Poetic Schemas: Reading Antiblack Collusions in Puerto Rican Aesthetics

Abstract

This article reads the affective charge of ethnonationalism and antiblackness in Puerto Rican poetics and performance. Moving from the “legible” affect in Afro–Puerto Rican feminist poet Julia de Burgos's ethnonational poetry to the “illegible” affect experienced on stage by Afro–Puerto Rican queer theater and performance artist Javier Cárdona Otero, this article provides a fragmented trajectory of the antiblack and white supremacist affective violence constitutive of art-making in Puerto Rico. In doing so, it locates an aesthetic collusion between ethnonationalism and antiblackness that in turn illuminates how the aesthetics of Puerto Ricanness can be antiblack, a claim that calls into question Puerto Rican nationalism's desire or need for ethnic difference.

In African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (2020), Julia de Burgos's poem “Farewell to Welfare Island” reads like an obituary mourning her deracinated position as an Afro–Puerto Rican woman in New York. Significantly, this was her last poem, and the only one written in English; it was also written during one of her last hospitalizations for depression and alcoholism at Goldwater Memorial Hospital on what was then called Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island). De Burgos's contributions to the anthology begin with her existential assertions about gender, class, and revolution in “A Julia de Burgos,” and they move to her poetic (self-)examination of an ancestral negritud (Blackness) in “Ay Ay Ay de la grifa Negra,” where the Puerto Rican existential and revolutionary assertions of “A Julia de Burgos” are questioned and even antagonized (as I will later show) through an ancestral and ethnic-racialized encounter with African slavery on the island. “Farewell to Welfare Island,” followed by “The Sun in Welfare Island,” ends her contribution to the anthology; “Farewell” is a poetic index of several forms of sociopolitical violence, including racism, misogyny, ability, and captivity, which become imbricated with the poet's Afro–Puerto Rican feminist body in 1950s New York City.

Also showcased in this anthology is Afro-Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri's poem “The Broken English Dream,” which played a major role in the initiation of a Nuyorican identity that expressed a new diasporic subject created through struggle in New York. De Burgos's and Pietri's aesthetic labor in this anthology contributes to the representation of intramural difference within the “African Americanness” that holds the anthology together (as in the work of Aracely Girmay, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Essex Hemphill, among others) through their gendered, Spanish Caribbean Blackness.¹ Indeed, Pietri's and de Burgos's Spanish Caribbean Blackness is framed in this anthology by way of the absence of any poetic reference to two revolutionary movements in the colony and its diaspora: (1) a radical aesthetic movement of nation-building in Puerto Rico in the 1930s, and (2) a Nuyorican subjectivity developed through a diasporic aesthetic movement emerging from Puerto Rican relations with African Americans in New York, represented in a space otherwise known as the Nuyorican Poets Café and initiated by Miguel Algarín.²

Instead of representing this Black and Brown Nuyorican aesthetic movement, the anthology turns to Pietri's “Broken English Dream,” a spoken-word poem that, no doubt, also informed this same movement.³ Yet the poem expresses an antiblack sentiment when it turns to “Blackening,” where one is “Blackened,” or “made” African American by the effects of proximity to or interpellation of African Americanness for Puerto Ricans in New York.⁴ African Americanness appears to be made within the depths of economic struggle through language, or the misuse of language, for Puerto Ricans:

American Blackness for Pietri and de Burgos, as well as for the anthology, signifies poverty and suffering, whereas Spanish Caribbean Blackness signifies “love.” Pietri writes about Puerto Rican Blackness, “Aqui to be called negrito / means to be called love,” and de Burgos asserts about American Blackness, “These Blacks don't even know how to speak English.”⁶ This antiblack juxtaposition of Spanish Caribbean Blackness and American Blackness governs much of the ambivalence about intramural antiblack quotidian and state violence on the colony and in the diaspora. Fortunately, radical Black feminist collectivities led predominantly by Afro-Puerto Rican and Black migrant queers and femmes on the colony and its diaspora have actively refused this ambivalence and have brought anticolonial strategies that are both intellectual, yet militant against this antiblack violence. This article lingers within this antiblackness to consider the aesthetic “making” of Puerto Ricanness. Where do ethnonationalist poetics and performance reside within such a racial and gendered schema? What can we glean by forcing a fragmented encounter among artists and their art-making practices and theories, an encounter not dependent on time and space but conditioned by racial and gendered affectivity? What implications does this novel knowledge have for imagining what it means to be Puerto Rican?

Instead of inscribing de Burgos's and Pietri's negritud within Spanish Caribbean Blackness, the anthology appears to summon figurations of Black and racialized poverty like that of Ronald Reagan's “welfare queen.”⁷ The “welfare queen” as antiblack metaphor appears extended or scaled out in the anthology to incorporate other forms of race and gender that seem to qualify as “African American” through de Burgos's and Pietri's references to death and poverty. De Burgos's “Farewell to Welfare Island” as both real and metaphoric obituary precedes and informs Pietri's Nuyorican aesthetic in “Broken English Dream” as well as in his anthemic “A Puerto Rican Obituary,” and it produces the setting for a Nuyorican identity, one founded on “Welfare Island.” As such, the anthology creates a two-poet genealogy of “African American” Puerto Rican poetry by way of the classed language of welfare and the despairing language of the obituary. The dense configuration formed by Blackness, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and nation is significant in this poetic representation: a contradictory antiblackness, a technology of violence “made” in the “plantation complex” that Rocío Zambrana theorizes in my epigraph above, guides these poetics into the realm of onto-epistemological figuration, which seems inescapable or “insular,” something like the white(ned), heteronormative, “docile” allegorical figure of the jíbaro (peasant) from my childhood. This contradictory antiblackness is played out through an (un)intended dependency on Spanish civility and (post-)Enlightenment thought as carrying a thread of subjecthood for Puerto Ricans in the colony and its diaspora. De Burgos's and Pietri's migratory “American Blackness” must be negated in order for the Puerto Rican ethnoracial subject to move away from racial discourses in the United States. As Omaris Zamora reminds us in theorizing the keyword negro, “It is pivotal that we recall negro in its transnational translation from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States and back as always ‘Black,’ which means that AfroLatinidad is also ‘Black.’”⁸ De Burgos's and Pietri's negritud lives within this transnational movement of Blackness as Black colonial subjects, which is why the production of aesthetics by Afro–Puerto Ricans and non-Black Puerto Ricans transpires within the contradictions and antagonisms that arise when blanqueamiento and ennegrecimiento meet.

Aesthetic and racial schemas such as these hold the affective and political reach of Puerto Ricanness, or what it means to be Puerto Rican. The plena-dancing, whitened jíbara figure from my ethnonational unconscious is conjured for me through such schemas and gestures to the existential loss that grounds my own subjectivity as a white Puerto Rican queer femme. This ethnonationalist trope recalls the colonial economy of the “plantation complex,” always waiting to be resuscitated, yet always resisting its pull (hence Puerto Rico's status as “none of the above”).⁹ This conjuring of white(ned) allegorical tropes, as technologies of violence, also incites feelings of existential doom for Puerto Ricans, feelings that undercut the need for political representation, which also undercuts the idea of the easily assimilable Puerto Rican subject in general. It is this sense of feeling Puerto Rican, and thereby being Puerto Rican, that has always brought me to the work of de Burgos and to the art of Afro–Puerto Rican queer performance artist Javier Cárdona Otero, and specifically to the former's contradictory yet particular Blackness and literary antiblackness and the latter's embodied analysis and critique of heteronormative and hemispheric antiblackness. From her earliest work, de Burgos aesthetically genders colonial violence, questioning the heteronormativity on which ethnicity and nationalism emerge in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Cárdona Otero's immersive practice, on the other hand, forces his audiences to contend with the problem of reference in the Spanish Américas through his own embodied performance. Put differently, he uses his body to index the heteronormative antiblackness dependent on the constitutive loss that occurs while performing as Afro–Puerto Rican. I use these two artists’ works as points of departure to experiment with the (im)possibilities that emerge when we center the antagonistic and contradictory relationship between whitening (blanqueamiento) and Blackening (enngrecimiento) within analyses of ethnonational aesthetics in Puerto Rico.

