Mulata Nation: Visualizing Race and Gender in Cuba

By Alison Fraunhar

Repeatedly and powerfully throughout Cuban history, the mulata, a woman of mixed racial identity, features prominently in Cuban visual and performative culture. Tracing the figure, Alison Fraunhar looks at the representation and performance in both elite and popular culture. She also tracks how characteristics associated with these women have accrued across the Atlantic world.

Widely understood to embody the bridge between European subject and African other, the mulata contains the sensuality attributed to Africans in a body more closely resembling the European ideal of beauty. This symbol bears far-reaching implications, with shifting, contradictory cultural meanings in Cuba. Fraunhar explores these complex paradigms, how, why, and for whom the image was useful, and how it was both subverted and asserted from the colonial period to the present. From the early seventeenth century through Cuban independence in 1899 up to the late revolutionary era, Fraunhar illustrates the ambiguous figure's role in nationhood, citizenship, and commercialism. She analyzes images including key examples of nineteenth-century graphic arts, avant-garde painting and magazine covers of the Republican era, cabaret and film performance, and contemporary iterations of gender.

Fraunhar's study stands out for attending to the phenomenon of mulataje not only in elite production such as painting, but also in popular forms: popular theater, print culture, later films, and other media where stereotypes take hold. Indeed, in contemporary Cuba, mulataje remains a popular theme with Cubans as well as foreigners in drag shows, reflecting queerness in visual culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Aug 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781496814449

Alison Fraunhar

Alison Fraunhar is associate professor of art and design at Saint Xavier University. Her work on Cuban art and culture has been published in such periodicals as Women’s Art Journal; Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures; and Hispanic Research Journal, as well as in the edited volume Latin American Cinema: Essays on Modernity, Gender and National Identity.

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MULATA

NATION

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2018 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2018

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fraunhar, Alison, 1954– author.

Title: Mulata nation: visualizing race and gender in Cuba / Alison Fraunhar.

Description: Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, [2018] | Series: Caribbean studies series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018009783 (print) | LCCN 2018016604 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496814449 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496814456 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496814463 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496814470 (pdf institutional) | ISBN 9781496814432 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Racially mixed people—Cuba—History. | Women—Cuba—History. | Stereotypes (Social psychology)—Cuba—History.

Classification: LCC HT1523 (ebook) | LCC HT1523 .F73 2018 (print) | DDC 305.4097291—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009783

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT BECOMES A NATION?

Nationalist Desire in Print Culture

CHAPTER TWO

PERFORMING THE MULATA, PERFORMING MULATAS

From the Colony to the Republic

CHAPTER THREE

COVER GIRLS

Mulatas and Artists between the Avant-Garde and the Popular in the Republic

CHAPTER FOUR

SCREENING THE NEW (WO)MAN OF THE REVOLUTION

Mulatas into Citizens

CHAPTER FIVE

FROM THERE TO HERE

The Politics of Mulata Self-Fashioning

CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of a long and winding research trail that began at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1997. In the years that followed, the project took twists and turns, ran down dead ends and blind alleys, came upon unforeseen vistas, absorbed local and world events both anticipated and unexpected, and ended up a long way from where it began.

Along the course of this journey, I have been enriched and challenged by the grace and generosity of scholars and institutions both in the US and Cuba. At UCSB, Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeanette Peterson introduced me to research and critical thinking. I am forever grateful for their scholarship and the examples and guidance they provided. A workshop at the Getty Research Institute helped me refine the project and think beyond my narrow focus; a Bancroft Library Fellowship allowed me the crucial luxury of working with primary sources. Along the way, publication and conference presentations and invited lectures helped me to further refine and shape the ideas that drive this project. Among these, earlier versions of the following chapters have been published elsewhere: Chapter 4, Mulata Cubana: Between narration and nation; Latin American Cinema: Modernity, Gender and the Nation Shaw, Lisa and Stephanie Dennison, eds. Raleigh, NC McFarland (2004) pp. 160–79; Chapter 2 in "Marquillas Cigarreras: National Desire in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Hispanic Research Journal 9, no. 5, December 2008) pp. 457–77.

