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UC Merced TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World Title Introduction to the Special Issue: Another Turn of the Screw Toward Hispanic and Lusophone Whiteness Studies

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Journal TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 8(2)

ISSN 2154-1353

Author Persánch, JM

Publication Date 2018-01-01

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Introduction to the Special Issue: Another Turn of the Screw Toward Hispanic and Lusophone Whiteness Studies ______________________________________________ GUEST EDITOR, JM. PERSÁNCH WESTERN OREGON UNIVERSITY “Al día siguiente vino del Oriente una gran canoa con 24 hombres, todos mancebos, muy ataviados y armados de arcos, flechas y escudos, de buena figura y no negros, sino más blancos que los otros que he visto en las Indias, de lindos gestos y hermosos cuerpos, con los cabellos cortados al uso de Castilla.’ (Cristóbal Colón, La carta de Cristóbal Colón anunciando el descubrimiento del Nuevo Mundo, 1493.) “El blanco que se aísla, aísla al negro. El negro que se aísla provoca aislarse al blanco. En Cuba no hay temor a la guerra de razas. Hombre es más que blanco, más que mulato, más que negro.” (Jose Martí, “Mi raza,” 1893.) To date, extensive scholarly research exists in the field of Whiteness Studies. Stemming from, and overlapping with, some premises of Post-Colonial Studies, this new discipline soon found home in the American, British, Australian and South African academies to examine white racial formations. Thus, in its beginnings, scholars shifted their focus from scrutinizing minoritized ‘Others’ to examining how white hegemonic identities came to be placed in relation to concepts of normalcy, privilege and oppression. Although the Whiteness field may be grounded in ideas of pan-Africanist scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, and anti-colonialist theorists like James Baldwin, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fannon, it is with Theodore W. Allen’s White Supremacy in United States History (1973) and Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (1975), that the discipline allegedly begins to emerge. Allen offered a definition of whiteness beyond phenotype and pigment in relation to religious and racial oppression in order to explain how the Irish, considered to be non-white Celtics, became white during the United States’ Reconstruction Era (1865-1877). Consequently, Allen’s theory argues that the Irish “became white” in the elite’s interests to maintain their privileges. This conceptual white expansion, according to Allen, established a solid white middle class as a mechanism for social control, thereby preventing the Irish from joining forces with the African American and other non-white rebellions seeking freedom and equality. A similar process of assimilation into whiteness would also later occur with Italians in the nineteenth century and with Jews in the middle of the twentieth century. Accordingly, due to this ability of

2 | Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 whiteness to morph overtime, Allen essentially understood it as an oppressive ideological category. Henceforth, the field has expanded incommensurably encompassing at least four stages. In the 1980s scholars showed interest in probing the centrality of whiteness in race relations. The discipline became tremendously multidisciplinary in the 1990s by incorporating commentators from Cultural Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, and many other fields. During this second wave, scholars eminently explored the centrality of the white subject to convey its cultural invisibility or normalcy as a privilege, and racism in the public sphere.1 In parallel, toward the end of the 1990s Richard Dyer published White: Essays on Race and Culture (1997), where he, examining their representation under the lens of Christianity, race, gender and colonialism, exposed the conception of whiteness purely as non-bodily ideals. Simultaneously, George Lipsitz’s publication The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998) deconstructed racism as public (political) and private (social); it defined whiteness as a structural system that benefits and protects white interests. In the wake of a third period, scholars like Fyre Jacobson in Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), began to conceive whiteness as a highly malleable category to explain the contingencies between political, cultural and social arenas. In my view the fourth stage regarding the study of Whiteness may have begun when Donald Trump announced his candidacy for U.S. President and, most definitively, he was elected. His election forces a revisiting of old-fashioned forms of racial discourses, in addition to the re-negotiating and re-articulating of racial identities, in a period of an apparent white backlash against the results of the post-WWII political push for a more inclusive and multicultural society and political correctness. In this sense, I contend that whiteness is again morphing, redefining its boundaries in trying to regain, to invigorate itself at the center of power relations. The Trump administration seems intent on neutralizing–when unable to eradicate–any domestic actors viewed as non-white agents who could change national dynamics, thus whitening the country implicitly through policies for which the wall on the Mexican border emerges as the symbol: these policies include the threat of deportation to millions (around 11.4 millions) unauthorized immigrants by ICE; the change of immigration policies as, for example, terminating chainedmigration; suspending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA); ending the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of 250,000 Salvadorians; enacting a ban on travellers from six predominantly Muslim countries (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen). In short, as CNN reported: “President Donald Trump expressed frustration behind closed doors with

3 | Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 people coming to the US from ‘shithole countries’” (Watkins and Phillip n/p). Those very same people his administration aims to “kick out of the country.” However, if we are to recognize that a central tenet of Whiteness Studies entails a reevaluation of History, and conduct a rereading of cultural products in racial terms to assess the effects of the structural paradigms of whiteness in contemporary societies, the following question arises: Can we fully understand the nature of white racial formation, its historical strategies and cultural forms of structural power in isolation? In Re-Orienting Whiteness (2009), Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus express their concern about how although “the narrowed national focus has not emerged as a prominent concern within existing critics of the field, we argue that it is in fact of central importance” (4). More so, these researchers continue to make their point about the existing contradictions in the field, as well as its current limitations, when they explain how despite pretentions to an almost universal applicability, distinct U.S. academic debates, as well as specific political projects and disavowals (particularly of the settler-colonial underpinnings of the United States), silently orient the field. In many ways, debates about whiteness have primarily reflected a turf war over leadership in the field of labor history in the United States. The issues at stake are far too important to allow them to be subsumed within such parochial concerns. (4; Original emphasis) Yet, though in retrospect, it is unsurprisingly that, after the end of the Cold War in 1989, many U.S. Marxist theorists sought shelter in the (not coincidental?) rise of Whiteness Studies during the 1990s to continue to theorize about class inequalities in the United States. In carrying out this methodological transition, American commentators validated Stuart Hall’s racial premise by sanctioning that “race is the modality in which class is lived, the medium which it is appropriated and fought through” (30). The greater flaw with the latter Marxist approach is not subsuming race within class, but rather doing so carelessly without establishing a transcultural relationality. This lack of relationality in the field makes it impossible to discern, for example, what is specific to American whiteness and what might be common features of other “whitenesses;” thus, undermining “pretentions to an almost universal applicability” while implicitly displacing to the margins any other nation’s racial dynamics and conceptions of what it means to be white across the globe. Peter Kolchin highlighted the existing lack of relationality in the discipline. Kolchin specifically evaluated the “assumption–sometimes asserted and sometimes unspoken–that the racism they describe is uniquely American and that American whiteness can be understood in

4 | Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 isolation” (170-71).2 Following this statement, it could be argued that the tendency of US commentators may have been to exclude from the dialogue other racial, political, and cultural practices regarding plausible conceptions of both race and whiteness. Taking Kolchin’s approach even further, since the field of Whiteness Studies has mostly engaged with conceptions of whiteness within Anglo-centred racial traditions and is thus written in English and concerned with the white presence in former British settler-nations, one could claim that the lack of relationality is indeed even greater than initially assumed. More than a decade ago in Postcolonial Whiteness (2005), Alfred López voiced his concern in expressing that by accepting as normalcy this lack of cultural diversity, the discipline “would itself be guilty of uncritically privileging whitenesses that speak English, and even of reinforcing the grim fact of English as the world’s preeminent White language” (9). Unfortunately, with rare, punctual exceptions,3 there has been a lack of response to, and engagement with, this phenomenon in the field of Hispanic Studies, where most critical commentators still seem to be focusing their interests and efforts on examining subalterns’ identities and representations. While these studies are very important and successfully provide explanations, as to how minority groups are racialized and minoritized, I often find that they do not offer sufficient insight into the processes by which the structures of difference and the processes of legitimization operate and replicate in society. At this juncture, I would suggest that a greater analytical scope concentrating on several ‘types’ of white cultural paradigms (including Hispanic, Luso, and Latin American societies) is much needed for our understanding of historic racial dialectics, as well as the persisting racial effects on contemporary societies. Based on these premises, and in response to the enormous vacuum in Hispanic Studies regarding whiteness and Whiteness Studies regarding Hispanism (Peninsular, Latin American, Caribbean, U.S. Latino/a, Afro-Hispanic Studies), I reason the need for an emergence of a Hispanic, Lusophone Whiteness Studies field. I am also prompted to say that the aforementioned field –in coalescence with other world white identities– is essential to enrich our comprehension of both contemporary racial signifying practices and white identity formation(s). I anticipate that the emergence of this interdisciplinary field will benefit a transcultural dialogue about whiteness exponentially, creating the basis for a better understanding of racial conceptualizations and societal dynamics within a larger context. The rise of such scrutiny of whiteness would be decidedly beneficial to the field: on the one hand, it would contribute to conceptualizing whiteness in relational terms, highly nurturing the fact that racial categories (as well as those of gender, class, political, social, and popular), imbued with different cultural traditions, are all interdependent; on the other hand, the

5 | Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 presence of a major relationality in the examination of whiteness will also acknowledge the constant exchange among different cultural practices regarding race, whiteness, and their historical processes. In Pamela Perry and Alexis Shotwell’s words, by means of conducting a relational understanding of the world, we would strengthen the notion that the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexual identities fundamentally happen through this relational process between the individual and ‘society.’ Understanding these social-institutional processes of subject formation and the ways power is implicated in them can lead to critical self and group reflection and deconstruction, and greater awareness of where one is situated within the complex matrix of power and hierarchy. (34-35) Henceforth, a Hispanic/Luso-oriented contribution to the discipline will make it possible to better comprehend the racial dynamics in which our contemporary globalized world falls into place. Overall, the rise of these studies will help to better understand the racial dynamics of a highly interconnected world. What follows is an issue on Luso, Hispanic Whiteness Studies that includes seven essays that conceptualize and scrutinize whiteness in Latin America and Europe. In “From Oppressive to Benign: A Comparative Latin American History of Whiteness in Brazil,” Darién J. Davis provides a brief history of how Brazilian intellectuals transformed the oppressive whiteness associated with conquest and the colonial project to what he calls a “benign whiteness.” Davis explains how Iberian colonizers created a caste system to maintain white supremacy even as society became more hybrid through so-called “miscegenation,” syncretism and other forms of cultural mixing. In doing, so the author explores how elite whites slowly built ideas, after independence, of nationhood privileging whiteness and offering limited incentives and opportunities to non-whites. Davis argues that after World War I, Brazilian cultural elites along with the bourgeois state, succeeded in promoting and institutionalizing notions of cultural hybridity as a unique cultural trait that bound all Brazilians together in a way distinct and superior to the notions found in the United States. The patriotic trope of hybridity masked the white privilege while benign whiteness helped to stymy cross-racial solidarity among non-white populations even as it continued to marginalize those populations. In the essay Davis demonstrates how white and almost white (a term that Darien borrows from Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil) helped propagate the idea of Brazilian benign whiteness, an ideology that continues to impact Latin Americans and Latin American migrants today. The second essay, “The Integration of the White into the Community of Color, or How the Europeans Became Brazilian in the Twentieth Century,” also deals with the Brazilian experience regarding whiteness. In it, Luisa Farah Schwartzman bases her premises on the fact

