Arrizon, Alicia. Race-Ing Performativity

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theatre research international vol. 27 | no. 2 | pp136152 International Federation for Theatre Research 2002 Printed in the United Kingdom DOI:10.1017/S0307883302000226
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Race-ing Performativity through Transculturation, Taste and the Mulata Body

alicia arrizn
A Cuban cocktail called mulata inspires an examination of the mulata body. Beyond an analysis of the cocktail as a commercial commodity, the mulata body can be placed within an intercultural space shaped by the processes of colonization, slavery and race relations. By examining the grammars in the mulata cocktail, the discussion moves the subject through other texts and discourses in order to mediate the mulata's embodied genealogy as a form of transculturation. As a hybrid body that inhabits a `racialized' performativity, the mulata's subaltern agency is imagined beyond the exoticism charged to its presence in the Latin American and Caribbean contexts. A closer look at the mulata body helps to trace not only the process of objecthood affected by masculinist power and desire, but also by the way the process of subjecthood is performatively achieved.
Mulata (Classic Cuban Cocktail) 1 ounce light rum 1 ounce dark creme de cacao 1 tablespoon fresh lime juice, or to taste 1 cup ice cubes Combine all of the ingredients in a bar shaker, cover, and shake well. Strain the mulata into a martini glass. This combination serves one.1
The blending of chocolate and lime seems incongruous. According to the recipe cited above, however, these ingredients avour a `classic Cuban cocktail'. Traditionally, a mulata is served straight up, but it can also be made into a frozen drink by pureeing the ingredients in a blender. Fusing the avours of chocolate, rum, and lime gives the mulata an exquisite, complicated taste. Salud! When I came across this recipe while consulting cookbooks and other references regarding Caribbean food, I was intrigued. As a feminist interested in race, ethnic, and gender analyses, I found the grammars implicit in the label mulata tantalizing. I felt compelled to look more closely at this `classic Cuban cocktail'. After consulting some of my Cuban friends and colleagues, and nding that no one had ever heard of the mulata cocktail, I grew skeptical about its `classic' nature.2 But, on my trip to Cuba, I located the cocktail in the menu of the most exclusive hotels bars (such as the Nacional and the Capri). I also came across the recipe in different books on Cuban cocktails.3 Then I concluded that classic or
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not, the mulata drink represents a cultural and commercial commodity, combining history, pleasure and consumerism. The drink also has meaning beyond this commercial functionality, however. I suggest that the mulata cocktail, like the mulata body, is a product of transculturation. I use the term mulata in italics to refer to the cocktail. When I mean the female gure of racially mixed descent, I use the Spanish term, without italics. Historically, the term has been used to refer to a mixed-blood individual, the product of miscegenation between a black woman and a white man. The term itself is derived from the Latin mulus, meaning mule. The English term `mulatto' was used from about the year 1600 onward. In this paper, I mean mulata to encompass more than a racially mixed female subject who is partially African.4 The body of the mulata not only embodies an intercultural space, but it has inuenced the modern and postmodern imagination in Latin American culture. Bound to it are all the complexities and unstable processes about how race, gender, and sexuality enact the power relations within colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial discourses.5 I begin by examining the mulata's embodied genealogy as a form of transculturation. This discussion sets the stage for tracing the ways in which the mulata body has shaped and has been shaped by the processes of colonization, slavery and race relations. Within these processes, transculturation is closely connected with the mulata body, inhabiting the performativity of race in a self-conscious conduct. While much has been written about the performativity of gender and sexual difference (for example queer performativity), there has been little emphasis on the performativity of race. Theories of performativity have been used in the philosophy of language, psychoanalysis, and feminist analysis. From the pioneering contributions of the philosopher of language J. L. Austin (he explored the role of what he called `performative language') to Judith Butler's conguration of knowingness and agency, the notion of performativity lacks the link to the racialized body. In this paper, the mulata's body suggests a pattern of `racialized' performativity, imagined in the ever-shifting patterns of cultural transformation and postcolonial discourse. Indeed, it is only by engaging a rupture of absolute heterogeneity that one recognizes there can be no pure identity posed to the very conditions of the mulata subjectivity. I chose to use the mulata cocktail here as an embodiment of discursive congurations that help us conceive some constructs of the mulata body.