Over the long durée of this project, I have benefitted greatly from collaboration with several institutions. In the US at Florida International University, I am especially thankful for help at the Cuba Research Institute and the generosity of its director, Jorge Duany, as well as CRI’s gracious staff; and at Special Collections at the Green Library, Althea (Vicki) Silvera, who shared freely her time, conversation, and the resources of the collection. I am grateful to Frank Luca and his staff at the Wolfsonian/FIU Library in Miami Beach, who provided access to an unparalleled collection of Cuban print ephemera. I first visited the Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC) at the University of Miami before I even had a project; I thank the Collection’s first director Lesbia Varona and the staff through the years for their helpfulness and enthusiastic support for my work. Martin A. Tsang, the current director of the CHC, is a trusted interlocutor and co-conspirator and to him, all props.

In Cuba, Obdulia (Yuya) Castro and Ana Oliva, librarians in the Sala Cubana at the Biblioteca Nacional Jose Marti, allowed me rare access to the library’s archives and welcomed me on successive visits. An early visit with Zoila Lapique introduced me to the erudition and knowledge of Cuban scholars. At the Museo Municipal de Regla, Pedro Cosme and Raisa Formaguera introduced me to the work of Jose Hurtado de Mendoza, one of the many unexpected and direction-changing discoveries made on this journey. Luz Merino Acosta and Ramon Vazquez Diaz of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes generously shared their deep knowledge and stimulating conversation. Eduardo Hernandez Santos, Mariette Pathy Allen, Juana Valdes, Crystal Pearl, Elio Rodrigues, Luis Gispert and Maria Magdalena Campos Pons generously allowed me to reproduce their magnificent artwork. Conversations with Dannys Montes de Oca and many other artists, scholars, curators, and historians in Cuba enhanced the project and enriched my life. Thanks to all. Dedicated staff members at the Instituto de Arte e Industria Cinematografica Cubana facilitated research and access to Cuban film culture, and Alica Garcia Garcia and Sara Vega at the Cinemateca de Cuba further introduced me to structures and knowledge of historical and contemporary Cuban film production. Raquel Carrerra facilitated image reproduction permission with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Jose Pepe Veiga generously made his incomparable archive available to me. Among many dear friends in Havana, Alida Reyes and her family always made me feel like a favorite cousin, opening their home and hearts to me.

At Saint Xavier University, I received several faculty grants and sabbatical leave to support travel, research, and conference presentations; in Chicago, colleagues and co-conspirators Olga Vilella, Jayne Hileman, and Virginia Miller kept my spirits up and my mind working through the cold winters. Martin Tsang, Juan Martinez, B. Christine Arce, and Gilda Santana offered insight and companionship on my frequent visits to Miami. To all of these friends, colleagues, and mentors, I offer my deepest gratitude.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Dorothy Lewis Fraunhar and Gilbert Fraunhar, whose passions informed my interest and whose love and support allowed me to pursue my dreams, and to my daughter, Sylvie Grace Fraunhar, who made it all worthwhile.

MULATA

NATION

INTRODUCTION

Two images bracket this study: Mulata del Rumbo by Víctor Patricio de Landaluze, from 1881 (fig. i.1),¹ and Eduardo Hernández Santos’s untitled photograph of 2005 (fig. i.2). Mulata del Rumbo is a nineteenth-century lithograph depicting a young woman of mixed race in an iconic pose of self-aware flirtatiousness, and the untitled photograph is a contemporary image of a cross-dressed young man performing the figure represented in the lithograph, albeit without the coquetry. Both of these images depict Cuban mulatas, but where Landaluze’s mulata is an invented figure, a representation fulfilling social fantasy (and social function), Hernández Santos’s mulata is a real, flesh-and-blood individual—furthermore, an individual who is actively producing and performing her own identity. In both images, the subjects return the spectator’s gaze, but in Mulata del Rumbo the coyly gazing subject is the representation of a stereotypical view by a white male artist, whereas Hernández Santos’s unnamed mulata is an individual, an active participant in her representation; her gaze is direct and demands an engagement with the spectator, to be seen for who she is. The long trajectory linking these competing images, how they are produced, reproduced, contested, and reified, is the subject of this book.