6 | Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 that the Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and North America generally assume that immigrants are less white and considered less “modern” than the nationals of the countries where they arrive. Farah Schwartzman’s purpose here is to examine what happens when we apply the idea of “immigrant integration” to European immigrants who arrived in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. She argues that these immigrants and their descendants have faced a contradiction between integrating into a national “imagined community,” constructed as “mixed-race,” and participating in local, national and global projects of white “modernity.” The paper explores how this contradiction was historically constructed in Brazil, how some Brazilians of European descent resolved it, and how we can think of the relationship between race, modernity, nationhood and immigrant integration from a more global perspective. While Davis and Farah Schwartzman’s essays contain studies of whiteness in Latin America, including the Caribbean, and Brazil, five other contributions examine conceptions of whiteness that are grounded in European soil. Daniel Herrera Cepero offers a study of the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca regarding his chromatic uses of blackness and whiteness to nurture his poetry. The author argues that the philosophy of Frederick Nietzsche influenced Lorca at an early age thereby becoming one of his references in seeking a profound Dionysian truth whose antithesis is in the Apollonian whiteness. According to Herrera Cepero, Lorca’s quest for this profound Dionysian truth entailed, in the aesthetic level, the unmasking of the 1920s dehumanized art through the blackness/whiteness paradigm. To prove it, Lorca’s work shows an obsession with Andalusian cante hondo as well as with African American music and dance, which resulted in his poetic representation of gypsies and blacks in the acclaimed Romancero gitano and Poeta en Nueva York, respectively. Anchored in the same period of the 1920s, Eva Woods Peiró shifts our focus from poetry to film in order to reconsider how Spanish film culture celebrated both aspirations of technological power and the enjoyment of or anxiety around technology. Specifically, her essay “Whiteness as Airmindedness: Juan de la Cierva (1923-1925), Film and the Airplane” explores how Spanish cinema historicized a set of propaganda films between 1923 and 1925 about Juan de la Cierva’s invention, the Autogiro, a machine that fused the airplane with the helicopter. According to Woods Peiró, these short hybrid media artefacts—a coalescence of documentary, actualité and advertisement—promoted de la Cierva’s invention while also drawing upon and furthering ideas about whiteness and its intimate, if not generative, connection with technology. Balancing theoretical frameworks provided by Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler with Richard Dyer and Judy Wajcman’s arguments about the raced and gendered construction of technology,

7 | Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 the author argues that these cinematic objects, which entertained cinemagoers and served military interests, were deeply saturated in the discourse of whiteness. The implicit assumptions of this race rhetoric, built into the material specificity of the airplane, were the control of the Spanish and European-identified race over this conquest of the air and the maintenance of the white viewer-driver-pilot. Also, through cinema, in “Spain is (not so) Different: Whitening Spain through Late Francoist Comedy,” Martin Repinecz reasons that another effort to articulate Spain’s whiteness, besides the white gypsy narrative of popular musical cinema from the 1920s-1950s, (See Woods Peiró, 2012), can be found in the popular cinema of late Francoism. The popular comedy cinema of this period (roughly 1960-1975), known as comedia sexy, comedia celtibérica, or simply landismo, aimed to shift the international perception of Spain away from racialized stereotypes of the nation’s Africanness in order to move it closer to a white European identity. Troubled by the reputation of Francoism as anachronistic in a context of global decolonization, U.S. civil rights, and rapid social and economic change within Spain, the regime used the popular cinema industry, which was closely aligned with it ideologically, to portray Spain as upwardly mobile on a geopolitical hierarchy that was imagined as a black/white racial paradigm. Specifically, by intertwining the macho ibérico / sueca narrative trope with racist caricatures of blacks, this cinema aimed to accentuate Spain’s upward geopolitical and racial mobility by contrasting it with the fixity of racial others, while simultaneously retaining a deracialized, commodifiable “difference” as a competitive advantage on the world stage. My contribution to the volume, entitled “From Impurity of Thought Toward the Glocalization of Whiteness in Spain,” is structured in three parts. Firstly, the introduction–by no means intended to be exhaustive but to provide a concise survey–aims to help to visualize the trajectory of Spain’s racial rhetoric in relation to whiteness, and its European counterparts’ historical processes of racialization, thus offering an explanation to the acute lack of studies regarding Spanish whiteness. Altogether, the introduction suggests how Italian humanism, central and northern Protestantism, the French Africanization rhetoric of Spanish Whiteness, as much as Spain’s colonial legacy, all contributed to largely shaped an ambiguous conception of Spanishness that has often been held off-whiteness. The latter review will lead us to a study that revisits the cultural, symbolical transformation following the Transición Española through Amanece, que no es poco (1988) to examine how Spain disregarded notions of mestizaje in this period, beginning to bound up Spanish whiteness with European multiculturalism, as much as with a long-imagined, Western modernity. The analysis demonstrates how Spain–regardless of the new multicultural ideals–instrumentalized Ngé Ndomo’s blackness merely as an ideological means to

8 | Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 raise awareness of social distance in the Spanish white racial formation. Specifically, the essay proves how Spanish film continued to replicate colonial tropes using blackness in order to redefine Spain’s white national identity, while silencing the black subaltern voice by subsuming the experience of blackness into the cultural practices of whiteneness. The essay also shows how this film strengthened the problematization of the presence of blackness regarding national identity coding hierarchical structures that established patterns of racial behavior that privileged the centrality and subjectivity of whiteness. To conclude, I link the study to the present day’s racial conceptions, assuming that, in a culturally globalized world, Spain may have decisively integrated into a relatively homogeneous, glocal sensibility of whiteness. While all the above contributions deal with historic discourses and cinematic representations of whiteness in Spain, in the last included essay Kathleen Honora Connolly provides a study of Spanish television with regards to “Masculinity, Whiteness, and Eastern Migrants in Spanish Prime Time.” She specifically analyses representations of whiteness and its imbrication with masculinity and the construction of Eastern European migrants in the Spanish TV drama Mar de plástico (2015). The essay explores how the violent, white masculinity of the protagonist, Héctor Aguirre, frames him as a protector of the weak and victimized, and the type of man who can resolve the many problems plaguing Spanish society. By contrast, she contends, the whiteness of Eastern European migrants is portrayed as insidious and threatening to the safety and social structure of the community. Honora Connolly’s main argument is that both engagements with whiteness stem from feelings of uncertainty and anger in broader Spanish society with entrenched economic and class hierarchies, as well as a reaction to changing demographics and new influxes of immigrants. Moreover, she establishes that the innovative aspects of the show are: a desire to create a well-produced, cinematic experience as well as to engage with socially relevant topics, unfortunately, are unproductive because the narrative falls back on stereotyped portrayals of immigrants and a hegemonic, warrior-hero masculinity. Overall, this issue offers a thorough and comprehensive interdisciplinary study of whiteness including a fair range of aesthetic forms, periods and traditions. We, the guest editor and contributors of this special issue on Hispanic and Luso Whiteness Studies, wish to express our gratitude to Transmodernity for supporting and fostering this incipient discussion. We hope that it will become an intense, enriching, interdisciplinary scholarly dialogue, one that will contribute to the rethinking of how the structures of difference and the processes of legitimization operate and replicate in contemporary societies and towards a revealing of white structures in the context of Lusophone countries and global Hispanism.

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See, for example, Toni Morrison’s acclaimed essay Playing in the Dark (1992). See Eric Kaufmann and David Roediger debate on the suitability, or not, regarding the applicability of US paradigms in other national contexts found in Ethnicities’ “Whiteness–Too Blunt an Instrument? A Reply to David Roediger” and “A Reply to Eric Kaufmann”, respectively. 22

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Works Cited Allen, Theodore W. White Supremacy in United States History. Insurgent Worker, 1973. Allen, Theodore, and Jeffrey B. Perry. Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race. Center for the Study of Working Class Life, Dept. of Economics, State University of New York, 2006. Blatter, Joachim. “Glocalization.” Enciclopaedia Britannica. 21 of May 2013. ˂https://www.britannica.com/topic/glocalization˃ Boucher, Leigh, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus. Re-Orienting Whiteness. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Colón, Cristóbal. La carta de Cristóbal Colón anunciando el descubrimiento del Nuevo Mundo. (Pedro Posa, 1493). Hauser y Menet, 1956. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. Psychology Press, 1997. Hall, Stuart. Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979. Hutchinson, 1987. Jacobson, Fyre. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard University Press, 1998. Kolchin, Peter. “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America.” The Journal of American History, Vol. 89, No. 1, 2002, pp. 154-73. Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Temple University Press, 1998. López, Alfred J. Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire. State University of New York Press, 2005. Martí, José. “Mi raza.” (1893) Biblioteca virtual universal, 2003. Perry, Pamela and Alexis Shotwell. “Relational Understanding and White Antiracist Praxis.” Sociological Theory, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2009, pp. 33-50. Watkins, Eli and Abby Phillp. “Trump decries immigrants from ‘shithole countries’ coming to US.” CNN January 12, 2018. ˂https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/11/politics/immigrantsshithole-countries-trump/index.html˃

UC Merced TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World Title From Oppressive to Benign: A Comparative History of the Construction of Whiteness in Brazil in the Post Abolition Era

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ISSN 2154-1353

Author Davis, Darién J


License CC BY 4.0 Peer reviewed

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From Oppressive to Benign: A Comparative History of the Construction of Whiteness in Brazil in the Post Abolition Era

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DARIÉN J. DAVIS MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE Abstract This essay deconstructs the ways in which Brazilian patriotic intellectuals transformed the oppressive whiteness of the Portuguese colonial project to what I call “benign whiteness.” After providing a brief history of the development of whiteness and hybridity in Latin America, I highlight patriotism and racism in thinkers such as Cuban José Martí, Uruguayan Enrique Rodó, and Brazilian Euclides da Cunha. After World War I, Brazilian cultural elites, along with the bourgeois state, promoted and institutionalized cultural hybridity as a unique trait that bound Brazilians together in a superior way to the United States. The patriotic trope of hybridity masked white privilege while benign whiteness stymied racial solidarity even as it continued to marginalize non-white populations. I show how whites and many almost whites along with foreign intellectuals, helped propagate the idea of Brazilian benign whiteness, an ideology that continues to impact Latin Americans today. Key Words: Luso-whiteness, whiteness, Latin America, Brazil, hybridity, post-abolition. In the 1993 song “Haiti,” Brazilian singer-songwriters Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil provide a poignant commentary on the complexity of race and power in Latin America. The song criticizes Brazil’s racist social hierarchy while focusing on the beating and murder of 111 prisoners in Sao Paulo who were “presos indefesos, mas presos são quase todos pretos/ Ou quase pretos, ou quase brancos quase pretos de tão pobres/E pobres são como podres e todos sabem como se tratam os pretos.” While the song denounces racism in Brazil, it also describes the construction of “whiteness” and “blackness” and each one’s relationship to power in a matter-of-fact style. The use of “quase” (almost) underscores the hybrid and fluid Latin American construction of race in general and whiteness in particular while implicitly indicting white supremacy as the main force behind racism and injustice (See Veloso and Gil, track 1). “Haiti” stands as a popular intervention in a long tradition of Latin American texts that promote hybridity as the essence of racial identity formations in Latin America. While miscegenation, mestizaje, and syncretism have all been de facto influences on the creation of Latin American societies since the arrival of Europeans and Africans in the fifteenth century, ideas of Latin America as a region of hybrid nations free of racial prejudice only emerged as a patriotic trope after the end of slavery and the emergence of the United States as a

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Davis, Darién J. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018.

hegemonic power. In the post-World War I era, white Latin American cultural elites reimagined whiteness as a non-oppressive benign force that was simply part of a Latin American color spectrum. Simultaneously, these elites projected their countries on to the world stage as modern white or almost white nations. The hegemony of the United States provided the backdrop against which this trope of Latin American hybridity emerged under white tutelage. The history of that construction in Brazil represents a powerful Latin American example. When European empires began to wither away after World War I, and the nation-state became the predominant political structure on the international world stage, many Latin American intellectuals, almost all white or almost white, helped to successfully construct and institutionalize an idea of Latin American whiteness that idealized hybridity (from the cosmic race, a nation of mestizos, to racial democracy). Moreover, white or near white writers instrumentalized the contributions of blacks and other non-whites thereby masking the entrenchment of white privilege and white superiority as a fundamental aspect of the new republics. Latin American intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s built upon the ideas of white superiority of the colonial past and established a dominant way of thinking about the region that continues to hold currency among many Latin Americans today. Over time, the cultural elites managed, controlled, and transformed colonial Iberian racial ideologies of the superiority of whiteness and European-ness that once benefitted the Portuguese and the Spanish from Europe, creating new patriotic ideas that would include “mixture” as part of the national family. In order to understand the masking of whiteness in the twentieth century, it is important to understand the three pre-twentieth century political processes that provided the foundation of Latin American whiteness and white domination: the creation of the Ibero-American caste system; the genocide of African-descendant and indigenous populations; and the use of migration as a tool of whitening. The Colonial Background According to Juan de Sepúlveda, sixteenth-century Aristotelian scholar and advisor to the Spanish crown, white Europeans had a legitimate right to conquest since the powerful were meant to dominate the weak, and the white Christian Iberians were clearly the more powerful. Sepúlveda asked how the Spaniards had any “doubt that these people, so uncultivated, so barbarous, and so contaminated with impiety and lewdness, have not been justly conquered?. . .

