not take into account the distinct agendas of the Black poets. Poesía negra, as
Kutzinski terms it, is a forum for Black poets to re-represent themselves as subjects, as opposed to
objects, and is the space in which they create agency. As Kutzinski states: “Afro-Cubanism was an
attempt at making poetry a stage for nationalist discourse, not by turning it into a platform for political
slogans but by tapping specific cultural institutions with a long history of resilience: The syncretic
forms of Afro-Cuban popular music and dance became the new signifiers of a desire for cultural and
political independence. In the tradition of José Martí, poesía negra/mulata sought to define an
ideological space that all Cubans, regardless of color and caste, could presumably inhabit on equal
terms” (154-5). What Kutzinski fails to note, however, is how Guillén uses poetry not only to define
such an ideological space, but he also uses his poetry to comment specifically on the social conditions

177
 describe here is a major one, resolving psychic dualism for writers,

and one which I have elaborated on in this study…It does not hurt to

point out furthermore that all three writers communicate a joy and an

acceptance of black life – and hence a self-acceptance – that contribute

an important dimension to our understanding of their writing. (136-7)

Cobb aligns the writings of Guillén and his contemporaries to the beginnings

of Black literature that began with Black writers of slave narratives and biographies,

and also with polemical writers such as David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet,

“all of whom represent a steady and outspoken strand in the evolving black literary

tradition” (137). The distinction between the negrista and négritude writers, as

Leslie Wilson’s “El negro en la poesía hispanoamericana” explains, is in point of

view, poetry written about Blacks versus poetry written by Blacks.180 Manuel del

Cabral’s “Trópico suelto” for example, paints an external, not fully authentic portrait

of its subjects; whereas Guillén and his contemporaries:

No longer satisfied with restrictions to traditional forms – sonnets,

odes, the aristocratic alexandrine among others — [they] observed

their people, spoke out of the mouths of the dispossessed, and reached

toward Africa for motifs, imagery, and the rhythms representative of a

black literary tradition whose oral roots, they discovered, were still

present in the stories, songs, sermons and rituals of their race. (Cobb

and political situation of the Afro-Cuban sector of the population, who were by no means on equal
footing at that time.

178
 138)

The key difference that Cobb points out, and on which I make my argument, is the

voice of the “dispossed.” Poetry creates a space for these poets of négritude to

resolve their “psychic dualism,” or multi-consciousness, as I termed it in Chapter

One.

Classifying Guillén as a poet of negrismo does not take into account his

political and cultural project. Guillén does not simply strive to define the island in

new nationalist terms, as did the negrista poets, nor does he depict Afro-Cubans as

primitive. His first portrayal of the African element in Cuba was representative of the

Afro-Cuban people, their contributions to Cuban mestizo culture, and their place in

Cuban society, as well as their social and economic sufferings, as seen in Motivos de

son (1930), and Sóngoro Cosongo (1931). In subsequent collections we see an

expansion in Guillén’s poetic vision, from simple reevaluation and appreciation of the

African element in Cuba, to a greater occupation of the Afro-Antilles, as seen in West

Indies, Ltd. (1934); and later a more American perspective La paloma de vuelo

popular (1958).

Guillén continued to write throughout his career, until 1982, publishing

four collections prior to the Revolution: Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas

(1937), España, Poema en cuatro angustias y una esperanza (1937), El son entero

(1947), and La paloma de vuelo popular (1958); and five collections after the

Revolution: Tengo (1964), El gran zoo (1967), La rueda dentada (1972), El diario

180
See Leslie Wilson, “El negro en la poesía hispanoamericana,” CLA Journal 13.4n (1970): 345.
179
que a diario (1972), and Páginas vueltas (1982).181 Two questions need to be

approached when considering the evolution of Guillén’s poetry. First, how does the

Revolution and ideas of cubanidad influence the artistic and cultural expression of a

poet such as Guillén; and secondly, how does one address these same issues and

concerns in a country that summarily denies the continued practice of discrimination

182
and racism, and also officially “discourages” any conversation to the contrary?

Previous to the Revolution Guillén’s poetry reflected his preoccupation with the

social and political situation of the Afro-Cuban population. After the Revolution,

when restricted on what he could write, Guillén finds a means of approaching the

“unapproachable” discussions of race, racism and Black pride by displacing his

poetry, both temporally and geographically outside of modern day Cuba. By

“traveling back” in time or outside of Cuba, he opens a “safe” forum to question and

critique the notions of social and racial equality in post-Revolution Cuba.

181
In Cantos para soldados and España Guillén increasingly turned to more universal themes and
motifs and abandoned temporarily his exploration of Afro-Cuban life. In España, for example, he
decries the evils of fascism and “poetically calls upon the soldiers of Cortés and Pizarro to return and
fight the evils of the modern era” (Kubayanda 117). Similarly, Cantos para soldados, is an indictment
of militarism. El son entero marks the integration of his earlier stages into a “universalist
apprehension of man’s social dilemma” (Kubayanda 117). His following publication, La paloma de
vuelo popular returns focus directly on social issues of the 1950s. In La paloma de vuelo popular
there is strong criticism of the United States, and an anti-imperialist attitude found in poems such as
“Little Rock” and “Canción puertorriqueña.”
182
Sonia Labrador Rodriguéz also broaches this question in her article, “’El miedo al negro’: el debate
de lo racial en el discurso revolucionario cubano” (113).
180
Displacement in Nicolás Guillén: Post-Revolution Poetry (1959-1982)

Well before the Revolution Guillén’s works can be read as socially

committed poetry. Keith Ellis does a Marxist reading of Guillén’s poetry, reading

poems such as “Sabás,” “Balada de los dos abuelos” and “Sensemayá” as anti-

imperialist, an interpretation that tends to ignore or dismiss the racial factor in

Guillén’s poetry.183 Contrary to Ellis’ and other critics’ contentions, Guillén does not

abandon his discussion of race after the Revolution. Whereas his discussion does

change in focus from Afro-Cuban to the Caribbean and takes on aspects of class-

consciousness, Guillén continues to write about Afro-American cultures, their

influence on and position in the “New World.” Tengo (1964) was Guillén’s first

collection published after the Revolution, and in this collection we see Guillén’s

commitment to the ideas of the Revolution, as seen in the title poem:

Cuando me veo y toco

yo, Juan sin Nada no más ayer,
y hoy Juan con Todo,
y hoy con todo,
vuelvo los ojos, miro,
me veo y toco
y me pregunto cómo ha podido ser.

[...]

Tengo, vamos a ver,

tengo el gusto de ir
yo, campesino, obrero, gente simple,
tengo el gusto de ir
(es un ejemplo)

183
Keith Ellis, Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén, (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1983): 81-86.
181
 a un banco y hablar con el administrador,
no en inglés,
no en señor,
sino decirle compañero como se dice en español.

[...]

Tengo que ya tengo

donde trabajar
y ganar
lo que me tengo que comer.
Tengo, vamos a ver,
tengo lo que tenía que tener. (78-80)

“Tengo” celebrates the success of the Revolution and the breaking down of barriers in

Cuban society, espousing the notion that with the new socialist order there will be an

end to all racial and class discrimination. Guillén believed, at least initially, that

socialism was a means of achieving the true vision of cubanidad in the post-

Revolution society, however he did acknowledge, in both his poetry and prose that

social problems still existed in Cuba: “Al desaparecer la división clasista de la

sociedad, perdió el racismo su más eficiente caldo de cultivo. Es posible que haya

todavía algunos pequeños Lynchs escondidos o enmascarados y algunos negros que

quieran irse…”184

Several critics, including Keith Ellis, Vera Kutzinski, Lorna Williams,

Constance Sparrow de Garcia-Barrio and Joseph Pereira have called attention to

Guillén’s continued discussion of race; however, none has theorized sufficiently the

significance of its continuance. For example, Lorna Williams in Self and Society in

182
Nicolás Guillén notes Guillén’s discussion of North American Blacks, however she

only comments in passing without further theorizing on the significance of such a

discussion in Cuba. Williams does note, however, Guillén’s implicit admission of

continued discrimination in Cuba in the poem “Cualquier tiempo pasado fue peor.”

Nevertheless, she does not investigate the significance of such an admission with

respect to the larger body of Guillén’s prose, which is fairly pro-Revolution, as well

as his poetry. Williams’ omission is particularly curious considering the ambivalence

that it creates in Tengo, a collection of poems that to a large extent celebrates the

Revolution.

“Cualquier tiempo pasado fue peor”

¡Qué de cosas lejanas

aún tan cerca,
pero ya definitiva-
mente muertas!

[…]

El cabaret que nunca se abrió

para la gente de color.

[…]

En los bancos,
solo empleados blancos.
(Había excepciones: alguna vez
el que barría y el ujier.)

[…]

184
Written in 1966 as an article for Granma, “Racismo y Revolución” is found in the collection, Prosa
de Prisa III, (La Habana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1976) p. 304. Joseph Pereira explains that Lynch
was governor of Alabama, a figure that Guillén uses to embody US racism and oppression.
183
 ¿No es cierto que hay muchas cosas
lejanas que aún se ven cerca,
pero que ya están definitiva-
mente muertas? (98-100)

If we read “Cualquier tiempo pasado fue peor” as being suggestive of the

incompleteness of the revolutionary project in establishing racial justice, (“…que aún

se ven cerca”); it gives us a clue to Guillén’s approach to discussing the

incompleteness of the revolutionary project with respect to race.