The next section develops a novel language that seeks to untangle the affective economies of antiblack violence, which serve the aesthetic invention of Puerto Ricanness. Interrogating these affective economies at work within aesthetic production helps us to delineate how ethnonational affect accumulates into an ambivalent mode. Desedimenting this affect allows us to clarify how these economies are experienced by de Burgos and Cárdona Otero. I draw attention to how Puerto Ricanness is dependent on the exceptionalism and reproduction of colonial injury through a subsumption of the Black aesthetic in the Caribbean, while Afro–Puerto Rican affect is negated, remaining unread and unthought by the ethnonationalist state (civil society and the law). I use this theoretical knowledge to reread de Burgos's poetics and to reexperience Cárdona Otero's performance, with an eye to the affective and emotive violence experienced when they stage Blackness in their work.

The Danger of “Insular” Theorizing

This article is not interested in comparing the colonial logic of the various racial schemas informing aesthetics in Puerto Rico with that of other schemas in other places in the Spanish Américas. Nor is it interested in interrogating the imposition of colonial injury on the colony's people and its diaspora; several Puerto Rican scholars have already researched and written important work on the material and sociopolitical effects of coloniality.¹⁰ Instead of reading Puerto Rico's political economy through its injury as a colonized territory, I read it intramurally, or through its insularity, a dangerous word for us nonnormative Puerto Ricans because of its dependence on the whitening poetics of white Creole elite intellectuals, particularly Antonio Pedreira's Insularismo.¹¹ The intramural here refers to its literal definition of “conducted within the limits of an organization or body,” not to be confused with “between” but “within.” Intramural as such attends to the events or happenings within the organization or body, which plays a role in structuring its meanings.¹² I attempt to linger within the intramural and expand its limitations through the oceanic scale of the Afro-Caribbean and its desedimenting thinkers who, like Hortense J. Spillers, “even more than an inquiry into the identitarian,” are “searching for a protocol through intramural space.”¹³ I read Puerto Ricanness through this “intramural space.”

I also read Puerto Ricanness through an existential condition created by the injury of loss, following Antonio Viego's psychoanalytic call to allow “ethnic-racialized” subjects the capacity to mourn.¹⁴ Although this loss is structured by the allegorization of Puerto Rico's colonized population into a whitened heteronormative peasantry (or class of jíbaros), I'm interested in how it transforms into cultural as well as political gains for non-Black Puerto Ricans through a folklorizing romanticization of Blackness.¹⁵ Thus, if Puerto Ricanness signifies loss, then antiblackness and white supremacy, as I will show, define the contours of this loss, which is both racialized and gendered.¹⁶ In this sense, I concur with Afro–Puerto Rican feminist scholar Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez when she writes,

This antiblackness is “endemic” to aesthetic production within Latinidad. This section studies and dissects the workings of Spanish Caribbean antiblackness as a remnant of “the plantation complex” within aesthetic production. It indexes the subsumption of Blackness as resource for both sameness and difference within aesthetics even while Afro-descended and Afro-Indigenous-descended Puerto Ricans are erased as formative figures in Puerto Rican radical art and culture. It is within these radical and liberatory spaces where I introduce an analysis of the tone and feeling of being Puerto Rican, or Puerto Ricanness, that can facilitate a theoretical conversation concerning the contingency of these spaces on the cultural and ethnicizing vitality of Black (non)being, what Tyrone Palmer describes as the “very malleability, or ‘fungibility,’ as an ontological fact of blackness.”¹⁸

Palmer explains how “Black affect is unthinkable, falling within the epistemological closure of Man's episteme; buried beneath an overdetermined discourse that reads the expression and performance of Black affect as always already excessive, inadequate, or both.”¹⁹ Black affect within the colonial economy between Puerto Rico and the United States, then, registers as illegible yet ever-present, and therefore pathological and unruly. I agree with Palmer in naming affect theory's inability to account for the “problematic of blackness, the particular affective dispositions that emerge in reaction to processes of racialization and racial subjugation, or the ways in which affect serves as an exploitable tool of racial domination and anti-blackness.”²⁰ As such, he critiques affect theory's dependence on the body's “capacity” to provide “freedom” from identitarian struggle (race, gender, etc.) because its mode of analysis is not concerned with whose body's “capacity” matters.²¹ Palmer maintains that this “freedom” is also contingent on “foreclosing” or “heavily circumscribing” Black sentience and Black interiority because their “social value lies in the Black's status as an implement; an instrument accumulated for the pleasure, enjoyment, and feeling of the Subject; a ‘being for the captor.’”²² To think of de Burgos's literary production outside this network of “freedom” is inadequate because her structural positioning as Black means that her position was “characterized by a continual ‘misrecognition’ and illegibility, and the nullification of Black subjectivity.”²³ I thus read her through this network of “freedom” and its production of affect and vice versa. And yet, what does it mean to attempt to hold the “being” and the “captor” within oneself through the failure of a romanticized ethnonationalism that falls prey to literary antiblackness? For, de Burgos is the commodified “being” for her own captivity within the colony's romanticization and the metropole's deracination of Blackness.

But who, what, and how does Blackness signify within a Spanish American colony as well as in relation to the governing racial topography of US-based Black studies? Looking back, to the present, and forward to racial enslavement and its afterlife, I consider not only the historical violence entailed by the production of cotton in the US South as marking the emergence of global Blackness as an “object for thought”²⁴ but also the myriad forms of violence (physical, psychic, political) entailed by the production of sugar and coffee within the Spanish Caribbean and Latin America. Considering Puerto Rico as a colony of the United States and as a geography of the Global South allows for a more hemispheric and diasporic practice of Black study not limited by the US academy. To be clear, I am interested in the meanings of Blackness as the interstitial conceptual space of the African diaspora because it can displace the originary status of the African American as the sole arbiter of double consciousness, especially in the context of the Hispanophone realm of the Américas. Puerto Rican mechanisms of antiblackness do something different from US mechanisms in that the former are produced through the sense and nonsense of nostalgia for Spanishness, with the “ethnicized” ruse of whiteness that it carries.