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For numerous and grave reasons these barbarians are obliged to accept the rule of the Spaniards according to natural law” (Hanke and Rausch 164-68). Consequently, both the Spanish and the Portuguese created similar hierarchies of racial identities that privileged white Iberians in law and practice. Non-whites were able to secure limited privileges based on their connections and affiliations with the wealthier white elite or, in rare cases, through the accumulation of their own wealth. In 1494, the Spanish and Portuguese agreed to divide and conquer the new lands in the Atlantic world with the signing of Treaty of Tordesillas. From 1580-1640, Spain and Portugal were joined under the Spanish Hapsburgs Phillip II, III and IV and Brazil fell under Spanish authority. When Brazil was under Spanish rule, however, Spain still expected the Portuguese to be financially responsible for defending Brazil and carrying out many of the Hapsburg’s policies causing tensions that would eventually lead the two empires to separate in 1640 (Schwartz 33-48). Both empires created social hierachies that defined European whiteness as superior to American whiteness (Creoles and Mazombos) and attempted to legally differentiate the progeny of unions between whiteness and indigenous mixture (Mestizos or Mestiços) and Iberian and African mixtures (Mulatos or Pardos). The dominance of whiteness expanded with the aid of diseases, war, and prohibitions that decimated and segregated indigenous populations, and limited rights and movement of enslaved Africans and their progeny. The Spanish and Portuguese authorities instituted a racialized system in which the conquered often received incentives to venerate whiteness with the hope of more opportunities or possible social mobility. Marginalized married women and concubines could often secure a better standing in society if their white Iberian overlords took favor on them, recognized them, or claimed their offspring. The Spanish and Portuguese crown bestowed titles that recognized political power and the Spanish crown went as far as to create a system in which they sold certificates of whiteness to aspiring people of mixed African and European backgrounds. The purchase and acceptance of these certificates allowed a limited number of non-whites to climb the social ladder to acquire either a socially-constructed whiteness or what JM. Persánch has called “rhetorical whiteness,” signaling a type of tactical assimilation (Twinam 124-45; Persánch 50-53). By the end of the colonial period, whiteness remained entrenched in the Latin American ethos as an identity of power even as sexual unions across racialized groups and syncretism created myriad racial identities with limited rights compared to European whites. For example,

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Iberians limited the occupations that Indians and people of African descent could practice regardless of economic considerations. At the same time, a select group of individuals with higher economic and political status had the capacity to whiten themselves legally through a process called gracias al sacar as the cases of merchant Julian Valenzuela and José Manuel Valdes and others indicate. In most Latin American societies, similar social structures emerged, although unofficial and official recognition of miscegenation blurred the strictly dual relationship of power to racial purity and whiteness (Twinam 2015). The general distinctions between the white conquerors and the non-white oppressed populations in this framework included a racialized geographical determinism in which American born whites were also deemed inferior to Europeans and assured European settlers of superior positions in societies. Thus, Peninsular Europeans were socially superior to Europeans born in the Americas (Criollos in Spanish America, Mazombos in Brazil). The fact that selected pardos and mulatos would later be able to purchase certificates of whiteness under certain conditions defined by the Crown facilitating a perception of an economic-based ethnic fluidity (Twinam 330). Over time, the emerging class system in Latin America became incompatible with the Iberian attempt at strict categorization of race. However, many Spanish and Portuguese men recognized their mestizo or mulato children and raised them with the privileges of whiteness even though by law they could not be able to hold many of the highest political offices or practice certain professions. Many African and indigenous mothers raised other mestizos and mulatos without these privileges. Patriarchy established a male-determined pattern of racial power in which class often played a mitigating role. These contradictions were not incidental, but the racial codes and dynamics must be seen as a concerted linguistic and cultural justification to maintain a cohesive Hispanic empire. Through the incorporation of “outsiders,” (that is, Africans) the Spanish and Portuguese pursued policies in the Americas similar to those used in in the formation of the Iberian Peninsula’s nation-state (Persánch 49-51). By the end of the eighteenth century, European Enlightenment had produced a new philosophy of liberalism that called for the equality, liberty, and fraternity of men. These were the supposed tenets of the 1789 French Revolution that would have a direct impact on Latin America independence. For Latin American white elites, liberty meant freedom of white males in the Americas from the restrictions imposed by white Iberians. Equality referred to equal standing of white Latin Americans with the Spanish and Portuguese. Only in Haiti, a colony that was overwhelmingly black, did abolition of slavery and independence go hand in hand. In other

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regions, independence preceded abolition in some cases by twenty to thirty years, and in the case of Brazil by almost seventy years. Independence leader Simón Bolívar frequently expressed his fear of a black revolution happening in South America, and other Creoles proposed ideas to prevent a race war (Geggus 25-27). The major obstacle to economic and political dominance of the white Latin American upper classes had been the white peninsulares who controlled trade and commerce and reinforced the distinction between white peninsular and white and almost white Creoles. Nonetheless, emerging American consciousness incorporated the racist beliefs that European dominance was justified by natural law, thus excluding non-white racial groups from their discussions of national identity. When new Latin American leaders evoked the Mexican or Brazilian nation after the wars of independence (1810s to the 1830s) in which many non-whites participated, they essentially meant white Creole Mexico or white Luso-Brazil. Indians and Blacks as well as mestizos, particularly those of lower economic rank were absent from this formulation. Aversion to blackness and indigeneity was fundamental to the American nations attempting to promote modern images, which ironically embraced the Europeanness of their former colonizers. Many states also pursued discriminatory migration policies that prohibited migration from areas that white elites considered undesirable and created campaigns that attempted to attract migrants from Europe, particularly northern Europe. In Argentina, Chile and Brazil for example, states promised land and opportunity to white migrants from Europe. These practices aimed to preserve or institute whiteness as the dominant force (Persánch 60). Independence, Whiteness and Modernity Simón Bolívar (1783-1830), the South American revolutionary and father of South American independence, recognized that in Venezuela the European had mixed with the African and the indigenous in the common nation, which he called the “womb of our common mother,” (Bushnell 42, 96). Yet, like most Creoles of his day, Bolívar was intensely skeptical of the ability of the non-white masses to partake fully in the new United States of South America that he envisioned (Bushnell 12-30). By the turn of the nineteenth century, Africans, indigenous people, and their offspring constituted a majority of the population of the Americas. Although Bolívar was initially reluctant to include blacks in his campaign against the Spanish, prejudice gave way to political expediency (Rout 126). Lieutenant Leonardo Infante, General José Laurencio Silva, Navy hero José Prudencio Padilla, and Afro-Uruguayans Dionisio Oribe and Joaquín Lenzina all

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fought with their white Creole counterparts against Spain. Nonetheless, even today Latin Americans honor very few black or indigenous men as founding fathers of their respective nations. Even in Cuba, a country that is predominantly black and mixed, white Creoles Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and José Martí occupy the most honored ranks in the Cuban collective consciousness. As the nation-states defined their geopolitical territories, national consolidation and order became essential. Within this context, post-colonial elites wanted to ensure that their nations possessed the appropriate labor force to guarantee the effective functioning of their economies. Bolívar’s white Creole identity served him well because, despite his privileged position, he was able to express solidarity with his Spanish American brothers, whether enslaved or free. The common Spanish enemy had provided a cause around which Bolívar galvanized the support of the popular masses with whom he sympathized. The Haitian masses had proven loyal during the rebellion against French colonialism in Saint Dominique, and Bolívar counted on the colonial masses to fill the ranks of his armies. Bolívar espoused a language of unity despite the anti-black feelings that members of his class harbored (Geggus 25-26). To fight colonialism, Creoles and Luso-Americans planted the seeds of nationalism that would sprout into separate nations (Deutsch 1-16). Nationalism, according to Edward Said, accompanies decolonization in two stages: firstly, resistance against an outsider; secondly, ideological resistance when efforts are made to forge a community against all pressures (209). Among Latin American countries, cultural whiteness as ideal was the glue that would sustain the fractured caste system left by the Iberian colonial project. Men like Bolívar utilized the rhetoric of an incipient nationalism to forge a patria that would be ruled by white Creoles. Neither white Spanish Americans nor white Brazilians conceived of their nations as multiethnic communities of citizens. Their primary goal was to expel Spain and Portugal from the region, not to articulate a vision for resolving racial disparities in their newly formed countries. Argentina provides us with an example of the cultural dynamics in the region. Argentine intellectuals opposed to the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas from 1829-1852 produced a wealth of anti-Rosas materials that was also anti-black and anti-American. The Argentine intellectual discourse against dictatorship in the nineteenth century provided a curious window into whiteness in Latin America as white Eurocentric Argentine intellectuals such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Esteban Echeverría allied themselves with a discourse of whiteness, one that they used to vilify Rosas, associating him with blacks, mulattos, and the popular masses, or

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what Sarmiento calls “barbarism.” After Rosas’s defeat in 1852, Sarmiento and others would call for the importation of “civilization” that in essence, meant white European migration (Sarmiento 18, 249; Echeverría 7-34). Simultaneously, he argued that Latin America’s ability to survive would depend on its ability to follow the example of North America, which had successfully transferred European values across the Atlantic (Sarmiento 245-248). In a similar fashion, elite white Brazilians clamored for the creation of an empire ruled by the white son of the Portuguese monarch in 1822 when Dom Pedro I, born in Portugal, declared Brazilian independence. When Pedro abdicated in 1831, his white Brazilian-born son Dom Pedro II succeeded him at the age of five when people of African descent represented the majority of the population (Buccifero 174). However, Pedro II did not govern Brazil until his coronation in July 1841 at the age of fifteen. The ascendance of an emperor perceived by his American subjects as legitimate ushered in a period of relative peace, distinct from the socially and politically turbulent decade from 1831-1841 when the Brazilian regency governed Brazil on Pedro II’s behalf. Indeed, having a white Brazilian-born emperor of royal blood was critical to the vision of the newly independent Brazilian elite, and Pedro II would govern Brazil for 58 years at a time when the country continued to rely heavily on enslaved African labor. Brazil strove to maintain a positive image in the international arena, and U.S. scrutiny was of particular importance as Brazilians had attained an impressive commercial trade with their northern neighbor by the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite the centrality of African slavery until 1888 in Brazil, and the fact that the majority of the population was of African descent, white Brazilians emphasized the European aspects of Brazilian culture. Transnational elite class alliances in this context became even more important than political affiliation or crossracial alliance within national boundaries. Thinkers such as Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910), a major spokesman for the abolitionist-republican movement, indicated that the relationship between abolition and immigration was not incidental. Essential to Nabuco’s anti-slavery stand was his hope for embranqueamento, or whitening, of seeing Brazil as becoming more European (223). For this reason, Nabuco also opposed the immigration of East Asians as it would “complicate the situation” (Skidmore 9). Meanwhile, Nabuco compared the plight of blacks in Brazil to blacks in the United States, stating that there was some mobility of Brazilian blacks who were better off than their counterparts in the United States. Nabuco believed that the dominant white Brazilians had afforded Africans opportunities that the United States had denied them (21). Nonetheless,

