Race/Class/Language: "El Negro" Speaks Cuban Whiteness in the Teatro Bufo

Abstract

An important phenomenon within nineteenth-century Cuban popular culture is the presence of white actors (or writers) in blackface portraying blacks with widely varying, yet always problematic, forms of speech. This phenomenon includes representations of pseudo-intellectual black Cubans, among them versions of the negro bozal and the negro catedrático. I analyze examples of these figures through some of the popular theatrical genres in which they appear: the immediate precursor to the teatro bufo, and especially the teatro bufo itself (a genre of Cuban blackface comedy akin to U.S. minstrel shows) and a sub-genre of the bufo known as negro catedrático plays. Specifically, I look at Fernández Vilarós's Los negros catedráticos trilogy, and Sánchez Maldonado's later bufo entitled Los hijos de Thalía. Examining the intersections between racial identity, class relations, and language -the hierarchization of linguistic registers based on conceptions of "proper" or "authentic" language and associated personal qualities -sheds light on the dynamics and function of these representations. Though written and staged within a thirty-year period, the two works display very different manifestations of the same race/class/language nexus. I seek to understand how Cubans, as witnessed in these two plays, shift from ridiculing and rejecting blacks for not being able to speak "properly" to ridiculing and rejecting blacks precisely for speaking "properly." I find that the explanation lies in the interplay between the Afro-Cuban figures and the figure of the (white) Cuban intellectual and his/her linguistic and cultural authority. Through this interplay white Cubans, and primarily those of the lower and middle classes, use the Afro-Cuban to speak, to convey through linguistic register and to generally express, white Cuban identity.