Studying the Afro–Puerto Rican nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos and his comrades’ collusion with Spanish Catholic civilization, Milagros Denis-Rosario writes, “They intentionally evoked a glamorized version of Spanish culture in order to contrast it with the U.S. Anglo-Saxon culture. Ironically, the recreation of an aspirational ‘plantation life’ discounted the role of slavery inherent in the plantation economy.”²⁵ Denis-Rosario further asserts that Albizu Campos's nationalism was infused with Catholic evaluations of what a Puerto Rican nation could look like. Theorizing the implications of early dependence on discourses of Spanish civility for organizing among Afro–Puerto Rican nationalists illustrates the avowal and disavowal of one's own Blackness within the romanticization of Spanish Catholicism, which also played a role in de Burgos's own self-making and unmaking through her ethnic-racialized poetics. In this way, as I will later claim, she repeats the romanticization permeating ennegrecimiento as a mode of subjectivation even as de Burgos, herself, is Black(ened) by this romanticization. Ennegrecimiento then is the ground for ethnicizing discourses on the new Spanish (Catholic) Human as well as defines the realm of the Black(ened).

Building on Zakiyyah Iman Jackson's use of the term blackened, I employ the verb-form Blackening to explain the role that gender and sexuation play in imposing extractive violence on Afro-descended peoples on the colony. This aesthetic extraction cannot transpire without the utility of gender and sexuation for reinventing legible modes of white(ned) liberal self-making, which in turn violently transmutes Blackness as human, subhuman, and nonhuman at the same instant.²⁶ “Observation of gender and sex,” Jackson writes, “was deployed in the interest of producing race as a visualizable fact,” and as such, the gendered “transmogrification” or the “plasticization” ²⁷ of the African also played a crucial role in the aesthetic creation of Puerto Ricanness.²⁸ This deployment of gender and sexuation is performed through Blackening's double violence within Puerto Rico's socio-political relationalities, such as feminism and colonialism: (1) the imposition of a “benign” drawing out of aesthetic Blackness and negation of Afro–Puerto Rican time and space within Hispanophone worlds to invent heteronormative white criollismo, and (2) an aesthetic surveillance of Blackness that delineates relation and proximity to whiteness (civil society). The parenthetical in “Black(ened)” as such in this article signals the lived experience of Afro-descended peoples throughout the African diaspora who confront this extractive violence daily.

To understand the aesthetic romanticism that steers this dense violence of extraction, I draw on Zambrana's theorization of the “plantation complex” and, crucially, Sylvia Wynter's discussion of the dispute between Father Bartolomé de las Casas and Ginés de Sepúlveda. Wynter distinguishes between the theocentric Christianity of the former and “the newly invented Man of the humanists, as the rational . . . political subject of the state.”²⁹ African enslavement and its utility in the colonizing project in the New World were at the crux of this debate: de las Casas justified African slavery within the realm of “Adamic fallen flesh,” while Sepúlveda refigured this symbol within the realm of irrationality and imperial expansion. Yet de las Casas believed in Christianizing the Indigenous populations of the New World because he believed they were not at fault for their “primitive” worldview as they had not yet experienced the missionary conversions of the church. De las Casas thus promoted the enslavement of Africans as “Enemies of Christ” who could provide labor in the New World in the place of the Indigenous populations. Thus commenced “the almost four-centuries-long slave trade out of Africa.”³⁰ Although de las Casas regretted his call for the enslavement of Africans, by then “the mass slave trade from Africa across the Atlantic that would give rise to today's transnational Black Diaspora had taken on a life and unstoppable dynamic of its own.”³¹

How are we to reexamine the Spanish colonial discourses of civility then that inform the collective significance of becoming Puerto Rican? Wynter, referring to Aníbal Quijano, provides further historical clarification here: “It was [in Ibero-Latin America] that the modern phenomenon of race, as a new, extrahumanly determined classificatory principle and mechanism of domination (Quijano 2000), was first invented, if still in its first religio-secular form.”³² Significantly the idea of race as a force of domination through classification emerges from the rationale of King Ferdinand (1492), who reinterprets the “Christians/Enemies of Christ” binary constructed by the papacy to create a more humanistic view that centers a new model for the invention of difference based in scientific and Greco-Roman notions of nature.³³ Sepúlveda finds an irrational lack in the Indigenous peoples of Latin America (that is, in Aztec mass human sacrificial practice) that sedimented their status as “natural slaves” through the new onto-epistemological order of “natural law” (297).³⁴ This lack is historically sustained from (post-)Enlightenment discourses to our contemporary moment by the question of whose life matters, a question that has its roots within the romanticism found in the Spanish crown's musings on the new Spanish (Catholic) Human.

This romance is also sustained within the colonized temporal and spatial terrain of Puerto Ricanness and can be understood only by analyzing modes of galvanizing or engulfing “objects” of discourses, as Denise Ferreira da Silva reminds us, and turning them into Others of Europe, which become strategic beings for subjectivation. This occurs even as those same Others of Europe develop the skills of subjectivation themselves. If “anti-Blackness is embedded in the very denial of its existence by the state and society,” then the illegibility of Afro–Puerto Rican affect, the negation of their sentience, must be a founding element for the development of even my own racialized ethnic nationalism as a white queer Puerto Rican femme. Aesthetics play the role here of engulfment, of reproducing affect and as such creating the sentience of ethnonational being, or Puerto Ricanness. This aesthetic configuration is indeed racial and informs the worlds of ethnonational artists and intellectuals like de Burgos; it makes them who they are as Puerto Ricans. Yet I assert that Puerto Ricanness spatially and temporally emerges from an affective mode of ethnonational antiblackness through its anxious negation yet cultural and classed subsumption of Blackness. In doing so, the production of aesthetics on the colony and its diaspora is contingent on a disavowal of Blackness as political, even as we sing along to the Africanist rhythms of salsa in order to make off-whiteness, a concept created by Hilda Llórens to name a colored schema that merges with nationalism.³⁵ Ethnonationalism and antiblackness thereby collude within Puerto Rican aesthetic production, showing how the sociopolitical condition of Puerto Ricanness as ethno national can be read as antiblack. Ethnonationalism within the Spanish Caribbean marks Puerto Ricanness through its affiliation with white(ned) Creoleness and discourses around mestizaje that travel from Latin America, as is shown in Wynter's exegesis. Thus the character of La patria de Puerto Rico is found in its supposedly benign multiracialism—índio, criollo (blanco/mestizo) +/– negro.

Ennegrecimiento (Blackening) then produces a form of subjectivation different from what we see in the Global North, even as Puerto Rico's white Creole elite government wants more access to the Global North's power. To return to de Burgos, her representation as “Afro-Nuyorican” is made within this schema. Reading her affect and being-thereness with ennegrecimiento in mind allows us to illuminate a through line that points to her representational entanglement with Spanish civility made to suit de Burgos's self-curated image as an ambivalent yet insurgent Puerto Rican feminist poet. Within this entanglement, we find an intimate relation with Albizu Campos, whose own Spanish Caribbean Blackness was sutured to a nostalgic sense of Euro-Spanish civility as opposed to US cruelty. Significantly, de Burgos writes a laudatory, loving poem to Albizu Campos, titled “Una cancion a Albizu Campos”³⁶ (“A Song to Albizu Campos”), that appeals to a patriotic devotion, a kind of romantic gesture to an idea of Puerto Rico:

De Burgos's desire for transcendence here is transparent: there is a sense of fugitivity, not just from colonization but from herself that she seems to yearn for, especially within “the idea.” And it is the act of writing for Albizu Campos that allows her to return to el Borinquen (the idea) and disentangle herself from the effects of ennegrecimiento. It is within the Spanish Caribbean, “the empire of constellations,” where interiority as “the idea” becomes nationalism. Sky (transcendence) and soil (immanence) become entangled within Puerto Ricanness here, registering a kind of distancing from Blackness, a movement into the realm of the ethnonational criollo. Deciphering de Burgos's intersubjective entanglement with Albizu Campos provides the reader a mode for reading against the silence that organizes this love of “the empire,” or Spain. Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean become part of the aesthetic “idea” that de Burgos signifies in the poem, an idea that emerges from the antiblack racial violence experienced by Albizu Campos, which leads him to embrace Spanish Catholic nationalism and become engulfed by the eugenic discourses of the “cosmic race.” José Vasconcelos himself writes of Albizu Campos: “He is well-acquainted with the rival culture and nobody can expose more skillfully its weaknesses and its crafty machinations.”³⁸

Yet his Spanish and Catholic-informed nationalism centered racial critique in the realm of exploitation and poverty. Zambrana's theorization of the “plantation complex” is useful here because it dislocates the centralization of exploitation in analyzing the material conditions of capital within the Puerto Rican case and tracks instead “the ongoing adaptation or actualization of slavery's racial order in Puerto Rico's belatedly developed plantation economy and process of emancipation in the nineteenth century as key for its transformation with US intervention in the twentieth century.”³⁹ This dislocation allows Zambrana to figure a “belated” plantation economy centered on an updated coloniality that emerges through the fungible racial value at play within the “plantation complex.” In other words, the “afterlife of slavery” on the colony as the “plantation complex” becomes the ground through which “the work of the contract in modalities of racial terror and dispossession is explained.”⁴⁰ Zambrana's analysis and critique informs my treatment of the collusion between ethnonationalism and antiblackness as the ground through which aesthetics are thought, created, and disseminated as representation in the Puerto Rican case. For Zambrana, then, studying aesthetics in the colony and its diaspora begins in the pastoral scene that occupies the “plantation complex,” and, as such, gestures toward a mode of sustained thought that works toward upending or destroying ethnonational antiblackness.

Situating this dislocation within the “plantation complex” reinscribes the figure of Albizu Campos with what white Creole elite intellectual Antonio Pedreira would call the “civility” of Spanish “blood.”⁴¹ For Albizu Campos refers to Spain in his manifesto “Puerto Rican Nationalism” from 1936 as “the motherland, the founding hidalgo of modern universal civilization,” thereby contributing to the same contradictory antiblackness that drives questions around American Blackness in de Burgos's as well as Pietri's contributions to the anthology. The timelapse between de Burgos's and Albizu Campos's nationalism of the 1940s and Pietri's Nuyorican nationalism of the 1970s is important here. For Puerto Rican artists from the 1970s in New York were shaped not only by Spanish colonial discourses, but also by Marxist-Leninist critiques dependent on revolutionary armed struggle in the colony, especially within the ranks of las Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), a paramilitary and clandestine anticolonial organization famous for its 1958 insurrection at the US capitol led by Lolita Lebrón.⁴² The FALN's ideals in general were contingent on worker-organized movement-building, as in many Third World movements of the time; its historical critiques were inspired by competing paradigms, including ethnicity, colonialism, and nationalism. The disorienting affect experienced by de Burgos, for example, in writing “Farewell to Welfare Island” from the intersection where blanqueamiento and ennegrecimiento meet, is caused by the revolutionary act of writing within these sociopolitical relations, thereby illuminating her existential and material encounters with racism and heteronormativity, her event-making process, or history. For this “farewell” was her last; here she became attuned to her structural position as a Black(ened) immigrant woman in New York. Her nationalism is found here alongside Albizu Campos's Catholic yearning for Spanish civility, even as both figures are Afro–Puerto Ricans.

It is important to contend with de Burgos's and Albizu Campos's positions as contingent on the same racialized power dynamics created in the plantation. This is because the self-making and unmaking of their Blackness through ethnonationalism is negated and disavowed, and this disavowal reinvigorates the capacity of the “plantation complex” to continue to signify who carries capacity on the colony as well as in its diaspora.⁴³ This “plantation complex” should be studied as the ground through which Puerto Rican historical materialist discourses hold Afro-descended Puerto Ricans captive within the space and time of historical events—historical events that are chosen for representation in the archive. For Afro–Puerto Rican women and femme scholars and activists in particular, this negation and silencing by the archive attempts to constitute their subjectivities through gendered antiblack violence; this loss doesn't signify within civil society and the law or its spaces of decolonial radicality. We still need to heed Afro–Puerto Rican feminist Angela Jorge's vital critique in 1979, where she writes, “[The Black Puerto Rican woman's] reticence to join [the Puerto Rican feminist movement], and her apparently low visibility in the movement are based, perhaps, on the belief that for her there is another struggle that if not won will cause her immolation, her genocide.”⁴⁴ While Jorge speaks to Afro–Puerto Rican women and femmes’ genocide in Puerto Rico, I follow Wynter's conception of the “demonic ground”⁴⁵ and suggest that such violence against Afro–Puerto Rican women and femmes is a necessity for the symbolic reinforcement of the ethnonational status of “none of the above.” Further, in a testimonio, Maritza Quiñones Rivera articulates a racial trajectory from living on the island as trigueña to being defined as Black when migrating to the United States. Rivera writes, “As a racialized, gendered, sexualized, and visibly invisible woman, I have felt the hostility, cynicism, and denigration of being a Black woman in the United States and Puerto Rico.”⁴⁶ Confronted with the reality of antiblack violence, Rivera maintains that non-Black Puerto Rican women expose their fear of Blackness, whether light or dark skin. She finds herself challenging notions of an “ethnonation” just by being Black. I quote these Afro–Puerto Rican feminist scholars here because of their rigorous theoretical scrutiny of the antagonistic, additive deployment of Blackness within utopian understandings of the ethnonational diaspora.

How does one carry the weight of antiblack violence while defending the causes of the worker and the colonized? Put differently, what does one do if one's own embodiment is always and already insurgent and revolutionary in the eyes of the law? In an interview for the Guardian about the 2019 summer uprising, Nina Figueroa, then twenty-five, discusses her experiences as a Black feminist activist on the streets of San Juan: “I have been arrested in protests three times and all three times I was doing nothing. I asked myself: ‘Why do the police arrest me so much?’ And obviously it wasn't until I understood that I'm an easy target for the police because I'm a black woman.”⁴⁷ Figueroa's experience indeed contradicts and antagonizes the liberal sentiments of racial democracy, especially within movement-building and organizing. Her subjection to police violence because of her gendered Blackness is sanctioned not just by the state but by Puerto Rico's liberal imaginary.

Figueroa seems to understand Blackness as incompatible with Puerto Ricanness within civil society and the law; it is as if her embodiment forces a kind of insurgent rupture of cultural value that needs to be disavowed within the space and time of the uprising. And it is the folklorization or mythicization of Figueroa's insurgent embodiment that, I assert, incites the collusion of ethnonationalism and antiblackness within the production of Puerto Ricanness (an intramural claim). This is the kind of aesthetic collusion that provokes the gendered disorder of Afro-Caribbean women writers as theorized by Maryse Condé, fictionalized by Mayra Santos-Febres, or even emerging from the (non)relation of Edouard Glissant's poetics.⁴⁸ At this turbulent intersection, Condé, Santos-Febres, and Glissant illuminate for us “the primacy of psychical violence” in aesthetic production, specifically within the Afro-Caribbean realm.⁴⁹ This aesthetic collusion produces a perpetual state of questioning the very ground through which “the ethnonational Human” emerges as a subject in Puerto Rico. It provides an intersubjective oceanic route (or root)⁵⁰ through which to think about Blackness and Puerto Ricanness together but also separately. Taking note of the turbulence of this conceptual space can help us attend to how Puerto Rico, like Brazil and other countries in the Caribbean and Latin America, does not rely on a white/Black paradigm but rather on nationalist categories dependent on racial structure.