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despite his pro-abolitionist stance, Nabuco attributed the problems in Brazil to the African presence, asserting that the vice of African blood came into widespread circulation, not owing to the African, but to the system of slavery. “Without slavery,” he explained, “. . . Brazil could have been like Canada or Australia” (98-100). Elsewhere in Latin America similar sentiments arose from white privileged revolutionary heroes. José Martí, the Cuban national hero of the same period took a parallel but slightly different approach to his whiteness and to white privilege. He attacked the myth of the inferiority of people of mixed racial ancestry at a time when Cuba’s population was more than half mulato, or mestizo. Martí stressed the lack of racial conflict among Cubans in an address to a New York audience in 1895 when he stated that “in Cuba there is no fear whatever of racial conflict. A man is more than white, black, or mulatto. A Cuban is more than white, black or mulatto” (Martí, Our America 278-79). Martí’s Cuba was undoubtedly plagued by racial prejudice, yet his rhetoric of unity attempted to rise above the racism of the day, often using admonitions encouraging the races to mix and poetic patriotism discouraging conflict in the pursuit of a post-racial, color-blind society (Martí, Our America 278-79, Poey Barro 56-60). Indeed, Martí instrumentilized blacks as a part of a greater unified white-directed nation and he saw the assimilating blacks as a positive symbol of a superior Cuba (Persánch 113). Moreover, as Eugene Godfried has indicated, Martí’s vision was what he calls “euroiberocentrista,” and Hispanic, particularly given his views of other parts of the non-Hispanic Caribbean. His views of Curaçao, for example, are outright racist (Godfried 1-13). In the early twentieth century, however, Cuban patriotic thinkers venerated Martí because of his ability to elevate cubanidad (Davis, “Mulato o criollo” 82). Ironically, in the wake of independence in the twentieth century, the Cuban government would ban all black political parties and wage war against black rebels who challenged racism (Helg 123-42). The white Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó best expressed criollo Latin America’s twentieth century sense of whiteness and hybridity as a patriotic and anti-American defense when he wrote in his 1900 classic Ariel: We Latin Americans have an inheritance of Race, a great ethnic tradition to maintain, a sacred bond which unites us to immortal pages of history and puts us on our honor to preserve this for the future. In the United States, their history is above all a spasm of virile activity. The typical hero is he who wants. . . North American life, indeed, describes Pascal’s viscous circle in a ceaseless seeking for

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Davis, Darién J. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. well-being with no object outside of itself. . . Its prosperity is as immense as its incapacity of satisfying even a mediocre view of human destiny. (93)

Like Martí, Rodó provided ideological resistance against an encroaching United States, as he inverted Domingo Sarmiento’s contention that South America was barbaric and Europe and the United States civilized (Sarmiento 2003). For Rodó and others, Latin America had become “civilized,” not through economic, political, or social change, but in the realm of culture. Latin America seemed to possess an ability to unite individuals of different racial backgrounds underneath the white Creole umbrella, while Creoles deemed the U. S. and its unchecked expansion barbaric. This vision of unity crafted by self-appointed whites who saw themselves as guardians of national culture was more projection than reality in terms of internal racial dynamics and demographic representation in the major realms of politics, culture, and economics. Furthermore, at the turn of the nineteenth century, intellectuals throughout the region were neither entirely optimistic nor necessarily proud of their unique heritage, as the case of Bolivian intellectual Aclides Arguedas indicated with the title of his 1902 essay Pueblo Enfermo. Arguedas not only blamed the ‘sickness’ in his country on the preponderance of “Indians” and their “psychology,” but also because he believed that Bolivia would not be able to attract European immigrants. At the same time, Arguedas uses an Iberian sensibility to critique criollos whose whiteness had been debilitated by the American environment (Arguedas 404; Gomes 7-19). The opening of a new century provided an opportunity for speculation by leaders and thinkers in the Latin American republics. In this context, the Brazilian republic, created in 1889, would re-embrace its Portuguese heritage in a newly found national pride that would be unleashed by the military’s brand of republicanism. Brazilian positivism had played a key role in the construction of “order and progress,” the motto adorning the new Brazilian republican flag in the late nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the positivist-minded Benjamin Constant would preside over a reformed professional military that promoted what Robert Nachman has called “practicing positivism,” which called for the reformation of mentality, habits, and customs, but within a paternalistic, hierarchical and corporatist framework that relied on education and access to capital (Nachman 1-23). Not surprisingly, in 1910, João Cândido, a black Brazilian, led one of the most important revolts in the navy to protest capital punishment, a brutal legacy of slavery (Morel 2016).

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Davis, Darién J. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. While Argentina had succeeded in transforming itself from a mestizo and Afro-Argentine

nation to a white one through migration by the 1930s, the Brazilian state had limited success in attracting migrants from Europe (Lesser, Negotiating National Identity 8). Still, as the Brazilian economy modernized, most manufacturing and service sectors preferred hiring new migrants rather than African-descendants who were deemed “backward.” Thus, abolition freed whites from being associated with a nation that practiced slavery but, as Katia M. Queiros has noted, for the majority of the formerly enslaved, it meant “the freedom to remain poor and indigent” (211) and, consequently, black or almost black. Kim Butler has insightfully described that phenomenon as a general imposition of order that “has prevented the equitable participation of blacks in national society” (17). Even many liberals who supported abolition did so not because they wanted the enslaved to be citizens, but because it was detrimental to their international image and their elite concept of a white nation. Joaquim Nabuco, one of Brazil’s leading abolitionists, best reflected this view when he wrote in 1886 that Brazilians wanted to eliminate slavery “not simply because it is morally illegitimate, but because slavery ruins the country economically, debases its politics and prevents immigration. Indeed it is a system which prevents our incorporation into modernity” (223). In this period, Brazilian writers also began to explore Brazilian hybridity through depictions of the mulato or the mestiço. Aluísio de Azevedo’s novel O mulato, published in 1881 and José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior’s 1879 painting The Woodcutter became reference points for the generation, although not without a sense of pessimism and fear reminiscent of Sarmiento’s Civilization and Barbarism, a texts that underscored Sarmiento’s own fears of South American demographic trends, and his desire to emulate what he believed was North America’s successful transfer of European values and European migrants (248-250). Brazilian liberals shared the desire to transform their society to become whiter or almost white. In several other countries including Uruguay, Paraguay, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, white intellectuals and politicians lamented the failure of liberalism to “whiten” their societies. The Dominican Republic’s historical anti-Haitian and anti-black campaign is a case in point. Silvio Torres-Saillant has documented the significant historical celebration and embrace of blackness before the rise of negrophobia and white supremacy that began to cast the eastern side of the island as culturally Hispanic and mulato (cast as almost white) rather than black (30-33). Most Latin American societies embraced abolition by the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the newly created liberal republics with constitutions and plans for economic

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development utilizing European ideas had not yet resolved issues of education for the masses or integration of marginalized populations. Nor had the new Latin American elites adequately developed mechanisms for the integration of its newly liberated citizens. In Brazil, official legal abolition in 1888 assumed a freedom not yet in practice. The looming fear of black discontent or revolt helped shape the elite’s republicanism. Not surprisingly, in the wake of abolition, the republic set out to create an orderly society. White Republican military leaders from Deodoro da Fonseca to the positivist-minded, civilian president Washington Luis valued order over civil liberties or justice. Throughout the Republic, states passed anti-black laws masked as vagrancy laws as Decree 1,435 in Minas Gerais in 1900, which prohibited begging. These policies aimed to make blackness invisible in a white–constructed hybrid society (Higgins 146-47). Euclides da Cunha's 1902 classic Os Sertões, or Rebellion in the Backlands, best reflected these racial and cultural tensions. Influenced by the pervading positivism of the time, da Cunha looked towards a future Brazil where order would rule (Nachman 1-23). In this period, Da Cunha’s work centered on the creation and destruction of Canudos, the anti-republican, predominantly nonwhite community in the northeast in 1892. Da Cunha defined what he called “The Brazilian Man,” while idealizing the Portuguese influence and denigrating the African. The Portuguese linked Brazil to the intellect of the Celts, he argued while the Black Man, the “homo afer, filho das paragens adustas e bárbaras, onde a seleção natural, mais que em quaisquer outras, se faz pelo exercício intensivo da ferocidade e da força” (56). Influenced by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, da Cunha concluded that biological evolution demanded the guarantee of social evolution. He saw the evolution of the races towards the pardo or mestiço: a whiter version of the black and indigenous popular masses whom the Brazilian military had just decimated in Canudos. This sense of hybrid benign whiteness, or almost whiteness, was striking in its condemnation of blacks and indigenous people. According to da Cunha, blacks were “humble and docile,” the indigenous man, a “roaming nomad, not adapted to toil” (Da Cunha 42, 45-47). While writers like the republican Alberto Torres refuted Da Cunha’s ideas, he and others still believed that Brazil was racially behind and could still “catch up,” essentially by becoming culturally white. Torres believed that there were no superior or inferior races, only advanced and backward ones (Skidmore 17; Torres 129). Still, Brazilian elites who feared possible disorder by the popular urban masses of the coastal cities, believed that indigenous people and blacks would, like the

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Canudos of 1896, become victims of progress. They would eventually be absorbed by the larger white mestiço “quase branco” population (Beiber 171; Burns 16-35). Institutionalizing Hybridity as Whiteness After World War I A generation after abolition, patriotic writers such as Gilberto Freyre led Brazil’s crusade to view cultural inclusion and mixture as a means to celebrate its national culture. In the process, Freyre’s generation downplayed the endemic social displacement of blacks and indigenous people in Brazil. Freyre’s explicit celebration of hybridity in food, sexuality, and other customs highlighted the white Portuguese ability to adapt to the tropics, and culturally and sexually intermingle with conquered peoples. Indeed, Freyre wrote of Portuguese social and sexual intermingling with other cultures as a cultural and historical trait of necessity. His ideas also developed from his personal experience as a white or almost white privileged Latin American intellectual in the United States, where he witnesses racism against Brazilians (Tannenbaum 1946). Freyre's scholastic and personal experience abroad had, as Jeffrey E. Needell has succinctly shown, a profound effect on his conceptualization of Brazilian identity (51-60). For example, Freyre’s classic work Casa Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves) created a static notion of Brazil that celebrated benign whiteness, hybridity and miscegenation while downplaying historical injustice (Costa 348). Other writers and politicians reiterated or paralleled Freyre's ideas for decades. José María Bello from Pernambuco, for example, called for Brazilians to realize their historical roots and the three great ethnicities that had contributed to the development of Brazil: the African, the Portuguese, and the indigenous. As in Freyre’s interpretation, the white Portuguese become the major heroes since they had provided a cultural umbrella of integration through a common language and religion (Bello 1936). The Portuguese were endowed with a certain cultural ability, which allowed them to easily mingle among peoples of other races and cultures. Historian Sergio Buarque de Holanda would further argue that Brazil was still linked to Portugal through tradition (15), even as its dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar (1932-1968), continued to justify his country’s colonization of Africa. The force and intellectual power of patriotic writers such as Freyre and Buarque in the 1920s helped Brazil emerge as a modern symbol of peaceful coexistence and racial intermingling yet to be achieved in Europe and the United States. In this context, Portuguese whiteness ceased to be the oppressive force that colonized Brazil and parts of Africa, and became a benign agent

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of a hybrid Brazil. This view would endure well after World War II, as Brazil accepted immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany. To foreign writers like the Jewish Austrian author Stefan Zweig, Brazil appeared culturally superior precisely because of its racial and religious tolerance. Zweig called his 1942 travelogue Brazil: A Land of the Future, for example, and while living in Brazil, he wrote that he had never “seen a finer place” and that “negroes worked in the open air like in slavery days only happy . . .” (Davis and Marshall 15). Zweig joined other white male European intellectuals, such as Blaise Cendrars, who exalted their experiences in Brazil because of perceived tolerance and exoticism at a time when religious intolerance and racial segregation were major obstacles to consolidation in the Western European republics (Davis, “Exile and Liminality” 51; Davis and Marshall 24-25; Cendrars 2010). Brazilian cultural producers throughout the twentieth century would continue to express and reshape ideas of benign ‘hybrid whiteness’. The classically trained Brazilian singer Elsie Houston boasted about how Brazilian musicians had successfully integrated what she called the “primitive quality of the native melodies,” which made Brazil a modern nation, (“BRAZILIAN MUSIC ON THE AIR”) unwittingly admitting to what bell hooks has called “a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy” (117). While many patriotic Brazilians sincerely embraced and promoted the centrality of Africa to Brazilian and explored indigenous and other non-European influences, they also promoted hybridity and mixture as a cultural ideal. Few espoused economic, social, political, or cultural policies that would empower non-whites in concrete ways. Moreover, many whites and almost white Brazilians instrumentalized blacks and black culture to celebrate hybridity and to downplay the historical oppressive whiteness that had perpetuated slavery and other systems of racial oppression. Whiteness through hybridity or the possibility of whitening was implicit in the Anthropophagite Revolution that celebrated Brazil’s ability to cannibalize other cultures and make it uniquely Brazil. This cannibalizing created an idealized white or almost white Brazilian type (Oswald de Andrade 1928). World War I signaled the failure of European cultural models for the Brazilian reality. A new generation of Latin American intellectuals witnessed the moral crisis and pessimism in the West described by European writers such as Spengler (104-13), and the economic downturn signaled by the 1929 stock market crash (Spengler, 96-99). Yet, Brazilians also appreciated it when respected European intellectuals began to celebrate nonwestern cultures in a number of movements, from surrealism to primitivism, to escape the

