Caribes 2.0: New Media, Globalization, and the Afterlives of Disaster 9781978819788

Table of contents :
Contents
1 Caribbean Mediascapes: After the Image
2 Enacting Others: Blackface, Brownface, and Caribbean Selves
3 Ratchetness and Vlogging the Self
4 Cities of the Dead: Performing Life in the Caribbean
5 Indebted Citizenships and Afterlives of Disaster
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Caribes 2.0

Global Media and Race Series Editor: Frederick Luis Aldama, The Ohio State University Global Media and Race is a series focused on scholarly books that examine race and global media culture. Titles focus on constructions of race in media, including digital platforms, webisodes, multilingual media, mobile media, vlogs, and other social media, film, radio, and tele­vi­sion. The series considers how race—­and intersectional identities generally—is constructed in front of the camera and ­behind, attending to issues of repre­sen­ta­tion and consumption as well as the making of racialized and antiracist media phenomena from script to production and policy. Jossianna Arroyo, Caribes 2.0: New Media, Globalization, and the Afterlives of Disaster Dan Hassler-­Forest, Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism: Defying E ­ very Label Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini, Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies Bronwyn Carlson and Jeff Berglund, eds., Indigenous ­Peoples Rise Up: The Global Ascendency of Social Media Activism Matthew David Goodwin, The Latinx Files: Race, Migration, and Space Aliens Hyesu Park, ed., Media Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences Melissa Castillo Planas, A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture Monica Hanna and Rebecca A. Sheehan, eds., Border Cinema: Reimagining Identity through Aesthetics

Caribes 2.0 New Media, Globalization, and the Afterlives of Disaster

JOSSIANNA ARROYO

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey London and Oxford, UK

 Rutgers University Press is a department of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, one of the leading public research universities in the nation. By publishing worldwide, it furthers the University’s mission of dedication to excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and clinical care. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Arroyo, Jossianna, 1967– author. Title: Caribes 2.0 : new media, globalization and the afterlives of disaster / Jossianna Arroyo. Other titles: Caribes two point zero Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University, [2023] | Series: Global media   and race | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022028293 | ISBN 9781978819740 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978819757   (hardback) | ISBN 9781978819764 (epub) | ISBN 9781978819788 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Caribbean Area—Civilization—21st century. | Caribbean Area—   In mass media. | Caribbean Area—In popular culture. | Popular culture—Caribbean Area. |   Internet—Social aspects—Caribbean Area. Classification: LCC F2169 .A77 2023 | DDC 972.9—dc23/eng/20220926 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028293 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2023 by Jossianna Arroyo All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) w ­ ere accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. rutgersuniversitypress​.­org

Contents 1

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes: A ­ fter the Image

1

2

Enacting ­Others: Blackface, Brownface, and Ca­rib­bean Selves

28

3

Ratchetness and Vlogging the Self

70

4

Cities of the Dead: Performing Life in the Ca­rib­bean

106

5

Indebted Citizenships and Afterlives of Disaster

133

Acknowl­edgments 157 Notes 161 Works Cited 171 Index 179

v

Caribes 2.0

1

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes ­After the Image The Ca­rib­bean as Image The framing of the Ca­rib­bean imaginary “as image” is filled with contradictory impulses. When I say “image” I am following Josep Catala’s definition of the image as subjective, phenomenological, and culturally constructed, “created” and “performed” by h ­ uman perception. In this sense, Ca­rib­bean images are creative and meta­phoric incursions into the real, rather than expressions of it. Idyllic beaches and resorts and natu­ral landscapes inviting subjects to bouts of fantasy and relaxation coexist with extreme vio­lence, po­liti­cal upheaval, and natu­ral disasters, thus organ­izing the con­temporary Ca­rib­bean mediascape. The infrapolitical-­colonial dimensions of power that cross repre­sen­ta­tion and what I define as “circulation images” clash with moments that, in Georges Didi Huberman’s phrase, create “images in spite of all, “spite of the hell we live or in spite of the risks taken to make them happen” (3). In the mid-1980s Édouard Glissant argued that “Ca­rib­bean unity cannot be guided by remote control” to describe one of the main challenges of understanding t­ hese forms of “cultural self-­discovery,” interpreting them as events that are real rather than imaginary. Glissant discussed the way the truth is manipulated in many of ­these dynamics, and especially its manipulation in politics. In ­these global Ca­rib­be­ans, the map that emerges juxtaposes the smile of the tourist resort and, for instance, the empty city space restored by art and creativity with the displaced bodies of former residents and the racial echo chamber created by Black 1

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ste­reo­typed bodies or ethnic, silenced subjects. It is a geography that includes the imaginaries of natu­ral disasters and the vio­lence of the racial state, or the folding together of the two. In our twenty-­first-­century moment, ­these scenarios have been sited, surveilled, and countersurveilled by cameras, social media sites, and iPhones. ­These technologies endow racialized subjects with a hypervisibility which end up fragmenting their bodies and voices. The vio­lence against t­ hese bodies takes the form of a brutal necropolitics framed by the state. This vulnerability is still the marker for all bodies ­shaped by con­temporary global conditions. Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean bodies carry a specific phenomenological imprint posed by the “object” itself that pre­sents us with the object-­body, enslaved, run down, dehumanized, and surviving with maximum risk among stressful conditions. ­These objectified bodies frame and act upon the spectrality of the real. As we have seen with the impact of hurricanes Irma and María—­the largest natu­ral disasters since Haiti’s earthquake of 2010—­and the 2021 earthquake, photography or “iconic images” have presented themselves in our mediascape. From Katrina to Harvey, from Irma to María, from the Mississippi Delta to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Circum-­Caribbean, Ca­rib­bean communities in exile as well as in their islands of origin do strug­gle to remain connected by social media networks. As technology moves to 4.0 and 5.0 digital worlds con­temporary Ca­rib­bean worlds fall more deeply into economic and po­liti­cal crises of all kinds. If the 2.0 world initiated the technological revolution, the 3.0 and 4.0 worlds represent levels of automation and “smart” technologies like the internet, digital phones and clouds. The industry 5.0 technologies are reflected in our daily lives with virtual worlds making t­ hese products accessible and personal to all. In this contradictory real­ity pushed by neoliberal markets, “the images in spite of all” cross our sense of the real, creating a language that is interpellated by the dynamics of the virtual. This virtual world started with the changes of the po­liti­cal landscape and war machine in the late eighties and early nineties, precisely when the internet was created and Glissant made his statement. Another useful term, coined by Arjun Appadurai is “mediascape.” Appadurai argues that the mediascape refers “both to the distribution for electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, tele­vi­sion stations, film production studios, ­etc.) which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world and to the images of the world created by ­these media. . . . ​What is most impor­tant about t­ hese images is that they provide large and complex repertory of images, narratives or ‘ethnoscapes’ to viewers throughout the world” (298–299). Although this definition was coined in the 1990s during the emergence of the internet and way before the creation of digital content platforms, the same argument can be made today about the reliance on media to locate “ethnoscapes” of content. This phenomena continues to be the most salient feature of the convergent global media worlds. French critic François J. Bonnet’s concept of

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 3

anesthesia, “a deficit of sensations and a growing inability to feel” (11), helps us understand this symptomatologic moment of continuous mourning and the wake-­l ikeness of ordinary life as well as the haunting dominance of the immaterial world of images, knowledge, and information. This anesthesia provokes and coincides with its opposite, the desire to perform affect or a form of histrionic insistence in media worlds. For ethnoscapes, this extreme affect relies on performing identity, race, language, or culture, usually for comical purposes. Vine in the past as well as its successors, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, provide the platforms where diverse forms of ethnic humor are staged. Social media’s version of ethnic humor is seen in the per­for­mances of such DIY stars as LeJuan James, whose routines are sited in ethnoscapes in which the signature be­hav­iors and norms of Hispanics/Latinx are brought in contact with mainland American norms and global youth culture, producing a comic contact zone. Contact zones of more dire import emerge on social media in images associated with vio­lence or death—­from the local news to individual media platforms—­that, while visibly related to previous modes of sensationalism, are now packaged or unpackaged by anyone who owns a phone with a digital camera. The companies that run the platforms try to label ­these images with content warnings, but they are still consumed on a mass scale unimaginable in the past. It is my contention that media deaths—­mostly of Black and Latinx subjects—­and many forms of ethnic humor used on Black and by Afro-­Caribbean diasporic subjects rely on distinct forms of vio­lence and consumption that concentrate on Black bodies as they enact forms of restorative/performative justice. As Black performers deconstruct or work with the tensions of this vio­lence, using sonic forms of humor to critique white supremacy in all its linguistic and imaginary extent, many of t­ hose who have died at the hands of the police do fall into a necro-­ontology that sacralizes their tragic deaths at the hands of the state. While mainstream media repeats ­these scenes of terror, indignation arises, but at the cost of a trauma experienced by Black and Latino communities themselves, as the denial of justice makes t­ hese scenes seem more like warnings than calls for the overthrow of racism. As Joy James and João Vargas ask, “What ­will happen when, instead of demanding justice, we recognize (or at least consider) that the very notion of justice-­indeed the gamut of po­liti­cal ele­ments that constitute formal, multiracial demo­cratic practices and institutions—­produces or requires black exclusion and death as normative?” (193). Even when the justice system delivers a result, such as the indictment of officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd, the contrast with dropped investigations, district attorneys who refuse to prosecute, and daily surveillance due to the harsh policing of p­ eople of color and the working class mourning over extreme violent death, ­whether in families or in communities, remains the order of the day. As Christina Sharpe reminds us, the wake is the ritualistic condition of mourning in regard to Black death in the United States and the death of Black and racialized subjects globally. Sharpe dedicates a few impor­ tant moments of her analy­sis to Haiti as a Ca­rib­bean geography where the

4 • Caribes 2.0

dynamics of the wake are intrinsically located in forms of local and global state-­ sponsored terror. This book departs from and extends Sharpe’s analyses from photography to tele­vi­sion and digital media to also read other Ca­rib­bean spaces, such as the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and their respective enclaves in Miami. Death or the finitude of the body versus the afterlife of the image remains one of the most intriguing aspects of the age of convergence of digital media. Media critic Manuel Avilés Santiago studies the digital epitaphs and memorials published online in social media accounts as forms of memorializing of the self in the case of  Puerto Rican soldiers who have passed away in the Iraq and Af­ghan­ i­stan wars.1 ­These sites remain open and are continuously updated with images of the deceased person, hosting interactions with friends and ­family members. In 2020 and 2021, as many families had to say goodbye to their loved ones, afflicted with COVID-19, without being pre­sent, the parting instead was made from ­behind glass or via iPhones or computer screens. The fragility of life intersected with media as a “tool” or resource, a topos of the “extension of man” literally incorporated in the mortal death scene, the ultimate touchstone of the real. To assume that the body is separable from technology is a humanist fantasy; though ritual practices such as silence, creative endeavors, and the imagination are not necessarily enclosed within anything that can be called social media, ­human life is not separated from technology. What has changed in this scenario is the neoliberal forms of capture of the media image, an event that clashes not only with the politics of the real but with imagination. It is in this clash and tension that I offer my critical view, which sits precisely in the contact zones between media image, vio­lence of capture, and imagination. If the parahuman condition is already aligned with technologies, I do not share the common view that the “subject meme” is the category that is necessarily defining our pre­sent. I see a complex negotiation or dynamic in Ca­rib­bean spaces that plays, defies, and even subverts many dynamics of the neoliberal attempt to capture ­human or digital real­ity or contents. The meme as a product of our pre­sent as well as the creation of social media personas or commercializing the body as product are linked to the ways creative assemblages as well as affect are reproduced in the pre­sent. Ca­r ib­bean mediascapes are media repre­sen­ta­tions of visual content that is authored, produced, or created in the Ca­rib­bean or in Ca­rib­bean diaspora enclaves in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti) from tele­vi­sion, or the uploaded and downloaded content put into mainstream video on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, among o­ thers. From tele­vi­ sion to film, from photography to memes, from the virtual to the viral, the key focus of this book is the role of the racial image—­and its forms of violent or comical content. I am specifically in search of the assertive gesture—­and how it reads Blackness as an echo chamber in con­temporary Ca­rib­bean mediascapes. From the staged photo­graph of a crime to make it look like a racial lynching to

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 5

the uses of televisual blackface/brownface in comedy and joyful gestures or protest actions authored by Black subjects, my main focus is the racial image and what Tina M. Campt has read as the tactical/performative or even furtive gestures of ­those considered visibly Black. ­There is a clear influence of new media “discourse” and visuals in ­these portrayals that is streamed from/to tele­vi­sion and vice versa. Caribes 2.0 engages with ­these questions of invisibility or hypervisibility, binaries and dichotomies around race, racialization, and racism, as well as the violent spectacle created through them, ­either collaboratively or coercively. I maintain that media images appeal to a regime of instant affectivity in the violent, spectral, and perverse dynamics of racial formations, which form dif­fer­ent dimensions in so-­called postracial socie­ ties ­today. In comedy or memes (­those products of a sampling aesthetic) it seems that we are bombarded by blackface or brownface from all media forms—as ­every image contains in one way or another a form of racial impersonation, appropriation, or culture decoding. Some of ­these per­for­mances remain within the traditional ways of “enacting o­ thers,” while some other per­for­mances use the same skin and culture to produce a ste­reo­typical product that becomes marketable for global audiences. Nevertheless, we should proceed with caution when we try to engage critically with the politics of repre­sen­ta­tion and the pos­si­ble languages of consensus built into and through ­these images. Images as well as the flow of information are key ele­ments not only in media-­savvy comedic per­for­mances but also in the way we are reading the per­for­mance of individuals/collectives in po­liti­cal spaces. While the blatant racism in many of ­these images is obvious to many viewers, the critical dismissal of them as simply “racist” or negative puts us inside a binary between positive and negative, the nonracist versus the racist, where the politics of the real closes the conversation before we are able to r­ eally think about the urgency and the vio­lence of the historical totality. Out of the foreshortened conversation emerges a respectability politics that looks for “positive images” without asking fundamental questions about the subconscious racism, homophobia, and sexism of respectability itself. However, a large critique of respectability is not what interests me h ­ ere. While the system of vio­lence to which Black and Brown bodies are subjected is simply too real to be dismissed, I focus on reading, deconstructing, and pushing the racist global image or “meme” further in order to understand its complex and spectral character. Thus, my proj­ect centers on reading race and racialization and seeing how they work with ste­reo­typical per­for­mances of the self and o­ thers (individuals and Ca­rib­bean collectives) in relation to their local/ transnational/diasporic cultures/spectatorship. The aura of negativity, melancholy, and humor, the images’ affective residue, operates within a resonant media echo chamber of signifiers in constant interaction with the Black body, which inserts ­those racialized/racist/ste­reo­typical body images into a mediascape that has a place for them precisely ­because it is genealogically inextricable from the systematic racism that is ideologically neutralized in the idea of “technology.”

6 • Caribes 2.0

In the case of Cuba, and to some extent Puerto Rico, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are ideal platforms for parallel streaming iPhone images taken by citizen journalists as well as in­de­pen­dents and have given bird’s-­eye views of protest, activism, vio­lence against racialized and Black bodies or even more structured forms of protest-­performance with self-­deprecating humor. It does not ­matter, for my purposes, ­whether t­ hese videos are created or “spontaneous.” I look at them, as in the case of “Pánfilo y la Jama!,” as productive echo chambers within which forms of ideological power are articulated and disputed (see chapter 2). These are images that include Black/Brown bodies, bodies commodified or used as “tools,” and mostly follow an anthropological script where subjects who are commodified, Black, racialized, and lumpen are interpellated to perform in front of a camera or an iPhone. Nevertheless, t­ hese shifting signifiers move beyond a specific category of “otherness.” Th ­ ese subjects have been speaking all along, that is true. New digital and convergence media are making it pos­si­ble to see and listen to them and for “them” to listen to each other. ­Today, ­there is a market for these images that encompasses older and newer forms of anthropological curiosity, minstrelsy, and ethnic identification. Sonic ethnic humor cannot be dissociated from forms of neoliberal imaginaries of consumption.

On Spectacle It was the show of the year. ­Every February the NFL Super Bowl pre­sents a halftime show for audiences in an event that is one the most watched shows in the United States and around the world. The planners of the 2020 halftime spectacle faced a very par­tic­u­lar conundrum as the protests led by NFL player Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives ­Matter movement against the violent deaths of Black men and w ­ omen by the police, notably the tragic death of George Floyd, had garnered local and international media attention. By mid-2019, several Black artists declined the invitation to participate in the famous spectacle—­among ­these Ca­rib­bean performers such as Rihanna (of Ca­rib­bean Bahamian descent) and Cardi B (of Trinidadian and Dominican Republic ancestry). Historically, Black artists have been the staple of NFL entertainment, from Prince to Beyonce, Bruno Mars, and Janet Jackson. When J.Lo and Shakira fi­nally accepted the invitation, a discussion about where and how to position the politics of some pop Latina/o artists in relation to racist vio­lence in the United States trended in both mainstream and social media. Once again, the spectacle was in many ways displacing the dynamics of the real, with the magic of per­for­mance being imposed against the racial vio­lence on the ground. The fact that J.Lo and Shakira are two highly vis­i­ble artists of Ca­rib­bean origin (J.Lo a first-­generation Puerto Rican from New York City and Shakira Colombian, from the coastal city of Barranquilla) also revealed the dynamics of whitening in Latino pop, posing the question of why and how certain racial, class, and even color-­coded dimensions of the spectacle cross over the Ca­rib­bean and U.S. Latina/o mediascapes.

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 7

I sat down on Super Bowl Sunday to watch a halftime per­for­mance that departed radically from the usual celebratory atmosphere, where not only the selected songs, choreography, and movements of the artists but also scenography with c­ hildren in cages all pointed back to social crises. The layered per­for­mance not only alluded to the border vio­lence experienced by Latina/o immigrant ­children separated from their families but also criticized the xenophobia of the Make Amer­i­ca G ­ reat ideology coined by the Trump administration. The Arabic tones of many of Shakira’s songs and movements as well as the final touch of the Puerto Rican flag close to J.Lo’s body ­were cues for Puerto Rican viewers but also a critique of the complete failure of the Trump administration to heed the cries of the thousand Puerto Ricans who had died without food or ­water in the months a­ fter Hurricane María. The final song, J.Lo’s pop hit “Let’s Get Loud,” started with some tunes sung by Eme (J.Lo’s ­daughter), was, above all, a call to vote to overthrow the conditions of second-­class citizenship and colonial death imposed by the establishment in the United States. While many conservatives criticized the show for its erotic innuendos and clothing, it was clear that they did not understand or refused to understand this halftime show’s performative language, which was actually centered in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Ca­rib­bean and completely outside the acceptable mainland mainstream. And yes, as in many of the per­for­mances of t­ hese two stars, Blackness remained part of the performative center of this semiotics, a fact that might be too obvious for many Latin American or Ca­rib­bean viewers but was too invisible for ­those American viewers used to pitting the Latina/o label against Blackness or vice versa. For many having some Latina/o “whitened” pop stars playing the racial democracy mixed tape did not suffice; it is part of the same prob­lem we have inherited as we interpret media and spectacle. For ­others, the fact that they could create a script that was a po­liti­cal critique of the past three and a half years of the Trump administration was a startling breakthrough.2 Neoliberalism has presided over a communication technology revolution that has made more vis­i­ble the fact that we all exist in regimes of vio­lence and disregard for life. What has been clear since the global economic collapse of 2008 is that this vio­lence is economic, racialized, gendered, colonial, and connected to forms of death that deny or dismiss the humanity and existence of t­ hose considered “not apt or able” to survive its script. The overarching theme of this book is the analy­sis of dif­fer­ent forms of Ca­rib­be­an/U.S. Latina/o media—­the spectacular, self-­making, critical, activist, and artistic—­and its complex relationship with this neoliberal script. My chapters look at artists, performers, and writers and their literary works, film productions, photo­graphs, dances, comedy routines, and celebrity self-­fashionings, profiling local and international figures who have gone viral to reveal the strategies by which they negotiate their bodies, subjectivities, and agencies in con­temporary Ca­rib­bean mediascapes. I have labeled this scene Caribes 2.0 to underline the dynamic relationship between past and new forms of digital social media apps such as YouTube, Facebook, and

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Instagram in this pro­cess. As I examine many of the practices analyzed in this book, such as blackface-­brownface, self-­making and ratchet consciousness, televisual versus internet humor, marginal voices, and the shifts in social attitude of Ca­rib­bean Latinidades in Miami and Orlando, I take the image as my key to both performative practices and the articulation of the continuing triad of race, gender, and sexuality, as they are inserted as key tropes in a continuing neoliberal script. In this post-­truth regime where cameras claim to see it all, justice and equality remain aspirations in con­temporary Ca­rib­bean and U.S. Latinx spaces. While from the viewpoint of standard critical theory the visual image is assumed to control all the affective, sensorial, and iconic forms of expression in our lives, it is clear that the performative and affective sensorium has occupied what was once called real-­life. Before the neoliberal state centered the biopo­liti­cal as part of the violent theater in the Amer­i­cas—­from Mexico to Central Amer­i­ca, the United States, and the Caribbean—­photography was the standard apparatus for filming vio­lence or observing death as a spectacle, be it of warfare or as crónica roja (a journalistic genre of graphic crime reports). The fact that ­today viral videos of violent deaths are circulated by activists to testify to many forms of abuse from the military to the police, and that this makes itself available for consumption and distribution, as Sayak Valencia has stated brilliantly in her analy­sis of gore capitalism, makes it clear that any reflection about con­temporary mediascapes must confront the dynamics of death as the ultimate violent spectacle. Neoliberalism did not invent the coexistence of spectacle and the theater of death and war, but in annexing it to forms of con­temporary capitalism the regime gave new meaning and currency to the staging of predation on vulnerable bodies—­those of the poor, Black, feminine, trans, disabled, or gender-­nonconforming p­ eoples where t­ hese subjects become the constant ciphers in an order of terror. Spectacle itself w ­ ill continue, but the mainstream is increasingly ethically repulsed by the neoliberal glorying in its own gore. As neoliberalism goes through the permutations of what could be its collapse, the theater of death and injustice it creates is ­going through a radical shift in signifying. Caribes 2.0 is an attempt to read spectacle and media products, artists, and creative contents to analyze the ways race and culture (mostly Blackness, Brownness, and Latinidad) coexist in Ca­rib­bean media and U.S. spaces. I have selected the con­temporary Spanish Caribbean—­Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic and their respective U.S. Latino enclaves in Miami and Orlando as the sites of the most watched media content in the insular Ca­rib­bean. Through their broadcasters Telemundo and Univision and other younger production companies such as Mega TV (based in Miami), media conglomerates define or subcontract a major portion of the Spanish-­language content consumed in the insular Ca­rib­bean and United States. Through Univision, content from Mexico’s Televisa is produced and disseminated to this demographic, while local programming—­news, gossip, variety, or interview shows—­continues to reflect on local realities for a loyal

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 9

but shrinking audience. As Yeidy M. Rivero acutely points out, most local content has dis­appeared from Puerto Rico’s tele­vi­sion programming in the past twenty years, while Univision and other cable broadcasters from Miami are taking a monopolistic market share. In the case of the Dominican Republic, local content is still maintained by a variety of local TV channels (more than twelve in 2010), and that content coexists with ­these main broadcasters. In the case of Cuba, where the state dominates local programming, many local Miami programming as well as shows distributed by U.S. cable networks arrive through “el paquete” (the package), a local Cuban invention where content from ­these networks is downloaded from satellites onto terabytes of a USB drive and sold for two Cuban CUC (convertible currency equivalent to dollars) to locals. Thus, it is clear that most of the televisual and YouTube content analyzed in this book, specifically that which connects artists and performers in the public media sphere, is recognizably the kind of convergence media analyzed by Henry Jenkins (2006). Convergence media takes and mixes content created by traditional forms of media (tele­vi­sion, film) with content created by new media from iPhones or other digital technology and insert it on platforms such as Instagram (IGTV), Facebook (Facebook TV), YouTube, and TikTok. In this book I perform a close reading of events, media discussions, and performers who have ­shaped ­these dynamics in twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century mediascapes. The main questions I address are the following: What is the temporality and sonic impact of the image in the Ca­rib­bean mediascape? What happens when t­ hese repre­sen­ta­tions are out of sync or do not align with (or parody) the neoliberal script? In relation to Blackness, some of ­these questions are ­these: What is the significance of the role of race and racialization in the con­temporary mediascape? How does Blackness interact with Latinidad? And fi­nally, how have the neoliberal script and convergence media cultures affected the subjective dynamics of per­for­mances and repre­sen­ta­tions? I define the neoliberal script as the way in which con­temporary culture centers itself around narratives of success (eco­nom­ically and socially), self-­making, and difference—be it gendered, racial, or economic—in which the appropriation or “repre­sen­ta­tion” of certain qualities leads to the theoretical primacy of the individual before the collective. Centered in the ways capital has defined ­every relationship from the personal to the po­liti­cal in terms, ultimately, of the monetary nexus, the neoliberal script relies on an image of a body that is abled, beautiful, normative, entrepreneurial, dynamic, healthy, and young—­although this category varies according to gender and class. For queer folk, the normative is read through the traditional ­couple script, incorporating normative dynamics of whiteness and the middle-­class ­family in a displacement of difference. The self is transformed into a product, and that product sells or capitalizes social power and ac­cep­tance. The fallacy in the script is that what is required for that social power needs to rely on an image. ­These narratives of self-­making have had a historical appeal in many stages. The neoliberal script relies on testimonio or a bio

10 • Caribes 2.0

of t­ hese histories of the self to be completely effective, thus we are all witness to ­these stories that rely on the illusion of the real. This is how celebrity culture has defined the illusion of the real, narrativizing ­these subjects in terms of their economic participation in the dynamics of capital. Whoever is outside ­these networks “does not participate,” which makes them “invisible” in relation to t­ hese forms of neoliberal subjectivation. It is an invisibility that is felt and is intended to be felt. Caribes 2.0 started by looking at the ways Ca­rib­bean con­temporary subjects in con­temporary Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola negotiated t­ hese politics of visibility in the era of globalization, concentrating particularly on what types of affect, reactions, and publics t­ hese negotiations produced. In the course of my research, I became aware that my original focus promptly moved away from mainstream media and popu­lar culture to focus on the uses of media by writers, photog­raphers, filmmakers, and performers and their own critical dialogue with the narratives of crisis, media exceptionality, and subjectivation. It became clear to me ­after a time that the exemplary survivors of the neoliberal contract ­were artists whose passions resided in what Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, and Willie Thayer have identified as the outside (el afuera) or the imagen exote, the image that is not necessarily repre­sen­ta­tion but hijacks the medium for the artistic experience, making art an in betweenness of suspension and displacement: “El no estar en ningún lugar en tanto terreno propio del arte. Se trata de estar en el ‘entre’ y más allá de la inmovilidad y la movilidad: podría decirse estar ‘en suspenso’ en tensión, en estabilidad y diferimento” (Tacetta 2).3 While ­these artists understand sensorial experiences as the outside of the image or an image in suspense; (­either as nonrepre­sen­ta­tional or as deconstructing the image itself), their signifying happens in relation to the world of popu­lar or mediated products that center and confide in the power of the image. I believe that even in the imaginary produced by popu­lar culture artists or the content produced by local and diaspora vloggers such as La Vampy de Lajas or LeJuan James, we see the instability of the media object in relation to the self. In other words, even when their histories and negotiations fall within or depart from the neoliberal script, the success or failure of their narratives relies on the complex dynamics of the pre­ sent. Time and temporality as well as the several mediations among power dynamics make a product that negotiates its complex dynamics with the mainstream neoliberal script of any content created by local and diaspora popu­lar figures, no ­matter how marginalized. I read ­those negotiations not only from the level of their productions but also based on the fact that they are in many ways, ­either outside or in the realm of the camp, critical or simply humorous forms of affect in relation to the global condition—to the condition of mediated nonbelonging. Visibility could be an experience of critical self-­effacing and nonbelonging even within the popularity enjoyed by the subject or her created brand or product. Or it could be, as is the case for viral web campaigns like the one created about “Pánfilo y la Jama!” in Cuba, an impor­tant echo chamber of many minds, makers, distributers, and commenters that exposes the layers of a failed

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 11

po­liti­cal state (Cuba) that impose themselves on the citizen in a humorous but effective way. ­A fter the fall of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 and the Special Period economic crisis of the 1990s, the opening of Cuba to the outside global market shifted discourses based on the ­battle of ideas, as Cristina Venegas and Antonio José Ponte have brilliantly argued, to a conversation that became more centered around the role of the internet and opening of the island to new ideas and new forms of media, content, and programming. I started to think about this book in the years between 2006 and 2008, when demo­cratic citizen agendas emerged inside the island and Proyecto Varela garnered more than eleven thousand signatures. Many local citizen groups and initiative for democracy and freedom of speech w ­ ere or­ga­nized inside of Cuba. At the same time, in the 1990s many popu­lar Cuban artists went into exile in Mexico and Miami, from which the tie with Cuba was not broken. During ­those years Cuban bloggers Yoani Sánchez and Claudia Cadelo started their critical blogs to describe the economic, social, and subjective precarities of a global Cuba. The same year Yoani Sánchez was invited to a conference at the Cuban Research Institute in Miami, where I presented a paper related to this new trend in media-­cultural communication and its influences on what Rachel Price has referred to as “planet Cuba.” ­These dynamics ­were shifting the distance among the understanding of the divide between popu­lar culture versus high culture not only within Cuba but also in its diasporas. As many scholars began to focus on the blogging phenomenon, I turned to the realm of popu­lar culture to read the diversión or the choteo that is key, according to Albert Laguna and Enrique del Risco, to the humorous dimensions of the Cuban experience—­a dimension of im­mense but unexplored sociopo­liti­cal import. Through my encounter with popu­lar culture I became fascinated with the figure of Mexico’s Cuban-­born resident vedette Niurka Marcos. Her presence across all media spanned the Hispanic space from Mexico to Miami to U.S. Latina/o enclaves in Texas and California. She was a crossover of sorts. Joking with my Cuban colleague and friend Rafael Rojas, I labeled Marcos as an ambassador—­but from whom and to whom? And if of Cuba, of which Cuba? Marcos’s popu­lar performative self-­fashioning is an example of what many have described as la estética del solar (solar aesthetics) in Cuban social spaces but adds to this an in­ter­est­ing feminist agency, one that is paralleled among celebrities only by rap artists such as Cardi B or Nicki Minaj. It forms a Ca­rib­bean ratchet aesthetic that is automatically scandalous to the discourse of respectability. In working on the themes adumbrated in this book, I had the chance, with the assistance of Rojas, as well as the late Cuban writer Eliseo “Lichi” Alberto, to interview Niurka at her home in Mexico City. From 2005 to the time of this writing, Niurka has hosted several tele­vi­sion shows, become a real­ity TV star, and put her name on a line of beauty products. In all of ­these ways she crossed over into almost all the niches of the Latina/o market. I analyze the feminist as well as sociocultural influences on Marcos in chapter 3.

12 • Caribes 2.0

This book centers on the image and its relation to its real and imaginary counter­parts, the bodies that make ­these media specters and are represented in code and their spatial constructions. Caribes 2.0 covers the transition of forms of traditional media such as tele­vi­sion, film, and photography to new forms of digital and convergence media in the 4.0 and 5.0 worlds. As a proj­ect, it started more than ten years ago as my life as a diasporic Ca­rib­bean subject, originally from Puerto Rico, made me realize that the consumption of images was a way of dealing with the need of knowing more about Puerto Rico or remain connected to the ever-­changing realities of the pre­sent. That conundrum touched the lives of all my Latin American friends as well and threaded through my relationship to the countries and spaces I loved in the Ca­rib­bean, such as Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. As I followed ­these images and repre­sen­ta­ tions, sometimes with satisfaction, sometimes with a critically framed dissatisfaction, I realized that the country I had left twenty something years ago not only was completely changing in front of my eyes but was, in many ways, as it happens to many first-­generation immigrants, completely frozen into an image of the country I left. As the economic crisis of the mid-1990s and ­later the crisis of the mid-2000s started hitting Puerto Rico, a­ fter years of po­liti­cal mismanagement ­under a corrupt colonial system that had negotiated the compromise between the populist regime of the past and the savage capitalism of the pre­sent by borrowing—­a solution to the social infrastructure prob­lem taken by so many Latin American countries—­I began to see the affective results of unpayable debts on a commonwealth-­wide scale as they touched the lives of friends and ­family. The country I had grown up in, with its precarious but still vital communities, was long gone. Public investment plummeted, leading to subpar, failing public infrastructure, from sewage systems to universities. Exile became the answer for the young and ­those searching for opportunities. For the first time the numbers of Puerto Ricans abroad in the diaspora became larger than the population of the archipelago itself. My media consumption of local Puerto Rican news, via cable tele­vi­sion as well as social media (which hooked me up in real time with ­family and friends), filled a complete void that sometimes took me into a melancholic place and at other moments made me happy that I could be so connected. It was and it is t­ oday an anxiety-­driven relationship. My social network became not only a ­matter of face-­to-­face and voice-­to-­voice communication but also visiting, or having accounts at, social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter and ­later on Instagram, making me part of a large community of interests and voices that encompassed and represented many periods of my life in the United States—­ and at the same time joined together many first-­generation Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Haitian friends. This is how the research for this book began, with exposure to t­ hese diverse forms of news through social networks that depicted local sociopo­l iti­cal strug ­g les, popu­lar culture, and natu­ral disasters. Puerto Rico made it to the agenda of mainland media, which for the most part had ignored it for de­cades, by becoming another disaster real­ity

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 13

show. While real­ity is not a “show,” as many of the suffering and displaced Puerto Rican families made clear, the disaster and bullying of po­liti­cal leaders led to po­liti­cal mobilization: such as the recent Puerto Rican Verano19 protests. While the languages of po­liti­cal or opinion dissent in the ­bubble of Facebook or social media sites sometimes made dialogues truly difficult or nearly impossible, I started noticing a pattern of relationality as well as connectivity that for the first time conveyed conversations around race, racialization, Blackness, trans, queer, and gender rights, popu­lar culture versus high culture, and lit­er­a­ture and the arts as a source of creation and imagination, among many other topics in the cases of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hispaniola. Collaborations among artists in dif­fer­ent areas (fictional or art film, documentary, photography, per­for­mance) became prominent in the case of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, while they ­were also taken up, ­under dif­ fer­ent po­liti­cal conditions, and a call to creative imagination against ideology by Cuban artists and the diaspora. What separated artists from Cuba and its diasporas also started to shift as well particularly in the 1990s, a­ fter the Mariel generation. In many ways the Ca­rib­bean mediascape in tele­vi­sion, film, and social media in the 1990s shifted into global forms of collaborative creation in all phases and dynamics. Many of ­these themes negotiate the body as a commodity for neoliberal exploitation. Nevertheless, I noticed that Ca­rib­bean artists and performers did not necessarily fall into traditional notions of the body as product. As I show by the many and diverse examples I consider in this book, their complex per­for­mances negotiate visibility while navigating the complex dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, and performativity in island and U.S.-­based media spaces. The phenomenon of Latina/o pop defined by Frances Negrón Muntaner emerged in the 1990s as a vernacular that also formatted Ca­rib­bean Latinidad for neoliberal consumption. As María Elena Cepeda correctly asserts, this Ca­rib­ bean Latinidad encompassed not only the cultural products of the archipelago but also the emergence of stars such as Shakira, making Miami the global point of contact for the creation of a new pop system. This Miami-­centric kind of Ca­rib­bean Latinidad is the main focus of chapter 2, put into relation to what Albert Laguna has defined as diversión, or the role of humor in televisual and media spectacle in Cuban Miami. My close readings of blackface and brownface in Miami local comedy produced by Cubans shows how t­ hese spectacles travel and/or come to represent Afro-­Latinidad. In grounding ­these themes I open a discussion around this question: why do blackface and brownface remain the main visual and sonic template mediations for the global mediascape ­today, not only in the Ca­rib­bean but around the world? The dialogues around this passionately criticized form of racial impersonation—­its forms of closeness, its play with proximities, as well as the sonic qualities that both intimate, in the sense of communicating indirectly, and are even upsettingly intimate—­are also analyzed for the case of the Puerto Rican context. H ­ ere I pick out, as an image-­event

14 • Caribes 2.0

packed with conflicting significance, the burial of Chianita, a popu­lar blackface character created by actress Ángela Meyer in Puerto Rico in the 1970s that was recently buried symbolically for televisual audiences on the island. Black activists in Puerto Rico, in Cuba, and among the U.S. diaspora have been key for the debates around blackface and brownface as a performative form. Chianita’s distinctive speech and the use of a red flower on her head led to a recent (July 2021) debate on Facebook. With the victory of U.S.-­born Afro–­Puerto Rican Jasmine Camacho-­Quinn in the hundred-­meter relay in the Olympics in Tokyo, racist memes made by island-­based Puerto Ricans posed a picture of Chianita with her flower superposed to Camacho-­Quinn’s allegedly arguing that she was Chianita’s grand­daughter. The fact that Camacho-­Quinn put a local red flower ( flor de maga) on her hair for her medal ceremony was celebrated by all Puerto Ricans. Nevertheless, for many racist Puerto Ricans, Camacho-­Quinn was not a repre­sen­ ta­tion of the island as she was Black and born and raised in South Carolina. As the meme indicated, to associate her in familial terms with Chianita, a fictional character in blackface, not only is an act of racial vio­lence but also offers discussions on Camacho-­Quinn’s authenticity as Puerto Rican. In other words, to understand Camacho-­Quinn as a Black Puerto Rican they needed to read her or transform her into a televisual-­fictional or folkloric character, which is in itself a form of erasure. Authenticity around Blackness in Puerto Rico, as Isar Godreau has argued, varies in relation to race and color as many visibly Black Puerto Ricans are questioned constantly about their national belonging. Ángela Meyer, the white actress who plays Chianita, answered the racist meme with a poem, indicating that saying that Chianita was Camacho’s grand­mother was in itself a source of pride and honor and that racists should be silenced. The poem, written in a jíbaro-­décima style, once again copied the style used in Chianita’s performative speech. Activists came back with their video-­poem, performing “Chianita nunca fue negra” to silence Meyer, indicating that her response was another way of reviving her “buried” character and once again get visibility with Camacho-­Quinn’s success. This example shows the complex layers of interpretation and dynamics of media language around race in Puerto Rico. First is the ­actual visibility of Camacho-­Quinn, a Black Puerto Rican and Afro-­Latina ­woman athlete on the world stage, and the fact that for many Puerto Ricans Blackness resides not in the humanity and singularity of the Black person herself but somewhere ­else in the media-­televisual worlds. Th ­ ese microaggressions, which happen in relation to media worlds, do not deny the complexity of blackface or brownface as an act in which not only distance and vio­lence but also closeness reside in semiotic and sonic ways. Chianita is still beloved by many, and I discuss the complex reasons for this love and nostalgia as well as dialogue with activists in Puerto Rico in chapter 2. The role of Black and mixed-­race w ­ omen as protagonists in many of t­ hese racial dramas has created complex dynamics in repre­sen­ta­tion that have led to gendered and sex-­positive visual imaginaries in televisual and digital spaces.

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 15

Chapter 3 is divided into two sections. The first one discusses the role of Ca­rib­ bean ratchet consciousness and its notions of realness in the figure of Cuban vedette Niurka Marcos. A resident of Mexico since the 1990s and a vedette who in her works has appropriated vari­ous nostalgia tropes from Mexico’s golden age cinema, Marcos has broken traditional gender roles through her queer and scandalous persona to become a successful artist. In this chapter I follow her trajectory from local shows in the coastal town of Mérida to Cuba when she was younger to vedette in the soap opera–­centered Mexican media to American real­ ity TV and fi­nally to YouTube star in Latina spaces. Ca­rib­bean ratchet consciousness opens up a site of creative dynamics that negotiates agency out of its marginalization as well as forming a recognizable pattern of self-­making for Cuban artists. She also represents a bridge generation for the artists on the island in relation to Mexico, Miami, as well as Cuba. The second section continues to tease out the layers of ratchet consciousness as it appears in the life and content of two vloggers from Puerto Rico and the diaspora and the 4.0 generation, La Vampy de Lajas (Puerto Rico) and LeJuan James (Orlando). While Marcos moved from tele­vi­sion to musicals, film, real­ity TV, and new media, ­these vloggers started in a more DIY way on YouTube and Vine in 2008 (Vampy) and 2010 (LeJuan), intervening in the public space with home videos filmed on their home camcorders and phones, a technology that did not exist when Marcos was starting out on her ­career. To transmit joy, to increase her happiness, and to see herself in a fun mood ­were some of the reasons that made Dagmar Flores Henríquez, a single mom of five, start making home videos that combined the selfie aesthetic with satire. Mostly, she filmed herself dancing to popu­lar tunes and posted the videos to YouTube. The videos w ­ ere classified as funny, ridicu­lous, or ratchet by many viewers and commenters and became a viral success on the island and among the diaspora. However, her breakout moment came months l­ater in a video that parodied Miley Cyrus’s hit “Wrecking Ball” (2013). This video was filmed in a local park, with lyr­ics in Spanish that w ­ ere not a translation of the original lyr­ics but an original product based on the original song. The song became such a YouTube hit that U.S. local news shows, particularly in Florida, discussed Lajas’s humorously as the Puerto Rican Miley Cyrus. A ­ fter her viral success Vampy continued to make videos, but they did not build on the initial success of “Wrecking Ball.” What went wrong? She was, as I postulate in my chapter, “out of sync” with the global script. What “out of syncness” means in relation to Puerto Rico, an archipelago with a colonial debt of $75 billion and a systematically corrupt po­liti­cal elite? It means an acute relationship of the subject and the content of this same global script that relies not on repetition but on dialogic subversion, one that is open to imagination, creativity, and language difference or even the subaltern quality of the media product or content itself. Many Cuban directors and critics worked with this difference in technology they defined the aesthetics of the tercer cine. For media content and DIY influencers it is more than “third content”; it is per­for­mance that breaks the tie. For colonial

16 • Caribes 2.0

citizens of Puerto Rico such as Dagmar Flores Henríquez it means risking jobs and living in debt and living in forms of neoliberal coloniality. ­These forms of coloniality create a neoliberal subjectivity which as Rocío Zambrana argues, “bears the burden of social reproduction ­under the guise of self-­responsibility but it thereby becomes a site of ‘sovereignty.’ Sovereignty h ­ ere is not the liberal unencumbered self, but a relationship to oneself in terms of ‘control, organ­ization and production of a territory that is the body itself, as a set of norms for its defense and enrichment’ ” (34). This debt has been named unpayable, and Puerto Ricans refuse to pay it, which, in financial terms, means they are “­behind” on the debt. If, as in neoliberalism, time is mea­sured in money, then t­ hose who d­ on’t have any, t­ hose who borrow and cannot pay, t­ hose who are not “too big to fail” (as w ­ ere the bankrupt investor banks in the crash of 2009) exist u­ nder a temporality filled with shame and threats. Revolt ­here means embracing an outlaw, out of sync temporality. As Zambrana reflects, debt in Puerto Rico functions as a form of power and within the realms of the colonial/territorial status of de­pen­dency of the island to the United States, but she adds, “It is a key apparatus for the creation and extraction of value in financialized capitalism, yet one that requires states for its actualization. As an apparatus of capture, the operation of debt involves expulsion, dispossession and precarization. . . . ​Debt lands, aterriza, as Verónica Gago and Luci Cavallero suggest, on bodies and populations” (10). For t­ hese DIY performers, such as La Vampy, who negotiates precarity from gender and class, the prob­lem becomes how to negotiate media visibility out of an attitude of shamelessness to articulate its complete disavowal or critique its capture. The second part of chapter 3 focuses, then, on the vlogging lives and media content of two internet influencers and entertainers from Puerto Rico and its diasporas: Dagmar Flores Henríquez (La Vampy de Lajas) and LeJuan James (Juan Ricardo Atiles Tejada) based in Orlando, Florida. LeJuan James was born in Providence, Rhode Island, was raised in Puerto Rico, and moved to Orlando, as many Puerto Ricans do, when he was in m ­ iddle school. A son of a Puerto Rican ­father and Dominican mom, he started to vlog funny ­family scenes first on Vine and l­ ater on Twitter (when Vine was purchased by Twitter) and Instagram. ­Today his ethnic humor based on the life of a Hispanic ­family in the United States and the generational differences between the first and second generations has millions of followers and corporate sponsors such as T-­Mobile. The trajectories of ­these two examples, one successful (LeJuan) and one not (Vampy), provide insights not only on the complexities of media reception and the ethos of “success” but also on the agencies implicated in being out of sync in our global times. I ­will look at what I describe as narratives of refusal and negotiation as a form of agency for communities on the wake—­the period of mixed mourning and carnival a­ fter death. Chapters 4 and 5 center on the afterlives of slavery and its remnants in the global Ca­rib­bean. As I began the proj­ect of writing this book, I was focused on

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 17

racial images as media per­for­mance and the conflictive dialogue they have with Blackness and racism. As I proceeded, I saw the mark of racial oppression in social regions that w ­ ere apparently framed by po­liti­cal or economic rationality. That rationality is in denial. All throughout t­ hese three major islands and its communities and enclaves, vis­i­ble Blackness continues to be a social marker of poverty, displacement, and vio­lence. Sentencia 168, a law enacted in 2010 as part of the new constitution of the Dominican Republic, denied citizenship and deported Dominicans of Haitians descent who had migrated to the island before 1929 and could not prove their citizenship, creating an atmosphere of social terror and vio­ lence in an already divided Hispaniola. Many attacks against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent working in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans of Haitian descent created a public and international uproar. The main difference is that now cameras ­were capturing ­these displays of vio­lence.

Necroimage An unidentified Black man is dead. His arms and legs have been tied and his body hangs lifeless from a tree, this tree’s “strange fruit,” whose staleness reveals the horror of condensed time—­the minutes before he was killed—­his body left as a spectacle, prob­ably overnight, at Ercilia Pepín’s park in Santiago de los Caballeros, in the Dominican Republic. As the image circulates in social media, rumors start to emerge. The man, still nameless, is identified as Haitian, and the rumors assert that he was killed by a group of Dominican vigilantes who accused him of robbery, took away the lamp and the money he was carry­ing, and killed him. His body was left as a marker and a moral lesson in social terror. What develops in social media, nevertheless, takes the attention from the continued horror set by his death. As the “Haitian” becomes an ethnic body connected with racialization, poverty, and discrimination, the dispute migrates to the issue of ­whether he is a “Haitian” or “Dominican”—­someone who was killed by his own ethnic group or a Haitian killed by Dominicans (un dominicano que murió a manos de dominicanos, o un haitiano que murió a manos de haitianos). The comments of nationalist-­local Dominicans start to emerge; one writes that the image has been used to manipulate the social realities of a “sovereign state,” adding that this “is another NGO scheme created by ­those against decision #168” or, even more incredibly, that “this man is not dead; that is a not a body but a doll, and this is a staged scene.” The vis­i­ble, in the words of Merleau-­Ponty, is a landscape of sorts, uncultivated but wild. Wilderness is a condition that requires inner stillness. But perception—­what involves our senses, feelings, and bodies, as well as our neurons—­moves, displaces, reorganizes images, making them subjective or recognizable. The body of this man, Jean Claude Henry, aka Tulile, a shiner of shoes, is posed as a sign of racial vio­lence, of a po­liti­cal machine, a neoliberal-­ authoritarian state that feeds upon it and, at the extremes, denies it h ­ uman existence—it is a “doll,” inanimate. Meanwhile, my Twitter accounts from the

18 • Caribes 2.0

Dominican Republic as well as my Facebook pages start blinking, and messages start coming in. The vio­lence of the day-­to-­day has become more vis­i­ble as it is codified in law 168, which draws a nativist line defining all Dominicans of Haitian descent born on Dominican soil ­after 1929 as “suspended” Dominicans, who must accordingly legalize their papers and situation in the DR or be deported to Haiti. Days before and ­after this incident, and due to the vio­lence that had started in the capital as well as some border cities against Haitian communities and Dominicans of Haitian descent, Puerto Rican writer Pedro Cabiya, who has lived in the Dominican Republic for more than ten years, received death threats ­because of his defense of citizenship for Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitian lives in general. Many Dominican writers, journalists, and activists who have been vocal against the sentencia in the DR—­Marino Zapete, Juan Bolívar Díaz, Uchi Lora—­received death threats as well. The body of this Haitian man became a visual spectacle, a lesson in social terror threatening ­those who dare to criticize Dominican “patriotism,” “nationalism,” and “sovereignty.” Days l­ ater Cabiya took his pen and wrote two letters in which he impersonated the voice of a “Dominican nationalist.” The humorous language of the letters echoed the best nineteenth-­century costumbrista prose and poetry written in the DR, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, for example, the poem of Juan Antonio Alix, “Diálogo cantado entre un dominicano y un haitiano en la frontera en Dajabón,” where the cibaeño Estanislao kills a Haitian “Papá Bokú” (Priest or Houngan of voodoo ceremonies) ­because he is inviting him to “bailar judú.” Therefore, he is breaking the bound­aries of his fragile self, “yo sí no bailo judú” (vudú). The popu­ lar oral language of Cabiya’s letter—­where the “nationalist” writes the same way he talks in cibaeño accent (from the Cibao region), connects humor, po­liti­ cal speech, and fictions of the collective, traversing discourses of nationalism, class, race, and citizenship. In this case, the letter casts a light on the shared but violent history between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As it is clear in Cabiya’s letter, the unnamed nationalist, representing the popu­lar Dominican modes of speech and repre­sen­ta­tion, is a profile in the character that constructs itself out of a dangerous fiction in which history is reinterpreted and language as reiterated speech becomes a key ele­ment. The letter is in many ways an “embodiment” of one specific type: “Dominican,” nationalist, “racially superior.” Lit­er­a­ ture locates us in the complex world of the ste­reo­type as the nacionalista becomes an ethnic-­identified, “local,” accented “Dominicano.” E estado biendo con sumo interéz cómo se hunifica mi pueblo contra lo traidore de mi patria, la patria que nos legó nuestro glorioso e inmortal prósel Duarte Sánchez y Mella, ese reberde seibano que luchó contra Dessalines, derrotó a Boko Haram en Bois Caiman y degoyó al tirano Ulises Hereaux para liberarno del llugo haitiano que durante más de quiniento años impuso sus sarbajes leyes sobre lo dominicano. Y ese frebol que despiertan en mí la patriótica consitnas de mis compueblanos proliferan en mí cual moriviví der monte por toda la rede sociale,

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 19

en la prenza, en la radio, y en la telebisión . . . ​cuar inescapable canto de sirena. Así pues, ¿dónde me incribo para matal haitiano? [And seeing with interest how my country gets unified to challenge the traitors of the fatherland the fatherland that is a legacy of our glorious immortal leader and famous son Duarte Sánchez y Mella, that rebel from Ceiba that fought against Dessalines, overcame Boko Haram at Bois Caiman, and beheaded the tyrant Ulises Hereaux to f­ ree ourselves from the yoke of Haitians than for more than five hundred years imposed their savage laws upon Dominicans. And that patriotic fervor than patriotic anthems and songs sang by my fellow Dominicans proliferate similarly to the mountainous shame plant over all on social media networks, on the press, on the radio, and on tele­vi­sion . . . ​like an inescapable mermaid song. So, where do I sign to kill Haitians?]4

In this satire the nationalist mentions several facts from Dominican-­Haitian histories that are all exaggerations and lies: outstanding among which is describing the nineteenth-­century Haitian occupation or unification—­which lasted twenty-­two years—as a five-­hundred-­year occupation. Boko Haram, guerrillas from Africa, are completely unrelated to Bois Caiman, the site in Haiti associated to Boukman Dutty, and the Ceremony of Bois Caiman that started the Haitian Revolution in 1791. Cabiya’s nationalist character mocks post-­Trujillo racism, which relies on similar factoids and their spread on social media, but also the literary and historical antihaitianismo used by some canonical writers and intellectuals in the Dominican Republic. It is impor­tant to read the last sentences on patriotic fervor that boil it down to what nationalist ideology is about—­hyperbolic lies spread on social media and through the press, radio, and tele­vi­sion. Like the tropes that animate Trumpism, this nationalist ideology promotes hate and division on the basis of half-­truths and an appeal to a visceral victimhood—in which the self-­pitying victim is r­eally the executioner. The nationalist makes the claim that he is not racist: “Nos acusan de rasismo todo el tiempo, pero eso es un truco para aselnos sentil culpable y no caeremo en esa trampa. Nosotro no tenemos ningún problema con que los haitiano sean casi todos unos mardito negro; el Ovnipotente nos creó a todos por igual” (They are accusing us of racism all the time but that is a trick to made us feel guilty we ­won’t fall into that trap. We ­don’t have a prob­lem that Haitians are almost all of them, damn blacks, the Omnipotent created all of us equally). H ­ ere Cabiya is using Chris­tian­ity and the discourse of equality as it is both mouthed by the racist and denied by his or her rhe­toric, which even makes the universal claim a racist slur against Haitians. The uses of language and speech with malapropisms and cibaeño speech put the nationalist in the Cuban bufo tradition of the “negro catedrático,” meaning a Black man who poses as an intellectual but comically speaks with malapropisms, incorrect facts, and a superior attitude. The language of satire then comes full circle not only to show nationalism as an illness but

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also to put the nationalist in the place of the “negro catedrático,” betrayed by his language as being ­really connected in his presence and life to the demonized, dehumanized other, “the Haitian.” The real­ity is that not only in the Dominican Republic but in most of the Ca­rib­bean globalization and neoliberalism are widening disparities between rich and poor, illiterate and literate, buen vivir and mal vivir, proper and improper, gente decente and the shameless. Mediascapes make race, ethnicity, culture, and language ele­ments of an echo chamber or “resonance,” relating them to images, and more specifically to racialized bodies, where they serve as markers, translations, and signs of capital, class disparities, and local and global commodification. Nationalism and nationalist language remain the distinctive articulation of vio­lence and state power. Meanwhile, the authors of Tulile’s murder w ­ ere conscious, on some level, of making an iconic repre­sen­ta­tion of his death as a lynching, with the body hanging from a tree. If racial relationships in the Dominican Republic exist, as Ginetta Candelario acutely insists, in a constant dialogue between the island and the United States, the act of staging this body as a lynching is not only a dialogue with the iconicity of U.S.-­based lynching photography but also the re-­creation of that form of extralegal murder as a sign of revisiting, in con­temporary times, what that apparent past “order” tells us about Black death as a global cipher of the pre­sent. In her poem “February 10th, 2015” Afro-­Dominican author Elizabeth Acevedo humanizes the life of the man whose image circulated in the media feeds of many: February 10th, 2015 for a man nicknamed Tulile in Santiago, Dominican Republic it never begins when the body hangs from a silk tree. it always begins when the body hangs heavy and knotted to the silk tree, and the tongue slips out of the mouth –­like a swollen maggot?—no, simply like tongue. this began when the body hung heavy from rope, knotted to the silk tree and the tongue, swollen with creole, slipped out of the mouth, a s­ imple tongue. it d­ idn’t begin with the tongue, swollen with creole, slipping out between blue lips; hands bound as if praying, ­couldn’t push the tongue back into the mouth. did it begin with the tongue, swollen with creole? (Acevedo, 62-3).5