Guillén’s method of addressing this issue is as well a manner of avoiding

being considered “subversive” for arguing that racial problems “persisted even if in

modified form” (Bethell 119-20). Guillén’s approach to the discussion is to

temporally and spatially displace the discussion of race. Hence, Guillén begins

“Cualquier tiempo” by discussing the distance of far away things (spatial and

temporal displacement), “Qué de cosas lejanas,” still very close “aún tan cerca,” but

finally definitively dead, “pero ya definitivamente muertas!” Guillén continues the

discussion of race by temporally displacing the discussion, referring to “far off times”

before the Revolution when people of color were denied access to social clubs and

events as well as places of professional employment, such as banks, where they

could only work as janitors and ushers. Guillén’s initial exclamation of the spatial

and temporal distance of “far away things” is in the end an interrogation: “¿No es

cierto que hay muchas cosas? [Isn’t it certain that there are a lot of far away things?]/

“lejanas que aún se ven cerca” [that still are seen close],/ “pero que ya están

definitivamente muertas? [but that are already definitively dead?]. Guillén finishes

184
the poem with an ironic question. One answer to the question is found above in the

excerpt published a few years earlier in “Racismo y Revolución” in which Guillén

comments on hidden or masked little “Lynchs” that remain after the Revolution. This

piece is also an example of Guillén’s use of spatial or geographical displacement and

it is indicative of how Guillén employs the strategy. Guillén’s discussion of race is

displaced to the United States, the country the he and many Latin Americans

associate with racism in its most nefarious form. In “Racismo y revolución” Lynch

personifies the racist character of the States. Guillén uses the notion of being a

“Lynch” to suggest that to which Cubans do not want to be equated. To call a Cuban

a “Lynch,” an American, or American-like is to effectively claim that she/he is racist

– in post-Revolution Cuba, an attitude that would be looked upon as anti-Revolution.

This poem also takes on an anti-imperialist dimension.185 Guillén, in line with

revolutionary thought, expresses anti-imperialist sentiments about the U.S.

intervention in Cuban domestic affairs.186 To be a “Lynch” then also means to be an

imperialist, which goes against the struggle for autonomy under the new

185
After the Spanish-American War (1898), the United States occupied Cuba, establishing a military
government first under General John R. Brooke and then Leonard Wood, a physician and colonel in
Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Cubans, however, were not content to be under the rule of the “liberators”
and called for the end of U.S. occupation of the island. In 1902 the U.S. pulled out of Cuba but left in
place the Platt Amendment which severely curtailed the island’s political and economic independence:
“The Amendment limited the authority of the Cuban government to negotiate international treaties and
to borrow funds from abroad, and claimed coaling and naval stations on the island for the United
States. In short, the Platt Amendment converted Cuba into an American protectorate.” From Ramon
Eduardo Ruiz, Cuba: the Making of a Revolution. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1968 (23-24).
186
At the time of the Revolution, U.S. companies and businessmen owned 90 per cent of Cuba’s
mineral wealth, 80 percent of the public utilities, most of the industry and cattle ranches and almost
half of the sugar production. With the American presence Havana became a center for gambling and
prostitution, catering to U.S. businessmen, military personnel and tourists. See Fidel Castro Speeches,
ed. Michael Taber. New York: Pathfinder, 1981 (8-11).
185
revolutionary government.

Guillén’s focus on racism in the United States spans his writing from well

before the Revolution. Take for example, his essay, “El camino de Harlem,” in which

he discusses Cuba’s racial problems by situating his argument against the heinous

racism of the United States.187 In his post-revolutionary prose and poetry, he

continues to refer to the United States to discuss racism, using Lynch as a constant

symbol of imperialism, as well as bigotry and intolerance. In “Frente al Oxford”

(Tengo), for example, he employs Lynch once again as a symbol of virulent racism,

as well as attacks Lyndon B. Johnson, Joseph R. McCarthy and Harry Truman.

Ese es Lynch. Con su látigo que desde el Sur esgrime

marcarme el rostro quiere y uncirme al bajo yugo,
y ver si como al Negro feroz verdugo oprime
feroz me rompe el cuello la mano de un verdugo. (86)

As Joseph Pereira points out, Guillén’s focus on racism in the United States as a

significant aspect of its social system,

—aspecto que atraía una censura moral—significaría que el racismo

dentro de Cuba tendría un clima aún más difícil en qué manifestarse,

mucho menos propagarse, puesto que el poeta ayudaba en deslegitimar

el racismo por esa asociación con el enemigo imperialista ya

identificado como antagónico a los intereses nacionales de Cuba. Así

esta poesía sirve de lucha indirecta contra el racismo residual

187
Found in Prosa de prisa, Tomo I (3-6). Originally published in Diario de la Marina, April 21,
1929.
186
 cubano.188

As Pereira elaborates, Guillén’s constant references to racism outside of Cuba is an

indirect means of attacking residual racism and racist thought in Cuba. In the poem

“¿Qué color?” Guillén criticizes the Soviet poet Yevtushenko’s portrayal of Martin

Luther King following his assassination in 1968: “Su piel era negra, pero con el

alma/ purísima como la nieve blanca…”189 Guillén’s poetic response is a harsh

criticism of this type of racist thought, and he offers in reply a distinct system of

values, proffering a Black aesthetic that legitimizes once again “el color y el concepto

del negro con una militancia reminiscente de escritores de la negritud” (Pereira 42).

Pero podría decirse de otro modo:

Qué alma tan poderosa negra
la del dulcísimo pastor.
Qué alta passion negra
ardía en su ancho corazón.

Qué pensamientos puros negros

su grávido cerebro alimentó.
Qué negro amor,
tan repartido
sin color. (284-85)

Guillén’s response expresses racial pride by inverting commonly used metaphors of

whiteness (representing purity and goodness), and replacing them with images of

blackness (also representing purity and goodness). His return to expressions of racial

pride in this post-Revolution poem brings to the forefront the continuation of earlier,

pre-Revolution modes of rescuing racial pride, by vindicating blackness.

188
Joseph R. Pereira, “Raza en la obra de Nicolás Guillén después de 1959,” Sin Nombre 13.3 (1983),
3.

187
 “¿Qué color” is found in the collection of poetry, La Rueda dentada (1972), a

collection in which Guillén uses both spatial and temporal displacement to allude to

problems within the revolutionary regime’s race policies, as well as to call to Afro-

Cubans to reassess their own conceptions of Blackness. The prologue to the

collection suggests an attempt by Guillén to criticize the Revolution’s failure to deal

with continued racism, and he exhorts the Revolution to work, with all Cubans

together. The prologue/poem is suggestive as well of the regime’s so-called color-

blind policies that “did not share [Black intellectuals] concerns about Cuba’s racial

inequality and blatant racism” (Howe 122). The poem describes a gear wheel with a

broken tooth. If we read the gear wheel as “Revolution,” as does Keith Ellis, we see

that Guillén does not envision the Revolution as being whole. In fact, an important

sector of the population is missing, and hence the broken tooth, which can be read as

lingering racist practices after the Revolution. Because of the broken tooth, the gear

wheel cannot turn, as it is impossible for it to turn without the integrity of all of its

parts. The poem ends with an entreat to start the stalled gear wheel and the desire that

once complete, the gear wheel can continue to turn and will run effectively:

Prólogo
La rueda dentada, con un diente
roto,
si empieza una vuelta se detiene
a poco.

Donde el diente falta (o mejor no falta,

sino que está roto)
la rueda se traba, el diente no encaja,

189
From the epigraph of “¿Qué color?” (284).
188
 la rueda no marcha, no pasa, no avanza,
se detiene a poco.

Ni árboles de fuerza, ni engranajes, bielas,

coronas tal vez, brazos y poleas,
serán suficientes, pues como se sabe
no hay rueda dentada sin dientes que anda,
ni rueda que ande con diente que falle:
si empieza una vuelta se detiene a poco,
bien si el diente falta, o bien si está roto.

[…]

¡Arriba y arriba la Rueda Dentada!

¡Arriba y arriba!
¡Arriba y arriba, de vueltas y siga!
¡Arriba y arriba!
Sin que falte un diente, o esté un diente
roto.
Siempre mucho mucho
nunca poco poco. (281-2)

The indirectness of the poem and its criticism are seen by the poet as most likely

resulting in a sense of frustration to the reader, for the poem “is apparently going

nowhere” and “promises no solution…” (Ellis 174). It does, however, result in

creating a curiosity in the reader about a possible metaphorical level of meaning. La

Rueda dentada contains several poems such as “Ancestros” and “La herencia,” that

allude to the persistent racism in Cuba and return to themes of racial pride; poems

which fill-in that metaphorical gap, representing the broken tooth of the gear wheel.

The poem ends urging-on the gear wheel (Revolution) and desiring reparation of the

broken tooth (lingering racist practices).

In “Ancestros” Guillén comments sarcastically on the system of values of

white Cubans who, “in their intent to legitimize their exploitative control over the
189
social forces, delegitimize slave labor and qualify resistance as bad” (Pereira 36).