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oppressive whiteness of their history. In this context, Brazilian ideas of hybridity emerged as possible antidotes and examples of new possibilities, fueling a wave of patriotism and exploration in many fields. While authors like Paulo Prado in Retrato do Brasil (1928) continued to view sexual and social intermingling with sadness and pessimism, many others recognized the power and centrality of racial intermingling as a critical force to the founding of Brazil from different perspectives. In Cassiano Ricardo’s Martim Cereré (1928), for example, a Brazilian “race” emerged from an indigenous base followed by an amalgamation with the African and Portuguese. Mario de Andrade’s treats this amalgamation more satirically in Macunaíma (1928), the story of the black Tapanhumas Indian from the interior of Brazil who migrates to the booming city of Sao Paulo. The protagonist of the same name is an anti-hero who succeeds through the use of magical powers and a sense of independence. These attributes combined magnificently with modern technology in what the author called “a revolt against the traditional national intelligence” (Mario de Andrade, O movimento modernista 24-25). Andrade satirizes whiteness while describing it as part of the Brazilian landscape, all the while celebrating the Brazilian capacity to make things work, or the jeitinho (Tosta 140-57). Even with satire, the building of national consciousness around hybridity and benign whiteness stymied solidarity among blacks, mestiços, mulatos and indigenous people. Abdias do Nascimento, founder of the Black Experimental Theater in 1944, believed that the greatest triumph for white superiority was that it convinced mulatos that they were not black (Nascimento 2016). Encouraging celebration of and public declaration of Negritude would be difficult in a society that had not erected explicit barriers for racial integration or created explicit racist laws as in the United States. De facto, racial and cultural intermingling meant that prior to the late black consciousness movements in the post-abertura era people who defined themselves as black (rather than pardo or mulato, for example) constituted an absolute minority. Whiteness through hybridity represented an example of identity politics, which Stuart Hall argues, “achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative” (19-39). White Brazilians and almost white Brazilians as well as almost black Brazilians construct their identities in opposition to the negativity of blackness because, to cite Gil and Veloso’s “Haiti” again, “todos sabem como se tratam os negros” (Gil and Veloso).

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Patriotism and Benign Hybrid Whiteness The 1930s ushered in a new era with a group of intellectuals who came of age in the 1920s. With the ascendance of the middle-class government of Getúlio Vargas, this patriotic-minded generation entered government institutions, particularly the Ministry of Education and Culture, helping to institutionalize the notion of benign whiteness and positive hybridity. Paradoxically, President Vargas, who governed Brazil from 1930-1944 and 1950-1954, succeeded in encouraging Brazilians to identify with an idealized white nation while celebrating its racial hybridity. In the process, nationalists created enduring national myths and symbols, which effectively marginalized racial consciousness for the rest of the twentieth century even as the Brazilian state, private enterprises and individual employers excluded or marginalized black and almost black Brazilians from important positions, including the diplomatic corps (D’Avila 2003). While contemplating the value of minorities to the nation, white dominant intellectuals from the 1920s to the 1950s consistently instrumentalized them as they promoted Latin American’s hybridity and racial mixing. Nationalist writers, mostly in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, constituted a cultural elite who emerged to construct the nation’s cultural identity, one that they could celebrate internationally. They did not expand on the notion of who could participate in the creation of a new Brazilian national culture. Instead, the cultural elite, many from or identifying with the middle class, became respected producers of the nation and guardians of national consciousness by virtue of their class and education (Ramos 229). Whiteness, nevertheless, remained central to power. Whites and near whites continued to speak about and for non-whites. Indeed, few nonwhites, almost blacks and blacks emerged as national representatives in national and international institutions or in the mainstream press. As migrants, blacks, mulatos, and mestiços began to swell the major urban centers after World War II, writers continually began recognizing the historical contribution of previously ignored racial sectors to the formation of national identity. Brazilians and other Latin Americans continued to project positive national racial images, celebrating cultural mixture, but creating few policies that would provide economic or social opportunities to structurally transform society (Fernandes 2007). Thus, Brazilians succeeded in transforming toxic and oppressive white racial oppression into benign hybrid whiteness by often evoking the Freyrian trope of miscegenation. American observers also helped propagate the idea of Brazilian benign whiteness during the Cold War. Frank Tannenbaum, for example, portrayed the African slave of Latin America in

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a relatively positive light in comparison to the enslaved subject in the southern United States (Tannenbaum 112). Stanley Elkins followed with a similar study, arguing that slavery in the U. S. was a result of rampant capitalism while in Latin America the presence of the Church and laws of manumission did not allow the slave to be reduced to the status of “commodity.” While Carl Degler’s Neither Black nor White concluded that whites in Brazil dilute their prejudice, but as blacks educated themselves and became more economically stable, prejudices would manifest themselves as in the United States (Degler 19, Tannenbaum 112). This line of thought served to enhance the ideas of Brazilians who claimed the uniqueness of the Brazilian racial experience. Other Latin Americans had similar ideologies. For example, Mexican Minister of Culture José Vasconcelos’s 1922 classic The Cosmic Race represents a similar vision of Mexico after the Mexican revolution and continues to be a reference point for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Vasconcelos argued that Mexicans had created a fifth race that joined the best of all the other races (Vasconcelos 25-26). Yet, here again, this cosmic mestiço race tended toward the European, more white than black or indigenous. While Edison de Sousa Carneiro and Bolívar Lamounier demonstrated the political implications of the white-hybrid paradigm and its role in coopting the masses in “La nacionalización del negro en el Brasil” (1954) and “Raça e Classe na Politica Brasileira” (1968), Abdias do Nascimento was the first to call the Brazilian practice of whiteness a genocide. In his work O Genocídio do Negro Brasileiro (1978) Nascimento argued that the policies of miscegenation, discrimination, rape, and torture were tantamount to genocide, hardly a benign act (Nascimento 1978; Skidmore 7-36; Carneiro 6-18, Lamounier 39-50). Between 1904 and 1929, migrants from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Japan, Turkey, Russia, Germany, and Austria settled throughout Brazil. In an attempt to ‘Brazilianize’ European migrants, the 1891 Brazilian Constitution guaranteed Brazilian citizenship to anyone living in the country for longer than six months. Despite the nationalist rhetoric of thinkers, such as Oliveira Viana, who cautioned against allowing the entry of exotic and non-Latin elements (383-385), the country’s immigration policies reflected a whitening ideal well into the twentieth century. Individual states and the federal government tried to welcome working peoples who they considered “whiter” and thus culturally advanced and restricted immigration from other populations including Jews and the Japanese (Lesser, Negotiating National Identity 8, 169). Vargas’s 1930s labor laws, which attempted to impose job quotas for Brazilians encouraged nativism, but did little to ameliorate underlying social inequalities. Moreover, the federal government lacked the

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resources to effectively monitor or control migration (Lesser, “Immigration and Shifting Concepts” 38). In Central America, economic projects such as the railroads and the Panama Canal depended upon skilled and unskilled cheap laborers from the Caribbean islands who were mostly black. The demographic changes in Central America during this period represents the only regional example of countries that did not become whiter as a result of the influx of laborers from the Caribbean islands and Asia. Even in these areas, however, countries like Honduras continued to forge a white-mestizo identity against the black Garifuna outsiders (Euraque 81-90). In 1941, Panamanian president Arnulfo Arias, who represented the white-mestizo majority, promulgated a Constitution that denied citizenship to Blacks of West Indian descent (Priestly 52). Conclusion Scholars of Latin America used to call the study of historical whiteness simply ‘history.’ Unlike the dominant narrative in the United States, Latin American nations in general and Brazil in particular forged dominant narratives of a whiteness based on hybridity that instrumentalized its minorities. Julio Ramos described this process of creating dominant ideas in Latin America as a “. . . created field, ordered, in the same politically predetermined disposition, from the discourse that names and… engenders the field of that identity” (229). These seemingly distinct dominant narratives do not represent fixed or static monolithic realities. Indeed, the historical evidence of the Americas clearly documents a shared reliance on slavery, an Atlantic cultural exchange, and a cultural, political and sexual mestizaje. Thus, it is important to understand when, how and why, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson’s work, Latin American national and regional elites and patriotic intellectuals imagined or reimagined their nations (Anderson 1991). Shaped by changing national and international political and economic forces, the different narratives of whiteness emerged over time, and hybridity became an important ingredient in Latin America, but not in the United States. Despite the shared history of oppression of Indians, African slavery, migration and various forms of cultural mixing, few North Americans employ tropes of hybridity or mixture to describe the United Stataes, while few Latin Americans refer to their countries as nations of migrants. By the end of World War II, Latin American patriotism had shifted from the days of independence, and the role of race in the rhetoric of nationhood within the region had also changed. The expansion of American hegemony (ironically detected when we refer to the United States as America) also provided a force towards which Latin

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American nationalists directed their efforts. For many Latin Americans, the United States of America became synonymous with progress and economic development, but also with racism, segregation and “toxic whiteness.” Anti-Americanism served Latin American patriotism by providing an economic and cultural imperialist enemy against whom the promotion of the idea of “the mestiço-white nation” could be fashioned. The emergence of texts created in the patriotic spirit of the 1920s and 1930s were passed down after World War II. Privileged white Latin American writers have tended to assume the position of caretaker of national culture and of the popular sectors, often instrumentalizing marginalized groups for patriotic purposes as if their ability to speak for the nation was somehow natural or preordained. Linda Alcoff reminds us that “speaking for others” carries social and political ramifications for the speaker as well as for the subjects being described. Ultimately this is also a question about representation and who represents whom (6-15). The white Brazilian cultural elite have continued to forge myths of the whiteness or near whiteness from a discursive location where non-whites play no roles in those particular constructions. Today Brazilians (and Latin Americans in general) continue to grapple with the legacy of hybrid whiteness inside and outside of Brazil. Many Brazilians abroad, for example, have begun to shift their visions of nationhood and self as they encounter news ways of imagining race or as they confront racism, anti-immigrant sentiments and generalized Latinofobia. In the United States, Latino/a constructions of race often clash with white North Americans version of race and whiteness. African-American communities understand more readily the notions of hybridity and colorism although, historically, becoming whiter often resulted in what North American called “passing.” Nonetheless, most United States Americans understand Latinos/as as “people of color” or “non-white,” although Latino communities may often include whites, blacks or mestiços or mestizos and their descendants born in the United States, the majority of whom have been shaped by the idea of benign whiteness. The tensions between Latin America and United States American construction of whiteness underscores the regional and national constructions of race. In an attempt to navigate her transregional sense of belonging, Dominican writer Julia Alvarez called herself a “white woman of color” (Alvarez 6). What privileges does this construction of whiteness or Latinidad afford Latinos/as who can claim whiteness in a country grappling with Latinofobia and where accents become a marker of nonwhiteness? The case of Brazilian whiteness and white privilege provides us with a window on to the complex construction of whiteness in the Americas writ large. Franz Fanon warned us

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against the pitfalls of any national consciousness movement or construction that attempts to be an “all-embracing crystallization of the inner most hopes of the whole people” (Fanon 1). Understanding the comparative history of the construction of the mestiço, the mulato or the hybrid nation in Brazil allows students of the region to deconstruct Brazil’s particular sense of whiteness and highlight the location and privilege (Alcoff 2-3). Many in and outside of Brazil continue to promote the country’s mestiço-ness at the expense of blackness and without paying attention to what Djalma Riberio has called the “lugar de fala” (Ribeiro, 2016).