As it happens in Cabiya’s text, the tongue, that is, the language, in this case Haitian Krèyol or Dominican-­accented Spanish, marks the racialized difference

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 21

that motivates the murder. The tongue tied with an accent is not the sign of vio­ lence but is, in a twist that functions as the twisted body of the tree does, a sign of the nature of difference as a marker of guilt. Blackness, language, and poverty are dynamics and gestures of sorts, and the lotto ticket, the lamp, and futurity represent a possibility of a change in luck and in life. Chapters 4 and 5 look at the image in relation to the dead, including t­ hose whose deaths came as results of direct racist attacks or daily racial-­colonial vio­ lence. The coexistence of both not only in the Ca­rib­bean but also in the diaspora can be understood through the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics, which posits that some lives ­will be protected while o­ thers w ­ ill live in precarity due to conscious governmental decisions. The afterlifes of slavery, as Sadiya Hartman have defined it, have been articulated in Ca­rib­bean spaces in this complex dynamic. I am writing t­ hese words one day a­ fter Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, was found guilty by a jury that met for ten hours to decide a verdict for a murder that we all watched on camera as it was happening. The fact that his death was watched by many and created a global movement that linked the strug­gles of activists for Black Lives ­Matter, which was founded in 2012 ­after the killing of Trayvon Martin, made a difference. The fact that t­ hese w ­ ere extralegal murders was at last recognized, even if only in this one well-­publicized instance. Since Rodney King’s brutal beating was filmed by a neighbor in Los Angeles in 1991, cameras have been filming brutal police attacks against Black men and w ­ omen and demonstrating that, far from being outliers, t­ hese attacks are part of the system of policing. The death of Eric Garner, filmed by his friend, Puerto Rican Ramsey Orta, made of his last words, “I ­can’t breathe,” a phrase linked to the movement. Paradoxically, ­these iconic and brutal videos ­were not followed up by ­grand jury indictments or ­trials for t­ hese killings. When, on April 20, 2021, Chauvin was found guilty on three counts of second-­and third-­degree murder, ­there was a break in the symbolic order. The fact that Floyd pronounced the same words as Garner reminds us of the brutality of this vio­lence but also the fact that breathing remains central to practices of freedom and that breathing-­related diseases, like asthma, are central to the environmental health disparities between Black and white. Stories have been constantly shifted to put the onus on African American men, stereotyping them as violent, aggressive, or intoxicated. The dynamics of the Black body as fugitive, outside of the law or prone to commit crimes—­and thus suspect in the “wrong” areas—­have been key to histories of plantation and post-­plantation socie­ties in the United States and the Ca­rib­bean. Many of the perpetrators of shootings of Black and Latino men, w ­ omen, and c­ hildren in the United States continue to not be held accountable to the judicial bodies entrusted with their security (and indeed their taxes contribute to ­these bodies), throwing the work of mourning and justice seeking back on the grieving families and friends, who as working-­class ­people are already burdened with debt and impossible work schedules. This, again, is another form of being out of sync—in suspension. This

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book looks at t­ hese bodies on the wake in relation to forms of remembrance and mourning. It analyzes funeral practices (the wake) as they rely on the care for ­those who have passed but also claim care as justice. Christina Sharpe has reminded us of the structure of the wake and defines a practice of mourning for ­those who have been direct and indirect victims of racial and colonial death. For that I analyze the nontraditional funerals created by Funeraria Marín in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, and the uniqueness of their “care-­body” pro­cesses of embalming and staging the body as the deceased requests it. As I show in detail in chapter 4, ­these nontraditional funerals are a resonant social phenomenon in the neoliberal Ca­rib­bean culture I am exploring in this book. The phenomenon started with the well-­publicized case of “El Muerto Parao” (the Standing Dead Body) in 2008 which involved families in the pro­cess of constructing a monument to the deceased out of the deceased corpse. This mourning pro­cess reflects on the ways death has become a meta­phor for the social realities experienced by many not only in Puerto Rico but also in the Ca­rib­bean and its diasporas. From the staged lynching to the prepared funerals, ­these Black and Brown bodies have many ­things in common: poverty, urban, and maleness. Puerto Rican scholar Luis Javier Cintrón Gutiérrez has associated many of ­these deaths and funerals to the drug vio­lence that has become for many an alternative to the economic crisis. Thus for him, who since 2008 has performed several close-­ participant ethnographies of many of ­these funerals, the phenomenon is closely linked to visibility in death, as part of the micro-­and macro-­violences perpetuated by the state. As he states, “En estos velorios el cuerpo ha retado la lógica de ser cádaver y se evoca un last per­for­mance o última manifestación corporal” (1). If the dead body is embalmed and preserved like a corpse but does not follow the dynamics of temporality what is then the purpose of preservation? Closeness to the body, a refusal of ­dying or something more? I ­will answer ­these questions on chapter 4. When discussing images and particularly photography, Susan Sontag wrote that ­there is a dual system in relation to photographic images that show what she describes as “ultimate horror.”6 In many of ­these images, it is not only the fatal encounter with horror and death that defines them but the exemplary staging of the photo­graph itself. This is when iconic images reflect on other images, to create a diachronic discourse—­and where the affective builds a form of grief, a call upon the nature of the h ­ uman condition that “opens knowledge” into the thick real­ity of the Other. A close reading of the Cuban film Juan de los Muertos (2011) looks at the way zombie imaginaries and the dead cross the geographies of cities from San Juan to Havana, with the aim of reading the unconsecrated spaces and geographies where l­abor is associated with survival and living has become unbearable. The embalmed natu­ral posing bodies in the funeral tableaus do not rot, remaining suspended in between life and death, becoming the connection between the two states. Puerto Ricans refuse to leave their loved ones ­behind. In a similar

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 23

fashion, in Rita Indiana Hernández’s novel Papi (2005), the longed-­for f­ ather of the narrator, Papi, fi­nally returns to Santo Domingo, proving to be a drug dealer and a sexual player. When he dies, his body decays where it is kept as an adored object in a wake that mimics Papi’s nostos, the journey home. Melancholia is at the root of the afterlives of vio­lence and capital in con­temporary Ca­rib­bean cities. The living-­dead is a trope of capitalism, and it appears exposed in zombie fantasies where the strug­g le for daily survival makes protecting ­human life the entire business of ­human life, as in the Havana of Juan de los Muertos or the empty city walls where animals run in despair as in Eduardo Lalo’s film La ciudad perdida (2005). As Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott has observed, bodies—­ those overtly pre­sent and t­ hose of the dis­appeared, the bodies that are still restless even a­ fter death—­reflect the order of our neoliberal times. Christina Sharpe offers a brilliant reading of the wake in the colonial and postcolonial contexts; the wake is both a state of mourning and despair but also a reference to the disposal of African bodies on slave ships, which ­were thrown into the ship’s wake. This touches broadly the entire history of not only the African American experience but also that of the African diaspora and Afro-­Caribbean ­peoples. “Black ­peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, ­under, despite Black death: to think and be and act from ­there” (Sharpe 22). Death is the major imprint for neoliberal regimes in the Ca­rib­bean region. Nevertheless, we should be reminded that the social dimensions of Black death—­and citizen death—­are specific to each national context and con­temporary realities in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hispaniola. Chapter 5 continues with this meditation on the body of the wake, switching to another state of suspense being, that of the dynamics of debt in Puerto Rico and the crisis before and ­after Hurricanes Irma and María hit the archipelago in 2017. The chapter discusses the attention offered to Puerto Rico in the U.S. media a­ fter the natu­ral disaster as well as the comic (graphic) art that emerged from this series of disasters, the photography that emerged in this period, and popu­lar cultural products that intersected, sometimes accidentally, with it. In the latter category I discuss the global musical hit “Despacito” (2017), a song and YouTube video by Luis Fonsi and ­Daddy Yankee, released five months before the hurricanes swept through. “Despacito” hit the airwaves and became not only a Spanish-­language global anthem but also the most watched video and song in the history of YouTube. While the main thread of this chapter is the crisis in Puerto Rico before and a­ fter María, I contrast that devastation to Despacito’s fantasy of Puerto Rico as a community site and as a sexual-­erotic attraction, branding it with the global tourist market. “Despacito” tours ­were offered in the neighborhood of La Perla in San Juan, the space where the video was shot, a business injection of sorts, with local businesses cashing in on the tourists coming in the wake of the song’s dynamic market. This global presence shifted ­after Hurricanes Irma and María hit the archipelago in August and September 2017. As

24 • Caribes 2.0

all the w ­ ater and power lines as well as the main communication links collapsed, Puerto Ricans remained in the dark, in el apagón, a colloquial term that Puerto Ricans use to describe long hours without electricity. Many died in their homes, while ­others died of ­causes related to lack of health care, food, ­water, and medicine in the months a­ fter the storms. A Harvard Chan study estimated the death toll at 4,645, although recent numbers estimate more than 8,000 deaths. The infamous visit of President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence as well as the negligence and publication of a private chat in which former governor Ricardo Rosselló and his cabinet made fun of ­these events and bullied Puerto Ricans, brought about an angry series of protests attended by thousands of Puerto Ricans, which led to Rosselló’s resignation in the Verano del 19 (Summer of 19). In this chapter I look at the dynamic cartoon art of Rangely García and photographer Adriana M. Parrilla, based in Puerto Rico and Paris respectively, in the aftermath of Hurricane María, and putting it in conversation with Javier Cardona’s per­for­mance Hasta el cuello and the increasingly acclaimed photography of the late ADÁL (Adál Maldonado), I reflect on the concept of debt and what it means for Puerto Ricans on the wake of displacement and social crisis. In t­ hese photographic repre­sen­ta­tions and per­for­mance pieces, ­water, mud, and creature-­like movements are key ele­ments that signal a primordial protest against the payment of an inhuman debt, which has created nothing but a landscape of new disasters to displace the h ­ uman condition. If, as Sylvia Wynter reminds us, dehumanization characterizes forms of oppression and bodily subjection, looking at the dynamics of ­labor but also of refusal of ­labor enacted by Ca­rib­bean ­peoples and enclaves in their islands and the diaspora helps to shed light on t­ hese complex individual and communal negotiations around time, social dynamics, and life. The image as imaginary of creativity and possibility has always been key to survival and transcendence. To conclude I reflect on the role of the image in con­temporary global Ca­rib­bean spaces and the social and po­liti­cal implications of its futurity, suggesting a way of seeing how and why images of protest are enrolled in the stream of popu­lar culture to mobilize new generations fighting against the theft of their past, pre­sent, and ­future, and the antidemo­cratic force of state control.

Underwater A group of four men play dominoes in a flooded street in Havana, in what is described as the aftermath of Hurricane Irma. A group of neighbors stay close by watching the game, ­others are cleaning debris. The ­water covers their feet and half of their bodies. They are literally submerged in what appears to be a sea of ­water. The picture titled by Gente de Zona artists as, “Al mal tiempo buena cara,” (Good Face against Bad Weather) which could be an accurate title for this picture. Then, as in a flash, a quote from Erick Mota’s sci-fi novel Habana Underguater came to mind. In this sci-fi post utopian novel most of t­hese

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 25

working class suburbs have been covered by the sea, “Al llegar a la playa de Zanja, justo donde Belascoaín se hunde en el mar, termina la zona independiente de Centro Habana y comienza el pueblohundido de Underguater” (As I arrive to the beach in Zanja just in the crossing of underwater ave­nue Belascoaín we see the in­de­pen­dent Zone of Centro Havana and begins the submerged town of Underwater) (69). In the photo­g raph, their ­faces are not looking into the camera—­good domino players look only at the fichas and the eyes of their opponents. To intimidate the opponent is one of the master secrets of the game. If we magnify the scene, we observe several men picking up pieces of debris, prob­ ably furniture, from the ­water. Another a­ ngle would show us the men in front of their flooded h ­ ouses, following up on a routine that offers meaning to their lives. This seemingly heartening image created a heated debate on social media as well as elsewhere, with the sides divided by the message of the scene. On the one hand, some saw a cele­bration of popu­lar survival. On the other hand, many thought it was a depiction of extreme poverty in an already poor area of Havana, and simply cashing in on the pain of its dwellers. As Laura Zöe Humphreys argues and as we ­will see throughout this book ­these dichotomies are simply part of the ways media products reflect ideological extremes in Cuban society.7 The picture taken by Juvenal Balán, a photographer for Granma (the official newspaper), clearly created opposed views in social media. The image was simply of a cleaning crew playing dominoes on a break from hard ­labor. The photographer captured the contrast between l­abor and joy, and the fact that ­water was filling the scene, made it sublime. The picture was used by Online Tours, a Cuban tourist agency, to promote travel to Cuba and prove Cuban’s resilience. This fact created a more complex discussion. Owned by Javier Leal Estébanez, the son of Eusebio Leal, historian and architect of the proj­ect of renewal of Habana Vieja, Online Tours has offices in Old Havana, Barcelona, Madrid, and Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. The manipulation of ­these images by the same elites that are so close to the regime is not surprising. We can see similar manipulation from the uses of popu­lar culture and Black/Brown bodies in “los especiales” (the video specials) from Banco Popu­lar de Puerto Rico. The assumption (for a prosperous international audience) that Black/poor bodies are meant to pick themselves up from injury and insult or are so resilient that they are able to celebrate life in the direst circumstances was a dictum that was at the heart of slave codes all over the Amer­i­cas. We are talking about bodies subjected to misery, but also about a dif­fer­ent concept of time, joy or plea­sure that disrupts the landscape, and in so ­doing creates a shift in temporality and ­human creativity. A reminder of this moment is Antonio Benítez Rojo’s phrase, “de cierta manera.” In this sense, having Cubans react “in a certain way” to events that do not necessarily define identity in relation to nation or belonging, but alludes to a ­human capacity or w ­ ill to live and survive in a certain temporal dimension—­those of chaos and continuity. This ­human condition gets problematized when Black bodies are read as the source or energy of this

26 • Caribes 2.0

continuity. In this sense Balán’s photography became an echo chamber and an iconic image. Iconic images have a frame—­and if taken in a historical continuum, if serialized, tend to arrive at a circular complexity. For the pre­sent is “choteo” or “una manera de ser”; for the past is the reminder of “el solar,” “what’s left,” from the slave barrack that in both of t­ hese images is a sign of the continuity of life itself. In the case of Puerto Rico, some of the images coming in from the disaster zone ­were more pre­sent for diaspora Puerto Ricans than many of its own ­people as they went for a state of isolation and faulty communication. Again, the parallel with Cuba is haunting—as if both islands ­were fated to mirror each other. I analyze several of t­ hese images by Adriana Parrilla and the late ADÁL (Adál Maldonado) in chapter  5, looking specifically at their dynamic movement as its haptic and sensorial ele­ments or­ga­nize the dimensions of Ca­rib­bean humanity in a zone of disaster, and in the wake (Sharpe). Natu­ral disasters pre­sent breaks with the notion of temporality, and in the case of Cuba, and then Puerto Rico, they do remind the archipelago not only of the power of natu­ral forces but of the disasters that are “man made” in con­ temporary economies. The high death toll in Puerto Rico, 4,645 per the Harvard Chan study and the dismissal of President Trump (who mentioned that the hurricane relief was a success in his short half-­day visit), diminished the disaster by throwing paper towels to Puerto Ricans, ­will also be discussed as part of the chapter u­ nder debt and refusal of payment as dynamic relations that define con­temporary Puerto Rico and its colonial relation with the United States. Although I follow the main critical voices on theories of disaster capitalism, such as Naomi Klein, I do look critically at the languages of “victimhood” or “resilience” that it aims to reproduce. As the per­for­mances and photo­graphs that I analyze show, protest, mobilization, and anger defined Puerto Rican sociopo­liti­ cal realities up to Verano19. Protest and mobilization but also inertia and refusal are some of the dimensions of the Puerto Rican condition that are also reflected in the con­temporary and citizen movements and protests in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba. While many of ­these protests do incorporate ele­ments of freedom of expression, and betterment of economic conditions (individual and artistic) versus the state as in the case of Cuba, o­ thers are requesting citizen rights and fighting the biopo­liti­cal context created by neoliberalism. The Puerto Rican, Dominican, Haitian, and Cuban islanders and their respective diasporas came forward to help and assist with the disaster. Among them, Orlando-­based Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube star LeJuan James has assisted the effort by collecting more than thirty thousand dollars in donations. This is where his video skits about an immigrant ­family become the medium to assessing solidarity in times of disaster. In James, we see all the f­ amily as an immigrant ­family, thus his f­ amily prob­lems appear more generational than part of a first or second generation. As many families ­were forced to leave Puerto Rico for Orlando or other parts of the U.S. mainland, a melancholy as well as humor coexist in t­ hese repre­sen­ta­tions. The word “resilience,” used to diagnose the assets of

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes • 27

neoliberalism in front of the shock doctrines created by disaster capitalism (Klein), does not fully describe the dynamics of displacement created by force relocation or adaptation to new conditions a­ fter a natu­ral disaster of ­great proportions. As for ­those diaspora populations “looking back” or using social media tools to remain connected to our loved ones, it is simply through media, sonic and visual materials, that we keep building our affective links. This is the reason why debates around the best or worst images reach a dead end. Images are mediated, subjective, and sensorial. They are a form of language and memory that reminds of a pre­sent that is not t­here, or a pos­si­ble futurity that we desire to create or to dread. The main challenge for con­temporary Ca­rib­bean 2.0 to 4.0 and 5.0 contents and generations is to reach beyond the initial seduction of the image to look for the ­human connection beyond it.

2

Enacting ­Others Blackface, Brownface, and Ca­rib­bean Selves Enacting O ­ thers Blackface, brownface, and other forms of ethnic impersonation have become practices that define many con­temporary visual interactions. Tele­vi­sion, film, and diverse social media apps, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, are both globalizing and ethnosizing, creating a vernacular of racial, ethnic, and other forms of repre­sen­ta­tion. This theatrical per­for­mance, the painting of the skin of a white actor or actress, started in its modern form in the Golden Age theater in Spain, from whence it became an ele­ment of Cuban bufo theater, while becoming a standard piece of stage business in the minstrel shows of the Reconstruction period, continuing far into the mid-­twentieth c­ entury in the United States, where it jumped from live per­for­mance to the cinema. For example, Al Jolson’s blackface per­for­mance in The Jazz Singer marked a decisive moment in the introduction of sound film into popu­lar culture—­and in tele­vi­sion. In the digital age, blackface, though ­under a cloud as an expression of a now condemned racism, still turns up on digital platforms. The rebirth of blackface is paralleled by the reemergence of racial vio­lence against Blacks and other ethnic minorities over the past twenty years. Obama’s election in 2008 was heralded as the hallmark of a new postracial moment in the country, but this was a delusion. In fact, on the contrary, Obama’s presence seemed to spark a racist reaction, as racial vio­lence became stronger not only in the United States but across the world as a 28

Enacting ­Others • 29

mark of the neoliberal order. What appears to be celebrated as an “ethnic or biracial look” for cosmopolitan stars or influencers has proven to be out of sync with the violent real­ity experienced by mixed-­race or Black youth (Latinx/African American) in the United States. At the same time the global racial formations formed within colonial forms and hierarchies keep putting Blacks and darker ­peoples in the lowest spheres in many Ca­rib­bean countries.1 While white influencers, such as Kylie Jenner, have been credibly accused of darkening their features with melanin enhancers and even plastic surgery, other celebrities who claim African heritage, such as Afro-­Latina Dominican singer Amara La Negra, have also been alleged to darken their skin, or—in Amara’s case—­donning afro wigs to “appear more black.” This practice also has its roots in the blackface tradition: famously, one of the best paid vaudev­illians of the early twentieth c­ entury, light-­skinned, Bahama-­born Bert Williams, was a Black man who used blackface to create more recognizably and visibly Black characters. The new celebrity adoption of old blackface techniques occurs against the background of daily vio­lence against Afro-­Latina w ­ omen and trans-­feminine performers. All of ­these events are pertinent to the constant “claims to authenticity” in media discourse and academic spaces. As mobile phone videos of virulent attacks against “racialized ­others” accumulate on social media, questions about cancel culture, who is able to speak for whom, how to distinguish the ally from the appropriator, and the fact that many feel that they could not or do not know how to talk about or criticize racism b­ ecause they are not Black, Brown, or racialized have become topics of conversation in ordinary life. The question of who speaks (often verbalized as who is allowed to speak, with the implicit assumption that permission is needed from social norms) has created an impasse for opening up dialogues about the current vio­lence, both overt and systematic, against Black and Brown ­people. At the same time, it is also true that many conversations are happening on social media, more than in other spaces, oftentimes in heated debates and discussions. The discursive situation took a decisive turn with the creation of the Black Lives ­Matter movement ­after the violent murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, when Black activists, scholars, and their allies moved to the forefront of discussions around police brutality and surveillance of Blackness. What happened in the United States had a major effect on popu­lar opinion in the Spanish Ca­rib­bean, where activists have created platforms for education, publication, and work to uplift their communities. Their strug­g le, often charged by nationalist views of mestizaje, has viewed comedic blackface and brownface in theatrical and televisual spectacles as categorically racist in intent. Why has blackface survived within the universe of visual imaginings (even on digital platforms) when it has been subject, for de­cades, to violent denunciation as a ste­reo­typically racist gesture and carries a taint even in the mainstream discourse? It may owe its survival to ­simple inertia: having been a performative practice closely related to the creation of the media image, for instance, of sound film, the very existence of the media image is associated with it structurally. From

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cartoons to new media, we have many examples. Cartoons borrowed from minstrelsy many of their most impor­tant ele­ments—­even the blackface and gloves in Mickey Mouse: “Blackface has made a come back in the twenty-­first ­century, especially on tele­vi­sion, and it is usually presented nostalgically an odd historical anomaly and a stand-in for some racist times and unenlightened per­for­mances and audiences” (Sammond 4). Along with per­for­mance, color and race go beyond the specific per­for­mance, but they do create sensorial dimensions that objectify “color” or Blackness, making it a “­thing.” Thus the color line becomes, as Raengo has analyzed, following Mark Smith, “a form of organ­ization of the ­human sensorium supposed to corroborate, or sometimes supplement or substitute for, the visual construction of race . . . ​an image of black density forming in response of the illegibility of skin color” (Raengo, Critical Race Theory 41). If the image is a sensorial construct from which perception is created (Coccia), it is clear that the use of Brownness and Blackness as a feature for the image—­ with its deep technical implications for such ­things as lighting—­plays with the conceptualizations of darkness and brightness for effect. If race is a social construct, the tonalities offered to skin or what Fanon called the epidermal fact in the skin have made darker pigmentation the g­ reat defining feature for identifying who is “white,” “Brown,” or “Black” in modern times. The old order of descent, which determined the freedom of the descendent, has receded before the skin itself, which accrues social meaning. Practically Blackness and Brownness continue, as Simone Browne brilliantly has observed, to be surveilled, prosecuted, and policed in daily encounters with vio­lence and with surveillance devices.2 At the same time, and parallel to this grim real­ity, many face apps enhance or change the color of your skin at a whim, making the dream of “enacting ­others” an easy-­to-­obtain affordance of our global times. This fact is related not only to the face. Yeidy Rivero, Ariana Hernández Reguant, and Antonio López have analyzed the ways “sonic” and performative blackface has worked historically in Cuba/Rican and Latino/Ca­rib­bean spaces. Their work with Black and white actors/performers such as Cuban Eusebia Cosme and Ramón del Rivero “Diplo” problematizes the ways that “scripts of Blackness” are read into Black bodies in the Spanish Ca­rib­bean. In ­these scripts, the hypervisibility of Black bodies—­ skin, phenotype—­and the privilege of whiteness interact in structural, material, spatial, and phenomenological ways. Building on this scholarship, this chapter traces Ca­rib­bean blackface and racial impersonation in Puerto Rico, Miami, and Cuba. Tele­vi­sion comedy as well as social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook or­ga­nize ­these media spectacles of race and ethnicity—­where old and new forms of framing and vlogging the self and ­others or­ga­nize visual spectacles of local exotic Ca­rib­bean cultures or Ca­rib­bean selves in the United States in YouTube series such as “­Things That Spanish Girls Say” or “­Things That Black Girls Say.” ­These mini-­stories combine comic line skits to demonstrate assumptions about the ethnic-­moral be­hav­ior that defines one skin color group over ­others.

Enacting ­Others • 31

As I mentioned previously, dismissing ­these images simply as “racist” puts us inside a binary where the urgency and vio­lence of the politics of the real closes the conversation without enlightening us about ­these practices. Thus we end up creating through respectability politics a premise of “uplift,” in the name of community, affiliation, or nation, that in contradictory ways ends up returning to the neoliberal script. The negative/melancholy/humorous or sometimes affective residue that accompanies t­ hese images or performative moments supplies many comments on class, race, gender and sonic protest through voice—as we ­will see ­later in my analyses of Chianita (a Puerto Rican blackface character) and Pánfilo (a Black Cuban man)—­which or­ga­nize a series of affective signs, ideological, memes, and even musical tunes. It is precisely the affective effects of this resonant echo chamber that I am interested in looking at, signifiers that are in constant interactions within the performative dynamics of the blackface impersonation or in many moments the Black body and opening up a series of “interpretations” from one racialized/racist/ste­reo­typical body image into the mediascape. This chapter provides an analy­sis of the spectral life of t­ hese televisual and new media repre­sen­ta­tions.

The Burial of Chianita: On Blackness and Closeness This section starts with a provocation: What are the politics of “closeness” in blackface (if any)? What dynamics of subject interpellation and erasure can we find in the ways that blackface/brownface “enacts ­others”? And fi­nally in what ways does this closeness ­factor into language and per­for­mance? While blackface and brownface are not unique to the Hispanic Ca­rib­bean, since they are plentifully represented in U.S. comedy, being taken up with vari­ous degrees of irony by African American comedians such as Eddie Murphy, Marlon Wayans, and even Dave Chappelle, this section puts that tradition to one side and concentrates on the past and pre­sent per­for­mances of blackface/brownface comedy in Puerto Rican tele­vi­sion and new media, investigating the ways t­ hese have influenced, critiqued, or articulated voice, sound, and agency for their publics. I depart from criticism made by Black theorists and activists that reminds us that blackface and brownface are degrading spectacles based on ste­reo­types derived from plantation slavery and for that same reason they do not represent “real” Blacks in respectable ways. Blackface and brownface are derisive and most of the time racialized and class repre­sen­ta­tions of ethnic o­ thers. When they are played by Brown or Black performers they also expose class dynamics within specific groups. At the same time, as a practice they remain strongly attached to forms of repre­sen­ta­tion and “the popu­lar” or comedic voice not only in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Ca­rib­bean but also in the United States. Why? First, the practice is above all a form of per­for­mance that is based on nostalgia of times past. Second, blackface or brownface impersonations maintain in the uses of the voice and sonic articulations not only the nostalgic text but also the inflection of social voices

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that speak critically about the pre­sent. Generally, blackface and brownface when played by white artists are denounced as degrading, appropriating or deflecting. Just ­because this denunciation is conventional within a society that remains systematically racist, blackface also pre­sents us with a moral ambivalence. The anxiety about the individual or group as a ­whole is played out especially when blackface and brownface are played by Black actors or actresses, for at that point of a sort of double dodge the per­for­mance carries a metacritical character, exhibiting a more insidious and insistent play with the nature of the ste­reo­type and the complete deconstruction of it. It provides, as Nicholas Jones, Alessandra Raengo, and Bambi Haggins have expressed, a unique art form that displaces the ste­reo­type and makes it what it is, a trope of language and moral judgment over the other. It is my theory that, in any form, blackface and brownface are above all about mediation and per­for­mance, and about bringing in ­others into the equation of the self. This is what I read as an ele­ment of closeness. Of course h ­ ere I am referring mostly to the comedic uses of the genre on tele­vi­sion and online media. Cherise Smith refers to “enacting ­others” as a form of power, for example in con­temporary avant-­garde art, “where t­ hese per­for­mances insatiate and underscore the friction that often exist between individual and group identity, between personal agency and community empowerment, and between the private and the public spheres” (16). At the same time, Alessandra Raengo argues that the aim of t­ hese per­for­ mances is to be read as repre­sen­ta­tions, but the aim of the discussion should center not on what “it represents, but into what it does, how it works, and what it achieves” (Critical Race Theory 66). My aim is to emancipate the interpretation of comedy, per­for­mance, and spectacularization ­here from the hegemonic moral discourse about what are the positive and negative images of Blackness. White performers enact Blackness and Black bodies to control them and at the same time to feel close to them. Closeness as a form of control relies on exorcism of the other and the fantasy of appropriating it by being this other. Visual and media critics Nicole Fleetwood and Bambi Haggins make a good point when they argue that creating a moral code for per­for­mances including t­ hose already preclassified as “ugly,” “negative,” or even “shameful” forecloses the conversation on the agency of the per­for­mance itself and the sonority, critical voice, or its dynamics in an ideologically suspect way. What W. T. Lhamon has defined as optic Blackness is at stake h ­ ere, “as acknowledges and works through stereotypic effects, usually turning themselves inside out” (quoted in Raengo, On the Sleeve 110). One example is the critique of the work of con­temporary African American artist Kara Walker and her uses of slavery images that are seen as ste­reo­typical in content. While many of the figures are shown having sex with slave masters, eating, defecating, and being punished, Walker’s art looks at the body as site of subjection, agency, and negotiation. In other words, her work elaborates on the economic, psychic, and porous relations of power created by slavery. It is my

Enacting ­Others • 33

contention that some types of blackface humor work t­ oward this porosity with the aim of deconstructing the racist gaze created by power relations and white supremacy, which sets up the very vernacular by which blackface can be banned by a code of decorum that still preserves racist privilege. Of course, this reading does not dispute the racist function historically enacted by most types of blackface/brownface impersonation or humor. This is meant not as an apology for blackface but as an investigation into its spectral place in the social unconscious and media. Comedic blackface has had a complex history in Puerto Rico since the late 1950s, and it can be said that it started as soon as the first tele­vi­sion came into a suburban ­house (Rivero). At the same time, blackface has aroused criticism and scrutiny by many Black consciousness activists on the island. Th ­ ese critiques have led to open discussions on the practice, extending to per­for­mance art and theater itself, as the monologue/play by Javier Cardona, You ­Don’t Look Like. Cardona’s uses of blackface and drag during the monologue and the ways the actor alters or challenges the ste­reo­types in which Black actors are “visibilized” plays and challenge the fixity that the ste­reo­type offers or denies to Black humanity. Lawrence La Fountain has also described the complex use of race and gender in this piece and how it encompasses the crossings of blackface in Puerto Rico.3 In “Digital Echo Chambers,” the second section of this chapter, I turn to Cuba to analyze the case of Pánfilo, “el de la Jama,” as a specific case of a Cuban Black man whose face, voice, and per­for­mance ­were enrolled in a Cuban campaign against hunger and in support of his freedom in 2009. By analyzing the viral quality of his digital influence as well as the memes and songs created by artists at the time, and the influential reach of his presence, I take a look at the ways the Cuban social mediascape, in specific Facebook, was able to create a successful diaspora campaign. I finalize this second section with the analy­sis of comedian Luis Silva’s character Pánfilo, a success within Cuba’s national and transnational publics, and the visit of Barack Obama to his program in Havana in 2016. It is my contention that the original Pánfilo, labeled as lumpen by the Cuban state, is the origin of this comedy character, who has crossed transnational borders with communities both on the island and in the diaspora. I define blackface as the act of donning makeup to darken the skin for performative purposes. Brownface is read h ­ ere as a form of ethnic or class crossover that sometimes requires dark makeup for the face and a costume that locates one in place of the other. Blackface has its pre­ce­dents, in the transatlantic world. In the United States, the minstrel theater of white actors in blackface emerged in the antebellum culture of spectacle, notably in Barnum’s vaudev­ille shows; blackface came a­ fter the Civil War. In the Ca­rib­bean, “teatro bufo” in Cuba derives from seventeenth-­century Spain. Critics agree that the Spanish Golden Age theater and mainly Cuban per­for­mances of bufo theater w ­ ere the origin of American vaudev­ille uses of the genre. In ­these spectacles, white actors or actresses darkened their features for theatrical affect, mostly in comedy. American minstrel

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blackface cartoonishly exaggerated red lips in contrasting with the dark skin. Many actors and actresses ­today do not engage in blackface but include part of the makeup in their per­for­mances for effect.4 In similar ways, brownface is donning dark makeup for the skin to perform or enact other races or groups. The predominant variety of brownface or blackface is performed by whites, who are part of the same cultural subgroup—­say of Puerto Ricans or Cubans—to represent racialized o­ thers of the same group. Among the more famous characters in the local theatrical/televisual repertoire in Puerto Rico is Chianita. Social exclusion and the repre­sen­ta­tion of the Other have ­shaped many aspects of blackface or brownface per­for­mance. Th ­ ese cartoonish aspects, which scapegoat ­people of color through characters that can be rejected, mocked, laughed at, and ste­reo­t yped, have attracted a large critical discussion. I look at a less analyzed aspect of this per­for­mance, that is, “closeness.” One may well ask, closeness to what or to whom, given that the per­for­mance is generally considered dehumanizing. However, when we situate blackface, we find that the complexities between closeness, on the one hand—­the proximity of mimicry, of enacting Blackness—­and complete rejection (or mockery), on the other hand, are key to the analy­sis of borders or frontiers. The presumption of mastery or superiority over the Other is a response that denies or exorcizes the Other’s dangerous bodily closeness to the white subject, to the “master signifier” of white skin. It is easy to mark the gesture of rejection or pure and vilified hate that exists in racism. Institutionalized, that rejection becomes segregation or apartheid. Nevertheless, I consider that it is more difficult to determine the blurry borders in blackface and brownface performativity b­ ecause they pertain to other forms of repre­sen­ta­tion or objectification, and that is where “closeness” comes into the discussion. Cultural and literary critic Nicholas Jones has elaborated a brilliant analy­sis of this complexity from the point of view of the use of “habla de negros” (Black speech) and repre­sen­ta­tion of Black characters in theater and social life in early modern Spain when he insists on moving beyond what critics have marked as “caricature,” “ste­reo­t ype,” or simply racist mockery of blacks to reconstitute the sonic, ­performative qualities, the adornment, agency, and even the articulations of the mouth (Black speech), and the ways Black bodies occupy space in social dimensions. I share his insight that t­ here exists “an uncanny transatlantic and cross-­ temporal overlap” between the Iberian world of the seventeenth c­ entury and nineteenth-­century minstrelsy in North Amer­i­ca. Perhaps this effect of uncanniness is achieved by eliminating Ca­rib­bean culture; Cuba, as Jill Lane has stated, might be, a­ fter all, the historical link that makes t­ hese connections pos­si­ble.5 It is my contention that Hispanic Ca­rib­bean and some Latin American uses of brownface or blackface relay on this category of closeness, as they depart from the master signifier of white skin, with the presumption that this skin signifies defines their power over Black populations. So in the eyes of ­those who enact this colonial fantasy, even mestizo/mulatto Black bodies “want” to be “owned”

Enacting ­Others • 35

or “mastered” in a ritual of social and material constraints. Racialized ­others are always in dispute with this colonial disciplinary schema, which includes desire, surveillance, vigilance, or critique; in this sense, ­there is a fugitive nature in ­those who want to divert or not comply into that colonial fantasy. Closeness comes when the per­for­mance moves into the realm of “culture” (shared language, accent): the imperative of official culture operating u­ nder the rubric of “our shared culture” as a nation makes me define you and interpret you through the lens of “our shared Ca­rib­bean Spanish,” which allows blackface per­for­mance and, disjunctively, claims our similarity. Nevertheless, “our shared culture” is still the product of differences that are marked racially, linguistically, and in relation to body shape. The Other is darker, is fat, louder, and/or clueless about social cues or manners, and “needs to be disciplined.” As Jones states, from Spanish Baroque theater this is clearly centered on per­for­mance, the visuality of Black skin and Black speech, making the trope “an hyperbolic trope of nature’s excess” as markers of the racialized body” (13). In some of the comedy examples I have chosen to analyze, the uses of blackface, brownface, and traditional ste­reo­types “associated” with Blackness (ser­vice, sexiness, loudness, direct speech, or language) are used to both mark and reflect on ethnic borders, playing on differences but relying on the aesthetic possibility opened up by the social proximity in the Hispanic Ca­rib­bean. They are close b­ ecause even within the moral codes instilled by the mockery ­behind blackface, they do understand each other; and even u­ nder colonial dynamics, ­there is a melancholic longing for unity. In the misunderstandings t­ here is a comedic lesson that has been key to Black repre­sen­ta­tion and bufo spectacles since “teatro breve” in its Golden Age theater years: if you behave, that is, if you are mastered socially, you could be moderately accepted “like me,” this is, like the superior, white, contained other. Passing, then, becomes associated with social restraint and social cues. And yes, that is again the fault of the racialized other. Ethnic brownface sits at the border of blackface mockery and admiration for this “other” body and its knowledge. It relies on the moral superiority of the rich or more educated (white or pale) interlocutor, but the joke is always on that educated subject, who loses or rejects the popu­lar knowledge brought into the dialogue. Popu­lar knowledge is vindicated and the joke is on the spectator who in close identification with both mirrors his or her own fears of not passing or not improving in the social order of ­things. Blackface/brownface stories develop their comedic punchline on ­these moral tales and their subversion. But sometimes (as ­will be evident in the examples) the Brown or Black “other” bursts through its hyperbolic imprisonment to become the holder of the lesson on social moral character vis-­à-­vis the white interlocutor. As I ­will see with the following examples from Puerto Rican mediascapes, t­ hese thresholds are as complex as the social norms that define them. In 2016, one of the most popu­lar blackface comedic acts on the island, that of the character played by Ángela Meyer, “Chianita,” was fi­nally put to rest in a

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public per­for­mance that included a “burial” with the repique of traditional bomba ­music and dance. The consecrated burial of a TV character is evidence of her social importance and touches on the complex layers of racial repre­sen­ ta­tion in Puerto Rico, where the official discourse claims that racism has been eliminated, embracing the traditional conceptualizations of Latin American racial democracy.6 From the perspective of the respectability discourse, it is odd that antiracist activists on the island who have been criticizing blackface and brownface comedy for years also participated in a bomba-­baquiné-­burial to Chianita, which signify the burial of blackface. Not only is Chianita a beloved character for many generations, but her costume—an afro wig, with a red flower representative of female coquettishness but also of the Commonwealth’s Popu­lar Party—­may hold more meanings than a ­simple ceremony. Bomba m ­ usic is considered the most impor­tant product of the African heritage on the island.7 While Chianita’s character was not socially acceptable to younger spectators, bomba ­music not only enfolded the character in a more generous sense of Puerto Rican humanity but paradoxically also annulled the negative, ste­reo­t ypical ele­ments that the antiracist critique had targeted. In addition, and as a representative of the pop­u ­lism of the Commonwealth Popu­lar Party, Chianita was a symbol of the ELA (Estado Libre Asociado/ Commonwealth). In July 2016, months before Chianita’s burial (November 2016), many artists in a group called Partido Anartista demonstrated against the so-­called La muerte del ELA (Death of the Commonwealth) in a per­for­mance called “Cena Negra” (July 2016). As Emmanuel Estrada López argues in his article, “Cuando llegó el coche fúnebre, no había ataúd, ni cuerpo, ni muerto” (When the funeral car arrived, t­ here was no casket, no body and no corpse).8 The protest critiqued the Obama administration’s imposition of PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act) and the creation of a junta or fiscal board to control debt in Puerto Rico. The board, composed mainly of the Puerto Rican upper classes, was in many ways the author of it. The PIP (Pro In­de­pen­ dence Party) published an original burial note that appeared in El Nuevo Día, one of our major newspapers, with a headline inversion of the slogan of Puerto Rican pop­u­lism: “Pan Tierra y Libertad in negation, Ni Pan, Ni Tierra, ni Libertad” (see figure 2.1). The w ­ ill to bring a revival of Chianita in 2012 and 2016 had a lot to do with nostalgia, but mainly with this climate of po­liti­cal crisis and dissent, it also had a type of memorial visual palimpsest as Meyer’s old comedic delivery reminded spectators of the culture of the de­cades of economic pro­gress in the 1970s and 1980s that w ­ ere now long gone. A Black jíbara (peasant) from the countryside who finds stardom on tele­vi­sion as an artist/po­liti­cal candidate, Chianita’s story embodied the myth of socioeconomic pro­gress associated with the Popu­lar Party’s ideology. The character came out of a media landscape in the 1970s mid-1980s when at least six channels ­were completely active with local programming,

Enacting ­Others • 37

FIGURE 2.1.  ​“La muerte del ELA,” El Nuevo Día, July 25, 2016. GFR Media.

artists, and production, which made Puerto Rico one of the leading exporters of TV shows to other Ca­rib­bean and Latin American countries. Chianita was developed as a character by actress Ángela Meyer for the soap opera El hijo de Ángela María. In the soap opera she was the grand­daughter of Panchita, the character played by Mona Martí, the nanny figure of the h ­ ouse.9 Yeidy Rivero reads Chianita correctly as a Cuban Rican bufo character with a Puerto Rican jíbara speech and vernacular. That Chianita not only came from the countryside into the ­house­hold in San Juan but also remained attached, in language, voice, and manner, to that same countryside is significant ­because, as she adds, “Chianita’s constructed jíbara persona was informed by her manner of dress, her jíbara speech patterns and her personality. First, she was depicted as uncultured and uneducated poor, black, a young w ­ oman from the countryside who was unaware of fashion trends and wore bold jewelry and brilliantly colored non-­matching outfits. Even though Chianita thought she was being fash­ ion­able, in real­ity she looked ridicu­lous. Second, Chianita’s magnified accent, frequent loudness, and constant mispronunciation of words suggested her lack of formal education and her jíbara identity” (93).

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The fact that she remained a jíbara, and that her character became so popu­ lar that they had to add more scenes and a romantic story line for her, tells us of the need of Black characters not only in soap operas but in the visual spaces of the island. Yet the fact is that Chianita was not Black; she was a white actress with her face painted in black, in the most traditional bufo style of theatrical repre­sen­ta­tion. Yeidy Rivero’s critical analy­sis covers the complex politics and active participation of Black Puerto Ricans from the island and the diaspora, activists, and artists, in the Black movement strug­gles in the 1970s. This media event happened during the same period when Black artists and activists such as Lucecita Benítez and Danny Rivera w ­ ere being critiqued for their proin­de­pen­ dence leanings. The proin­de­pen­dence movement was associated with the cultural icons of Black aesthetics, of which one of the most recognizable was the afro. Chianita in this context “domesticated” the afro, appearing as a nonthreatening body to the establishment. She pop­u­lar­ized a softer and more assimilable Black politics to the viewing audience. It helped that she was clearly one of “ours” and not a U.S. import; she discussed our prob­lems and avoided the topics of racism or colonization. Chianita was folkloric, comical, and nonthreatening, but most importantly she introduced the pronunciation of the Puerto Rican jíbaro Spanish, something that offered her a specific affective quality in relation to sound and speech (Rivero 91–93). Chianita’s popularity relied as much on her comedic puns, speech, and voice as on her visual pre­sen­ta­tion. Her news sketches first appeared on José Miguel Agrelot’s Don Cholito tele­vi­sion segment “Encabuya, Vuelve y Tira,” where her bit was to discuss the daily news. Chianita covered local news like a reporter, ­going from interviews to po­liti­cal commentary.10 During t­ hose years of transition Luis Muñoz Marín, the founder of the PPD, governor from 1941 to 1969, and architect of the Commonwealth and the ELA, retired from politics. During the era po­liti­cal transition was clear, as the victory of the PNP (New Progressive Party) between 1969 and 1973 shifted the hegemony of the PPD (Popu­lar Demo­ cratic Party). Also, it led to the transition in the PPD as Muñoz Marín and PPD leaders welcomed the young leadership of Rafael Hernández Colón in 1974. Puerto Rico’s so-­called economic miracle made pos­si­ble by Operation Bootstrap caused the consolidation of the Commonwealth in 1952. Many industries ­were attracted to the island by section 936 of the federal tax code, which allowed subsidiaries of U.S. firms operating in Puerto Rico to move to the island without paying taxes. Many of ­these industries offered employment to Puerto Ricans on the island in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, oil, and manufacturing. This climate of po­liti­ cal and economic optimism gave Chianita her entrance as a feminine voice in the televisual spaces. It is impor­tant to contextualize her in the mediascape of the time; her comedy relied on social and po­liti­cal commentary. The popu­lar LP Chianita de Parranda (1974) contained her song “Chianita Gobernadora,” in which Chianita proposed her need to become governor of the island; it became a success during the Christmas season of 1974, which in turn pushed

Enacting ­Others • 39

FIGURE 2.2.  ​ Chianita de Parranda LP cover. Produced by Tomás Figueroa and Quality Sound

Inc., 1974.

the character from the soap opera to the noon time slot on channel 4, El Show del Mediodía (figure 2.2). The lyr­ics of the song centered on a claim of ­women to assess their feminist/ feminine power and become governor one day. The chorus of the song, “Voten por yo” (Please vote for myself), literally translated as “Vote for I,” a misappropriation of the traditional bufo script, used for humor, played on the fact that Chianita was d­ oing her own po­liti­cal campaign to become the first Black female governor of the island. The “Yo/I” is read h ­ ere as subject interpellation of the impoverished Black masses entering as a protagonist in the public po­liti­cal sphere.

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A jíbaro seis/guaracha song opens with a “speech” that is modeled on Luis Muñoz Marín’s famous phrase, “Queridos correligionarios”: Queridos correligionarios ar (al) fin ya llegó la hora de que esta patria bendita tenga una Gobernadora. Yo prometo lo que cumplo y cumplo lo que prometo y cuando meto la pata es porque la pata meto (Dear brethren, the time has arrived at last that this fatherland w ­ ill have a female governor. I promise what I could deliver, and deliver what I promise and when you see me screwing up it’s b­ ecause I screwed up). Song: La mujer siempre fue esclava, la mujer siempre fue esclava de la casa y del trabajo, yo grito arriba la farda (falda) y los pantalones pa’ bajo,(¿oíste negro?) los pantalones pa’ bajo (­Women have always been slaves of the h ­ ouse and profession, so I shout, up with the skirts and down with the pants [do you hear me my negro (love)?] down with the pants). Voten por yo, Voten por yo (Please vote for myself, vote for myself). Coro: Chianita Gobernadora y las cosas se mejoran (Governor Chianita ­will make every­thing better).

The fact that the song starts with references to ­women as slaves of double duty (house and ­labor) is a brilliant take that brings into focus the complex layer of the character as a Black domestic worker who wants to run for governor of the island. Her knowledge is personal and intersectional, while her agenda is mostly directed ­toward ­women. As Chianita makes clear in her lyr­ics, her goal is the highest office of the land, “no quiero ser Arcardesa ni tampoco Senadora, quiero dir pa’ Fortaleza y ser la Gobernadora” (I ­don’t want to be a mayor nor a senator, I want to go to Fortaleza and be the governor). The jíbaro accent of the song as well as use of verb forms such as dir instead of ir (to go) and the interposition of r/l (instead of Alcaldesa she says Arcardesa) relies on an Afro-­Hispanic habla de negros that was being performed by poets in the negrista Puerto Rican tradition of poetry and is found in literary and popu­lar recitations as well as the work of poets like Fortunato Vizcarrondo (author of the famous satirical and antiracist poem “¿Y tu agüela aonde ejtá?” [Where is your grandma at?]) and Black performers such as Juan Boria, who as an actor was for many years the sonic per­for­mance reference for negrista poetry, particularly the verses created by Luis Palés Matos in his poetry collection Tun-­tun de pasa y grifería (1938). The fact that both white and Black artists, poets, and performers had to use the same language to channel, perform, and represent Blackness adds to the sonic and sentimental value of this poetic-­popular tradition in the Hispanic Ca­rib­bean and problematizes the criticism made of Chianita’s character.11

Enacting ­Others • 41

The sonic power of this Afro-­Hispanic accent in Chianita’s per­for­mance is unique to blackface impersonation in Puerto Rico where, as Yeidy Rivero argues, Cuban-­accented speech dominated most of the per­for­mances of the fifties and sixties (35–36). While not unique to the tradition, the shift from Cuban-­accented blackface characters (mostly male) into a jíbara Black ­woman offered a change not only in race but also in gender. It was this sonic appeal on the Puerto Rican accent and vernacular and transition to jíbaro ­music (Christmas ­music is marked by the traditional guaracha and seis) that accounts for the character’s long-­lasting appeal. A close reading of the phenomenon leads to the conclusion that under­neath the humorous surface, Chianita functions as a populist character whose appeal centers on her critique of the failures and corruption of politicians at the time. Chianita dis­appeared from public tele­vi­sion in 1985 as Meyer found that the makeup was creating an allergic reaction to her skin. A boom of nostalgia created by the economic crisis, particularly in politics, brought her again to the media during the party elections of 2012, making her hit “Chianita Gobernadora” popu­lar again. As Meyer made clear in vari­ous interviews that she planned to resurrect the character for the 2016 elections, Black activists from dif­fer­ent groups on the island, such as Colectivo-­Ilé, directed the initiative that led to Chianita’s public burial. One of the first responses was the video-­poem “Chianita nunca fue negra” (“Chianita has never been Black”),12 written and conceptualized by Rafael Alejandro (Siloé) Andino, recited by Colectivo Afroversiva, criticized the character as well as other blackface comedic acts in Puerto Rico. The poem, recited as collective voice interventions by two Black ­women, among them found­ers of Colectivo Ilé, Gloriann Sacha Antonetty and Ana Castillo Muñoz, and two Black men (Siloé Andino and Welmo Romero Joseph), ends with ­these stanzas: Por eso te entierro y a tu familia de bufones que desde el privilegio hablan. . . . ​ Chianita nunca fue negra, y su pinta no nos representa ni a tí, ni a mi ni a tus ancestras, mujeres negras que han sido siempre reinas, mujeres negras brillantes, mujeres negras profesionales, dignas, Chianita, nuestro color te queda grande así que respeta, y no aparezcas a seguir siendo parte del problema. [This is the reason I bury you and your f­ amily of buffoons who speak from within privilege. . . . ​Chianita has never been Black, and her features do not represent me, you or your female ancestors, Black w ­ omen who have always been queens, brilliant Black w ­ omen, professional Black w ­ omen, dignified, Chianita, our color is too ­great for you, so please re­spect and do not come back again to be part of the prob­lem.]