Once again, Guillén temporally displaces the discussion of racism, this time to pre-

independence Cuba, only to reveal and criticize the residual ideologies that the

descendants of the slaveholders share with their ancestors about the “benevolence” of

slavery (Pereira 36):

Por lo que dices, Fabio,

un arcángel tu abuelo fue con sus esclavos.
Mi abuelo, en cambio,
fue un Diablo con sus amos.
El tuyo murió de un garrotazo.
Al mío, lo colgaron. (285)

As Pereira points out, the fact that the poem was written in 1969 suggests the

continuation of non-institutional racism that Guillén conceded in his article in 1966,

and signals that, after the initial poetry of celebration and [in order] to project a racial

and revolutionary unity, Guillén is ready to confront those vestiges of mental racism

[residual ideologies] that are maintained in Cuba (Pereira 36).

The article to which Pereira refers is “Racismo y Revolución.” In this essay,

Guillén revisits Article 20 of the Republican Constitution that stated that all Cubans

were equal under the law. As he reminds his reader, this was the law on paper, but

was not enforced in the public sphere, as he shows with numerous examples of

discriminatory practices that persisted before the Revolution. He ends the essay

saying that there are possibly some “Lynchs” (racists) still in Cuba, but that in

revolutionary Cuba institutional racism has been defeated: “pero lo cierto es que en

Cuba revolucionaria negros y blancos marchan juntos, en igualdad de condiciones, y

190
las generaciones próximas hablarán de razas entre nosotros como de un fantasma

lejano y abolido” (304). As he states in his essay and as he alludes in his poetry,

racism still exists in revolutionary Cuba.

“Noche de negros junto a la catedral” is another poem in which Guillén

temporally displaces his discussion of racial pride to the past. What is interesting to

note about this poem is the ambivalence of time. The first stanza presents an image

of costumed Blacks depicting a mood of celebration. At the end of the stanza

Guillén’s ambiguity about the time raises questions about to which historical period

he is actually referring:

Tambor.
Resuena la noche ancestral.
Vestidos de limpio, la risa desnuda,
cien negros (o más, ¿cuántos son?)
bailan a la luz de la Luna
en la vieja plaza de la Catedral.
Siglo XVIII, tal vez. Pero
¿y el cañaveral?

Pasa el caleser negro.

Va con su calesa.
Como el rostro sudado
le brillan, le sudan las botas.
La erecta marquesa (de trapo)
quiere ser una fresca gran flor tropical.
Siglo XIX, quizás. Pero
¿dónde está el mayoral?

No ha venido Aponte.
(Ya es hueso pelado.)

No ha venido O’Donnell.
(Quedóse en palacio.)

No ha venido Plácido.
191
 (Ayer lo mataron.)

Y nada se sabe del negro Santiago,

con la llaga viva, tremenda,
que en nalgas y espalda le abrió el bocabajo.
(La cura fue orine con sal.) (286-87)

The poem is divided into two sections: the present, which documents the

carnivalesque mood of Blacks celebrating Carnival; and the return to the past, and the

harsh, contrasting vision of history. The first two stanzas give a “false interpretation

of history,” depicting Blacks as, “tipo pintoresco/ turístico del mítico nativo alegre”

(Pereira 37). The questions at the end of the first two stanzas recall the reality of the

suffering, repression and dehumanization of Afro-Cubans depicted in the following

stanzas. The references to Aponte and Plácido are presented in contrast to the

dehumanization as symbols of resistence (Pereira 38). The final image of the poem

contrasts sharply with the mythical image of Blacks as happy and celebratory, images

which, according to Pereira, had been embraced by Afro-Cubans themselves in 1966

(38). “Noche de negros” is an attempt to correct the romanticism of the era, and is a

call to Afro-Cubans to rethink their role in Cuban history as well as to look to Afro-

Cuban heroes as a source of strength.

“Ancestros,” “¿Qué color?,” and “Noche de negros” bring the reader back to

question the “broken tooth” in the “gear wheel” of the prologue of the collection. The

Revolution did not erase racism overnight, with a decree by Castro that racism ended

with the defeat of capitalism. It still exists, and if the “gear wheel” is to work

properly, racism must be eliminated and Blacks need to truly become equals in Cuba.

192
Still, criticism of residual racist practices and racism in Cuba is only one topic that

Guillén touches upon with his use of the trope of displacement. He also uses poetry

as a forum to discuss racial pride. In his earlier poetry, most notably in Motivos de

son and Sóngoro cosongo, Guillén called on Afro-Cubans to take pride in their racial

heritage, and also reminded Cubans of the African contribution to Cuban culture and

history. This is perhaps best expressed in “Llegada,” which depicts the arrival of

Africans in Cuba, and “Mujer nueva,” a portrait of the Afro-Cuban woman.190 Both

Motivos de son and Sóngoro cosongo, somewhat unjustifiably considered to be

merely lighthearted folkloric expressions, are, as Kubayanda argues, a “coherent

questioning of some of the monocausal specifications that saw blackness as

predictable and uncomplicated primitiveness” (Kubayanda 25). Kubayanda goes on

to explain, in his analysis of “Mujer nueva,” that “Guillén’s word is inextricably

intertwined with a sense of qualitative self-transformation and with an emotional

dismissal of reductionist reasoning and ordering in relation to race (25). “Mujer

nueva” rewrites the image of the Afro-Cuban woman, not only as a sensual creature,

but also as strong, elegant, regal, “como una diosa recién llegada” (120).

After the Revolution, Guillén continued to re-imagine Blacks in Cuban social

and cultural history. The temporal displacement of his discussion can be read as a

method of subverting cultural officials who might otherwise question his compliance

with official Cuban revolutionary politics. His post-revolutionary poetry differs in

tone from his earlier poetry. As a cultural icon, one who sets the example for others

190
Both poems are from Sóngoro Cosongo.
193
to follow, Guillén has to carefully balance his expression of Black themes in his

poetry while not calling in to question his allegiance to the Revolution. He does this

through his pro-Revolution stance in his poems, in which he praises the Revolution

and the benefits it has brought to Cuba, and especially to Afro-Cubans. Still, he

manages to touch on Black issues by situating his discussion of race in a pre-/post-

Revolution dynamic vis-à-vis the trope of displacement. In Tengo he revisits the

history of Africans in Cuba, retracing this history from the arrival of Africans in Cuba

to the triumph of the Revolution in “Vine en un barco negrero.”

Vine en un barco negrero.

Me trajeron.
Caña y látigo el ingenio.
Sol de hierro.
Sudor como caramelo.
Pie en el cepo.

Aponte me habló sonriendo.

Dije: --Quiero.
¡Oh muerte! Después silencio.
Sombra luego.
¡Qué largo sueño violento!
Duro sueño.
La Yagruma
de nieve y esmeralda
bajo la luna.

O’Donnell. Su puño seco.

[...]

Pasó a caballo Maceo.

[...]

¡Oh Cuba! Mi voz entrego.

En ti creo.
194
 Mía la tierra que beso.
Mío cielo.

Libre estoy, vine de lejos.

Soy un negro.

La Yagruma
de nieve y esmeralda
bajo la luna. (106-8)

Guillén traces the line of struggle by Blacks for a dignified existence in Cuba. He

begins with the middle passage and slavery, depicting the cruelties suffered by Blacks

under the slave master’s whip. He goes on to trace Blacks in Cuba’s history, from

Aponte’s leading of the 1812 “Conspiracy” to overthrow slavery and colonial rule,

through Maceo’s leadership in the fight for independence from Spain, and on through

the death of Menéndez and the triumph of the Revolution. His voyage back through

history is yet another attempt of post-Revolution writers, artists and intellectuals to

recall the heritage of Blacks in Cuba.191 He is careful to position himself within the

revolutionary vision in the final three stanzas, “Mía la tierra que beso…” thereby

averting criticism and censorship, while at the same time once again reaffirming his

“Africanity” and also his cubanidad:192 “Libre estoy, vine de lejos./ Soy un negro./

La Yagruma/ de nieve y esmeralda/ bajo la luna.” The Yagruma tree, with its two-

toned leaves, form an enduring Cuban symbol throughout the poem, linking the past

191
As discussed in Sonia Labrador Rodriguez’s class, “Blacks and National Discourse,” fall 1994.
192
Lorna Williams’ Self and Society in the Poetry of Nicolás Guillén (1982) contains an important
chapter in which she investigates the idea of Africanity in Guillén’s poetry. Her study parallels Ellis’
in part due to her endeavor to interpret blackness from an ideological and not cultural or racial
perspective. Another study by Josaphat B. Kubayanda, entitled The Poet’s Africa attempts to critique

195
and the present, and also representing the notions of cubanidad and mestizaje.