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Works Cited Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking For Others.” Cultural Critique, vol. 92, Winter 1991, pp. 5-32. Alvarez, Julia. “White Woman of Color.” The Hungry Mind Review, Spring 1998, pp. 6, 58. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Emergence and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1991. Andrade, Mario de. Macunaíma. Livraria Martins, 1968. Andrade, Mario. O movimento modernista. Edição da Casa do Estudiante do Brasil, 1942. Andrade, Oswald de. Manifesto antropófago (1928). Reprinted online http://www. ufrgs. br/cdrom/oandrade/oandrade. pdf Arguedas, Alcides. Obras completas Vol 1. Aguilar, 1959. Bello, José María. Panorama do Brasil. Imprensa Nacional, 1936. Beiber, Judy. “Catechism and Capitalism: Imperial Brazilian Policy on a Brazilian Frontier, 18081845.” Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500-1900. Ed. Hal Langfur. University of New Mexico Press, 2014, pp. 166-97. BRAZILIAN MUSIC ON THE AIR,” New York Times. Nov. 10, 1940, p. 158. Buarque de Holanda, Sergio. Raízes do Brasil. 2nd Edition. Olympio, 1948. Bucciferro, Justin R. “Racial Inequality in Brazil from Independence to the Present.” Has Latin American Inequality Changed Direction? Looking Over the Long-run. Ed. L. Bértola and J. Williamson. Springer Open, 2017. Burns, E. Bradford. “The Destruction of a Folk Past: Euclides Da Cunha and Cataclysmic Cultural Clash.” Review of Latin American Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1990, pp. 16-35. Busnell, David. Ed. El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolivar. Oxford University Press, 2003. Butler, Kim. Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador. Rutgers University Press, 1998. Cendrars, Blaise. Le Brésil: Des hommes sont venus. Gallimards, 2010. Crocitti, John J. and Robert M. Levine. The Brazil Reader. Duke University Press, 1999. Cruz Costa, João. A History of Ideas in Brazil: The Development of Philosophy in Brazil and the Evolution of National History. University of California Press, 1964. D’Avila, Jerry. Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917-1945. Duke Univeristy Press, 2003. Davis, Darién J. “Exile and Liminality in ‘A Land of the Future’: Charlotte and Stefan Zweig in Brazil, August 1941–March 1942,” Stefan Zweig and World Literature: Twenty-First century Perspectives. Boydell and Brewer, 2014. pp. 173-90. ---. “¿Mulato o Criollo?: Cultural Indentity in Cuba, 1930-1960.” Ethnicity, Race and Nationality in the Caribbean. Universidad de Puerto Rico, Instituto de Estudios del Caribe, December 1996. Davis, Darién and Oliver Marshall. Stefan and Lotte Zweig’s South American Letters: New York, Argentina and Brazil, 1940-1942. Continuum, 2010. Da Cunha, Euclides. Os Sertões. Positivo, 2004. http://www. aprendebrasil. com. br/classicos/obras/euclides_da_cunha_os_sertoes. pdf. De Assis Barbosa, Francisco. Testamento de Mario de Andrade e Outros Reportagens. Rio de Janeiro, 1954. De Sousa Carneiro, Edison. “La nacionalización del negro en el Brazil.” Cuba Professional (Havana), Vol. 3, No. 10, April-June 1954, pp. 16-18. Degler, Carl. Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States. MacMillan Company, 1971.

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Deutsch, Karl W. “Nation Building and National Development: Some Issues for Political Research.” Nation Building Eds. Karl W. Deutsch and William J. Foltz. Atherton Press, 1963. pp. 1-16. Echeverría, Esteban. El matadero (1838) y apologia del matabre (1837). Stockcero, 2004. Elkins, Stanley. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago, 1959. Eraque, Dario. “Free Pantos and Mulattoes Vanquish Indians: Cultural Civility as Conquest and Modernity in Honduras.” Beyond Slavery: The Multi-layered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ed. Darién J. Davis. Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, pp. 81-108. Fanon, Frantz. “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness.” Chapter 3 The Wretched of the Earth. Macgibbon and Kee in 1965 reprinted. https://www. marxists. org/subject/africa/fanon/pitfalls-national. htm Fernandes, Florestan. A integração do negro na sociedade de classes, Vol. 1. Biblioteca Azul, 2007. Freyre, Gilberto. The Mansions and the Shanties: Making of Modern Brazil. Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Geggus, David. “The sounds and Echoes of Freedom: The Impact of the Haitian revolution on Latin America.” Beyond Slavery: The Multi-layered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ed. Darién J. Davis. Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, pp. 19-36. Gomes, Miguel. “El ensayo enfermo: Alcides Arguedas y la radiología,” Cuardernos del Chile, No. 7/8, 2005-2006, pp. 7-19. Haberly, David. T. Three Sad Races: Racial Identity and National Consciousness in Brazilian Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hall, Stuart. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Identity.” Culture, Globalization and the World System. Ed. A. King. McMillan, 1991. Hanke, Lewis and Jane M. Rauch editors. People and Issues in Latin American History: The Colonial Experience. Marcus Wiener Publishers, 2010. Helg, Aline. “Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930: Theory, Policies and Popular Reaction.” The Idea of Race in Latin America. Ed. Richard Graham. University of Texas Press, 1990, pp. 37-70. Higgins, Martha Knisely. Slavery to Vagrancy in Brazil: Crime and Social Control in the Third World. Rutgers University Press, 1984. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992. Knight, Alan. “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: México, 1910-1940.” The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940. University of Texas Press, 1990, 71-115. Lamounier, Bolívar. “Raça e Classe na Politica Brasileira.” Cuardernos Brasileiros, Vol. 47, MayJune 1968, pp. 39-50. Lesser, Jeffrey. “Immigration and Shifting Concepts of National Identity in Brazil during the Vargas Era.” Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 31, No. 2, (Winter, 1994), pp. 23-44. Lesser, Jeffrey. Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. Duke University Press, 1999. Martí, José. Our America. Ed. Philip Foner. Monthly Review Press, 1977. Morel, Edmar. A revolta da chibata. Paz e Terra, 2016. Nabuco, Joaquim. Abolitionism, The Brazilian Anti-Slavery Struggle. University of Chicago Press, 1977. Nachman, Robert G. “Positivism, Modernization and the Middle Class in Brazil.” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 57, No. 7, Feb. 1977, pp. 1-23. Nascimento, Abdias do. O Genocídio do Negro Brasileiro. Editora Perspectiva, 2016. Needell, Jeffery D. “Identity, race, gender and modernity in the origins of Gilberto Freyre’s oeuvre.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 1, 1995, pp. 51-77. Nist, John. The Modernist Movement in Brazil: A Literary Study. University of Texas Press, 1967.

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Oliveira Viana, Francisco José. “Imigração e colonizaçnao ontem e hoje.” Ensaios inéditos. Unicamp, 1993. Persánch, JM. “Blancura situational e imperio español en su histora, cine e literatura.” Ph.D Diss. University of Kentucky, 2016. DOI http://dx. doi. org/10. 13023/ETD. 2016. 102 Poey Baro, Dionisio. “‘Race and Anti-Racism in José Marti's ‘Mi Raza.’” Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 12, Ethnicity, Gender, Culture, and Cuba, Special Section, Article 6, 1994, pp. 56-61. Prado, Paulo. Retrato de Brasil. São Paulo. Duprat, 1928. Priestley, George. “Antillean-Panamanians or Afro-Panamanians? Political Participation and the Politics of Identity During the Carter-Torrijos Treaty Negotiations.” Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 12, No. 1/2, 2004, pp. 50-67. Queirós Mattoso, Katia M. To Be A Slave in Brazil, 1550-1880. Rutgers University Press, 1987. Ramos, Julio. Desencuentros de la modernidad en America Latina. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989. Ribeiro, Djamila. O que é lugar de fala? Letramento, 2016. Ricardo, Cassiano. Martim Cerreré. Revista de Tribunais, 1928. Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel. Margaret Sayers Peden trans. University of Texas Press, 1988. Rout, Leslie. The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502-Present. Cambridge University Press, 1976. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Knopf, 1993. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. Trans. Kathleen Ross. University of California Press, 2003. Skidmore, Thomas E. “Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil 1870-1940.” The Idea of Race in Latin America. Ed. Richard Graham. University of Texas Press, 1990. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West, Vol. I. Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Stuart B. Schwartz, Stuart B. “Luso-Brazilian Relations in Hapsburg Brazil, 1580-1640.” Américas, Vol. 25, 1968, pp. 33-48. Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas. Vintage Books, 1946. Torres, Alberto. O problema nacional brasileiro. Impresa Nacional Brasileiro, 1914. Tosta, Antonio Luciano de Andrade. “American Dream, Jeitinho Brasileiro: On the Crossroads of Cultural Identities in Brazilian-American Literature.” US Latino Literatures. Ed. Davis and Caulfield. Tamesis, 2007, pp. 140-157. Twinam, Anne. Purchasing Whiteness Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies. Stanford University Press, 2015. Vasconcelos, José. La raza cósmica. John Hopkins University Press, 1979. Veloso, Caetano and Gilberto Gil. “Haiti.” Tropicália II. PolyGram do Brasil, 1993. Viotti da Costa, Emilia. The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories. Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1985.

UC Merced TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World Title The Integration of the White into the Community of Color, or How the Europeans Became Brazilian in the Twentieth Century

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1071t043


ISSN 2154-1353

Author Schwartzman, Luisa Farah



eScholarship.org


The Integration of the White into the Community of Color, or How the Europeans Became Brazilian in the Twentieth Century ______________________________________________ LUISA FARAH SCHWARTZMAN UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO Abstract Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and North America generally assume that immigrants are less white and considered less “modern” than the nationals of the countries where they arrive. In this essay, my purpose is to examine what happens when we apply the idea of “immigrant integration” to European immigrants who arrived in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These immigrants and their descendants have faced a contradiction between integrating into a national “imagined community,” constructed as “mixed-race,” and participating in local, national and global projects of (white) “modernity.” The paper explores how this contradiction was historically constructed in Brazil, how some Brazilians of European descent resolved it, and how we can think of the relationship between race, modernity, nationhood and immigrant integration from a more global perspective. Key Words: Latin America, Brazil, Immigrant Integration, Whitening, National Identity, Whiteness. In the 1960s, the Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes wrote, in The Integration of the Black into the Society of Classes, on the relationship between blacks and whites in the city of Sao Paulo: O antigo agente do trabalho escravo foi expelido, nas condições em que se formou e se consolidou, inicialmente, a ordem social competitiva na cidade de São Paulo, para as ocupações marginais ou acessórias do sistema de produção capitalista. O imigrante aparece como o legítimo agente do trabalho livre e assalariado, ao mesmo tempo que monopoliza, praticamente, as oportunidades reais de classificação econômica e de ascensão social, abertas pela desagregação do regime servil e pela constituição da sociedade de classes.1 (11) In Fernandes’s account, former Afro-Brazilian slaves and their descendants, who formed the bulk of the Brazilian workforce and population and had been living in Brazil for many generations, needed to be absorbed into a modern “society of classes” of which recently arrived European immigrants and their children were the best representatives. This “society of classes,” however, did not come to define national identity through much of the twentieth century as white; rather, the idea of Brazil as a “mixed” nation, whose founding myth did not seem to include these more recent European immigrants, rose to prominence. In contrast, North

34 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. American and European scholarship on “immigrant integration” generally assumes that being integrated into the modern economy also means being assimilated into a white national identity. Recent North American scholarship has suggested that contemporary immigration challenges the boundaries of the nation-state, threatening the established exclusionary forms of modern citizenship and national identity that these nation-states have worked to delimit (for a review, see Bloemraad, Korteweg and Yurdakul, 2008). However, in the Brazil of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, state elites initially did not see immigrants as a threat to the boundaries of the nation-state, but as an instrument in national modernizing and whitening projects (See Skidmore, 1995), similar to the project of creating “white settler” societies in North America and Australia (See Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, 1995). In Brazil this project ultimately failed because domestic and international cultural entrepreneurs (intellectuals, artists, and media broadcasters), and the broader Brazilian population, jointly contributed to creating a new kind of national identity based on race mixture, during a period when state elite members still associated European immigrants and their descendants with (white) modernity, but as potentially disloyal to the nation too. This paper examines what happens when we apply the notion of “immigrant integration” to European immigrants who arrived in Brazil in the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their descendants. To understand “immigrant integration” fully from a more global perspective, one should locate immigration within the project of “modernity.” As part of modernization projects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some nations have unmistakably been constructed as “modern” and “white,” while “others” remain “primitive” and “nonwhite.” Similarly, some immigrants are constructed as whiter and more modern than the local population. In this context, for European immigrants to Brazil and their descendants, investments in being modern and white often ran contrary to the possibility of identification with an allegedly racially mixed Brazilian national identity. White European Immigration, Racial Underpinnings of National Identity in Brazil, and the Case of Samba Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country in the Americas (Eltis 37). Slavery was slowly phased out between the end of the slave trade in the mid-nineteenth century and abolition in 1888. Social unrest ensued among slaves and former slaves, who increasingly refused to work under slavery-like conditions.