The poem critiques the way the character mocks Black Puerto Rican w ­ omen, identifying them with ignorance and illiteracy. Along with face painting,

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Chianita offends ­because she is not a dignified repre­sen­ta­tion of Black ­women. This piece of activist art and per­for­mance used direct and clear language to assess the notion that the character “does not speak, act, or represent us.” Are comedic per­for­mances done to represent a group? Or is the activist piece missing the complex layers of critique embedded in the character? Indeed, for many years Chianita was the most popu­lar among the few repre­sen­ta­tions of Black ­women on tele­vi­sion. Nevertheless, she was always presented like an ethical ­woman with agency. Although based on servile ste­reo­types, she never acted as a typical domestic or servile figure. In the soap opera El hijo de Ángela María she was never seen working; quite the opposite, she was always daydreaming and distracted. Her afro wig and clothes reflected on a generational shift that was in timid dialogue with the arrival of Black power ideologies on the island in 1970. The fact that she did this, along with a comical aspiration to be governor, alluded directly to a populist critique of Luis Muñoz Marín and his government. The burial of Chianita as well as the burial of the ELA that happened months ­earlier in 2016 do feed into the semiotic languages of protest and per­for­mance that we ­will continue ­later in Verano19 that I discuss in chapter 5. Omiseke Tinsley has studied respectability as centered on “discipline” of Black ­women in regard to language, class origins, attitude, and sexuality. Chianita is poor and her jíbaro speech is what targeted the critique. She was a comedic and festive character, and as such she has no reason to appear respectful—­quite the contrary. While I subscribe the critique of blackface in digital and televisual repre­sen­ta­tions, the fact that critiques against Chianita also come from a feminist perspective offers more layers that should lead us to further discussion. For example, Francheska la Yal, a character created in 2014 by actress and singer Natalia Lugo,13 shows the power of a working-­class Puerto Rican identity. Francheska is a working-­class Puerto Rican ­woman, a single ­mother with c­ hildren who strug­gles to make ends meet and who is theatricalized through exaggerated makeup and dubi style, long nails, and a sexy outfit (a green bra and shorts). The ste­reo­type being played with ­here is that of welfare-­supported ­women (WIC cards and other federal subsidies) who have no l­abor discipline and are easy prey to consumerism and “bad taste.” The term yal derives from the Jamaican patois word gyal, or girl. As Frances Solá-­Santiago points out, Puerto Ricans got an introduction to the word in the 1990s when dancehall ­music and other Ca­rib­bean musical genres made their way onto the island. The word migrated into rap, where the term was widely applied to w ­ omen—­notably in the songs “Todas Las Yales” by ­Daddy Yankee and “Yal” by ­Daddy Yankee and Nicky Jam.14 During ­these years, as Marisol Lebrón has argued, the establishment war on raggaetón became a war against Puerto Rican working-­class caseríos and their ­peoples. This was the period when the “Mano Dura contra el Crimen” became the main agenda of the administration of former governor Pedro Rosselló. As Solá-­Santiago argues, by the early 2000s yal was indissolubly linked to reggaeton’s vernacular, evidenced in songs like “Gata Salvaje” by Hector y Tito. This backstory is necessary to see

Enacting ­Others • 43

how the term is operationalized as mockery in the per­for­mance of Francheska. But it also animates the romanticized version in Bad Bunny’s m ­ usic, where another term, bichiyal, emerges, meant as an homage to the working-­class status of ­these ­women. I ­won’t analyze Francheska’s character in detail, but it is not difficult to see that the affect and energy of female bodies in debt and their ­labor (Chianita as a domestic worker who wants to be governor, Francheska as a working-­class ­woman with no job who wants to be materially provided for by the government), affects, and social positions that remain key for t­ hese comedy impersonations. They represent two distinct po­liti­cal subjects emerging from critical moments in Puerto Rico, one from the 1970s and 1980s televisual spectacle, the other from comedy on YouTube. Their appeal is not simply to a respectable ­middle class that looks down on working-­class Puerto Ricans but also to the latter, who enjoy on some level the overturning of the bourgeois respectable standard. The juxtaposition of Chianita’s burial and Francheska’s rise on YouTube raises certain questions. Are new digital media platforms more tolerant than tele­vi­sion of comedic spectacles that mock the subaltern Other, w ­ hether this is ­people of color or the working class? Indeed, network tele­vi­sion is still a more traditional platform than YouTube or other new media platforms. Even if it could be argued that the same publics (fifteen to thirty-­five years old) consume both platforms, the act of donning blackface in Chianita remains a prob­lem, while the exaggerated makeup on white skin and the dubi hair on Francheska have not instigated the same racialized critique (figure 2.3). In many ways, Francheska is a greater ste­reo­type of low-­income ­women than Chianita was. Chianita was a character who reflected a period in which upward social mobility was a real product of the policies of the Commonwealth F ­ ree Associated State (ELA) and also of the corruption of that liberal order, while Francheska reflects on its current neoliberal crisis where social mobility is impossible and survival or “hustle” becomes the order of the day. For both characters local jargon and speech are key. Chianita uses the language of the Puerto Rican countryside, changing the “l” for “r” (al/ar), while Francheska speaks with an urban accent with influences of En­glish that remind one of urban Puerto Rican slang and Nuyorican Spanish. Thus yales could also be Puerto Ricans who are protagonists in the circulation from the island to the U.S. mainland and back. In this sense, the sonic appeal, where language is part of the comedy sketch, becomes part of ­these “bufo theatrical modes” of per­for­mance, even for comedy sketches that do not use blackface. I define “bufo script” following Jill Lane’s study of 1880s Cuban bufo theater, in which she examines characters such as “la mulata” (the mulatto ­woman), “el Gallego” (the Spaniard), and “el negro catedrático” (the Black professor or intellectual). ­These character constellations can be used over in dif­fer­ent contexts. For instance, the Puerto Rican TV comedy show Susa y Epifanio (1990–2019) rewrites bufo characters without the blackface as the “sexy ­woman,” “the humorous marginal man,” and the owner of the

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FIGURE 2.3.  ​Francheska La Yal, still from YouTube La cosa ta’ mala en PR. Frenchy La Caballota

de Paso Fino (parody).

store, an el­derly creole Puerto Rican (Epifanio González Villamil) who feuds with “Susa” (Jesusa Cruz Avilés), the elderly-­Black ­woman.15 In ­earlier comedic sketches Epifanio, who is a follower of the pro-­Commonwealth Popu­lar Demo­ cratic Party, and Susa, who is a follower of the pro-­statehood Progressive, fight. Epifanio calls her ugly and monita (female monkey), clearly alluding to her race, while Susa hits him with her purse, which gives the Black w ­ oman a certain agency, but all in the ser­vice of physical comedy. A lot of the race comedy was dropped from the show’s script years l­ ater, but the early episodes are a good example of the ways race and racialization work in Puerto Rico’s mainstream media. Víctor Alicea, the creator of Epifanio as well as other characters such as Guille (a flamboyant gay man), is a multidimensional comedian whose main strategy is to create complex characters; actress Carmen Nydia Velázquez (Susa) uses her dark skin to create Susa and thinks of the character as a study in the social agency of Black ­women. Susa and Epifanio speak with the accent of jíbaro Puerto Ricans from the countryside, like Chianita. Their characters are from coastal Ponce (Epifanio) and mountainous Las Marías (Susa). Although blackface in itself is frowned upon, bufo motives live on and even thrive in daily televisual comedy. The latent complexity of Puerto Rican characters does not necessarily apply to Dominican characters in the Puerto Rican media. As Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel reminds us in Caribe Two Ways, Dominicans are a distinctly ethnic community on the archipelago and as such are the object of racialized and

Enacting ­Others • 45

ste­reo­typed ethnic jokes. The ste­reo­type of Dominicans as Black, rather dense, and invariably employed in the ser­vice professions is a mainstay of Puerto Rican comedy sketches. Jokes such as “Cuántos dominicanos hacen falta para . . . ?” (How many Dominicans are needed to . . . ?) are passed around in Puerto Rican popu­lar culture, reinforcing a frontier/border between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. In real­ity, since Puerto Ricans and Dominicans (as well as other ­peoples in the Spanish Ca­rib­bean) are phenotypically similar to each other, this frontier shifts from physiological to philological features, with the cibaeño dialect (from the northern region of El Cibao in the Dominican Republic) becoming the main racial marker of difference. As we w ­ ill see in chapter 3, the same comedy routines pop up in Miami as well, where Dominicans are also racialized (in blackface) and also identified by the cibaeño dialect.16 In this overlap between Puerto Rico’s and Miami’s media spheres, Dominican impersonations can pass between the two dif­fer­ent points, sometimes appearing in blackface or brownface and often speaking cibaeño. Tita Guerrero is a Puerto Rican comedian, dancer, and presenter who is of Dominican descent on her ­mother’s side and Puerto Rican on her ­father’s. She has worked in Puerto Rican radio and tele­vi­sion since the late 1990s as a dancer, radio broadcaster and tele­vi­sion comedian. In this chapter I examine fragments of Tita Guerrero’s show for Univision Puerto Rico, Noche Ilegal,” and Telemundo’s Demasiada Tita to address the complexities of understanding blackface as a local vernacular phenomenon that can be transposed into the transnational Ca­rib­be­an/Latin American dimension. As we will see with the videos of LeJuan James, ethnic filiation between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans plays an impor­ tant role in the making of a per­for­mance of Dominicanidad that is key to understanding transnational Ca­rib­be­anness. In par­tic­u­lar, I examine the character Joselyn created for the sketch show Lo In con Joselyn. Joselyn is a Black Dominican hostess of an interview show. In a discussion with the local journal Primera Hora, Tita Guerrero commented on how the character of Joselyn was created and inspired by her ­mother’s Dominican culture, paying a jokey homage to it. Nevertheless, her physique and style w ­ ere inspired by a w ­ oman who used to work as a cleaning lady in “Tuto Soto’s ­house, the owner of the radio station.” In the comedy situation she arrives to the radio station to do a show and believes “she is it, as ratings go up b­ ecause of her.” De su progenitora también heredó el amor por República Dominicana, tierra de su madre y de su nuevo personaje “Jocelyn.” (sic) Esta “pícara señora” nació en febrero a través del programa radial “Happy Hour” (Fidelity), el cual anima junto a Otto Oppenheimer, y hará su primera presentación en vivo en el espectáculo. “Es una señora que lo que hacía era lavar screens en casa de Tuto Soto, el dueño de la emisora, y llega a la emisora y se cree que es alguien importante y que por ella es que se hace rating,” explicó la artista sobre este personaje.

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[From the ­woman who gave birth to her she also inherited the love for the Dominican Republic, land of her ­mother and of her new character “Jocelyn.” (sic) This picaresque lady was born in February in the radio program “Happy Hour” which she hosts with Otto Oppenheimer, and she ­will appear for the first time live in a public show. “She is a lady that cleaned screens in Tuto Soto’s home, the owner of the radio broadcasting com­pany, and she arrives in our studio believing that the high rates on the show are b­ ecause of her,” explained the artist about her character.]

At the same interview, Guerrero recognizes the challenges to represent Joselyn as the public “might not like her physique. . . . ​I see her as a fat and picaresque ­woman with a lot of bling (brillo); so the character might die just t­ here or become stronger.” Notice that Guerrero does not mention that Joselyn is Black or that she ­will perform the character donning blackface but references her economic status and her fondness for “bling” that might be beyond her economic status. From this alone it is clear that she has been racialized as a Black ­woman.17 Before moving into the analy­sis of Guerrero’s Joselyn I would like to return to the provocation that opened this chapter: if blackface has r­ eally been so thoroughly dismantled by an antiracist critique that makes its racial assumptions obvious, why has it survived and seems to appeal to performers, much less audiences? Do the politics of closeness in blackface give us some understanding of the pragmatics of Guerrero’s Joselyn within a larger politics of closeness and distance? When the cultural appropriations implicit in brownface and blackface in the larger Spanish Ca­rib­bean culture are so obvious, are they permitted through some exculpatory moment of closeness?

Lo In con Joselyn Dominican migrations to Puerto Rico in the late 1980s and 1990s brought a culture of conviviality strongly inflected by their Dominican heritage (particularly the culture around merengue and bachata ­music). The boundary that defined the Dominican subculture also made it the target of racist ethnic jokes as well as of ordinary social aggressions in everyday interactions. The l­abor markets (particularly in media, but also in commerce) soon exhibited a strong Dominican cast, propelled by Dominican entrepreneurs, the majority of whom ­were w ­ omen, as Sonia Fritz makes clear in her documentary Visa para un sueño (1990).18 Many Dominican ­women labored as domestic workers, while ­others found opportunities in a diversity of ser­vice industry sectors, such as restaurants and hair salons.19 The Joselyn character was inspired by a Dominican ­woman who worked with Guerrero at a Puerto Rican radio station in 2008. In fact, as previously stated, Joselyn first appeared, sonically, on the radio program El Happy Hour on radio station Fidelity 97.5 FM. Instead of a visual repre­sen­ta­tion, Joselyn’s Dominicanidad was at first expressed in the accents, slang, and tempo of a Dominican ­woman who

Enacting ­Others • 47

discussed daily situations in a comical way. Once the character shifted from radio to tele­vi­sion, it was clear that the aesthetics for the character belonged to the 1980s Dominican soundscapes on the island and the diaspora, as it goes back to the famous merengue band Milly, Jocelyn y Los Vecinos, founded by Milly Quezada and her husband and bother in Washington Heights, New York, in 1975, self-­ described as a feminist band with satirical lyr­ics and frantic tempos. They saw their mission as “anti-­macho”: “ ‘Most of the groups are all-­male, and the songs they sing are anti-­women,’ said Jocelyn Quezada. ‘­They’re sexist—­they put ­women down or treat them as sex objects. It’s that ­whole macho-­Latin ­thing.’ ‘We have a big female following,’ said Milly Quezada. ‘They like the message ­we’re sending out—­we’re saying what they want to say’ ” (“New Jersey ­Sisters”). Jocelyn, Milly Quezada’s ­sister, joined the group in 1978 and the group changed its name to Milly, Jocelyn y los Vecinos.20 As the second voice of the group Jocelyn never had played the lead singer like Milly. What is impor­tant for the character Jocelyn is to see the aesthetics of the character. Not only is Guerrero’s Joselyn a feminist, but her antimacho per­for­mance and affects are centered on the agency and l­abor of Dominican ­women, such as the songs “Volvió Juanita.” The aesthetics of the character are also centered in the eighties with a jheri curl wig as well as glittery clothes and flashy makeup (see figure 2.4). Joselyn appeared for the first time in the stand-up comedy show Ese pobre lechón at Christmastime 2008. Along with her character Tonya (a parody of Puerto Rican show hostess Sonya Cortés), Joselyn became one of the most popu­lar characters among Guerrero’s routines. Guerrero, who started working on tele­vi­sion as a choreographer and backup dancer to salsa and merengue bands in the early 1990s, had not worked in stand-up comedy before, but a­ fter Joselyn became a hit on the radio, it opened the doors for her successful ­career as a comedian. ­After a stint on El Show de Raymond Arrieta, where she performed as an extra and played a leading role in some skits, notably with her Tonya character, she left the Fidelity 97.5 FM Happy Hour radio sketch in 2017 and has launched herself in comedy tele­ vi­sion, particularly a­ fter the success of her TV show Demasiada Tita in 2013. In her comedy sketch with Puerto Rican merengue singer Giselle, Joselyn is a brilliant conversational partner and monologist, throwing out a stream of puns and double entendres linked to sexuality, moral codes, and female beauty. The sketch’s atmosphere is a throwback to variety shows in the late eighties and nineties, the stage setting being minimal: one sofa is provided for the interviewee, while Joselyn sits in a dif­fer­ent chair. Opening with a merengue tune, Lo In con Joselyn starts with a preface when Joselyn, with her strong Dominican accent, introduces Giselle: “Vamo (h) a hablá con una persona que siempre está in, porque el merengue siempre está in . . . ​Con nosotros señoras y señores la fre(h)ca esta Giselle.” (Let’s talk to a person that is always in ­because merengue is always in.. With all of us ladies and gentlemen, the coquettish, Giselle). The darkening of the skin, the jheri curl wig, as well as the fat inserts for the face and flashy clothes reference, as well, a throwback to an ­earlier era, milking

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FIGURE 2.4.  ​Milly, Jocelyn y Los Vecinos, Esta Noche!, Algar Rec­ords (1984). CUNY Dominican

Studies Institute M ­ usic Collection.

humor from the clash of codes by making the interviewer a gaudy personage instead of the voice of the buttoned-­down or wised-up establishment. If the hostess anchors the audience’s identity, as she does in most talk shows, Joselyn throws that dynamic off-­balance, with stylistic clues from eighties variety shows—­a tongue-­in-­cheek aesthetic. Image wise, the show could have been produced in ­either Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. The juxtaposition of Joselyn’s flashy clothes, wig, and cibaeño accent and the look and voice of the Puerto Rican merengue star puts both figures in complete contrast making Giselle more trendy or con­temporary and playing with two televisual aesthetics ­those from the mid-1980s and ­those from the pre­sent.(figure 2.5). A popu­lar interpreter of merengue m ­ usic from the early nineties to the pre­ sent, Giselle has been influential in the m ­ usic market as an interpreter of feminist romantic ballads to merengue beat, like Olga Tañón and Jailene Cintrón, who gained fame in the 1990s as performers of the merengue ballad. Tita Guerrero was a backup dancer at this time, performing many shows with Giselle as

Enacting ­Others • 49

FIGURE 2.5.  ​Joselyn, Lo In con Joselyn. Primera Hora, GFR Media. (Courtesy of Tita Guerrero.)

well as with other merenguero bands. It is clear that Tita Guerrero’s Joselyn wants to pay homage to this impor­tant moment in the Puerto Rican mediascape. This creates the backstory against which the sketch plays out as Joselyn preens and questions Giselle’s CD picture and lyr­ics: J: Ud. sabe que esto inspira lujuria, esto a mi me molesta mucho (You know that this inspires libidinous thoughts this ­really bothers me too much). G: ¿Te molesta? (Does it bother you?) J: Si porque uno tiene que ir buscando hacia lo divino a Dios y ud va mira pero pal Infierno (Yes, ­because you always need to seek the divine and look up for God but you seek Hell).

By being too moralistic and religious Joselyn criticizes the same feminist lyr­ics that Giselle and other merengue singers are known for. Joselyn breaks with all the normative codes of the interview as she insults her guest calling her old, evil, and too sexual. She even comments on her hair, touching it (a social faux pas among Black and racially mixed w ­ omen) and making allusions to her Blackness: J: Ya los cabellos (le toca el pelo a Giselle) se te están poniendo como este (se toca su propio pelo) (Look at this, your hair [touches Giselle’s hair] is looking like this [touches her own curly hair]). G: Ahí se refleja mi abuela: ella sale por ahí (This is where you see my grand­ mother in my hair).

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The fact that Giselle names Blackness with the Puerto Rican common “y tu abuela donde está?” (and where is your grand­mother?) with the famous phrase by Fortunato Vizcarrondo’s antiracist poem shifts the views of Blackness from Dominicanidad to the Puerto Rican ­family narrative. Joselyn is visibly Black but Giselle, who happens to be lighter, is also Black. While Giselle does not deny her blackness, she does subscribe to Puerto Rican views of miscegenation, by using her grand­mothers famous phrase. Of course, the viewers see Joselyn as Black and overweight, not the normative Puerto Rican televisual standard for beauty. This creates a certain off-­balance tele­vi­sion moment. Guerrero has commented that this is what she intends with her character: “Joselyn weights more than 300 pounds but acts like she is not both­ered by it.” Her moralizing comments to Giselle puts the latter on the defensive. Joselyn questions Giselle’s décolletage and makeup, saying that they “are too provocative.” Giselle defends her wardrobe and pose in a direct manner, reminiscent of the feminist lyr­ics of her songs, which appropriate the ranchera genre sung by ­women, putting down men in stories of broken-up relationships, adding that “all that she does is tasteful.” Voicing the hypocritical attitude of patriarchal morality while preening her own looks, Joselyn pushes the bound­aries of the interview, even screaming comically at some point that the interview is over—­which, for the spectator, breaks the formal codes for a gracious hostess. The absurdity of the scene puts all the racial ste­reo­t ypes into play, while creating an intra-­ Caribbean conversation, Dominican Blackness as vis­i­ble but honest televisual given, Puerto Rican Blackness as ancestral Blackness, with whitening undertones and tacit mixed-­race looks. Thus, the type of transactional feminism that is derived from the dialogue reflects mostly on social and moral codes, but in a brilliant fashion Joselyn debunks the traditional ste­reo­types of Dominican ­women as more sexual or erotically driven than Puerto Ricans.21 The inversion of character positions situates Giselle, with her dress and attitude, as overtly sexual, while Joselyn plays the more traditional, religious, and even maternal (nagging) role. From the position of Joselyn, Puerto Rico, the U.S.-­influenced territory, is the amoral culture, while the Dominican Republic is where ­women know their worth—­and their place. The comedy ­here derives from playing against the expectations of popu­lar prejudice and ste­reo­t ypes coming from both sides, and it also, in brilliant fashion, brings in the ongoing moral agendas of certain groups against popu­lar ­music. In many ways, and as we ­w ill see in the following section with my analy­sis of Yeyo Vargas, a character conceived for the Cuban diaspora show El Show de Alexis Valdés, brownface Dominicans are often positioned as the moral, civic, or even more po­l iti­cally driven force vis-­à-­vis Cubans or Puerto Ricans. Their politics are connected more socially with Blackness in their respective immigrant enclaves, ­whether in the United States or Puerto Rico. It is as if Dominicans have learned, due to their po­liti­cal histories, not only how to navigate and or­ga­nize themselves in transnational and civic networks that identify

Enacting ­Others • 51

them as Black but also how to enter into solidarity with Latinidad. This is why, for many mainstream comedies in Miami or Puerto Rico, Dominicans are always represented as Black. It is to this relationship between Blackness and Latinidad that I turn in the next section.

Yeyo Vargas, Obama’s Tigre Yeyo Vargas is a beloved character in the Miami mediascape who originated and became a staple on the Cuban diaspora Miami based comedian Alexis Valdés comedy-­variety show Esta Noche Tu Night from 2010 to 2012. ­A fter the show was canceled in 2012, the character lived on, appearing in live theatrical acts. As well, the schtick that he made famous lived on: Yeyo Vargas is the president of the ULPO (Partido de Unión Latina) an imaginary po­liti­cal party, which represents the interests of Latinos and mostly Demo­cratic Afro-­Latinos who voted for former president Barack Obama in 2008. Carlos Marrero, who plays Yeyo, is of Cuban origin. He does other blackface characters, such as Yeyo Vargas and the Haitian Bullfighter.22 In his act, Yeyo Vargas bluffs and hyperbolizes his importance. He calls himself “El Tigre Barack Obama’s right hand; and his advisor for Latin American and Ca­rib­bean affairs, including t­ hose of the Major, Minor, and Tiny Antilles.” Yeyo Varga’s brownface is an impor­tant ele­ment in the rollout of Marrero’s po­liti­cal satire, linking all Demo­cratic voters with Blackness (which reflects an ethnic divide in South Florida, and in par­tic­u­lar between Dominicans and Cubans) as well as making fun of the exaggerated style of local politicians in the United States. The fact that Yeyo Vargas is performed in darkened brownface in combination with an afro wig and the m ­ usic of merengue positions the character at the crossroads of Blackness and Latinidad, which is a tension in the exile Cuban community in Miami. Barack Obama and Raúl Castro agreed to normalize relations between Cuba and the United States on December 17, 2014, which was followed by the expected visit of the Obamas to Cuba in March 2016. Th ­ ese decisions w ­ ere opposed by Castro hard-­liners in South Florida but received a more understanding reception from most parts of the Cuban community and other Ca­rib­bean communities both in the diaspora and at home. The Yeyo Vargas routine was both symbol and symptom of the anx­i­eties circulating around Blackness and Latinidad for the Ca­rib­bean diasporas in Miami, which w ­ ere crystalized by the intersection of local politics and international politics at this moment. The lock of the Republican Party on the Cuban demographic had loosened ­under Obama, especially among the younger generations that had fewer or even no memories of Cuba. As well, the new migratory waves of Cubans was less invested in anti-­Castro militancy. Yeyo not only describes himself as Obama’s tigre—­a Dominican slang word that defines brotherhood, macho sexual prowess, and street smart be­hav­ior—­but, in one routine, even talked to the Obamas by phone. Yeyo Vargas visited the White House and acted as an impor­tant news reporter from

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Washington, D.C. By being Obama’s tigre, he was identifying tigeraje in Obama as well, making the former president seem street-­smart, cool, and savvy in all his po­liti­cal decisions. In one sketch, the Obamas (Barack and Michelle) acculturate themselves into Dominicanidad once they travel to the Dominican Republic for a Christmas party. Michelle plays the tambora at the party, while Obama wears a “bling-­bling” suited to raggaetón or street savvy tigres’ outfits. The images of the former president and First Lady are photoshopped with the outfits and the tambora drum. For the sketch, it is the Dominican/Ca­rib­bean party that engages and transforms the Obamas. In a second sketch Yeyo reflects on the changes that happened when a hotline call ser­vice from Washington, D.C., into the Dominican Republic magically transforms a white American redheaded ­woman operator into a Black Dominican. As soon as she is transformed into a Black Dominican w ­ oman, her outfit changes from the original professional ensemble into a sexy maid outfit, her body magically standing in front of an ironing board with an iron in hand. The conversation heats up as she tells Yeyo that she is “naked below the waist,” or in other words that she is also available for phone sex. The D.C. po­liti­cal hotline becomes the sexy hotline or, putting the two sketches together, a type of “Hotline Bling” in the Obama White House directed by Yeyo. It is clear that Yeyo Vargas the Black Dominican po­liti­cal handler not only has transformed the Obamas into street Black Dominican men and ­women but also can ste­reo­ typically convert them into ser­vice workers, reversing the direction of social mobility. So even if Dominicans have po­liti­cal leverage as Demo­crats in the Obama administration, the metamorphosis performed by the joke is that they ­will always be of ser­vice to that same group of Demo­crats, never their equals. The social hierarchy that allied older Cubans to a white establishment is restored through minstrel show comedy. In this way, a double message is established, in which the old ste­reo­types of oversexed and unintelligent Blacks are restored against the threatening real­ity of an educated Black man and his wife in the White House and the theoretical civil equality that allots votes to Blacks as well as to whites is shown as a con game run by Demo­crats who use Black and poor demagogues like Yeyo to trick Black voters. To local Cuban spectators Yeyo Vargas is the true face of the failed liberal program, even if the face has, in real­ity, been painted on. The bond between Obama and Yeyo is the racial “truth” b­ ehind the artifice of Obama’s respectability. This extends to, and in a sense depends upon, a ste­reo­typed hypersexuality. Yeyo, as a tigre, lusts for Cuban ­women, particularly the vedette Niurka Marcos. She, however, does not reciprocate his courtship, and tells him that “she only fancies one Black man” (ese negro me encanta), President Obama, Yeyo’s boss.23 Yeyo is not the only Black Dominican that Miami Cuban comedians have created: the Merengueros Dominicanos analyzed by anthropologist Ariana Hernández Reguant, are a comedy sketch that continues to make the Cuban

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audience laugh with their crass sexual dancing and vulgar lyr­ics. But Yeyo is surely the most power­ful image. As a presidential advisor, he represents not only himself but also so-­called Latinos—­and therein lies the question. Why do recent, Spanish-­speaking, working-­class Cuban immigrants see a Brown Dominican as the comedic embodiment of Latinidad? And why do they not use a Brown Dominican but instead resort to a performative device—­blackface—­that is so intertwined with racism in the United States? Anthropologist Ariana Hernández Reguant and I view t­ hese brownface and blackface visual repre­sen­ta­tions in Miami tele­vi­sion, and we agree that the impersonations of Dominicans on comedy shows describe “a form to claim whiteness as a path for upward mobility. In Miami, no ­matter their immigrant cohort, Cubans report overwhelmingly (over 95%) as white. But while their position in a white and black world is unambiguous, their relationship to a hybrid or brown Latinidad is far more complicated. “Cubans alone did not invent ­these racial codes, as “South Americans, and many middle-­class Dominicans in Miami identify also as white and ­middle class.” To many Cubans, the portrayal of Dominicans in brownface or blackface represents a form of mock vio­lence that is part of acculturation into U.S. society. In our analy­sis of Yeyo Vargas and The Merengueros Dominicanos we concluded that Cubans strug­gle with what Latinidad means, but in par­tic­u­lar with their refusal to be read as Black in U.S. society.24 As Hernández Reguant has also analyzed more recently in her insightful essay on “Meeting Cubans 4 Trump,” blackness and whiteness are connected as well as ideology with the way Cubans see Trump as a candidate with possibilities for f­ uture po­liti­cal change.25 Cubans are not alone in their understanding of race in the United States. Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Central Americans share the same strug­gle to find themselves in the complex realms of U.S. ethnic repre­sen­ ta­tion and belonging. Wrongly labeled as “Brown” or as a kind of “race,” Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Central Americans bear the effects of imperial colonial histories in relation to the United States.26 The backstory of the Yeyo character imagines him to be an honest peasant from what Dominicans call “el monte” or “el campo.” In this sense he relates to Cuban guajiros or Puerto Rican jíbaros, and similarly, he speaks with an accent and speech (cibaeño) that signals his rural provenance, sprinkled with the malapropisms identified with the negrito catedrático in Cuban minstrel theater—­the ­mistakes of an urban Black man who is trying to imitate the speech of educated whites to elevate himself. His mannerisms and speech index his poor educational and class background, yet he has fared very well. Why? B ­ ecause his color has allowed him to benefit from affirmative action and—in white Cuban eyes—­the favoritism of the federal government. For the comedy sketch, it is clear that he signifies a new racial regime that baffles many recent Cuban immigrants for whom whiteness should hold the key to upward mobility. Yeyo’s success in having the president’s ear and therefore a voice in Washington puts a farcical cast to Obama’s rise, which is another instance of undeserved reward and has somehow

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been wrenched from the power associated with the Republican Party and the likes of Ileana Ros-­Lehtinen, Mario Díaz-­Balart, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz, all educated, white Cubans. Yeyo stands for the unlikely immigrant dream: a Black Dominican representing a type of Ca­rib­bean federation for Barack Obama’s administration. And that is precisely what makes Cubans laugh, confirming their sense that Obama is not serious, an interval in the white hegemony they identify with. Second, Yeyo represents Latinidad or at least a form of Black Latinidad, from which first-­and second-­generation immigrant Venezuelans, Colombians, South Americans, Cubans, and Spaniards in Miami are racially estranged. Yeyo’s Latinidad is one often claimed by Mexicans as well as by Puerto Ricans, who have a longer presence in the United States as internally colonized populations and who have been usually classified as “Brown” but nonwhite. The mostly working-­class, nonwhite Dominicans who settled in areas of heavy Puerto Rican presence in the Northeast have been able to ease into the Latino category, unlike their white middle-­class conationals in Miami. For the recently arrived Cuban writers who write Yeyo’s and the Merenguero’s sketches, t­ hese Dominicans are safe to mock before a local audience that mostly excludes them. At the same time, however much they are mocked, Dominicans are part of a dialogue between Ca­rib­be­anness and Latinidad that is intriguingly dif­fer­ent in terms of ­labor relations, class, and immigration status to Cuban viewers. The Cuban fast path to U.S. citizenship as former communist subjects does not make them the kind of American subject that Latinos are expected to be. This has ­shaped the Cuban immigrant rejection of a ste­reo­t ype of Latinidad with which they cannot identify. At the same time, many of them (­unless they are Black Cubans) are allergic to the Latinidad associated with Ca­rib­bean Blackness, which, in the American po­liti­cal culture, places them closely into other sociopo­liti­cal alliances.

Digital Echo Chambers Looking for Pánfilo That morning I woke up ­earlier than usual. It was my first day teaching at the summer program in Cuba’s Casa de las Américas and I wanted to take the time to walk the c­ ouple of blocks from my apartment rental, the pent­house of 3ra-­A, to the institution, by walking from the side close to Malecón Ave­nue. ­A fter breakfast I went into a dimly illuminated elevator down fifteen floors. María mentioned that I was lucky ­because it had been working at least for a ­couple of weeks now—­for many days she was not able to go downstairs for her usual after­ noon paseo due to the broken elevator. At her age it was hard to take all ­those stairs one by one. As I was walking the four short blocks between my building and Casa, I noticed many changes on the façades and the street from my last stay in Havana. The usual movement of ­people close to eight ­o’clock in the morning was always the same, but new restaurants with outside seating ­were available.

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A Turkish restaurant very popu­lar with the young Vedado crowd had opened in my building. Th ­ ere was even a new high-­rise apartment complex on the corner of 3ra and D. The sign and name of the building interested me, so I thought about taking a picture, but the traffic of p­ eople ­under the construction “vigas” made this impossible. I was walking very slowly and had to get to class to prepare my students for the first day. Also, whenever I am in Cuba, I shy away from being noticed or seen as a common tourist. Though all my past experiences of being s­ topped at h ­ otel entrances, questioned in restaurants, or even harassed by an old Spanish tourist in an elevator told of my failure not to stick out, my aim in Cuba has always been to blend in. A new iPhone model would certainly call ­others’ attention, I thought—­a lthough by looking at the recent developments around me in that corner of Vedado, maybe it w ­ ouldn’t. At that moment I noticed a group of Black men standing in a corner of a h ­ ouse just across from the new development, talking. The sounds of some local reggaetón ­were blasting in the back. They might have recognized my indecision as I had to walk close to their side of the street to avoid the construction area. They kept engaging each other in conversation for a while and then became ­really ­silent as I walked by: “Buenos días,” said the one sitting on what looked like a chaise longue in the m ­ iddle of the sidewalk. “Buenos días,” I answered back and kept walking. All conversation and eyes w ­ ere kept insistently on me as I walked by. One of the men in the back, the one close to the radio, murmured something that I failed to hear. ­A fter a few seconds they started talking again. That after­noon a­ fter class I talked to María about this new building. “A new apartment complex,” she answered while watering her plants. “Who are they renting t­ hese apartments to?” I asked. “Cubans,” she said, “and maybe some extranjeros, but many of them Cubans. Some live abroad and are buying property ­here. Some ­others live ­here in the island; and they are buying them to rent them to tourists.” I wanted to know what happened to the families who used to live in the area. “Many have died, have left the island or have moved to the countryside,” she answered. “I am still waiting for the ­house they promised me, and I am a vieja (an old lady), and still not getting my share, this is how ­things are ­here.” Many of ­these displaced tenants are el­derly and Black like María; some of the families have been habaneros for generations. The next day as she was sitting watching her Brazilian soap opera, I sat with her to discuss the show. We discussed the ones I have watched and the ones she liked. She loves local and international soap operas and crime series. I asked her about Pánfilo, the man of the infamous video that created a social media movement: “Jama y Libertad!” many years back, a movement that started in Miami and went global. She looked at me, confused: Pánfilo the comedian, the protagonist of the comedy show Vivir del Cuento? I answered, “no María, the other Pánfilo, the Black one.” “Ahhh, el de la Jama?” She laughed a ­little and then became ­silent. By referring to the two Pánfilos, María had confused two dif­fer­ ent comedic characters, one a popu­lar local Black man, the other played by a

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white comedian and TV personality, Luis Silva. María, like many Black and working-­class Cubans, spends the time that she is not working in front of the television—­the only entertainment she has from her hard laboring hours as the main cook, washer­woman, and attendant in the apartment. “Alguna gente dice que está enfermo, quizás ya se murió” (Some say that he is sick, maybe he already has passed), she said lighting her cigar, “o si no, se lo llevaron” (or maybe he was taken away). Then she said, “You know that his f­ amily is from the alley down h ­ ere, close to Malecón at 3ra and D.” I thought that maybe ­those men I saw in the morning are part of his extended ­family, but I d­ idn’t want to jump to conclusions. María said that Pánfilo “got very well” the first time he was rehabilitated for his excessive drinking but she believes that with no options for him to work, he went back to drinking again. “Alcoholism is a prob­lem in Cuba,” she said. “­People drink to pass the time, to confront day to day prob­lems; but a drunk never lies.” A ­ fter a long silence she added, “Es un muchacho muy espiritual. Algún día te acompaño a ver si lo encontramos” (He is a very spiritual young man. I ­will go with you some day to look for him). We never did. As my summer commitments kept piling up, the idea of finding Pánfilo faded. ­A fter our three weeks in the city ­were over, we took off to see the Cuban countryside. I realized at this point that María’s gossip about Pánfilo was prob­ably more insightful, more full of the ordinary fate of Cubans, than any interview I would have conducted. Pánfilo was for many the honest voice of a crude Cuban economic real­ity that became for a moment a viral cause, among the swarm of urgent viral po­liti­cal ­causes that have ­shaped the Cuban web space since the late nineties. Most of ­these ­causes centered on politics, especially ­after Proyecto Varela, or­ga­nized in 1998 by Oswaldo Payá, accrued international notice for its effort, in 2004, to change the Cuban constitution, collecting more than fourteen thousand signatures on its petition—­thus exposing dissent on the popu­lar level. This galvanized the once fragmented Cuban opposition on the island, breaking open a discussion of civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of trade, the opportunity for Cubans to rent and own businesses, and freeing po­liti­cal prisoners. The protests of Las Damas de Blanco, wives and ­mothers of po­liti­cal prisoners, in Quinta Avenida in Miramar in 2008 showed up on my feed on Facebook and Twitter, where it was joined by news of the hunger strikes started by several men, many of them Angola veterans, all of them Black. Whereas in the past dissent from the Castro regime led, almost inevitably, to exile, a new, vis­i­ble thread of po­liti­cal discussion on the island (and in the diaspora) created space in Cuba itself for dissent in social spaces. What Damián Fernández describes as “the politics of passion” has ­shaped Cuban po­liti­cal discourse for de­cades, particularly inflecting the anti-­Castro politics of the Miami-­based community. That older politics was normatively white. The ­faces of dissidence in Cuba at the dawn of the post-­Castro era w ­ ere mostly young and Black, Afro-­Cuban men and w ­ omen, joined by some white h ­ uman right leaders like Oswaldo Payá. This

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was a seismic shift in the way Cuban po­liti­cal discourse, on the island and in the diaspora, was s­haped, leaving both the older hard-­line Castro supporters and hard-­line anti-­Castro opponents perplexed. It is in this historical context that Pánfilo’s humorous video became viral. The video had all the ele­ments of Cuban choteo to be successful: colloquial habanero jargon, some swearing, a popu­lar Black and street-­smart character (Pánfilo). In this section I analyze the viral response to Pánfilo in terms of an affective-­ sensorial echo chamber that incorporated the social tensions and dynamics of con­temporary Cuba. While centered in choteo, laughter, per­for­mance, and creativity, this response uses media and new media self-­consciously, reflecting the con­temporary global style of po­liti­cal discourse in the age of 24/7 cable and internet. Blackness, sound, and body are signifiers that trace an echo chamber in Pánfilo’s per­for­mance as key ele­ments from whence body and spirit materialize in a drunken frenzy. Jama y libertad! (Food and Freedom) are the two words that ­shaped the campaign’s declaration of civil autonomy. Even ­after the Castro regime silenced him, ­under the cover of assigning him to “rehabilitation” centers to “cure” his addiction, Pánfilo’s message of hunger and freedom was understood by the Cuban p­ eople for what it was: not an idiosyncratic fit of alcohol-­fueled madness but a direct message to the world about the plight of ordinary Cubans squeezed by the government’s policies in neoliberal-­global times.

Jama y Libertad A media echo chamber is constructed when an online product becomes viral and is reproduced, but also intervened, changed, and remade into a multitude of other repre­sen­ta­tions or products. The digital echo chamber could be quoted through reenactments of the video, takes of the dialogue, language/sounds, or even adding musical tunes or a clever phrase. It becomes a racial/racialized echo chamber when the main actors are Black or racialized subjects. In the case of Pánfilo, his video became viral thanks to the local Miami news and programming that made of his brief intervention an “urgent call in times of crisis.” Presented for the first time in a news segment directed by Miami-­based Cuban American journalist María Elvira Salazar (who l­ater ran for Congress on the Republican ticket), the video was framed on her news segment with standard anticommunist vitriol: “Hunger is a prob­lem in Cuba and this ­humble voice of a citizen is making that clear,” was the message. Pánfilo was thus labeled the voice of the common citizen on the island: Black, poor, and dispossessed. While the tone of moral superiority of the Cuban exile community is palpable and expected, importantly, the journalist bypassed the disturbingly carnivalesque humor of the sequence to focus on the plight of hunger itself. Exiled Cuban communities are not unanimously on the right po­liti­cally. In fact, many moderate Cuban Americans are against the U.S. embargo, but Salazar is certainly not one of them. For her, the Cuban state and Castro’s regime have been inflicting hunger on the Cuban ­people since 1959. In this framework,

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Pánfilo’s video is shown as an example of how “the current realities of scarcity” are worsening the crisis. Cubans on the island have a phrase: “the embargo inside the embargo.” It describes the l­ imited availability and dissemination of certain products, which are consumed by the lucky few who are connected to the Communist Party, the black market, or the power­ful, or even, sometimes, to t­ hose who wake up early to stand in lines. With nearly a million and a half views, the viral video that appeared online in April 2009, “¡Lo que hace falta es Jama! (El Original!),” just lasted eighty seconds. Jama is a word originally from Caló, a Romani dialect from the Iberian Peninsula, and it means food, but also to chew.27 It is used in Cuba and in some countries of Latin Amer­i­ca. In the video an unidentified Black man is discussing local rap/hip-­hop artists when Pánfilo comes from the left side of the camera gesturing and screaming, “¡Jama! Jama! Eso es lo que hace falta!” ­A fter a short interruption, the cameraman gets him out of the shot, but then Pánfilo returns unexpectedly from down the frame. This looks very much like a staged per­for­mance. ¡Jama! Jama! ¡Oye! Pinga! ¡Asere, graba ahí, ¡Jama! ¡Jama! ¡Hace falta comida que aquí lo que hay es tremenda hambre! Te lo está diciendo Pánfilo en Cuba. ¡Comida! . . . ​Picadillo de soya, ¡Mira esto! ¡Tremendo descaro . . . ​con los viejos!, ¡Oye asere graba ahí, graba ahí lo que te estoy diciendo que yo no digo mentiras!, ¡Oye pónla, Jama! [Food, food! Hey! Fuck dude, rec­ord this! What we need is Food! Food! We need food ­because what we have ­here is deep hunger. Pánfilo from Cuba is telling you the truth. Food! We get soy mincemeat, . . . ​A terrible abuse with the el­der­ly! Hey homie, rec­ord this! I am not telling lies, Hey put it on! Food!]

The video became viral when it was picked up by the Cuban diaspora community on Facebook and Twitter. The Pánfilo video and its viral spread opened my eyes to how the new media echo chamber phenomenon operated. Filmed with a cell phone camera, the video was not a high-­quality product but became, even if in brevity, a symbol of the plight of the Cuban economic crisis in 2009.28 Juan Carlos González Marcos, alias Pánfilo, became a celebrity overnight. But the fact that this celebrity status came from an island that was commercially blocked by the United States since the mid-1960s and with no wideband internet access made this viral success a new kind of phenomenon. Contrary to the po­liti­cal weight, for instance, that local broadcasts gave to the case of Elián González, the child who became a cause célèbre in 2000 due to the l­egal b­ attle for his custody between his ­father in Cuba and his ­family members in the United States, the Pánfilo video circulated on social media and was promptly posted on YouTube. This was an island-­made product, centering on the voice of a drunken Black man, gesturing to the camera. It was precisely t­ hese facts that made it

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an iconic visual product. Mainly ­because of its comical content the video quickly became a protest statement, coming out of the Special Period (­after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its support) during which Cubans experienced a transition into a more stratified class division, with the government expanding tourism and dollar-­generating enterprises that did not trickle down to poorer Cubans.29 ­These class divisions put the already affluent party strata of state bureaucrats as well as families who received money from their families abroad in a better economic place, while ­those who ­were unconnected ­were left to sink or swim. Social protests as well as local dissenting movements sprang up, and local activists in Cuba started filming their protests and walk-­outs starting in the early 2000s, as the technology became more available.30 Most notable w ­ ere Las Damas de Blanco walks on Quinta Avenida in Miramar, which echoed the famous Madres de la Plaza de Mayo who helped bring down the military junta in Argentina in the 1980s. Filmed in the same street restaurant gentrified area, an area open only to tourists and affluent Cubans who could pay for it located in Malecón (the neighborhood described at the beginning of this section), the video reveals the complexities of the displaced/poor, in this case Black subjects in con­temporary Cuba. Pánfilo’s comical intervention reproduces words that are spoken in ­every Cuban ­house or on each street corner. Indeed, Cubans do complain about a lack of food, the expense of groceries, and the cost of living, twenty-­four hours a day, but they understand not to do this in front of a camera. A clever joke from the nineties, “Jamás jamé jamón ni jamás lo jamarás” (I never ate ham, and you ­will never eat it), a clever use of jama (as food) and the adverb Jamás (never) and the word jamón (ham), exemplifies the daily humor of Cubans in the face of scarcity.31 The cases of viral videos of Black subjects in situations of pain or stress have emerged as an archetypal genre within con­temporary globalized echo chambers. In the United States, which is the center for the production of this kind of video, ­there was a viral tune created from the video made out of Antoine Dodson’s interview on TV, denouncing the rapist who attacked his ­sister. This song became the improbable platinum-­selling hit song “Bed Intruder” (Gregory ­Brothers, 2010). Sweet Brown, a ­woman whose vivid description to a TV crew of escaping from a fire in the rundown housing proj­ect she lived in became the hit “­A in’t Nobody Got Time for That” (2012), was elevated to real celebrity status. Both of ­these musical hits that started as memes ­were mixed and enhanced digitally with home sound systems and computers. Their f­ aces and voices became auto-­ tunes, GIFs, memes, and pictures in the American pop cultural mediascape. In the case of Pánfilo his visibility was followed by a dif­f er­ent kind of fame. He was silenced by the Cuban state, who took, with an authoritarian literalness, his “drunkenness” as an excuse to put him away in a rehabilitation center. While incarceration for open critique or public protest against the state is common in Cuba, Pánfilo’s repression created an immediate reaction from the Cuban

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diaspora abroad. Picked off immediately at his ­house by the police he was classified as a “marginal,” a Cuban term associated with the lumpenproletariat. Marx defined the lumpenproletariat as the working class that goes over to the repressive forces, manning the police and the prisons. The marginal represents a type of nonsubjecthood, a vagrant. In Cuba, the marginal is the individual that does not perform any l­abor and neither follow o­ rders nor lives through state control. A marginal is conceived as a nonsubject but also as antisocial, an identification that alludes to deviance or to m ­ ental, physical, or other disabilities. Pánfilo is a marginal-­racialized subject so he is in other words what Ann Stoler reads as a subject who is part of the spaces of “imperial debris” (16) built by the material ruination that has occurred in Havana, particularly a­ fter the state proj­ ect of making Havana a dollar-­generating tourist destination during the Special Period. While “entrepreneurialism” and “self-­making” have been the slogans of this economic crisis, the unemployment rate for Black men and w ­ omen has increased considerably. When word leaked that Pánfilo had been put in rehabilitation/prison for his lumpen diversion, Boris Larramendi, a Cuban musician based in Spain, wrote the song “Jama y Libertad!,” which became the anthem of the movement to f­ ree Pánfilo. The video, directed by Lien Carranza, was filmed in the Negra Tomasa Café, a Cuban bar/restaurant close to Malasaña district in Madrid where Larramendi lived in exile since 2002. It was uploaded to YouTube on August 29, 2009, and featured Boris in the center, alone, with a guitar. Jama, jama y libertad (4 veces) Pánfilo se dio unos tragos y lo filmó no se quién Diciendo lo que hace falta en su modesto entender Todos nos reímos, todos lo posteamos, Que divertida evidencia lo que cantaba el borracho Coro Jama, jama y libertad (4 veces) Todo el mundo se enteró y fue suficiente, La policía pasó y se lo llevaron urgente, Dicen que fue por vagancia, que a lo mejor robó, Peligrosidad mi hermano le dice cuando no tienen razón.

The main theme of the song is freedom (libertad), not only to made food available (jama) but to have freedom of expression without the state (la policía), and the police taking you prisoner and labeling you as dangerous (peligroso), or vagrant (vagancia), a typical depiction of anyone who protests or speaks freely. The digital newspaper Diario de Cuba made clear that Pánfilo was not a h ­ uman rights activist, to c­ ounter the international outcry about his suppression. This pretense was contradicted by the charge u­ nder which he was arrested, peligrosidad predelictiva (pre-­criminal dangerousness) a common mot for the Cuban regime to indict citizens accused of activities against the state.32 The visual echo

Enacting ­Others • 61

chamber was also truly original. The meme campaign directed by Josán Caballero used creative materials to influence the state to bend to its demands.33 In the months of August and September alone, Pánfilo’s video was watched by four hundred thousand viewers. Many of ­these views w ­ ere possibly promoted by the local media in Miami and across the United States, as the song was publicized on Latina/o channels such as Mega TV on programs including El Show de María Elvira Salazar, which had a faithful Cuban American audience. A letter circulated online that was signed by many Cuban writers. Cuban writer Enrique del Risco, author of many memoirs and narratives filled with humor, told me that many signatures came to support the cause, including Spanish phi­los­o­pher Fernando Savater, who wrote to him in a letter, “Naturally, sir you can count on my signature for this good cause. A cause based in freedom of speech, which in my eyes is helped by the fact that I am supporting a drunk who got himself into prob­ lems, which makes me empathize with him immediately” (naturalmente, cuenta usted con mi firma para esa buena causa. Si no bastase la defensa de la libertad de expresión, saber que se trata de un borracho en apuros me hace inmediatamente simpatizar con él). Savater’s clever response locates Pánfilo as a picaresque figure whose material needs (hunger) and freedom of choice (drunkenness) made him an ideal and oddly likeable subject for a campaign supporting dissent and refusal. An open contest for creative art accompanied the call, and in response ­there circulated images in the media echo chamber that broadcast a humorous but clear disruption/critique of the social conditions on the island, in contrast to the didactic moralism in which t­ hese campaigns usually traffic. Some of the most creative memes put Pánfilo’s face in a similar image to Barack Obama’s campaign pictures (figure 2.6) In figure 2.6, Pánfilo’s face with an open mouth appears with a knife and a fork with the link oyejama​.­com (Oye Jama, Hey food!), Pánfilo’s famous phrase. His open mouth is a freeze frame from the video when he is shouting to the camera. The colors and style connected to Barack Obama’s campaigns play with the double entendre that Obama might bring in the jama or help to end the food scarcity on the island. As it joins both Black skins and masculinities, one marginal and one presidential, the meme brilliantly deduces that the hope campaign in Cuba is centered on the jama—­offering agency to Pánfilo’s voice. The utensils next to Pánfilo’s face play a double role, as symbols of both eating and the view that Pánfilo himself is the menu or the face “to eat.” The semiotics of the Black face with the mouth open work on this cannibal ste­reo­type as the main symbol of hunger. Other memes took off from the same facial gesture made to the camera in the video, as we see in figure 2.7, created by Cuban reknown caricaturist Alén Lauzán. ­Here the gesture of the hands also implies food, while the seriality of the gesture in blue and red re-­creates the sensation of movement. The hands are empty and the open mouth and teeth evoke the sonority of the word “jama.” In figures 2.6 and 2.7 we see what Alessandra Raengo has identified as “racial image,”

FIGURE 2.6.  ​Pánfilo meme, Ojama.

FIGURE 2.7.  ​Pánfilo meme, Alén Lauzán.

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where “race acts as a form of the articulation for the visual—­a template, an epistemology, a map, an affect, a gestalt, a medium”—­that persists even in our postracial or post-­ontology moment (3).34 The use of the hands pressing into thin air while calling for food and the intensity of the eyes show what Tina M. Campt has defined as the sound of the image—­a haptic dimension created by the repre­ sen­ta­tion of the Black body. ­Here we see in the gesture a clear praxis of protest but also of refusal to accommodate “a range of creative responses black communities have marshaled in the face of racialized dispossession . . . ​refusal is not a response to a state of exception or extreme vio­lence . . . ​they are practices honed in response to sustained, everyday encounters with exigency and duress that rupture a predictable trajectory of flight” (Listening to Images 10). The comical but insightful protest gesture is haptic—as it evokes all the sensorial implications of the act of eating such as taking the food with the hands, opening the mouth, and, through the teeth, chewing. In figure 2.8, created by Josán Caballero, Pánfilo’s Black photographed face is collaged on a painted white body, which is adorned by what appear to be a Black mold/plant in the shape of a tie that grows out of his body. The white suited figure is seated in what appears to be a corner of El Malecón, where the swirly black lines of mold cover him. It is as if he w ­ ere occupied by a symbiot. The word “Libertad” (Freedom) appears in white letters that float in a stencil below him. Another meme has collages of three f­ aces, Raúl Castro to the left, Fidel Castro to the right, and Pánfilo in the m ­ iddle, all cut out from photo­graphs or stills. Pánfilo’s face is inside a b­ ottle filled out with white hands that seem to be pressing on the sides of the b­ ottle. U.S. currency appears around the b­ ottle and the word “Libertad” appears once again in gray letters. The b­ ottle is evidently associated with Pánfilo’s drinking prob­lem, out of which he emerges in a sort of scream. The ghostly hands, pressing outward in the confined space, could be associated with the idea of an ancestral offer to ­those who have died from drinking, looking for some kind of escape. The background is a building close to the Malecón, where Pánfilo lived and which is in the pro­cess of expelling p­ eople like Pánfilo as it gentrifies to tourists and the new rich. Ironically, from a North American perspective, where the Castros represent communism, ­here t­ hese ­faces preside over the sacrifice of poor Cubans such as Pánfilo and all the anonymous hands collected inside the ­bottle to t­ hose who benefit from neoliberalism. As Cuban scholar Roberto Zurbano has argued, “the private sector in Cuba now enjoys a certain degree of economic liberation, but blacks are not well positioned to take advantage of it.”35 Tourism and the access to the dollar or euro make t­ hese differences only more vis­i­ble. While it could be argued that the campaign created by the media echo chamber offered Pánfilo some type of visibility or notoriety, similarly to what happened to other Black subjects whose bodies or contents have gone viral in the United States, he himself did not at all profit from his notoriety. However, a­ fter

Enacting ­Others • 65

FIGURE 2.8.  ​Pánfilo meme, Josán Caballero.

being put away in a rehabilitation center, the international campaign forced the Cuban state to back down: he was released from the center and was not sent to prison. This modicum of mercy proved to many Cubans in the diaspora that social media campaigns could work. Clearly, Pánfilo posed a peculiar danger to the ostensibly socialist state. H ­ ere was a poor Black man speaking out about the pervasive impoverishment of ­people like him, unconnected plebes. ­Here, again, one sees the power of the cell phone camera in the ultra-­connected mediasphere—as it had been key for filming protests and altercations with the police since 2009–2010, when local opposition groups and artists inside the island made ­these protests more vis­i­ble.36 What has shifted in Cuba since? The economic changes decreed by Raúl Castro in 2006 ­were having their effect at the same time, that the protests reached their apex. Since then, the po­liti­cal structure has remained closed to demands from citizen and denizens even a­ fter the change of power taken by the new minister Miguel Díaz-­Canel in 2019, reflecting,

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still, one-­party rule in Cuba. The dialogue that was begun by Obama was reversed ­under Trump. ­These ­factors all press on the state, which is more vulnerable to bad publicity from repressing the politics of dissent inside Cuba. From 2009 to the pre­sent, opposition groups on the island, composed of scholars, artists, as well as ­mothers of po­liti­cal prisoners, have opened dif­fer­ent channels to make their voices heard. While their physical per­for­mances as bodies in the street are still impor­tant f­ actors—in terms of both the risk to the protestor and the risk of overreaction by the government—­the full spectrum of dissent has its center of gravity in social media by way of vlogging and cell phone videos that are uploaded to YouTube, Twitter, and other sites. What Cristina Venegas saw as the main media blockage due to the unequal accessibility to the internet has changed drastically as basic internet access and telecommunication tools become both more widespread and more essential for the globalized economy. Cuba c­ an’t afford to go backwards ­toward the era before PC and cell phones, but as it goes forward it provides tools for quantitatively more extensive social participation and digital activism.37 Daily, many videos denouncing arrests, mistreatment, or even harassment throughout everyday life at the bus stop or the existence of long lines at the supermarket are posted on Twitter or shared in WhatsApp. Blogging as well as in­de­pen­dent journalism counteracts state media.38 Parallel to this new networking, media surveillance has also increased, with the creation and training of highly advanced technology trained members who from Villa Marista who worked to supervise but also direct their influence on what since 2006 has been called “la batalla de ideas” (the ­battle of ideologies). From 2018 on, the petition against Decreto 349 (Decree 349), signed by artists, performers, in­de­pen­dent filmmakers, and other intellectuals, became the center of a movement to claim freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and creative control by Cuban artists on the island. The recent incarceration of Black artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara for “deviant art” has stirred up demonstrations in front of the Culture Ministry since March 2020, becoming a movement for freedom of speech and creative control in Cuba. While the San Isidro Movement might seem a high cultural phenomenon distant from the story of Pánfilo discussed in this chapter, they are both civil claims from Cuban society.39 The movement of 11J (July 11) has led to more incarcerations of local artists and protestors all across Cuba, from Havana to Santiago de Cuba. As we have seen throughout this book, and as we ­will see in detail in the protests on Verano19 (Summer 19) in Puerto Rico and the recent protests in the Dominican Republic, while specific objects of protests differ, the totality of civil unrest involves social actors and communities across the region, questioning cultural, po­liti­cal, and economic frameworks as well as structural in­equality. Digital technology and social media are playing central roles both on the ground in mobilizations on the street and in online ideological strug­gles between governments, po­liti­cal parties, and social movement actors. While t­ here is a growing global lit­er­a­ture on digital activism, strategies, and methodologies in relation to the changing landscape and

Enacting ­Others • 67

tools, the lack of training and lack of access to information are key concerns for activists (Freedman and Obar 3).40 The example of Pánfilo, and the recent visibility and action of Movimiento San Isidro or movements such as 11J, makes clear that although po­liti­cal changes are not defined by social networks we should not underestimate the role of social-­ media-­based in­de­pen­dent journalism or blogging in con­temporary Cuba. Tele­ vi­sion, ­because of state control of the airwaves and the expense of r­ unning a tele­vi­sion network, is more vulnerable to control and state censorship than peer-­to-­ peer online sites. In the era of liberalization, however, ­there are exceptions to the heavy hand of tele­vi­sion censorship. One exception is the humorous comedy program Vivir del Cuento, which tells the story of the second Pánfilo.