In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau delves into this race-producing schema when she discusses the geopolitical space of Ponce on the southern coast of Puerto Rico, a city celebrated for its Eurocentric sensibilities, with “a reputation for flaunting the influence of European immigrants who settled there when the city became a conduit for sugar and coffee exports in the nineteenth century.”⁵¹ The ecological dynamics of Ponce, with its earthquakes and its oceanic geography, which make it easily accessible to hurricanes when they first make landfall, carries the promise that the Caribbean can continue to invent and destroy ecological subjectivity, the kind of promise that Suzanne Césaire spoke of in Martinique.⁵² Instead of such an ecological subjectivity founded within Afro-Caribbean knowledge, Godreau explains that what Ponce contributes to is the production of Puerto Ricanness through its extraction of the Blackened “vitality” (aesthetic life and living) carried by the Afro–Puerto Rican barrio of San Antón. Godreau focuses on the constitutive besideness of San Antón within the whitened architectonics of Ponce. She shifts “attention to the role that history (as a selective interpretation of the past) plays in the formulation of national ideologies that marginalize blackness and support the construction of San Antón as a place of racial uniqueness or exceptionality.”⁵³ Godreau thus identifies the mechanisms of antiblackness at work as aesthetic extraction within the geography of San Antón: in a sense, an aesthetic factory for the Puerto Rican ethnonational imaginary.

Puerto Ricanness therefore is shaped through a dependence on the formlessness of abstraction—what we can now understand as an aesthetic imposition of antiblackness (or ennegrecimiento). De Burgos's poetic romance with the ethnonationalism developed by Albizu Campos above, for instance, abstracts her own Blackness into a distant realm, discovered again and again within the Black(ened) embodiment of Afro-descended Puerto Ricans in making Puerto Rican aesthetics. In this way, the colonial injury that informs Puerto Ricanness is no doubt also informed by an aesthetic Blackness, which emerges through antiblack mechanisms founded in Euro-Spanish civility. Jackson notes how “the ongoing process of universalization is purchased precisely through the abjection and ontologizing plasticization of ‘the African.’”⁵⁴ Jackson's critique of “universality” sheds light on the process through which the “abjection” and “plasticization” of “the African” continues to reproduce our disciplinary knowledge on the human.⁵⁵ Further, Jackson goes on to discuss how Hegel believes that “Africans kill their king, which is a failure to recognize the superiority of higher authority than themselves, whether that of God or law.”⁵⁶ While the ghosts of Euro-American “universality,” or Hegel's Geist, have seemingly been pummeled by the turn toward ethnonational historicism and social science scholarship on Puerto Rico, an antiblack ethnonational aesthetic consciousness has come to bear on the meaning of being Puerto Rican—so much so that this antiblack ethnonational aesthetic explains the jurisgenerativity of the law and the political in Puerto Rico in general. For example, the “King” has become a white(ned), ethnonational Creole who speaks through “God” in Puerto Rico. Put differently, there is no “worshipping of the self,” no killing of the “King” as there was in the Haitian Revolution.⁵⁷ Puerto Ricans instead find themselves aesthetically positioned within the whitened representation of an antiblack allegorical peasant, or the jíbaro, the injured, off-white “primitives” of a US colony.⁵⁸ As ethnonationalists, we are nothing without allegory.

The Antiblack Ambivalence of Julia de Burgos

Consider this: the poetry of Julia de Burgos was made within the conceptual domain of the plantation complex where antiblackness is an aesthetic source for subject-making on the colony and its diaspora. What kind of anxieties would such a statement about de Burgos produce for Puerto Ricanness? This question points to de Burgos's own racial imagining of herself and gestures toward the Puerto Rican racial imagining of de Burgos as Afro-descended, as Black Boricua. But in order to understand de Burgos's own Spanish Caribbean Afro–Puerto Ricanness through her aesthetic antiblackness and to trace how it transforms into and invents ambivalent modes of ethnonationalism, I begin with her poem “Ay Ay Ay de la grifa Negra,” from her first poetry collection Poema en veinte surcos (1938). I do this because de Burgos has an aesthetic experience of racial abjection in this poem; she writes herself both into and out of Blackness, or what one translator of her poetry refers to as “a black chunk of blackness.”⁵⁹ This writing expresses the collusion of ethnonationalism and antiblackness within de Burgos's aesthetic production. Her writing is caught in the affective antagonism that occurs when blanqueamiento (whitening) and ennegrecimiento (Blackening) meet. In other words, her writing is shaped by competing abstractive projects, which form her poetics as it emerges from the grip of coloniality and from a “fleeing black race.”⁶⁰ In the last two stanzas of “Ay Ay Ay,” de Burgos writes:

The phrase “ay ay ay” sounds as a kind of Puerto Rican battle cry that doesn't stray too far from the “ay ay ay” my mother said when her children misbehaved. This phrase intimates a mode of martyrdom in which each time de Burgos performs this “ay ay ay” she sacrifices more of her Blackness for the sake of the bronzed. This phrase seems to summon an odd encounter between de Burgos and her contemporary Luis Pales Matos, with his penchant for onomatopoeia where the sound of the words in his poetry imitate Afro-Caribbean instruments. While de Burgos wrote this poem as a response to the racist and heterosexist work of negristas like Palés Matos, they become strange bedfellows as they share her veneration for racial mixing, through which they imagine the ethnonational subject will emerge. Palés Matos, a white Creole Puerto Rican poet, was credited with initiating the Afro-Antilliano poetry movement emerging out of the Greater Antilles alongside Nicolás Guillén and others. He is harshly criticized today for his literary antiblackness and especially for appropriating Afro–Puerto Rican embodiment in the name of negrismo, an antiblack literary movement emerging out of the Spanish Caribbean that was textually violent toward Afro-Caribbeans. That is, this literary movement uproots Afro-Caribbean people's very being within its writing. Palés Matos's poetic negrismo projects a bestial exoticism on Black being that intentionally uses the Afro-descended features of Afro–Puerto Rican peoples as antiblack tropes of gendered Caribbean Blackness. Yet Palés Matos uses this poetic pornotroping method to create some contradictory form of antiracist critique, which paradoxically informs the same ethnonationalist discourse around Puerto Ricanness that underpins de Burgos's scream, her “Ay ay ay.”

After first reading this stanza, the reader is roused by the flight through the racial paradigm of Blackness to the whitened “bronzed.” The refuge of ethnonationalism forces de Burgos into the cultural domain of ethnicity, prompting her to write this poem and forcing her to confront the “whiteness shadowed by blackness.” Yet she is confounded when she exclaims once again, “Ay ay ay,” and her “black race flees” and the “bronzed” future is realized. But she pushes on into the poetics of blanqueamiento that emerge from the structural collusion of ethnonationalism and antiblackness, inevitably marking her body with the ethnic figure of the Puerto Rican. Her feminist poetics are produced through a structural and libidinal drive to distance herself figuratively from Blackness. De Burgos's ability to perform “the kindred future of our Américas” through an attempt to understand her Blackness and her own experience of an aesthetic disassociation from Blackness in this poem, even as she writes from a “subaltern” position, moves Puerto Ricanness into the privileged position it will acquire under ethnonationalism. As we learn of de Burgos's poetics of self-immolation through the libidinal drift of her racial desire, we can begin to see de Burgos as both an originator of a radical diasporic feminism and a practitioner of a literary antiblackness that is particular to the Spanish Caribbean.