Mediating transculturation
A syncretic artefact is not a synthesis, but rather a signier made of differences. What happens is that, in the melting pot of societies that the world provides, syncretic processes realize themselves through an economy in whose modality of exchange the signier of there of the Other is consumed (`read') according to local codes that are already in existence; that is, codes from here.6
The three ingredients blended in the mulata cocktail chocolate, lime, and rum embody colonial encounters, the intercultural exchange and the syncretism marked by Antonio Bentez-Rojo in the above passage. For him this syncretism is the product of the cultural interactions between the self and other, the local and the trans-local, the traditional and the foreign. Although these ingredients chocolate, lime, and rum at rst glance, may seem no different from the exotic subjectivity enacted (and charged) in many Caribbean and
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Latin American nations, a closer look reveals that the mulata's syncretic amalgamation represents a conuence of worlds and cultures. However, as products of transculturation, they mark serious hierarchic imbalances implicated in the invention of the `new' world.7 Applying the concept of transculturation rst to the mulata drink, then to the mulata herself opens new possibilities for understanding the racialized body, its performativity and the geography of the `contact zone'. As function of the `contact zones', Mary Louise Pratt has explained that transculturation dramatizes dialectical bodies ready to be re-construed, reembodied, and re-visioned. Pratt's theorization of the `contact zones' suggests a framework to understand the impact of imperialism within sites stricken by colonialism.8 In her own context, the conuence of worlds and cultures generates syncretic subjectivities, expressed in the `relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ``travelees'', not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of co-presence, interactions, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power'.9 When relations of power are at the core of the intercultural exchange, the dialectics of the dominant/subordinant subject need to be re-conceptualized: the performance of difference becomes itself a process of resistance and rejection. While the dominant subject attempts to establish a homogenous cultural space, the subordinate unsettles, shatters and disrupts domination. According to Diana Taylor, this interference in transcultural bodies `suggests a shifting or circulating pattern of cultural transference' in which `minor' and `major' subjectivities give and take from each other.10 As a self-conscious practice, this process develops an awareness of the politics of diverse representational options, marking its own cultural power. First, I consider to be paramount the analysis of the ingredients combined in the mulata cocktail in order to mediate transculturation. Consider, for example, chocolate. A native American plant, the tree that produces the cocoa bean was rst grown by the Aztecs. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the beans were rst used to produce chocolate, however. The word for chocolate, chocolatl, originates from a combination of Mayan-Aztec linguistic markers. The implicit grammars in chocolate offer original instances of transculturation: now known in Mexico as a mexicanismo (or americanismo), this chocolate is dark, ranging from black to the colour of mulatez. In contrast to the subjectivity embodied in the term mestizaje, which refers to the blending of the indigenous and the Hispanic worlds (or other European cultures), in the Latin American cultural context, mulatez (mulatto-ness) is the marker of the black-hybrid body. Although both mestizaje and mulatez may be associated with relations of power, racial mixing, and the postcolonial imagination, I believe they are best understood as a form of transculturation. Vera M. Kutzinski connects mestizaje and mulatez by viewing the two as a particular type of multiculturalism. She explains that multiculturalism àcknowledges, indeed celebrates, racial diversity while at the same time disavowing divisive social realities'.11 The consideration of multiculturalism is crucial to any attempt at comprehending hybrid bodies, race relations and `diversity'. However, in applying this term, the emphasis should be political, not aesthetic or humanistic. Multiculturalism necessarily invokes pluralism beyond the `racial difference' that had perpetrated the irrevocable paradigm of black and white. It should not only recognize and value cultural and racial diversity, but it should diagnose the damages of racism within the sustained ideals of racial superiority that coexist
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in any history of colonial and postcolonial societies. The true light of diversity and pluralism attempts to deconstruct the fallacy of racial essentialism. It also tries to decolonize knowledge, marking its relatedness with power in a racially differentiated society. Multiculturalism not only responds to certain òrders' of domination, but it must perform multiple perspectives in which the hegemonic body becomes displaced and contested. Thus, the multicultural subject compromises with the conscious politicization of symbolic positioning and repositioning of identity, in contact with but differentiated from others. As forms of Cuba's multiculturalism, for Kutzinski, mestizaje and mulatez are the result of the creolization and Africanization of the nation state. The Africanization is indeed encouraged by the demands for slave labour that accompanied the rapid expansion of Cuba's sugar industry. The second and third ingredients in the mulata, limes and rum, are non-indigenous. Limes are believed to have originated in India or Malaysia. In 1493, on his second voyage to America, Cristobal Colon brought with him the citrus stock that produces limes. This fruit soon became a crucial component in the cuisine across the Caribbean and Central and South America. Rum, the last of the three key ingredients in the mulata, is found wherever sugar cane is grown. For Cubans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans, rum is what tequila is for Mexicans. Èl ron', as it is popularly known, represents the `mixed-blood' of Caribbean nations. Like citrus, sugar cane shoots were brought to the `new' world by the conquistador Colon during his second voyage. He brought with him several specialists on sugar-cane cultivation and several hundred sugar-cane shoots from the Canary Islands. By the eighteenth century, sugar cane was being cultivated throughout the Caribbean. It was Cuba's primary industry by the nineteenth century. Whether owned and operated by the French, British, or Spanish, sugar plantations have remained a fairly constant presence in the Caribbean through time. The plantation in the Caribbean constituted what Antonio