Coda: The Other Pánfilo In 2014, as the memory of Juan Marcos (Pánfilo) was becoming fainter, a Cuban comedian, Luis E. Silva, created Pánfilo, a comedic character whose voice and stories ­were filled with innuendos and social critique. The comedic plot of Vivir del Cuento centered on his life as an el­derly resident of the popu­lar Centro Habana neighborhood who strug­gles with daily issues of survival, such as food, infrastructure, or surveillance from his neighbors and negotiates the numerous obstacles in his way. In one episode, he wakes up to find a broken pipeline has flooded his apartment. The ­woman director of the CDR, the neighborhood organ­ization, as chief representative of the area and state functionary tells him that they could fix it in the next six months. To accelerate the pro­cess Pánfilo bribes her with a b­ ottle of shampoo to speed up the work order. The next day when they come to repair the pipes, the bribed official comes into the scene: her hair has been scorched by the shampoo, which turns out to have been concocted from stolen and volatile materials.41 This gag, not the original Pánfilo from the Jama, is the one María refers to when I asked her about Pánfilo. The success of the comedy program on Cuban TV was crowned by the participation of President Barack Obama in two sketches that aired when he visited the island in March 2016. In the first sketch Obama opens the conversation with the phrase “Qué bolá,” Afro-­Cuban jargon that means “How are you?” and offers some details that anticipate his visit.42 The fact that the conversation happens on a direct line to the White House from Pánfilo’s h ­ ouse in Centro Habana is significant, as the sketch plays with the idea that Obama not only talks but “listens to their voice”: that is, the voice of downtrodden, el­derly working-­class Cubans. Obama promises Pánfilo that he ­will stop at his ­house when he actually arrives in Havana. In a second sketch, filmed during Obama’s visit, Obama plays dominoes at Pánfilo’s ­house with Pánfilo and his neighbors Facundo and Chequera (figure 2.9). At the domino game Obama uses the time to talk about the won­ders of Cuba, and Pánfilo adds, “This is a new moment ­were every­thing is getting fixed not only

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FIGURE 2.9.  ​Still from Vivir del cuento, comedy program (March 2016). Televisión cubana.

the U.S. and Cubans relations but the streets, the buildings.” Pánfilo makes a joke on the 6–2 combination, which actually refers to 1962, the year that the United States started the economic blockade against Cuba ­after the Missile Crisis. Obama ends the sketch with the phrase “No es fácil,” a catchphrase among Cubans to describe their daily strug­gles, to which Pánfilo responds, “No es fácil pero tampoco es díficil” (It’s not easy but it’s not difficult e­ ither), an insightful joke about pos­si­ble ­future po­liti­cal changes among both countries. While the visit was more a symbolical success than a po­liti­cal one, as the Cuban state did not welcome many of the changes requested by the Obama administration, the visual symbolism of the first Black president playing dominoes in a Centro Habana working-­class neighborhood became one of the most symbolic parts of the visit. I read this impor­tant moment into the symbolic echo chamber I have sketched out in this chapter, with its reach between high and low culture and between media institutions and the social media grassroots. While, on the one hand, the co-­optation of the name of the Black Pánfilo by Luis Silva might be read as an attempt to erase or domesticate the original Pánfilo, on the other hand, the name ­can’t but echo with the social critique and humor that was associated with his character in the original video. The sketch not only defers to Pánfilo’s original Blackness but also works brilliantly with the significance of Obama’s “mulatto” body for Cuban viewers. ­Here I follow what Brazilian critic Emanuelle Oliveira-­ Monte reads as the power­ful symbolic semiotics of Obama’s body in Latin American spaces such as Brazil, particularly where she states, “The Brazilian

Enacting ­Others • 69

media reinvented Obama according to their country’s own racial anx­i­eties and desires. Stephanie Li’s notion of ‘race-­specific, race-­free language’ provides a useful road map to comprehend the construction of Obama as a sign within vari­ ous geo­g raph­i­cal and cultural contexts. Li proposes that Obama forges a ‘race-­specific, race-­free language’ speech that reflects the legacy of multiculturalism in the United States, where the praising of diversity coexists with anx­i­eties about how to face difference. The ‘race-­specific, race-­free language’ discourse emphasizes racial diversity, while refusing to speak about racial tensions” (8).43 While the multicultural and postracial utopia of the Obama years was never turned into a real­ity, on the symbolic level it resonated in many countries undergoing the stresses of economic and, under­neath, racial in­equality, like Brazil, Cuba, and other Ca­rib­bean countries where the myths of racial democracy and equality encounter the real­ity of a race and class-­based white hegemony. Cuban tele­vi­sion used Obama’s visit to a comedy show to offer access to the leader in a context that would be seen as “less serious.” Nevertheless, that does not make its effect any less po­liti­cal. Obama became more popu­lar in Cuba than outside of the island. Even for Cuban exiles in Miami the show Vivir del Cuento became so popu­lar with an audience of young Cubans that Silva had many live shows in Hialeah and Brickell in 2018.44 If this is a strategy of soft power for the Cuban state, it has offered benefits well beyond what the state elite hoped for and perhaps is able to deal with.45 ­Here, as I have argued throughout this book, the usual Manichean division between exile anti-­Castro Cubans and the Cubans on the island decomplexifies a mediascape with many strands of signification, many creators of media products, and a sometimes unpredictable demographic of consumers. While the mediascape does connect with a cultural language that in some cases could be read as conservative, it is clear that this is not the case necessarily in Cuba, where new media and televisual humor have opened, accompanied by con­temporary art and per­for­ mance, some forms of ideological dissent and critique.

3

Ratchetness and Vlogging the Self

On Shame Shame is the moral barometer that orients us in trying to understand the social force of respectability in Hispanic Ca­rib­bean socie­ties. Shameless be­hav­ior, shameless bodies, and shameless characters are chastised in public and private spheres. Although the shameless ­isn’t necessarily criminal, it is “outlawed,” and its perpetrators call down social sanctions on their heads. U ­ nder the banner of order, the shameless character or group must be restored and made to pursue a moral code or order, in order that the collective ward off the ­great threat of disor­ ga­ni­za­tion. The shameless should not be admired or loved. Shameless bodies in par­tic­u­lar are subject to racial and gender tagging, being devoid of the character that constitutes the socially respectable. The shameless body is made legible through the code of propriety, which is anchored in “whiteness” and by a social logic makes “Blackness” a sign of shame. In the United States, as well, the mainstream code of be­hav­ior is whiteness. Theoretically, anything read outside t­hese codes is e­ ither shamed or illegible. The illegible is subject e­ ither to cultural obliteration or to condemnation as “ignorance.” Shame is a form of moral condemnation in which the ­bearer is excluded from the aspirational dream of upper mobility. While mediascapes represent Ca­rib­bean body politics as “more open” or “sexualized” compared to other Latin American socie­ties, I understood early that in my Black/white f­ amily aspirational dreams ­were obsessively coded around poverty and Blackness. To be a loose ­woman, una cuera, puta o mala mujer, meant 70

Ratchetness and Vlogging the Self • 71

falling into social oblivion. Even as my racialized body was policed excessively to show propriety, respectable be­hav­ior, and femininity, a role played mostly by my abuela, whose moral tales always ended in phrases such as “that be­hav­ior is for the maids” or “you ­don’t want to be in the kitchen all your life,” I understood clearly that she was reading me and telling me how ­women of your and our status and color are supposed to behave to be successful in this society. Similarly, in postslavery plantation socie­ties (which includes all Ca­rib­bean polities) the hermeneutics of survival and ­labor for Black and ­women of color generated a par­tic­u­lar style of reading. Reading reflects on moral and social codes and sometimes could evoke shame as well. For example, “that be­hav­ior is for the maids” labeled the moment when you ran enthusiastically to the door when your boyfriend arrived. Proper ­women, mistresses rather than maids, should always wait and not show their desire for men too much. For “you ­don’t want to be in the kitchen” the message was to not be of ser­vice or serve o­ thers too much b­ ecause they w ­ ill begin to see you that way. It is not surprising that this language, although moralistic or restrained, came from her direct experience as a ­woman who was constantly put in t­ hose positions. I would like to restore the ways shamelessness, chusmería or sinvergüencería, acts as a queer lens—in the ways read by José Muñoz and Frances Negrón-­ Muntaner, from where we could read the moral respectability constructions of what I call the Ca­rib­bean ratchet, a type of consciousness that forms the space within which racialized, gendered, and classless bodies of w ­ omen are read. Ratchet is a term that emerged from African American popu­lar culture in southern U.S. cities such as New Orleans and is used to mean “ghetto” or “shameless” or is used for a w ­ oman or a situation that it is not following usual social norms. From popu­lar ­music in 2012, into mainstream culture, ratchetness defines a specific kind of Black or racialized w ­ oman who even with this be­hav­ior is able to have control of her body and sexuality, thus Ca­rib­bean ratchetness as Cuban chusmería or Puerto Rican sirvengüencería alludes to shameless be­hav­ ior from ­women, queer, or feminine-­gendered subjects. Many of ­these terms pass from the social dynamics of strug­gle or hustle to describe po­liti­cal meta­phors in Ca­rib­bean spaces. Frances Negrón-­Muntaner claims that sinvergüencería names the semantic field in which Puerto Ricans deal and negotiate with the ambiguity of their colonial/commonwealth status. José Muñoz argues that, similarly, the notion of chusmería in Cuba is defined as a stigmatized/stigmatizing class identity, where the pejorative label of chusma operates to distance a putative m ­ iddle class from the working class: “In the United States, the epithet chusma also connotes for recent immigrants and a general lack of ‘Americanness’ as well as excessive nationalism—­that one is somewhat over the top about her Cubanness” (181–182).1 This “excess” Cubanidad is the mark that has ­shaped discourses in the mediascape since the 1990s. Albert Laguna discusses many of its aspects and how they relate to Cuban city enclaves such as Miami and Hialeah and what he has

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acutely read as “diversión.” This chapter locates several figures who have followed transnational media trajectories defined by joy, laughter, and diversión: Puerto Rican influencers La Vampy and LeJuan James and Niurka Marcos, a Cuban artist and vedette who resides in Mexico and has crossed over from the Latin American to the U.S. Latina televisual market using chusmería or ratchetness as a form of self-­fashioning. For Laguna, “a chusma ­woman is mal hablada, a bold ­woman who has ­little interest in gender understandings of decorum and “refuses standards of bourgeois comportment.” Th ­ ere is an allure in this unfettered, uncaring enactment of a vulgar cubanía. “The chusma says t­ hings directly, without filter in the most explicit and descriptive language pos­si­ble. This might suggest a lack of self-­awareness on the part of her character” (145). The “lack of self-­ awareness” is as much of a learned and routinized tactic as any other form of self-­presentation: in fact, Niurka’s ratchet persona is precisely a form of self-­ consciousness, a per­for­mance of chusmería, where the ratchet or meta-­chusmería is acted out. The exaggeration or comical effect is intended and, in a sense, depends on the language of respectability from which it distinguishes itself. I read Niurka’s trajectory from Cuba into real­ity TV as a success story centered on feminist ratchetness but also as a form of crossover into Latinidad. In the second part of the chapter I analyze the figures of Dagmar Flores Henríquez, La Vampy, and Juan Atiles Tejada, aka LeJuan James, two influencers from Puerto Rico and the diaspora. Henríquez is a Puerto Rican influencer whose low-­budget videos produced on a home computer made her an online celebrity. Originally from Lajas, Puerto Rico, a town in the southern part of the island, Vampy r­ ose to fame on the basis of “Wrecked Ball,” her parody of the song-­video “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus. ­A fter the success of the video, U.S. variety shows started describing her as the Puerto Rican Miley Cyrus, a joke in itself, as Vampy is a single m ­ other of five who flaunts an un-­modelish figure and lives in a modest h ­ ouse in Lajas, Puerto Rico. Her parody depends on presenting a very distinct, unglamorous persona in contrast to Cyrus the pop star. A ­ fter the success of her initial video she continued vlogging herself mostly in dancing or opinion videos from her home in Lajas. Her success centered on offering diversión and happiness to o­ thers, which had the effect of making her name known in media circles in Puerto Rico and Miami, but losing face with her ­family members and coworkers. Expelled from her job due to her supposedly sinvergüenza videos, she was forced to earn a living by selling lemonade and making appearances at local festivals on the island. From her online vlogging channel on YouTube she fi­nally transferred her character to Facebook and Instagram, a change that brought in new followers but that she ­couldn’t monetize. Vampy’s trajectory describes the precarious situation of many working-­class ­women in Puerto Rico and shows that the path of the social media influencer does not necessarily leads to wealth. In contrast, the story of LeJuan James and his vlogging videos online outlines a rare upward trajectory. Orlando-­based Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube star LeJuan James (Juan Ricardo Atiles Tejada) started making videos for

Ratchetness and Vlogging the Self • 73

the fun of it in 2014. His schtick was to jokingly exploit the differences that spring up between Hispanic Ca­rib­bean parents and their c­ hildren, who are growing up as second-­generation Latinos in the United States. The videos rapidly went viral, making LeJuan a YouTube and Instagram star and a key voice for the Puerto Rican and Dominican community in Orlando. In his book, titled Definitely Hispanic: Growing Up Latino and Celebrating What Unites Us (2019), James, who was born in Providence, Rhode Island, makes reference to his transnational Ca­rib­bean upbringing as he mentions that his summers “would be spent with his cousins in the Dominican Republic” while the rest of the year would be mostly “at school in Puerto Rico.” LeJuan started working on a type of ethnic video that has become popu­lar with the 4.0 publics through YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok and explores the humor of the way Hispanic Ca­rib­be­ans react, live, and act in the United States within mainstream Anglo-­spaces, using his own ­family as his material. While ethnic humor is a recognizable genre in American comedy, dating back to vaudev­ ille, it became a staple in the 1950s when the cultural dynamics of the melting pot w ­ ere critiqued from the point of view or voices of ethnic o­ thers, such as Italians, Jews, Mexicans, and o­ thers. James insists on the use of accented Ca­rib­ bean Spanish (Dominican and Puerto Rican) as part of his comedy. The Cuban bilingual situation comedy ¿Qué pasa U.S.A. (1977–1980) pioneered the model that LeJuan is using ­today for the 2.0 to 4.0 media generations—­a ­family drama, with a bilingual script in En­glish and Spanish. Translation was provided on the script itself, and by the excellent per­for­mances of the actors who by using their body language or expressions w ­ ere able to translate the comedy situations. This is the same script followed by James’s sketches, which include lots of physical and affective per­for­mances and humor. However, the elaborate setups and studio values are stripped down in ­these DIY short format videos (usually ­running from two to three minutes), giving them an effect of intimacy. A look at ­these three performers, one an international and successful artist connected to soap operas, musicals, and real­ity TV and two from the vlogging scene, ­will help us to assess the economies of neoliberal self-­ making in the Ca­rib­bean mediascapes from tele­vi­sion into the con­temporary media worlds. The dynamics of Ca­rib­bean affect and bilingualism as well as the displaced or low-­budget temporality of the DIY media content not only reproduce the dynamics of visibility for t­ hose whose visibility is heavi­ly mediated through the dominant white gaze of establishment media but also point to typical paths of self-­making and imagining possibility through economic gain and self-­reinvention in a society where class solidarity as well as the welfare state have been shredded. ­There is a clear queerness in the three main performers I discuss in ­these two sections that helps to proj­ect authenticity, carried along on a continuing sense of optimism even in the midst of a harsh pre­sent. Even in their ­will to entertain as performers ­there is a form of openness and refusal that alters the dynamics vis-­à-­vis their negotiations with the neoliberal script. The

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asynchronous palimpsest pre­sent in Niurka’s persona reflects on many distinct temporal dimensions. For Niurka it is the ways the script of the Ca­rib­bean rumbera, popu­lar in Mexican golden cinema, syncs and dialogues with her pre­sent per­for­mances. For Vampy it is the dynamics of the domestic interior (her home), particularly her living room, with the all-­year Christmas tree in the background. Fi­nally, for LeJuan James’s are the urban, as well as domestic geographies of Orlando Florida, one of the largest Puerto Rican enclaves previously best known for being the site of Disneyworld.2 All of ­these spatial and visual repre­sen­ta­tions puts their content into dialogue with dynamics of migration and con­temporary formations of Ca­rib­bean transnational cultures. The fact that it is accessible in the worlds of one viewer (myself) and many publics defines the complex spatial and intimate geographies in our global world.

Ca­rib­bean Ratchet: Niurka Marcos from Scandal to Real­ity TV Even before the feminist transcendence of Ca­rib­bean artists such as Rihanna, Cardi B, and Nicki Minaj—­stars who created and defined theoretically what “ratchet” means—­and before Black southern rap diva Megan Thee Stallion wrote the lyr­ics of her song “Savage” (“I am a savage, sassy, bouggie, ratchet”), Cuban vedette Niurka Marcos was evoking a specific category of ratchet be­hav­ior that serves as the imprimatur of her c­ areer and persona. A ratchet w ­ oman is loud, takes space, is open, talks about her desires and what she needs, and is sexually expressive. Feminist scholar Montinique D. McEachern defines “ratchet” as the embodiment of “black femme liberatory consciousness. Ratchet is a cultural knowledge, per­for­mance, and awareness of an anti-­respectability that can be shared across Black communities and is not bound by geography, social class, or level of traditional education (79). Black feminist scholar Britney C. Cooper has also expanded the theory of the ratchet as a mode of self-­styling in musical and televisual spaces that represents Black ­women asserting themselves with agency in public spaces. The liberatory consciousness of ratchet be­hav­ior centers on not only calling out sexism, misogyny, and abuse but also “maneuvering through oppression and intentionally acting in ways of subverting it” (81). It is my contention that in similar fashion as Cuban diva star La Lupe—­who anticipates Marcos’s ratchet performance—­Niurka Marcos relies on a form of ratchet performativity that centers on body expression and affect, code switching, and Cuban chusmería aesthetics. The creation of this persona is rooted in a specific Cubanidad per­for­mance associated with neoliberal forms of self-­making that adheres to the specificities of her story. Camp, humor, and Marcos’s ability to negotiate or translate herself from Cuban, Mexican, and Miami geographies and affects into the vari­ous screens (film, tele­vi­sion, theater, and now Instagram) and publics are an outgrowth of her survival in the struggling years of the late 1980s and 1990s in Cuba. In the sections that follow I do a close reading of three moments of her biography to illuminate the creation of her scandalous persona through the docudramas Mi verdad (2005) and La verdad de mi verdad

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and her participation in the real­ity shows Lo veremos todo (Mexico) and Ricas Famosas y Latinas (2014–2016). I am interested in her pioneering embodiment of many forms of Ca­rib­bean ratchet in relation to Cuban, Cuban American, and U.S. Latino/a spaces. From the Cuba of the 1980s and 1990s up into U.S. Latina/o real­ity TV and new media presence of the past two de­cades, Marcos’s visibility and affect have brought a ratchet consciousness into the public Ca­rib­ bean discourse, a fascinating example of convergence cultures, “which relies on the flow of content across multiple media platforms . . . ​the migratory be­hav­ior of media audiences” or in this case artists “from one platform to ­others.”3 While Niurka’s crossover was mediated by the power­ful soap opera industry and producers at Mexico’s Televisa, particularly her romantic relationship with Mexican producer Juan Osorio, her persona was ­shaped by the brand of the “mulatas de fuego” (fire mulatas) dancing performers at the Cuban Tropicana club in the 1990s. Of course, this has been a theme for Mexican cinema and production since the “rumbera cinema” of the 1940s. Laura G. Gutiérrez explores the transnational bodies of Cuban and Puerto Rican dancers, such as Ninón Sevilla and Mapy Cortés, on t­hese Mexican B movies as a transnational critical language where gender, sexuality, and specifically Blackness ­were articulated through a specific geography imaginary of the tropics. Tropicalization as a mediascape topoi especially promoted Cuban cabaret culture in ­these films through sound, ­music, and dance. Thus Havana life, santería ritual songs and dance movements, as well as big ­music bands became a staple for films shot in Veracruz, the Mayan Riviera, or Cancún, coastal Ca­rib­bean cities. Why did ­these tropes become so active in the mediascapes of the 1990s particularly when in Cuba, particularly ­after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, they w ­ ere struck through by censorship and associated with a discredited, criminal past? How did Cuban dancers and artists from the island insert themselves in this new role?

Lo Veremos Todo “Niurka Marcos is a chusma,” my Cuban colleague argued with me over lunch as I insisted on my intention of writing about her as a case study. While I met several p­ eople, mostly Cubans, who made the same argument, o­ thers w ­ ere receptive and even enthusiastic about the idea. It was the polarity between ­these two sides that intrigued me, feeding into my initial interest in her as her private life was reliably featured on Univision almost ­every after­noon during the late 1990s and early 2000s. On the one hand the refusal of certain publics, and their moral stance of not seeing her ways as a per­for­mance but as a representative of Cuba, on the other, the admiration of a certain public, that included some cis ­women, cis men, and above all, queer men and ­women. In e­ very female ratchet per­for­mance the qualities of drag impersonation, that is, camp, kitsch, and body movements, haunt the routine. Niurka similarly invokes imaginaries of queer gender self-­ making—­where sexuality remains at the center of creative possibility.

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When the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc dissolved, the Cuban economy was abruptly denied its major source of foreign aid. The dynamics of scarcity and ruination defined the next period in its history as what the state labeled Special Period in Times of Peace. Marcos grew up in a popu­lar neighborhood called Centro Habana in the 1970s and 1980s as a child of the revolution. It was in the mid-1980s that she started taking lessons in dance and got involved with La Escuela Circense, a local com­pany that offered opportunities to dancers and performers. By the time she left Cuba in the early 1990s, she had already accomplished much, dancing in many night shows and tourist cabarets in Havana like the famous Tropicana; she had even traveled to Eastern Eu­rope and Italy as part of the Tropicana troupe. It was a time in which the state had de­cided to counteract scarcity through emphasizing Cuba’s attractiveness as a tourist destination, even g­ oing so far as to begin a publicity campaign emphasizing the club culture of prerevolutionary Cuba, an extraordinary turn of events. Many of ­these traditional shows of the 1950s ­were not necessarily open to local consumption or tourism, even if dance companies often relied on that retro aesthetic when they traveled abroad. Being the d­ aughter of a military officer and a local h ­ ouse­wife, Marcos was considered to have a reliable class background. She was only seventeen years old when she started performing in ­these cabaret shows. In a personal interview at her home in Mexico City, she said that her m ­ other was always pre­sent when she performed in Cuba and extremely protective (Arroyo, 2004). She was never allowed to go out ­after shows nor mingle with tourists. As the oldest ­sister of five, a­ fter her parents divorced she was responsible for helping take care of her ­brothers and ­sisters and in general helping her ­mother. Marcos developed, in ­these circumstances, as an extremely intelligent-­talented persona, one who uses her earthy, reactive demeanor to disarm onlookers or critics, even as she knows how to pre­sent her “scandalous” persona given the right set of circumstances. In her personal interview, her Cuban accent, which is audibly infected with Mexican tonalities and slang, becomes stronger as she remembers her days in Cuba. She w ­ on’t discuss politics with me, calling it “dirty.” Clearly, although she has left Cuba, she likes traveling back and wants to maintain close links to Cuba, even if that means muting the expression of her own po­liti­cal opinions. For similar reasons she avoids mentioning the scandals that shook Cuba in the late 1980s and 1990s when a group of elite military men w ­ ere accused of treason against the revolutionary state and accused of illegal drug trafficking, w ­ ere tried publicly, and w ­ ere executed (The General Arnaldo Ochoa Case). Extended families of the military class also left the island at the same time, many of them ­going to Panama or Mexico. During the 1990s, as Marcos was touring the Mexican coastal city of Mérida, she de­cided to stay for several months. She gained contracts to perform in cabarets for tourists at several clubs and ­hotels, got married, and was then naturalized as a Mexican in 2004. In the late 1990s she met Televisa soap opera producer Juan Osorio and was his partner for several years. During ­these years she became a big

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star, gaining stellar roles on the soap operas Salomé (2001) and Velo de Novia (2003–2004) and appearing as herself on the real­ity show Big ­Brother Mexico (2004). It is at this conjuncture that her romance with actor Bobby Larios went public, which was the foundation on which the media built the profile of her “scandalous or ratchet Ca­rib­be­anness.” I read this moment very closely for clues to the unique transnational shift in media repre­sen­ta­tion that was accelerating in this de­cade. The Marcos’s scandal occurred at the same time that Cuba accommodated the global neoliberal shift and dropped the Cold War discourse for one tethered to entrepreneurialism and individuality. Marcos’s exile to Mexico in the 1990s also corresponded to the exile of tele­vi­sion artists to Spain or Miami such as Alexis Valdés and Carlos Otero, among many. Albert Laguna has seen this moment in the 1990s as key to the formation and shifts of Cuba’s con­temporary Miami’s televisual landscape. Miami as the salient metropole that used to have an anti-­Castro Cold War politics in the 1960s and 1970s was being supplanted by a new group of artists, actors, and media performers who w ­ ere intent on opening up “a bridge to Cuba,” thus recognizing shared and common values with Cubans from the island and t­ hose living in the diaspora in Miami. It is to this group of artists that Marcos belongs. The first act in this history—­ Marcos’s—­begins in Mexico and is imbricated with the corporate history of Univision and its partner Televisa. Marcos’s appearances on many soap operas, usually with roles similar to ­those associated with other traditional rumberas or vedettes, such as Ninón Sevilla, for example, restored the rumbera trope but inscribed it within the realms of the neoliberal script. In this sense, her character Karicia in the soap opera Velo de Novia is not a tragic mulatta (a trope key to the B movies in the 1940s and 1950s) but is rather a working-­class ­woman who succeeds through her hard l­abor. If some of this l­abor involves sexual ser­vices, this does not condemn her to outsider status. Therefore, it could be argued that the revival of the vedette, the cabaret, and the tropical desires it articulates signals a shift ­toward neoliberal culture, with its receptivity, as Laura G. Gutiérrez has argued, to views of feminist agency within a corporate friendly ideology.4 Nevertheless, the fact that Niurka married and left the power­ful Mexican producer Juan Osorio for another man fed the ste­reo­type of the Ca­rib­bean w ­ oman, in this case the Cuban ­woman as a “hustler” or aprovechada, a key ele­ment of the construction of her persona as scandalous, improper, and wild. During my interview with Marcos in her ­house in the suburbs of Mexico City she showed that ­these comments disturb her, particularly a­ fter the airing of Juan Osorio’s biopic Mi verdad (2005) for tele­vi­sion, where she appears as an overtly sexual, manipulative, and emotionally unstable ­woman. ­Here the ste­reo­t ype of the vedette as overtly sexual both is criticized for its hyperbolic and male-­centered rhe­toric but also is used as a strategy for defining a positive “ratchet consciousness.” The character of Rachel, from the book and theater piece La canción de Rachel (1969), by Miguel Barnet, is evoked:

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Yo creo que Niurka es el sinónimo de un nuevo enfoque de mujer, no porque Niurka se haya planteado como mujer como novedad, no, no vayamos a confundir, Niurka es lo que la mujer viene cosechando desde hace muchos años atrás pero que no se habia definido y que por fin ha conseguido, vamos a ponerlo como que Niurka fue la mujer que lo hizo público que dio la cara. Hay un escrito que yo hago en mi remembranza, en mi sinopsis de la Rachel que yo interpreto donde yo digo: “Las vedettes, no hay vedettes sin historia negra, las vedettes, todas, las que lo ocultan, las que se creen, las que lo son, todas, todas, todas tienen una historia negra,” lo que pasa es que Niurka rompió un contexto, hay vedettes que no hablan de eso, hay vedettes que creen ocultarlo creen ocultarlo tras el canutillo, tras la lentejuela, o tras el plumaje, o tras un fastuoso telón. Creen ellas. Lo que pasa es que no hablan de eso, lo que pasa es que no se toca el tema porque ellas siempre lo evaden. Rachel en canción de Rachel se destapa, y le cuenta al mundo sus fantasías, sus problemas, sus necesidades y convierte al mundo en cómplice o sea, Rachel rompe eso, quita el telón, quita la lentejuela y grita: “Yo soy así,” Rachel es Niurka en esta época y en esta vivencia. (interview, July 14, 2005) [I believe that Niurka is synonymous with the new w ­ oman, not ­because Niurka has not presented herself as novelty, no, no do not get confused, b­ ecause Niurka represents what ­women have been gathering for many years, and fi­nally has been achieved, let’s put it as if Niurka was the one who made it public and gave it an imprint (a face). ­There is a written text that I perform and interpret in Rachel, my character that says: “Vedettes, t­ here a no vedettes with a dark history, vedettes are t­ hose who believe that they are vedettes, the ones that r­ eally are vedettes, all of them have a dark history,” what happens is that Niurka broke the mold, ­there are vedettes who d­ on’t like to talk about it, and hide, hide it b­ ehind their gimp, ­behind their sequin or b­ ehind their feathers, or ­behind a lavish curtain. Or so they believe. What happens is that they do not discuss it, or if the dark theme is brought in, they evade it. Rachel in Rachel’s Song opens up about it, uncovers the truth of her fantasies, her prob­lems, her needs, and converts the world in accomplices, thus, Rachel breaks with that, takes off the curtain, the sequin, and screams: “This is who I am!” Rachel is Niurka in this lifetime and this incarnation.]5

The recurrence to “this is who I am” (yo soy así) puts subjectivity and agency first while it embraces per­for­mance and the creation of a product (the body product) as part of the equation. For Marcos the tension between person and per­for­mance is not avowed as a prob­lem, as self-­making is just what we expect from the persona of the ratchet w ­ oman. Cuba is a product and she is Cuba. In a scene of Mi verdad Osorio takes the time to remind her that not only her h ­ ouse in Mérida but also her teeth needed to be fixed for audiences in Mexico City. In this sense, Osorio implies, she is in his debt as he owns her a­ fter “fixing” her third-­world prob­lems.

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In the first scene of Osorio’s revenge biopic, a traveling shot of her room shows a ­humble TV ­table with rolls of toilet paper in the lower part, a small toilet in a bathroom with no doors, and a plain mattress with no headboard. In the second scene Niurka (played by Cuban actress Liz Vega) puts her hands over her mouth, afraid to expose her bad teeth if she smiles. Mérida, identified with Ca­rib­ bean Mexico, is represented as a backward space, a ruined city similar to the island Niurka left b­ ehind. About that scene, Marcos comments that “cuando Juan a mi me conoció yo no estaba muriendome de hambre, ni con la casa con gotera, ni la taza del baño en la recámara, Juan me conoció a mi en una casa de dos plantas, cuatro recámaras, con mi auto con mi trabajo, con mi imagen pública, local, pueblerina, yo me podia considerar en Mérida entre las queridas, privilegiadas, respetadas, por el público (When Juan met me I was not ­dying of hunger, and with a leaky h ­ ouse with the toilet inside with no door inside the master bedroom. Juan met me in a four-­bedroom two-­story ­house, with a car, with a job and a ­humble town local public image, in Mérida I considered myself loved, respected and privileged by the public). In rejecting Osorio’s degrading picture of her, Marcos shows her awareness of what is ­going on: the association of the crummy bedroom and the toilet is as much about Mérida, and Ca­rib­bean culture, as the teeth are about her Cuban body, a body that remains beautiful in scarcity and pain, working aspirationally ­toward something better, a body in movement in the pro­cess of self-­making. As of her front teeth, Osorio and his producers got them fixed, creating a new, perfect face according to the norms of mainstream media, with no trace of brokenness. The neoliberal body is conceived as perfect, young, and healthy. Thus, the Cuba created by the media industry in Mexico rescues the island from its follies and ruins and replaces it in the global neoliberal spectacle. While Marcos accedes to this script, her ratchet consciousness is not ­limited by it. Her ­career and her autonomy advance together. Self-­making is key to this pro­cess. It is to this pro­ cess of self-­making, the “Yo soy” / “I am” that I turn in the next section on her crossover into Miami.

Yo Soy / Body as Product When I met Niurka in her home in the suburbs of Mexico City, I saw that she had clearly created a Cuban design for her ­house. She had put santería altars at the entrance, one to her ­father orisha, Changó, god of war and justice, and the other to Ochún, goddess of love and sexuality. Th ­ ese w ­ ere vis­i­ble from the sofa where I sat waiting for her. She arrived dressed in white with almost no makeup, her hair done, directing her gaze to me with a calm and soft demeanor. Bobby, her husband at the time, remained close by: as we started the interview, he came in to bring us tea. I had just arrived that same morning at the airport and my stomach was still getting used to the altitude. I was very grateful that Niurka made time to see me. I had been able to fix this rendezvous a week before I was

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to attend my summer seminar in Tepotzlán, Morelos. I was lucky that Niurka was a close friend of my colleague, the late writer Eliseo Alberto. Like several Cuban writers from the island, Alberto had established close ties to Mexican tele­ vi­sion. Alberto, author of Informe contra mi mismo (1998) and stories such as Caracol Beach (1998), became acquainted with Marcos at Televisa, where he also worked part-­time, writing several scripts for soap operas and tele­vi­sion series. Thanks to Alberto and the close knit community of Cuban exiled friends in Mexico, I had been able to get tickets to Marcos’s musical Aventurera, which was itself a g­ reat theater experience. An adaptation of the now canonical Mexican film Aventurera from 1949 (starring Cuban dancer Ninón Sevilla), the musical, produced by Carmen Salinas had been staged for many years, with actresses such as Edith González, Itatí Cantoral, and o­ thers in the main role of Elena Tejero. That year, Marcos was selected for the protagonist role in a musical that included Cuban m ­ usic from the fifties to the pre­sent, paying homage to the glamour of the Tropicana shows in Havana and the cine de rumberas. Niurka was the only Cuban able to get the role among many Mexican actresses and dancers. When I fi­nally met up with Alberto and my Cuban friends weeks a­ fter the interview, they made it clear that they owed their entrance into the Mexican scene partly to this Cuban nostalgia. Of course many actors, actresses, and writers had to negotiate the power of this narrative to make their voices heard. Albert Laguna, analyzing this same phenomenon in Miami, notes the way it “reproduces a “glamorous utopic space” centered on spectacle (102). For Televisa to revamp ­these scripts of cine de rumberas or ficheras for the soap opera audience is also a form of negotiation with the demands of the global market and NAFTA economics. It is through the success of Aventurera as well as Niurka’s presence on Televisa’s soap operas, which are broadcast into Miami and the Latina/o market through Univision and its network in the United States, that Niurka has gained footing as a star in the U.S. Latina/o market. To maintain her status, Niurka makes it a habit to visit many local interview shows popu­lar with a Cuban local audience such as Univision’s El Gordo y la Flaca and El show de Cristina and Mega TV’s El show de Alexis Valdés. In ­these interviews Niurka sticks to the ratchet script, using broad, suggestive-­physical humor, and her skills at dance or song embody the power­ful vedette trope—­which, as she w ­ ill say in her interviews, pre­sents “a vedette with the flavor of the past and the passion of the pre­sent.” The power of this double televisual nostalgia, with its reference to Batista era Cuban cabaret and its further reference to Mexican B movies in the cine de rumberas, made an immediate success of Niurka Marcos’s immigration to Miami. Indeed, she combines in her life story both the glamour of years gone and the self-­making fantasies of the neoliberal script. This nostalgia legitimates her choice “that she ­won’t discuss politics, as politics are dirty.” Her studied neutrality vis-­ à-­vis con­temporary Cuba would, perhaps, in a less ratchet celebrity be less tolerated. Marcos left Televisa about the time Obama was elected. She completed two

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interview shows for Azteca TV in Mexico, El show de Niurka (2008) and Espectacularmente Niurka (2010), and had a significant coprotagonist role in the novel Emperatriz (2011) with Gabriela Spanic. In 2008, as well, she published a memoir, Soy Niurka / I am Niurka (2008), which represented her life story in terms of the self-­made success. She also marketed a line of perfume, Niurka con Feromonas / Niurka with Pheromones, in Mexico and the United States.6 In a comical sketch from El Show de Alexis Valdés Niurka is invited to promote her perfume, while another guest, Yeyo Vargas, the Dominican politician and businessman played by Cuban actor Carlos Marrero in brownface, claims that the perfume is an “infusión de perros con monas” (an infusion of dogs and monkeys).7 The sketch is molded on the scripts of Cuban bufo theater from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and centers Yeyo Vargas as a “negro catédratico” (or pseudo intellectual Black man) and Niurka as the sensuous mulatta. The negro catédratico speaks with linguistic malapropisms misunderstanding the meaning of vocabulary. One example of this is when Niurka explains linguistically that she is talking about pheromones (Es fero-­monas), dividing the word into two syllables, and that pheromones are substances secreted by the body, Yeyo understands instead of “secreted,” “secret” and adds to the audience laughter ending with the punchline, “If they are secret how are you able to put it on the perfume?” Yeyo Vargas then tries to seduce Niurka, to which she reacts with mockery and rejection, telling him that if he continues to disrespect her she w ­ ill slap him in the face (Te voy a dar una galleta). Yeyo sums up this portion of the sketch by saying, “My ­mother always advised me, do not mess with Cuban ­women, they are r­ eally difficult, stay with Dominican w ­ omen your own national product.” From sex he moves to business (which fits well within the neoliberal script), suggesting she add some drops of mamajuana, a Dominican artisanal rum made with herbs, to the ­bottle of perfume. Niurka then adds, “Mamajuana makes you ­really hot [sexually excited].” And so the synthesis of sex as sex appeal, an advertising ploy, and commodity is achieved, making the sketch into an intra-­ Caribbean negotiation. The Cuban sensual mulatta and the herbal rum from the Dominican Republic are commodities promising beauty, flavor, and delicacy, definitely too “hard” to refuse.8 The sketch is a microcosm of the larger themes of globalization: the perpetual linkage of products, bodies, and sexual desire, wrapped up in a nostalgia for colonial fantasies. Affect is thus connected to sexual desire and longing. Indeed, many local Miami Cubans loved Niurka precisely ­because her life story, ­humble origins, strug­gle, and experiences mirrored their own. She was not only beautiful but also charismatic, and most of all remained connected to popu­lar language and the colorful, vulgar expressions this allows. Thus, her ratchet and rowdy persona, while rejected by many (perhaps mostly by w ­ omen who disliked what seems, in their view, objectification), is also adored by many (­women and men). This is the main reason why Nancy Clara, a first-­generation immigrant originally from

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FIGURE 3.1.  ​Niurka Marcos, Target Style cover. Concept: Nancy Clara, body art: Erika Monroy.

Argentina and the magazine director of Target Style in Miami, selected Niurka for the cover of the third issue of its first edition, in November 2009, which commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban exile community in Miami. The magazine cover image concept created by Clara in collaboration with Mexican art body painter Erika Monroy (also based in Miami) used Niurka’s painted sculptural body, posed in a posture between the Statue of Liberty and an Olympic athlete, with a depiction of a mélange of the flags of three countries, Mexico, Cuba, and the United States (see figure 3.1). It was meant to create, as Clara

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suggested to me, an “original and fearless feminist icon” (personal interview, April 14, 2020). It took Monroy five hours to complete the painting of Niurka’s naked body. While the colors of the Mexican flag cover a part of Niurkas’s face, the blue and white of the Cuban flag are in her heart (star) and torso, while her legs include the stars and red of the United States flag. This feminist icon—­like the Statue of Liberty and France’s Marianne—­was highly symbolic, connecting Niurka’s diasporic connections with a transnational body. While Cuba remains in her heart, the white doves that cover her arms and legs do represent freedom, in­de­pen­dence, and self-­reliance but also symbolize peace for Cuba, the country that remains linked to her soul. Monroy’s art recognizes the canvas-­like possibilities of the ­human body while creating an art event that dis­appears as soon as the body gets wet.9 To me, this ephemerality is key to the per­for­mance. If, on the one hand, the colors of the flags are identified as “national symbols,” the diaspora body literally straddles them to represent a network of migration and the real cosmopolitan Ca­rib­be­anness that is not an ideal, but the real situation of ordinary citizens in t­ hese places. Niurka also wears her hair cropped short and only light makeup. H ­ ere the per­for­mance of the body itself becomes focal, how it talks through the art and how it is tagged by symbols as part of the torso, arms, and lower body. The posture is both statuesque and athletic, a poise that joins reverence to fluidity, potential energy. In reference to the national colors, Monroy explained that the U.S. colors that enwrap the feet allude to the specific role of the legs for immigrants as walkers or crossers into this frontier. For Cubans it could also touch on the controversial wet feet, dry feet policy that changed the status of Cuban migration ­after 1995 and that ended in 2017. In 2010 when the photoshoot was completed, thousands of Cubans had died or dis­appeared at sea. T ­ oday, Cuban immigrants, just as Mexicans and ­others, do need to reach e­ ither a shore or a border crossing safely and apply for citizenship, a pro­cess that takes longer than in the Cold War period (1960s), when Cubans w ­ ere granted not only citizenship but also business or home loans and ESL classes. Indeed, the communities that live in the Miami area ­today are very dif­fer­ent from each other not only eco­nom­ically but also po­liti­ cally. Nevertheless, the success of the golden age of 1960s Cuban exile differs from the racialized and criminalized depiction of Mariel during the Reagan years, and the balseros crisis of the 1990s, when Cubans who came in had less support from the host country and greater economic needs. In effect, the Cubans ­were treated as immigrants from other Ca­rib­bean islands. It is in this context that the body/product is at once a symbol and an irony. In other words, the crossover into the U.S. Latina/o mediascape is not without impediments, even for Cubans who ­were once considered “golden exiles.” It is to this crossover and its historical complexities on the mediascape that we refer now. In figure 3.2 the poses appear in distinct styles including moments when she is sitting down. The cover reads “Yo soy el Pueblo Cubano” (I Am the Cuban ­People); the Cuban ­people that she refers to are ­those who ­after the 1990s and early 2000s have strug­gled to

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FIGURE 3.2.  ​Niurka Marcos poses in photo shoot, “Yo soy el Pueblo Cubano” (I Am the

Cuban ­People). Nancy Clara.

arrive to U.S. shores by sea or by land. ­These Cubans are not the golden exile but ­those who are currently changing the city landscapes in the United States, particularly in Miami.

El Paquete and Neoliberal Selves The crossover of Niurka Marcos into the U.S. Latina/o market happened through Mexico and Miami but also coincided with an impor­tant moment in Cuba’s po­liti­cal discourse, which was labeled the “­Battle of Ideas.” This ideological move centered on the control and surveillance of traditional and new media sites inside and outside of Cuba, which the state claimed was to protect “national interests.” This had the effect of silencing dissidence and controlling the right to speak in the public sphere. As the Cuban state opened itself onto the global stage, it wanted to control public opinion and critical dissent. State security refined forms of surveillance, training military youth as experts in media technologies, as chronicled and analyzed by Cristina Venegas and Antonio J. Ponte. At the same time bloggers such as Yoani Sánchez, Claudia Cadelo, and ­others inaugurated blogs that offered visibility to the civil society groups that have been fighting for the past twenty years to f­ ree the press from censorship and to allow f­ ree movement, f­ ree association, property rights, and amnesty for po­liti­cal prisoners. Some of ­these reforms ­were requested as part of the Proyecto Varela (Valera Proj­ect),

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started by Oswaldo Payá, and his Christian Liberation Movement in 1998. While the proj­ect gained strength and collected more than eleven thousand signatures, its leaders ­were incarcerated, harassed, or put u­ nder domiciliary arrest.10 The repression incited many Cuban artists and performers inside the island and the diaspora to emphasize ­these same themes: freedom of expression and creativity, body per­for­mance, Cuba as a commodity, and ­others. Some of ­these artists, such as Reynier Leyva Novo and Tania Bruguera, are internationally recognized figures in art biennials in Cuba and around the world, and their critical views on history, the pre­sent, and the body in relation to censorship are original and diverse.11 Although ­these references seem distant from the work of Marcos, it is clear that her per­for­mance is rooted in and marked by the deep po­liti­cal and social structures in Cuba. As I have stated throughout, in the 2.0 world the popu­lar mediascape is profoundly implicated in the dialogue on censorship, technologies, and the arts. Local Cubans participate in social media and follow their favorite diaspora artists from around the world in a difficult-­to-­censor movement of commentary and DIY uploads. Albert S. Laguna makes it clear that this is a shifting aspect for the ways the ludic is shared, a theme g­ oing from 2009 to the pre­sent, from tele­vi­sion to the 2.0 to 4.0 digital convergence era. Although the Trump interlude changed some of the terms in which this pro­cess was ongoing, t­ hose terms ­were generally set during cultural exchanges between Cuba and the United States ­under President Obama (126). This is where the “paquete semanal” or “el paquete” enters as a media resource. Laura Zöe Humphreys has brilliantly analyzed the context of entrepreneurship, negotiations, and challenges of local Cubans that enabled the creation of a participatory culture—in other words, allowing Cubans not only to watch and be up to date with all the shows coming in from the United States, but also being able to advertise local businesses, magazines, and the arts. R ­ unning the gamut from HBO’s Game of Thrones to mainstream comedy, “el paquete” includes a diversity of content, from all types of media: m ­ usic videos, upgraded computer programs, Turkish and K-­Pop soap operas, and o­ thers, all copied onto a USB drive or hard drive that one can rent or purchase for two CUC (approximately two dollars). Humphreys also claims that Cuban w ­ omen are key consumers and negotiators in this economy.12 Real­ ity TV and soap operas are a favorite of Cuban audiences. In the section that follows I analyze real­ity TV as a key mediator of con­temporary neoliberal repre­ sen­ta­tions in focusing on Rica, Famosa, Latina—­a real­ity TV show—­and the ways Niurka Marcos (Cuba, Mexico, Los Angeles) and Joyce Giraud (Puerto Rico, Los Angeles) have been incorporated into the franchise. It is my contention that even in the context of the rich and famous, Ca­rib­bean actresses and models such as Marcos and Giraud carry into t­ hese shows a ratchet-­comical ele­ ment that plays with sexuality or the reversal of proper moral codes of respectability for U.S. Latina/o audiences and publics.

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Real­ity TV Real­ity TV as a format of dramatic tele­vi­sion has its origin in sensational TV docudrama-­cum-­game show formats such as Laura en América (which began in Peru and is now in Miami) and José Luis sin Censura (Mexico). Typically the shows dramatize an arc that goes from a history of poverty (or loss) into a new real­ity (provided by the show main host) of material gain. Other shows, such as the now canceled Caso Cerrado (hosted by Cuban born ­lawyer Ana María Polo, who grew up in Puerto Rico), are based in Miami and represent the private agonies of courtroom defendants that we see in American shows such as Judge Judy. The theater of Jerry Springer, based mostly on nudity or interracial romance among the white underclass and ratchet Black participants, is too carnivalesque to adhere to the neoliberal script of Laura or José Luis, but its content is overtly outrageous to entertain a home audience for profits. Success is sometimes related to love or business or both—­some of the ­women come from money while ­others marry into it. Many of ­these shows have migrated to Miami or Los Angeles as the United States has become more Hispanic, an impor­tant fact that connects to Rica, Famosa, Latina. Rica, Famosa, Latina (Rich, Famous, Latina) is a real­ity series show cocreated by Lenard Liberman of Estrella TV and Puerto Rican model, actress, and producer Joyce Giraud. Giraud, a Miss Universe runner-up in 1998, gained fame when she moved to Los Angeles and became a member of the Real House­wives of Beverly Hills cast in season 4. She was the first Latina to be part of this group of upper-­class w ­ omen. Indeed, the Spanish-­language show was visibly inspired by the Real House­wives franchise, which has gone global since its inception on Bravo in 2005. Rica, Famosa, Latina premiered on September  16, 2014. Its premise was in keeping with the genre: it followed five financially successful Latina ­women in Los Angeles. The second season aired in 2015, while the third season filmed in 2016 and featured Sissi Fleitas, Luzelba Mansour, and Sandra Vidal and newcomers Mayeli Rivera, Andrea García, and Cuban vedette Niurka Marcos. Due to the success of the Real House­wives franchise, which made stars of some of its cast members and attracted stars for some of its other seasons and places, the franchise moved to many cities or neighborhoods, such as Beverly Hills, (season 4) or across the United States, such as New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Dallas, among many. Feminist critic Gloria Steinem, in 2013, labeled it “a minstrel show for w ­ omen,” in which femininity is outsized and ste­reo­typical, and every­thing from the plastic surgery to the fights are intended to be consumed by an audience that could enjoy both the vision of wealth and the vision of the “classless” be­hav­ior of the rich wives. The franchise has also been criticized for its racial segregation.13 Feminist author and critic Roxane Gay responded to Steinem’s claim by saying that the show was not comparable to minstrelsy aesthetics. Instead, the show allowed “­women to be their truest selves,” adding that “when ­women are allowed to be their fullest selves, that’s the most

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feminist t­ hing we can do.”14 In t­ hese two views we see the clash of two dif­fer­ent waves of feminism, the second wave more centered on respectability, and the third wave ­women of color view embracing ratchetness as the core of feminist agency. Gay articulates a view centered on agency for all ­women of color, while Steinem denies them agency. Of course ­these views are extremely subjective and center on what Gay and Steinem see in the shows, which reiterates the public’s subjective response to real­ity TV shows. It is against this background of a conflict in views about agency, feminism, class, race, and ethnicity that I situate my analy­sis of the per­for­mance of Puerto Rico’s Joyce Giraud (2013), Cuban Niurka Marcos (2015–2017), and Cuban American model Sissi Fleitas on the Latina version of Real House­wives. My main theory is that t­ hese three characters pre­sent distinct ways of articulating Ca­rib­bean feminist affect in contradistinction to the Mexican and Mexican Americans repre­sen­ta­tion on the show. While the scenes with Giraud center on the theme of passing Latinidad in an Anglo-­mixed environment in Los Angeles, Marcos’s cubanidad from el solar (low class urban Cuban affect) produces its hypertrophied Cuban image in a group of mostly Mexican and Cuban Miami ­women. In contrast, Fleitas offers another form of affect related to her Miami based acculturated new rich Cuban status. This contrast is easier to spot when we situate Rica, Famosa, Latina (2015–2017) in its urban milieu. Although a follow-up from the initial Real House­wives of Beverly Hills (2013), Rica, Famosa, Latina breaks out of the claustrophobic atmosphere of Beverly Hills to use the ­whole city of Los Angeles as its landscape. In this sense, while Giraud’s scenes happen mostly in ­houses in Beverly Hills, Niurka and her rich and famous friends are filmed at many sites (including businesses and restaurants) around the city. A certain threshold in the first franchise was crossed when Giraud became the first and only Spanish-­speaking Latina among anglo ­women in the Beverly Hills group in the first franchise from 2013. While the former Ms. Puerto Rico speaks perfect En­glish and dresses well, her comments are purposefully constructed to violate the tonal rules followed by the other members of the group, as she discusses private sexual m ­ atters in public and relates such ­matters as the size of her husband’s penis or his prowess in bed. In another scene she greets the husband of one of the Anglo wives in Spanish. All of t­ hese touches underline her semiotic function as an exotic. In Rica, Famosa, Latina Niurka and Mayeli Alonso (Rivera) (ex-­wife of norteño singer Lupillo Rivera) are represented with the accent on Niurka’s Cubanness and Rivera’s roots as a Mexican norteña: parallel bodies in relation to class and origin. In this case, norteña sensibilities are thus border based and working class. Sissie Fleitas shares many aspects of Cubanidad with Niurka as well, as we see in the first scene when they meet in a restaurant and Niurka gives her the santero salute, Abure Yemayá. Both Cuban ­women wear a bracelet that represents their orishas, Sissi a blue one, the color of Yemayá, and Niurka a red one and a yellow one, the colors of Changó and Oshun.

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The fact that the two Cubans are gossiped about by the other, richer and established Mexican w ­ omen, such as Luzelba, for example, shifts the codes of Latina exoticization and passing established in 2013 to motifs having to do with class and cultural respectability. The narrative arc, though, is fi­nally determined by ethnicity, as the Mexican ­women join forces against Sissi and Niurka, who become closer. Cuban ­women and particularly Niurka come down against two mainstreams, the one represented by Mexican proper (upper class) latinidad, and the U.S. anglo mainstream. At the same time, it is Niurka’s role to solve prob­lems or confront insidious gossip. The scripts in Rica, Famosa, Latina create drama through gossip: some temporary alliance w ­ ill bind together gossipers against some gossiped about ­woman. Or rumors get transmitted from one member of the group to another. The gossip and rumors serve as the background against which the spontaneous encounters or reactions of the protagonists are forged. Th ­ ese spontaneous incidents provide the ­great plea­sure of the show and can radiate out to vari­ous fanbases. Niurka, then, assumes a pivotal function in breaking through the gossip circles, speaking “frankly,” or solving prob­lems. The foregrounding of class dynamics among ­these w ­ omen reflects both tensions between t­ hose who are new arrivals—­who are not “pedigreed”—­and t­ hose who work for a living and o­ thers who exist on more “traditional” forms of capital—­the earnings of spouses, for instance—­but it also acknowledges the role of symbolic nannies or caretakers to the group. ­These roles of protection fall indeed into Niurka or Mayeli the ­women with working class origins. While all the protagonists are necessarily rich, the top of the social order belongs to t­ hose who are rich b­ ecause of marriage, not ­because of their ­career. Thus, Niurka, whose wealth comes from her ­career as an artist, functions in a nontraditional role vis-­à-­vis the other ­women. Of course, this reflects a rather archaic notion of female capital in the 2010s, but the class standards are respected within the frame of the show, in relation to Niurka. Not even a shared Cubanidad among Niurka and Sissi Fleitas disturbs this hierarchy. In any case, the prob­lems that are tied up with other w ­ omen’s issues does not put their national affiliations against the other. In one significant scene Niurka, wearing her santería bracelets and ilekes (consecrated orisha collars), arrives to give counsel to Sandra. While the clothing is not mentioned at all in the scripts, it is a key feature of the world of real­ity tele­ vi­sion, in which clothes, atmosphere, and presence often say more than the dialogue itself. Niurka is always dressed in a more casual way than her friends and usually is wearing less or no makeup. Her clothes and ilekes tell us that her role, latent at times but always on call, is one of caretaker and healer. In another scene that happens in Miami, Fleitas visits her babalawo to receive advice about love. Although it is clear that she is a santera, this specific practitioner is reading tarot cards and not the shells for tele­vi­sion. Fleitas needs to receive advice about love and relationships. Thus, l­abor and affect continue to be markers of ­those who, although “rich and famous,” did not come from money. The redundancy built

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into the repre­sen­ta­tion of class relations, which operates on the hyperbolic rhetorical level, marks Niurka’s persona: she is loud, too frank, too emotional, and prone to speaking out of order. In the only scene when Niurka loses her temper, it is ­because she is defending her friend Sandra against the gossip of o­ thers, which leads her into a physical altercation against Victoria del Rosal, a Mexican celebrity (season 3, episode 10). The altercation happens in a gym, to which Niurka has invited the group to attend a pole-­dancing class. The sequence ends with a cat fight and both ­women crashing on the floor. The ratchetness of this scene full of screams, hair pulling, and even body bites, and the fact that it happens at the end of the season, reflects on the type of “climax” the makers of the show extract from Niurka’s per­for­ mance and persona. Although Niurka has established herself in a hyperbolic mode, this is the only time when we see her lose control, although the dynamic of the narrative has already primed us for this free-­for-­all from her. Niurka’s monstrous ratchetness emerges, as Victoria in the next scene calls her “that ­thing” (esa cosa) and “without class” (mujer de quinta). As in many real­ity shows dealing with wealth and class, the self-­made story about subjects who come from rags to riches, which is often referenced in the defense of capitalism, shows itself as a flaw that needs to be ­either tamed by the group or put into the ser­vice of caretaking roles. This excessive affect is Niurka’s story line on the show, with a secondary one concerning her ratchet immigrant affect centered on Cubanidad. Ratchet feminist subjects such as Niurka are never fully socialized into mainstream U.S. society, nor do they never pass or get accepted into Anglo communities.