Canonized as one of our national feminist voices, de Burgos has been named as a precursor to the Nuyorican Poets movement, specifically in Puerto Rican studies scholar Vanessa Pérez-Rosario's important book, Becoming Julia de Burgos. Controversies have always followed de Burgos's feminist literary contribution to nationalist as well as diasporic Puerto Rican culture, even within my own natal family, which treated her as a “tragic mulata” found dead and bloated from alcoholism in a New York City alleyway. Other critics deny the importance of her poverty-stricken upbringing in Puerto Rico because of her ability to mobilize the social capital afforded by her literary fame. Pérez-Rosario works against de Burgos's critics and argues for the anticipatory nature of her poetry in establishing a Puerto Rican diasporic identity in New York.⁶² In sum, de Burgos's work becomes the ground for an understanding of Nuyorican identity in general, even if scholars and writers have attempted to prevent her from becoming its “very symbolon.”⁶³

For Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús, de Burgos's iconicity yields a form of imagined collectivity for Puerto Ricans in the diaspora, disavowing the ways in which de Burgos herself breaks down her own diasporic identity within her poetics, especially in her early poetry. As Mendoza-de Jesús writes, “To become, more than any other figure in Puerto Rican letters, the very symbolon that secures the possibility of collective identification, de Burgos's corpus has been submitted to an ironic form of overlooking, in which those aspects of her life and her writing that would blemish her allegorical mirror have been neglected at the same time that her figure has become ubiquitous.”⁶⁴ Mendoza-de Jesús forces us to take seriously the “nothingness,” the “self-immolation,” the canceling out found in her poetics. In this way, he suggests, de Burgos provokes us to try to feel everything while she offers us nothing, as her politics are seemingly canceled out in her figurative undoing. Yet de Burgos's staging of Blackness in her poetry illuminates her “imprudent desire” for an “ironic nothing,” which is Blackness for de Burgos. Reading the “blemish” as ethnonational antiblackness within her gendered ethnoracial poetics allows us to see the perverse contours of its “allegorical mirror.” I lean on Mendoza-de Jesús's reading of discontinuity and disidentification in her early poems to rethink the political work of her aesthetic production. Put differently, I'm interested in what Mendoza-de Jesús describes as “this nothing that belongs to no one (but herself) and is owed to no one.”⁶⁵ I'm particularly invested in smashing this “allegorical mirror” even as I know it will be reconstructed.

Pérez-Rosario refigures this “allegorical mirror” by considering de Burgos's contribution to intersectional Puerto Rican feminist discourse and Nuyorican poetics. Pérez-Rosario describes de Burgos's poetics as devised of escape routes leading away from the misogynistic nation-building aesthetics of the writers of la generación treinta (the Generation of the 1930s). Some of de Burgos's metaphors and allegories perform uncompromising critiques of these writers. As Pérez-Rosario writes, de Burgos “transcends their rigid gender and cultural nationalisms,” as in her poem “The Grand River of Loiza.”⁶⁶ The poem considers the afterlife of African slavery in Puerto Rico and the Loíza River, which cuts through the town of the same name known for its large population of Afro–Puerto Ricans. Yet, as Afro-Latinx studies scholars Isar P. Godreau and Zaire Dinzy-Flores assert, Loíza's Black geography is consistently reduced to the status of folklore or metaphor, treated as an additive narrative to the racial discourses of our national culture.⁶⁷ De Burgos's “escape route”⁶⁸ from the nationalism of the 1930s not only leads to a critique of the treintístas’ misogynistic national imaginary but also illustrates her own folklorization of a gendered Blackness, as when she writes, “My dear man, my river. . . . The only man who by kissing the length of my body, kisses my inner spirit.”⁶⁹ De Burgos here produces a folklorization of the enslaved African male by romanticizing a metaphor of the river, which represents Blackness in her poem. He (the river), therefore, sexually blackens her “pale naked flesh” when she moves from the pale to the bronzed epidermal space of the Puerto Rican. This tropicalized poetic movement points to the ecological, racial, gendered, and sexual plasticization of Blackness within de Burgos's study of the self.

De Burgos's writing becomes part and parcel of Puerto Rican diasporic literature that also migrates to the metropole and finds itself situated within new racial formations imposed by the Black and white paradigm of the United States. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the recent 2018 publication of the collection of letters written to her sister, Consuelo, titled Cartas a Consuelo. In a letter written to Consuelo from April 9, 1940, de Burgos describes her experience living in Harlem while working at the New York census department. I quote this passage at length in order to understand de Burgos's own nationalization of racial categories:

This exchange with her sister illustrates the Puerto Rican form of antiblackness. De Burgos, as an “ethnonational” Afro-Puerto Rican subject, comes face to face with her other—the African American. Yet, the African American that de Burgos finds a kind of lack in is also “cocolo,” a non-Hispanic Afro-Caribbean migrant. Thus, this exchange undoes her staging of national Blackness. In fact, we can see that this national Blackness is merely a tinge of color that she uses to ethnicize her own subjectivity. While it is important to note the intramural relations within the Afro-diaspora, including relations between Caribbean Blackness and Blackness in the United States, such a notation risks subsuming the antiblack affects that appear in de Burgos's critique. What we find in this exchange is the collusion between ethnonationalism and antiblackness, a ruse where de Burgos's affect in dealing with the supposedly childish and brutelike Black Americans gestures toward a hemispheric form of ethnonational antiblackness. Diaspora is shown to be limited here: the African American “cocolo,” as discursively constructed by de Burgos, finds themself in a captive state where the representation of the African American is outwardly determined. As such, we find de Burgos unintentionally in bed again with Palés Matos: “One of the most skilled manipulators of the African sound, language, and rhythm, Palés Matos resorts to Negro-Ape analogies in his poetry.”⁷¹ While de Burgos's commentary on African Americans was part of a private exchange of letters, de Burgos's libidinal relation to her Blackness and to her ethnonational and classed antiblackness surface here as instances of a general Puerto Rican antiblackness that is experienced when one makes art while Puerto Rican.

