Hiram Perez,
"Alma Latina: The American Hemisphere's Racial Melodramas"
(page 2 of 4)
The casting of Susan Kohner, the daughter of Mexican actress Lupita
Tovar, as Sarah Jane, draws attention also to a remarkable transnational
career for the tragic mulatto. The Mexican film Angelitos negros,
directed by Joselito Rodriguez and produced in 1948, during the Mexican
golden age of cinema, was inspired by Stahl's Imitation of Life.
Beginning in the 1920s, Afro Cuban culture became popular in Mexico.
According to Robert McKee Irwin, the Afro Cuban is "deployed in Mexican
film as a means of reinforcing Mexican national identity as
mestizo, i.e. a mix of white and indigenous, by representing Afro
Latin American culture as its exotic other."[5]
The exoticized Afro
Cuban of this period not only reinforces mestizo identity but
also whitens that identity by othering blackness. Angelitos
negros is set in a Mexican nightclub, but blackness (exotic,
sensual, and primitive) is projected onto Cuba.[6]
The Cuban actress Rita
Montaner plays the role of Mercé, the black nanny, and, as the narrative
ultimately reveals, the true mother of the film's blonde protagonist,
Ana Luisa de la Fuente. Irwin points out that "appearing in blackface . . .
Cuban actress Rita Montaner . . . despite actually being mixed race, the
real-life daughter of a mulata needs to mark her difference by
cosmetically accentuating her blackness." The ambivalence stirred by
racialized desire is palpable. Blackface ironically also functions to
whiten Rita Montaner, making miscegenous desire safe, whether that be
the miscegenous desire implied in the narrative or the desire for
Montaner's body. She is whitened, achieving a kind of provisional,
default whiteness, by the film's racial spectacle that requires her
blackness to be achieved cosmetically. Similar, but not quite identical,
to the complex of disowned desire instanced in the casting of German
Mexican Susan Kohner in Sirk's U.S. production of Imitation of
Life, Angelitos negros presents Montaner as brown playing
black—or perhaps white playing black, or is it black playing blacker?
Her symbolic significance for Mexican (as well as pan-Latin American)
audiences is complicated by the transnational context.
Mercé's mulatta daughter, Ana Luisa de la Fuenta, is played by the
Spanish actress Emilia Guiu, who immigrated to Mexico with her family as
a child, fleeing the Spanish Civil War. Joselito Rodriguez remade the
film in 1969, and, in homage to Douglas Sirk, cast Juanita Moore (an
Academy Award nominee for her portrayal of Annie in Sirk's adaptation)
as the black nanny Mercé. In the remarkable hemispheric circulation of
black blood as symbolic, Mexico has exchanged Susan Kohner for Juanita
Moore, and in both Sirk's and Rodríguez's productions, Moore
plays mother to a Mexican—or Mexican American—actress playing black.
Martha Rangel, Rodríguez's daughter, portrays the blonde Ana
Luisa. Another daughter, Titina Romay, originated the role of Belén, the
black "throwback" child, in the 1948 original, and she returns in 1969
as Isabel, a black friend of protagonist Juan Carlos Flores. She
reprises the role in a third adaptation of Angelitos Negros (dir.
Antulio Jiménez Pons, Mexico, 1970) as a telenovela. Romay appears in
blackface in all three productions. Also in blackface, Mexican actress
Silvia Derbez resurrects "La Nana Mercé" for the telenovela, and once
again a Spanish-born actress (Alicia Rodríguez) stars as Ana
Luisa. Apparently inexhaustible, the story is adapted once again in 1997
into a popular Mexican telenovela, El Alma No Tiene Color (dir.
Otto Sirgo, Mexico, 1997), distributed across Latin America and the
U.S., with legendary Cuban singer Celia Cruz as the black nanny,
Macaria, and white Mexican actress Laura Flores as the tragic mulatto
figure, Guadalupe Roldan, who, "unable to save herself . . . is branded by
the stigma of a secret, a truth that no one should ever hide."[7]
By focusing on a U.S. source—Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life
and its Hollywood adaptations—I do not wish to imply a unidirectional,
gendered model of global influence, whereby U.S. culture, maintaining an
inviolable ontological integrity even amidst transnational models of
cultural contact and exchange, imposes its worldview on a passive,
feminized Mexico. I want to shift the focus to what Linda Williams terms
the mode of melodrama, to think about Imitation (and its
repeated imitations) as part of a larger history of popular performance
linked to uneven processes of modernization in the Americas. Melodrama
then represents not only a dominant national form in the U.S. (as
Williams contends) but also a hemispheric—regional, transnational,
extranational—mode or symbolic structure that in the excesses and
peregrinations of its performances may indeed reinforce nation-state
racial formations but also subverts, or at least recodes, those
formations. I use "performance" here to identify the particularities of
both cultural production and consumption—not only the
performances of film and television actors but also those of
oppositional spectators. The melodramatic mode both consolidates and
exacerbates the logics of racial domination.