Guillén uses the trope of displacement to express racial pride as well as to

critique race relations in Cuba after the Revolution. Nevertheless, he is mindful of

the regime’s stance on questions of race. Guillén’s position is particularly precarious

because of his appointment as the national poet of Cuba and president of UNEAC

(Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos). In an interview with Keith Ellis,

Guillén addresses his positioning as a poet:

I believe that négritude is a phenomenon which is produced in

countries where there is a black population exploited by a white

colonial sector. The blacks find it necessary to strive to expose their

cultural values: their music, their sculpture, painting, and so on. In

countries where a revolution has taken place, as in Cuba, the problem

of négritude does not make sense, because it would be a kind of

racism, a dispersing element rather than an agglutinating one. If I had

continued after the Revolution with a black line of writing, I would be

isolated. And more so when I personally believe that the aim of the

struggle is not to separate whites from blacks but to unite them. And

that struggle cannot be racist but revolutionary in order to abolish the

division of society into classes, since this very division is the source of

racism.

these earlier criticisms of Guillén’s work [Ellis, Kutzinski and Williams, amongst others], and argues
that any serious interpretation of Guillén’s poetry has to take both the social and racial contexts.
196
 In Cuba itself, before the Revolution, an emphasis on blackness

was explainable because the artistic, political, cultural, indeed the

human, values of the black man had to be stressed in the face of

discrimination or slavery; and one had to give emphasis to this element

within the national culture. It was one of the manifestations of the

class struggle. But when a revolution erases that struggle and gives

power to the working class without any regard for skin colour, the

concept of racial superiority does not exist any more.

There are moments – historical moments – when négritude is

linked to movements of national liberation; but it is impossible to

maintain négritude as a primary attitude because then it would be

converted into another form of racism. (Ellis 227)

Guillén acknowledges that discussions of race were necessary before the Revolution,

and is careful in how he locates himself within the Revolution.193 As the national

poet of Cuba, he understands the precariousness of his position and the obligation to

work within, and never against the Revolution. He must be extremely careful and

mindful of how he delves into issues such as race because it is expected that he, as a

national figure and poet of the country, will remind his readers and other cultural

workers of the new government’s stance on Cuba as a “raceless” society.

As Guillén states in his interview with Ellis, “In countries where a revolution

197
has taken place, as in Cuba, the problem of négritude does not make sense, because it

would be a kind of racism, a dispersing element rather than an agglutinating one. If I

had continued after the Revolution with a black line of writing, I would be isolated”

(my stress) (Ellis 227). The Revolution does not allow the continued discussion of

race because racism was part of the capitalist system; the Revolution brought an end

to capitalism, and hence to racism. To continue to discuss race, racism and

discrimination would be to invite reprisal by the government. “Isolation” might take

several forms, whether exile, imprisonment, censorship or ostracism, and the loss of

his position as cultural icon and president of UNEAC. Nevertheless, although

Guillén must officially distance himself from the négritude movement, he does not

desist from addressing Black themes in his poetry. As Kubayanda explains in The

Poet’s Africa, there has been a tendency in the critical discourse on Cuban literature

of the post-1959 era in Cuba “to ignore, avoid, or totally reject literary and cultural

Africanity” (119). I agree with Kubayanda’s conclusion that, “the Revolution has not

succeeded in eradicating the tradition of Black expression that has manifested itself in

Cuba since the late 1920’s…the black tradition in Cuba, as elsewhere in the African

diaspora, is characterized by its resilience and by its capacity to perpetuate itself

under all conditions” (119). As I propose, the tropes of temporal and spatial

displacement offer Guillén an important tool in his endeavors to revisit questions of

race, racism, and Blackness in post-Revolution Cuba, offering him a method to

193
It should be noted that Guillén was a member of the communist party since 1937 and even served as
deputy to the National Assembly and member of the Central Committee of the Communist party of

198
position himself within the Revolution while continuing his discussion of race.

Although Guillén actively supported the new regime and publicly

acknowledged the end of racism and discrimination that the Revolution supposedly

brought about, and whereas his discussion does change in focus from Afro-Cubans to

the Caribbean and takes on aspects of class-consciousness, Guillén never ceases

discussing Afro-American cultures, their influence on the “New World” and the

position of Afro-Americans in the “New World.” After the Revolution race remained

an important issue, despite the lack of a forum to discuss it in Cuba, and Guillén was

not alone in his desire to reopen the topic. Like Guillén, Nancy Morejón, a post-

Revolution poet, displaces her discussion of race temporally to the past as well as

geographically outside of Cuba to revise revolutionary ideology of racial and social

equality.

NANCY MOREJÓN

Nancy Morejón is Cuba’s most famous female poetic voice, and like her

predecessor, Guillén, she questions and subtly attacks the idea of racial equality in her

poetry. Looking at her poetry written from 1979 onward, we see a rebuttal to the

earlier negrista poetry of her predecessors who envisioned Cuba as a mulatto nation,

a nation where race is deemed to be a non-issue. The ideology of racial equality,

widely espoused and encouraged by the Revolution and Castro’s government, makes

Cuba. See The Daily Daily. Trans. Vera M. Kutzinski. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1989 (v).
199
the discussion of some topics, such as race and homosexuality, problematic. Nancy

Morejón, however, finds a means to approach the issues of racism, express racial

pride and develop a “Black” identity in her poetry without calling into question her

allegiance with the Revolution and the ideology of cubanidad. By displacing her

discussion to the past, most specifically to the era of slavery, Morejón responds to the

poets of the negrista movement, rewriting the role of Afro-Cuban women in Cuban

history from the sixteenth through the twentieth century. Using various tropes of

displacement, she redirects her discussion to the past (temporal displacement), as well

as outside of Cuba (spatial or geographic displacement), thereby subverting the

systems of censorship and finding a “safe space” to openly discuss what is considered

by some to be a “taboo” topic, a topic which led to a twelve year imposed silence for

Morejón.

Morejón began to write and publish poetry at an early age, with her first

collection of poems, Mutismos, published in 1962, a collection of poetry written

between the ages of nine and fifteen.194 Her first collection, along with the following

collection, Amor, ciudad atribuida (1964), correspond to the period immediately

following the Revolution in which intellectuals and artists still maintained relative

freedom in their cultural productions (Howe 237). As early as 1961195 there began to

194
Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Introduction, Singular Like a Bird. Washington: Howard UP, 1999: (3)
195
1961 marks the year that Castro shifted his allegiance from the 26th of July Movement to the PSP,
the Cuban Communist Party. Subsequently, on the artistic level, there arose a power struggle between
Lunes de Revolución, the official newspaper of the 26th of July Movement, and the National Council
of Culture and the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Artes e Industrias Cinematográficos) whose leaders
were members of the Communist Party. Lunes was forced to close in June of 1961, with Castro’s
proclamation in his famous “Words to the Intellectuals,” “Within the Revolution, everything; against
200
emerge a polemic, in terms of cultural production, over aesthetics, and hence began

the limitations on the freedom of artistic expression in Cuba.196 Cultural officials of

Castro’s government described literature and art they disapproved of as anti-

Revolution, bourgeois and obsolete. Strictly hermetic poetry was judged bourgeois,

and in 1965, El Puente, an independent publishing house and literary group of which

Morejón was a member, was criticized and punished for writing hermetic poetry, and

was eventually shut down (Howe 97).197 In Cuba it became apparent that the writers

and artists, or “cultural workers,” would contribute to the new socialist state. In fact,

it became necessary to produce cultural works within the frame of revolutionary

thought, or suffer censorship or even possible imprisonment or exile.198

Morejón’s first two collections of poetry belong to the Lunes period of

cultural pluralism and changing events. Mutismos, as described by Miriam DeCosta-

Willis, is replete with abstractions (time and space, light and shadow), and indirectly

and tangentially treats social themes such as race, poverty, and revolution (2-3) .199

At the end of Mutismos Morejón begins to develop the theme of the city, which is

the Revolution, nothing…” These words pronounced a policy by which all works would be judged,
and literary critics of the period pressured writers to glorify the Revolution in their works (Luis 84).
196
For more information on the limitations of artistic freedom, see Seymour Menton’s Prose Fiction of
the Cuban Revolution. Austin: UT Press, 1975.
197
Morejón’s first two books, Mutismos (1962) and Amor ciudad atribuida (1964) were published by
Ediciones El Puente, a private publishing house which operated from 1960 to 1965 and gave support
and publicity to young writers. See William Luis “Race, Poetry, and Revolution in the Works of
Nancy Morejón” (83).
198
Linda Howe and Seymour Menton (Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution) both discuss the
punishment, ostracism, and even exile of artists, writers and intellectuals whose work was considered
to be outside of the Revolution’s framework of acceptable cultural production.
199
William Luis differs with DeCosta-Willis on the question of Revolution “There is no mention of the
revolution, though there are references to race, a sensitive and problematic issue for writers who dared
to test the boundaries of literary expression (84-5).
201
further developed in Amor ciudad atruibuida (Luis 86). The overall tone of the

second collection differs from the first, leaving behind the solitude, pessimism and

despair expressed in Mutismos, and celebrating in Amor a “life full of love and

excitement” (Luis 86). The theme of race, according to Luis, “has been silenced in

this collection and is only mentioned in passing as the poet refers to her ‘black aunt’”

(87). The year after the publication of Amor, El Puente publishing house fell out of

grace with the government and its members were accused of being elitists, anti-

socials, and homosexuals, and many were sent to rehabilitation camps known as

UMAP (Unidad Militar de Ayuda a la Producción) (Luis 87). As William Luis

explains:

As the role of culture and the perception of what authors should write

about changed, action was taken against those who did not conform to

a set of prescribed expectations. The closing of El Puente, along with

other events confirmed that it was not enough for writers to support the

revolution, Castro’s revolution, they had to glorify it in their works.