The aesthetic and folkloric nature of the antiblack language used by de Burgos forces me to engage in a critical reading of de Burgos's iconicity, which is formed within the “social landscape of the pastoral,” as Saidiya Hartman calls it.⁷² Zambrana's rewriting of the “plantation complex” and its mode of racialized and gendered subjectivation is located at this same juncture and is what impels anthropologists Arlene Torres and Norman Whitten to define the Latin American racial concept of mestizaje as a construct of blanqueamiento and cultural Indigeneity in opposition to the concepts of négritude and autodetermined Indigeneity. These racial (and cultural) formations constitute the ethnic blocs emerging from the circum-Atlantic that are directly linked to the pastoral scene of racial slavery and its social landscape. Torres and Whitten write, “We submit that throughout the New World, the mestizaje-négritude contrast represents a symbolic opposition reflecting cultural exaggeration of ideologically conjoined social constructs of race, civilization, nationalist patrimony, and social movement.”⁷³ Yet the “cultural exaggeration” that Torres and Whitten speak of is not an exaggeration at all; it is the diglossial gap between a Spanish-appropriated criollo that is blanqueado (whitened) and an African Bozalo (Kikongo) criollo that is ennegrecido (Blackened), which marks the structure of thinking and writing in the Spanish Antilles, the moment where the poetic takes the form of movement from the reflection of mestizaje to the sense of négritude, the libidinal zone of contact. To transmogrify this language into flesh in this transmission, I return to de Burgos's poem “Rio Grande de Loíza,” where she writes, “Rio Grande de Loíza! . . . My wellspring, my river since the maternal petal lifted me to the world; my pale desires came down in you from the craggy hills to find new furrows.”⁷⁴ De Burgos here writes from the supposedly whitened Creole hills and descends into the Blackened rush of the Loíza River. The hills in de Burgos's stanza announce the poetic labor that allows one to think and write from blanqueamiento/mestizaje and then move through the realm of négritude and autodetermined Indigeneity. This kind of self-reflection induces anxiety for the ethnonational thinker and writer, a historical anxiety, or affect, that reproduces the antiblackness of ethnonationalism. In other words, the collective affect provoked by this anxiety leads the subaltern back to Spain, or its other metropole, the United States, to take refuge in the comfort of ethnonationalism.

This anxiety registers a racial order shaped by the antiblack extraction of Black aesthetics, or the constitutive beside.⁷⁵ It is an anxiety that enacts and instantiates the fantastical yet material virtues of ethnonationalism that de Burgos prophesizes. In other words, de Burgos moves hesitantly through the teleological and hierarchical racial terrains and varieties of ethnonationalism. These racial terrains and varieties should shed light on the gendered and sexual violence imposed on the Afro-descended and Indigenous-descended peoples of Puerto Rico. However, this violence is recalled in the cultures of the Spanish Caribbean as a nostalgic longing for the white(ned) Catholic Spaniard and all that he represents. The knowledge of sexual violence in the making of racial categories is written out of history; the enslaved African and their descendants are denied the ability to think, to write, to signify. In a sense, the Black(ened)’s frame for thought and writing—that is, their language—is in excess of Hispanicity, and therefore Latinidad. The colonial linguistic terrain that produces this diglossial gap does indeed produce knowledge for the ethnoracial ontology of nationalism by colluding with the antiblackness of the aesthetic extraction of Afro-descended people's folklorized Blackness. And yet, as Sora Han writes, “This drive [to think] neither suppresses nor closes these diglossial gaps but scrutinises them with a desire to know how every word and thought is suspended in and by them.”⁷⁶ Following Han's assertion, Black(ened) thought and writing in the Puerto Rican diglossic gap structures and critiques the transhistorical violence of the gap itself, its modes of subsumption and negation. This structuring and critique create the Black(ened) Puerto Rican imaginary as a site for an “exercise of thought” that exceeds the taxonomies of white(ned) creolization. Spillers would assert that this site carries the “protocol for an intramural analysis”⁷⁷ and Glissant would call it a set of “submarine roots” that connect the oceanic geography of the African diaspora and its weather to Puerto Rico—supposedly the whitest island of the Hispanophone Caribbean.

Revisiting the Black Queer Gaze in Javier Cárdona Otero's You Don't Look Like— (2003)

Now, picture this: queer Afro–Puerto Rican educator and performance artist Javier Cárdona Otero runs out onto a black-box theater stage wearing a white tank top, green pleated pants, and running sneakers while his black dreadlocks are held back with a rubber band. He carries a red backpack with the Puerto Rican flag emblazoned on it as he continues to run in circles to a slowed-down, droning version of Wilfredo Vargas's El africano (1984), a merengue ode to the Afro–Latin American male stereotype, the myth of the Black male rapist. His long, slow glides on the stage follow the droning caused by the slow speed of the song; time is anachronized in and through his own embodied movement. Cárdona Otero indeed runs along to this rhythm as if the rhythm itself, constructed through the violent Blackening found in the song's inquisitive lyric “Mami que será lo que quiere el negro,” became the force through which Cárdona Otero experienced aesthetic and hemispheric antiblackness. He suddenly stops his circling, sits on a wooden desk, pulls out from his backpack an orange guayabera and a beautiful, gold, handheld mirror with a rosary attached to the handle. Cárdona Otero closes his eyes and slightly moves his lips in prayer as he gently caresses each bead attached to the mirror until he very hesitantly decides to look in the mirror and ask, “Mirror, mirror—I need to know If I am also . . . ,”⁷⁸ questioning the racial myths projected onto his body by casting agents at various performance auditions throughout the Hispanophone Américas. Thus begins Cárdona Otero's one-man show You Don't Look Like—, created in 1996. And I end this article with a meditation on this performance because of its way of showing how abject violence centers on Black(ened) and racialized bodies. You Don't Look Like— also attempts to deliver these bodies from antiblack, racist, and heteronormative evil.

What is most remarkable about this performance, as well as Cárdona Otero's practice in general, is that it illuminates for audiences the “submarine roots” that Glissant claims unite Afro-Caribbean discourses on violence, and brings to the fore the interiority of the supposed cocolos that de Burgos condemns.⁷⁹ For instance, Cárdona Otero's incapacity to complete the sentence (“I need to know if I am also—”) points to a kind of aporia where a critical discourse on ethnonational antiblackness can be found. And it is in this Blackened diglossial gap that Cárdona Otero is able to experiment with embodiment. His movement-based method uses the theatricality of the body and its resources of experience and expression, in part, to theorize the antiblackness of colonial language, of the word. His embodied theoretical practice becomes a form of public pedagogy for his audiences. Cárdona Otero thus produces uncomfortable yet necessary affective experiences for his audiences, immersing them in what Christina Sharpe would call “the weather” of ethnonational antiblackness.⁸⁰ Trained in Puerto Rico in the dramatic experimental project Los Teatreros Ambulantes de Cayey at the University of Puerto Rico, Cárdona Otero focuses on the intersectional experiences of performing while Black and queer throughout the Américas. Cárdona Otero's travels led to his one-man show You Don't Look Like—, which focuses on his experiences at auditions where he is forced to perform Black hemispheric stereotypes to be cast in Latinx and Latin American theatrical productions. He critiques this antiblack casting practice, but he does so, I would argue, by reaching for the security and protection afforded by Puerto Rican ethnonationalism. If the sentient being of ethnonationalism pivots on a shared cultural heritage in Puerto Rico and the United States that attempts to invalidate the racial difference of Blackness, especially in its disavowal of the violence experienced by Afro–Puerto Ricans, then what becomes of Cárdona Otero's embodiment when his ethnonationality and his racial Blackness collide? Cárdona Otero's Afro–Puerto Rican insurgent aesthetic is produced at this juncture. Regarding his transnational Black experience in the Américas, he narrates,

Cárdona Otero here geographically traces what Wynter describes as the territory of Man: he signals to the imposition of reference and the fullness of subjecthood through identification. Put differently, what happens to the signifier when they are also the signified? This semiotic violence holds Cárdona Otero's representation captive within the realm of objectivity in civil society and the law. For he uses the American translation of the determiner “what” in “What am I?,” indexing the violence of an imposed objectivity or “thingness” within antiblack representation in the Américas. His explicit defense of Puerto Ricanness seems to Blacken or interrogate the territory of Man as a forced encounter where ethnonationalism becomes exposed as “a model that enables the [natural organism] to overrepresent its ethnic and class-specific descriptive statement of the human as if it were that of the human itself.”⁸² Reading Wynter alongside Cárdona Otero exposes the existential need for the discursive human as if it were the biocentric human.