Through his prolific body of drawings, lithographs, and paintings, Landaluze was a key figure in the visualization of cubanidad, the quality of what is uniquely Cuban, including people and places.² The nineteenth-century cubanidad that Landaluze helped to articulate has been surprisingly resilient, and his imaginary mulata is by no means a mere ghost of the past. Contemporary Cuban visual culture continues to draw from Landaluze’s iconic images. Within the teeming visual landscape I encountered on my first trip to Cuba in 1997 were signs of the publicity campaign for a brand of rum called Ron Mulata, launched in 1993, which reiterated this trope. The then-new brand reflected Cuba’s cautious opening to tourism and trade in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and the devastating so-called Special Period in Time of Peace in Cuba that followed. The labels and advertisements featured an image of a young woman of indeterminate race garlanded with a wreath of sunflowers, invoking the visual heritage of nineteenth-century lithography (fig. i.3).

The protagonist of the ad, for this is clearly a performative image, engages the spectator with an expression at once grave, modest, and sultry: the image and the persona projected through it are based upon a long line of iconic Cuban mulatas.³ The idealized mulata depicted in the Ron Mulata label is understood to be a static subject whose agency is latent rather than active. This image endorses a particular world view, interpellates subjects into discursive positions, and signifies and repeats certain discourses. We are made aware of the mulata’s participation in these processes through her gaze at the spectator and the spectator’s reciprocal gaze at her. The image is self-reflexive and performative and at the same time representative; it reminds the spectator that the mulata is constructed and performed according to certain criteria.

The image captures several of the paradigmatic characteristics commonly attributed to the mulata cubana: sensuality, rhythm, flirtatiousness, and availability. Both the Ron Mulata label and Mulata del Rumbo are popular or popularizing images: mass produced, widely reproduced, commoditizing and commodities in themselves, images such as these have tremendous rhetorical power to produce consensus and identification. While analyses of identity and identity formation have historically looked to elite cultural sites (whether textual, visual, or performative), it is within the popular registers of these cultural forms (popular theater, print culture, and, later, film and other media) that identity and stereotype take hold. In this book, I aim to explore how the figure of the mulata has been represented and performed through gaps and intersections between elite and popular cultural production.

The mulata was commonly figured as a bridge between European subject and African other (although this binaristic definition ignores indigenous and Asian elements that also contributed to the mulata’s appearance and mythology), seen (through European optics) as embodying the sensuality attributed to Africans in a body more closely resembling the European ideal of beauty. Black women were too different from Europeans to be typed as tropes of desire in the same way mulatas were; although represented as highly sexualized, embodying raw, primitive, animalistic passion, the otherness of black women was more extreme and thus generated a higher ratio of fear to desire.⁴ The mulata was European enough to be visible and beautiful to the white male subject, and African enough to be typologized as sexual, primitive, desirable, and available. An understanding of this representation, how and why and for whom it was useful, and how it was both subverted and restated over time is crucial to our understanding of how the mechanism by which race and gender operate simultaneously as signs of desire and of nation continues to produce meaning for the nation. It is the tension between varying and occasionally competing discourses of slavery and racism, erotics and nation, that makes necessary the constant reiteration and repetition of the stereotype.