35 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. Anxieties over social control led white agrarian and political elites to debate whether to replace slaves with what they believed to be more “disciplined” European workers, or whether former slaves could be taught to become good workers and orderly citizens (See Azevedo, 1987); Andrews 25-89). By the end of the nineteenth century, concluding that Afro-Brazilians were “naturally” inferior to Europeans, these elites started importing European immigrants to replace slave labor. However, this immigration policy caused another form of anxiety: immigrants were deemed naturally superior, but there were fears that immigrants would be disloyal to the nation and import dangerous foreign ideologies (Seyferth, “Construindo a Nação” 49-50). Consequently, the elites concluded that newcomers needed to be taught to be Brazilian. Bringing immigrants was not only a project of control over labor, but also a project of nation-state consolidation that meant protecting the national borders and creating a productive and loyal population. In the nineteenth century, the Brazilian imperial government had given small plots of land to European immigrant families, so as to make “productive” use of the “empty” land in southern Brazil. These immigrants were expected to protect national borders by occupying border areas with Argentina and Uruguay (Lesser, Immigration 27-34). This process resulted in the dispossession of the indigenous people. Between the 1880s and the 1960s, thousands of European immigrants arrived in Brazil, mainly from Portugal, Spain and Italy and, to a lesser extent, Germany (See Appendix: Figure 1, and Table 1A). In the early twentieth century, Brazilian political and intellectual elites adopted a modified version of scientific racism based on the idea that the Brazilian population could be “whitened” as European immigrants mixed with Brazilians of color. Since the 19th century, prominent foreign race scientists repeatedly visited Brazil and scorned the country as a mostly non-white society where not even the elites appeared white. They predicted that the country would degenerate due to its race mixture, a view that some Brazilian intellectuals embraced with much concern. In response to this discourse, and observing the increase in immigration from Europe, other intellectuals predicted that, by “whitening” through immigration, Brazil could build a strong, successful and modern nation (See Skidmore, 1995). From 1910 onward, using a neo-Lamarckian version of eugenics that preached that effects of the environment on individuals could affect the biological fitness of their offspring, elites saw no contradiction between whitening through immigration and “improving” the local population of color through education, hygiene, and other measures to improve public health (Dávila, Diploma de Brancura 52-93). The reorganization of urban public space was used to

36 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. Europeanize and modernize Brazil. In Rio, for example, the downtown cortiços (tenement housing for the poor) were removed to make way for Paris-style buildings and wider streets, while poor people were forced to move to the periphery and to the hills surrounding the city (Fischer 19-49). Street-level cultural manifestations by poorer citizens, such as carnival parades, religious processions, and music playing in the city’s center were often put down by the police. In short, social policies were designed to discipline—often through violent means—poor and/or black people on their behavior and cultural expressions to make them more Europeanlike, and thus allegedly more civilized. This Eurocentric “civilizing” approach was still dominant among political elites in the 1930s, but it became framed less around biology, and more on changing the culture of the Brazilian population (See Dávila, 2005). During the first Vargas Government (1930-1945), educational policies partially reflected a continuation of those which had been promoted by Lamarckian eugenicists. Government bureaucrats were now mainly preoccupied with promoting hygienic habits among the Brazilian population, such as teeth brushing and physical fitness in schools (Dávila, Diploma de Brancura, 47-94, 199-241). They were really concerned with bringing European civilization to Brazilians, by fostering the teaching of Latin, Greek, and ancient European history (Schwartzman, Bomeny and Costa 189-216). Thus, governmental policy during the Vargas era continued the “whitening” project, not by attempting to make Brazilians whiter, but by introducing health and educational policies which, in turn, propagated European values, knowledge, and behavioral standards. Despite the ideological and practical continuity regarding race, we perceive a shift during the Vargas period as well. Government officials were increasingly suspicious of immigrants and “unassimilated” Brazilians of immigrant background. The government felt an increased concern to promote national sentiment and allegiance among those living in the country (Schwartzman, Bomeny and Costa 157-88; See also Seyferth, 1997). At the same time, the government instrumentalized the nonwhite, poor populations attempting to create a povo (a people) which would be loyal to the state in exchange for some form of symbolic recognition and some material benefits in the form of new labor legislation (Fischer 116-48), thus balancing their fears. The change of attitudes toward immigrants did not come just from the state itself, but was a reflection of the changing national and global context of the time. Immigration from Europe dropped abruptly due to the Great Depression of 1929 and World War II, as these events limited movement across the Atlantic (See Appendix: Figure 1). Brazilian legislation

37 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. became more restrictive to immigration too. As the Brazilian middle-class expanded, and urban working classes became more politically influential, both resisted competition from immigrants, and pushed the government to limit immigrants’ access to jobs. As in North America, antiimmigrant sentiment was increasing, partly associated with new “kinds” of immigrants which were considered less desirable, such as Arabic, Jewish and Japanese people (Lesser, Immigration 136-40, 163-68; Fitzgerald and Cook-Martin 278-90). In the years before, during and immediately and after World War II, in the midst of fascism, Nazism and communism, the Brazilian government became paranoid about threats to the nation-state from the outside: from immigrants with allegiances abroad, and from Brazilian citizens who retained cultural or political connections to other nations. As Brazil joined the Allies in the war, Vargas’s nationalist project came to include the forced assimilation of immigrants. Germans and German-Brazilians as well as Japanese and Japanese-Brazilians came to be the “legitimate” scapegoats for assimilationist projects. More broadly, “foreigners” were viewed as a threat to national security. Schools were required to teach in Portuguese and to adopt a curriculum that was increasingly dominated by nationalist content. The government also created barriers to several immigrant-based ethnic organizations–including recreational and sports organizations–banned publications in foreign languages and prohibited speaking foreign languages in public. This period included military intervention and police violence to punish and control unassimilated Brazilians and foreigners (Seyferth, “A Assimilação” 96-98; Schwartzman, Bomeny and Costa 157-88; Lesser, Negotiating 138, 165-66). Despite the instrumentalization of education to foster nationalism among both immigrants and the broader population, the content of the nationalist curriculum was still Eurocentric and elitist (Schwartzman, Bomeny and Costa 199-220). Continuing an earlier tradition that dates back to the times of the Empire (and has partly continued until today), Brazilian history school textbooks portrayed blacks and indigenous peoples as part of the Brazilian past, but they were (and often still are) treated as passive, emotional and usually nameless historical subjects, while whites were (and are) named, and portrayed as intelligent makers of history (See Ribeiro, 2008; Abud, 1998). Beyond the myth of origin, however, the content of nationhood promoted through education was not—and still is not—particularly “mixed-race.” Although the Vargas-era Ministry of Education did interact with people of different worldviews, proponents of a more multiculturalist, multi-racialist view of Brazil such as writer Mario de Andrade became marginalized, while those who favored Europeanization of

38 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. education were privileged (Schwartzman, Bomeny and Costa 97-106). We see here a continuity with the whitening project by the Vargas government (and arguably by later governments) even with the decline of scientific racism and with the emergence of intellectual elites that sought to promote a less white and Europeanized national identity. In contrast to the government’s continued “whitening” project, influential nongovernment actors have, since the 1920s, increasingly promoted an image of Brazil that was not simply white. This new image, at least on the surface, included and valued the country’s Afrodescendant population. Intellectuals such as Gilberto Freyre followed the global trend in the social sciences of challenging scientific racism and becoming interested in the “cultures” of nonEuropean peoples, highlighting how Africans, Indigenous peoples and the Portuguese together contributed to the formation of the Brazilian national character (See Freyre, 1933). Elite artists in Brazil and abroad turned to seek out “primitive” and “authentic” Brazilian art forms, of which music was perhaps the best example (See Guimarães, 2003). Those who controlled or profited from the emerging radio and sound-recording industry saw new business opportunities in marketing the cultural production of the Brazilian people of color both in the country and abroad. This new cultural, intellectual and economic context allowed for the creation of discursive spaces where non-elite, nonwhite Brazilians—especially those living in Rio de Janeiro, the country’s capital and the center of its broadcasting and recording industries—could broadcast, albeit often in a limited and negotiated way, an alternative image of the nation which was less white and less Eurocentric. The history of samba is perhaps the most well-documented example of this story. Although the actual origins of samba are disputed, in Rio de Janeiro it was frequently played in predominantly black and lower-income neighborhoods. While more recent approaches recognize samba as having a variety of influences, early on it was mainly associated with Afro-Brazilian religious rituals of macumba and candomblé. In the early twentieth century, Rio elites would both officially condemn and privately participate in Afro-Brazilian cultural and religious manifestations. On the one hand, this contradictory behavior reflected their simultaneous subscription to ideologies of “Western modernity” and scientific racism (through their cultural and intellectual ties to Europe) while, on the other hand, their embeddedness in social and cultural relationships within the city often transcended racial and class boundaries. Afro-Brazilian artists and religious leaders in the periphery negotiated their relationships with white elite members, who sometimes had them arrested, and sometimes came at their defense (See Reis 246-60).

39 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. By the 1910s and 1920s, “primitivist” trends such as the avant-garde movement in Europe and the modernist movement in Brazil led foreign and local elite artists and intellectuals to become more openly interested in the music played by black and lower-class Brazilian musicians, as well as other forms of black and lower-class cultural manifestations (Vianna 95107; Reis 265-70; D. Fernandes 14-17). But foreign as much as domestic elites often preserved the understanding of music composed and played by black Brazilians as natural, emotional and traditional. Elite Brazilian composers sought out “authentic” Brazilian elements too, using them as “raw material” for their more “sophisticated” artistic production. Foreign audiences similarly considered music produced by black and/or lower-class Brazilian artists to be “primitive,” but often looked down on white elite Brazilian artists and government officials’ attempt to “civilize” Brazilian “authentic” music, making it “fake” and “for show.” Be as it may, this new cultural context gave some black Brazilian musicians the opportunity to perform in predominantly white venues in Brazil and abroad. Thus, they perpetuated a national image that bypassed Brazilian elites’ efforts to showcase a whiter national identity (Reis 260-70). Nonetheless, as these foreign audiences consumed such music to satisfy their desire for “primitive” art, such performances reinforced the image of Brazil as a “primitive” country. In the 1920s and 30s, the recording industry and commercial radio broadcasting enabled samba to move from a music heard by black people in Rio's poorer neighborhoods–and perhaps a few eccentric elite and middle-class members–to something that Brazilians in all regions and of all social classes would hear, thus making it a “mainstream” and “national” genre. New communication technologies made it possible for less powerful, often poor and/or black people, to write music and lyrics that would be heard across the country. Therefore, the lyrics of Samba was heavily “cleaned” and changed in the process by recording companies. Moreover, they were frequently sung by white singers, and even the authorship of the songs often had to be ceded to more powerful and whiter people in order to achieve success. But the national samba never became fully white: black or mixed-race and non-elite portrayals of Brazil and its people came to be heard by diverse groups of people across the country and to shape the ever-changing national imagination. In a way that echoes Benedict Anderson’s description of the role of printing press in Europe, the spread of the recording and radio industries in their circulation of music composed by Afro-Brazilian and lower-class artists managed to diffuse an alternative, less white, Brazilian “imagined community” (Vianna 109-27).