The experience of ethnonational antiblackness seems undeniable in this moment: Blackness is homeless, denied its place in the colonial experience of the Puerto Rican diaspora—which is to say, the ethnonation. This moment invokes (but then disavows) the cruelty inherent in being cast to perform the antagonistic relation that emerges when blanqueamiento and ennegrecimiento meet on the body. This encounter with ethnonational antiblackness seizes Cárdona Otero on stage: his non-Black audience finds a kind of pleasure and/or desire in watching Cárdona Otero perform, while, with his Afro–Puerto Rican queer body, he attempts to find refuge within the supposed betweenness of Puerto Rican ethnonationalism, which doesn't seem to have a home for his Blackness. As Palmer writes, “As a result of the varying modalities of violence—epistemic, material, metaphysical, ontological—which produce blackness as a locus of incapacities, Black affective responses are legible only as signs of pathology, further reifying blackness as subhumanity, as a sign of both excess and lack.”⁸³ Cárdona Otero illustrates how his embodied Blackness (at once “excess and lack”) doesn't need to break the “ruling discursive codes” for the nation and the colonial metropole to geopolitically discipline his body. He theorizes these ruling discursive codes themselves within his embodied performance.⁸⁴ Frank Wilderson III notes how for Black peoples “there are no cognitive maps, no conceptual frameworks of suffering and dispossession which are analogic with the myriad maps and frameworks which explain the dispossession of Human subalterns.”⁸⁵ If, according to Wilderson, Blackness is denied a time and space within civil society and law, that is, within language, how do we read Cárdona Otero's gendered and class critiques in You Don't Look Like—?⁸⁶ In some of the first analyses of Cárdona Otero's work, Jossianna Arroyo identifies Cárdona Otero's You Don't Look Like— as a work of cultural drag that centers the feminine as a signifier for the messiness of Blackness in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.⁸⁷ This reading is vital for thinking about the role of queerness and femininity in highlighting the epidermalization,⁸⁸ or Blackening, experienced by Cárdona Otero in You Don't Look Like—. Yet the antiblack violence experienced and narrated by the Black diasporic performer could fall by the wayside through its refiguration as play, parody, or messiness centered on femininity. For example, in a crucial moment when he literally Blackens himself with blackface paint for an audition, Cárdona Otero hums the tune of “El Africano.”⁸⁹ He performs a mode of Blackening here that is intimately connected to and theatricalizes Wynter's claim that we must continue to interrogate the eugenic/dysselected sociogenic code, and this is exactly what Cárdona Otero does with his aesthetic practice: he performs a theatrical deconstruction of ethnonational antiblackness through an embodied theorization of the universal myths assigned to Black(ened) peoples. His performance uncovers ennegrecimiento as an aesthetic mode of meaning-making, always refining and revising the eugenic/dysselected sociogenic code through Puerto Rican creolization.⁹⁰ Cárdona Otero performs a doubling experience of Blackening, offering a critique of ethnonationalism by showing the nation's antiblack aesthetics while reproducing and reperforming his own experience of dysselection as a form of Blackening that haunts the antiblack weather of the spaces he performs in. For Cárdona Otero, then, the “fact of blackness” provides another narrative for the antiblackness of Puerto Rican ethnonationalism. The intellectual force of Cárdona Otero's art derives from his ability to foreground the embodied knowledge of the intersectional experiences of the “African diaspora as an object for thought.”⁹¹

The images Cárdona Otero uses in You Don't Look Like— portray Blackness as matter that is fungible in gendered and sexualized representation, as C. Riley Snorton, Meredith Lee, and others have discussed.⁹² Cárdona Otero's Blackness becomes the central protagonist in his performance of a gendered and sexualized critique of Latin American hegemonic nationalist representation. The two images above (figs. 1 and 2), for instance, show the varied libidinal fantasies of gendered Blackness for Latin American and Latinx audiences. On the right, Cárdona Otero offers himself to his audience in the form of the Santera Caribeña, an image that recalls de Burgos's comments on Black North American “savagery.” The Santera looks rather stoic, solemn, and wise—seemingly always available for the curious passerby who wants to set aside his Catholicism or Pentecostalism for the day. On the left, Cárdona Otero portrays an exaggerated version of la ama negra (the mammy stereotype). She stands in a polite, offering stance, yet she is barefoot. He also presents an image of himself as the jíbaro type, but in this image he ruptures nineteenth- and twentieth-century Creole elite writers’ imaginaries with his own embodied Blackening of the white(ned) nationalist trope of the Puerto Rican peasant. These photographs seem to display what Kara Keeling describes as “a condition of existence, or a reality, produced and reproduced by and within the regimes of the image.”⁹³ And yet Cárdona Otero's images are informed by a hemispheric Black queer studies critique of the “regimes of the image” that thereby places him within the broader ensemble of Black queer performance. Cárdona Otero's practice produces radical knowledge that is centered in a diaspora read as Black and queer; as such, it rejects the Puerto Rican ethnonational ideal. This rejection allows for the formation of Black queer Antillean worlds within and against ethnonational belonging.

Conclusion: Toward the Ennegrecide (the Blackened)

Indeed, race is socially constructed, but the symbolic overdetermination of the ethnonational “human” calls for a bolder analysis that can take on the biological determinism as well as the folklorizing racism sustaining antiblack and heteronormative violence. Analyzing the aesthetic encounter between blanqueamiento and ennegrecimiento allows a rendering of de Burgos's patriarchal and national captivity through the lens of racial antagonism and contradiction as a material and painful site of careful self-interrogation. The poetic and seemingly feminist understanding of ethnicity driving de Burgos's artistic production allows us to read her perverse desire for, as well as rejection of, her own Blackness, offering readers a window onto the gendered antiblackness found within the insularismo of Puerto Ricanness. No doubt, this antiblackness also pains the Afro-Boricua de Burgos. But this pain produces pleasure both in metaphorizing Spanish Caribbean Blackness and in denigrating American Caribbean migrant Blackness.

Questioning this diasporic ethnonational antiblackness—spatially from Loíza to Harlem and temporally from de Burgos to Cárdona Otero—allows me to reread, rewatch, and listen again to Puerto Rican aesthetics through an ennegrecide (Blackened) critical practice centered in the Black diaspora. De Burgos and Cárdona Otero together theorize the affective violence experienced by forcing movement within the psychic and material stasis caused when ethnicity and nationalism collude with the mechanisms of antiblackness in making aesthetics. The importance of this theorization is twofold: while an analysis of white supremacy and the structure of coloniality is critical for understanding Puerto Rican aesthetics, an interrogation of antiblackness and its role in the reproduction of Puerto Ricanness, specifically the ways in which fantasy and imaginary take form through bodies, is also crucial. Further, such an interrogation of antiblackness in Puerto Rican aesthetics also makes clear how national and colonial policy work together to delegitimate Black(ened) Puerto Ricans. Here I also refer to the figures that emerge from the shackled restraints of Rikers Island to the corners of Caguas streets. In other words, I take seriously the intersectional claim to work from the bottom, the underground, or from those most vulnerable to antiblackness on the island and in its diaspora.

Notes

Works Cited