The Ron Mulata illustration fits within an archive of images of mulatas most famously represented by Landaluze’s often reproduced lithograph; like the Mulata del Rumbo, the vaguely quaint, charming look of the girl depicted on the Ron Mulata label is something of a red herring. Beyond serving as the poster girl for marketing rum—and its associations with pleasure, intoxication, and sugar (all characteristics shared with the mulata)—the mulata is associated in Cuba with both darker iterations of the Virgin Mary (particularly the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre) and Ochún, the Yoruba orisha (deity) of dance, flirtation, honey, romance, rivers, sensuality, and femininity: the sunflowers in the Ron Mulata girl’s necklace are particularly associated with Ochún.⁵ Both the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre and Ochún are especially important to the construction of the mulata through shared attributes and skin color. These associations coalesced into an (apparently) stable set of attributes that became inextricably linked to the nation, and the mulata became the paradigmatic figure of cubanidad. These subject positions constitute the paradoxical, impossible subjectivity of the mulata as a sign of Cuba.

In The Repeating Island, a key text for understanding the metadiscourse of the Caribbean and especially Cuba, Antonio Benítez-Rojo deconstructs the iteration of the mulata Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of Cuba, tracing her roots back to and beyond the black madonnas of European origin, the preconquest indigenous deities worshiped by the Taíno and Arawak, and her most important other, Ochún.⁶ Indeed, these specific predecessors can be mapped out, and affinities stretch even further: the reverberating discourse of mulataje—the affective and performative qualities associated with the mulata—finds links to the Indian yakshi, the Greek maenad, and the European gypsy immortalized by Prosper Merimeé as Carmen.⁷ The multiple origins of the trope of the mulata foreclose on a binaristic reading of the Caridad/Ochún.⁸ Although the Virgen has her roots in Spain, her legend is uniquely Cuban: in the foundational story, she appeared to three boys (one white, one black, and one indigenous) adrift in the Bahía de Nipe north of Santiago de Cuba on the easternmost edge of the island in 1610. Her miraculous rescue of the boys was witnessed and recounted by an African slave, Juan Moreno, and hence the legend envelops the entire imaginary nation, racially and geographically. In addition to attributes of sensuality, dance, femininity, and sweetness, certainly compelling in themselves, we must include the mulata’s metonymy with agricultural products closely associated with Cuba—sugar along with rum and tobacco—as reasons for her persistence as a prominent sign of Cuban culture. These commodities and embodied practices are folded into the Cuban national narrative and have been persistent themes in Cuban cultural production.

Of course, the imaginary mulata’s physical appearance and attributes are by no means uniquely Cuban.⁹ The characteristics of sensuality, rhythm, and desirability that I have cited as attributes of the mulata cubana are not unique to this body and this island nation; they are pervasive throughout Latin American and Caribbean cultural production. Mulato/as signify a number of national identities throughout the greater Caribbean region, and they do so in a number of colonial and creole languages. The mulata is linked to larger discourses of the Caribbean, the Black Atlantic, Latin America, and the plantation economy, and the issues I raise in the context of Cuba have resonance in this expanded field. In my study, I am inspired by Benítez-Rojo’s method: in repetition, rhythm, return, circularity, and the productive chaos of the sea there are no final answers, no definitive readings, only endless coalescences and dissolutions. The reverberating discourses of mulataje play out across the Atlantic world. Benítez-Rojo (following Sidney Mintz) situates the Caribbean as a societal area and a meta-archipelago: a fragmented bridge connecting North and South America, and America to Europe and Africa. While the islands and the continents bordering the Caribbean have diverse linguistic and geohistorical formations, they share certain structural and social modalities that link the Caribbean in a network of epistemological relations.¹⁰ Each island has its own specific geohistory, including its colonial and imperial legacy, language(s), population, geography, cuisine, cultural practices, weather, and economy, and thus resists unification under a master theory (itself a tellingly problematic mechanism of colonialism); but to follow the titular conceit of The Repeating Island, the Caribbean can’t resist repeating, aggregating, resonating, and reverberating. Benítez-Rojo declared that the spectrum of Caribbean codes is so varied and dense that it holds the region suspended in a soup of signs.¹¹ This soup of signs is a more satisfying metaphor than the melting pot or Fernando Ortiz’s famous ajiaco; in the latter, each individual ingredient retains its original form, color, texture, and taste, whereas in Benítez-Rojo’s soup the ingredients (signs) continually dissolve and combine to create new flavors and textures.¹² People have come and gone from Cuba for millennia in waves, and mulatas have featured prominently in this soup of signs ever since the voluntary and involuntary arrival of Europeans, Africans, and Asians. All these groups and individuals have ceaselessly and repeatedly changed Cuba, and the way Cuba sees itself and the self it projects to the world beyond its shores.