Bentez-Rojo calls à predictable state of creolization'.12 In his article `Three Words toward Creolization', Bentez-Rojo examines the notion of creolization through three utterances: plantation, rhythm, and performance. He relates the process of creolization as the cause and effect of these terms. He suggests that the plantation and its product created a particular culture which constituted itself as a crossing, combination, fusion and mutual transformation of two or more pre-existing cultures. For him the plantation is `the womb of [his] otherness and of [his] globality'.13 The plantation is the site where cultures developed and perform themselves ìn the different states of creolization that come out here and there in language and music, dance and literature, food and theatre'.14 These cultural productions, according to him, are incorporated in the Carnival. As one of the most ancient and recurrent celebrations, the Carnival culture in the Caribbean has been saturated by the synthesis of diverse West African and Hispanic inuences. In numerous studies, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz highlighted the African contribution to Cuban cultural identity and society. In Cuba as elsewhere in the Caribbean the institution of slavery made possible the formation of what was known since the 1920s as Afro-Hispanic culture. The culture of the Spanish Caribbean signaled the effort to redene the very concepts of ìdentity' and `nation states' with a language cognizant of the African presence. Thus the sugar industry is unimaginable without considering the African experience in the Caribbean. The production of rum, the third ingredient in the mulata, and of sugar, parallels one
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another. Initially, between both commercial enterprises stood the problem of industrial production, which demanded machinery and technicians that did not exist in the newfound territories. All these needs had to be exported from Europe. Indeed, capital was needed to buy slaves and bring the right machinery for milling, boiling, evaporating, and rening. Sugar became the product of slave toil, and no American society seemed capable of exporting sugar without the use of African slave workers. The production of sugar in the Caribbean and its technological discourse `had awakened the Creole landscape from its languid, precapitalist dream'.15 Sugar cultivation began the evolution of the plantation regimes in the Americas and brought about the establishment of African slavery. While Spain outlawed slavery among the indigenous population early in the sixteenth century, it permitted African enslavement. In both Spanish America and Brazil, colonialists turned to slaves imported from Africa as new sources of manpower. The colonialists also devised a labour system for the indigenous population in Latin America which, although not formally called slavery, had many of the same effects. Sugar plantations became the site for a culture in which the protagonists were in contact but differentiated from others. This culture, in its performative ow, contributed crucially to the emergence of a black sensibility beginning in the nineteenth century. Fernando Ortiz's classic work, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, examines the dynamic culture that has arisen from the production of sugar and tobacco. Using the discourse of race as an allegory of representation, he marks both products in a fashion that separates them, while at the same time distinguishing the different social and economic orders they embody:
Tobacco is dark, ranging from black to mulatto; sugar is light, ranging from mulatto to white. Tobacco does not change its colour; it is born dark and dies the colour of its race. Sugar changes its colouring; it is born brown and whitens itself; at rst it is a syrupy mulatto and in this state pleases the common taste; then it is bleached and rened until it can pass for white, travel all over the world, reach all mouths, and bring a better price, climbing to the top of the social ladder.16
In contrasting sugar and tobacco, Ortiz situates the discussion of race in gurative terms. He represents each product in relation to the other, and he marks the `colour' of each one to differentiate them. At the same time, however, he considers sugar and tobacco as a form of cultural synthesis. Ortiz denes the production of sugar as a capitalist enterprise, attached very closely to the history of colonization. Interestingly, he uses gender relations to discuss the controversial nature of the two products, popularly known as Don Tabaco y Dona Azucar, as an erotic competition. Tobacco is dark and gendered male by Ortiz; sugar is white and female. Man and woman are posited as exclusionary categories within the author's symbolic grammars, `[s]ugar is she, tobacco is he. Sugar cane was the gift of the gods, tobacco of the devils; she is the daughter of Apollo, he is the offspring of Persephone'.17 Ortiz's discursive congurations position both men and women as symbols of both products. By separating the difference between the roles men and women (should) play, Ortiz splits the two but at the same time unies the genders, interchanging one for the other in a dialectical competition: `[b]ut if where tobacco is concerned women invade men's eld
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smoking cigarettes, which are the children of cigars, men return the compliment in their consumption of sugar, not in the form of sweets, syrups, or candy, but as alcohol, which is the offspring of the sugar residues'.18 The gender analysis proposed by Ortiz recognizes the roles of man and woman as interchangeable categories, but within a traditional framework of domination. When he characterizes men as the primary protagonists in charge of tobacco, he is positioning the gender relations as a denition of one of their interrelated aspects, the man. Signicantly, Ortiz discusses the different types of social and economic conditions in the production of both crops. By contrasting both products within their historical peculiarities, Ortiz's `counterpoint' suggests a dramatic dialectic that he believes offers original ways to discuss the notion of transculturation. It is on this point that I Fig. 1 Cuban painter Carlos Enrquez, Èl rapto de concur fully with Ortiz. His analysis of sugar las mulatas' (`The Abduction of Mulatas'), 1938. and tobacco functions as a model for the Oil on canvas. (Courtesy of the Museo Nacional de Cuba.) historicity embedded in the fusion of races and cultures in Cuba as elsewhere in the Antilles. In this context, the very concept of `historicity', like the related concepts of `subjectivity', èxperience' and `knowledge', marks the different locations of race in social orders stricken by colonial encounters, slavery, resistance and so on. Thus, transculturation as Ortiz denes it, involves a discourse about the transmission of difference where the performativity of race establishes a