Mami Niu and Social Media What contribution to Ca­rib­bean mediascapes is made by ratchet-­tude? And is the accusation, leveled by Gloria Steinem and o­ thers, that this spectacular form of affect is just a minstrel show, a continuation of ste­reo­types about certain ethnic groups surviving into neoliberal times, justified? In this chapter I am arguing that the ratchet consciousness brought in by figures like Niurka Marcos can be seen in terms of affect and ­labor as a feminist praxis ­under neoliberal regimes. It is clear that the “hustle” created by entrepreneurs and laborers such as Niurka Marcos defines forms of self-­making and branding the artist as a commodity. Even if they are branded as scandalous, overtly sexual, or shameful by some, Marcos and the group of Ca­rib­bean artists crossing over into the televisual and media market in the United States are using ste­reo­types as vectors to destroy or transcend ste­reo­type and its bind with respectability discourse. In other words, when you become “that t­ hing” (esa cosa) that is socially scandalous, that is, ratchet, loud, and overtly honest, you are indeed embodying a type of feminist practice, owning your voice and talent for a purpose. Niurka, now labeled “Mami Niu” (­Mother Niu) by her Instagram followers, is an idol to many ­women and

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men, including gay and trans p­ eople. She has used her vedette per­for­mance to resuscitate a genre of spectacle that is turned on the one hand to the golden age of Mexican cinema, but is turned, as well, to the global tropics for consumption by a heterogenous audience. This tropic is not a copy of the same Panamerican tropics of the 1940s but uses the repertoire of the hyperbolic, the tropical, and retro cool to enter the global spectacle, which centers on competition, survival, and spectacle. As an artist she feeds off this nostalgia, as a business entrepreneur, and she is able to control and direct her marketing, a series of products that are original but also rely on her Cuban desire for invención. ­A fter her perfume became a commercial success, Marcos continued to sell products that she signed. In the last year, she has been selling COVID-19 protective masks on Instagram that have unique colors and her own trademark phrases printed on them. Iconic and funny phrases such as “Chocaste con el muro de Berlín” (You just clashed with the Berlin Wall), “¿Bailas?” (Do you dance?), “Si te pica, ráscate” (If you have an itch scratch it), and her iconic with Cuban-­accented En­glish “I’m sorry for you” are some of the messages of t­ hese masks. In May 2021, she created a new online show Niurka Oficial as a brand of entertainment in IGTV (Instagram TV) and has been participating in drag festival shows where she performs with drag queens. Her queer ratchet Ca­rib­bean persona has been embraced by her queer and cis ­women fans who adore her honesty and charisma. If the body is the ultimate product, but Ca­rib­be­an/Cuban affect continues to be her mark of originality, Niurka Marcos’s comedic interactions and Cuban puns are her way of selling an impromptu way of speaking, a ratchetness in social spaces, that serves, albeit for her own purposes, the cause of a subaltern class. Marcos has made Ca­rib­bean ratchetness a valid intervention in the discourse of three countries, Mexico, Cuba, and the United States, creating a counterdiscourse to the respectability mask of bland speech, class contempt, and the inauthenticity of celebrity. Her honest openness to her fans seems more reliable than the poses, claims to fame, and even fake personas created by traditional media conglomerates. The fact that she has maintained her originality, reinvented herself through numerous transformations—­first as the striving Cuban immigrant, then as the scandalous lover, then as a dancer, soap opera star, interviewer, and real­ity TV actress, and fi­nally as the drag-­queer ­mother Mami Niu, an in­de­pen­ dent brand businesswoman as well as symbolic ­mother of her followers, is the key for understanding the global dynamics of self-­making in con­temporary Ca­rib­bean mediascapes. It helps us foreground but also see the differences between her and Puerto Rican island based and diaspora entrepreneurial self-­ fashioners and influencers like La Vampy and LeJuan James.

Vlogging the Self from La Vampy to LeJuan James: Out of Sync It’s summer 2016. I am driving with my f­ amily through road 303 in Lajas as we are visiting La Parguera that week. That day we aim to catch route 100 to El Faro Beach in Cabo Rojo, one of the few beaches that have been labeled as “safe to

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FIGURE 3.3.  ​Ruta Extraterrestre, Lajas, PR. (Photo by author.)

bathe” on the western side of the island. Rains and pollution have produced bacteria in river w ­ aters that empty into the sea and produce toxic environments, just one of the many environmental crises that the island of Puerto Rico is facing that year. Suddenly, I realized that my iPhone is completely dead. I am trying to text a friend who is meeting us ­there to let her know that we are ­running a ­couple of minutes late. I take my eyes from the phone and look at the official signs of “la ruta extraterrestre” / extraterrestrial 303 (figure 3.3). The mystery of why iPhones do not work on that specific road has created several urban legends. Many locals attribute it to the strange presence of UFOs in the Lajas Valley, an agricultural and ranching area that since the late 1970s has reported many UFO sightings. The name “Extraterrestrial Route” was given to this specific road by locals and l­ ater by the regional government of Lajas to endorse, with some degree of irony, the claims of locals that the valley and the two small mountains that surround it are indeed a UFO site or landing for extraterrestrial ships. The green road sign and the cartoon alien figure posted on cardboard in front of a local bar tell me that the stories of alien visits and UFO sightings are attracting local tourism to the area. The cardboard alien figure looks like the typical gray/green creature with black almond eyes, elongated body, and long arms. We ­don’t stop for a picture, but the fact that the iPhone is not responding (not even to texts) makes me realize that at least for half an hour to forty-­ five minutes we are completely disconnected from or out of sync with the outside. ­Later that eve­ning as we return from the beach to our apartment at La Parguera I realized that what was once during my childhood a strong tourist attraction due to the natu­ral Bioluminiscent Bay has become a dead town. I go to the

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balcony and look at the Aerostate, the balloon dirigible that was installed in the early 1980s by the federal government to look for ships or boats bringing illegal drugs into the bay. In 2011, the cable that keeps it in place broke and the dirigible flew a few kilo­meters around town, eventually landing in the fields of a nearby farm, where it stayed for several days.15 Attached once again to its cable but in a nonfunctioning capacity since 2004, the Aerostate Radar System (or TARS) has been adorning the town as a ghostly type of surveillance mechanism against drug trafficking and, implicitly, against the lives of the town’s residents. Indeed, the town looks empty for a summer after­noon. Even when summers are low for tourism—­lower than Christmas when its considered high season—­locals still used to gather to hang out in the few open bars and restaurants. For a quick lunch we sit at the Parador Villa Parguera, once a site of local and international gatherings in the eighties. The décor as well as ambience takes me back to ­earlier times. I marvel at the photo­graph of Henry Lafont, the Cuban comedian who used to host tele­vi­sion and comedy stand-up shows with another Cuban exile, Alfonso Gende Casanova, “El Casanova,” in the late seventies and eighties and who is still ­doing shows in H ­ otel Villa Parguera ­after all ­these years. La Parguera as a tourist destination seems to have frozen in time, outside of “global time,” although in real­ity its slowdown reflects all too accurately the casualties produced by globalization. Visitors of all ages, old and young, keep coming although restaurants that still close at eight o­ ’clock on Fridays and weekends, leaving tourists, who have become accustomed to 24/7 sensation, with nowhere to go. What is Lajas, a small southwestern town in the oldest colony of the world, to global time? How could we read its ruins from the inside/outside of global economies ­today? Ruination looks dif­f er­ent when we are looking at spaces defined by con­temporary capitalism and coloniality. La Parguera in its spectral presence as a ruin of capital is out of sync with the “connected” world, and its habitants, the locals who still participate in its economies, are ghosts from the perspective of the machine of globalization. In this sense, La Parguera out of sync temporality, aligns with the dynamics of tourist zones around the Amer­i­cas such as towns in northeastern Brazil or the U.S. Virgin Islands, where business happens only when locals and incoming international tourists gather in high numbers and some other times it moves slowly in the tranquility of the day to day. This ruinous landscape is very dif­fer­ent from the ruination created by plantations, prisons, or older colonial buildings, which do not rely on recontextualization, or the heaviness that the imperial debris imposes on them.16 Nevertheless, the debris left around this palimpsest of capital haunts us as neoliberalism has widened the clear divide between the rich and the poor and made it part of our entertainment in the 4.0-5.0 digital worlds. ­People with no purpose or destiny, who by their insistent presence, survive and strug­gle in the ups and downs of economies and global invisibility. In the midst of this economic crisis, Dagmar Flores Henríquez (La Vampy de Lajas) emerged as a local media influencer in Puerto Rico (figure 3.4). She

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FIGURE 3.4.  ​La Vampy de Lajas. (Courtesy of Dagmar Flores Henríquez, La Vampy.)

carries the name of her town, owing her fame and her absolute precarious economic situation to the complexities of vlogging the self on YouTube in 2.0 Puerto Rican web spaces. What are the spaces inhabited by La Vampy? What are the dynamics of an online “creature” who insists on surviving in space and time and negotiating the cultural politics of visibility? La Vampy is an online persona, an internet creature, but also someone who belongs to the real inside/outside spaces of performing life in Puerto Rico. La Vampy performs for “vloggers” in videos, songs, and dances that have attracted a social media audience. For Vampy, online time recurs in the space of her home and during some time in tele­vi­sion in Puerto Rico and Miami. Her day-­to-­day job as a breathing therapist in a medical center in the town of Mayagüez was sacrificed to her creation of La Vampy when she was fired from her office as their supervisors rejected her social media persona. Vampy lip-­synchs and dances to pop idols or ­music and more recently participates in online challenges and funny videos with neighbors. Even the so-­called ufologist and paranormal researcher Reinaldo Ríos has joined into the “vampireo,” which La Vampy defines as the activity of filming yourself at home in funny situations. Vampy has said that boredom with her ­family life as well as the nine to five job stimulated her to embark on the path of dubbing videos and dancing with herself. Her videos ­were made years before the selfie culture became rooted on Instagram and TikTok video sharing (the former through IGTV, the latter through its own app). Like Niurka, audience response

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to La Vampy on the island and abroad focuses on her ratchetness, her self-­ presentation as a shameless creature. Her Wikipedia bio labels her wrongly as a porn star performer (on web stream ser­vices such as OnlyFans); but she has not ever worked as an OnlyFans entertainer. In her YouTube channel, #lavampiresacrea, she is seen mostly dancing to pop tunes or imitating o­ thers, aiming to have a good time and entertain. When La Vampy the Lajas streamed her first video in 2010, Puerto Rico was ­going through its worst economic crisis in con­temporary history. ­A fter the cancellation of the 936 tax credit for U.S. companies to situate themselves in Puerto Rico, many pulled out and moved abroad to Asia or the ­Middle East. The local colonial governments floated through this crisis by borrowing heavi­ly, creating an outstanding debt of $76 billion and in the pro­cess paying billions in fees to banks. Since the money was used to merely maintain the already existing infrastructure, it failed to address the prob­lem of business closings and could be paid off only through drastic cuts and tax hikes—­which simply aggravated the already depressed economy. In 2016, Governor Alejandro García Padilla called the debt “unpayable.” With the creation of PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act), President Barack Obama’s administration instituted a Fiscal Control Board (colloquially known as La Junta) to structure the bond payback as well as monitor Puerto Ricans as citizens. This came in response to the media outcry when García Padilla de­cided to stop payments ­toward the debt accrued. New York Times editorials and impor­tant op-ed pieces told the story of economic upheaval in the U.S. colony: “Save Puerto Rico before It Goes Broke” (October 24, 2015); “Creditors Signal Potential Support for Overhauling Puerto Rico’s Debt” (November 22, 2015); “Inside the Billion-­Dollar ­Battle for Puerto Rico’s ­Future” (December 19, 2015). Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress once again failed to address Puerto Rico’s half-­and-­half status, simply demonizing the ­Free Associated State (ELA) and ignoring its historically unequal status. The discourse of shame is always about an interruption, a refusal of identification. It is also a subconscious understanding of this refusal. As Eve K. Sedgwick argues, “Shame and identity remain in a very dynamic relation to one another, at once deconstituting and foundational,” a keystone affect that is both individuating and relational (36).17 The economic crisis, with the billions that went into inefficient bureaucracies, ill-­thought-­out municipal proj­ects, and stretching to provide ser­vices for a population undergoing depression-­era style unemployment and falling income, was rooted in long-­term colonial disadvantages suffered by the island, but the mainland response to the crisis was defined by shaming: Puerto Rico was represented as “the most shameless creature of all.” The parallel I am making might seem hazardous. What does a shameless creature like Vampy have to do with the shaming endured by Puerto Rico in the years of its economic freefall? My thesis is that her per­for­mances, classified by many as narcissistic, eco­nom­ically driven, inauthentic, or simply ridicu­lous and out of sync, throw light “on the emotional logics of capital,” while the performative

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mediascapes in which she found a role and a certain fame was linked to creative echo chambers of meaning where ordinary life took its own selfies in the global downturn.

Vampireo When Dagmar Flores Henríquez, resident of Lajas Puerto Rico, divorcée, and ­mother of five c­ hildren, opened her YouTube account lanenavampiresacria in 2010, YouTube was five years old. She did not know that the vlog name she created for herself needed to have fewer than eigh­teen letters nor that the word “criatura” the most impor­tant part of her self-­persona, was also g­ oing to be cut from her name. As well, she had no idea that her amateur videos of herself dancing and performing would be successful. Of all YouTube videos, 90 ­percent are amateurish clips that are not necessarily oriented ­towards any perceived market. To her interviewer at “Rubén y Co.” she asserted, “Yo solo quería bailar y divertirme” (I only wanted to dance and have fun). What started as three-­to five-­minute videos made with her computer camera, sometimes in pajamas or in a short and tight blue T-­shirt soon developed into more complex productions where new per­for­mances (mediatic) of herself and—­more recently—of ­others joined her YouTube archive. This is the unlikely crossroads where the local and the global met. Technologies of subjectivity and of subjection—­and the ways they build citizenship—­exemplify what Aihwa Ong calls the “state of exception of neoliberal” citizenship. I am not talking only about the “inside” pos­si­ble fame created by YouTube technologies (although we can observe this phenomenon ­here) but also about the spectatorial side of the out of sync-­ness of global temporality. I am referring to the pos­si­ble mediated outsides built by the “mediascapes” of La Vampy a somewhat overweight, funny Puerto Rican ­woman from Lajas and what that represents for online Puerto Ricans as well as local and diaspora audiences. Vampy’s videos go against the normative/moral crusade against “shame” or­ga­nized by a co­ali­tion of Puerto Rican politicians and the religious right, which operates on the Puerto Rican archipelago as it does in the United States. The continual signals stream in from mainstream TV media, gossip shows, real­ity TV, and the many va­ri­e­ties of social media, affecting working-­class and well-­to-do families alike. Humor in mainstream and traditional TV in Puerto Rico is often about creating shame about difference. In this sense, it is a humor that feeds on moral, homophobic, or racist views. What Vampy does, even in her recent theatrical per­for­mances, is offer a queerness that brings the Puerto Rican countryside into the global spectacle, although with its more vis­i­ble personalities or characters. Out of sync temporality—­being “­behind,” ­whether on one’s debts or on one’s fashion—­could induce a certain kind of shame, but in Flores Henríquez’s case, the combination of being temporally out of sync with global trends and an ironically claimed hipness is precisely her routine. Flores Henríquez shows her

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media savvy in presenting herself, as a m ­ other of five, in her ratchet queerness as an outsider of celebrity culture, a mimic of the established media’s fash­ion­able celebrities, working on a minimal bud­get. It is, in fact, part of the humor that the production values are DIY. Creating her own scripts that she adapts to pop ­music, and thus making her own soundscape, she foregrounds “a refusal to a politics of hypernormative domesticity,” to borrow Juana Maria Rodriguez’s phrase: a ­house­wife and a nurse escapes the policing of sexual and corporal norms and around them the “moral disciplinary discourse, which commodify difference and leave plea­sure out” (13–15). I would like to read their insistence on sharing this plea­sure on the web—­the solitary plea­sure of “dancing with herself”—or opening her “art” to viewers as a queer gesture, perverse, narcissistic, exhibitionist, and above all affected. For Vampy the fan’s attunement to con­temporary songs and her remakings of U.S. pop and global musical culture is a way of personalizing time and making herself a participant in global trends. Global cap­i­tal­ist culture advertises the values of hipness, youth, and a thin body—­which it equates with being fit. Vampy does not follow this script; rather, she gleefully deconstructs it. The name “Vampy” was given to her by commenters on YouTube who meant to mock her. The term “vampiresa” is both a vampire a creature that sucks blood and a young, gorgeous diva. Vampy, the diminutive, turns that mockery around, putting Vampy in the role of a small diva with nontraditional looks and a zaftig body ­counter to the ideal that has been thrust upon mainstream viewers. Vampy’s true crime against cap­i­tal­ist culture is that she enjoys her body and considers herself sexy—­hence her lack of shame. In real­ity, she is more representative of the vast majority of bodies than the diva. The merger of Flores Henríquez and the vampiresa creates a creature who w ­ ill, from her looks, have succubus qualities (so sexy that she literally is a maneater) while drying them from their blood (vital energy). Vampy is then I believe an online folk creation like our famous Chupacabra or the Vampiro de Moca popu­lar in the early 1980s.18 Her perversity lies in the fact that she seduces or sucks viewers in, even when they ­don’t want to look at her. It makes no difference that she exists in the real world. Playfully, she not only appropriated the mocking name that her fans created for her but turned it into a verb with a hashtag, #vampireo. #Vampireo, in Vampy’s definition, is exploring your plea­sure by having fun, dancing, singing, considering yourself sexy, seeing yourself as desirable and deserving of love and attention. As an obvious queer stand and attitude it is clear that everyday chores outside of vampireo are burgeois, traditional, boring, painful, moralistic, and hierarchical. ­Women like Vampy, categorized in local Puerto Rican culture as “yales” or “cafres,” usually “single ­mothers,” have been demonized in the press as “bloodsuckers” who take money and resources from the system and refuse to work or act ashamed in return. Their bodies are beaten, shamed, invisibilized, and/or murdered ­every day in Puerto Rico’s archipelago. They are targeted as “symptoms” and scapegoats of what’s gone wrong with the welfare state’s perversion of “the values of the traditional Puerto Rican f­ amily.”

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La Vampy is in many ways a YouTube persona as well. For her, the convergent mix of vlogging, personal diary, talk show, and televisual seduction entertainment in which she is supremely literate is the unique and novel possibility created through YouTube technologies. Nevertheless, her local affect and shameless persona (as well as the affect of the shameful with which she is viewed—­she knowingly aims for ­those moments when the viewers cringe) are connected to the moral politics of local Puerto Rican cultures and spaces t­ oday. It is in­ter­est­ ing to see her personas in dif­fer­ent sites. I ­will say that her daily attacks on her Facebook pages where death wishes happen constantly are not as terrible as the material realities of being fired from her job as a respiratory therapist in Mayagüez, or the leak of a pornographic short video from her computer, or being left with a two-­month-­old baby by her young husband once the “attention became too much.” The re-­creation of her many personas (Vampy, Iris Chacón, Vampy, Selena Quintanilla, Vampy Pollito Pío, Vampy Miley Cyrus, among many ­others) is part of paying homage to the pop artists who inspire her. But as an “exhibitionist” she puts herself in the line of fire. She cannot stop. She does not want to stop. More recently, her Facebook persona has re-­created a shift into the YouTube videos. She is laughing back, building a form of what I call “vampymoral” that goes against ­those who have diminish her. My reading ­will look at one per­for­mance by La Vampy to analyze the complexities of her YouTube/Facebook personas. By analyzing it closely I return to four main components of queer configurations: (1) ratchetness, (2) affect, (3) temporality, and (4) audience reception.

Sin Importarme un Fifí The superimposition of lyr­ics, local speech, and m ­ usic or the “meme” has become a trend on YouTube. From the “Bed Intruder Song” to “The Harlem Shake,” this mix creates a palimpsestic interplay of original images or ­music stream that intersects with other lyrics/situations. In many cases it produces an either/or. If at the beginning what La Vampy created was dancing/performative video diaries where her voice was silenced to give way to body movements and gestures, in her parody of Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” we hear her voice for the first time. Nevertheless, what “La Vampy” appropriated, the Miley Cyrus song, did not align with the meme’s homage to its source, although the streamline m ­ usic of “Wrecking Ball” is t­ here. Instead, she coupled the instrumental with completely dif­fer­ent lyr­ics in Spanish where love, as well as what is called in trovador and raggaetón culture as la tiraera (showdown, faceoff ­battle between singers) against her audience, become key ele­ments. The video does “parody” its source in substituting some ele­ments for o­ thers in the original Miley Cyrus version (which former porn star Ron Jeremy does as well). We can read it as a palimpsest, a superimposition of sorts, in the ways that parody superimposes and displaces the “original.” The Puerto Rican Miley Cyrus became a success on VH1 and other musical video channels in the United States.

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FIGURE 3.5.  ​Still from Ustedes me hacen fuerte video, Dagmar Flores Henríquez, La Vampy.

The video opens with a shot of Vampy’s face and torso that gives the illusion of nudity. The lyr­ics start softly, and we cannot hear her voice clearly as the first images of the moving torso start voicing them. While in Cyrus’s video the naked body functions as a sign of vulnerability, ­here the face and torso, the striptease of half nudity, shows a dif­fer­ent vulnerability story, not a high society one but one encoded in the softness/low style of the lyr­ics (figure 3.5). The singing voice is so soft that you need to raise the volume to hear it. The head is talking back to us and taking over all the screen: “Yo bailé, yo reí, yo jugué, yo brinqué y ustedes todos me tripeaban” (I danced, I laughed, I played, and I jumped and you all tripped [mock] me). The song is about her actions (past tense) and the current activities of her audience: (you used to trip me (mock me)” We proceed to a montage of several shots of La Vampy with a hammer and a pick—­ alluding to big hammer used by Cyrus in the original, where it was a prop, but in the parody moving the hammer into its real background of use, at a local playground, prob­ably close to her h ­ ouse, which appears to have a construction site. While she hits the ground with the pick, dressed in construction boots, white shorts, and a white T-­shirt, she moves slowly, showing her belly—in movements that seem as tired and robotic as t­ hose of the routine of physical l­ abor. A ­ fter that the playground image shifts to La Vampy sitting on an exercise green ball—­her wrecking ball in a swing, creating an in­ter­est­ing shift of images. The swing does not move, as the exercise ball and her motionless body make it impossible. Gravity, inertia, automatic movements, laying down. Meanwhile the chorus goes, “Ustedes me hacen fuerte, ustedes me hacen reír, me hacen re-­re-­ír” (You do make

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me stronger, you do make me laugh, you do make me . . . ​laugh); the pause in the phrasing gives emphasis and breaks the verb: laughter breaks you as you mock her, but she has the last laugh. The body lays down in the playground when the chorus stops as if she is completely resting or ­after a fight (a fight that, if we follow Cyrus’s script, she ends up losing). But ­here we see her vulnerability and agency. La Vampy exists as a persona ­because of her fans, but she does not depend solely on them. They are laughing at her, she is laughing at them—­“en contra de los amargados” (against ­those who are embittered). ­Here la tiraera makes of her a vulnerable persona—­something ­else. At the final scene a block flies up into the sand of the construction site and falling on it. The sense of gravity as the one centered on the exercise ball is odd—­a cement block that flies and could hurt you. We are not sure if she throws it. Then, her body appears on the c­ hildren playground. Nothing could be built now, just what lies ­there. ­Here we see two forms of l­ abor u­ nder two regimes, one industrial—­construction—­while the other is l­ abor on the body to “keep fit” the bodily correspondent of “emotional ­labor” in the hyperconnected regime of the global economy. Nevertheless, by the motionless of the body it is easy to conclude that while engaging with them, she is refusing both at the same time. The inertia and stillness in contained energy are the key sources of genius in this video.

Ustedes Me Hacen Fuerte For audiences, including my friends who follow performers like Vampy online, her queer per­for­mances bring e­ ither happiness and elation or shame, extreme sadness, and even horror. Sometimes they entertain by offering an alternative to our “disappearing local TV,” as media scholar and historian Silvia Álvarez-­ Curbelo pointed out to me. Th ­ ese performers exist in real time, but they also represent a form of “ecstatic time.” It is not a coincidence that Vampy has recently re-­created herself as well. She became a “zombie” character (Vampy Zombi) and an in­de­pen­dent lemonade vendor (with a lemonade stand), making too real that the joys of fifteen minutes of fame cannot escape the harsh structural and economic realities of ­labor on the island. Coincidentally from this living/dead persona (as Zombi and real Facebook voice) she has criticized, laughed at, and confronted the morbid sensationalism that feeds Puerto Rican society: for instance, in her recent prank when she announced that her sixth pregnancy was faked to expose the lack of seriousness in Puerto Rico’s news/journalism and the way the media gaze sees the bodies of ­women such as her and applies its moral compass. This vampymoral ends up turning the t­ able literally on the ones who see themselves as “­owners” of this morale. What type of politics could be rescued from this seemingly nihilistic gesture? I argue with Juana María Rodríguez that this politics is part of a “critical trans politics” on its own terms. It derives from one coming from bodies that are racialized, shamed, commodified, and invisible, who eat and who are eaten, consumed, and discarded. The media

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produce t­ hese moments of convergence that d­ on’t result necessarily in forms of liberation but are in many ways forms of participation. For Vampy, her ­house as a site of plea­sure “for herself” and ­others has pushed the script to challenge the system with feminist, po­liti­cal statements. Are we seeing this DIY queering as a neoliberal sign of our apocalyptic global times? Or are online personas such as La Vampy feeling beautiful or desirable even out of the precincts of respectable beauty and sexiness, are an insight into our feminist need for joy and desire (even if out of synced) for plea­sure? I do believe that ­these per­for­mances are most of all an invitation to look at ourselves in the inside and the outside, affective and affected, completely out of sync—­and shamelessly so.

Reading LeJuan James: Ca­rib­bean Ethnic Diasporas Orlando-­based Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube star LeJuan James (Juan Ricardo Atiles Tejada) started making fun videos on Vine in 2013 that jokingly presented sketches of the differences among Hispanic/Latina/o parents and their ­children growing up in the United States. He was born in Rhode Island and then lived in Puerto Rico, where the ­father strug­gled for many years before migrating for good to Kissimmee, a Puerto Rican enclave in Orlando (James, Definitely Hispanic, 6–7). Given this background, the videos shed light on the day-­to-­day lives of recent émigré populations in Orlando, the subjects of a study by Jorge Duany and Félix Matos-­Rodríguez.19 Between 1990 and 2000, the city of Orlando experienced the largest increase (142 ­percent) in the number of Puerto Ricans stateside. T ­ oday, Orlando is the fourth-­largest metropolitan area for Puerto Ricans in the United States, ­after New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Nearly one-­third of all Puerto Ricans in Central Florida are young adults (between 25 and 44 years), a similar proportion for Puerto Ricans in New York City and the entire United States, compared to slightly more than one-­fourth for Puerto Rico. An impor­tant component (12.6 ­percent) of mi­grants from the Island to Central Florida are el­derly persons.

In the first chapter of Definitely Hispanic: Growing Up Latino and Celebrating What Unites Us, titled #Home, James describes the economic realities faced by many Puerto Rican families that move ­every year or even ­every six months to the U.S. mainland in search of jobs. When the f­amily returns to the United States ­after five years in Puerto Rico, the destination chosen is Orlando. ­Here, James started collecting the daily live experiences of being a “Hispanic” on the U.S. mainland. In his book, which supplements and broadens the trajectory of many of his videos, he reflects on the transition from the transnational

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Ca­rib­bean self into Latino/“Hispanic in the United States.” LeJuan started making videos in 2013 and became the first Hispanic/Latino figure with a large group of followers on Vine. When Vine was acquired by Twitter, LeJuan was able to reissue his content as well as expanding his fan base via Twitter. Being savvy about the need for having many sites on the internet, he ported his content to Instagram (193). As in the case of Dagmar Flores Henríquez, his fame on social media made his employers unhappy. He was eventually fired from his job as a man­ag­er at Nike but by this time had monetized his video presence, becoming an “influencer,” which involved traveling, creating more diversified content, and hiring a man­ag­er. Contrary to Vampy, LeJuan was already based in the United States and so was already embedded in the greater diasporic demographic. Starting years ­a fter Vampy, his initial precarity did not last long as he followed the new trends in the new media business (such as tours) to get supporters. Thus, even influencers need to follow a professionalization pro­cess. With a man­ag­er he was able to not only create content that was supported by multibillion-­dollar brands, such as T-­Mobile, but also negotiate ­these contracts. LeJuan works not with scripts but with general concepts or ideas. A ­ fter making videos that referenced his f­ amily but ­didn’t feature them, he even persuaded his mom (LeMom James), his wife Camila, and his dad (LeDad James) to appear as characters in his videos (200–201). Recently his newborn d­ aughter has appeared in some videos. He had started out impersonating all the characters donning wigs or hats without disguising his bearded face, an intentionally amateurish detail that created a comical effect and broke gender norms. Th ­ ese comical effects include the monologues but also the gestures he uses to mark his characters as feminine or masculine. James’s language is transnational Ca­rib­bean Spanish as he moves at ease from Dominican to Puerto Rican accents with ease as well as En­glish, sketching out characteristic moments in the lives of a Ca­rib­bean immigrant ­family in the United States and their son. His skits make us think of scripts of tele­vi­sion shows such as the Cuban Qué pasa U.S.A.? and more con­temporary shows such as the CW’s Jane the Virigin (adapted from a Venezuelan soap opera), set in Miami, or Netflix’s One Day at a Time and In My Block, set in Los Angeles. Using ­these already established formats, James’s videos shed light on the day-­to-­day lives of recent émigré populations in Orlando. In James, all the ­family are presented as immigrants, which makes his f­ amily prob­lems appear more generational than part of a first-­generation to second-­generation divide. What type of visual/affective communities are interpellated by this ethnic humor? Only the ones who understand the speech? And to what extent are language-­ethnicity, closeness, and separation related genealogically to blackface/brownface? Where do we locate Blackness in LeJuan James’s vlogging experiments? In his face, speech, or both? Is Brownness/Blackness h ­ ere part of the ethnic humor/per­for­mance? While the formula is an easy one, derived from mainstream tele­vi­sion, “Ca­rib­ bean Hispanics are like . . .” is, for LeJuan audiences, a ­matter of recognition

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that is enacted by the mostly Ca­rib­bean diaspora communities, who “get” the humor as well as accent (the use of Dominican, Puerto Rican vernaculars) that defines his per­for­mance. LeJuan is an author, distributor, and producer of all his content—­a key difference between his per­for­mance and a corporate-­sponsored show, related to the possibilities for outside expression that emerged with “vlogging” and new media platforms. Regardless of background, all my Latinx students get his humor and understand his jokes. Although he makes the accents par­tic­u­lar to a region (Puerto Rican and or Dominican), the talent is not only in the mimicry but also in the way accents are shifted. When he wants to represent the mom, he alternates between a Dominican and a Puerto Rican accent to offer dif­fer­ent sonic accounts of “moral” lessons to the son or ­daughter. The ­mother speaks in Dominican-­accented Spanish when she is arguing, resulting in a faster, affected speech, which seems like a mixture of many domestic arguments. Puerto Rican Spanish is deployed in t­ hose sketches in which the basic theme is that of morals and manners, related to ­family, be­hav­ior, and rules of life in the United States. It could be argued that the Puerto Rican accent is associated with the colonial life experience (the law, relationships, or being good citizens), while the Dominican one is the nurturing axis of ­family life. As I reflected in chapter 2, Dominicanidad appears to be the core of affective and transcultural Latinidad in the United States even and more so in Afrolatina/o repre­sen­ta­tions. ­These accents are accompanied by m ­ usic, be it Dominican bachata, salsa, merengue, or con­temporary Puerto Rican raggaetón depending on the appropriate circumstances. Recognized salsa artists such as Jerry Rivera and La India have made cameo appearances in ­those of his sketches dealing with romance, an impor­tant signal of his upward ascension in the media sphere, but also an insight into the Latinx per­for­mance of affect, love, and desire in relationships. LeJuan takes advantage of the histrionic characteristic of Latino cultures (in comparison to a more buttoned-up WASP norm) to highlight the plethora of details and interactions among the first and second generations of Ca­rib­bean Hispanics in the U.S. LeJuan does not directly address race in his sketches, but he embodies a certain type as a light-­skinned Black man. His accented Spanish as well as the m ­ usic used in his comedy sketches center Ca­rib­be­anness and Latinidad around race and ethnicity. It is clear that Brownness defines most of the sketches, and this ethnic difference is racialized through language and culture. Although many of his sketches happen in the Orlando area, with its populous Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhoods, LeJuan’s humor resides in presenting the strength of Hispanic/Ca­rib­bean parental culture versus the prob­lems they encounter in the entirety of the United States. Good and moral be­hav­ior is required (and demanded by parents), a strong emphasis is put on excellence in schoolwork and sports, and sons and d­ aughters are more overseen and allowed less latitude to socialize compared to U.S. adolescents. Showing re­spect for older p­ eople is a core value. This provides humorous material for many of LeJuan’s sketches. For

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instance, the mom is watching her TV show and having her time off when the son arrives and needs her help to find the car keys. The mom resents the disruption as she is fi­nally “relaxed watching her soap opera,” but the son insists. As expected the mom finds the keys, which are very vis­i­ble on the ­table, and reminds him that her time and space in the ­house is sacred and “hers only” so he should or­ga­nize his life better. As it happens in e­ very Latinx h ­ ouse, lessons at home are expected to be taken always as “lessons in life.” Thus the phrase “I d­ on’t know what you are g­ oing to do with your life” is repeated constantly as an educational/ moral lesson mostly expressed by the mom and dad characters. In one of the most popu­lar videos by LeJuan, a young man is playing in a kid’s baseball league and the Dominican dad is so invested in the game that he acts as if his son is already a professional player. At the beginning of the video the ­father brags about his son’s prowess as a player: “¡Aquí viene mi hijo, muevánse pa’ trás que pa allá atrás es que va la bola! (­Here comes my son! Move to the back, way back ­because the ball is ­going over ­there!). A ­ fter the first ball, he desperately counsels, “Hijo, hijo, agarra el bate como te enseñé, y dale duro, machúcalo, como Toño, machúcalo” (Son, Son, grab the bat as I taught you, and hit it hard at the center of the plate, crush it like Toño!). Toño Rosario is a Dominican merenguero and ­here LeJuan is playing not only with the linguistic but also with the reference to his merengue “Kulikitaka.” ­A fter the son reminds his dad, that, “I am ­here to have fun dad, just to have a good time with my friends” (in En­glish), the desperate f­ ather answers comically in Dominican Spanish, “¡Tú ere hijo mío, tú ere un pelotero, tú tiene sangre hispana. Todos estos niños están aqui para jugá pero tú no. . . . ​This is not fun! Esto es la vida! Es muy importante que tu cojas la vida en serio, el que no coje la vida en serio se queda atrás y tú eres un hijo mío y no voy a dejar que eso te pase” (You are my son, you are a natu­ral baseball player, you have Hispanic blood, all ­these kids are h ­ ere to play but you are not. This is not fun! for you this is your life, you understand? Your life! It is impor­tant that you take life seriously, ­those who ­don’t are left ­behind and you are my son and I ­won’t let that happen to you). When as expected the son strikes out, the ­father starts screaming and hitting the fence in anger. The understandable joke ­here is mostly on overbearing parents who over-­identify with their ­children—­especially ­fathers with sons—so much so, that they fail to understand them as ­children. The pressure of the young son, a Dominican first-­generation boy playing baseball, touches on what appears as an initiation into what is perceived as “au­then­tic” Dominican manhood, in the eyes of the ­father. The fact that many Dominican professional players are recruited as young prodigies and become baseball stars also links the sketch with ideals of the American dream and Dominicans in the United States. The idea that “fun” is the opposite of “life” denies an ele­ment of childhood and adolescence that is valorized in the United States. Like the themes elaborated by U.S. Dominican based writers such as Loida Maritza Pérez and Junot Díaz, LeJuan questions not only the differences between the first and second generations of Dominicans in the United States but also what Ca­rib­bean

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authenticity or Dominicanidad are supposed to look like given the vast socioeconomic changes in which ­these concepts are defined.

Vlogging the Self A close reading of the lives and experiences of t­ hese two vloggers and their 2.0 content sheds light on the diverse scripts, humorous and comical, of certain forms of vlogging in Puerto Rico and its diasporas in Orlando. If La Vampy’s comic videos are couched in the codes of Puerto Rican rural ratchetness, her feminism, her ingenuity, and her candid self-­presentation as well as her proudly DIY production values reflect on a shame and shamelessness in the collective Puerto Rican subconscious, where being ­behind on debt and being ­behind on the neoliberal consumer lifestyle converge in an out-­of-­sync temporality that cannily mocks the mainstream global experience. Even before many understood the influencer experience as a “Hollywood” marketable pro­cess with fit, skinny, or plastic surgery enhanced bodies or ­faces, La Vampy’s thick curves, sexy demeanor, and sense of self w ­ ere already breaking ground and opening the uses of YouTube to what TikTok or IGTV became years l­ ater, platforms for original idiosyncratic content: the theater of the self, materialized digitally. La Vampy’s visit to shows such as Telemundo’s Miami-­based Caso Cerrado, where they had a story of a man who was addicted to her videos in a show aired on February 24, 2015, not only showed that her publics ­were transnational but also signaled her recognition in Miami and Orlando as well as other cities in the diaspora. Although the script used “addiction” as its lens for presenting the Puerto Rican connection to YouTube or new media (as well as indirectly to porn), La Vampy’s presence in the show offered a light, joyful presence that debunked this traditionalist, Cuban-­ centered, moralistic script. For Dra. Polo, the judge of the show who grew up as a ­daughter of Cubans in Puerto Rico, La Vampy was a source of joy, as for many who watch her online. The continuity of the Cuban-­R ican script h ­ ere explored in chapter 2 is also evident. Since 2018 La Vampy has integrated other characters and dancers into her YouTube streaming world, such as Reinaldo Ríos (best known as the ufologist for his UFO interests) and his wife Chachi, in humorous plays or dancing per­ for­mances. ­These new additions show that her content continues to be humorous but that it has passed from the initial amateurism to more inventive and worked-­over scripts. In spite of the veneer of professionalism, however, La Vampy is resolutely out of sync as a traditional online presence, and even with a strong fan base she is frequently the target of online attacks, mocked for her physical appearance and content. While she is still a presence and voice in con­temporary 2.0 media circles in Puerto Rico, her economic precarity points to the vulnerability of w ­ omen, particularly single moms, in Puerto Rico (as in the United States). For LeJuan James, the trajectory is dif­fer­ent. Ca­rib­bean Latinidad remains the axis for his ethnic

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humor that has become a managed and successful product. His videos come out weekly, and he is more recognized now in Anglo as well as other Latina/o circles outside Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. The DIY ethos, for James, was much more a m ­ atter of apprenticeship than an aesthetic-­ethical position, as it has been for La Vampy. For both performers, the key motive has been bringing joy and humor to the audience even as they express home truths about the Ca­rib­bean experience. Their emergence on social media has opened up spaces not only for creativity but also for grassroots commentary and voice in a contemporaneity dominated by global corporations and the power­ful.

4

Cities of the Dead Performing Life in the Ca­rib­bean Spectral Lives Life and death defined the temporal dimensions of the plantation. The slave was, as Orlando Patterson describes it, ­under the edict of social death (37–40). Flight or escape was, on the one hand, the assertion of life, but on the other hand, it brought the slave face to face with the systematic and oddly contractually ordained vio­lence at the root of the slave system. The slave’s contract was negated from the beginning by her social death, yet escape was treated as though they had broken a contract. Patterson’s notion of slaves as liminal figures—­even in socie­ties where they formed the majority of the population—is a useful hermeneutic device with which to explore the fundamental structure of Ca­rib­bean colonial socie­ties inasmuch as it describes an entity—­neither alive nor dead—­ that crosses over from the world of the living to the dead and vice versa. In relation to the slave’s (non)contract Michael Taussig reminds us that “the space of death is impor­tant in the creation of meaning and consciousness, nowhere more than in socie­ties where torture is endemic and where the culture of terror flourishes. We may think of the space of death as a threshold that allows for illumination as well as extinction” (quoted in Holland 4). The plantation as a self-­enclosed system of patriarchal normative power was a necropolis that had its own ways of dictating how, when, and why the enslaved would die. As Colin Dayan has argued, extreme forms of vio­lence, punishment, and death created 106

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dif­fer­ent forms of agency, from the point of view of the enslaved: to die, but also to perform, to offer a testimony against a master, or any “other contract” that put enslaved bodies ­under the law, was constructed according to the social conventions of meaning, in both the ordinary and the juridical sense. But then the question remains, in a culture defined by the absolute terror threatening the majority of the population, what produces meaning from the point of view of the enslaved? Meaning resides and coexists with forms of l­abor power. If the enslaved w ­ ere ­things and/or property and their l­abor power and production belong to their masters, their social death poses the enigma that they must somehow smash. Liminality, an ethnological as well as psychoanalytical term, denotes a concept central to languages of symbolic power in slavery and plantation socie­ties. It is therefore impor­tant to think of the dead as a socius, including ­those who passed on due to the terrors of the plantation system, but also ­those living-­dead who mourned them. To take care of the dead became a form of agency outside of the bonds of the master’s society, as it offered a form of recognition linking together ­those who performed t­ hese rituals. Perhaps for this reason the real death of a slave and the rituals attending to it often became sites of contention between the enslaved and colonial authorities, who sought to outlaw or at least curtail funeral rites for fear of rebellion. For example, in Cartagena, Colombia, the permitted funeral rituals, the lloros, ­were performed at night with songs and ceremonies, during which the body was buried directly into the ground without a casket. In the eyes of the masters, this meant that the body was not “properly Christianized,” in contrast with their own funeral practices. For the Africans, however, this was the proper way to return the body to the source of all life and being, earth.1 In the United States, African American burials in the late 1890s, a­ fter emancipation, ­were still performed on land outside of the plantation, as plantation land was not seen as “proper land” to bury marginal or disaffected bodies.2 The afterlife in the African imaginary was conceived as a timeless, faraway dimension, which presented a return to the ­imagined homeland and the final step to spiritual freedom. When public mourning was not pos­si­ble, African descendants in the Amer­i­cas, who thought of the dead as protective ancestors, created ritualized practices to keep the beloved dead closer, pragmatically translating traditional forms of mourning. Altars, stones, a piece of cloth, bones, and ashes symbolized the materiality of ­those who passed. To conjure air, fire, w ­ ater, and earth with blood or to carry the spiritual amulet or prenda became a form of remembrance for the bodies of ­those gone. The assemblage of objects, m ­ atter, and intentions proposed a way to bring the dead to life, in a timeless and cyclic continuity. Thus, the dead are material forces whose physical, social, and affective copresences influence economies of ­labor, plea­sure, and survival in plantation socie­ties. In this context of extreme latent and overt vio­lence, mourning is a psychic ele­ment of survival. Ghosts that haunted ­others or dead presences considered too attached to the world of the

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FIGURE 4.1.  ​El Velorio, Francisco Oller.

living ­were caught up in the network of power relations—­which provided a total structure in which both animals and ­humans, the zombified or t­ hose embodied in natu­ral phenomena, had their place and could be accessed. Plantation vio­lence and its correlates throughout the colonial domain, attached to the transatlantic trade routes binding together the g­ reat Eu­ro­pean powers, African nations, and American dependencies, provided the setting of the theater of creaturely life. As Robin Derby has remarked in her study of lougarous, ciguapas, and other creatures in Hispaniola and the Puerto Rican Chupacabra, t­ hese beings are intrinsically related, by way of long histories, to the relationship between folk ideology and the politics of the governing class. For the case of Puerto Rico, she argues that “the state in Puerto Rico is pervasive yet remote; commanding yet invisible, since much of the muscle of US imperial power resides on the island b­ ecause the US armed forces have enormous holdings on Puerto Rican soil” (294). One of the most celebrated paintings from late nineteenth-­century Puerto Rico, Francisco Oller’s The Wake / El Velorio (1893), depicts the Afro–­Puerto Rican tradition of baquiné, a wake-­celebration performed in the aftermath of the death of a baby or young child. The wake had food, ­music, and a festive environment, reflecting the belief that babies and young ­children died without sin and thus gained entrance to paradise. The painting pre­sents one such party in disarray (figure 4.1). The body of the young baby at the center, with flowers on his head, is ignored by all the guests, including the immediate ­family; meanwhile, a Black man, dressed in rags, looks solemnly at the baby’s corpse. Lunch has just arrived, and a man walks in with pork on a stick. All the eyes are on the pork, allegorizing sustenance, life, and desire, but also the sacrifice of the body/animal for the soul and material continuity of the collective.

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If plantation socie­ties in the Ca­rib­bean w ­ ere our first cities of the dead, within which emerged the practices and negotiations of material and spiritual considerations related to life, it is clear that the creation of ­these forms of material, pragmatic, and super­natural agency worked in tandem with recognized forms of necro power. This poses a prob­lem: what survival scripts w ­ ere in­ven­ted by and for t­ hese bodies? Plantation socie­ties in their forms of total domination, subjugation, and instrumentalization of life conditioned the emergence of negative sovereignty and agency, that is, claims to otherworldly power, which transcended the in­de­pen­dence of ­these islands and distributed ­these beliefs into the material, economic, and ­human relations of con­temporary Ca­rib­bean socie­ties. In this chapter I look at the ways t­ hese survival scripts are represented in con­temporary neoliberal capital scripts, where the dead—­whether as spectral presences, zombified cadavers, or animal presences—­are represented in funeral tableaus. While the artisan’s workshop or the industrial machine shape the dynamics of plantation and post-­plantation economies, it is the society of the spectacle and the decline or abandonment of con­temporary cities reflected in the mediascape that organizes the Ca­rib­bean cosmic vision of humanity and the dead. To understand twenty-­first-­century Ca­rib­bean history, one must go back to the historical forces that took shape in the nineteenth ­century, when some islands in the Ca­rib­bean domain ­were achieving in­de­pen­dence while ­others remained ­under colonial rule, but all ­were subject to the emergence of cap­i­tal­ist forms of production and trade. The impress of this history remains on the relationships among body, power, and subjection translated into ­these survival scripts.

Artisan ­Labor and Techné Plantation economies in the insular Spanish Ca­rib­bean w ­ ere as diverse as the histories that configured them. ­A fter the success of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, Cuba, still a Spanish colony, took the lead in the sugar industry, due to the fall of the French colonial plantation system, which instigated the migration of whites and f­ ree p­ eople of color from Saint-­Domingue to the eastern coast of Cuba. Cuban sugar barons inserted themselves in the new transatlantic trade developments with ease, taking advantage of British and German imported machinery as the Spanish Crown, caught up in the Napoleonic Wars on the Continent, allowed economic reforms, which in turn encouraged vast sugar cane latifundia. The Cuban bourgeoisie modeled their vision of the social and economic order on the philosophical mandates of the late eigh­teenth c­ entury, retaining slavery as an institution and fearing interference by the Spanish government. Meanwhile, slavery on the model of Saint-­Domingue was not ever dominant in the eastern part of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic) or Puerto Rico. The pro­ cesses of subjection to l­abor in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico w ­ ere characterized by coerced, semifeudal agricultural arrangements that maintained the instrumentalization of life but left workers a form of smallholder in­de­pen­ dence in relation to the market. This lingering opposition to cap­i­tal­ist wage ­labor,

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with its imposed, managerially or­ga­nized forms of work, has survived as an ethos and real­ity well into the post-­plantation, postslavery era and persisted through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This smallholder ethos touches on Ángel Quintero Rivera’s describes as “maroon” or “counter-­plantation” socie­ties, creating through sheer physical flight the negation of authority and negative sovereignty vari­ous forms of grassroots creative agency. This is reflected in spectral forms of l­ abor and bodies and social per­for­mances in the social imaginary. Originally maroon subjectivity was connected to re­sis­tance to the slave global market, which defined global economies from the seventeenth ­century to the nineteenth, even as mechanization and ­free markets made slave ­labor increasingly obsolete. Eric Williams’s pioneering study Capitalism and Slavery (1944) went beyond accounting for peer-­to-­peer master-­slave relations and addressed the complex connections forged in the global trade on Black slaves between sugar plantations and the financing of harbor cities such as Liverpool, which ­were built on the back of the slave trade.3 Williams critiqued the Marxist model of capitalism, which premised f­ ree wage ­labor, showing the crucial role played by global racial oppression to accumulation of capital that financed the industrial revolution and the system of f­ ree trade. Raúl Cepero Bonilla’s Azúcar y abolición (1948) and Manuel Moreno Fraginals’s El ingenio (1964) are encyclopedic points of reference for the world made by the masters and slaves in colonial Cuba.4 What all t­ hese works have in common is that they see the slave system not as precapitalist but as precisely the opposite, as a necessary instrument for the production of global capital and forms of l­abor discipline. Enslaved bodies are instrumentalized in the ­labor pro­cess as their humanity dis­appears, not only by forms of exploitation but also by law. What Patterson describes a “dominum or thingness” in the slave condition is an inheritance from Roman law and with it the notion of absolute property over a slave (32).5 The slaves who worked as artisans in the plantation system w ­ ere as socially dead as the field hands, even as their skill set reflected the hierarchy forming in a society on the verge of industrialization and the growth of cities. ­These artisans ­were outsiders/insiders, artists, and creators who manufactured sophisticated goods but remained u­ nder the uniform ban of slavery. The racial ideology that selected Africans for the slave market ran up against a contradiction in using African, mulatto, and indigenous artisans since their skills ­were in contradiction to their supposed animality. Artisans became especially prominent in the under­ground enlightenment of the colonial period. José Luis González sees in the subculture of urban slaves a key to the definition of eighteenth-­century Puerto Rican culture, “Puerto Rico’s first floor.” Similarly, in Cuba, Brazil, México, and Peru, the advanced colonies in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, they became the proletariat and artisanal corps that built, painted, sewed, and decorated the colonial infrastructure of buildings such as churches, government h ­ ouses, streets, fortifications, and public squares.6 It is not pos­si­ble to analyze Baroque art in the

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Amer­i­cas without understanding the complex social pro­cesses involved in hiring, teaching, and contracting of Black and indigenous skilled artisans. The model for many slave systems in the Amer­i­cas followed the premise that “the highest the skill of the artisan-­slave the faster the manumission” (Harvey 109).7 With manumission and the development of the kind of skills rewarded by the market also came social status and power. In other words, although ­free l­abor was not the precondition of the cap­i­tal­ist mode of primitive accumulation, techné did become a bridge to l­ imited social freedom, respectability, and status. David Harvey sees it as “the possibility of slaves to sell their ­labor power” and while “this type of craftsmanship continues,” it “confers a certain power upon whoever possesses it ­because it is, in some degree monopolizable; ­these are the skills that have to be eliminated if capitalism is to survive, in other words, skills are anathema to capital” (107).8 Skills both have training costs and drive up wages, and ­these costs come out of revenue, which, given the logic of the market, drives the search for automation, or techniques that can be easily taught and lead to accelerated production. Skilled slaves w ­ ere often rented out by their masters. What Marx sees as “de-­skilling” pro­cess in the working force happens, as well, in slave-­labor economies, when only a small percentage of the slave population learned artisanal skills to serve their masters, or the economic needs of growing urban populations in Havana, San Juan, or Salvador, Bahia.9 Therefore, skills are not necessarily the conceptual negation of slavery, as is made clear in slave lit­er­a­ture and repre­sen­ta­tions, which show us a more complex pro­cess of subjection of Black mulatto artisans and their ­labor. In Autobiography of a Slave (1841), Cuban slave Juan Francisco Manzano is a master of many arts, among them sewing fine feminine clothes, lace embroidery, cooking, painting, oratory, arithmetic, and l­ater writing. He is an example of Rancière’s hybridity, what he describes as someone, “born out of the conjugations that emerge within artisan economies, “a false ­free man a half-­part slave, an impossible being, an unthinkable nature” (24).10 Still a slave, Manzano shares both forms of subjection: the one of being a slave, dead to his master, and the one of capital. As a slave, it is precisely his mastery of all ­these professions that makes him more attractive to the system. For the artisan, value comes from his mastery of skills and not from his status as a f­ ree citizen. In the case of Manzano this becomes more complex as he is still enslaved. L ­ ater, his mistress rents him to señor Nicolás, a young master in Havana. Manzano, who is already an orphan, is working hard to be able to purchase his manumission papers. He feels discouraged when he realizes that not only what he earns but also the small inheritance left to him by his m ­ other belong to his mistress. When in an impor­tant scene he manages to confront her, she answers, “Are you in a big hurry for your inheritance? D ­ on’t you know that I am the automatic heir of my slaves?” (119). Her answer shows how the alienation experienced by a slave who is not able to earn money to purchase his freedom was pre­sent in the consciousness of the master class. Given the ­legal rapacity of his mistress, and his vulnerability as a skilled

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slave, Manzano manages to hide some money from his mistress. It is at precisely this instance in the narrative that we witness his rebellion. Harvey acknowledges that formal and real subjection to the production pro­ cess and capital happened when workers sold “their ­labor power in order to live” (107). For slaves to have money was illegal and punished by death. For the f­ ree slave population, the forms of subjugation became subtler as they earned money for their work but faced the or­ga­nized discrimination of second-­class citizens, remaining outside of the circle of white Cuban Creole social and cultural capital. Thus, for Manzano, as for many enslaved or f­ ree artisans, money reflects a system of value associated with forms of subjugation. In Cirilo Villaverde’s novel Cecilia Valdés (1882), Master Uribe, the mulatto tailor, exemplifies this condition, as he confides to his Black apprentice José Dolores Pimienta that artisans like him need to “show their teeth” to white Creoles and “kissing hands that he would desire to see cut and chopped.”11 This is the only instance in the novel in which a hint of Black-­mulatto rebellion is suggested. As I have argued elsewhere, it is precisely the liminal social status of mulatto artisans and the ways they w ­ ere racially discriminated against in Cuban society that created this duplicity.12 Symbolically to cut the hand of the white Creole master would be to cut their power as a social class, as creators, which is the way the hand functions in the world of artisans and artists. Uribe verbalizes the ultimate revenge wish of slaves against their masters. In his fantasy masters are subject to the overwhelming objectification that makes their bodies commodities that can be used and abused by ­others. Daily accidents especially in the sugar economy where the harvesting and refining of sugar involved dangerous instruments. Slaves ­were constantly at risk of losing their arms or legs, which would quickly lead to other losses as the slave became a burden rather than an instrument. If a slave was read as “incomplete,” she or he was unable to work. For Marx technology is the ­actual transformation of nature into use value and production, and it is clear that machines and tools are also part of this pro­cess. As machinery was put in place to substitute for slave ­labor, the composition of the rural slave class changed. ­These changes continued ­a fter abolition (Haiti and the Dominican Republic, 1804; Puerto Rico, 1873; Cuba, 1888), which hastened the social movement of artisan economies and the formerly enslaved from the rural areas to the cities. However, the abolition of slavery as a l­egal form did not lead to full civil and economic rights for Black and mulatto laborers. In post-­abolition Ca­rib­bean socie­ties, the role of Spanish and French colonialism and the rule of law had its own afterlife, even a­ fter the conditions that produced it ­were abolished. U ­ nder the Spanish regime in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Creole elite managed to destroy the liminal economic power gained by mulatto elites (ILa Escalera, 1844) and continued to coerce bodies for ­labor (Jornalero Book Laws, 1859). In the Dominican Republic, as well as Puerto Rico, Black and mulatto populations negotiated status and ­labor rights as they could, incorporating ­these relations into a postslavery racial identity that lived in the disappointment that emancipation did not equal real equality. While the

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development of ­these discourses in the first three de­cades of the twentieth ­century goes beyond the scope of this chapter, it is my argument that in the insular Ca­rib­ bean ­these dynamics of power built by slavery, serfdom, and coercive forms of l­ abor or­ga­nized forms of spectral life, where vulnerable bodies negotiated their po­liti­cal, creative, economic, and artistic status from below. The survival scripts that literally maintained life at a spectral frequency provided the ground in which con­temporary neoliberal regimes root themselves.