(87)

As I stated before, much of the criticism surrounding this group had to do with

stylistics and thematics, the expression of the individual taking precedence over the

collective.

In Morejón’s later poetry, such as Richard trajo su flauta (1967), we begin to

see a shift in styles, a shift from strictly hermetic stylistics to a more conversational

poetics, following the favored forms of the Revolution’s cultural officials (Howe
202
245).200 Artists and writers by the late 1960s began to realize that since cultural

officials had tightened the reins on cultural production, they would have to produce

and publish works that “glorif[ied] the Revolution” (Luis 86). Although Morejón

had touched on racial themes in her earlier poetry, in Richard she develops a much

more complex politically committed poetry, a poetry that would be consider

revolutionary. At the same time she does not abandon the racial concerns expressed

in her earlier poetry. In Richard the poet shares the lives of her family members,

using her relatives as a means of exploring the theme of race. There is a subtle yet

persistent racial awareness and pride in this collection, expressed in terms of the

poet’s family and also in the rich Afro-Cuban religious symbolism that abounds in

some of her poems. The title poem, for example, “celebrates the joy of Africanity”

(Martin-Ogunsola 230). The poem is steeped in Black culture: Grandfather Egue’s

name; stories about Black heroes such as Juan Gualberto Gómez; popular music like

sones and rumbas; and lighting a candle to Eleggua, the Yoruba deity of the

crossroads, revisited in another poem, “Los ojos de Eleggua.” Morejón dedicates an

entire poem to the deity Eleggua, the god of the road and the trickster figure in

African diasporic literatures:

Los ojos de Eleggua

esta noche
junto a las puertas del caserón rojizo
he vuelto a ver los ojos del guerrero
eleggua

200
Take for example the rewritten poem, “Amor, ciudad atribuida”, this version being dedicated “al
lector, compañero,” and in which she makes reference to the Revolution: “aquí diré las olas de la costa
y la Revolución” (Richard 26).
203
 la lengua
roja de sangre como el corazón de los hierros
los pies dorados desiguales
la tez de fuego el pecho encabritado y sonriente

[…]

ya no sabrá de Olofi si ha perdido el camino

ya no sabrá de los rituales
ni de los animales en su honor
ni de la lanza mágica
ni de los silbidos en la noche

si los ojos de eleggua regresaran

volverían a atravesar el río pujante
donde los dioses se alejaban donde existían los peces

quién sabrá entonces del cantar de los pájaros

el gran eleggua ata mis manos
y las abre y ya huye
y bajo la yagruma está el secreto
las cabezas el sol y lo que silba
como único poder del oscuro camino.201

As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. points out, the trickster Ecu-Elegbara, the guardian of the

crossroads, is a topos in Black vernacular traditions throughout the “New World.”

The trickster figures are fundamental terms of mediation, as Gates explains: “they are

mediators, and their mediation are tricks,” and hence the term trickster (Gates 6) 202:

[Esu-Elegbara is] master of style and of stylus, the phallic god of

feneraltion and fecundity, master of that elusive, mystical barrier that

separates the divine world. [He connects] truth with understanding, the

201
Nancy Morejón, Richard trajo su flauta y otros poemas, (Madrid: Visor, 1999),18-19.
202
The trickster is a topos that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. traces back to Fon and Yoruba cultures of Benin
and Nigeria in his study, The Signifying Monkey. Esu-Elegbara (in Cuba Echu-Elegua) is the “divine
trickster figure” of Yoruba mythology (5).
204
 sacred with the profane, text with interpretation, the word (as a form of

the verb to be) that links a subject with its predicate. He connects the

grammar of divination with its rhetorical structures. (Gates 6)

Miriam DeCosta-Willis points out that in Morejón’s poetry, “Eleggua is the trickster

figure who manifests the ‘occult and enigmatic power’ of the writer, the power to

unify opposites, to resolve paradoxes, to mediate distances” (DeCosta 287). In “Los

ojos de Eleggua” Eleggua is a warrior god who represents the unification of two

diametrically opposed forces, one constructive (the white coconut tree); and the other

destructive (imagized in stone). In this poem, Morejón uses linguistic forms, (the

future tense and the imperfect subjunctive), to broach the possibility of the loss of the

mythological African world –its gods, rituals, totems, and magic swords, “ya no sabrá

de Olofi.” Eleggua symbolizes, in Morejón’s poetry, the “creative force that infuses

all art,” as well as her African past (DeCosta 289). Richard trajo su flauta, although

politically committed poetry, it was filled with Black images, religious symbolism

and subtle critique of the continued economic and racial sufferings of Blacks. Her

focus on Black themes and images and her spotlighting of the ongoing plight of

Blacks called the attention of cultural officials. Morejón was at this point censored

and unable to publish her poetry during a twelve year span.203

In response to the imposed silence Morejón began to make aesthetic and

thematic changes to her poetry, resulting in a less hermetical style and the

205
incorporation of more political themes. When Morejón began to publish poetry again

in 1979 with her collection, Parajes de una época, we see her commitment to

revolutionary poetry. Her poetry in this collection, as well as subsequent

publications, is more replete with nostalgic references to Revolution icons and

remembers the military struggle against Batista (Howe 251). For the most part,

Morejón steers away from her earlier “Black” poetry, developing her “revolutionary”

voice. However, there is one poem in Parajes that could be termed a “racial poem.”

In “Mujer negra” Morejón takes her reader to the past and the role of the Black

woman in the forging of the Cuban nation.204 “Mujer negra” is Morejón’s historical

revision of Cuban history in which she rewrites the active role of the Afro-Cuban

woman in the forging of the nation and as a guerrilla fighter in the Revolution and

thereby redefining and reaffirming her status as an Afro-Cuban woman. Although

she returns to Black themes in her new poetry, Morejón had to develop strategies to

avoid further censorship. One strategy is to temporally displace her poetry to pre-

Revolution Cuba. In the case of “Mujer negra,” she portrays the Black woman as an

active participant and supporter of the Revolution, thereby leaving no question as to

her allegiance to the Revolution. By displacing her discussions of race and racial

pride to the past she avoids the appearance of directly questioning or criticizing the

revolutionary government, and is able to ward off censorship. After Parajes she

203
She did find other forms of production. It was during this period of silence, 1967-1979, that she
wrote literary criticism, such as Recopilación de textos sobre Nicolás Guillén (1974). She also
published sociological study with Carmen Gonce, entitled Lengua de pájaro (1971).

206
continues to re-examine Black themes, always looking to Cuba’s past or outside of

Cuba as an arena for her discussion.

In Octubre imprescindible (1982) Morejón also revisits Black themes,

touching on slavery and Afro-Cuban religions, and at the same time dedicating many

of her poems to Cuban nationalism. The collection is divided into four parts, the first

and second sections are characterized by poems of social and political awareness; the

third contains poems about the sufferings of Blacks and returns to racial themes; and

the fourth contains a variety of topics, combining to some degree many of the

political, racial, and Afro-religious images of the first three sections (Luis 94).

Several of the poems make reference to Guillén’s négritude poetry, such as

“Hablando con una culebra,” an answer to “Sensemayá” and “Guijes,” which recalls

Guillén’s “Balada del Guije.” The poem “Amo a mi amo” is, like “Mujer negra,”

another temporally displaced discussion of the Afro-Cuban woman, one of several

poems in Octubre imprescindible in which Morejón “conjures up a past, as well as a

present, religious phenomenological world” (Howe 252).

After her twelve years of imposed silence, Nancy Morejón is careful in her

treatment of Black identity and racial politics. By using the trope of displacement

and positioning her discussion to the era of slavery and to the pre-Revolution negrista

poets, she is able to open a safe arena where she is able to discuss issues of race and

racism in post-Revolution Cuba without calling into question her allegiance with

204
“Mujer negra” was originally published in 1975 in Casa de las Américas, the only poem she was
able to publish during her twelve-year period of silence.
207
revolutionary politics.

Rewriting the Female Subject: “Amo a mi amo” and “Mujer negra”

One manner in which Morejón is able to broach the topics of race, sexual

inequality and repression can be seen in her refiguring of the Afro-Cuban woman,

most specifically in her return to and contestations of the earlier images of the Afro-

Cuban woman proffered by late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature.

Although she was writing in the 1970s and 1980s, she uses her poetry as a means of

looking back and addressing lingering myths and images of Afro-Cuban women,

employing the trope of displacement to return to pre-Revolution Cuba to engage

highly sexualized and reductionist representations of mulata and Black women.

Morejón revisits the images of the Afro-Cuban woman constructed in anti-slavery

literature such as Cecilia Valdés, and by the negrista poets, images that reduced the

Afro-Cuban woman to a sexual icon.