set of polarities characterized in terms of the dynamics and demands of colonial expansion. In the Western imagination, the èxoticism', èroticism', `paganism' and `barbarism' of the subjected, allow them (invaders or colonizers) to project themselves in contrast as `rational', `legitimate', `moral' and Christian. Indian women, mestizas, black women and mulatas were often used as sexual objects outside all social commitments. In this context, the mulata as a victim of rape and miscegenation became a depiction impossible to ignore. In art, Cuban vanguardist painter Carlos Enrquez, has depicted the mulata's body as being enslaved in El rapto de las mulatas (`The abduction of the mulatas', see Figure 1). This painting stages the history of conquest and slavery. In the words of Juan A. Martnez, this painting `can also read as a powerful symbol of the genesis of the Cuban people and culture out of the clash of Spain and Africa in the Caribbean'.19 In colonial times the mulata was held to be inferior to the mestiza because of her legal status as a slave woman. This preference, rst for Indian women over black and for mestizas over mulatas, was the product of social simplication with reference to caste relations. For
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example, many Spaniards married Indian women who contributed native nobility and signicant dowries. In addition, indigenous women were not only free like them, but they were already allied with the white men who had made them submissive to their power.20
The choreography of the mulata's body

An important twentieth-century poet who has addressed the power of sugar is the Cuban Nicolas Guillen. His revolutionary and innovative voice not only represents the misfortunes of blacks in the caneeld, but also lls Latin American cultural historiography with the topography of the black body. As a mulato himself, Guillen's contribution to the AfroCaribbean movement deepened the presence of blacks in Latin America.21 His poetry provides an intense dramatization of colonialism as an invasion of evil forces. His poetic vision was shaped by conditions during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when American sugar investment had become the basis of the Cuban economy, supported by incorporation into the US import system. The large American corporations had taken over the bulk of cane production in other Caribbean islands, as well.22 The following poem, `Cana' (sugar cane), is considered one of the most striking among Guillen's collection, Songono Cosongo (1931). The black body is connected to the earth and to the hierarchic mechanisms of the plantations:
El negro junto al canaveral. El yanqui sobre el canaveral. La tierra bajo el canaveral. Sangre que se nos va! The Black in the caneeld. The Yankee above the caneeld. The earth below the caneeld. Blood that drains from us!23
This intense dramatism denounces US economic power and its effect on the black who cultivates the sugar cane; the poem also rejects the authority of the Yanqui who may own the sugar corporations. Within this context of despair, Guillen's Èl negro' and Èl yanqui' are counter-positioned in relation to the caneeld. One is connected physically and metaphysically to the earth, despite the exploitative conditions in which he works; the other is represented as having no contact with the land. In characterizing this stage in Guillen's life, Antonio Bentez-Rojo has suggested that the representation of anti-imperialism in poems such as `Cana' embodies `not only the connement of blacks to the caneeld, but [also] impregnates Cuban society with the libido of the black, thus transgressing the mechanisms of censorship imposed by the plantation'.24 Although Guillen's anti-imperialist ideals took diverse forms in his poetry, he is most concerned with producing a culture that exalts the beauty of the black body. This is more evident in poems where he captures the sexual eroticism of the rumba danced by a mulata. For example, `Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio' (`The Abduction of Antonio's Woman') represents the synthesis of the power of music and the dancing body of the mulata, captured in the poetic imagination this way:
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arrizn Race-ing Performativity through Transculturation, Taste and the Mulata Body De aqu no te iras, mulata, ni al mercado ni a tu casa; aqu moleran tus ancas la zafra de tu sudor: repique, pique, repique, repique, repique, pique, pique, repique, repique, po! From here you will not go, mulata, neither to the market nor your home; here your ankle will crush the thickness of your sweat: repique, pique, repique, repique, repique, pique, pique, repique, repique, po!25
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The dancing body of the mulata is central to the rhythms that make this poem a perfect musical composition, a rumba. Guillen's poetic interpretation choreographs the mulata's body, describing her dancing body at the end of the poem as the `cintura de [su] cancion' (the waist of his song). Musicality and dramatism are central elements in Guillen's works. The mulata's body motivates Guillen's poem, but the poetic subject also challenges others (including the mulata's man, Antonio) who may interfere with her dancing. She is determined to perform the `repique' (beat) of the sound of music. The performative action behind the abduction of Antonio's woman the body of the mulata dancing the popular rumba represents a key ritual in the popular cultures of the Caribbean. Rhythm is carnivalesque and intimately related to the performance of oral cultures and to the popular imagination. In Latin America, as in many other cultures, music tends to brighten up the dark misfortunes of poverty. Especially in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the rumba dance is improvisational and celebratory: people gather in the streets, some with instruments, others singing, and then they begin to dance, following the sound of the drums. Unlike the Santera (the cult of saints), the rumba does not have religious roots; the dance is full of sensuality and erotic movements.26 In the decade of the 1920s, the rumba was popularized by the arrival of the radio, the Victorola and the recording industry. Prior to the 1920s, according to BentezRojo, the rumba was only danced and played among blacks. It became accepted as a national cultural expression in Cuba until the majority had internalized these rhythms. Thus, the formation of Afro-Cuban culture was inuenced heavily by the acceptance of these rhythms. It `produced the symphonic music of Amadeo Roldan and Alejandro Garca Caturla, the negrista poetry of Nicolas Guillen, the magic realism of Alejo Carpentier, the essays of Fernando Ortz and Lydia Cabrera, and the painting of Wilfredo Lam'.27 The linguistic markers `pique, repique, repique, po' in Guillen's poem infuse a very creative language that blends the sounds of musical instruments such as the drums, the bongo, and maracas. According to Kutzinski, this inventive language was traditionally used in mulata poetry in an effort `to disguise political choices as purely aesthetic ones'.28 This system of production allowed writers such as Guillen to create an original voice, one that gave meaning to the African-European encounter in postcolonial Cuba. Guillen's poetic imagination is the imagination of a mulato in a racist environment. In general terms, his work deals with Afro-Antillean or black culture; for him, the mulata's body is the muse of inspiration, an icon that asserts his own search for national identity. Guillen's black sensibility was needed in Cuba as well as in the Antilles and Latin America. Unlike the