The qualities and histories associated with mulataje have accrued over centuries and across diasporic and exilic space. Mulataje, like blackness or Jewishness, is constituted from geographic, phenotypical, and cultural markers that are recruited as signifiers of (always/already unstable) identity, and interpreted through an epistemological framework constructed on a foundation of colonialism and imperialism. Mulataje is destabilizing and disruptive to the dominant social order not only because it unites incommensurable markers of race and class but also because it doesn’t stay put; it is neither/nor; it resists regulation either overtly or slyly, appearing to comply with the social hierarchies as it undermines them. Mulataje shifts positions, encroaches, seduces, mimics, appropriates, and rebels, affording people of color the agency that would have been otherwise unattainable.

Mulata daughters born to black women in colonial Cuba were partially European, containing enough European subjectivity to fulfill the colonizer’s desire for a subaltern who is like but not quite, in Homi Bhabha’s famous phrase.¹³ In the often quoted essay Of Mimicry and Man, Bhabha is concerned with colonial mimicry; he is interested in what he calls its slippages, the way that mimicry (the subaltern’s adaptation of colonial norms and practices) points to and exceeds colonial knowledge and colonial control. According to Bhabha, the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.¹⁴ His observations about the mechanics of mimicry refer both to the colonial construction of subalternity and to the threat it posed: [T]he menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.¹⁵ The menace of mimicry resides both in the disruption of (colonial) authority and in the subaltern appropriation of colonial customs and practices, which cannot be adequately policed. While Bhabha is interested in the slippages produced by colonial discourse and not in mixed-race bodies, his ideas about mimicry have been useful for thinking about embodied hybridity and mimicry such as that produced in representations and the performance of the mulata. Central to the construction of Cuban colonial subjectivity, the idea of the mulata is generated through colonial processes; it works as a boundary between colonizer and colonized subject positions, at the same constantly threatening to transgress that boundary. This is the root of the colonial epistemological crisis. Bhabha goes on to explain: "The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal."¹⁶ The mulata’s multivalence, as the internalized and expelled other of the colonial subject, fulfills both rupture and suture: disruption through the sexual desire she embodies, and suture by demarcating and transgressing the boundary between the social order and the realm of the imaginary.

Bhabha notes that ambivalence is a constitutive aspect of colonial mimicry; but it is an ambivalence between not only two opposing positions, a unified colonizer and a unified colonized. While these are arguably the two most important positions within the Cuban colonial episteme, each of these terms is constituted by multiple subjects occupying multiple positions, and it is within this changing and unstable matrix that mimicry, slippage, excess, and difference are generated. Perhaps Bhabha’s deployment of the term can be understood as an attempt to stake out the broad contours of South Asian colonialism, predicated upon a binary between European colonizer and native colonized; yet nuances of class, race, and gender within these broad categories must be taken into account to deliver a more holistic understanding of coloniality. Ambiguity accommodates a more open sense of position and identity than ambivalence does, and it creates space for more than two positions. The figure of the mulata, comprising more than two distinct racial origins and occupying more than one social space, is an ambiguous one. While the figure is presented as the bearer of a fixed and closed meaning in colonial-era cultural production, meaning escapes and exceeds even the mere representation of the figure. In her unique position linking the European subject with the African/indigenous/Asian other, she embodies the unstable and polysemic relations of these competing identities.