Urban Cemeteries Survival has remained a ritualized practice that pervades our global times. Individual and collective forms of survival are tied to the ways capital directs our lives, intentions, and emotions. As Negri forcefully argues, capital produces a spectrality that corresponds with common experiences: “­There is no longer an outside, neither a nostalgic one or a mythic one, nor an urgency for reason to disengage us from the spectrality of the real” (9). The spectrality of the real alludes to the subjective fight or flight reflex in the survival script—­and the moments of stasis when both impulses are equally power­ful. When time is constantly being translated into money, survival might seem to the observers to be an uber-­transaction where bodies live to pay back or to create inversions in pre­ sent and f­ uture schemes. Survival, related in many ways to the networks created by informal ­labor and markets, appears, at least in the Spanish Ca­rib­bean and Latin Amer­i­ca, to constitute what James Scott has labeled “infrapolitics” or the “hidden transcripts, unor­ga­nized, clandestine or evasive practices of the working class and the underclass.” Defined historically by “state capitalism” on the one hand and transnational globalization on the other, la lucha (the strife) or la brega de todos los días (everyday strug­gle) in San Juan or Havana consists of certain short-­term ­doings and long-­term waiting—­waiting for the next deal to come through, waiting to buy food for the next meal, waiting for the car to get fixed, selling what­ever is proscribed by the state, be it drugs, or vending food without a license, or medicines. Between bregar and luchar ­there is also inventar (invention), which defines all performative ways of living by the creative in-­ betweenness of the pre­sent and the ­future. Time, embodied in waiting, is annulled when creative invention becomes part of life. Con­temporary cities in the Spanish Ca­rib­bean survive. Survival in ­these terms is the narrative of our times. The timeless forms of brega, lucha, and inventos vary, but their transmission by ­human energy and capacity inscribes survival in networking. To discuss death and mourning in this context may seem like a complete paradox. Is survival included in what po­liti­cal phi­los­o­phers have termed life? She, the one who survives, is always in fight or flight response, showing her scars, moving forward. The questions posed by Judith Butler in Precarious Life about the vio­ lence of global times are pertinent in relation to ­those who survive. Whose lives count as lives? How are we to relate the grievable life to the survival script? (20).

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Is the survivor real? And what about death? Who mourns and how? Is the survivor always dehumanized? How? ­Shaped by colonial and postcolonial histories and now neoliberal o­ rders, Ca­rib­bean bodies are ciphers from whence life, death, and the afterlife are understood. Vulnerability to economic cycles, to imperialism, to disease, to media-­spread moral panics, to environmental catastrophe, to anomie, to powerlessness marks all bodies ­shaped by con­temporary global conditions. However, postcolonial Ca­rib­bean bodies carry the afterlives of plantation and feudal economies of exploitation. Christina Sharpe has analyzed t­ hese con­temporary bodies in the afterlives of slavery as constituting the “orthography of the wake.” Following the definition of the “wake” as “the track left by on the ­water’s surface of a ship, the disturbance of a body swimming or moved in ­water; the air currents b­ ehind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow” (3), Sharpe reads the “past that is not past” or the afterlife of slavery and its effects on con­temporary Black bodies, from the ­Middle Passage (the initial wake) to con­temporary deaths by police vio­lence. The wake, which is also the ritual, the ceremony, that we create for ­those we have lost celebrates the life, memorializes and mourns, insists on a feast that visibilizes and remembers ­those who have passed. It is in the orthography of the wake that I choose to read t­ hese Ca­rib­bean bodies as “prob­lem” for thought, as spectral entities that foreground the dynamics of the real. As De Ferrari writes, the invention of the Ca­rib­bean as we know it t­ oday originates in the symbolic appropriation of bodies, the tendency among con­temporary writers to foreground the body’s literal and figurative vulnerability, “which forms a “epistemological malleability in forms of subjectivity and identity” (3). Their survivor status is conferred by the unavoidability of their imbrication in spectral entities in con­temporary economies of capital. They are productive parts of decayed or restored con­temporary city landscapes, the ground troops of the informal economy. Survivors are spectral laborers, in a pro­cess more real than any other. San Juan, Havana, and Santo Domingo are artistic centers: they have each produced impor­tant work in lit­er­a­ture, film, video, and collective imaginings, where, characteristically, the tropes of ritualistic death, survival, and collective mourning, per­for­mance and sociability, are interrelated. In this chapter I analyze the narrative script of the film Juan de los Muertos ( Juan of the Dead) and Eduardo Lalo’s documentary La ciudad perdida (2005), in conjunction with the funeral rites performed by Funeraria Marín in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, whose “performative funerals” or collages have circulated since 2010 in journals and on the internet, creating what appear to be “living tableaus” or original wakes. I argue that zombies, the living-­dead, and the performative dead are all roles of the same pro­cess, reflecting sites of melancholia that necessitate, in the collective survival script, responsive social action. Although my argument does read t­ hese actions as forms of agency against the state or neoliberal economies, I also contend that they cannot be reduced solely to agency. Necropolitics, to use Achille Mbembe’s term, “frames” forms of precarious

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subjectivity and existence in con­temporary Ca­rib­bean socie­ties (Butler). The melancholia in question is, paradoxically, oriented t­oward the pre­sent instead of the past. In this sense, Havana, San Juan, and Santo Domingo are, in their “jouissance,” melancholic cities, and desacralized spaces (unconsecrated), where the dead, the living, and their mediums create a narrative of survival whose scripts are constantly improvised in the vio­lence of daily lives. The racialized and diverse geographies of urban Ca­rib­bean cities are keys to understanding Ca­rib­bean performativity, as well as the mediascapes created by the internet, where algorithms commodify and reduce life, death, and survival to eternally recurring consumer “choices,” or spectacularize them with images of tent cities, decayed uninhabited spaces, and vari­ous disaster “wakes.” “Cities of the dead,” argues Joseph Roach, “are made for the living.” The role of the living-­ dead common to Havana, San Juan, and Santo Domingo is invested in spectacular death or the death as collage for the living, thus reflecting the intersection of vio­lence, postcapitalist market economies, and mourning. Internet and daily media images rely on “spectral cities” where the dead or the living-­dead or­ga­nize rhetorical devices for the living. For themselves they elaborate rituals to mediate ordinary survival (uber-­life) in a desire for feeling together—in communities of sympathy. Th ­ ere is an affective turn in t­ hese works and per­for­mances that poses questions about the deep structure of neoliberal market economies, a problematic that brings to the forefront the role of vulnerable and discarded bodies that have fallen out of the cir­cuit of utility. ­These are bodies whose sources of energy are not plugged into the living world and are thus read as in some way “dead.” If the state uses ­dying (military, torture, crime, vio­lence) as a strategic tool for “cleaning” (in economic and po­liti­cal terms) or disappearing the lives that are not valuable, ­these works step back to look and mourn. How should we mourn if the corpse is not ­there and has dis­appeared? Sergio VillalobosRuminott argues, “La ceniza, el resto y el espectro son formas anacrónicas de la presencia que interrumpen la identificación y alteran el engranaje maquínico constituido por la tensión entre soberanía y acumulación, haciendo posible la aparición de la ruina, la fosa común y el cenotafio generalizado como lugares en los que se juega el sentido de una historia que cada vez más parece ser la historia natu­ral de la destrucción” (Ashes, waste, and the ghost are anachronic forms of presence that break with meaning and identification, subverting the mechanical forms built by the tensions between sovereignty and accumulation, making pos­ si­ble the formation of the ruin, the common grave, and the cenotaph as markers where historical meaning is related only as a natu­ral history of destruction).13 The ­trials and tribunals of reconciliation at the end of the era of the National Security State w ­ ere offered the mission of making the living accountable for the dis­appeared; ­whether or not they succeeded, ­whether or not they “satisfied” the survivors, they have been key to discussions on the aftermath and presence of vio­lence of the Southern Cone and con­temporary Mexico. In the Ca­rib­ bean spaces, t­ hese institutionalized rituals have been less felt.14 It is the overt

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presence of dead bodies as ciphers, ­here, of capital, power, and death, their insistent presence, and their afterlives, that poses the prob­lems I am concerned with. What about the living-­dead and their negotiations vis-­à-­vis the politics of destruction? What happens when corpses are embalmed to look as if they ­were still alive? What type of meaning do we give to t­ hose bodies? Mourning as related to the death drive touches many of the dynamics of t­ hese negotiations between the living, the dead, and the embalmed corpse. In the case of Havana and San Juan melancholia takes the pre­sent as its object. In the case of the Dominican Republic the body of the ­father in a state of decomposed ­matter opens the analy­sis to other temporalities. What we have is a meditation of the never-­ending pre­sent and overbearing presence of creaturely life.

Zombies and Funeral Tableaus Zombie characters and stories have long been pre­sent in con­temporary Ca­rib­ bean narratives to reflect on the colonial living-­dead condition, l­ abor, love, sexuality, and the hauntings of Ca­rib­bean histories. In Pedro Cabiya’s novel Malas hierbas (2011), the male protagonist has a ­mental disease that makes him feel that he is a zombie. The female protagonist of the story, the scientist Isadore Bellamy, who grew up at the border between Haiti and Dominican Republic is nevertheless the one who has grown around zombified laborers and has watched the auction of zombies (for domestic ­labor) and how it has affected her town, friendships, and ­family. As a witness, and by studying the zombie phenomena scientifically, Isadore seeks a form of reparative justice and tries to escape the subjection dynamics of her haunted past. While Isadore’s tries to exorcize the past, the male protagonist, a rich, white and professional who believes he is a “zombie” detaches from his real­ity. Both points of view are sustained by the narrative, on the one hand, Isadore’s trauma and reactions based on her personal history, her skin and her origins, on the other, the protagonist delusions about his detached affect vis-­ à-­vis the world. Cabiya’s first person narrators, work ­these dynamics in a brilliant fashion shifting from female to male perspectives and problematizing race, gender, and sexual desire. Erotic control and psychological submission, the classic sadomasochistic binary, define the zombie narrative in Cabiya. But the male protagonist does not understand sexuality or sexual desire, while Isadore and his female co-­workers do. The fact that most of the novel happens in the halls of a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal industry touches on con­temporary technologies of subjection and power. Who has technological and social power? Who is enslaved or abused in this real­ity? Other zombies, t­ hose living in the afterlives of slavery in the border towns or cities are always defined by their l­abor, gender, or skin color. In other words, the zombie controls consciousness and to an extent social power, status, and l­ abor. In Rita Indiana Hernández’s Papi (2005), the eponymous object of the narrator’s desire becomes a zombie at the end of the novel, but, in contrast to the bodily detachment of Cabiya’s zombie, Papi’s body rots from the inside,

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emitting a foul smell. His ­daughter, in an act of melancholic loyalty, makes him the leader of a new cult (obviously modeled on the early twentieth-­century cult of Papá Liborio [Olivorio Mateo], which came to an end when Dominican forces massacred the members in the community of Palma Sola). Papi, however, is depicted as a figure more like two-­time president Joaquín Balaguer than Olivorio, and his time is moved up to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the narrative takes place. To break the cycle of melancholy Papi’s ­daughter fi­nally lets him decay completely, putting herself in his place in a symbolic embrace of language and power that fi­nally symbolically restores her to her m ­ other’s body. The Havana of Alejandro Brugués’s film, Juan of the Dead / Juan de los Muertos (2011) is a con­temporary city where zombies appear randomly in ­houses and streets, their zombification read as a “polluted animic state” (a virus) mainly associated with capitalism and neoliberal ideologies coming from the outside. Juan, his best friend, his d­ aughter, and his son fight together to destroy the zombies who attack them. The film still keeps the structure of the comic book where zombies appear mostly in groups, making of Juan and his small group of brave defenders of the living in their fight against the living-­dead. Their fighting scenes as well as his business are or­ga­nized according to the genre’s apocalyptic logic of survival. The ironical motto of the business “We killed your beloved ­family” (“Matamos a sus seres queridos”) places affect and emotions in the only site pos­ si­ble: the state. If it’s difficult for you to kill your loved ones Juan does the job. In a post-­ideological apocalyptic scenario only Juan remains standing as the one living consciousness in a sea of death. The movie scenes filmed in the neighborhoods of Vedado, Nuevo Vedado, and the Malecón are staged on rooftops, walls, and fi­nally at sea, a celebratory scenario often used in con­temporary Cuban films such as Una noche (2012). The Havana-­centric locations define the exuberant real­ity of the living and the cuenta propismo as a “Havana specific real­ity.” Sexuality and voyeurism abound in a hypermasculine narrative that relies on self-­ gratification and homosociality. In a postapocalyptic instance of the normativity of the latter, Juan refuses a male friend’s invitation to have sex (given the pos­ si­ble lack of ­human partners), preferring castration. Survival poses the threat of castration—­but Juan defends his masculinity by being productively violent and efficient in killing the zombies (which are practically the po­liti­cal opposition). ­A fter his only h ­ uman companions leave for Miami in a raft, Juan—­the only living body in a sea of zombies—­ends up the sole maroon, defending the urban space (and the land) from the zombies. Urban Havana spaces become telluric, with Juan becoming the prodigal son of Cuba’s recent history. Nevertheless, we could read his status at the end of the film as a type of living-­dead condition. In this case zombies as a mass with no living purpose represent a form of energy, which Juan ­will eventually use himself to survive. Leaving versus staying produces a type of antiheroic script in the case of Juan. He is not redeemed. He is, like his revolution, a melancholic living-­dead character. John Torres’s poetry collection Undead (2013) makes of San Juan a space from where the living-­dead

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perform in a carnivalesque fashion the “nowhere history” (“la inanida historia”) of suspended time. En esta inanida historia yo soy yo y el reverbero de muertos vivos que me persigue—­entre segmentos deshilvanados por la fuga—­, una estela hedionda que acecha a las hordas, la suma de las partes sajadas por vicio. El resto del relato es sencillo Las muertes se retratan solas sólo hay que saber mirar. [In this nowhere history I am who I am and the reverberation of living deads that follow me—­within segments unwoven by the flight—­, a hideous steal that stalks, the multitudes, the sum of its parts broken by vice. The rest of the story is s­ imple The dead take pictures of their solitude You just need to learn how to look].

In his documentary La ciudad perdida (2005) Eduardo Lalo traces the death of urban spaces in San Juan, Río Piedras, and Santurce, Puerto Rico. In his own words, Puerto Rico is the symbol of a postcapitalist environment where desolation, ruins, decay, and abandonment are part of our pre­sent. Naomi Klein’s model of “disaster capitalism” describes the death of many of ­these urban spaces. A difference with Klein’s model is that t­ here is no option that could be substituted for what has been submerged and dis­appeared. The super mall or the Walmart exist in conjunction with t­ hese ­dying spaces. Lalo uses graffiti scrawled on walls as a chorus that addresses the ruin flaneur. The image of a dog that runs in schizoid ways opens and closes the documentary (figure 4.2). The dog is a more desperate instance of wandering in this world. ­There are other dogs, however, who continue to bark aggressively, satisfying the guard dog routine—­even as what is guarded is increasingly worthless, territory without use or beauty. Man and animal—as Agamben argues—­share a similar consciousness of the ­g reat emptying out of meaning in our globalized ordinary life. The

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FIGURE 4.2.  ​Still from Eduardo Lalo, La ciudad perdida (2005), “Perro que corre.”

pre­sent, the short-­term horizon, becomes every­thing and nothing. In t­hese spaces of decay where vio­lence is the order of the day (anonymous and also ever pre­sent)—­collective, individual, self-­inflicted—­where “exceptional vio­lence,” as Deborah Thomas has called it, is part of daily life, the interactive pro­cesses of death become spectacular, ritualized, vis­i­ble. A media event crystallized this sense of despair: Angel Luis Pantojas, twenty-­ four years old, knowing that he was ­going to die young had a final request: “Do not put my body to rest. I want to stay standing.” By requesting this, he was asking for a type of domain to be standing, as ­others w ­ ill be, a­ fter death, what anthropologist Kelli Swazey sees as a “type of life that ­doesn’t end with death.”15 Still standing—­the per­for­mance of the funeral aspiring to erase the mark of what he foreshadowed as an early violent death (figure 4.3). Pantojas’s body was found in w ­ ater, drowned and swollen in a mangrove area close to his ­house in the caserío Quintana, Hato Rey, with eleven gunshot wounds in several areas—­collar bone, thorax, head. He was another young man in his early twenties, poor, mixed-­race origin, another statistic in the weekly drug-­related massacres that happen on the island. What historian Carlos Pabón (2013) has read as a “social war in Puerto Rico” creates an atmosphere of fear “in which it seems that indifference and silence are strategically posed to let ­these ‘­others’ kill themselves, which results in a distance from this other, and the writing off of t­ hese murders” (parecería que la indiferencia y el silencio se traducen en una estrategia de dejar que “otros” se maten entre sí, lo que implica un alejamiento del otro y cierta condonación a los asesinatos). Funeraria Marín in Río Piedras performed the funeral rites. His body was exposed in his h ­ ouse, in the living room, standing in the corner, dressed in his favorite rap clothes, as he requested. Known as “El Muerto Parao” (The Standing Dead Body) Pantoja became an iconic corpse. Antonio Martorell re­created

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FIGURE 4.3.  ​“El muerto parao.” (Courtesy of GFR Media, El Nuevo Día.)

Pantoja’s funeral on his piece for the Havana Biennial of 2012. The piece titled “Velando, Mamá Velando” (“Watching M ­ other Only Watching”) also paid homage to Puerto Rican Francisco Oller’s The Wake / El Velorio (1893), a repre­ sen­ta­tion of the Afro–­Puerto Rican tradition of “baquiné de angelito.” Martorell uses ­these paintings as panning shots constituting the per­for­mance of a Puerto Rican “proto-­fi lm” (figure 4.4). Showcased at the Havana International Film Festival (2012), Velando, Mamá, velando plays with the double meaning of the popu­lar song “Jugando, mama jugando,” with its sexual subtext. “Velar” means to observe, to witness, and to bear witness. The performative text written for the exhibit (what Martorell calls the no-­ vela) plays with El Velorio of Oller to suggest the opposite, of not-­seeing, “no ver” as the fictional role of the no-­vel. In an article for the Cuban journal La Jiribilla Martorell commented, “Our citizen and h ­ uman rights are being v­ iolated by a police state in the name of national security.” This is the kind of comment that can be transposed almost anywhere. And almost anywhere the police presence and media pervasiveness merge with each other. ­Here, the artist refers to the exceptional vio­lence in Puerto Rico, and the exceptional vio­lence in Havana, which happen to be dif­fer­ent, but related similar forms of economic scarcity that lead to forms of subjugation. The state and some citizens opt to not see “no-­ver” or its opposite, “velar.” To look, “mirar,” as John Torres argues, is what becomes key, “seeing or not-­seeing.” I do believe this is the form that Rubén Ríos Ávila

FIGURE 4.4.  ​Antonio Martorell, El muerto parao, 2011. Carbón, crayón y papel sobre lino,

72 × 48 inches. (Courtesy of the artist.)

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has acutely identified in his reading of Martorell’s text, “the unusual form that mourning starts to assume in times of catastrophe, mixing mourning with profanation” (la forma inusitada que asume el duelo en los tiempos de la catástrofe” que mezcla el duelo con la profanación). The distance assumed by artists and ­others of “the macabre dance” or the mix between dance, soneo, and per­for­mance is re-­created in Pantojas, Oller, and Martorell’s “tableau vivants” of the ways dwelling and mourning have been represented in t­ oday. As Manuel Ramos Otero has forcefully argued in his very performative poetry collection, El libro de la muerte, it is as if funereal rituals have been reconciled with this aesthetics of collective mourning. In t­hese stanzas from his poem “Como todas las mujeres de nuestra raza” carnival, cele­bration and death coexist in transformative rituals: Otravez. No es carnaval pero es espejo El pellejo adivina la nada del payaso. El utilero ha puesto un flamboyán en esta esquina, Y la gente nunca habla cuando camina. La vieja de la montaña se ríe de camino al cementerio . . . El Cojo de la Norzagaray, los Rosarios de Cruz, Las Luces de Bengala en la Perla, los títeres achicharrando a Cristo en su altar de gladiolas y azucenas, y el lucero punzó sobre mi abuela. (19–20) [Once again. Is not the carnival it is the mirror, The skin foretells the nothingness of the clown. The prop man has put the flamboyant tree in this corner, And the ­people do not talk when they walk. The old mountain lady laughs on her way to the cemetery. The Lame from Norzagaray Street, the Cross Rosaries, The Flame Lights from La Perla, the young punks scorching Christ over, with gladiolus and lilies, and the red shining star over my grand­mother’s head.]

In 2010, for “El muerto en motora” David Morales Colón, twenty-­two, posed in a ­music video with his motorcycle, the one he used for his job as a messenger (figure 4.5). He died on his motorcycle in Santurce when several men shot him. Knowing that his days ­were numbered ­because “he already had a price on his head” for drug trafficking, he requested to be seated as if alive with his motorcycle. “Repsol,” written on the machine, is the name of the Spanish multinational oil

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FIGURE 4.5.  ​“El muerto en motora.” (Courtesy of GFR Media, Primera Hora.)

com­pany. ­A fter showing this image to my students, we could not deny the irony (or not) of the beats of ­Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” as a sonic motif for this image. Labeled as “El muerto en motora: or El Matatán,” this funeral, in contrast to Pantojas’s funeral, referenced the aesthetics of motion and fast speed and, as well, the commercial place of the drug runner. In Philadelphia, Julio López, twenty-­nine years old, who was a member of a motorcycle club copied, Morales Colón. His burial was performed by Mitcum Wilson Funeral Home (figure 4.6). “El muerto sentado” was the name given to Carlos Cabrera, “El Che,” who was viewed by his friends and f­ amily, sitting down and dressed as El Che Guevara, a figure he admired. H ­ ere a statement on politics as well as his devotion to the Cuban Revolution are pre­sent (figure 4.7). While Morales’s wake happened at Funeraria Marín, the next funeral, the one of Edgardo Velázquez Velázquez, happened in his ambulance, particularly at his work site in Trujillo Alto. Killed by accident when his friend was cleaning a gun close to him, he always requested to be inside his ambulance instead of a casket (figure 4.8). The funeral for the boxer Christopher Rivera Amaro was done as a homage to him by his m ­ other, who wanted to show her son d­ oing what he loved in life, boxing, as part of his funeral. Done at an open site in Funeraria Marín, this funeral had a complex staging along with a ring, curtains, and decor (figure 4.9). ­Here “the everyday strug­gle” becomes intertwined with the sport, while the red and white of the Puerto Rican flag are used as curtains. More recently, the owner of a funeral parlor in Ceiba performed a traditional funeral ritual for his best companion, a German shepherd named Brownie. Brownie had an open casket and was buried in a niche located in front of the

FIGURE 4.6.  ​“El muerto en motora” 2.

FIGURE 4.7.  ​“El muerto sentado” (El Che). (Courtesy of GFR Media, El Nuevo Día.)

FIGURE 4.8.  ​“El muerto en ambulancia.” (Courtesy of GFR Media, Primera Hora.)

FIGURE 4.9.  ​“El boxeador.” (Courtesy of GFR Media, Primera Hora.)

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FIGURE 4.10.  ​“Brownie.” (Courtesy of GFR Media, Primera Hora.)

funeral home. ­Here being “­human” does not define the “proper” wake ceremony but the humanization of the animal by affective bonds (figure 4.10). Many of ­these collective performers of mourning, including the funeral owner, ­were penalized with fines by the police and the state for crossing the ­legal line between what was labeled as “healthy,” “decorous,” and “proper.” In the wake called “Grandma in the Rocking Chair” (Abuelita en Mecedora), Doña Georgina Chervony Llórens, eighty years old, requested and planned her funeral as a way to bear with the grief at the early death of her younger son. Dressed in her pink wedding dress from thirty-­six years prior, Doña Georgina sat on her rocking chair accompanied by her favorite book and flowers from her garden (figure 4.11). Through this gesture, she became a symbol for her ­family, an “ancestor” in the flesh. Although Doña Georgina’s act breaks with the histories of vio­lence ­behind most of the untraditional funerals taking place in Puerto Rico and the diaspora since 2010, it is impor­tant to see t­ hese rituals in all their complexity. The suspension of death in ­these performative funerals is a response to the vio­ lence of death, often by murder, itself; more broadly, it is a response to the violent politics of the real and the dismissive role of the Puerto Rican state regarding life, all forms of life. As Guillermo Rebollo-­Gil writes in his poem “Cartografía, Doce hombres han matado a doce mujeres en lo que va de año. Es un país pequeño comparado con casi cualquier otro lugar. Doscientas personas emigran cada día.

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FIGURE 4.11.  ​“Abuelita en Mecedora.” (Photo by Ángel Rivera. Courtesy of GFR Media,

Primera Hora.)

Otras desaparecen. Entre ellas, doce mujeres en lo que va de año. Según los pronósticos, sus muertes no afectarán los niveles de producción en la industria. [So far this year, twelve men have murdered twelve w ­ omen. It is a small country compared to other countries. Two hundred ­people emigrate ­every day. Some o­ thers dis­appear. Among them, twelve ­women, so far this year. Predictions say, that their deaths w ­ ill not affect the production levels of the industry].

In October 2015, a young man from Hato Rey, Jomar Aguayo Collazo, requested to be honored sitting in his local bar, having his favorite beer, and playing dominoes (figure 4.12). His friends and the community came by, drank and played with him, making play and gaming key ele­ments for the final farewell. The time of the game or its pre­ sent appears as not restrained by the corpse, who is in many ways open for another game. Dominoes allegorize our cipher or numbers, but also the continuous match all h ­ umans play with death, in this case, a game that we w ­ ill lose at some time or another. In the meantime, community, ­family, and friends are invited to pitch in, gather together, have a drink, for another hand of dominoes. The wake work (Sharpe) performed by the community is one of connected to eating and drinking

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FIGURE 4.12.  ​“Hombre jugando dominos.” (Photo by Luis Alcalá del Olmo. Courtesy of GFR

Media, Primera Hora.)

but also of com­pany, sociability, and gathering. To accompany the dead in a festive atmosphere is to continue the contractual forms for the living.

Cities of the Dead In the last part of his documentary, La ciudad perdida, Eduardo Lalo films a man on a park bench who spontaneously begins to pray. C ­ hildren are playing in front of him. This sequence, juxtaposing the prayer and the profane, the adult and the child, the mourning and play, strikes me as an emblem of the conjunction of issues with which I am concerned ­here: ordinary life, death, and mourning in the context of “lost cities.” Christina Sharpe has defined collective mourning as “wake work,” a conjunction of the funeral customs of dif­fer­ent cultures that are hyphenated in the Ca­rib­bean. In “the active wake black-­colonized bodies . . . ​ imagine new ways of life in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlife to survive (and more) the afterlife of property” (18). The Ca­rib­bean archipelago is the degree zero of the wake as it became the first port or harbor that received shipments of the enslaved. The Atlantic and the Ca­rib­bean Sea, as the first common grave for all who died in the M ­ iddle Passage, and for t­ hose who cross t­ oday in yolas (rafts) to migration, is memorialized in the rituals for Olokun, the orisha of the sea/ cemetery, who it is said received “a h ­ uman body for sacrifice” to be appeased,16 and has its modern, aesthetic symbol in the “Underwater Museum” sculptures created by British artist Jason de Caires Taylor in Moliniere Bay, Grenada, the Bahamas, and Cancún. Created with a cement that facilitates reef regeneration and sea life, t­ hese sculptures change, flow, and keep alive the cement, u­ nder w ­ ater (figure 4.13). In Viscissitudes, his figures are holding hands ­under w ­ ater. Although

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FIGURE 4.13.  ​Jason des Caires Taylor, Vicissitudes, Moliniere Bay, Granada. (Courtesy of

https://­sites​.­duke​.­edu​/­blackatlantic.)

not created originally as a homage to the M ­ iddle Passage, the piece echoes that history. As Davide Carozza describes it, “Figures of ­children holding hands, that in one sense represent death and turning them into the medium for new life. The tragic is never forgotten; in fact, as the coral takes hold in the concrete, unsettling effects are produced as the figures slowly become less recognizably h ­ uman. At the same time, the very pro­cess that deforms their ­faces and limbs, that is, that enacts vio­lence on the body, produces an afterlife in vibrant color. Th ­ ese mixed characteristics, both emotional and aesthetic, result from the way the sculpture physically combines generativity and decay” (figure 4.13). This sculptural graveyard is like other graveyards of the sea, full of marine life, utilizing the stone and clay to create new forms and exploit the possibilities of tide, temperature, and the biota of the sea bottom. In Dead M ­ atter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses, Margaret Schwartz meditates on the materiality of dead bodies and their cultural, symbolic, and phenomenological meaning. The communicative quality of the corpse produces national bodies such as Vladimir Lenin’s and Abraham Lincoln’s; martyred bodies such as Emmett Till’s or Hamza Al-­K hateeb’s; and tabloid bodies like Michael Jackson’s or Princess Diana’s. The corpses in the performative funerals in Puerto Rico are in one sense expelled quite literally from the nation, no longer subject to tax or law, but on the other hand join the nation inasmuch as a nation exists through time and the dead: ­these taxidermies could even be seen as martyrs to the vio­lence to which they have been exposed through state policies and the vagaries of private power. As

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well, they serve as tabloid bodies as they appear in media and new media (internet and YouTube), making for a sort of freak show. It is easy to recognize the commodification of death, but we should also recognize how overdetermined the performative stance of this eruption of death into life and lifelikeness into death is. It plays with the materialization (value) and dematerialization (nonvalue) of the body. While in Havana, in the cinematic imaginary, we see a masculine (but fragile-­comical body) instituting a telos of survival; in contrast, in San Juan, among bodies that have endured the ultimate end of fragility—­violent death—­ these performative funerals attempt to reclaim the subject’s status, a “consumed body that becomes vis­i­ble” only in death. The expenditure on t­hese funerals and their class association should not be disregarded; as it is not disregarded by the spokespeople for the respectable ­middle and upper classes, where ­these are known as “caco-­funerals” (thug funerals), with po­liti­cal pressure being applied to the Puerto Rican Health Department and the government to regulate or ban ­these “nontraditional funerals.” Of our funerals, the case of the dog stands out inasmuch as we see the affective annexing the nonhuman (the dog), which offers a key to the interpretation of ­these funeral tableaux: the vulnerability of the animal infects the masculine body with a vulnerability that ­these effigies of masculinist strength try to deny. The binary between vulnerability and strength extends to the grand­mother figure, the Abuelita en Mecedora, who is displayed as a projection of the masculine created imago of the ­mother, unsexed but maternal. Here the grandmother becomes the guardian of the feminine, the trophy of the w ­ ills of the son. The world of the funerals is a world divided between sons and ­mother figures. In t­ hese funerals, the sons look not only as if they ­were alive, as in standard embalming practice, but as if they ­were at the peak of their life—on a motorcycle, standing strong in a room, and so forth. In this way, they enact a scenario in which the ­mother can mourn the loss of a strong son, as a form of “public mourning.” Funeral rituals in Ca­rib­bean cultures have often been the part of the “world” of ­women—­and even as far back as ancient Greece, the Antigone figure, the ­woman who sees, in the slain corpse, a figure who shames the polis for its failure, has emerged as a very real archetype. In many ways, as Melissa Harris-­Perry has forcefully argued, we see this happening when systematic injustice becomes evident in crime: as was the case in recent times for the victims of Katrina. In the beginning of the civil rights era, Emmett Till’s m ­ other, whose open-­casket funeral of her son displayed the wounds that killed him, played the role of another of ­these “­sister citizen” to t­ hose who remain, the holders of memory and memorialization. Taking control, sometimes illegally, of the social funeral ritual that marks the passage from life to death, from citizen to ancestor, they perform their suffering publicly, displaying the price they have paid with the deaths of their sons. The technique of curating, embalming, and creating special effects for the body (that is, standing, sitting, boxing, eyes opened) garners a hypervisibility clearly in tune with media spectacularization of vio­lence, while making a very innocent play for continuity: the f­ amily and the community want,

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desire, touch, kiss, and love this body that the community in some way expelled. In the exemplary case of “El muerto parao” (2008), the body, standing, imitates the public statuary of the soldier, which points to the state whose failures are accountable for this death. The state needs to bear witness, cry, mourn, and be “in the wake” along with the immediate f­ amily and the community as “they make meaning with their own ­matter. They stand for ­peoples in a quest for rights, sovereignty, and recognition” (Schwartz 55). Eduardo Lalo shares this melancholy of the lyrical voice in confrontation with this rupture in the socius in his recent poem collection Necrópolis: “What type of poetry fits in ­these streets, what bold dead corpse?” (¿Qué poesía cabe en estas calles ni qué calva de muerto?). My tentative response to this question points to the lyricism incorporated in t­ hese tableaux, t­ hese living-­dead per­for­mances, which re-­create their lives as something hoped for. In their embodied repre­sen­ ta­tions they transcend the mortal bound­aries of the human-­animal making a po­liti­cal statement about the violent economic crisis in Puerto Rico. As José María Lima writes in his poem 24 from Poemas de la muerte, Desde la tumba de mi tumba Un hoy-­abierto avanza; Mi amada, su escalera, su nombre, Perseguidor ayer—­desciende y pretende no haber muerto. Perseguidor ayer—­ingodtrostea Con indignos retratos y artificiales discos en relieve. La imagen de la imagen No pare más; Sus muros no adivinan la gotera, Ni la sienten, Ni la esperan. (87–88) [From the grave of my grave ­Today opens itself and moves forward My love, her stair, her name, Yesterday The Chaser—­descends and pretends not to be dead. Yesterday The Chaser—­ingodtrusting With despicable portraits and embossed artificial discs The image of the image, Does not gives birth; Its walls do not predict its own leaks, Do not even feel it, Do not even wait for it].

What’s left for the dead? If the per­for­mance does not end with d­ ying, and e­ very mourning is in many ways an affirmation for the living, are ­these ironical

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zombies or mummified presences an homage to a pre­sent that does not argue for any futurity? Or is it precisely in the abjection or nurture that they evoke where we could find the chore of our intrasubjective dilemmas in imagining the pre­sent? Perhaps we can look at this “necropolis” in terms of a timeless suspension of the act of sovereignty itself, a moment that happens only when the body dies—­a type of homo sacer who instead of being completely ejected and abjected as the sacrificial other becomes the articulation of a new politics signification, an intrasuspended and timeless order.

5

Indebted Citizenships and Afterlives of Disaster El Apagón During the autumn months of 2017, I had only images to guide me. Th ­ ese images became substitutes—­metonymic substitutes for the f­ aces, smells, and voices of my ­family members who could not communicate with me in the aftermath of Hurricane María.1 The lines ­were down, the transmitters ­were down, the net was down. First came the darkness and desperation as posts from friends and ­family members started to dis­appear from my feed. The day Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico (September 20, 2017), I lost contact with my ­sister and her ­family at four in the morning. Then a­ fter four or five days I found I was unable to communicate with my immediate ­family members. The desfase between what was happening t­ here and the knowledge available abroad, the images I saw and the voices and messages I could not receive, that could not be sent, was abysmal. My case was Puerto Rico’s case: on the island, as all phones and electric power went down, the population descended into a real blackout as well as a cyber one. A triangulation sprang up, between diaspora Puerto Ricans and their families and friends on the island, as t­ hose who for one reason or another could receive signals laterally supplied o­ thers. Even as some of the infrastructure was repaired, for thousands of h ­ ouse­holds the blackout extended for frustratingly long, or even to unbelievably lengths—­six months to two years. Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans on the mainland and the diaspora witnessed an in­ter­est­ing shift: Puerto Rico was on prime-­time news coverage on CNN, ABC, and MSNBC. President Trump’s attacks on the ­people of Puerto Rico and his short visit to the town of Guaynabo, 133

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where he threw paper towels to the audience; the inefficiency of the colonial government; and the grim real­ity described by the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, and correspondents on the ground like David Begnaud made Puerto Rico—­albeit as a disaster zone—­hot, that is media hot. For myself, communication with relatives was mostly restored a few weeks ­later. At the same time, the electric communication infrastructure, back online, was letting us hear and see the voices of individual and collective rescue missions from all parts of the island. We witnessed the painstaking work of cleaning brigades and heard and read the news reports of in­de­pen­dent journalistic sources from local sites outside the metro area. The mainstream press framed the story as one of the rescue by the colonial American power, “praising the efforts” of FEMA and turning a blind eye to the inept bureaucracy and the stalling and pillaging of resources sent to help t­ hose in need; in addition, the manipulation of statistics, which are so often a part of the story when the disaster zone consists of poor and marginalized populations, began: stories manipulating the number of deaths on the ground in ­houses and hospitals appeared, with lesser estimates to make the irresponsibility of the governing class appear less. Meanwhile, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook—as well as the group of journalists from the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo—­became the only sources whose news one could trust.2 Barely one month ­a fter the disaster, San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz became the global face and voice of disaster-­impacted Puerto Ricans in the media. From Twitter to NBC’s impersonations on Saturday Night Live, Yulín Cruz overshadowed Puerto Rico’s former governor Ricardo Rosselló due to her charismatic presence in the media and on the ground. Media presence, which normally takes pre­ce­dence over the real was, in this case, overtaken by the real—­which was in such palpable disaccord with the mainstream discourse. As media saturation has accelerated the rate at which news stories “develop,” the media consumer has learned to expect a twenty-­four-­hour news cycle—­which means that older news or larger stories often are evicted from the attention space. Weeks ­after Hurricane María, in the absence of the usual story structure, in which “natu­ral disaster” leads to repair, the crisis was once again replayed, and once again feminized, this time with the figure and voice of Yulín Cruz. The fact is that during the first two months ­after the hurricane Puerto Rico received more media coverage in the U.S. local news than it had in the previous twenty years. Yulín Cruz, who took on the role of President Trump’s antagonist, became a symbol of the disaster at home and abroad, while explanations of Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory created the following conundrum: Is the United States “saving” Puerto Ricans as part of a general humanitarian policy, or do Puerto Ricans have the same rights to national aid as any other U.S. citizens? Out of a blackout—­el apagón—­arose a relative media saturation of images from Puerto Rico on the mainland: surely it is a media paradox that fullest U.S.-­based coverage of the island in the past two or three de­cades came from the lack of Puerto Rico’s own capacity for coverage. The argument I follow in this chapter

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follows the spectral logic of this paradox. As the U.S. media or­ga­nize this coverage u­ nder the note “Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens” (“even when they lived on that island, and islands are surrounded by w ­ ater,” an a­ ctual quote made by the former president Donald Trump), I show that this ambiguous legitimacy connects with other forms of spectrality and debt, which are expressed in repre­sen­ ta­tions promoted by the U.S. media, on the one hand, and appropriated by local artists, performers, and photog­raphers from the island and abroad, who have been documenting or using their art to reflect on the crisis, on the other. This chapter uses t­ hese media repre­sen­ta­tions (memes, caricatures) as a point of departure to move into other per­for­mances and mediums such as dance, theater, lit­ er­a­ture, and photography to explore the crossroads of nature (within the age of climate change) and an economic crisis caused by debt and the policy of deindustrialization resulting from state governance. While the trope of ruins and ruination has been a common thread in Cuban studies since the Special Period in the 1990s, Puerto Ricans’ colonial condition and the exploitation of nature and natu­ral resources have been a commonality of its history that have led to what appear to be more nuanced, less noticed forms of ruination. Writer Eduardo Lalo (1960–), born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico, has explored this trope in his writings, videos, photography, and art installations, anticipating a generation of writers, photog­raphers, and performers who are now working ­under the sign of Puerto Rico’s economic crisis as it has become another layer of disaster in the post-­María period. In the wake of Puerto Rico’s disasters t­ here’s been a thematic convergence with many of the motifs favored by Cuban con­temporary artists, with the immersive crisis referenced in art pieces, per­for­mance, or photography that reference the stresses inflicted on ­human bodies and lives, navigating a ­middle zone of existence that reflects the posthuman with connections to a necro-­ontology.3 In ­these works nature, creativity, m ­ atter, and the reconstruction of geo­graph­i­cal spaces are configured through the prism of the strug­gle for survival. The social context in which t­ hese works ­were created and viewed in the pre-­and post-­María time period intruded the language of debt and the current economic crisis into the lives of artists who had never been particularly po­liti­cal before, in the same way it became part of daily conversation. Puerto Rico’s economic debt ($75 billion) and the role that the new plan for the crisis, or PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act), created by the Obama administration in 2016, and its representative, the Junta de Control Fiscal, have assumed, abolishing any demo­ cratic constraint on economic micromanagement of the archipelago, created a new l­egal order that aroused l­ittle attention outside of Puerto Rico, even though technically the island is “part” of the United States. To put the Puerto Rican situation in historical context, in 1917 the Jones-­Shafroth Act gave Puerto Ricans citizenship with the territoriality clause that stripped Puerto Rico of its trading sovereignty, in effect coercing Puerto Ricans to be consumers of U.S. goods and forbidding direct trading with other countries u­ nless this trade takes place

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on U.S. vessels. One of the results of the mono­poly position this gives the mainland is the increase in commodity prices since Puerto Rico cannot legally sponsor competition for the import of goods. This regulatory giveaway worsened the state of emergency on Puerto Rico as the neighboring Ca­rib­bean or Latin American countries could not offer immediate help. The Jones-­Shafroth Act is not the only regulatory move that has devastated Puerto Rico. Long before María, a Clinton-­ era “reform,” which fully went into effect in 2006, ended a law, known as the Section 936 provision, that offered tax benefits to U.S. corporations on Puerto Rico. ­These U.S. corporations began to pull up roots, in a familiar search for the lowest pos­si­ble tax and the highest return on production. States on the mainland often order tax breaks to attract businesses, but due to the colonial status of the commonwealth, Puerto Rico’s hands are largely tied in this area. The result was a steady increase in unemployment and migration even as the economic picture was good in the States. When the economic slump happened in 2008, it was a double whammy to the archipelago, leaving a ­whole class in desperate straits, as tax receipts flatlined, creating unsustainable commonwealth debt. Cuts in all areas of life—­particularly in infrastructure and energy—­created a vicious cycle in which economic fallout led to further austerity, resulting in even more fallout. Visually, sites all over the island became physical wrecks. Many artists, experiencing this accelerating disaster, created works that reflect on ­these changes in the basic quality of life. Three motifs have emerged as especially pertinent in ­these works: w ­ ater, sleep, and suspension. In an unexpected way, many pre-­María works have anticipated the conditions of suffocation, drowning, and despair that overtook Puerto Rico in the dark years of 2017–2019. ­These motifs are explored in exemplary fashion in the late Adál Maldonado’s (ADÁL) photographic series Puerto Ricans Underwater (Los ahogados) (2016),4 a proj­ect started on social media (Facebook and Instagram) that has gone viral and now has been collected into a book of photo­g raphs and in his recent ongoing series Los dormidos, which has added images that represent the real­ity post-­María.5 Javier Cardona’s dance per­for­mance Hasta el cuello (2016), which is imbued with a sense of catastrophe as well, uses dif­fer­ent motifs to reflect on the ruination of space and gentrification in Santurce.6 ­These works, by focusing on the crisis, delve into what Naomi Klein has described as Puerto Rico’s “perfect storm” of economic and social ruin by starting discussions about indebted and fugitive bodies, action, citizenship, and debt.7 A new generation of photog­raphers such as Adriana Parrilla, a gradu­ate of the University of Puerto Rico, and currently pursuing a master of art in photography in Paris, took the first images of post-­María destruction, having had the misfortune to be t­ here when the hurricane hit as she was visiting her ­family on the island. Subsequently, she traveled across the island as a Red Cross volunteer trying to reach families in remote towns and took pictures on her journey.8 This chapter puts t­ hese works in conversation with some images of the media coverage from the United States, Cuba, and Puerto Rico (and their critical interpellations on the island)—to the tune

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of the mega summer hit “Despacito,” now a global musical hit. Part of this coverage was impacted by the mega YouTube video hit “Despacito,” a song by Luis Fonsi and ­Daddy Yankee, which came out in January 2017 and immediately became the anthem of Puerto Rican globalization. This chapter aims to theorize not only the actions but also the refusal to pay inherent in forms of indebted and fugitive citizenship. While Puerto Ricans have been termed “rogue” by a rogue administration in Washington, and as they have tried to negotiate their economic debt, “Despacito,” racking up an astonishing three billion hits, became the soundscape of global success on an island that would soon experience the ruination of Hurricane María. I would like to counterpoint that ruin with the way Le Perla, the colorful but poor barrio that had served as the site for the video of “Despacito,” was trying to use the celebrity of the song to spark a tourist influx. The dissonance between the success of a popu­lar tune celebrating street culture and authenticity and the harsh economic real­ity of the sphere in which it was produced is one of the characteristics of the neoliberal production pro­cess in the mediascape. I examine t­ hese aspects in detail in what follows. Given the economics and politics that preceded María, it is not surprising that Puerto Rico’s post-­hurricane relief has been drastically insufficient, poorly administered, and subject to media falsification. In this chapter I decenter the spectrality of the images of ­these art works as well as the meta­phors that contain them, that is, ­water, the sustenance of the earth, and ­water and its interactions (rain, seawater, mud) and their correspondence with bodies that refuse to pay to show how their ironies unfolded, as it ­were, prophetically—as if the artists had unconsciously already absorbed the perfect storm to come, before it struck. The seduction implied by “Despacito”—­the slow-­f_ck, which both parties enjoy at a full-­moon beach as the image of tropical fulfillment and fantasy—is the background of my analy­sis, a spectacular reflection on the scripts embedded in the mediascape and their critical resonances. In many ways, I examine t­ hese images and per­for­mances to explore what indebted citizenship implies—­what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have identified as “the debt that cannot be repaid, the black debt, the queer debt, debt broken from credit, debt as its own princi­ ple” (61). Puerto Rican citizenship as indebted citizenship has been marked as bad—­and unconsolidated debt—­but it is also related to a form of “fugitive publics, of refusal of payment” (64–65). It is from ­these inalienable contradictions that we can read the now (el ahora). The Ca­rib­bean has historically been the ground for media repre­sen­ta­tions of natu­ral beauty, where exotic natu­ral landscapes and bodies have been analyzed or consumed. In con­temporary times, the media—be it tele­vi­sion, film (in collaborative productions with Spain or France), YouTube channels, social media sites such as Facebook or Instagram, vlogs of subjective comedy or stories, ­music videos, or photography—­have been circulating more. The power of this mediascape, as Arjun Appadurai has called it, particularly ­after the late 2000s, has reached populations even in Cuba, where internet connectivity is

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less available.9 As I have studied throughout this book, citizens have an active participatory culture in media blogs, Twitter, and media inventions such as el paquete semanal (analyzed in chapter 2), which includes shows from the United States and local Cuban tele­vi­sion shows from Miami that are not shown in Cuba. Historically, the Ca­rib­bean has been part of this mediascape since the nineteenth ­century, when technologies such as photography, the telegraph, and the wire cable arrived to make the archipelago center of the news. Manifest Destiny, the Spanish-­A merican War (1895–1898), and the invasions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which led to the creation of the first films of voodoo ceremonies produced by U.S. occupation soldiers, make t­ hese first media products and their soundscapes the key sources for the repre­sen­ta­tion of Ca­rib­bean nature, resources, and humanity. ­Today, ­these mediascapes build a Ca­rib­bean network of sorts in which Ca­rib­bean subjects author, produce, and consume t­ hese m ­ usic videos, songs, fashion trends, and even po­liti­cal protests. While the global neoliberal state opens itself to forms of international and local tourism as well as fierce privatization of natu­ral resources, making the division between rich and poor larger and larger, the current state of the con­temporary mediascape keeps informing as well as entertaining, imbricating its networks into the local po­liti­ cal scene. In Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola, incidents of state repression and intervention have been filmed by common citizens and local activists. As a result, ­these videos become sites of online activist opinion and communities mostly in the diaspora are inspired to intervene. We have seen this play out following the recent natu­ral disasters in Cuba (Irma) and Puerto Rico (María) and with the discussions about Senate Bill 168, which since 2013 denies citizenship to Dominicans of Haitian descent who cannot provide l­ egal documents. In the specific case of Puerto Rico, discussions and protests about the final number of deaths during and ­after Hurricane María and local journalism sites such as Centro de Periodismo Investigativo have made an impact with small resources and have insisted that Governor Rosselló and the Trump administration be held accountable for the deaths of thousands of Puerto Ricans.10 The economic crisis before and a­ fter María and the fact that many members of Rosselló’s cabinet made fun of ­these deaths in a chat on Tele­gram, made public by CPI, led to the week and a half massive protests in Verano19 that outed Rosselló from government. This indignation started by Puerto Ricans ignited protests against corruption and neoliberalism in Haiti, Chile, Mexico, and many other countries around the world. In 2018, the fact that many Puerto Ricans (40 ­percent) ­were still “in the dark” without electricity, ­water, or food ten months ­after being hit by Hurricanes Irma and María proposes that t­ here are other ways to read the image as metaphor—­ namely, with the notions of memory, imagination, and creativity. While some of the photo­graphs I explore ­were taken weeks or months a­ fter the natu­ral disaster, Hasta el cuello, by performer Javier Cardona, and the photographic series

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Puerto Ricans Underwater by ADÁL w ­ ere completed in 2016–2017 and explore the crisis in all its dimensions. In other words, they foreshadow the life in Puerto Rico postdisaster as they explore race, racism, gender, class, subjectivity, and the migration of four hundred thousand Puerto Ricans to the United States, particularly to the state of Florida.