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population of most Caribbean islands, the people of Cuba are primarily of Spanish European descent; just 20 percent of the population is of African origin. The search for a black sensibility helped prevent the denial of race and colouring the prevailing denitions of Eurocentric critical constructs. For Guillen, cultural and racial afrmation, the vernacular, and social realism are all markers that challenge the canons of ùniversal' aesthetics. The Puerto Rican Luis Pales Matos, whose work has been considered a precursor of negrismo (Black aesthetics and cultural movement) in the Antilles, captures the sensualized body of the mulata coupled with the choreography of her movements in ways that are similar to Guillen's:29
Dale a la popa, mulata, proyecta en la eternidad ese tumbo de caderas que es rafaga de huracan, y menealo, paya, de aya paca, de aqu menealo, menealo, para que rabie el To Sam! Shake your butt, mulata, project into eternity this beat of your hips that's the hurricane's gale, and shake it back and forth, forth and back, shake it, shake it, to make Uncle Sam rage!30
Like Guillen, Pales Matos depicts the mulata in terms of the way she moves her body when she is dancing or even just walking. From the perspective of the poetic subject in Pales Matos' conguration of the mulata, the `beat' of her body `back and forth, forth and back' determines her position as an object of irresistible attraction to the poetic subject. And, based on his own desire, he suggests that the movements of her body would be enough even `to make Uncle Sam rage'. While the author objecties the mulata's body, choreographing the `storminess' of her walk, he considers her excessive sensuality as an alternative way to challenge imperialism. He highlights the movement of her body, thinking that it might cause the rage of Uncle Sam and depicts her as a hip-swaying goddess of sensuality. At the core of Pales Matos's objectifying congurations and imaginative dialectics, the exotic body of the mulata is mediated between the dening self and the performativity of òtherness'. In his argument of the exotic, Edward Said employed the term Orientalism. For him, Orientalism (just as the Orient) is performed more in the relationship to the Occident's self-image than in any truth about the Orient.31 It has been argued that the European ideal of sexual difference constructs women as objects of knowledge, emphasizing the superiority of masculinity rather than unmasking women's historicity. The powerful reection produced by Said in Orientalism has a parallel in the narratives of or about the Americas. In Pales Matos's work, it is the image of the Mulata in the form of the èxotic other' that not only denes him as a white Puerto Rican, but also utilizes her body and sensuality to combat intellectually the forces of imperialism. As in Guillen's discursive congurations, the mulata embodies a characterization of national identity, incorporating exoticism into this de nition while integrating the assertion of self and other. While the exotic, for Pales Matos, embodies an idealized denition of national identity, it becomes associated with desire, difference and the movement of the mulata body. In both Guillen's and Pales Matos's work, the mulata's body is merely an object of desire and a capturing symbol of mulatez in the Spanish Antilles. As a voiceless, gendered subject and one without a history, the mulata's
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Fig. 2 `Mi querido dice tenga esperanza' (`My lover tells me not to lose hope'). Cigarette lithograph from the collection `Vida y muerte de la mulata' (`Life and Death of the Mulata'). La Charanga de Villergas Cuban cigar factory, n.d. (Courtesy of CENDA.)
sensualized body tells more about the speaking subject's positionality of desire than about her experiences as a black woman. Her body is not much a fact but a performance. The mulata epitomizes the in-between-ness of cultural hybridization. Her presence blurs the essential distinction marked by the effects of racial intermixture. In the tradition of Spanish Caribbean literature and cultural production, the black body has often been dened and constituted as an extension of oppressive colonial practices, a perspective that helped locate the embodiment of sexuality linked to this colonial order. Since the nineteenth century, the mulata's body and her presence have been demarcated in exploitative terms: she has been dened merely as an erotic symbol who embodies the African dance or the musical instrument which conducts the movement of her body. Kutzinski argues that as object of desire and product of a masculinist imagination, the mulata's body ìs the inscription of a desire for cultural synthesis upon a eld of sociopolitical contingencies that is accordingly distorted'.32 This inscription was also expressed in the graphic art of colonial Cuba. The lithographic marquillas advertising Cuban cigars and cigarettes persisted in popular art well into the twentieth century. The mulata became a protagonist in many of these marquillas: her sensuality was marked within a scenic ethnographic view while documenting the integration of European and African elements (Figure 2).33 As the product of the promotion of blanqueamiento (whitening), the volatile body of the mulata encapsulates the process of objectication and the institutionalization of racism, sexism, and enslavement.34 The way her body has been constructed with and subjected to
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male desire is marked as the site of the performative where gender in essence is feminine but is less signicant than its erotic subordination (Figure 3). To alter these established conceptions, Cuba's leading contemporary black female poet, Nancy Morejon, has created a counter-discourse that redenes the black body. Her writing not only attempts to recover the historicity of the black body but also represents a counter-revolutionary act against male objectication. In Morejon's `Mujer negra' (1975), the mulata's saga acquires substance: the subject is located in terms of her `genuine' black body and historical subjectivity:
I walked on. This the land where I suffered abuse and whip I sailed the length of all its rivers. Under its sun I sowed, I reaped, I ate none of its harvest. My home was a barracks. I myself carried stones to build it, but I sang to the natural beat of the Island's birds.35
`Mujer negra' is one of Morejon's most frequently anthologized poems. Structurally, the poem's dramatism is embedded in sections with different headings; these divisions present history as an organizing device. The verse titles include images of determined movement: Ì rebelled', Ì walked on', Ì rose up', Ì worked a lot more', Ì went off to the mountain', and Ì came down from the Sierra'. The diverse sections also function as a chronology beginning with the transplantation of the black from Africa and the implementation of slavery, continuing through the struggle for independence and the nationalist movement, and ending with the Cuban Revolution:
I came down from the Sierra to put an end to capital and usurers, to generals and the bourgeoisie. Now I am: only now do we have and create. Nothing is not ours. Ours the earth. Ours the magic and fancy Equally mine, here I see them dance around the tree we planted for communism. Its wonderful wood now resounds.36
The process of historical transformation in the poem positions the subject the black woman as a symbol of resistance and liberation. Race, gender, and class are implicit foundations of resonance. The dramatic action of the speaking voice Ì', however, becomes a collective `we', displacing the power of the gendered subjectivity with the epic history of the black diasporic body. Thus, the black woman's presence is the subject of history, one whose sense of condence embodies the collective self. But in this process, her body foregrounds not the oppression of objecthood as a sexual victim, but her capacity for survival. In theatre, the black body was even more drastically affected by the impact of colonialism, which tended to `bleach out' every strain of colour. Beginning in the nineteenth century, for example, Cuban theatre was suffused with an elaboration of the negrito known
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as Bufo (slapstick comedy) theatre. As with much nineteenth-century Cuban theatre, Bufo relied on the parodic representation of black experience as an allegory for colonization more generally. As a type of burlesque commedia, Bufo frequently used triumvirate characters, such as la mulata, el negrito, and el gallego. These prototypes were not necessarily black actors, but more often whites, performing the black body. In theatre, the black body and the female role have received similar treatment: on the Cuban stage, the entry of the black body whites performing as black was affected by racism; the entry of the woman in the boundless public realm of theatre was shaped by sexism and by the `feminization' of a male-dominated eld. As a genre that involves music and dance, the Bufo inuenced many forms of cultural expression in the twentieth century. One popular form, the cabaret, emerged as a model of extravagant performance where the mulata's sexual exoticism was meant to incarnate the idealization of hedonistic Fig. 3 `Mulata de rumbo' (`The ``Loose'' Mulata'). power. In cabaret productions, the perfor- Lithograph by Victor Patricio Landaluze, n.d. (Courtesy of CENDA.) mers shift from being rumba dancers (rumberas) in popular celebrations to being stars in the great spotlight of the nightclub. By the late 1940s, with the expansion of tourism and casino industries nanced by American capital in Cuba, the cabaret style was co-opted and revised. Cabaret productions became afliated with the grand US hotels, with casinos, and with the exotic bodies of mulatas. When Fidel Castro took over the country in 1959, the famous Tropicana Nightclub was a relative newcomer. In the post-revolutionary era, casinos were dismantled. Still, the Tropicana spectacle remains one of the most extravagant nightclubs and is internationally known for the sublimation of the mulata-cabaretera. The rumbera-cabaretera also became the subject of exotic narratives in Mexican cinema during that country's golden period. One star, Tongolele (Yolanda Montes), soon drew international acclaim. Her `Tropicalisimo Show de Tongolele' was one of the most well known spectacles of this nature in Mexico, Cuba, Europe, and South America (see Figures 4 and 5). Although Tongolele was born in the United States, part of her heritage was Tahitian. In an interview with Elena Poniatowska, Tongolele explained that her stage name not only recalls the Polynesian Island Tongo, but at the same time, its rhythms evoke the sound of drums. Tongolele also noted that because she became one of the greatest attractions in La Havana's well-known Tropicana Nightclub, people from Miami and South America believe she is Cuban.37
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Tongolele is used as an example by Pingalito Betancourt in Carmelita Tropicana's performance of Milk of Amnesia/Leche de Amnesia. As Pingalito, Carmelita Tropicana in drag embodies the macho prototype of Latino cultures. While his intention is to help Carmelita Tropicana recover her Cuban identity, he extols the natural beauty of the island by objectifying women. Representing them as national symbols, Pingalito proudly declares:
Oye me mano. Esas coristas de Tropicana. With the big breasts, thick legs. In Cuba we call girls carros and we mean your big American cars. Your Cadillac, no Toyota or Honda. Like the dancer, Tongolele. I swear to you people, or my name is not Pingalito Betancourt, you could put a tray of daiquiris on Tongolele's behind and she could walk across the oor without spilling a single drop. That, ladies and gentlemen, is landscape. For that you give me a gun and I ght for the landscape. Priorities.38
Fig. 4 `Tongolele' performing her sensual body and dressed in her dance costume. Popular picture in postcard form, n.d.
From the implicit aesthetics of the celebratory mulata rumbera (rumba dancer mulata) in the popular performances of community gatherings, the cabaretera or coristas, to use Pingalito's term embodies the excessive orders of postmodernity. While contradictions abound in post-revolutionary Cuba, the conation of the mulata-cabaretera within a commodity production undermines the mulata's subjectivity by rewarding commercial use of her body. In Pingalito's own denition, the coristas are like cars, not the small ones, but the big American `Cadillac'. In the performance/creation of Pingalito, Carmelita Tropicana not only traverses genders and sexualities but also creates an excellent prototype of the Cuban choteo (poking fun), who celebrates the role of the mulata rumbera as the spectacle of national treasures. She is an object and a subject of the diasporic imagination. She represents the modern and the postmodern history, spanning as many mytho-aesthetic bodies and embedded in the inventiveness the `new world' largely conceptualized in terms of the dynamics of colonial expansion.
