Alma Latina: The American Hemisphere’s Racial Melodramas

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.”¹ 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.² 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.”³

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.

1. Robert McKee Irwin, “Memín Pinguín, Rumba, and Racism: Afro-Mexicans in Classic Comics and Film,” in Hemispheric American Studies, Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008, 249-265, 249-250. [↩]
2. This is in keeping with a tradition of representations of popular Cuban music and dance in golden age Mexican cinema, much of it co-produced between Mexico and Cuba. [↩]
3. “El Alma No Tiene Color,” Alma Latina: The Biggest Mexican Telenovelas Database. [↩]