Take for example, the negrista poetry of the 1920s and 1930s Spanish

speaking Caribbean, which abounds with images of the Black woman, and most

especially the mulata; an image that is very often sexualized and exoticized. We see

ample images of swinging hips, dancing body parts and exotic beauty. Images of the

Black woman and the mulata are of "la pulposa, la sabrosa, la rumbosa y majadera"

(Arozarena, "Caridá"); and images of her breasts and hips abound throughout the

poetry. The mulata is the femme fatale, the temptress who is the cause of man's fall.
208
She is the balance of barbarity and civilization, a mixture of Black and white,

a combination of two races and cultures. For some, she is symbolically represented

as the mother of the Antilles, symbolic of the mixing of the races (mestizaje) and

cultures, and the creation of a new nation, and this image was embraced widely in the

nationalistic poetry and rhetoric of the nation-building era in Cuba as well as Puerto

Rico.205 The mulata came to symbolize the new nation, independent of Spanish

control and US domination, in a poetry and literature that sought to define national

character after independence.206

Morejón presents us with a very different vision of the mulata, contesting the

ideas and images put forth in nineteenth century Cuban literature and negrista poetry.

In the poems “Amo a mi amo” and “Mujer negra” she displaces her subject and topic

to the era of slavery in order to reconstruct the image of the Afro-Cuban woman. In

“Amo a mi amo” Morejón tells the story of a slave girl in a love-hate relationship

205
See, for example Kutzinsky’s analysis of negrista poetry, where she states that “Afro-Cubanism
[poesía negra] was an attempt at making poetry a stage for nationalist discourse, not by turning it into
a platform for political slogans but by tapping specific cultural institutions with a long history of
resilience: the sincretic forms of Afro-Cuban popular music and dance became the new signifiers of a
desire for cultural and political independence. In the tradition of José Martí, poesía negra/mulata
sought to define an ideological space that all Cubans, regardless of color and caste, could presumably
inhabit on equal terms. (154-55)
206
See for example Mónica Mansour’s examination of negrista poetry, and her analysis of Palés
Matos’ poetry, as she explains: “Luis Palés Matos es quien más desarrolla, en su poesía, la idea del
“panantillanismo”. Las islas, todas, son producto de una mezcla de elementos africanos y españoles,
que ahora se han fundido en una unidad indivisible. De esta manera, todas son mulatas y constituyen
una gran familia, aunque cada una tenga sus peculiaridades. (Mansour 239-40) As stated earlier, the
negrista poets, primarily white males, incorporated the broken language of Afro-Cubans, using Black
language (oftentimes invented words) and [Afro-Cuban] musical beats to construct their poetry. The
images, the rhythm, and the language of the poems were a new manipulation of old myths and
stereotypes of the Black past. The Afro-Cuban, as Richard Jackson explains, was looked upon as “a
curious, exotic, and sensual subject,” and was reduced to racist clichés as one-dimensional caricatures
that perpetuated images of the Black as a primitive, mindless, sexual animal. The Black woman (and

209
with her master. This poem rewrites and contests the stereotypes and images of the

Afro-Cuban woman and presents the reader with a very distinct image than that

propagated in negrista poetry. This is not the overly sexualized, dancing, frolicking

temptress object found in negrista poetry, but a female subject who contemplates

murder in response to her continual victimization by her master and the system of

slavery. Morejón successfully revamps the image of the Afro-Cuban woman by

appropriating the subject voice, no longer willing to have the Black woman remain

the object (objectified sexual image), and by rewriting her in her historical moment.

By taking on the subject voice, Morejón retells the seduction myth of the Black

female, that of the seductress who tempts men and leads them to their downfall. We

see instead the subjugation, domination and abuse of the slave woman by her white

master:

Amo sus manos

que me depositaron sobre un lecho de hierbas:
Mi amo muerde y subyuga. (94)

In the end, she is not the happy, dancing, sexualized figure portrayed in negrista

poetry, but one who is left with frustration, bitterness, and a desire to kill her lover

and tormentor.

Amo a mi amo, pero todas las noches,

cuando atravieso la vereda florida hacia el
cañaveral donde a hurtadillas hemos hecho el
amor,
me veo cuchillo en mano, desollándolo como a una res sin
culpa. (95)

the mulata) especially became a distorted, sexual figure, “not too far removed from the jungle”
(Jackson 1976, 43).
210
Revisiting the subject of female subjugation and abuse in the era of slavery contests

lingering myths of Black female sexuality as well as brings to the forefront current

womanist discourse of female repression in Cuban society.

Alice Walker wrote: “How refreshing and almost unheard of to read the

poems of a Black woman who is at peace with her country. Nancy Morejón’s

beautiful and passionate poems tell us what it feels like to live as part of a revolution

that is, for her and its people, a success.”207 Richard Jackson agrees with Alice

Walker in her perception of Morejón’s poetry as an expression of the “strength,

independence, and freedom that she feels” (Jackson 1999, 108-9); to which Mariela

Gutiérrez adds, “the female is invariably self-confident, fulfilled in her status as a

woman, even in the face of adversity.”208 Nevertheless, I believe it is important to

reanalyze Morejón’s positioning in poems such as “Mujer negra” and “Amo a mi

amo.” By interpreting Morejón’s use of temporal displacement in these poems as a

method of initiating a discourse on discrimination, sexism, and abuse, while at the

same time skirting censorship, the poems can be read as contestations to the current

myths of sexual and racial equality in Cuba.

Morejón appropriates Walker’s term of womanism, with certain reservations,

207
Quoted in Richard Jackson, “Nancy Morejón, the ‘New Woman’ in Cuba, and the First Generation
of Black Writers of the Revolution” Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejón (Washington:
Howard U P, 1999): 109.
208
Mariela A. Gutiérrez, “Nancy Morejón’s Avenging Resistance in ‘Black Woman’ and ‘I Love My
Master’: Examples of a Black Slave Woman’s Path to Freedom,” (211).
211
not divorcing issues of sex and gender from race:209

Walker criticizes the universalizing power of the sex-gender system

which was very much a part of the ethnocentric [Eurocentric] and

imperializing tendencies of European and Euro-American

feminisms… Morejón’s choice of the womanist theory is not only

linked to how she positions herself as a Black woman writer in

revolutionary Cuba; it is also a response to the government’s

maneuvers to restrain Black cultural and political expression after

1959. (Howe 266-7)

Morejón’s historical revisionism of the Black woman in Cuba is an indication of her

position being other than “at peace with her country.” Her revisionism and womanist

theoretical positioning bring to light a version of Cuban history previously

suppressed, provide critical sites to speculate on the situation of the Afro-Cuban

woman in post-revolutionary society, as well as call attention to the complex

circumstances of Afro-Cubans in revolutionary Cuba.210

Reconfiguring the myth of the mulata as the mother figure, the embodiment of

the mixed races and cultures of the Antilles, is another task that Morejón undertakes

209
Walker explains womanism: 1. From womanish….A black feminist or feminist of color… Usually
referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in
greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one….2. A woman who loves other women, sexually
and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility… and
women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to
survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically for
health. Traditionally a universalist (Alice Walker. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. (San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983): xi.
210
Linda S. Howe, “Nancy Morejón’s Womanism” (166).
212
in “Amo a mi amo.” Cecilia Valdés introduced the conception of the mulata as the

mother of Cuban races and culture in the figure of María de Regla (Luis 1999, 93).

Morejón’s portrayal of the slave woman breaks with this maternal image. In “Amo a

mi amo” the image of the slave woman is not of a fertile, life giving force, but of a

sterile woman, unable to give nourishment: “Maldigo/…estos senos de piedra que

no pueden siquiera amamantarlo” (95). Contrary to the mother image, the slave

woman remains a foreigner in her master’s land -- his religion and his language

remain foreign to her.

...Mi lengua para él ya no es la suya.

[...]

Oyendo hablar a los viejos guardieros, supe

que mi amor
da latigazos en las calderas del ingenio,
como si fueran un infierno, el de aquel Señor
Dios
de quien me hablaba sin cesar.

[...]

esta lengua abigarradamente hostil que no mastico. (94-5)

“Amo a mi amo” breaks with previous notions and constructions of the Afro-Cuban

female figure. Gone are images of soft, erotic, dancing women; in their place

Morejón depicts the Afro-Cuban woman as strong and rebellious; these are the

women who help build nations and fight wars. Morejón, however, does not

completely reject the conception of the Afro-Cuban woman as the mother figure;

rather she rewrites this persona as an active participant (as opposed to a passive and

213
subjugated woman) in the birth and building of the nation, as seen in “Mujer negra.”

“Mujer negra” brings together Morejón’s racial themes seen in earlier works

and her reconceptualization of the Afro-Cuban woman; as well as expresses her

commitment to the Revolution. The poem recounts the history of the Afro-Cuban

woman, from the Middle Passage and the rape and oppression she suffered under

slavery; to her “rebirth” in her new home, and her participation in the forging of the

new nation; to her present situation as an Afro-Cuban woman of the Revolution. The

poem begins with a brief remembrance of the Middle Passage, the journey from

Africa to the Americas, and of the subject’s African heritage and identity, an identity

soon to be lost.

Todavía huelo la espuma del mar que me

hicieron atravesar.