Closing remarks
The broader meaning of race emerges when the mulata cocktail and the mulata body are examined in relation to each other. While the mulata cocktail's implicit creativity must be understood as the product of commodity consumerism, it also represents an embodied
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Fig. 5 Advertisement for Èl tropicalisimo Show de Tongolele' in Mexico, n.d. Also published in Elena Poniatowska's Todo Mexico (1990).
discourse. And, like other embodied discourses, it can have a variety of relationships with its frame, or its body. While the mulata cocktail may function as an embodiment of discursive congurations, it helps to understand the constructs of the mulata body including the diverse processes of her objectication. The mulata's body as a modeled singularity could also be the site where the discursive practices of performativity might be imagined: neither black nor white, but in-between the orders of an enacted differentiality. Similar to gender performativity from which Judith Butler has suggested it (gender) can always be adopted and then performed race performativity not only subverts the dominant hegemonic discourse but it borders the relation between self and other, black and white (and the inbetween). These relations are rooted in the materiality of histories born of the confrontation between cultural entities of unequal power through which identities of difference are often constructed. When dealing with the mulata's body, race performativity cannot be theorized apart from heterogeneity, hybridity, creolity, and/or resistance. Because it cannot be located without granting access to both black and white, the need to speak of cultural difference embraces the desire to escape essentialism and proves that although, white and black are separate and distinctive, both take part in structuring the intricate genealogy of the mulata body. Understanding this dynamics means attending simultaneously to both its aspects: the mulata body as metaphorical gure for the cultural division between the two black and white and as a non-metaphorical symbol marking the narrative embedded in slavery, male desire and the process of self-invention. In the words of Kutzinski, the mulata's body `may be feminine in appearance, but much more signicant than its gender attributes is that it is the site of an erotic ``performance'' represented as feminine'.39 In her analysis of Cubanness and the portrayals of the mulata, Kutzinski conceives such a body marked by sexual and racial differences. By suggesting that the mulata body has all the attraction of a mythical site, Kutzinski looks at this body in its relation to being captive and absent but continuously displayed as spectacle. She argues throughout Sugar's Secrets that the mulata body produces the character of women's oppression under the rule of many different systems. Indeed, as a signier of a masculinist imagination the mulata's specicity is denied and asserted simultaneously. This visible/invisible paradox marks the process of objecthood/subjecthood
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150 arrizn Race-ing Performativity through Transculturation, Taste and the Mulata Body
affected by the cultural deracination, which functions as the intellectual and emotional counterpart to enslavement. However, it also offers a way of looking at the performativity of race within a circulating model of cultural exchange because the mulata's body subverts metaphysical, cultural, and racial boundaries. The subversion works against the imperialism of `purity' that has seriously inuenced the problem of xenophobia by maliciously obscuring the polyvalent agency that may dene particular kind of bodies. Through transculturation and its intercultural negotiation, the performativity of race can be traced to the genealogy of the mulata body in confrontation with otherness and with the sense of the incomplete self. If the theories of gender performativity have multiple sources, the performativity of race must interconnect the space for racial, social and cultural coexistence. In this context it would be unthinkable to speak of the mulata body without representing the relation of sameness and difference because its performance does not obey any regulations. As a hybrid body, that can perform both whiteness and blackness, the mulata's subaltern agency becomes a reinscription of the divided and hyphenated self. In the words of Jennifer DeVere Brody, the `hyphen performs it is never neutral or natural', because it marks `the tension between assimilation and difference'.40 But the mulata body, which is the result of the cross between both black and white plays out separation and contrasts. The act of being caught in-between opens up a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articulation may be obvious because agency is constituted through these interactions.