The popularity of Angelitos negros suggests that the structure
of the race secret holds considerable cachet in Mexico as well as the
U.S. This contradicts the common generalizations made about Latin
American racial discourse, understood to homogenously privilege class
and color over the logic of hypo-descent, perceived as idiosyncratic to
the U.S. The plot of Angelitos negros diverges significantly from
Imitation of Life, focusing on the trope of the "throwback" child
absent from Hurst's novel and both U.S. film adaptations. The recourse
to this trope indicates the bearing of hypo-descent in a Mexican racial
imaginary. As in the U.S., racial difference is gendered, cast onto the
black mother. Mercé is martyred, like Delilah and Annie, but in her case
the martyrdom serves also to punish her for the sexual indiscretion that
sets the melodrama in motion. Likewise, the tragic figure of the black
progeny, light enough to "pass," is gendered female. The prospect of a
black man able to pass for white presents too great a threat as a
potential contaminant of both the nation and white women (symbolically
collapsed). Angelitos negros thus exhibits the ideological
contradictions typical of melodrama. Ana Luisa's comeuppance teaches a
lesson against racism, confirming the Mexican national
character—mobilized around hybridity, after all—as fundamentally
antiracist, yet it reinforces the structures of the racial secret,
which, consistent with notions of hypo-descent, inevitably betrays the
black body. The narrative also invokes the legacy of race shame, an
instrument of self-betrayal basic to the operation of the racial secret.
Although Mexico, like other Latin American countries, consolidates
national identity around the figure of the hybrid body (the mestizo),
the anxieties suggested by the ideological contradictions of
Angelitos negros indicate that the hybridity celebrated by the
nation is more metaphoric than literal. In other words, while agents of
nationalist rhetoric might claim hybrid identities, their pronouncements
enact ceremonious expressions of national identity that are spared the
brush of racialization. Whiteness (akin to purity) remains the
privileged category for reputation, even as a symbolic hybridity
consolidates the nation. The negotiation of that symbolic, however,
creates different stakes for spectators, depending on how their
identities align with or disrupt nationalist practices. Tracking the
mulatta's hemispheric career introduces singularities that do not
entirely cohere with the racial formations of the nation-state.
As a case in point, consider the testimony of an anonymous respondent
on Alma Latina,
a web site dedicated to fans of the Mexican
telenovela:
This movie [Angelitos negros] always makes me cry
every time I see it. Well not this one the 1948 one with Pedro Infante.
This movie is so sad cause I think of it as if I was Belen and I feel
bad because Im the same color as her. Im puerto rican but my mom is a
white skined puerto rican and my dad is a black skined puerto rican and
I would feel really bad if my own mother rejected me because of the
color of my skin (Im trigueñita—right in the middle of black
and white skin). This movie is great!!! [sic]
The respondent sets down some of the complicated cross-racializations
actualized by the transnational interface of identity discourses. She
introduces the category trigueña as distinct from black or
mulatto. Within the Spanish Caribbean, categories such as
trigueña, morena, and prieta (and in the Dominican
Republic, india) can function to identify a phenotypical
construct of blackness that simultaneously distances the subject from
black group identity. The character of Belén, played by director
Joselito Rodriguez's white daughter in blackface, occasions for the
subject both an identification with and an alienation from blackness.
Because of Puerto Rico's colonial relationship to the U.S., "Puerto
Rican" may indicate either national or racial identifications. White and
black may function as either ethnic or racial categories. For example,
the respondent may be identifying her mother as an ethnically white
Puerto Rican and her father as an ethnically black Puerto Rican. She
identifies singularities specific to Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latin
American identity formations but also suggests, with the implicit shame
indicated by a fraught identification with Belén and the fantasied
correspondence of her mother with Ana Luisa, the kind of black trauma
also revisited by an African American spectatorship of either Stahl's or
Sirk's Imitation of Life.
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