As several scholars have noted, the word mulata and its masculine cognate mulato is rooted in the Latin mulus or mule, a hybrid creature, as the mulata was (conveniently) thought to be. The offspring of the union of a horse and a donkey, mules cannot reproduce; in the colonial imaginary the mulata, offspring of union between European and African, was reputed to be sterile (in the face of rampant evidence to the contrary).¹⁷ Sterility, indeterminacy, Unheimlichkeit; the sense of the mulata’s exclusion from any natural social order is wryly expressed in the marquilla (the paper wrapping in which bundles of cigarettes were sold in Cuba in the nineteenth century) depicted in figure i.4. It gnaws, this disavowal of the obvious; how is it that despite ever growing legions of increasingly mixed-race babies, the myth of sterility was generated at all? Even when the myth dissipated, the mulata’s placelessness persisted. On the marquilla, the mulata is derided as ni chicha ni limona [sic] (neither fish nor fowl), neither white nor black, by the calesero, the tropic black coachman, another key figure of mimicry and colonial excess, with whom she shares the scene. Throughout Cuban cultural production, the figure of the mulata occupies a myriad of subject positions, including not only that of the demure Ron Mulata girl and the saucy Mulata del Rumbo but that of the drag performer in a present-day Havana nightclub as well. Indeed, I will argue that the figure is characterized not by biological determinism but as a quality of being (what Benítez-Rojo would call a certain way of being) encompassing a wide range of phenotypical markers of skin, hair and eye color, hair texture, and, although the figure is feminized, gender as well. It is as much a gestural, performative way of being in the world, usually characterized by the qualities of sensuality, grace, rhythm, flirtatiousness, love of pleasure, and desirability, as it is a catalog of physical characteristics. As a physical and psychic symbol initially of the colony and later of the nation, and a map of hegemony, the mulata was a shifting sign constructed on unstable ground.

At distinct moments from the early seventeenth century to independence (1899) to the present, images of the mulata have been produced and deployed to optically endorse and contest issues of Cuban identity and citizenship both domestically and internationally. The mulata (and the nation of Cuba) is presented and represented in images and performances; these iterations and reiterations are produced in relation to ever changing social, economic, and political conditions. The figure of the Cuban mulata and the performance of mulataje likewise tease out paradoxes, specificities, and similitudes of the Caribbean in an ever shifting configuration of attributes, not only comprising African and European phenotypologies but incorporating indigenous and Asian characteristics as well, and the performative desire that exceeds race and gender. The quality of mulataje, while embodied, is not located exclusively in the mixed-race female body; mulataje is detached from biological determinism and accrues symbolic meaning over time, as the descriptive is applied to both men and women of different racial profiles.

Furthermore, the expanded, ambiguous definition of mulata that I have proposed here must be considered in relation to notions of individual and national identity. The notion of identity, pervasive within a range of disciplines but seldom adequately defined, can be preliminarily approached through the mirrored concepts of separation and incorporation: that is, how individuals and groups define themselves and how they are defined by others, for a variety of reasons, prominent among which are notions of control and resistance.¹⁸ Beyond this broad preliminary definition, Stuart Hall suggests a model of identity based on ambivalence: that identity is always constructed through [s]plitting between that which one is, and that which is the other. The attempt to expel the other to the other side of the universe is always compounded by the relationships of love and desire.¹⁹ Hall’s use of ambivalence as a constitutive element of identity opens up a more nuanced and complex epistemology of how individuals know themselves and are known by others, and situates the mulata as a privileged example. As Andrew Solomon has recently argued, the terms identity and illness have each been deployed to describe people with certain psychic, physical, and affective traits at different times and in different places; these continue to be key criteria both in self-definition and in long-standing social judgment.²⁰ As we will see, the mulata has occupied multiple signifying positions in Cuban culture, and among these is the diseased or pathological body.