notes
1 2 Recipe from Steven Raichlen, The New Florida Cuisine: Miami Spice (New York: Workman Publishing, 1993), p. 15. The three women I spoke to about the drink were Carmelita Tropicana, Lillian Manzor, and Ela Troyano. When I tried the mulata myself, I found it an interesting blend of contrasting avours that produced a delicious taste. For example, see Ramon Pedreira Rodrguez, Mi Recetario de Cocteles Cubanos (Madrid: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1999), p. 70. As opposed to the feminine form mulata, mulato is the masculine gender inection. Mulato also signies a long, tapering, dried poblano chile with a dark chocolate-brown colour and a mild to medium hot avour. A traditional ingredient in various regions of Mexico, the mulato is often used in mole sauces. In order to grasp the notion of the modern in Latin America, one has to discuss the transcultural realignments of historical and political afliations, and of Latin America's participation in them. In my view, the modern subject in Latin America deals with the politics, culture, and new forms of the racialized body. Historically, of course, postmodernism replaces the institutionalization of modernism and the construction of elaborated symbolic systems. Thus, more than a new era in Latin America, postmodernism becomes a new form of interpretation, a new `reading' of the postcolonial body. Antonio Bentez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, translated by James E. Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 21. Thus transculturation can be explained as an intercultural body that is associated with colonial encounters and with a system that resists and contests the powers of domination.The term transculturation was coined by anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940. He formulated this neologism as a way to counteract and subvert the homogenizing grammars implicit in the term àcculturation', which Anglo anthropologists had coined in the late 1930s. Specically, Ortiz's notion of
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transculturation was a response to Melville J. Herskovits's work Acculturation: The Study of Culture Contact (1938). For more information on the theory of transculturation, consult also Diana Taylor, `Transculturating Transculturation', in Bonnie Marranca ans Gautam Dasgupta, eds., Interculturalism & Performance, (New York: PAJ Publications), pp. 6074, Silvia Spitta, Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America (Houston: Rice University Press, 1995), Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chavez-Silverman, eds., Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1997), and my article `Transculturation and Gender in US Latina Performance', Theatre Research International, 24, 3 (1999), pp. 28894. Mary Louise Pratt refers to the `contact zone' as the space of colonial encounters in her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. Diana Taylor, `Transculturating Transculturation', p. 63. Vera M. Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 5. Antonio Bentez-Rojo, `Three Words toward Creolization', in Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie Agnes Sourieau, eds., Caribbean Creolization: Reections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity (Miami: University Press of Florida, 1998), p. 55. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 56. Antonio Bentez-Rojo, `Nicolas Guillen and Sugar', Callaloo 10, 2 (1987), p. 331. As a special issue on Nicolas Guillen, this number of Callaloo was edited by Vera M. Kutzinski. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, translated by Harriet de Ons (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 9. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid., p. 16. Juan A. Martnez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 19271950 (Miami: University Press of Florida, 1994), p. 122. That was the case of Malintzn Tenepal (La Malinche or dona Marina) who served as Hernan Cortes's interpreter and mistress, and the mother of his mestizo son. She also became the intermediary between two cultures. La Malinche, as it was known by the Indians, has become a national symbol of the cultural tyranny embedded in the process of colonization. Artists, critics and historians have noted the historical and mythical representation of La Malinche as a paradigm of this legacy of betrayal repeatedly. The rst victim of the Spanish colonization, La Malinche was known for her ability to speak and understand many different languages. By becoming Cortes's `tongue', she betrayed her people. The inaugurators of the Afro-Caribbean movement were Lus Pales Matos, a Puerto Rican, and the Cubans Jose Zacaras Tallet and Ramon Guirao. These authors, as opposed to Guillen, are white. Their achievements often have been portrayed as products of the stereotypical black of mystery, eroticism, and dance. For example, by 1935, nearly 50 per cent of all land operated by sugar companies in Puerto Rico was under the control of four big American-owned interests. Nicolas Guillen, Antologa mayor (Havana: Ediciones Union, 1964), p. 46. I am responsible for this and later translations. The same poem was included in Songoro cosongo, the following year. Antonio Bentez-Rojo, `Nicolas Guillen and Sugar', p. 340. Antologa mayor, p. 47. Santera (the celebration and veneration of saints) legitimized itself along with Catholicism as a national religion, inuencing language, music, literature, theatre, dance, painting, etc. In Cuba the patron saint is the dark-skinnned Virgin of la Caridad. She was also the Oshun of Santera. Antonio Bentez-Rojo, `Three Words toward Civilization', p. 55. Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets, p. 179.
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29 Although both authors have been acclaimed as the two greatest Antillean poets, most comparisons have tended to value Guillen's work more highly. Pales Matos has been charged with just being another white author who took advantage of his talent and inspiration to exalt the black body in the Puerto Rican context. Luis Pales Matos, `Plena de menealo' (Shaking it), in Margot Arce de Vasquez, ed., Luis Pales Matos: Obras 19141959 (Rio Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1984), p. 528. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). Said conceives the notion of Orientalism as a discourse of domination in which the Orient is closely connected to the West's knowledge about it and its domination over it. Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets, p.165. For a critical study of the representation of Afrocubans in Cuban cigar lithographs see Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets. For an examination of early twentieth century Cuban art see Martnez, Cuban Art. In Cuba, for example, this factor is particularly signicant because it was one of the last countries to abolish slavery. Nancy Morejon, Ours the Earth: Poems by Nancy Morejon, translated By J. R. Pereira (UWI, Mona: Institute of Caribbean Studies, 1990), p. 9. Ibid., p.10. Elena Poniatowska, Todo Mexico: Tomo I (Mexico: Editorial Diana, 1990), p. 22753. Carmelita Tropicana, `Milk of Amnesia/Leche de Amnesia', The Drama Review: The Journal of Performance Studies, 39, 3 (1995), p. 96. Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets, p. 174. Jennifer DeVere Brody, `Hyphen-Nations', in Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster, eds., Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representations of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 149.
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alicia arrizn is Associate Professor at UC Riverside where she teaches in the departments of Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies. She is author of Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Indiana University Press, 1999), a book selected as one of ten Òutstanding Academic Titles' by Choice in 2000. Her latest book is a co-edited anthology, Latinas On Stage (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 2000). Some of her articles have appeared in The Drama Review: The Journal of Performance Studies, Ollantay: Theatre Magazine, Mester: Literary Journal, Theatre Journal and Theatre Research International.
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Arrizon, Alicia. Race-Ing Performativity

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Race-ing Performativity through Transculturation, Taste and the Mulata Body

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The choreography of the mulata's body

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