[…]

Acaso no he olvidado ni mi costa perdida,

ni mi lengua ancestral.
Me dejaron aquí y aquí he vivido. (46)

The poetic voice speaks of the lost history, the lost memory of the horrific journey,

“La noche, no puedo recordarla./ Ni el mismo océano podría recordarla”(46). The

Afro-Cuban woman is not native to the island, but she quickly came to consider it

home, her own heritage and history lost to her and she is in fact “reborn” an (Afro-)

Cuban. Stolen from the Africans were not only their freedom and identity, but also

their history, a history that Morejón resuscitates for her audience. With the brief

treatment of the Middle Passage, which represents the stolen history and identity that

214
as an Afro-Cuban woman the poetic voice cannot recall in the present, she begins to

tell her story, the story of the Africans in Cuba, which began with the arrival of the

slave ship to the island: “Pero no olvido al primer alcatraz que divisé/ Altas, las

nubes, como inocentes testigos presénciales” (46). The poetic voice begins to rewrite

history, telling it from a different point of view and a distinct memory, and not

Eurocentric, as suggested in the earlier quote by Martin-Ogunsola. History begins for

her with her arrival in Cuba:

En esta misma tierra toqué la sangre

húmeda
y los huesos podridos de muchos otros,
traídos a ella, o no, igual que yo.
Ya nunca más imaginé el camino a Guinea.
¿Era a Guinea? ¿A Benín? ¿Era a
Madagascar? ¿O a Cabo Verde? (47)

As a slave she did not forget Africa or her native tongue, but through the centuries

Cuba became her new home, and Spanish her new language, and she was in fact

“reborn” a Cuban. Her new identity as a Cuban, due to the role she played in the

development of the nation, does not preclude her from remembering her African

heritage, “A cuánta epopeya mandinga intenté recurrir” (46). She is the fusion of

African and Hispanic cultures that form a “transculturative reality,” and her offspring

is the embodiment of cubanidad (Howe 1995, 276).

Su Merced me compró en una plaza.

Bordé la casaca de Su Merced y un hijo
macho le parí.
Mi hijo no tuvo nombre.
Y Su Merced murió a manos de un
impecable lord inglés. (46)

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Proper names are the symbols of identity, and in this stanza they are noticeably

absent. Not only is the child deprived of a name, but the poetic voice also remains

nameless. There is a sense of helplessness that threads the events of this stanza from

one line to the next and unifies its actors: the African woman who has been stripped

of her personhood and is powerless against the sexual abuse of her master; the woman

who gives birth to a child who can claim neither his father’s name nor his wealth, a

finally “a master who suffers divine justice in death, leaving the slave woman in a

state of dubious freedom.”211 This momentary sense of helplessness is quickly

replaced by the self-empowerment of the African woman. Morejón recalls the Afro-

Cuban woman as an actor in the development and forging of the new nation: first, as

a slave planting and harvesting crops; later, in the fight for independence; and finally,

participating in and supporting the Revolution: her descent from the Sierra is a direct

reference to the Sierra Maestra Mountains from which Castro’s guerrillas waged

battles against Batista’s army.

Mi real independencia fue el palenque

y cabalgué entre las tropas de Maceo.

Sólo un siglo más tarde,

junto a mis descendientes,
desde una azul montaña,

bajé de la Sierra

para acabar con capitales y usureros,

con generales y burgueses. (47-8)

211
Caroline A. McKenzie, “Language, Culture, and Consciousness in the Poetry of Nancy Morejón”
(92-3).
216
It is through the Black woman’s hard labor in the slave system and in the battles for

independence that Cuba became a modern nation. The Black woman is portrayed as

the guerrilla fighter who descended from the Sierra with Castro, a female refiguring

of Ché Guevara, hero of the Revolution.

The image of the female as a guerrilla fighter, along with the poem’s ending,

conveys Morejón’s political commitment to the Revolution. The repetition of the

possessive adjective “nuestros” and “nuestras” exemplifies revolutionary thought.

The new regime is credited with eradicating all institutional racism, opening doors to

Blacks and women, and providing a basic standard of living to all Cubans.

Ahora soy: sólo hoy tenemos y creamos.

Nada nos es ajeno.
Nuestra la tierra.
Nuestros el mar y el cielo.
Nuestras la magia y la quimera.
Iguales míos, aquí los veo bailar
alrededor del árbol que plantamos para el
comunismo. (48)

Reminiscent of Guillén’s “Tengo,” Morejón’s portrayal of a bold and daring Black

female who is committed to the new nation and the new revolutionary regime now,

through socialism, has gained an equal economic footing in the revolutionary nation.

She highlights a sense of belonging and identification with Afro-Cuban history and

culture. “Mujer negra” is a redefinition of Afro-Cuban women’s heritage, employing

strategies in her poetry that enable Black women “to have their voices heard and

217
their histories read.”212 Although Morejón revisits Black and womanist themes, by

displacing her project to pre-revolutionary Cuba, and by celebrating the Revolution at

the end of the poem, Morejón is able to continue publishing.

Morejón wrote “Mujer negra” in 1975, during the twelve-year period of

officially imposed silence when she could not get any of her poetry published in

Cuba. It was published by Casa de las Américas in 1975, and was later included in

Parajes de una época in 1979. She says that she did everything possible to prove that

she was disposed to revolutionary participation.213 It is notable that Morejón shows

her explicit commitment to revolutionary politics in a poem laden with Black issues.

Nancy Morejón’s poetry intersects with the poetic tradition of protest or resistance

poetry of her predecessor, Nicolás Guillén. Both Guillén and Morejón’s poetry is a

forum for social criticism that connects the past system of slavery with the “ever-

changing forms of colonialism and neoslavery in and outside of Cuba” (Howe 273).

In the 1960s Walterio Carbonell, an Afro-Cuban intellectual, called for a

Black reappraisal of Cuban history and, and after the Cultural Congress of 1968 he

and other intellectuals found themselves ostracized for their commentaries on the

racial situation in Cuban culture.214 He and other intellectuals, historians and artists,

were allowed to discuss race, but only in the past tense. Guillén and Morejón in most

212
Elliot Butler-Evans, Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade
Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989): 13.
213
From an interview with Morejón and Bianchi-Ross quoted in Howe’s dissertation “Afro-Cuban
cultural politics” 33.

218
of their publications were no doubt supportive of the Revolution. In fact, both wrote

articles and poetry in support of the Revolution, while at the same time writing poetry

that returns to the 19th century to open a polemic on race as well as, in the case of

Morejón, womanism. As the president of the UNEAC, the Unión Nacional de

Escritores y Artistas Cubanos, it was Guillén’s mission to foster a revolutionary

culture for the post-revolutionary order. Guillén defined his revolutionary project as

one that was determined to recover and represent the historical presence and

contribution of Afro-Cubans in the nation, as exemplified in “Una revisión entre

otras:”

Dieron los españoles de su espíritu – tan complejo y matizado ya --, de

su lengua, de su cultura. Pero también dieron los negros, y no dieron

menos, además de su largo jadear en la plantación y en el ingenio bajo

la servidumbre sin piedad…Por eso en Cuba es mestizo el blanco, es

mestizo el negro y es mestizo…el mestizo….

¿Por qué, pues, no revisar nuestra historia en este punto,

enriqueciéndola con los hallazgos e investigaciones de la sociología

moderna, aplicada a nuestra realidad?215

Race, therefore was a necessary part of Guillén’s writings as the National Poet

of Cuba and the president of the UNEAC. Though this was not necessarily at odds

with the revolutionary project, for Castro did desire a re-evaluation of Cuban history,

214
Pérez-Sarduy, ed. Afro Cuba (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998) 19-20.

219
it did pose problems. The Revolution declared an official state position of racial

equality, a legal state of “racelessness,” in which all Cubans were equal. This official

dictum alone, however, did not, and could not result in the full appreciation of the

African contribution to Cuba. Nor could such a structural change negate the pre-

existing ideologies or make obsolete the racial formations that so permeated the

society from its inception. To revisit the past in order to re-evaluate the cultural,

folkloric, and historical importance of Black contribution to contemporary Cuba was

allowed. However, to criticize the continuance of racist ideologies under the new

regime’s policies of “racial harmony,” would not be as easy a task, for it could be

equated to divisive intellectual activity, and be considered anti-revolutionary. Caught

between a personal project of mestizaje, promoting a one-race view of Cuban society

per the concept of transculturation, and the inability to criticize the lack of progress

made by the Revolution, Guillén would have to find other means to discuss the

question of race and racism in Cuba. Guillén’s answer was to write about race and

racism from a position temporally displaced from Cuba, focusing on racism in pre-

revolutionary Cuba.

Nancy Morejón defended Guillén in Nación y mestizaje against critics who

viewed his négritude poetry as separatist or “Black racism:”

Aquellos que han querido ver un racismo negro en Guillén han sido

víctimas de un espejismo nada aconsejable; o bien son ellos mismos

215
From Prosa de Prisa II, (1959): 178. “Una revision entre otras” was originally published in Hoy
on 29 March 1959.
220
 defensores solapados de un racismo a ultranza. Porque como se

percibe a una primera lectura, aun en la primera etapa o en el primer

ciclo de la obra poética de Guillén, sus poemas hablan y cantan, ya

para el negro, sin que por ello se desprenda un mensaje que desgaje al

negro del contexto nacional. (205)

Morejón “defends Guillén’s advocacy of the Castro regime’s homogenous concept of

identity and racial harmony and argues that his use of Black themes and images did

not mean unconditional support for separatist Black politics or ‘Black racism’”

(Howe 279). She argues that his Black themes should be viewed as an integral

component of revolutionary politics and society. Similarly, we can extrapolate her

stance on Guillén’s poetry to her own situation as an Afro-Cuban female poet who

witnessed and suffered official restrictions and sanctions of Black politics in the

1960s and 1970s.