Throughout this book, I am concerned with how the definition (and construction) of the mulata as a marker of Cuban identity is related to ideological and psychosocial agendas; the mulata has projected different social and cultural national values and crisis at different historical junctures. Mulata is a racialized, descriptive term that has been deployed historically to signal a totalizing identity; more recently, it has been used, sometimes self-consciously, to refer to the degree to which an individual’s performance conforms to a predetermined set of characteristics. The social, cultural, and ideological contours of mulataje are not biologically determined, although discourses of biology have long dominated the discussion of identity and identity formation.²¹ According to Diana Fuss: "Identity, because it is never in a moment of critical repose, because it resists the forces of suspension or negation, and because it neither begins nor ends at a point of total immobility, draws its very lifeblood from the restless operations of identification…. [The] subject … comes-into-being (devenir) through the agency of a complex network of identificatory processes—narcissism, aggressivity, misrecognition and objectification."²² Fuss’s insistence on the dynamic operations of identification rather than a static notion of identity helps us understand the active, procedural nature of identity and begins to frame the myriad iterations of mulataje. José Esteban Muñoz takes processes of identity and identification a step further in an operation he calls disidentification:

Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.²³

Set against the liberatory potential of identification and disidentification is the idea of national identity. Discourses of the nation, nationalism, and national identity have been fertile ground for developing and contesting identities; as early as the late nineteenth century, Ernest Renan theorized that the most powerful unifying forces in the development of a sense of national identification are shared suffering and hope for the future.²⁴ By the mid-nineteenth century in Cuba, there had already been incidents of collective crisis (and there would be many more to come) that established a base of shared suffering and memory and discourse about the future of the island, to dovetail with Renan’s theory of national identity. At this time, the mulata was the bearer (as well as the cause) of much of this sense of tragedy; it is thus an ideal body through which to narrate these histories, as the mulata’s hybridity unites the different geohistorical and racial identities that collectively constitute cubanidad. Furthermore, the mulata embodied and symbolized the trauma and tragedy of slavery, upon whose unstable foundation the nation was built. During the colonial era, the mulata was effaced as a person because of race, civil status, and gender, while at the same time she served as a sign of Cubanness. The gap between the imaginary mulata as a symbol of cubanidad and the lived experience of mixed-race women calibrated along gendered and racialized lines is wide indeed. In this study, I am primarily focused on performative and representational registers of mulataje. I am interested in the trope of the mulata in its compliance with and resistance to ideological formations. While this study does not focus on case studies drawn from actual life experiences of mulatas, at several crucial points life and art intersect, and the lived experiences of mulatas and women of color work to both reinforce and contest hegemonic constructions.

The reifying power of stereotypes as prescriptives blurs the often invisible boundary between staged performance and the performance of everyday life: the repetition of stereotypes reifies and encodes behaviors, and these migrate into codes of practice in daily life. Performance and representation occupy at times distinct positions in the realm of cultural production, yet they overlap at even the epistemological level. I understand performance in the intentional or institutional sense of stage and screen, that which Richard Schechner calls twice repeated behavior, but also as a practice of everyday life.²⁵ I use both performance and performativity in an expanded sense, one that is attentive to Judith Butler’s ideas about the production of identity through the repetition of (dominant) cultural norms; she points out that performativity is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names.²⁶ Butler is focused here on gender issues, and indeed she has been criticized for overlooking structures of race and postcolonial power relations in her account of performativity and its operations; nevertheless, the method is highly valuable and can be stretched to include additional hegemonizing factors. Indeed, as I claimed earlier, Mulata del Rumbo is performative both through the attitude and self-awareness projected by the eponymous figure and by the role it plays in reproducing, reiterating, and communicating social values. Performance and representation are intertwined, as actors represent and images perform. Yet the terms diverge also, as representations can be produced with little or no participation on the part of the subject; they are often static and congealed in time, while performance is inherently temporal and bears the potential for change and disruption. The genealogy of the performance of mulataje is a complex mix of repeated behavior, representation, and embodiment. Throughout this book, I link the representation and performance of race and gender in Cuban cultural production, including advertising, fine art,