Humor and Critique Po­liti­cal cartoons have turned to the current crisis and cast a dark, mocking eye on the corrupted governing establishment. In the internet 2.0 to 4.0 digital age, the art of caricature, with its roots in the late eigh­teenth c­ entury, would seem to be a hopelessly outmoded genre—­but, surprisingly, it retains an im­mense power to offend, as we saw first with the caricatures of Mohammed in the reactionary Danish paper, Jyllands-­Posten in Denmark, and then with the cartoons mocking Islam in the French satirical paper, Charlie Hebdo in 2015. In t­ hese cases, the object of mockery is socially weak and marginalized. However, ­there is a long tradition of “punching up,” of taking on figures invested with real power.11 In Puerto Rico, po­liti­cal cartoons have long provided a space to represent social realities and criticism. At the beginning of the twentieth c­ entury, many newspapers in Puerto Rico—­the Puerto Rico Herald, La Araña in San Juan, El Carnaval—­ all contained cartoons (Delano 133). Carmelo Filardi, from El Mundo, became a well-­known figure in Puerto Rico’s po­liti­cal and media spheres starting in 1948.12 The caricature tradition has continued to create images that condense into iconic situations the abstractions of power and the establishment figures that embody them, even as they find new media platforms. This is also the case in U.S. Latina/o enclaves where iconic figures such as the Chupacabra (also popu­ lar in Puerto Rico) embody agency for subaltern and marginal populations. Still affect and ­labor are impor­tant ele­ments for Latina/o repre­sen­ta­tion in comics. As Frederick Aldama states in his study of Latina/o superheroes, “Unlike their Anglo peers, Latino superheroes in the mainstream have tended to be identified with their bodies and emotions (usually raw and out of control) than minds. Latino superheroes are most likely to follow a bildungsroman prototype narrative, having to learn to become and work at becoming superheroes” (7). Most recently the graphic novel La Borinqueña, a comic created by Edgardo Miranda-­ Rodríguez, and its heroine, Marisol, a Puerto Rican from Brooklyn, raised the Puerto Rican archipelago and its natu­ral and man-­made ecological disasters as key concerns for cartoonists and graphic artists. De la Nada! is a series of cartoons posted on YouTube by Puerto Rican animator and cartoonist Rangely  J. García Colón (Rangy). In this series she comments on local po­liti­cal issues, using traditional puns and oneiric devices on social media. For instance, in “La culpa la tiene Palmagül” (It’s Palmagül’s fault), Rangy critiques in a comical way the former pro-­statehood governor Ricardo Rosselló. She compounds the symbol of the candidate’s party, the palm tree,

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FIGURE 5.1.  ​Rangely García, De la Nada! cartoon.

with that of a popu­lar Turkish soap opera Fatmagul. In the ­great tradition of po­liti­cal satire, she attaches a nickname to a po­liti­cal figure that is vaguely mocking and at the same time insightful of a socially damning character trait. Equipping her mock hero with this sobriquet, Rangy creates a story line that is both didactic and satirical. De la Nada! became a lifeline of po­liti­cal satire ­a fter Hurricane María. Rangy worked on a webcomic diary titled Ave María: A Comic Diary of a Category 5 Disaster. Using a dim internet signal from a Burger King, she was able to publish some of ­these cartoons on a daily basis on her Facebook De la Nada! platform.13 The cartoons I examine ­here ­were published on Facebook only a few days ­after President Trump’s short visit to Puerto Rico on October 4, 2017. The first cartoon depicts a long line of Puerto Ricans at the airport (figure 5.1); their ­faces all reflect sadness and desperation. Above the long line, President Trump’s face appears from a tele­vi­sion monitor that says, “Puerto Ricans have thrown the bud­ get out of whack,” a quote from his short press conference. An angry Puerto Rican from the line responds, “Guess now we ­will have to throw your reelection out of whack!”—­a comment that relays to a ticket held in the hand of one of the ­people in line, which reads, “to Florida,” a state in which Puerto Rican residents can vote in presidential elections. In the second cartoon, also by Rangy, a battered green island of Puerto Rico, pluckily raising its skinny arms, is raised aloft by the ­people, artists, the diaspora,

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FIGURE 5.2.  ​Rangely García, De la Nada! cartoon.

the government, the mayor of San Juan, and even the U.S. military. On the other side of the cartoon, an obese, orange Trump tweets, “Why is Puerto Rico not kneeling to me? Ingrates,” while sitting on a sinking throne made out of his own golf clubs (see figure 5.2). It is impor­tant, in understanding this cartoon, to see it among the w ­ hole community of images that represent the impact of Hurricanes Irma and María. The “pluckiness” of Puerto Rico is reflected in many of the photo­graphs that came out of the natu­ral disasters that disrupted Ca­rib­bean time, space, and life. As I showed with the analy­sis of the iconic photography of Cubans playing dominoes in the flooded streets (chapter 2), the floodwaters ­under the ­people propping up Puerto Rico—­those upon which Trump’s throne floats—­are, symbolically, the same flood ­waters that are being ignored by the men in Habana playing dominoes. A story in Diario las Américas on September 17, 2017, pointedly demystified an image of Cubans bathing in the rain and looking joyous. It was posted on Facebook by a Cuban tour com­pany, Online Tours. The story in the South Florida newspaper questioned the appropriateness and construction of the picture, which seemed to harken back to a long history of racist pictures caricaturing ignorant ­people of color. As offensive was the use of a line from the song “Hasta que se seque el malecón” by Cuban reggaetón artist Jacob Forever to caption the image, as though flooding w ­ ere some exotic attraction. Online Tours is a travel agency owned by Javier Leal Estébanez, son of historian Eusebio Leal, architect

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and director of many restoration proj­ects in Old Havana, elite figures in Cuba.14 As I mentioned in chapter 1, in my analy­sis of another iconic image the ruthless indifference that seemed to motivate this par­tic­u­lar response to the flood—in contrast with the photo­graphs of grassroots re­sis­tance and survival—is an example of how and why Cubans and Ca­rib­bean p­ eoples understand their losses “in a certain way” (de cierta manera), as Antonio Benítez Rojo reminds readers in La isla que se repite.15 Ca­rib­bean ­peoples’ “certain way” is not a nationalistic claim but a difficult encounter with time and resources in moments of dire scarcity; a pact with debt, ­labor, and the condition of the “undercommons”; a po­liti­cal dissent in times of invisibility.16 In the Online Tours photo­graph, the subjects who ­were dancing in the rain ­were aware they ­were being photographed and w ­ ere performing for the lens—­which as they knew is an instrument not just of repre­sen­ ta­tion but of power. “That magic,” similar to Benjamin’s aura, with its sense of a spatialized temporal distance, which is produced by the destitute, the poor, and the undercommons and is consumed by the tourist, or the middle-­class spectator, pre­sents a conundrum for po­liti­cal thought; as Richard Iton reminds us in the case of African Americans, it provides us with a link between the industrial output of the creative class (in film, advertising, social media, e­ tc.) and the images or imaginaries of the popu­lar. It is this link that drives many con­temporary artists to look for t­ hese local town or cityscapes to use as backgrounds for their productions, as we w ­ ill examine in more detail with the videos around the hit song “Despacito.”17 Thus, the ethnographic image, which may be motivated by a sense of cultural justice, can easily be appropriated by the digitalization and conversion of a group of citizens into a meme, reenacting the dehumanization of racialized subjects and use of digital blackface in the mass proliferation of con­ temporary GIFs.18 Artistic photography looks for local color too but, in the best case, relies on the consent of t­ hose photographed, a consent that is part of a larger dialogue, even as the photographer strives to achieve an iconicity of the image. In the images in figures 5.3 and 5.4, shot by Puerto Rican photographer Adriana Parrilla for her series titled ¡Santa María! in October 2017, the natu­ral disaster is painted on the ­faces of ­those who have been bereft of hope. Parrilla was vacationing on the island with her f­ amily when the hurricane hit on September 20, 2017. Like Rangely, she saw t­ hese events in terms that cross the profane and the sacred, the breakdown of po­liti­cal order and the apocalypse. She named the series ­after the popu­lar Puerto Rican plena song about a hurricane: “Santa María, líbranos de todo mal, ampáranos señora, de este terrible animal” (Santa María, liberate us from evil, protect us our lady from this terrible beast). The pictures, which show the impact of the disaster on nature and the living conditions of ordinary ­people, ­were taken during rescue missions across the countryside. Figure 5.3 shows the impact of the hurricane on nature, particularly trees. We see the back of a ­house and the yard, which crosses a small creek. Everywhere trees are down, in such abundance that the level of damage is made visceral to the viewer. The

Indebted Citizenships and Afterlives of Disaster • 143

FIGURE 5.3.  ​ Destruction in Puerto Rico. ¡Santa María! photography series. (Photo by Adriana

Parrilla.)

damaged natu­ral landscape amplifies the fragility of the living space—­the ­house and the man-­made materials subject to a force they could not withstand. Among t­ hose who bore the brunt of the disaster w ­ ere the el­derly, who, lacking support from the state or nonstate organ­izations, had to take the recovery effort into their own hands. An el­derly ­woman holds in her hands a packaged blanket and two b­ ottles of Clorox in front of a gate, and b­ ehind her appears a hurricane-­shredded area (see figure 5.4). It could be assumed that ­these are recent provisions offered to her by rescuers and that she w ­ ill use them to clean what is left of her living space. She looks seriously at the camera, her face reflecting a certain decisiveness. She is ready to take what­ever comes into her hands. The deep power of this image stems from the gaze of this ­woman against such a background, with such minimal supplies. The photo­graph has the feel of a synecdoche, the w ­ oman being interrupted in a part of a larger history of undergoing many other natu­ral and ­human disasters on the island. The el­derly population across the island was the most vulnerable even before the disaster. Over 16 ­percent of Puerto Rico’s population is el­derly, while 40 ­percent of them live at or below the poverty level.19 Given the diaspora that has resulted from Puerto Rico’s seemingly intractable economic crisis, Hurricane María has revealed h ­ ere, once again, a disaster that was ­going on ­under the pre-­hurricane surface. One won­ders, what is left for the ­woman with the two Clorox ­bottles? What­ever is left, she ­will clean and reor­ga­nize. That is her pre­sent, in the face of ongoing po­liti­cal and economic indifference that has shifted all risk onto the shoulders of the vulnerable. This is what suspension looks like.

FIGURE 5.4.  ​ ­Woman with Detergent ­Bottle, Puerto Rico. ¡Santa María! photography series,

October 2017. (Photo by Adriana Parrilla.)

Indebted Citizenships and Afterlives of Disaster • 145

Deudas and the Undercommons A group of neighbors gathers to eat some meat and rice at the home of the only one who is able to get gas. A shopping cart is the only way of transporting ­water and food through a destroyed bridge to hundreds who cannot and would not desire to leave their ­houses or land. A community effort is or­ga­nized to cut trees that have fallen on electric lines; ­children bring out their plastic trucks to help. Some ice is shared with an el­derly patient who needs to keep his insulin cold. Families do not have time to cry for their ill or bury their dead. Many are living in tents on the island and abroad. The darkness—­the full darkness—is making it pos­si­ble for many to look within and across, to be able to see in the face of their ­family member or their neighbor a conversation, a needed connection, a form of grieving or acting together in the face of despair. The crisis is the past, the pre­sent, and the ­future. How can one think about the ­future of the crisis or futurity in relation to it? Puerto Ricans have anticipated disasters, have lived through and survived them. As Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri jokingly and acutely points out, we are the “cockroaches” of the beginning, the past, the pre­sent, and the ­future; the alpha and omega of survival; the creatures of the tenement and the blue tarps adapting from and for the ele­ments.20 Years, de­cades, centuries of debt and colonialism make Puerto Ricans “indebted citizens.” Indebted citizenship, negotiated in the case of Puerto Rico within its colonial relationship with the United States, is an impor­tant trace of neoliberalism that marks many of the current trends of capital in the greater Caribbean—­ for example, in Cuba and Hispaniola, whose triangular relationship with the United States has been marked by dictatorships such as Trujillo’s and Batista’s and the Cold War. If capitalism makes us all citizens of debt, what happens now in neoliberal times when debt forms and informs citizenship? What happens with t­ hese Ca­rib­ bean islands, particularly Puerto Rico, where the perfect storm of local greed and corruption, neoliberal reforms, and megasize natu­ral disasters has hit the core of our daily lives, relationships, senses of self? How do Puerto Ricans not only negotiate but also enact the undercommons of fugitive debt? Is t­ here a now? Puerto Ricans have historically paid their debts with their bodies. Since Hurricanes Irma and María, bodies have become the currency of debt and indebted citizenship. But what is “indebted citizenship” in the case of Puerto Rico? Answering this entails focusing on how the global market (featured in our global musical hit “Despacito”), the media, and local artists (photog­raphers and performers) have proposed and represented their imaginaries of the real world within the crisis in relation to debt and capital. State and police repression, including illegal incarceration, since the protests on May 1, 2018, and the ­later protests of Verano19 that outed former Governor Ricardo Rosselló have taken a toll on a population that is already tired of abuses and has realized that this antidemo­ cratic stance is the new “state” of Puerto Rican society. The excessive show of force

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by the police and the silence of the local government bring back the real­ity that for the Puerto Rican colonial condition debts have been and are paid with bodies. The ­people have been attacked, gassed, put down—­these are the bodies of ­children, the el­derly, teachers, t­ hose who cannot breathe. Yet they continue to live against all odds, to exist and to survive. As Christina Sharpe writes, “In the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, to act life despite death: to think and be, and act from t­ here.”21 For humanity in the wake, visibility and protest come with a price—in this case, the price of consumption u­ nder a neoliberal script or even physical death. Puerto Ricans have been part of this script for de­cades. Ironically, months before the worst national disaster of the past one hundred years, the tune “Despacito”—­ cowritten by Puerto Rican Luis Fonsi and Panamanian Erika Ender and sung by Fonsi, rap star D ­ addy Yankee, and Justin Bieber—­became the song of the summer. B ­ ecause of its success, it also became an anthem for attracting international and local tourism to the island.

“Quiero Respirar Tu Cuello Despacito” “Despacito” is a song about seduction and desire. This ­will, the w ­ ill of desire, is centered on seeing, touching, talking, and particularly breathing. “Quiero respirar tu cuello despacito”—­the phrasing of the song plays with erotic longing and fantasy. The fact that “Despacito” not only is the most popu­lar song on YouTube but also has had many remakes (in Swedish, Chinese, Bengali, Hindi, e­ tc.) speaks to its popularity and to the fact that the song exudes a global beat of reggaetón-­ rumba-­flamenca-­bachata that translates into sensuality and desire. The fact that this beat accommodates so many languages derives from the Afro-­Asian roots of ­these rhythms. At the same time, the lyr­ics and local geography of the ­music video (La Perla, San Juan) locate the global beat in an exotic place—­a poor barrio where gentrification is (as yet) non­ex­is­tent and the demands of authenticity are reflected and portrayed. As Petra Rivera and Jericko Torres state, the tune’s continuous popularity “has made it a symbol of national Puerto Rican identity” (87). The song was already popu­lar and attained number one—­from January to May 2017—on the Latino charts even before Justin Bieber sang the crossover phrase in En­glish, making clear the pull of the Latino ­music market and also the importance of its products (88). As Leila Cobo argues, this success followed previous crossovers in the Latino market such as “Feliz Navidad” by José Feliciano (1970), “La Macarena” by Los del Río (1994), and “Livin’ la Vida Loca” by Ricky Martin (1997). “Despacito,” which includes the voices of a ballad singer (Luis Fonsi) and a raggaetón star (­Daddy Yankee), was the first Spanish crossover hit that did not have to rely on an En­glish version (257).22 The mix of the song, rumba flamenco tunes to a raggaetón beat, similar to what Enrique Iglesias and Gente de Zona did with the hit “Bailando” (2014), catapulted it up the charts with a fusion soundscape imprinted into Ca­rib­bean con­temporary rhythms.

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The success of the tune made the video the most watched on YouTube in the history of the content platform, with more than seven billion views by July 2017.23 The video’s production was a r­ ecipe for success. It had a global imprint; filmed in La Perla, a barrio in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the video had the presence of the only Puerto Rican Black ex–­Miss Universe, Zuleyka Rivera, in addition to local color. You d­ on’t have to know Puerto Rican Spanish to understand the global beat of the song, and many viewers do not know what the lyr­ics mean. Not surprisingly, when I analyzed it with a mixed group of Anglo-­A merican and African American students, a percentage of them did not know that the song alludes to a sexual encounter. Years before Hurricane María hit the island, La Perla gained visibility through the video and local businesses profited from “Despacito,” making it an asset for global and local tourism. Middle-­class Puerto Ricans from the island and the diaspora who never thought about visiting La Perla started visiting local businesses in the area.24 In a video filmed in August 31, 2017, weeks before Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico a group of local Puerto Ricans take the “Despacito Tour.” The tour is sponsored by callejeandopr​.­com, a local tourist organ­ization supporting internal tourism. The goal of the com­pany is “practicar un turismo responsable. Que nuestra gente visite s­ imples pero excepcionales destinos. Impulsar el turismo interno para conservar los recursos naturales. Aportar a la culinaria puertorriqueña degustando nuestros productos” (to practice responsible tourism. That our ­people visit ­simple but exceptional destinations. To enhance internal tourism to conserve natu­ral resources. To contribute to the Puerto Rican culinary tradition by tasting our products).25 Yashira Gómez, the community leader at La Perla, takes the group to dif­fer­ ent sites: El Callejón de los Cuernos, where local w ­ omen and U.S. Marines used to have sex; the building with the Lares flag; the site where the first Head Start program was inaugurated by former Mayor Felisa Rincón in the early sixties where local students can complete their schoolwork; a basketball court built with donations from NBA players such as J. J. Barea; a cuchifrito (Puerto Rican fritter) stand; and the Park Luis Ramírez. The group leader says, “Este es uno de los mejores spots, aquí se puede tomar fresco” (This is one of our best spots, h ­ ere you can get some fresh air) and “Aquí se filmó el video de Cultura Profética del Banco Popu­lar” (They filmed Banco Popu­lar’s “Cultura Profética” video h ­ ere), which talks about a local initiative that although it wants to help local tourism, pre­ sents the mediascape as the main sustained ideology for coming into La Perla. At the end of the clip, it looks as if t­ hese local tourists are admiring the view more than the community itself. If “Despacito” is a local-­global sensorium, it is clear that ­these images transform both the local rhythm and paces into “sponsored identities” that define scripts of neoliberal multiculturalism. I want to return to breathing, the intimate breathing on your neck from a desiring and willing partner, as a meta­phor for what happens next: “Yo no tengo prisa yo me voy a dar el viaje / Empezamos lento, después salvaje”—­the invitation to the dance and the erotic encounter and

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its cadences and rhythms into a climax. To read the opposite—­the absence of breathing—we turn to the Puerto Rican condition in Javier Cardona’s Hasta el cuello and some photo­graphs from Adál Maldonado’s Puerto Ricans Underwater and Los dormidos.

Hasta el Cuello, Puerto Ricans Underwater, and Los Dormidos When Javier Cardona performed Hasta el cuello in an abandoned lot in Barrio Gandul in Santurce in November 2016, I could not attend. Thus, watching the per­for­mance in video format opened new ways of viewing and assessing the movement via my computer screen. From the beginning, a mediation is set; at the same time, the fourth wall of the theater-­participatory space is complicated, as the digital image can be ­stopped and the perception of each movement gets closer. The techne of the scenography is complex. An abandoned lot or junkyard in Barrio Gandul contains four cars; pieces of metal, glass, and brick mortar are mixed with mud and rainwater. A mural of baseball star Roberto Clemente appears in the background, bearing witness to the action. In this abandoned lot, three Black bodies of two men (Javier Cardona and Aramis Garay) and one ­woman (Lydela Rodríguez ,from the collective per­for­mance group Las Nietas de Nonó) exist as creatures whose movements—­from crablike motions to jumps and violent and sometimes love-­like embraces—­hint at the geographies of Puerto Rico and its pre­sent crisis of economic drowning. When the presenter, a character with an illuminated mask (Aneek Hernández), enters the space with lights on her head, the installation piece begins. Initially, the three dancers moving like creatures appear ­behind a fence, their crablike movements starting slowly and then intensifying. One dancer (Cardona) jumps from a car to the roof of the shack and suspends himself from several objects. It appears that this body wants to transcend or escape, making space for the ­others. At the same time, the remaining dancers enter and leave the cars; they sit with their legs outside and hang from the doors and car tops to prove the connection between man and machine. The abandoned vehicles on the site serve a function of mobility and action, as they appear to respond to the energy of t­ hese movements. The bodies hit the car in what appears to be a rape scene, when the only ­woman attacks the man—­and vice versa. ­A fter this scene, Cardona’s character walks around the shattered glass, adding an extra soundscape (stress, brokenness) into broken phrases. In the second act, the three dancers b­ ehind the fence move together, separately and fiercely, as their bodies get swept with mud (from the space) and dirt from rolling on top of the cars. The act ends when Cardona’s body hangs from an upper position along with the other male character from the right-­side wall—­his body falls while the other male dancer also jumps in a parallel movement, ending the piece on a note of climax (see figure 5.5). The soundscape of Hasta el cuello, created by musician Recluso, is a mix of electronic, natu­ral, and cityscape sounds.

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FIGURE 5.5.  ​Javier Cardona, Hasta el cuello. (Photo by Antonio Ramírez Aponte.

Courtesy of Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, MAC en el Barrio proj­ect San Juan, PR.)

By coincidence, the soundscape I am listening to includes the voice-­over and ­music from Alexandra Lúgaro’s po­liti­cal campaign. Lúgaro, who was a candidate for governor in the 2016 elections for the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana party, was holding a meeting close to the site of the per­for­mance that same eve­ning. In an eerie turn of events, the soundscape became more po­liti­cal, while the dancers’ feet broke pipes, glass, and debris. While Recluso’s original score played with the deconstruction of musical tropes of Puerto Rican nationalism, like our national anthem “La Borinqueña” and “Preciosa” (Rafael Hérnandez), the dancers’ bodies in a frenzy reflected on the broken illusions of the F ­ ree Associated State (Commonwealth) as a failed po­liti­cal ­future. ADÁL’s series Puerto Ricans Underwater (Los ahogados) and Los dormidos, both done for social media sites and part of the 2018 exhibit Puerto Rico U ­ nder ­Water at Columbia University, attend to the psychic, affective intrusions of debt and anguish but also look for a critique against necropo­liti­cal views, to look for solitude and creativity in the body. The series that started in 1987, with ADÁL’s self-­portrait underwater, anticipated social media sites but reflected on his life in New York. The bodies underwater scream, smile, open their eyes, and have icons of identity and self-­expression that mark them. ­Water, the source of life, is the liminal crossroad in t­ hese images, where “holding your breath” is making the shot pos­si­ble and “giving birth” to the final shot (see figure 5.6). The tub is a power­ful container of possibilities—­the one that holds and protects but also puts you in that liminal space—­el ahogo (see figure 5.7). The punctum in t­ hese images reminds us of Victorian death photography (particularly the black-­and-­white

FIGURE 5.6.  ​ADÁL, Andrea del Pilar, 2016. Series Los ahogados. (Courtesy of the artist.)

FIGURE 5.7.  ​ADÁL, Francisco Felix, 2016. Series Los ahogados. (Courtesy of the artist.)

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FIGURE 5.8.  ​ADÁL, Isa Idepunto + Caribe, 2018. Series Los dormidos. (Courtesy of the artist.)

ones). In o­ thers, we assess the per­for­mance of the self as a labor-­affective social m ­ atter. To give birth, but also to make pos­si­ble birth, in conditions of impossibility—­ the tub, “el agua por todas partes” reflects on the w ­ ater (sea) and the insular condtion as an imposition but also as a possibility. Sexuality and desire appear as inherent parts of the self, played for the camera but also as part of an intimate-­ introspected erotic game. Thus, in Puerto Ricans Underwater, desire, sexuality, and art open up dimensions “beyond the tub.” In a way, ­these suspended bodies in ­water “are,”/ and do “exist” and create even in ­these natu­ral conditions of insularity. In the video of Los dormidos—­what Maldonado has called “waking up Puerto Ricans from an ecological and colonial crisis”—­a young w ­ oman sleeps covered with the Puerto Rican flag; the distorted scream of waking up haunts the sleep of the ­woman, who does not move.26 In other images, the tropes of travel and migration can be seen, but ideas of intimacy and love also come through (see figure 5.8). As with Puerto Ricans Underwater, the bed is the only “framing” of the many actions revealed in the image. Puerto Rico’s archipelagos, in many areas underwater, have shifted the historical and ­human geography in and of the island.27 The island pre-­María is not the one that we left or the one that we ­will encounter when we return. Images from the disaster zone, still coming out, appear to be more pre­sent for diasporic Puerto Ricans than for ­people on the mainland due to the fact of isolation and faulty communication. The hurricane’s damage revealed de­cades of structural, socioeconomic crisis, the one converging with

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the other, the populace drowning in debt paralleled by the h ­ uman geography drowning in ­water.

Image and Fugitive Debt To close this chapter I return to indebtedness as a form of violent refusal in the case of ­these major visual and artistic works. I revisit a line of “Despacito,” “Vamo’ a hacerlo en una playa en Puerto Rico hasta que las olas digan, Ay bendito!” (Let’s do it at the beach in Puerto Rico u­ ntil the waves scream Ay bendito!), as a point of orientation for thinking through the way debt and indebted citizenship in the age of neoliberalism have framed this moment in history as they have concrete meaning for Puerto Rico and what it means to be Puerto Rican ­today. If, as Ariadna Godreau-­Aubert declared in a recent book, Las propias, “[estar en deuda] es un estado material, político, social y afectivo que significa tener y sentirse a la vez, desposeída de algo” (being in debt is a material, po­liti­cal, social, and affective state that alludes to feel dispossessed of something) (15), then we are in a moment that is indeed a torn space, a dis/placement, a wake, which builds into the body a form of longing and return. Puerto Ricans owe, and in their owing and in their refusal to pay on the terms and at the pace of their creditors they are enacting a form of fugitivity that has, in return, brought about punishment— in terms of further debt and further cutbacks—­that is administered by the very ones who created the crisis. “Despacito” is a fantasy of call and response that is saturated with the visions of neoliberal multiculturalism, which in turn translates into joyous subordination into the language of debt. That in­equality is to be understood through its feminized, racialized dimensions, due to a promise, or debt, that has not been paid in the wake of the civil rights movements of the last half of the twentieth ­century. While the song entails an erotic seduction, that of the pos­si­ble lover, capital relies on the meta­phor of debt, and its real vio­lence is outlined in the social unconscious. Creators of the crisis psychologize t­ hese citizens/denizens who refuse to pay the debts created “on their behalf” as the main cause of the prob­lem, displacing the colonial mantengo to a made and remade “culture of poverty.” From the neoliberal technocratic viewpoint, impoverished Puerto Ricans, mostly jefas de familia (­women), are to be blamed for their expenses and their “incapacity for work” and incited by further cuts to their quality of life. Authors of the crisis psychologize ­these citizens/denizens, ­those who refuse to pay, as the main cause of the prob­lem, displacing the colonial support (mantengo) to a made and remade “culture of poverty,” where impoverished Puerto Ricans, mostly ­women (jefas de familia), are blamed for their expenses and their “incapacity for work.” The fact is that during the first two months a­ fter the hurricane, Puerto Rico received more media coverage in U.S. news than it had in the past twenty years. ­A fter the short, twenty-­minute visit by Mike Pence and President Trump and the paper towel fiasco, the figure of San Juan’s mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz—­portrayed as

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President Trump’s antagonist—­feminized the crisis. Citizens “pay” with their bodies and honor their faulting debt. The local banks at fault are protected ­under PROMESA as well as the Junta de Control Fiscal. As we see in the Cuban picture created by Online Tours, con­temporary tourism follows the neoliberal script of exoticism, exploiting the local poor and the destitute. If for Cuba it is the bodies of the poor that are put on display in relation to the natu­ral disaster, in Puerto Rico it is the success of the popu­lar song that marks the interest of local Puerto Ricans in visiting La Perla. In both examples, this neoliberal script is marked by the popularity of reggaetón, a global sound coming from the Ca­rib­bean diaspora via Jamaica and Panama and finding fusion in Puerto Rico. While reggaetón marks the neoliberal soundscape, the soundscapes and body movements in Cardona’s Hasta el cuello deconstruct national symbols and audioscapes to build a new “strident” mobile audioscape that is pessimistic and proj­ects the ecologies of Black bodies becoming one with the ele­ments—­matter, mud, ­water, glass, debris—­suspended in space. The several cultural products examined above, from the cartoons by Rangely García to local business publicity in La Perla, the per­for­mance by Javier Cardona, and the pictures by ADÁL and Parrilla, pre­sent creative/symbolic allegorical viewpoints that comment on and take their resistant energy from the crisis. They pre­sent collectives in movement, e­ ither in the form of a local tourism that references a popu­lar hit song/video, or in visual art, or in dance/theater. “Despacito” and the La Perla video display both a claim to their aesthetic right in the media and touristic spheres as well as an ethno-­fascination with “otherness” and “the exotic” that fold into the informal rules of neoliberal multiculturalism. While the residents of La Perla are fully aware that their neighborhood is being exploited, they are also prepared to welcome self-­explorations or to direct and profit from their own initiatives as a possibility for putting much-­needed funding in a community that they are proud of, with its relics from the era of liberal development. Many of t­ hese funds are invested in the community so they are not individual profit. The soundscapes and body movements in Cardona’s Hasta el cuello deconstruct Puerto Rican national symbols and audioscapes, to build a new “strident” and pessimistic mobile-­audioscape. The ecologies of Black bodies, cis masculine, cis feminine and queer, become one with the ele­ments—­matter, mud, w ­ ater, glass, debris coming out of a wall cruelly allegorize the real­ity of the disaster in which Puerto Rican grassroots democracy has been suspended in time and space. The images in ADÁL’s and Parrilla’s photography speak to the diversity, uniqueness, and creative pro­cess of self-­making of the Puerto Rican condition. If owing to o­ thers and the self is the stream of the neoliberal script, Puerto Ricans owning and refusing this debt is the key to the con­temporary dilemmas of the Puerto Rican condition. The images in ADÁL’s and Parrilla’s photography speak to the diversity, uniqueness, and creative pro­cess of self-­making of Puerto Ricans. This condition—­psyched, artistic, suffering, and in agony—is displaced and

Indebted Citizenships and Afterlives of Disaster • 155

forged into the punctum between life and death. As it happens in the wake of a natu­ral disaster, in Cuba or Puerto Rico, ­these islands strug­gle with the dynamics of luxury tourism and a corrupt governing class that profits from the economic crisis and poverty of the majority of its citizens. Th ­ ese indebted citizens are being displaced from their communities. From ­these negotiations, an “undercommons,” or fugitive class—­“el de las cuentas de la vida, pero también del alma”—­ rises. The fugitive is not r­ unning away or taking flight. Thus, fugitivity is not related to escaping your circumstances. It is for many of t­ hese citizens, a form of refusal, defining the negotiations of ­those who stay and strug­gle in their daily lives infusing t­ hese dynamics of debt, surveillance, and subjection with their personal stories. To be “out of sync” in the neoliberal script traced by capitalism is to negotiate alternative paths in the pre­sent and the ­f uture. If resilience and strength are once again words that subscribe that same necropo­liti­cal machine of death and owing, it is in the pre­sent and f­ uture mobilizations against the necropo­liti­cal state where Ca­rib­bean futurities ­will reside. The spectacle ­will continue. My hope as I have mentioned throughout this book is to be able to define its role as a complex machine that develops a specific script, dynamic, and power. A Ca­rib­bean humanity that mobilizes through the ruination and dynamics of the spectacle it is able to reassess its lines of flight and dimensions through critical art, irony and humor, per­for­mance, m ­ usic and self-­ making ­will also assert life and creativity against the vio­lence or mainstream reification of its machine.

Acknowl­edgments Books are not solitary endeavors, not even in the moments when initial and second drafts are completed and temporality breaks into distinct moments of cognition or ability. Caribes 2.0 took more than two de­cades to be completed. The COVID-19 pandemic and my job as an administrator and mom delayed the pro­ cess of revision and rewrite. As a research proj­ect it started in the mid-2000s when my research questions took a turn into the fields of new media and media studies. Growing up in Puerto Rico as an avid media consumer, I was part of the generation in the 1980s that saw the inauguration of MTV, the first Atari console game system, and the console game room. Watching soap operas with my grand­mother was a daily ritual, as well as police series and romantic movies with my parents. Tele­vi­sion and m ­ usic ­were key in this social world. When I started thinking about this proj­ect, most of the local TV channels in Puerto Rico ­were closed or ­going through a pro­cess of transformation as they ­were being purchased by large U.S.-­based broadcast networks such as Univision and Telemundo. I realize now that in many ways the proj­ect started as a deep nostalgic need for understanding my generation, but most of all the affective languages that framed our real­ity, a world that was completely changed or transformed in the pre­sent. As this is a transnational Ca­rib­bean proj­ect, my first inquiries started as conversations with colleagues who from similar or younger generations had experienced tele­vi­sion, film, and the advent of new media as impor­tant changes in their own lives. Puerto Rican tele­vi­sion was, in the 1970s and 1980s, like many sites in U.S. Latino media, very informed by U.S. imports, but also a source of and ­house for local performative talent and creativity. Many colleagues and friends have contributed greatly to the development of the research and ideas in this book. My gratitude to the friends and colleagues from the Tepoztlán Institute for the Amer­i­cas in Mexico for their valuable feedback on the first chapters of this proj­ect. In relation to Cuba and the Cuban 157

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diaspora, my gratitude goes to Rafael Rojas, the late Eliseo (Lichi) Alberto, Anke Birkenmaier, Rachel Price, Cristina Venegas, Ana López, Guillermina de Ferrari, Jacqueline Loss, Norge Espinosa, Enrique del Risco (Enrisco), and Ariana Hernández Reguant, who not only w ­ ere enthusiastic when the first ideas came into fruition but also coauthored essays with me about the role of brownface and blackface in Miami tele­vi­sion (Hernández Reguant), participated in panels, facilitated interviews with artists, and most of all supported me with materials and contacts offering feedback on e­ arlier drafts of t­ hese chapters. The conversations with Silvia Álvarez-­Curbelo, Yeidy M. Rivero, Manuel Avilés, Danny Méndez, Lawrence La Fountain-­Stokes, Pedro Cabiya, Luis J. Cintrón Gutiérrez, and Wilfredo Burgos Matos offered me valuable insights and dialogue on the phenomena of nontraditional funerals and the changing role of tele­vi­sion and new media in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Special thanks to Alexis Sebastián Méndez and Israel Rodríguez for their help with the interviews, images, and videos used in my research, a task that is actually difficult for scholars of popu­lar culture and media and tele­vi­sion in Puerto Rico since many visual archives do not survive. The afterlives of Ca­rib­bean subjects as well as the ever-­ changing quality of the media archive and its echo chambers in the digital era defines the main themes of this proj­ect. My former gradu­ate students from the two versions of the seminars “Virtual Islands” (Islas virtuales) from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies offered key insights that aided me in understanding DIY Latina/o artists and the role of convergence media. My special gratitude to Dr.  Omaris Zamora, who helped me think through theories of Black feminist agency and embodiment in the Dominican and Puerto Rican literary and media spaces. Thanks to Dr. Ana Almar, whose discussions in class helped me see parallels with the mediascape in Spain and repre­sen­ta­tions of post-­porn, in gay and lesbian cinema, and to Dr. Alida Perrine, whose research on Black Brazilian feminist media and activism helped me with feminist readings on body positivity, erotics, and media spaces for Black ­women in the Ca­rib­bean and its diasporas. My gratitude to Dr. James C. Staig and Dr. Sam Cannon, whose respective works about f­ ree media activism, poetry, and gaming culture, along with comics and graphic novels, helped me in shaping my own analy­sis of the impor­tant role of poetics, cartoons, and memes in the Ca­rib­bean echo chamber. My gratitude to Guillermo B. Irizarry and my colleagues at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, for the invitation to give the Robert G. Mead Endowed Lecture for El Instituto, in which I worked through several concepts of my theory about nontraditional funerals in Puerto Rico and the afterlives of slavery and capitalism in Puerto Rico and the Ca­rib­bean. A section of chapter 2 was copublished as “The Brownface of Latinidad in Cuban Miami” with anthropologist Ariana Hernández Reguant in the journal Cuba Counterpoints. Chapter 4, “Cities of the Dead,” appeared in the special

Acknowledgments • 159

volume “A Ca­rib­bean Hauntology,” edited by Guillermina de Ferrari and Odette Casamayor for the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2018). Chapter 5, “Indebted Citizenships and Afterlives of Disaster,” written in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and María in Cuba and Puerto Rico, appeared in the volume Ca­rib­bean Migrations: The Legacies of Colonialism, edited by Anke Birkenmaier for Rutgers University Press (2021). Thanks to my editor Roger Gathman for his careful edits and suggestions. And fi­nally I offer my gratitude to Frederick Aldama editor of the Global Media and Race series at Rutgers University Press for their support for this proj­ect from day one. To Nicole Solano from Rutgers UP my gratitude for her faith in this proj­ect since day one. This book is dedicated to the memory of my grand­mother Antonia Rivera Rodríguez, a media lover and specialist in soap operas and variety shows, and to my m ­ other Myrta Martínez García, whose love for tele­vi­sion, film and per­for­ mance taught me to enjoy life to the fullest. Aché.

Notes Chapter 1 

Ca­rib­bean Mediascapes

1 ​The digital epitaph has become the most common way of mourning and remembering our beloved or dead ­family members in con­temporary times. See the impor­tant analy­sis of this genre in relation to the Puerto Rican nation “in the wake” of war in Manuel G. Avilés’s Puerto Rican Soldiers and Second-­Class Citizenship. 2 ​As this book went to press J.Lo’s documentary “Halftime” a reflection on her life as a multifaceted artist—­actress, singer, performer, ­mother—­came out on Netflix on June 8, 2022. The documentary shows insights about the script, rehearsals, and dynamics for that halftime show and how it centered not only on her Puerto Rican heritage but on her latinidad. The documentary declines to comment strategically on the complex fact that Puerto Ricans have been citizens of the U.S. since 1917 (Jones Law); and focused on their status as second-­class citizens and immigrants and their working class origins in the United States. I w ­ ill discuss many of t­ hese dilemmas on Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship and aid during and in the aftermath of Hurricanne María in chapter 5. 3 ​Tacetta, Natalia. “Sobre imagen exote, aproximaciones al afuera.” La imagen exote de Willy Thayer. Chile: Editorial Palinodia, Santiago, 2020. https://­ficciondelarazon​ .­org​/­wp​-c­ ontent​/­uploads​/2­ 020​/0 ­ 9​/­Imagen​-­exote​-­Dossier​-­Ficcio%CC%81n​-­de​-­la​ -­razo%CC%81n​.­pdf. 4 ​Pedro Cabiya, “Carta abierta de un nacionalista del montón a los líderes del frente patriótico nacional,” February 5, 2015, http://­w ww​.­pedrocabiya​.­com​/­2015​/­02​/­carta​ -­abierta​-­de​-­un​-­nacionalista​-­del​-­monton​-­a​-­los​-­lideres​-­del​-­movimiento​-­genocida​ -­dominicano​-­moderno​-­mgdm. 5 ​Acevedo, Elizabeth, “February 10, 2015 for a man nicknamed Tulile in Santiago Dominican Republic.” Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-­Latin@ Poets. Houston: Arte Publico P, 2017, pp. 62–63. 6 ​Sontag, Susan, On Photography. New York: Picador, 2001. 7 ​See Laura Zöe Humphreys, Fidel Between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema. Durham: Duke UP, 2019.

161

162 • Notes to Pages 29–42

Chapter 2  Enacting ­Others 1 ​Theories of global racial formations are defined by Edmund T. Gordon in “The Austin School Manifesto.” 2 ​See Simone Browne’s Dark M ­ atters on the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke UP, 2015. 3 ​See my essay “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” and Lawrence La Fountain’s “Javier Cardona and the Transloca of Drag” in Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance. 4 ​In this chapter we ­will analyze brownface in the characters of Francheska (Natalia Lugo) and Joselyn (Tita Guerrero) from Puerto Rican tele­vi­sion and YouTube. One example is the performer Colleen Mae Ballinger, whose comedy character, Miranda Sings, became successful by making fun of YouTube stars and social media trends, such as the use of TikTok. Her exaggerated red lips are key to her character and come from blackface/minstrel makeup. 5 ​See Jill Lane’s Blackface Cuba. 6 ​Puerto Ricans who consider themselves a mix of three races see Blackness as their “third root” to allegedly deny their racism or understand it as a form of soft interaction with Black ­others, similarly to other countries such as Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. The recent protests on the island ­a fter the death at the hands of the police of George Floyd in Minnesota opened other forms of media intervention such as #aquinoexisteelracismopero on Facebook, created by Muloyawi Iyaye Nono, a performer and activist who is part of the group Las Nietas de Nonó. 7 ​On bomba ­music and its debates in the early 2000, see my “Roots or the Virtualities of Racial Imaginaries in Puerto Rico and the Diaspora.” Latino Studies (2010). 8 ​See Emmanuel Estrada López, “ELA, o la Muerte de lo inexistente,” Diálogo. Universidad de Puerto Rico, July 3, 2016. 9 ​Chianita was written into the script by writer Esther Palés to fill in for the absence of lead actress Mona Marti from the set, who took a leave when her husband of many years passed away. The character became so popu­lar that it was added to the soap opera. See Ríos, “Chianita nació por casualidad.” 10 ​Chianita was a character created by Meyer for the soap opera El Hijo de Ángela María (dir. Fernando Cortés, Telemundo, 1973). She was conceived as a young black jibarita whose grand­mother, Panchita—­played by actress Mona Marti—­was the mammy figure of the ­house. Dressed in jeans, and with an afro, she represented a younger generation of Black ­women in the story. 11 ​The genre of Black or Negrista poetry was seminal for the Avant Garde tradition in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the works of poets such as Luis Palés Matos, José Ballagas, and Nicolás Guillén. See the dialogues of this tradition with the Afrocubanista movement led by Black and white intellectuals and artists in Cuba u­ nder the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos and Fernando Ortiz in my book Travestismos culturales. 12 ​“Chianita nunca fue negra” (Chianita has never been Black), written by poet Rafael Alejandro (Siloé) Andino, is a collective poem by Poesía Afroversiva, available at www​.y­ outube​.c­ om​/­watch​? ­v ​= ­dynjd8pMiAQ#action​=­share. Founding members of Poesía Afroversiva are Gloriann Sacha Antonetty Lebrón, professor and writer, Welmo Romero Joseph, hip-­hop artist and MC, Ana Castillo Muñoz, journalist and founder of the blog Con el verbo en la piel, and Rafael Siloé Andino, hip-­hop MC, poet, and composer. See more of their biographies and poems at http://­ afropuertorico​.­blogspot​.­com​/­2017​/­03​/­colectivo​-­afroversiva​-­una​-­voz​-­de​.­html. 13 ​Natalia Lugo is a Puerto Rican actress and singer, born in New Hampshire and raised in Puerto Rico. She studied communications and drama at the University

Notes to Pages 42–58 • 163

of Puerto Rico. Fuera del Marco (Out of Frame) is her first a­ lbum. She created Francheska La Yal (aka Frenchy la Caballota) as a comedy character to make a statement about the agency of working-­class ­women in Puerto Rico. Her comedy show La cosa está mala (2015) as well as her m ­ usic video La cosa está mala became popu­lar on social media networks such as YouTube. On August 21, 2015, she called for a “National Dubi Day” (El Día Nacional del Dubi) to celebrate her hairstyle and the one used by many w ­ omen in the Ca­rib­bean and Latin Amer­i­ca to keep their hair soft from the effects of the humidity. See Brenda I. Peña López’s “Francheska.” 14 ​See Frances Solá-­Santiago’s “Classist History ­Behind Bad Bunny’s Bichiyal.” 15 ​The show originally started as a radio comedy show and aired on WTVLUZ-­T V in San Juan with the name El Derecho de Lavar. It consisted of a twenty-­minute sketch that described the daily lives of workers in a laundromat. The main plot, based on the Cuban radionovela El Derecho de Nacer by Félix B. Caignet, discussed the romance of Epifanio’s adoptive ­daughter Chachita with a Black Puerto Rican Papo Tennis who Epifanio rejects ­because of his Blackness. The character of Susa was added in the 1990s and produced by Luis Vigoreaux as El Kiosco Budweiser, La Taberna Budweiser, and currently as Susa y Epifanio, mostly in theatrical per­for­ mances around the island and among the diaspora in Orlando, Florida, and Texas. 16 ​See Hernández Reguant and Arroyo, “The Brownface of Latinidad in Cuban Miami” and Rosa’s analy­sis of raciolinguistic traits in Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race. 17 ​Initially the name of the character was spelled with a “c,” but when she taped the scenes it was written as Joselyn with an “s.” I maintain Primera Hora’s spelling in the article but follow the use of the “s” “Joselyn” as this is the one used by Guerrero. In an interview with Primera Hora Guerrero stated, “A la gente puede no gustarle el físico por tener una idea preconcebida de quién es ‘Jocelyn.’ Se puede morir el personaje o coger más fuerzas, manifestó. ‘Jocelyn’ (sic) explicó la actriz, es una mujer gruesa, pícara y ‘con mucho brillo,’ cuya ‘imagen’ estuvo a cargo del actor y maquillista Bryan Villarini” (“Revelará a ‘Jocelyn’ (sic)). 18 ​See the documentary Visa para un sueño” (directed by Sonia Fritz, 1990) and the essays by Jorge Duany and César Rey in El Barrio Gandul. For more information on the artistic initiatives in Barrio Gandul since 2014, see my analy­sis of Javier Cardona’s per­for­mance Hasta el cuello in chapter 5. 19 ​Ginetta Candelario reflects on the role of the Dominican w ­ oman entrepreneur in Black B ­ ehind the Ears. 20 ​See Burgos-­Matos and Ortiz’s “Narrative.” 21 ​See Brennan’s What’s Love Got to Do with It? and García Peña’s Translating Blackness. 22 ​In this sketch aired on January 12, 2011, one year ­after the terrible earthquake that demolished Haiti, the Haitian Bullfighter discussed not only his work as a taxi driver in Miami but also the fact that he was now unemployed given that he was a bullfighter, which is a profession more v­ iable in Spain and Spanish-­speaking countries than in Haiti. See https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v ​=­​-­ri1tUoh​-­eQ. 23 ​See a close reading of this comedy sketch by Niurka Marcos and Yeyo Vargas in chapter 3. 24 ​See Hernández Reguant and Arroyo, “The Brownface of Latinidad in Cuban Miami.” 25 ​See Ariana Hernández-­Reguant, “Meeting Cubans 4 Trump,” NACLA Report on the Amer­i­cas. October 31, 2020. 26 ​See Milián’s Latining Amer­i­ca and Hooker’s Theorizing Race in the Amer­i­cas. 27 ​Caló is a language spoken by the Spanish and Portuguese Romani. It is a mixed language based on romance grammar, with an adstratum of Romani lexical items

164 • Notes to Pages 58–66

through language shift by the Romani community. It is often used as an argot, a secret language for discreet communication among Iberian Romani. Jama is used as an equivalent of food in Cuba, Nicaragua, Perú, and many Latin American countries. 28 ​­These viral video moments from Cuba happened at the same time as the Arab Spring, a social movement that used the power of social media to mobilize what appeared to be a previously docile population. The spontaneous quality of t­ hese movements from 2000 to the pre­sent in Chile is analyzed by Karmy in Intifada. 29 ​See Henken and Ritter, Entrepreneurial Cuba and Price, Planet Cuba. 3 0 ​Ted A. Henken has documented ­these advances in technology, particularly with more internet accessibility in zones and homes (with the local ser­vice ETECSA) as well as the distinct ways state surveillance has entered new media and public spaces. See his introduction “In Media Res: Who ­Will Control Cuba’s Digital Revolution?” in Henken and García Santamaría, Cuba’s Digital Revolution. 31 ​Thanks to Wilfredo J. Burgos-­Matos for this reference. Another clever joke with “jama” came from Cuban scholar Mabel Cuesta (University of Houston), who remembered the lyr­ics of Bonney M’s disco tune, “I’m Born Again / Bahama Mama” (1979): “Bahama, Bahama, mama got the biggest h ­ ouse in town Bahama mama,” changed by her elementary school friends to “la jama, la jama, la jama.” Informal interview, July 29, 2020. 32 ​See Redacción CE, “Exiliados lanzan campaña por la liberación de Pánfilo.” 3 3 ​The campaign was inaugurated on August 26, 2009, lasted three months, and involved the creation of materials to protest Pánfilo’s incarceration. Other collaborators besides musician Boris Larramendi ­were pianist Alina Brouwer, artist and writer Lien Carrazana, cartoonist and designer based in Chile Alén Lauzán, and writers Enrique del Risco and Alexis Romay. The graphic content of the campaign was completed by Isbel Alba and her proj­ect Vox Pópuli. The campaign was divisive in the Cuban diaspora as well. As Josán Caballero argues, many criticized the campaign as Pánfilo was considered a marginal subject. See Caballero, “Jama y libertad.” 3 4 ​See Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual. 3 5 ​See Zurbano, “For Blacks in Cuba the Revolution ­Hasn’t Begun”: “change is the latest news to come out of Cuba, though for Afro-­Cubans like myself, this is more dream than real­ity. Over the last de­cade, scores of ridicu­lous prohibitions for Cubans living on the island have been eliminated, among them sleeping at a ­hotel, buying a cellphone, selling a ­house or car and traveling abroad. ­These gestures have been celebrated as signs of openness and reform, though they are ­really nothing more than efforts to make life more normal. And the real­ity is that in Cuba, your experience of t­ hese changes depends on your skin color.” 36 ​This period on the visibility of Las Damas de Blanco, many of them Black m ­ others, as well as the context from where many writers and journalists claim their words through vlogging, Twitter, and other media has been documented in the works of vlogger Yoani Sánchez and her award-­winning “Generación Y” as well as Claudia Cadelo, among many o­ thers. 37 ​See Cristina Venegas’s canonical book Digital Dilemmas and her new copublication Digital Activism, Community Media, and Sustainable Communication in Latin Amer­i­ca. 3 8 ​See the essays by Ted A. Henken, Sara Garcia Santamaria, Anne Natvig, Abel Somohano, and Mireya Márquez in Henken and García Santamaría, Cuba’s Digital Revolution.

Notes to Pages 66–83 • 165

39 ​See Ernesto Hernández Busto’s essay “¿Qué es el Decreto 349 y por qué los artistas cubanos están en contra?” About the incarceration of Black performer Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, his hunger strike, and the protests of December 2020, see Christian Viveros Fauné’s “Cuban Artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.” 4 0 ​See Des Freedman and Jonathan A. Obar, “Media Development and Media Reform: Time for Change (2019) and on recent technology changes in Cuba see, Cheryl Martens, Etsa Franklin Salvio Sharupi Tapuy, and Cristina Venegas’s introduction titled “Transforming Digital Media and Technology in Latin Amer­i­ca” in their Digital Activism, Community Media and Sustainable Communication in Latin Amer­i­ca. 41 ​See Associated Press, “Humor abre paso a la crítica social en Cuba.” 42 ​The phone call sketch was filmed months before Obama’s visit to Cuba. For more details, see Albert Laguna’s analy­sis of Luis Silva’s popularity in Diversión, 162–164. 4 3 ​See Emanuelle K. Oliveira Oliveira’s book, Barack Obama is Brazilian: Resignifying Race Relations in Con­temporary Brazil. 4 4 ​See, “Vivir del cuento arrasa en Florida y entre funciones, Pánfilo consigue un part time,” Diario de Cuba, 11 de abril 2018, https://­diariodecuba​.­com​/­cultura​/­1523472180​ _­38656​.­html. 45 ​Former president Obama is also reference for the brownface character of Yeyo Vargas as I discussed in section 1 of this chapter. While Yeyo is “Obama’s po­liti­cal assistant and right hand,” “Vivir del Cuento” was able to bring in the real Obama as part of a sketch.

Chapter 3  Ratchetness and Vlogging the Self 1 ​See Frances Negrón-­Muntaner, Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2004; and José Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Per­for­mance of Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998, p. 181. 2 ​See Jorge Duany’s study Puerto Ricans in Orlando and Central Florida. New York: Hunter College, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, 2006. 3 ​See Jenkins, Convergence Cultures. 4 ​See Laura G. Gutierrez, Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (2010) and her forthcoming research on rumbera cinema and its Ca­rib­bean transnational dialogues. 5 ​Arroyo, J. “Interview with Niurka Marcos.” Mexico City, July, 2004 (not published). 6 ​The perfume line was launched in 2008 and was sold in local pharmacies for the Cuban and U.S. Latino community in Miami, such as the local Navarro pharmacies, and at Walmart. The fragrance claims to have pheromones, the natu­ral secretions of desire that make one feel attractive and able to attract o­ thers. 7 ​The sketch was aired May 5, 2009, in Valdés, Esta Noche / Tu Night. 8 ​As Albert S. Laguna has stated, this race-­based humor, derived from bufo theater, “plays with Cubans anx­i­eties about blackness and whiteness” (16–18), in this case in a Miami where the lines between African American and Cuban have often been tense. See his excellent analy­sis of bufo as spectacle in Diversión. 9 ​Erika Monroy uses her art as part of her training as a psychologist, combining it with Jungian archetype symbols, anthropology, and symbolic totemic work. She also performs her body art with corporate business, c­ hildren camps, e­ tc. Her com­pany, Akin Body Painting, is based in Miami. See https://­a kinbp​.­com.

166 • Notes to Pages 85–100

10 ​The spring of 2003 did not see the direct silencing of Cuban artists, performers, activists, and writers, but the time put a heavy burden on the creative community. On November 27, 2020, protests in front of the Cuban Ministry of Culture building in Vedado against the arrest and hunger strike of artist Manuel Otero Alcántara led to the formation of the San Isidro Movement as well as another group, 27N, made up of performers, artists, and in­de­pen­dent filmmakers, that is requesting freedom of speech and less control of creative expression. An incident with the minister and vice minister of culture on January 27, 2021, led to the brief incarceration of some w ­ omen and artists who are members of 27N. See OnCuba Redacción, “Nueva protesta en la sede del Ministerio de Cultura.” 11 ​Many of ­these Cuban artists such as Tania Bruguera had been active at the Cuban Biennials from 2000 to the pre­sent with alternative and critical works that reflect on ­these themes. Classified as a dissident artist, Bruguera was in domiciliary arrest for eight months, during which she waited for the restoration of her passport. She has been censored but not forbidden to perform, which she still does from her home in Havana. See her performative piece El Susurro de Tatlin #6 (2009), in which she parodies Fidel Castro’s famous first televised speech when a dove speech flew into Fidel Castros’s shoulder on January 8, 1959. At Brugera’s per­for­mance all Cubans who accessed the microphone wore a dove in their shoulder indicating a new po­liti­cal moment for freedom of speech. The creation of INSTAR—­Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt—in 2015 with an open reading of fifty hours of Hannah Arendt’s canonical book The Origins of Totalitarianism has been key to the continued vocal protests of other artists on the island. 12 ​See Laura Z. Humphreys article “Copying and COVID-19 in Havana Cuba.” Mediapolis, vol. 5, no.2 (June 16, 2020): https://­www​.­mediapolisjournal​.­com​/­author​/­lzhumphreys​/­. 13 ​Tracie Egan Morrissey pointed to Potomac and Atlanta for their almost entirely African American casts, while the other iterations (Beverly Hills, Orange County, Dallas, New York, and New Jersey) are overwhelmingly white and have featured few ­women of color. Real House­wives of New York has never featured a ­woman of color as a ­house­wife, while the addition of Kary Brittingham to Dallas in 2019 marked the show’s first nonwhite cast member. See “When W ­ ill a Reckoning on Racism Catch Up with Real­ity TV?” 14 ​See Harnick, “Why Real House­wives Is Good for Feminism.” 15 ​See “Se desprende aerostato de Lajas.” 16 ​See Stoler, Imperial Debris. 17 ​See Eve K. Sedgwick’s essay, “Queer Performativity: Henry James and The Art of the Novel.” (36). 18 ​The Vampiro de Moca (1980) and the Chupacabra (1990–­pre­sent) are folktale creatures from Puerto Rico that are also pre­sent in other countries across Latin Amer­i­ca and the United States. In Puerto Rico they are represented as animals (bat, dogs, mixed animals) or alien-­like creatures that consume the blood of farm animals and leave their corpses b­ ehind. In an article from 2018 I read the Chupacabra as a symptom of Puerto Rico’s colonial condition where “blood” is sucked from t­ hose who survive, creating a living-­dead condition. For Puerto Rico, see Arroyo J., “Pensar el monstruo” (2018) and Robin L. Derby, “Imperial Secrets” (2008); and for Latinx and Mexican American populations, see F. Aldama, “The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie” (2021). 19 ​See Duany and Matos-­Rodríguez, “Puerto Ricans in Orlando and Central Florida.” In the aftermath of Hurricane María in 2017, more than 45,000 Puerto Ricans migrated to the U.S. mainland, most of them to the Orlando-­K issimee area.