Morejón continues to invoke Black issues in her poetry. Her poetry sustains a

Black tradition, that of the négritude and other protest or resistance poets, while

working within revolutionary discourse, as seen in “Mujer negra” and other poems

such as “Hablando con una culebra,” “Negro,” “Richard trajo su flauta” and

“Freedom Now.” Her poems “Amo a mi amo” and “Mujer negra” add another

dimension to this protest poetry by rewriting gender issues that present alternative

versions of Afro-Cuban female subjectivity.

Morejón’s use of the trope of temporal displacement is one method found to

bring questions of race and female subjectivity to the foreground for discussion in the
221
supposedly “raceless” and egalitarian post-Revolution Cuba. By rewriting the role of

the Afro-Cuban woman in historical terms, she questions modern day treatment of

Blacks, as well as women. She debunks the myths and the folklorization of Afro-

Cubans in the foundational and national literatures, as well as in scholarly studies,

such as those by the ethnographer, Fernando Ortiz. By claiming the subject voice in

her poetry and displacing it to the nineteenth century, she in turn gives voice to the

Afro-Cuban woman of the past and present, and also is able to rescue racial pride

after the Revolution. Temporal and spatial displacement, forms of metaphorical

journeys to the past and other geographical locations, are often used in conjuncture in

the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and Nancy Morejón to criticize residual ideologies from

the pre-existing power structures that operated to maintain a racialized state in pre-

revolutionary Cuba. Temporally and spatially displacing the discussions of race and

sexism allowed Guillén and Morejón to point to instances of past racism, and through

innuendo suggest its continuation in post-revolutionary Cuba, and also opened a “safe

space” to rescue racial pride.

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 CONCLUSION

I began Reconfiguring Mestizaje as an investigation into expressions of Black

identity in Spanish Afro-Caribbean literature. My research stemmed from a long-

standing interest in questions of racial identity development and how racial identity

intersected with the concept of mestizaje. Puerto Rico, Colombia and Cuba were

ideal place studies because of their long-standing, pronounced cultural adaptations of

the ideology of mestizaje. Cuba was of particular interest, because, different from

many Latin American countries where people from many cultures speak of the non-

importance of race but take no official position on it, the Cuban government has taken

an official stance on questions of race. Although concepts of mestizaje differ, for

some it refers to a cultural mixture, whereas for others it refers to racial mixture as a

means of whitening the country, the ideology of mixture has been adopted throughout

Latin America and has formed a central part of the national images of many

countries. The projections of mestizo nations have tended to downplay the

importance of race, clinging instead to notions of “racial democracy,” and looking

upon expressions of racial difference as being divisive. This position of racial

democracy has raised questions that informed my research. For example, how do

people of African descent envision themselves within their respective nations? Is

“racial democracy” embraced across racial and ethnic lines, or is it simply a

projection put forth by the hegemonic powers? If people of African descent do

choose to distinguish themselves racially, how do they go about doing so without

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positioning themselves as anti-national?

The answers to the questions that I posed revealed that mestizaje is extremely

complex. Trying to identify oneself racially within a system that discourages looking

at oneself as different inevitably means going against the mainstream tide of thought,

and possibly isolating oneself as anti-national or divisive. It becomes especially

difficult to define oneself in terms of race when “Black” and “Indian” continue to be

looked upon as “inferior,” and mainstream society persists in its encouragement of

people of color to “better the race” through miscegenation, or whitening. In order to

be able to identify in racial terms, due to the continued disparagement of people of

color and the privileging of whiteness, the authors that I studied looked either outside

of their homelands to gain an understanding of Blackness in a different context, or

looked to the past to [Black] national heroes and to the unspoken heroes who helped

forge the nations.

In their projects of redefining or refiguring the national image to include

people of African descent, the authors that I studied used journeys, both actual and

metaphorical, to investigate Blackness in a different social context or historical

moment and also as a means of approaching the racial question, in the example of

Cuba. The theme or trope of travel is one of the intersecting points between the four

authors, as it is used as the medium to broach the subject of racial identity. The travel

narrative is acquired from the Western tradition and is reformulated to meet the ends

of these four writers. Each acquires the subject voice and rewrites him/her-self, not

as the Other, but as integral elements of the modern nation. Western travel accounts
224
have traditionally been studied as the writings of European or Euro-American authors

who travel to new or exotic lands and, through their writing, create the Other. Unlike

the Western narratives that depict the Other and serve the projects of conquest,

colonization and nation formation, the Afro-Caribbean writers I study do not set out

to discover the Other, but instead are searching for a means to redefine themselves.

Manuel Zapata Olivella and Piri Thomas accomplish this by leaving home and

traveling to sites that they see as centers of Black culture. Their shared view of the

South as a cultural homeland for Blacks in the Western Hemisphere is the most

prominent point of intersection between my readings of Piri Thomas and Manuel

Zapata Olivella. Their similar desires to seek out Black culture in the South of the

United States and the use of multiple identities bring us to question “race” and racial

identity as defined by society, both in the United States and in the Caribbean. In fact,

part of the desire to travel to the South stems from the need to witness firsthand the

practice of Jim Crow in the United States. The apartheid witnessed by Thomas and

Zapata Olivella is also a recurring theme in Nicolás Guillén’s poetry and essays. He

refers to the racist practices of the United States in his support of mestizaje, but at the

same time subtly reminds his readers that race continues to be an issue in Cuba

despite the official stance of cubanidad. Nancy Morejón adds further to the argument

by introducing questions of gender in her revision of the historical role of the Afro-

Cuban woman. Although Morejón and Guillén do not depict physical journeys

outside of Cuba as means of investigating Black identity, their temporal displacement

to the past acts as a type of time travel, looking back in history in order to remember
225
the contributions of Afro-Cubans to the forging of the Cuban nation and the triumph

of the Revolution.

The contribution of people of African descent not only to the forging of

American nations, but also to modern Western society has historically been

overlooked or downplayed. This is especially true in nations that subscribe to

ideologies of mestizaje, which tend to minimize the importance of the African

presence and culture and privilege whiteness, as I discuss in Chapter One. The

continual undervaluing of the African contribution, even in modern societies, is what

makes the works of these writers, as well as scholars such as José Luis González, so

valuable as well as controversial. By stressing racial heritage and taking pride in this

heritage in their writings, these authors are refiguring the national images put forth by

the turn-of-the-century Creole writers and intellectuals who have tended to ignore or

purposely play down the important place of both African and indigenous peoples in

the nation. Reconfiguring Mestizaje is an investigation of the use of literature not

only as a forum for expressing Black identity and pride, but also of the use of

literature as an arena which continues to be used to refigure the nation.

My research intersects as well as departs from much of the current scholarship

in Afro-Latin American literature. Although there is a growing body of scholarship

on Afro-Latin American and Caribbean literature, I find that many scholars are

hesitant to engage questions of racial identity beyond the point of identifying authors

along racial lines. Racial themes within the literature are often overlooked or given

secondary or less importance in the study of writers of African descent. When racial
226
themes are studied in the literature, there is often the trend of collapsing writers of

both African and European descent into one pool of writers who deal with Black

themes, such as the negrista poets. The conjoining of writers of European and

African descent into one pool of “Black” literature does not take into consideration

the fact that both groups may write from different social and political experiences,

and that their agendas in writing may be vastly different. My research, for this and

future projects, departs from the understanding that there does exist for many authors

of Afro-Caribbean descent different viewpoints and agendas in the approach to

questions of race.

As this study is but a point of departure for future research, I recognize it as a

beginning, rather than the completion of a project. It is not my intention to replace

one myth (mestizaje) with another – the view of Blackness as a monolithic concept,

or with the idea that all Black writers share a common viewpoint or share a similar

historical and social experience. To do so would be to diminish the importance that

mestizaje plays for Black writers in Latin America and the Caribbean. The

recognition of difference within Black communities and between writers of African

descent within mestizo societies will serve as a point of departure for continued

research in this field. There are questions that were not approached in this study that

will need to be addressed in future studies. For example, how do gender and class

influence the positioning of writers of African descent; and what role do womanism

and/or feminism play in the refiguring of racial identity within the nation?

Also, how do turn of the century Black writers, such as Arturo Schomburg of Puerto
227
Rico, engage race discourse at the same time that Creole writers are working to

construct definitions of the new nations? These and other questions will aid in the

refocusing and expansion of this project for future research.

228
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 VITA

Khamla Leah Dhouti was born in Riverside, California on July 11, 1969, the

daughter of Lynda Dhouti and Lehad Dhouti. After completing her work at John W.

North High School, Riverside, California, in 1987, she entered Washington and Lee

University in Lexington, Virginia. She received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from

Washington and Lee University in May 1991. During the following two years she

was employed as a bilingual substitute teacher in Riverside County, California. In

July 1993 she entered graduate school at Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont,

and completed the year abroad program in Madrid, Spain in June 1994. She received

the degree of Master of Arts from Middlebury College in August 1994. In August

1994 she entered the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin.

Permanent Address: 4805 Yucca Hill Drive, Austin, Texas 78744

This dissertation was typed by the author.

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