Notes to Pages 107–115 • 167

Chapter 4  Cities of the Dead 1 ​See Navarrete, “Algunas prácticas mágico religiosas.” 2 ​Bailey, Fits, and Welch, in “History of African American Cemeteries,” argue that, in relation to South Carolina graveyards, “the location of African-­A merican graveyards in marginal areas, for example, was prob­ably the result of blacks being enslaved. Not only did ­owners not want to lose valuable land to slaves, but controlling even where the dead might be buried was yet another example of the power plantation o­ wners had over their slaves. The use of plants to mark graves, however, is likely related to African antecedents. Marking the graves was impor­tant, regardless of what was used, at least for the current generation. The predominance of temporary items—­plants and wood planks, for example—­suggests that it ­wasn’t particularly impor­tant for ­f uture generations to know the location of any specific grave. In fact, the use of temporary markers helps, in its own way, to ensure that the cemetery is always available to t­ hose who want to be buried with their kin. As one modern black man explained, ‘­there is always room for one more person.’ Cynthia Conner, an archaeologist who studied South Carolina low country plantation cemeteries, remarked that the very ideology of black and white graveyards is fundamentally dif­fer­ent. In white cemeteries, the idealization of death is paramount. The romanticization of the landscape is intended to create heaven on earth in the cemetery grounds and deny the blunt real­ity of death. . . . ​The black cemetery, on the other hand, is not directed ­toward a parklike environment, or, I believe, the denial of death.” 3 ​Williams, Capitalism and Slavery. 4 ​Bonilla, Azúcar y abolición, 11–207, and Moreno-­Fraginals, El ingenio. 5 ​Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 32. See also Buck-­Morss, “Hegel and Haiti.” 6 ​See González, El país de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos. 7 ​See David Harvey, 107. 8 ​See David Harvey, 107. 9 ​See Bergad, García, and Barcia, eds., Cuban Slave Market, where they argue that skilled and semiskilled slaves might have constituted about 14 ­percent of the population of Havana in 1836. The need for skilled slaves, it should be noted, was advanced by the terms of the world market in sugar once the protections of the Habsburg Spanish Empire w ­ ere abolished. It might also be noted that the investment cost of the master in the “development” of skills was often diminished by an endogenous slave tradition of skills g­ oing back to Africa in vari­ous fields, like woodwork and ironwork. 10 ​Rancière, Phi­los­o­pher and His Poor, 24; Manzano, Autobiography of a Slave, 118. 11 ​“Haz como el perro con las avispas, enseñar los dientes, para que crean que te ríes. ¿Tú no me ves besar muchas manos que deseo ver cortadas?” (Try to be like the dog when he ­faces the wasps; show your teeth so they think that you are smiling. Have you not seen me kiss-­ing all ­these hands that I wished to see cut off?). Villaverde. Cecilia Valdés, 103. 12 ​See Arroyo, Travestismos culturales. 13 ​See Sergio Villalobos-­Ruminott, “Las edades del cádaver: dictadura, guerra, desaparición. Postulados para una geología general,” http://­anarquiacoronada​ .­blogspot​.­com​/­2015​/­04​/­las​-­edades​-­del​-­cadaver​-­dictadura​-­g uerra​.­html. 14 ​In Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane María, the official death toll of 4,645 gave rise to the protests that led to Verano19 and the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. See chapter 5.

168 • Notes to Pages 119–138

15 ​See Swazey’s discussion of her research in Indonesia in “A Life That Does Not End with Death.” 16 ​Cabrera, Yemayá y Ochún.

Chapter 5  Indebted Citizenships and Afterlives of Disaster “Apagón” from the Spanish verb “apagar” (to turn off) is the Puerto Rican word for electricity blackout. The protests against LUMA Energy the com­pany that took charge of the transformation of the power grid in Puerto Rico from the government sponsored AEE (Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica) a­ fter Huricanne María, since June 1, 2021; have shown that the industry has not been capable of working with the demands of the electric grid system and its local consumers. Thus, “apagón” and blackouts, daily ocurrences in Cuba, as well as the Dominican Republic is a condition that influences the lives of Puerto Ricans in the archipelago particularly a­ fter Huricanne María. Bad Bunny’s musical hit “El Apagón” from the a­ lbum “Un Verano Sin Tí” and the m ­ usic video released on September 16, 2022 (“El Apagón/Y Aquí Vive Gente”) with a report by Bianca Graulau discusses the economic crisis brought by t­ hese U.S. companies, luxury investors and the local politicians profiting through neoliberal policies and disaster capitalism—­the same necropolitics I have been exploring in this book. https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v ​=1­TCX​_ A ­ qzoo4. 1 ​As I edit ­these pages before this book goes to press, Hurricanne Fiona, a category 1 phenomena, hit the Puerto Rican archipelago on September 19, 2022, five years a­ fter María, creating mudslides and floods mostly in the mountain and southwestern areas of the island. As many bridges and other infrastructure fell due to w ­ ater, it was clear for Puerto Ricans that the infrastructure as well as the federal solutions to “fix” Puerto Rico did not work (including LUMA Energy, see above). 2 ​The Centro de Periodismo Investigativo is an in­de­pen­dent network of Puerto Rican journalists that works to produce and de­moc­ra­tize news in con­temporary Puerto Rico, promoting access to the truth without the manipulation of information or control of other journalistic resources and media. It was founded in 2012 and has been key to recent reports and discussions about the death toll ­a fter Hurricane María. In July 2019, CPI journalists released more than nine hundred pages of a chat in the application Tele­gram that involved Governor Rosselló and five of his assistants. The release of the conversations as well as the indignation of many who felt tired of the abuses of his administration led to the Verano19 movement, in which millions of Puerto Ricans joined demonstrations that resulted in Rosselló’s resignation. 3 ​As I have analyzed throughout this book, this necro-­onthology is not specific to con­temporary Ca­rib­bean histories but part of a crisis generated by neoliberalism. In Eu­rope and the United States, following the economic crisis of 2008, horror movies have become the genre that reflects this neoliberal cultural malaise. See Andreu Domingo’s “Analyzing Zombie Dystopia as Neoliberal Scenario.” 4 ​Maldonado, Puerto Ricans Underwater. 5 ​Maldonado, Los dormidos. 6 ​Cardona, Hasta el cuello. 7 ​See Klein, ­Battle for Paradise. 8 ​Parrilla, ¡Santa María! 9 ​Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” 10 ​See the impor­tant article by Dr. Domingo Marqués and coauthors, “Mortality in Puerto Rico a­ fter Hurricane María.”

Notes to Pages 139–152 • 169

11 ​Another example from France is the 1831–1832 “pear-­shaped” caricatures of Louis Philippe by Honoré Daumier and o­ thers, ­a fter a law was passed forbidding caricatures of the king. See Victoria Dailey’s “A Pear, a Bear and Some Hair.” 12 ​See Cabrera Collazo, “Medios y resistencia en la era muñocista.” 13 ​Rangely J. García Colón (Rangy) is a Puerto Rican illustrator, cartoonist, and story board artist. She graduated from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale and is currently based in Puerto Rico. She started working with “¡Atención! ¡Atención!” a pedagogical tool with rock m ­ usic for young ­children. Currently she is the director and creative artist b­ ehind De la Nada! Productions, a YouTube and Facebook channel with cartoons and videos that represent and critique current po­liti­cal events in Puerto Rico. See her interview in Spanish at www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​? ­v​ =­YQgZpVGLCDg. For an analy­sis of her cartoons a­ fter Hurricane María, see Chansky, “Auto/Biography a­ fter Disaster.” 14 ​See “ ‘Hasta que se seque el Malecón.’ ” 15 ​Benítez Rojo, La isla que se repite. 16 ​Moten and Harney, The Undercommons. 17 ​Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic. 18 ​Memes or GIFs of Black ­people reacting have become popu­lar online to show affective or humorous reactions. The phenomenon, more popu­lar since 2000, has gained popularity with the creation of Black digital personas or avatars. See Jones, “Why Are Memes of Black P ­ eople Reacting So Popu­lar Online?” 19 ​See “Crisis in Puerto Rico for the El­derly.” 20 ​Pietri, “Suicide Note of a Cockroach in a Low Income Proj­ect.” 21 ​Sharpe, In the Wake. 22 ​See Cobo, Decoding “Despacito,” and Rivera and Torres, “Colors and Flavors of My Puerto Rico.” 23 ​See “ ‘Despacito’ Just Became the Most Viewed Video.” 24 ​See “Despacito Tour, La Perla Video.” YouTube, August 31, 2017, https://­w ww​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​? ­v ​=7­ ​_ ­q4Qv2hmg8. 25 ​See their website at www​.­callejeandopr​.c­ om. 26 ​Maldonado, Los dormidos. 27 ​Since December 2019 a series of earthquake swarms have been affecting Puerto Rico’s southern towns (with epicenters close to Guánica). Around eleven have been of high magnitude, but the largest so far happened in January 7, 2020, with a magnitude of 6.4. See “2019–20 Puerto Rico Earthquakes,” Wikipedia, https://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​ /­wiki​/­2019%E2%80%9320​_­Puerto​_­R ico​_­earthquakes. See the analysis of “aftershocks of disaster” as a theoretical concept in Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón, Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. accountability, 21–22, 115–116, 130–131, 138 Acevedo, Elizabeth, 20–21 activism/activists: in the afterlives of disaster, 138; Cuban, freedom of speech/expression in, 25–26, 56–57, 60–61, 66–67; and ethnic impersonation, 29, 31–32, 33, 35–36, 38, 41–42, 58–59, 66–67; in mediascapes, 8, 13–14, 21 ADÁL (Adál Maldonado), 154–155; Los dormidos, 135–137, 149, 152–153; Puerto Rican’s Underwater (Los ahogados), 135–137, 138–139, 149–152 aesthetics: in cultural products of disaster, 154; in ethnic impersonation, 34–35, 38, 46–48; in funeral tableaus, 122–123; ratchet, 11, 15–16, 71–72, 74–75, 76, 86–87 affect: in the afterlives of disaster, 26–27, 139, 149–150, 153; in ethnic impersonation, 31, 38, 42–43, 46–47, 57; in images of violent death, 22; and indebtedness, 12–13, 42–43; in Latinx ­family relationships, 101–102; in mediascapes, 2–3, 5, 8, 9–11; in mourning and funeral rituals, 107–108, 115, 125–126, 129–130; in ratchetness, 73–75, 81–82, 86–87, 88–90, 94–97; in zombie narratives, 117–18. See also emotion African Americans, 21–23, 31–32, 71, 107–108, 167n2

Afro-­Cubans, 56–57, 164n35 agency: in the afterlives of disaster, 139; in ethnic impersonation, 32–33, 41–44, 46–47, 61, 162–163n13; in mediascapes, 11, 14–16; of plantation slaves, 106–107, 109–110; in ratchetness, 74, 77–79, 86–87, 98–99; in urban cemeteries, 114–115 Aguayo Collazo, Jomar, 127–128 Alberto, Eliseo: Aventurera, 80 Alicea, Victor, 44 Alonso, Mayeli, 87–89 Álvarez-­Curbelo, Silvia, 99–100 Andino, Rafael Alejandro: “Chianita nunca fue negra,” 41–43 animals/animality, 22–23, 107–109, 110–111, 118–119, 123, 126, 129–131, 166n18 Appadurai, Arjun, 2 appropriation, cultural, 5, 29, 32 assemblages, creative, 4, 107–108 audiences: for ethnic impersonation, 5, 13–14, 29–30, 46, 47–48, 52–54; for LeJuan James, 101–102, 104; for ratchetness, 74–75, 78–79, 80–81, 85–87, 89–90, 93–94, 95, 97–100 authenticity: of “Despacito,” 146; ethnic, 13–14, 29, 73–74, 103–104 Autobiography of a Slave, 111–112 Avilés Santiago, Manuel, 4

179

180 • Index

Bad Bunny: “El Apagón,” 168 Balán, Juvenal: “Al mal tiempo buena cara,” 24–26 balseros crisis, 1990s, 83–84 baquiné (wake cele­bration), 108–109, 119–120. See also funerals/funeral rites Barnet, Miguel: La canción de Rachel, 77–79 baseball, 103–104 “­Battle of Ideas,” Cuba, 11, 66, 84–85 beauty: in ethnic impersonation, 47–48, 49–50; natu­ral, in Ca­rib­bean tourism, 137–138; in ratchetness, 79, 81–82, 100 be­hav­iors: ethnic-­moral, in ethnic impersonation, 30–31, 51–52; in ethnoscapes, 2–3; ratchet, 70–71, 74, 86–87; in vlogging the self, 102–103 belonging/nonbelonging, 9–11, 13–14, 53 Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 142 biopolitics, 21–22, 25–26 blackface/brownface: Chianita character, 13–14, 31–46; digital, in the afterlives of disaster, 141–142; in ethnic impersonation, 13–14, 28–31; Francheska la Yal (character), 41–43, 44, 162–163n13; Lo In con Joselyn, 46–51; in mediascapes, 4–5, 13–14; in ratchet comedies, 81; sonic, 30; Yeyo Vargas character, 51–54. See also impersonation, ethnic and racial Black Lives ­Matter, 6, 21–22, 29 Blackness: in Ca­rib­bean ethnic diasporas, 101; in digital echo chambers, 57; in ethnic impersonation, 29–46, 162n6; in impersonation of Dominican ­women, 48–51; and Latinidad, 51–54; in mediascapes, 4–5, 6–7, 12–14, 16–17; Obama as symbol of, 68–69; in Pánfilo memes, 61; and ratchetness, 70–71, 75. See also whiteness/ white ­people blackout (el apagón), 23–24, 133–39, 168 Black power ideologies, 41–43 bloggers/blogging, 11, 66–67, 84–85, 137–138 bodies, Black and Brown: in afterlives of disaster, 24–26, 135–138, 148–153, 154–155; in cities of the dead, 128–130; enslaved, as specters, 106–107, 109–110, 112–113; materiality of, 129–131; in mediascapes, 1–3, 5, 6, 7–8, 17–18, 21–23, 24–26; mestizo/ mulatto, 29, 34–35, 43–44, 68–69, 77, 81, 111–113; in payment of debt, 145–146, 153–155; in ratchetness, 70, 71, 78–84,

95–96, 99–100, 104; in urban cemeteries, 113–114, 115–116. See also impersonation, ethnic and racial Bonnet, François J., 2–3 borders, ethnic, 34–35, 44–45, 46 brega de todos los días (everyday strug­g le), 113–114 Browne, Simone, 30 “Brownie” (German shepherd), 123, 126, 129–131 Bruguera, Tania, 166n11 Brugués, Alejandro: Juan of the Dead/Juan de los Muertos, 22–23, 114–115, 117–118 burials, 31–46, 107–108. See also funerals/ funeral rites Butler, Judith: Precarious Life, 113–114 Caballero, Josán, 64, 65 Cabiya, Pedro, 18–21; Malas hierbas, 116–117 Cabrera, Carlos (“El Che”), 123, 124 Cadelo, Claudia, 11 Caires Taylor, Jason de: Vicissitudes, 128–130 Caló dialect, 58, 163–164n27 Camacho-­Quinn, Jasmine, 14 Campt, Tina M., 5 capitalism: disaster capitalism, 26–27, 118–119, 168; and out-­of-­syncness, 92, 96, 154–155; in the Puerto Rican debt crisis, 12, 16, 145–146; in slavery and artisan ­labor, 109–113; and spectacle, 8; in zombie narratives, 22–23, 117–119. See also neoliberalism/ neoliberal market economies Cardona, Javier: Hasta el cuello, 135–137, 138–139, 148–149, 154–155; You ­Don’t Look Like, 33 Ca­rib­be­anness, 45–46, 53–54, 76–77, 81–84, 102–103 caricatures, 34, 61–62, 139–140, 141–142 Carozza, Davide, 129 Carranza, Lien: Jama y libertad!, 57–67 Cartagena, Colombia, 107–108 cartoons, 29–30, 33–34, 138–141 Castro, Fidel, 64, 166n11 Castro, Raúl, 51–52, 64, 65–66 Castro regime, 56–58 celebrities/celebrity, 9–10, 11, 28–29, 58–60, 72–73, 80, 90, 95–96. See also influencers cell phone cameras, 64–66 cemeteries, 113–116, 128–130, 167n2

Index • 181

Cepeda, María Elena, 13–14 Cepero Bonilla, Raúl: Azúcar y abolición, 110 Chauvin, Derek, 21–22 Chervony, Llórens, Georgina, 126–127 Chianita (blackface character), 13–14, 31–46 Chianita de Parranda, 38–39 choteo, Cuban aesthetic of, 11, 25–26, 57 Chupacabra, 108, 166n18 chusmería, Cuban aesthetic of, 71–72, 74–75. See also ratchetness/ratchet aesthetic cibaeño dialect, 18, 19–20, 44–45, 47–48, 53–54 Cintrón Gutiérrez, Luis Javier, 22 citizenship: for Cubans, 53–54, 83–84; Dominican, for p­ eople of Haitian descent, 16–18, 138; indebted, 136–137, 138, 145–146, 153–155; in mediascapes, 7, 16–18; neoliberal, 95; of Puerto Ricans, in the aftermath of Maria, 134–137, 161n2 Clara, Nancy, 81–83 class, socioeconomic, 31–32, 58–59, 71, 86–89, 129–131, 154–155 Cobo, Leila, 146 Colectivo Afroversiva, 41 colonialism: in the afterlives of disaster, 25–26, 133–134, 135–137, 145–146, 152, 153–154; and Ca­rib­bean ethnic diasporas, 101–102; in Ca­rib­bean vulnerability, 114; in ethnic impersonation, 28–29, 34–35, 53; in indebted citizenship, 145–146; and the living-­dead, 116–117, 166n18; in Puerto Rican economic crisis, 12–13, 15–16, 94–95; and ratchetness, 71, 81, 92, 94–95, 166n18; in spectral lives, 106–108, 109–111, 112–113; and violent death, 21–22 comedy: in the afterlives of disaster, 137–138; ethnic impersonation in, 4–5, 30–32, 33–46, 47–54, 55–56, 67–69; in mediascapes, 2–3, 5; of Pánfilo, 57–58; ratchet, 71–72, 162–163n13; in vlogging the self, 73, 101, 102–103. See also humor commodification: of death, 129–131; of life and death, 112–113, 115; in mediascapes, 6, 9–11, 12–14; in ratchetness, 81–82, 89–90, 95–96, 99–100 communications, 7–8, 11, 12–13, 23–24, 25–26, 66, 133–134, 152–153 conglomerates, media, 8–9, 90

consciousness: Black, in activism against blackface, 33; and death, 106–107; ratchet, 7–8, 15, 70–75, 77–78, 79, 89–90; and zombies, 116–119 consumption: in the afterlives of disaster, 135–136, 137–138, 141–142; of death, 115, 129–130; of images, by the diaspora, 11, 12; in mediascapes, 2–3, 6; in the neoliberal script, 146; of ratchetness, 69, 85, 86–87, 89–90, 99–100, 104; of Spanish-­language content, 8–9; of U.S. good, in the afterlives of disaster, 135–136; of vio­lence, 8 contact zones, 2–4, 13–14 Cooper, Britney C., 74 corruption, 12–13, 15–16, 41, 43, 138, 139, 154–155 crises, economic and po­liti­cal: in the afterlives of disaster, 135–137, 138, 143, 148–149, 152–155; in cities of the dead, 131–132; in digital echo chambers, 58, 59–60; and ethnic impersonation, 36–37, 43; in mediascapes, 2, 12–13; Puerto Rican, vlogging in response to, 90–95. See also debt/indebtedness critique, social: in the afterlives of disaster, 139–144, 149–150; and digital echo chambers, 54–69; on ethnic impersonation, 32–33, 35–36, 41–43, 46, 49–50; in mediascapes, 2–3, 5, 7, 16; in vlogging, 73 crossovers, cultural, 11, 33–34, 71–72, 74–75, 79–80, 83–84, 146 Cruz, Carmen Yulin, 134–135, 153–154 Cuba: afterlives of disaster in, 24–27, 137–138, 141–142, 154–155; artisan l­ abor in, 109–113; and Barak Obama, 51–54, 67–69; dissent in, 54–69; el paquete and neoliberalism in, 84–85; ethnic impersonation in, 13–14, 30–31, 33–35, 51–52; mediascapes in, 6, 8–11, 12–14; ratchetness in, 74–75, 76–77 Cuban diaspora: artists in opening of, to island Cubans, 76–77; and ethnic impersonation, 50–54; and Niurka Marcos, 78–80, 81–84; and Pánfilo, 56–57, 59–60, 64–66 Cubanidad, 71–72, 74–75, 86–87, 88, 89 Cyrus, Miley: “Wrecking Ball,” 14–16 dance, 74–75, 76, 93–94, 104, 121–122, 148–149 Dayan, Colin, 106–107

182 • Index

death: death tolls, 23–24, 25–26, 133–134, 138; in mediascapes, 3–4, 8–9, 17–22, 25–26; racial and colonial, 21–23; social, of enslaved persons, 106–107, 110–111; as tool for cleaning socie­ties, 115; violent, 3–4, 8–9, 17–21, 22 debt/indebtedness: in afterlives of disaster, 134–136, 145–146, 149–152, 153–155; indebted citizenship, 136–137, 138, 145–146, 153–155; in mediascapes, 12–13, 14–16, 23–24, 25–26; of ­women, in ethnic impersonation, 41–43. See also crises, economic and po­liti­cal Decreto 349, Cuba, 66–67 dehumanization, 18–20, 23–24, 34, 141–142 del Risco, Enrique, 61 Demasiada Tita comedy (Telemundo), 45, 47–51 democracy/demo­cratization: in afterlives of disaster, 135–136, 145–146, 154–155, 168n2; in mediascapes, 7, 9, 11; racial, 35–36, 68–69 Derby, Robin, 108 desire, 70–71, 74, 81–82, 116–117, 145, 152 “Despacito” (Luis Fonsi and ­Daddy Yankee), 23–24, 135–137, 146–148, 153–154 “Despacito” tour, La Perla, Puerto Rico, 23–24, 135–137, 146–148, 154 dialogues: humor and critique in, 142–143; in mediascapes, 12–14, 16–17, 20–21; on race and ethnic impersonation, 29, 41–42, 53–54; ratchetness in, 73–74, 85 Diario las Américas, 141–142 diasporas: in afterlives of disaster, 23–27, 133–134, 147, 152–153; and ethnic impersonation, 50–54; in mediascapes, 2–3, 4–5, 11–14, 15–16, 21–27; mourning the dead in, 21–23, 126–127; ratchetness in, 78–80, 81–85; vlogging on families in, 15–16, 100–104 difference: in diasporan parenting styles, 100–104; and ethnic impersonation, 34–35, 44–45, 68–69; in mediascapes, 9–11, 15–16, 20–22; and ratchetness, 95–96 dis­appeared persons (the dis­appeared), 22–23, 115–116 disasters, afterlives of: Black and Brown bodies in, 24–26, 135–138, 148–153, 154–155; blackouts in, 133–139; in dance and photography, 148–153; debt/indebtedness in, 134–136, 145–146, 149–152, 153–155; diasporas in, 23–27, 133–134, 147, 152–153;

humor and critique in, 26–27, 139–144; in mediascapes, 1–2, 24–27 displacement, 1–2, 9–11, 12–13, 23–24, 26–27, 55, 59, 153–155 dissent, 36–37, 54–69, 84–85, 141–42 diversión (humor). See humor divisions: class-­based, in ethnic impersonation, 58–59; of the Cuban diaspora and Cubans on the island, 69; in mediascapes, 19; of rich and poor, in afterlives of disaster, 138 DIY productions, 2–3, 15–16, 73–74, 95–96, 104–105 Dominicanidad, 45–54, 101–102, 103–104 Dominican Republic, 8–9, 16–21, 109–113, 115–117, 138 Dominicans, 17–19, 44–54, 103–104, 138 drag per­for­mance, 33, 75, 89–90 Duany, Jorge, 100 earthquakes, 1–2, 169n27 echo chambers, 4–5, 6, 9–11, 25–26, 31, 54–69, 94–95 ELA (Estado Libre Asociado/Commonwealth), Puerto Rico, 35–36, 37, 41–43, 94–95 emancipation/manumission, 111–113 embargo, Cuban, 57–58 emotion, 77, 88–89, 99, 113–114, 117–118, 128–129, 139. See also affect entrepreneurship, 46, 76–77, 85, 89–90 epitaphs, digital, 4 equality/in­e­qual­ity, 8, 19–20, 52, 66–67, 68–69, 94–95, 112–113, 153 erasure, 13–14, 31–32, 68–69 Esta Noche Tu Night (Alexis Valdés), 51–54 Estébanez, Javier Leal, 25–26 Estrada López, Emmanuel, 36 ethnoscapes, 2–3 exaggeration, 18–20, 33–34, 41–43, 51, 71–72 exclusion, social, 34, 53–54, 70 exploitation, 12–13, 110, 114, 135–36, 154 “Extraterrestrial Route,” Puerto Rico, 90–91 face apps, 30 Facebook, 12–14, 33, 56–59, 97, 139–142. See also social media feminism: in ethnic impersonation, 39–40, 41–43, 46–47, 48–51; and ratchet

Index • 183

per­for­mance, 11, 71–72, 74, 77, 81–83, 86–87, 89–90, 99–100 Fleetwood, Nicole, 32 Fleitas, Sissi, 86–89 flooding, 23–27, 141–42, 168n1 Forever, Jacob: “Hasta que se seque el malecón,” 141–142 Francheska la Yal (character by Natalia Lugo), 42–43, 44, 162–163n13 freedom of speech/expression, 11, 25–26, 56–57, 60–61, 66–67, 84–85, 166nn10–11 fugitive debt, 136–137, 145–146, 153–155 funerals/funeral rites, 21–23, 35–36, 41–43, 107–108, 109, 114–115, 119–128, 129–131. See also wakes Funeraria Marín: funeral tableaus, nontraditional funerals: Aguayo Collazo, Jomar, “Hombre jugando Dominos,” 127–128; Amaro Rivera, Christopher, “El Boxeador,” 123, 125; Cabrera, Carlos, El Che, “El Muerto Sentado,” 21–22, 123, 124; Chervony Lloréns, Georgina, “Abuelita en Mecedora,” 126–127, 129–131; Morales Colón, David “El Muerto en Motora” “El Matatán,” 122–124; nontraditional funerals by, 21–22, 114–115; Pantoja, Ángel Luis, “El Muerto Parao,” 119–120, 130–131; Velázquez Velázquez, Santiago “El Muerto en Ambulancia,” 123, 125 García Colón, Rangely J., 23–24, 169n13; Ave María: A Comic Diary of a Category 5 Disaster, 140; De la Nada!, 139–141 García Padilla, Alejandro, 94–95 Gay, Roxanne, 86–87 gender: in comedy of LeJuan James, 101; in ethnic impersonation, 33, 41; and fugitive debt, 153–154; in ratchetness, 70, 71–72, 75; and repre­sen­ta­tion, in mediascapes, 14–16; in zombie narratives, 116–117. See also queerness; ratchetness/ratchet aesthetic; sexuality gentrification, 59, 64, 135–137, 146 geographies: in afterlives of disaster, 135–136, 146, 148–149, 152–153; of cities of the dead, 22–23, 115; in mediascapes, 1–2, 3–4, 22–23; of ratchetness, 73–75 “ghetto.” See ratchetness/ratchet aesthetic Giraud, Joyce, 85, 86–89 Giselle, 47–51

Glissant, Édouard, 1–2 Gómez, Yashira, 147 González, José Luis, 110–111 Graulau, Bianca, 168 Guerrero, Tita (Joselyn), 45–51 Gutiérrez, Laura G., 74–75 Haggins, Bambi, 32 Haiti and Haitians, 3–4, 16–20, 138 El Happy Hour (Fidelity 97.5 FM), 46–47 Harney, Stefano, 137 Harris-­Perry, Melissa, 130–131 Harvey, David, 111, 112–113 Havana, 24–27, 54–69, 76, 79–80, 117–118, 120–121, 141–142, 167n9. See also Cuba Henríquez, Dagmar Flores (La Vampy de Lajas). See La Vampy de Lajas (character by Dagmar Flores Henríquez) Henry, Jean Claude (Tulile), 17–21 Hernández, Rita Indiana: Papi, 22–23, 116–117 Hernández Reguant, Ariana, 30, 52–53 hierarchies, socioeconomic, 28–29, 52, 88, 110–111 high culture, 11, 66–67 El hijo de Ángela María, 37, 41–43 Hispaniola, 8–9, 16–21, 109–113, 115–117, 138 humanity: in the aftermath of disaster, 25–26, 146; and the dead, 109, 110, 118–119, 123, 126, 128–129; in ethnic impersonation, 14, 33, 36; in neoliberalism, 7–8 humor: in the afterlives of disaster, 26–27, 139–144; Cuban, in the diaspora and mediascape, 11, 13–14; in Hispanic/ Ca­rib­bean parental culture, 102–103; in mediascapes, 2–3, 6, 7–8, 16, 26–27; ratchet, 15–16, 71–73, 80, 95–96. See also comedy humor, ethnic: in ethnic impersonation, 31, 32–33, 39–40, 41, 43–44, 57, 60–61, 67–69; of LeJuan James, 16, 73, 101–105; in mediascapes, 2–3, 6, 7–8, 16 Humphreys, Laura Zöe, 25, 85 hurricanes: aftermath of, in mediascapes, 1–2, 23–27; in destruction of infrastructure, 168n1; humor and critique in afterlife of, 139–141; hurricane Irma, 1–2, 23–27, 139–141, 145–146; hurricane María, 7, 24–25, 133–144, 145–146, 152–155; indebted citizenship in afterlife of, 145–146; in mediascapes, 1–2, 23–27 hypervisibility. See visibility/invisibility

184 • Index

“I c­ an’t breathe,” 21–22 ideology: in enslavement and death, 107–108, 110–111, 167n2; in ethnic impersonation, 36–37, 41–42, 53, 66–67; in mediascapes, 5–6, 7, 12–13, 19, 24–25; in zombie narratives, 117–18 image: Ca­rib­bean, in mediascapes, 1–6; of flooding in Cuba, 24–27; fugitive debt in, 153–155; necroimage, 17–24; and spectacle, 6–17. See also photography impersonation, ethnic and racial: agency in, 32–33, 41–44, 46–47, 61, 162–163n13; Blackness and closeness in, 31–46; Blackness and Latinidad in, 51–54; of Dominicans, 44–54; in echo chambers, 54–67; as enacting ­others, 28–31; language in, 31–32, 40, 41–44, 68–69; in mediascapes, 5, 13–14; nostalgia in, 14, 29–30, 31–32, 36–37, 41–42. See also blackface/brownface influencers, 14–16, 28–29, 71–73, 90–97, 100–104. See also celebrities/celebrity infrapolitics, 1, 113–114 infrastructure, 12–13, 133–134, 135–136, 168n1 Instagram, 89–90, 100–101. See also social media intimacy, 13–14, 73–74, 147–148, 152 invisibility. See visibility/invisibility Jama y libertad! (Pánfilo), 57–67 James, Joy, 3 jibara persona and speech patterns, 36–38, 40–44 J.Lo, 6–7, 161n2 Jones, Nicholas, 34–35 Jones-­Shafroth Act, 135–137 Joselyn (Tita Guerrero), 45–51 journalism/journalists, 6, 66–67, 133–134, 138, 168n2 justice, 2–4, 8–9, 21–22, 116, 130–131, 142 Klein, Naomi, 118 ­labor: in the afterlives of disaster, 139–140; artisan, 109–113; enslaved, 106–108; in ethnic impersonation, 41–43, 46–47; and ratchetness, 70–71, 77, 88–90, 98–99; refusal of, 24, 59–60; ­women’s, 41–43, 46–47, 70–71, 77, 88–90, 98–99; in zombie narratives, 116–117 La Fountain, Lawrence, 33

Laguna, Albert S., 13–14, 71–72, 76–77, 80, 85 Lalo, Eduardo, 135–137; La ciudad perdida, 114–115, 118–119, 128–129; Necrópolis, 131–132 la lucha (the strife), 113–114 Lane, Jill, 43–44 language: of debt, 135–136, 153; in ethnic impersonation, 31–32, 40, 41–44, 68–69; of nationalism, in mediascapes, 18–21; of power, in plantation and slave society, 107; of ratchetness, 71–73, 101–103; in spectacle, 7, 9–10, 12–14 La Parguera, Puerto Rico, 90–92 La Perla, Puerto Rico, 23–24, 146–147, 154 Larramendi, Boris: “Jama y Libertad!,” 60–67 Latinidad, Ca­rib­bean, 13–14, 50–54, 71–72, 86–87, 101–105, 161n2 Lauzán, Alén, 61, 63, 64 La Vampy de Lajas (character by Dagmar Flores Henríquez), 14–16, 71–74, 90–100, 104–105 Leal Estébanez, Javier, 141–142 LeJuan James (Juan Ricardo Atiles Tejada), 2–3, 14–16, 26–27, 71–74, 100–105; Definitely Hispanic, 72–73, 100–104 Lhamon, W. T., 32 Li, Stephanie, 68–69 life/death, per­for­mance of: in the afterlives of disaster, 154–155; collective mourning in, 128–132; in plantation society, 106–113; in urban cemeteries, 113–116; zombies and funeral tableaus, 116–128. See also per­for­mance/performativity Lima, José María: Poemas de la muerte, 131–132 liminality/liminal space, 106–107, 112–113, 149–152. See also suspension, state of living conditions, post-­d isaster, 135–137, 142–143, 153–154 living-­dead, 22–23, 107, 115–118, 131–132, 166n18. See also zombies Lo In con Joselyn, 45–51 López, Antonio, 30 López, Jennifer. See J.Lo López, Julio, 123, 124 Lúgaro, Alexandra, 149 Lugo, Natalia (Francheska la Yal), 41–43, 44, 162–163n13 LUMA Energy, Puerto Rico, 168 lynching, 17–21

Index • 185

“Man Playing Dominoes,” 127–128 Marcos, Juan (Pánfilo), 54–67 Marcos, Niurka: body of, as product, 78–84; Mami Niu character by, 89–90; in mediascapes, 11, 14–16; neoliberal self-­ making by, 73–79, 80–81, 84–85, 89–90; Niurka Oficial, 89–90; ratchet persona of, 71–72, 73–75, 89; on real­ity TV, 86–89; as soap opera star, 76–77; Soy Niurka/I am Niurka, 80–81 marginalization, 15, 59–60, 133–134, 139 markets: for artisan ­labor, 109–111; in mediascapes, 6, 8–9; and tourists, in afterlives of disaster, 23–24, 145–146; U.S. Latina/o, ratchetness in, 11, 71–72, 80, 84–85, 89–90 Marrero, Carlos (Yeyo Vargas), 51–54 Martorell, Antonio: “El Muerto Parao” (The Standing Dead Body), Puerto Rico, 119–22; “Velando, Mamá Velando” (Watching ­Mother Only Watching), 119–120 martyrs, 129–131 masculinity, 61, 117–118, 129–131 Matos-­Rodríguez, Félix, 100 melancholia, 22–23, 26–27, 31, 34–35, 114–118, 131–132 memes, 4–5, 13–14, 33, 59–66, 141–142 memorials, 4, 36–37, 128–131 memory and remembrance, 21–22, 26–27, 107–108, 114, 130–131, 138–139 Merengueros Dominicanos (characters), 52–53 mestizo/mulatto bodies, 29, 34–35, 43–44, 68–69, 77, 81, 111–113 Meyer, Ángela (Chianita character by), 14, 35–43 Miami, Florida: anti-­Castro politics in, 56–58; ethnic impersonation in, 30, 44–45, 51–54; in mediascapes, 8–9, 11, 13–14; ratchet entertainment in, 76–77, 80–85, 86–87, 93–94, 104 microaggressions, 13–14 ­Middle Passage, 114, 128–129 migration, 46, 51–52, 80–84, 86, 128–131, 135–137, 138–139, 152 Milly, Jocelyn y Los Vecinos, 47, 48 minstrelsy, 28–30, 33–35, 52, 53–54, 86–87 Miranda-­Rodríguez, Edgardo: La Borinqueña, 139 Mitcum Wilson Funeral Home, Philadelphia: López, Julio, “Man in Motorcycle,” 123, 124

mobility, social, 43, 52–54, 70–71, 72–73, 86–87. See also self-­making, narratives of mobilization, 12–13, 23–24, 25–26, 66–67, 154–155 mockery, 18–19, 34–35, 41–43, 53–54, 95–96, 98–99, 104, 139–144 Monroy, Erika, 82–84 Morales Colón, David, 122–123 morality/moral codes: and ethnic impersonation, 30–32, 34–35, 47–48, 49–51; parental lessons in, 101–103; and ratchetness, 70–71, 75, 85, 95–97, 99–100, 104 Moreno Fraginals, Manuel: El ingenio, 110 Mota, Erick: Habana Underguater, 25–26 Moten, Fred, 137 mourning, 3–4, 21–23, 107–108, 114, 115–116, 120, 121–132. See also wakes mulatas de fuego (fire mulatas), 74–75 multiculturalism, 68–69, 147–148, 153, 154 Muñoz, José, 71 Muñoz Marín, Luis, 38, 41–43 Muntaner, Frances Negrón, 13–14 nationalism, 17–21, 71, 148–149, 154–155 nature/natural world, Ca­rib­bean, 134–136, 138, 142–143 necroimage, 17–24 necro-­ontology, 2–3, 135–137 necropolis, 106–107, 131–132 necropolitics, 1–2, 114–115, 149–150, 154–155 Negri, Antonio, 113–114 Negrón-­Muntaner, Frances, 71 neoliberalism/neoliberal market economies: in afterlives of disaster, 25–27, 135–137, 138, 145–146, 147–148, 149–152, 153–155; and death, 22–23, 109, 112–115, 117–118; and “el paquete,” 84–85; and ethnic impersonation, 28–29, 31, 43, 57; in indebted citizenship, 145–146, 153–155; in mediascapes, 4, 6, 7–11, 12–16, 17–20, 25–27; in Pánfilo memes, 64; in the Puerto Rican economic crisis, 92; ratchetness in neoliberal self­making, 73–79, 80–81, 89–90; in vlogging the self, 104. See also capitalism NFL Superbowl halftime spectacle of 2020, 6–7 Niurka Oficial (IGTV), 89–90 Noche Ilegal (Univision Puerto Rico), 45

186 • Index

normativity, 9–11, 49–50, 56–57, 95–96, 106–107, 117–118 nostalgia, 14–15, 29–30, 31–32, 36–37, 41–42, 80–81, 89–90 Obama, Barack, and administration, 28–29, 36, 51–54, 61, 67–69 Ojama, 61, 62 Oliveira-­Monte, Emanuelle, 68–69 Oller, Francisco: The Wake/El Velorio, 108, 119–120, 122 Olokun cemetery, 128–129 Online Tours, 25–26, 141–142, 154 openness, personal, 73–74, 90 Operation Bootstrap, 38–39 Orlando, Florida, 72–74, 100–104 Osorio, Juan, 76–77; Mi verdad, 77–79 Otero Alcántara, Luis Manuel, 66–67, 166n10 otherness/othering, 6, 18–20, 28–31, 154. See also impersonation, ethnic and racial out-­of-­syncness, 14–16, 21–22, 28–29, 90–96, 104, 154–155. See also suspension, state of; temporality Pánfilo (character in Vivir del Cuento), 67–69 Pánfilo, el de la Jama (nickname of Juan Carlos González Marcos), 6, 33, 54–67 “Pánfilo y la Jama!” viral campaign, 6, 54–67 Pantojas, Angel Luis (El Muerto Parao), 119–122 “el paquete”/“paquete semanal” (the package), 8–9, 84–85, 137–138 Parilla, Adriana M., 23–24, 25–26, 135–137, 154–155; ¡Santa Maria!, 142–144 parody, 14–16, 44, 47, 72–73, 97–99 Partido Anartista: “Cena Negra,” 36 Payá, Oswaldo, 85 per­for­mance of life: collective mourning in, 128–132; in mediascapes, 2–10, 11, 12–14, 21–22, 23–24, 25–26; spectral lives in, 106–113; urban cemeteries in, 113–116; zombies and funeral tableaus in, 114–115, 116–128. See also blackface/brownface; life/death, per­for­mance of; ratchetness/ ratchet aesthetic per­for­mance/performativity: in afterlives of disaster, 134–137, 138–139, 141–142, 148–149, 151–152, 154–155; in mediascapes, 2–10, 11, 12–14, 21–22, 23–24, 25–26

photography: in the afterlives of disaster, 134–137, 138–139, 141–144, 147–148, 149–153, 154–155; in mediascapes, 1–2, 3–5, 8, 22, 23–26. See also image Pietri, Pedro, 145 PIP (Pro In­de­pen­dence Party), 36 plantation society and economies, 70–71, 106–113, 114, 167n2 PNP (New Progressive Party), 38–39 policing, 3–4, 21–22, 145–146 politics: in the afterlives of disaster, 135–137, 138, 139–144, 148–155; ethnic impersonation in, 31–46, 50–52, 53–54, 56–59, 65–69; in life and death, 107–108, 112–116, 117–118, 123, 126–127, 128–132; in mediascapes, 1–4, 5, 6–7, 9–11, 12–13, 16–19, 23–24; and ratchetness, 70–71, 76–77, 80–81, 83–85, 93–97, 99–100 popu­lar culture, 9–11, 23–24, 25–26, 28–29, 44–45, 71 poverty: in afterlives of disaster, 143, 153–155; in ethnic impersonation, 52, 53–54, 59, 64–66; in mediascapes, 16–17, 24–25; and ratchetness, 70–71, 86, 92, 104–105 power/power dynamics: in the afterlives of disaster, 133–134, 137–138, 139, 141–142, 143; in cities of the dead, 106–108, 109, 110–114, 115–117, 129–130; and ethnic impersonation, 32–33, 34–35, 39–40, 41–42; in mediascapes, 1, 6, 9–11, 16, 18–20, 24–26; in ratchet per­for­mance, 80–81; of social media echo chambers, 64–66 PPD (Popu­lar Demo­cratic Party), Puerto Rico, 38–39 pro-­independence movement, Puerto Rico, 38 PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act), 36, 94–95, 135–137 protests: in afterlives of disaster, 138, 145–146; and ethnic impersonation, 36–37, 41–42; in mediascapes, 6, 12–13, 23–24, 25–26; Pánfilo in, 56–57, 58–67; in post-­hurricane Puerto Rico, 23–24 Proyecto Varela, Cuba, 11, 56–57, 84–85 Puerto Ricans: in afterlives of disaster, 23–25, 133–134, 143–144, 147, 152–153; lived experience of, in Florida, 100–104; in mediascapes, 12–14, 25–26. See also La Vampy de Lajas; LeJuan James

Index • 187

Puerto Rico: artisan ­labor in, 109–113; corruption in, 12–13, 15–16, 41, 43, 138, 139, 154–155; debt of, 14–16, 145–146; el apagón/ blackout in, 23–24, 133–139, 168; ethnic impersonation in, 31–32, 33, 35–43; image and fugitive debt in, 153–155; mediascapes in, 8–9, 12–14, 23–24, 25–26; nontraditional funerals in, 21–22, 122–124, 124, 125, 126–127, 129–131; post-­disaster humor and critique in, 139–144; territoriality of, 16, 135–137; in zombie narratives, 118–119. See also debt/indebtedness; hurricanes Puerto Rico U ­ nder ­Water (Columbia University). See ADÁL (Adál Maldonado) queerness: in afterlives of disaster, 154–155; and neoliberal normativity, 9–10; and ratchetness, 15, 71, 73–74, 75, 89–90, 95–97, 99–100 ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? (PBS comedy), 73 race and racialization: in afterlives of disaster, 141–142, 152; of ethnic difference, by LeJuan James, 102–103; and fugitive debt, 153–154; of the living dead, 115, 116–117; in mediascapes, 1–2, 5, 8–9, 12–13, 17–18, 20–21; and ratchetness, 70–71, 83–84. See also blackface/brownface; Blackness; impersonation, ethnic and racial racism: in afterlives of disaster, 141–142; in afterlives of slavery, 21–22, 112–113; in ethnic impersonation, 28–33, 34, 35–36, 46–47, 48, 52–53; in mediascapes, 2–4, 5, 6, 13–14, 16–17, 19–20, 21–22, 23–24 Raengo, 30 Raengo, Alessandra, 32 raggaetón, 41–43, 97, 101–102, 146–147 Ramos Otero, Manuel: El libro de la muerte, 120, 122–123 ratchetness/ratchet aesthetic: body as product in, 78–84; of La Vampy, 90–100; in mediascapes, 11, 14–16; and moral codes, 70–71, 75, 85, 95–97, 99–100, 104; and nostalgia, 14–15, 80–81, 89–90; in real­ity TV, 86–89; and scandal, 11, 15, 74–78, 89–90; in self-­making, 71–72, 73–84, 88–90; shame and shamelessness in, 70–75, 93–96; transnational, 90 real­ity (the real/real life), 6, 8, 9–11, 68–69, 100–104

real­ity TV, 15–16, 74–75, 85, 86–89, 90 Rebollo-­Gil, Guillermo: “Cartografía,” 126–127 refusal of payment, 25–26, 94–95, 135–137, 153–155 reggaetón, 55, 141–142, 146, 154 relief, post-­hurricane, Puerto Rico, 137 repre­sen­ta­tions: Afrolatino, by LeJuan James, 101–102; in ethnic impersonation, 28–29, 31–32, 34–43, 50–51, 61–64; of Latinx in comics, post-­disaster, 139–140; in mediascapes, 5, 9–11, 14–16, 18–20; of ratchetness, 73–74, 76–77 repression, 59–60, 65–66, 84–85, 138, 145–146 resilience, 25–27, 154–155 respectability: politics and discourse of, 5, 31–32, 35–36, 41–43, 54; and ratchetness, 70–72, 74, 85, 86–87, 88, 89–90 Rica, Famosa, Latina (Rich, Famous, Latina), 86–89 Ríos, Reinaldo, 93–94 Ríos Ávila, Rubén, 120, 122 rituals of death and mourning, 113–114, 118–119, 121–131. See also funerals/funeral rites Rivera, Petra, 146 Rivera Amaro, Christopher, 123, 125 Rivero, Yeidy M., 8–9, 30, 38 Roach, Joseph, 115 Rodríguez, Juana María, 99–100 Rossellò, Ricardo and administration, Puerto Rico, 23–24, 139–140 rumbera scripts, 73–75, 76–77, 79–81 Salazar, María Elvira, 57–58 Sánchez, Yoani, 11 satire, 18–20, 51–54, 139–141 Schwartz, Margaret: Dead ­Matter, 129–131 section 936, federal tax code, 38–39, 94–95, 135–137 Sedgwick, Eve K., 94–95 segregation, racial, 34, 86–87 self-­making, narratives of, 9–11, 16, 71–72, 73–84, 88–90, 154–155. See also mobility, social semiotics, 7, 13–14, 41–43, 61, 67, 68–69 sensationalism, 86, 99–100 sensorium, performative and affective, 8, 9–11, 25–27, 29–30, 63–64, 147–148 Sentencia 168 (Dominican Republic), 16–18

188 • Index

sexuality: in “Despacito,” 23–24, 146–147; in ethnic impersonation of Dominican ­women, 41–43, 47–53; positive imaginaries of, 14–16; in Puerto Ricans ­Under ­Water, 152; in ratchetness, 70–71, 74–76, 77, 79–80, 81–82, 85, 87, 89–90, 95–96; in zombie narratives and funeral tableaus, 116–118, 119–120 Shakira, 6–7 Sharpe, Christina, 3–4, 21–22, 114, 128–129, 145–146 El Show de Alexis Valdés, 81 Silva, Luis (Pánfilo character by), 33, 67–69 sirvengüencería. See ratchetness/ratchet aesthetic slaves/enslavement, afterlives of: and artisan ­labor, 109–113, 169n9; in cities of the dead, 128–129; con­temporary Black bodies as, 114; in mediascapes, 16–17, 21–23, 25–26; spectral lives of, 106–113, 167n2; and standards of be­hav­ior for Black w ­ omen, 70–71; ste­reo­t ypes of, in ethnic impersonation, 31–33, 40; in zombie narratives, 116–117 Smith, Cherise, 32 soap operas/soap opera industry, 37–39, 41–42, 74–75, 76–77, 79–80, 85 social media: in the afterlives of disaster, 24–26, 133–134, 135–136, 137–138, 139–140, 149–150; in Cuban activism, 33, 55–59, 66–67, 68–69; ethnic impersonation on, 28–31, 33; in mediascapes, 2–3, 4–5, 6, 7–9, 12–14, 17–20, 24–27; power of echo chambers in, 64–66; ratchetness on, 72–73, 85, 89–95, 97, 99–101, 104–105 Solá-­Santiago, Frances, 42–43 sonics/soundscapes: in afterlives of disaster, 136–137, 138, 146–147, 148–149, 154–155; in ethnic impersonation, 30–32, 34, 40–41, 43–44, 46–47; in funeral tableaus, 122–123; of LeJuan James’s moral lessons, 101–102; in mediascapes, 13–14; neoliberal, 154; of Pánfilo memes, 61–64; of ratchetness, 95–96 Sontag, Susan, 22 sovereignty, 14–16, 17–18, 109–110, 115, 129–132, 135–136 spectacle: in afterlives of disaster, 155; in Ca­r ib­bean life and death, 109, 130–131; of ethnic impersonation, 30–32, 33–35,

42–43; in mediascapes, 5, 6–18; in ratchetness, 80, 89–90, 95 spectral lives, 1–2, 32–33, 106–114, 115, 134–135, 137 speech: in ethnic impersonation, 13–14, 34–35, 37–42, 43–44, 53–54, 68–69; in mediascapes, 18–20; in ratchetness, 90, 97, 101–102, 166n11. See also freedom of speech/expression Steinem, Gloria, 86–87 ste­reo­types: of Ca­rib­bean ­women, as ratchet, 77–78, 89–90; in ethnic impersonation, 31–35, 41–43, 44–45, 50–52, 53–54, 61; in mediascapes, 1–2, 18–20 subjection, bodily: in enacting ­others, 32–33; in mediascapes, 23–24; in slavery, 32–33, 108–110, 111–113; in zombie narratives, 116–117 subjectivity: maroon, and artisan l­ abor, 109–111; in necropolitics, 114–115; neoliberal, in mediascapes, 14–16; in rachetness, 77–79, 95 surveillance, 1–3, 34–35, 66, 67, 84–85, 91–92, 94–95 survival: in afterlives of disaster, 23–26, 135–136, 141–142, 145–146; of blackface, 29–30; in cities of the dead, 22–23, 107–108, 109–110, 112–116, 117–118, 128–130; and neoliberalism, 7–8, 9–10; in ratchetness, 70–71, 74–75, 93–94 Susa y Epifanio, Puerto Rican comedy, 43–44, 163n15 suspension, state of: in afterlives of disaster, 136–137, 143, 151–152, 154–155; between life and death, 22–23, 126–127, 131–132; in mediascapes, 9–11, 14–16, 21–22, 23–24. See also liminality/liminal space Target Style (Miami), 81–84 Taussig, Michael, 106–107 “teatro bufo,” 33–35, 37–38, 43–44. See also blackface/brownface temporality: in afterlives of disaster, 141–142; of DIY ratchet videos, 73–74, 95–96, 99–100, 104; in ethnic impersonation, 34–35; of life and death, 21–22, 106–107, 113–114, 115–116; in mediascapes, 8–11, 14–16, 25–26. See also out-­of-­syncness testimonio, 9–11 Tinsley, Omiseke, 42–43

Index • 189

Torres, Jericko, 146 Torres, John: Undead, 117–118 tourism: in the afterlives of disaster, 23–24, 25–26, 137–138, 141–142, 145–148, 154–155; in Cuba, and the rise of club culture, 76–77; and economic crisis in Puerto Rico, 90–92; and enacting ­others, 54–55, 58–60, 64; in mediascapes, 23–24, 25–26 transgender politics, 89–90, 99–100 Trump, Donald J. and administration, 7, 23–24, 53, 133–134, 138, 140–141 truth and lies, 1–2, 8, 18–20, 52, 58, 104–105, 168n2 truth and reconciliation tribunals, 115–116 Univision, 8–9, 75, 77, 80 Valdés, Alexis: Esta Noche Tu Night, 51–54 Valencia, Sayak, 8 Vampireo. See La Vampy de Lajas (Dagmar Flores Henríquez) Vampiro de Moca, 166n18 Varano19, 41–43 Vargas, João, 3 vedettes, 77–79, 80, 89–90. See also Marcos, Niurka Velázquez, Carmen Nydia, 44 Velázquez Velázquez, Edgardo, 123, 125 Verano19 protest, Puerto Rico, 145–146 Villalobos-­Ruminott, Sergio, 23, 115 Villaverde, Cirilo: Cecilia Valdés, 112–113 Vine, 2–3, 100–101 vio­lence: in cities of the dead, 106–108, 113–116, 117–119, 120–121, 126–132; and ethnic impersonation, 28–30, 58, 63–64; and fugitive debt, 153–155; in funeral tableaus, 120, 122; in mediascapes, 1–4, 5–8, 13–14, 16–23 viral response/virality: in afterlives of disaster, 136–137; to LeJuan James, 72–73; to Pánfilo’s videos, 10–11, 33, 56–59, 64–65; to ratchetness, 15–16, 72–73; vio­lence in, 8 visibility/invisibility: in afterlives of disaster, 146–147; of death, in mediascapes, 21–22; of dissent, in echo chambers, 49–50, 56–57, 59–60, 64–67; in mediascapes, 1–3, 4–5, 6–7, 9–11, 12–14, 16–18; of mourning,

114, 129–131; of race, in ethnic impersonation, 13–14, 29, 30–31, 33; and ratchetness, 16, 73–75, 86–87, 93–94, 95 Vivir del Cuento (Cuban TV), 67–69 vlogging/vlogging, 9–11, 15–16, 66, 72–73, 90–105 vulnerability, 1–2, 98–99, 104–105, 111–113, 114, 115, 129–131, 143 wakes: in afterlives of disaster, 23–24, 25–26, 135–136, 145–146, 153, 155; baquiné, 108–109, 119–120; in cities of the dead, 128–129, 130–131; funeral tableaus, 21–23, 109, 114–115, 119–128; in mediascapes, 2–4, 21–24, 25–26; orthography of, 114; in remembrance and mourning, 21–23. See also funerals/funeral rites; mourning Walker, Kara, 32–33 whiteness/white ­people: and ethnic impersonation, 29, 30, 31–32, 33–35, 52, 53–54, 56–57, 64; in mediascapes, 6, 7, 9–10; in Pánfilo memes, 64; and ratchetness, 70–71, 73–74; in spectral lives of slaves, 109–110, 112–113. See also Blackness white supremacy, 2–3, 32–33 Williams, Eric: Capitalism and Slavery, 110 working class: in afterlives of disaster, 24–25; Cuban, and Pánfilo, 55–56, 59–60, 67–68; in ethnic impersonations, 41–43, 53–54; in mediascapes, 3–4, 21–22; and ratchetness, 71, 72–73, 77, 87–89, 95 “Wrecked Ball” (La Vampy), 72–73, 97–99 xenophobia, critique of, 7 Yeyo Vargas (character), 51–54 YouTube: afterlives of disaster on, 23–24, 136–137, 139–140, 146–148; enacting ­others on, 42–43, 58–60; Jama y Libertad on, 58–60; in mediascapes, 8–9, 14–16, 23–24; ratchetness on, 14–16, 26–27, 90–98, 100–105. See also social media Zambrana, Rocío, 16 zombies, 22–23, 114–119, 166n18 Zurbano, Roberto, 64

About the Author JOSSIANNA ARROYO is a literary and cultural studies scholar who specializes in the

analy­sis of Afro-­Diasporic, Afro-­Latina/o and Ca­rib­bean lit­er­a­tures and cultures. She is a Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of African and African Diaspora at the University of Texas, Austin. She is author of Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil and Writing Secrecy in Ca­rib­bean Freemasonry.