40 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. When Vargas reached power in 1930, samba had already been popularized to national audiences. As late as 1937, the government started controlling and censoring the musical style. While the government encouraged music that promoted the country and the regime, discouraging music that advocated for antagonism between blacks and whites, government officials did not direct musicians to portray Brazil as a mixed nation. Despite the control and censorship, musicians were still able to get their own messages across. For example, the censoring of samba focused on combatting the apology of “malandragem,” while encouraging a work ethic. A closer look at the lyrics and recordings of the time reveals that several songs were performed in such a way as to subvert the original meaning, showing how stupid it seemed for poor, moreno people to work the whole day for a meager salary and poor living conditions (Paranhos 107-69). This shows the agency of black and poor Brazilian artists. It also evidences the way in which they were able to influence the cultural content that came to form the national identity. Public Perception and Lived Experience Regarding Mixture and Whiteness in Contemporary Brazil Descendants of European immigrants in Brazil today still seem to live immersed in their contradictions between their white, immigrant-descendant identity and their idea of Brazil as a mixed nation. Or, as a university student I interviewed in 2005 explained to me: Rita: Hoje em dia, eu acho que na nossa sociedade não existe ninguém que não seja mais ou menos mestiço, entendeu? Autora: E na sua família, como é que é? Tem alguém índio, negro? Rita: Não. Deixe eu pensar. Oh, se tiver é distante mesmo, ou então, ninguém nunca soube. Tem alguma coisa errada, mas com certeza em algum momento histórico, entendeu? Rolam, rolou uma miscigenação, ainda mais aqui, a gente mora no Brasil, entendeu?2 Similarly, in a 2003 survey by the Fundação Perseu Abramo, ninety-five percent of Brazilians agreed with the statement that “a good thing about the Brazilian people is racial mixture” regardless of racial self-identification, reported racial composition in the family, or reported immigrant origins (See Appendix: Table 2A). Yet survey results also suggest that, for many Brazilian whites, the connection to “mixture” is not a very personal one. Table 1 below shows that a significant proportion of white Brazilians, especially those of immigrant background,

41 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. those who have a college degree and people living in the wealthier regions of the country (the South, the Southeast and the Center-West), tend to inhabit social spaces where the majority identifies as white, and where a relatively large minority report having exclusive white parents or grandparents. Table 1 – Classification as “white” or immigrant background, by education, region and place of origin

Region North Center West Northeast South Southeast Rio de Janeiro São Paulo Education Less than primary Primary High School College or more Immigrant background Portuguese Spanish Italian German Other* Total Notes: N=5,003

Percent white classification, forced choice with census categories

Percent white classification, open-ended question

Percent claiming exclusive white ancestry

Percent claiming immigrant background

23.18 45.03 28.10 72.36 48.85 36.21 54.49

16.41 37.43 21.04 65.99 42.86 33.91 49.36

9.38 20.76 13.41 55.01 28.5 20.11 30.77

9.9 21.05 4.42 41.19 26.63 27.59 33.97

38.71 48.49 49.66 65.14

31.43 41.29 45.6 57.8

24.46 24.92 28.88 38.53

13.88 22.00 30.86 48.62

62.87 81.61 76.72 85.15 59.23 44.27

58.38 75.86 70.9 76.24 51.54 37.76

35.33 52.87 56.61 62.38 37.69 26.18

20.89

(*The “other” category includes Japanese, Arabic, Turkish, Jewish, African and “others.” Source: calculated using microdata from Fundação Perseu Abramo). The table suggests that Brazilians with memory of European immigration are over-represented in these more exclusively “white” and privileged spaces. Twenty-one percent of Brazilians reported having an immigrant background as a response to the question that asks interviewees if they “come from a family of immigrants” or if their family “has always been from Brazil.”

42 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. Eighty-seven percent of survey respondents who reported having an immigrant background traced their origins to Portugal, Spain, Italy or Germany. In contrast to the general population, people who reported having a European immigrant family overwhelmingly classify as white and are more likely to report an exclusively white ancestry, than the general Brazilian population. Brazilians reporting immigrant ancestry are over-represented at higher educational levels and the more developed regions, which also have higher proportions of whites. While less than ten percent of Brazilians living in the North and Northeast region report an immigrant background, around twenty percent reported this background in the center-west, almost thirty percent do so in the Southeast and more than forty percent in the South. While only thirteen percent of Brazilians with less than primary school reported an immigrant background, almost half of Brazilians with a college degree or higher reported this background. Given the latter structural position of whites and of the descendants of European immigrants in Brazil, and the historical context described in the previous section, it is not surprising that another student I interviewed explained his identification as white this way: “Por que a minha cor de pele é branca, tenho traços faciais brancos, pelo aspecto físico, e pelo aspecto cultural, por que, na prática, eu faço parte de uma cultura ocidental branca, ou seja, eu faço parte da classe média branca.”3 When making sense of the experience of European immigrants and their descendants in Brazil, contemporary European and North-American immigration scholarship’s assumptions about a white, modern “core,” “mainstream” society against which “integration” of (usually non-white) immigrants is measured become problematic.4 In Brazil, while the normative way of life, the economic “core” or “mainstream,” are white and middle-class, the national community is represented as nonwhite (usually “mixed”) and poor. Thus, this twofold conception of Brazil and Brazilian-ness offers two ways for white immigrants to “integrate:” they could either opt to take part in this middle-class lifestyle or identify culturally as part of the “mixed” nation. These modes of integration may often contradict each other, because the “mainstream” in these two senses is not aligned. The hierarchy of economic and political rights is not defined within national borders, but beyond them. The source of advanced capitalist economy is understood to be located abroad (See Takhteyev, 2012), in the “white” middle-classes (Bonnett 49-67), or in particular regions of the country–especially São Paulo (See Weinstein, 2015)–which have not succeeded in providing the image of what it means to be “Brazilian,” either at home or abroad.

43 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. Global Imbrications of Modernity, Race and National Belonging Rethinking “immigrant integration” requires an understanding of how immigrants fit into a world where nationhood, modernity and race jointly constitute hierarchies between different “kinds” of immigrants and nationals (See also Bashi Treitler, 2015). “Modernity” has been described in different ways by social historians: in one sense, modernization is often described as an expansion and deepening of the reach and control of states over populations (for example, see Tilly, 1990, and Scott, 1998). Within the colonial project (and here I include the “internal colonial” projects of post-independent American states), this “modernization” often resulted in a heightened racialization of colonial hierarchies, as, European colonialists in the Americas gave privileged (and “white”) status to people of European descent as a way to ensure their cooperation in their efforts to centralize and increase control over colonial subjects (Bonnett 17; Cooper and Stoler 612-16). Paradoxically, “modernity" is often associated with the removal of state controls, through practices associated with classic liberal ideologies. But as liberalism legitimized social movements for the abolition of slavery and other forms of forced labor, for more democratic states, and for freedom of movement, threatened elites reacted by using racial and national ideology and exclusionary practices to delimit citizenship, control labor and establish social order (See Holt 1992; Torpey, 2000; Roediger, 1999). In Europe and North America, class compromises leading to improved citizenship were tied to whiteness–enhancing the privilege and “whiteness” of (part of) the working class, while denying rights in majority non-white colonies of European powers (Bonnett 28-48), and among black, indigenous and Asiandescendant people North America (See Roediger, 1999; Backhouse, 1999; K. Anderson, 1991). Thus, the emergence of a liberal and ostensibly egalitarian ideology brought about new forms of social exclusion based on race, citizenship and nationhood. Thus, in a third sense (which comes in part to resolve the contradictions between the first and the second), “modernity” has been understood as a category of social distinction between people and between nations, a distinction which has been historically racialized. Elites in Europe and North America attempted to regulate sexual relations to prevent miscegenation and to influence which immigrants could cross the countries’ borders and become citizens. They promoted immigration from desirable “races” of people and the assimilation of those deemed assimilable, restricting the entrance of undesirables and increasing the disconnect between metropolitan and colonial populations. These newly constructed “modern white nations” were

44 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. juxtaposed against their opposite, i.e., primitive, or decaying nonwhite or “mixed-race” nations (Skidmore 27-32; Loveman, National Colors 125-26; Bonnett 7-44; Lake and Reynolds 1-15). Race and nation-building thus became intimately intertwined. National elites that could not claim whiteness for their populations have, generally, either translated scientific racist ideas to advance their populations in their racial hierarchies, as in China and Latin America (Dikötter 423-30; Stepan 135-71; Loveman, National Colors 121-68) or forged “nations within a nation,” where the majority of the population was excluded from citizenship and national belonging, as in South Africa (Marx 84-104). Latin American elites sought to provide representations of their nations–both abroad and at home—that allowed them to imagine a viable, modern and, by implication, whiter, future (Skidmore 64-69; See also Loveman, 2015). These very same alternative national representations were often not accepted as legitimate in Europe and North America, whose members continued to see and treat Latin Americans (including their self-described “white” elites) as non-white. White Immigrants in a Racialized World Within the historical context described above, how can we come to terms with immigration and immigrant integration? Since the nineteenth century, political and economic elites have become concerned with how to control the labor, movement and behavior of people, as well as their elites’ own continuation in positions of power, in a context where people were increasingly thought to have the freedom to work as they pleased, go wherever they wanted and choose the government they wanted to have. In Brazil, the way these tensions got resolved was for boundaries to be drawn around what “kinds” of people could be trusted to be good citizens and good workers. Within this framework, the prospect of nations prospering became seen as depending on the “racial kinds” of people that were available. Consequently, that explains why immigrants from Europe were thought as a source of strength for countries in the Americas. Indigenous, African-descendant and Asian-descendant peoples were seen as challenging the prospect of building “modern societies,” while immigrants from Europe were compatible with this project (Loveman, National Colors 121-68, and Whiteness 221-22). In the same vein, in North America, immigrants from Northwestern European countries were seen as desirable citizens and workers, and came to define the national character, based on the idea of a Northwestern European “settler society.” More established peoples of indigenous and African slave descent were excluded from citizenship, as were immigrants from non-

45 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. European countries, while Southern and Eastern Europeans were given formal rights while expected to be culturally assimilated (Boyd, Goldman and White 38-40; See also Jacobson, 1998). The “immigrant integration” framework in North America comes from assimilation theories of the 1930s, when immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were seen as a “threat” to WASP middle-class sensitivities though, unlike Asian immigrants and black migrants from the US South, potentially assimilable (Alba and Nee 17-66). It was in this period that less desirable and variously racialized Europeans started becoming incorporated into a more encompassing category of “whiteness” (Jacobson 91-135). In both Europe and North America, the “integration” question re-emerges after World War II, when racial barriers are lifted, former colonies became independent and a large wave of “third world” immigrants started moving to the global north, thus challenging the boundaries of “white nations.” In the rest of the world, nonetheless, the story of immigration is more complicated. Nationalist movements often reframe non-white or non-European identities as positive and legitimating of national sovereignty. These “other” nations seek legitimation in a world where Europe and North America provide the model for “modernity” (See Loveman, 2015). Historically, in many of these contexts, colonial immigrants from Europe and their descendants have retained power and privilege over the majority, nonwhite population. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were not expected to “integrate” but to “civilize,” and colonial administrations often took precautions so that they did not “mix” with local populations (Cooper and Stoler 612-16). In many places, contemporary immigrants from Europe and North America are still not expected to “integrate” at all but to retain their national identities, being often called “expats.” While this process was occurring in the north, Latin American elites sought to make their countries more like Europe and the United States, using immigrants from Europe to make their nations more “white” and “modern.” Some Latin American countries, such as Argentina, partly reproduced the “settler society” model of Americans, while countries like Mexico and Brazil never managed to achieve a national image of whiteness and modernity. Therefore, as the case of Samba illustrates, these countries started building national allegiances with their local, nonwhite populations (Appelbaum, MacPherson and Rosemblatt 7). Starting from the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, as Latin American countries begin adopting multiculturalist and anti-racist rhetoric and policies, new racially and ethnically diverse national identities gain legitimacy

46 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. (Loveman, National Colors 250-300). Yet, throughout Latin America, “white” skin color and European culture still retain high status and is associated with power and privilege (See Telles, 2014). In today’s “nonwhite” nations, “white” nationals occupy an ambivalent position relative to national boundaries. Local whites increase their status by tying themselves to “global modernity” and selling this modernity to non-whites in their countries. They thus see themselves as part of projects of national whitening. When explicit mentioning of race (such as using a language of whitening or whiteness) is no longer politically legitimate, as in post-Apartheid South Africa, local whites appeal to “universal” and “modern” values, which are talked about in non-racial terms, but are symbolically racialized (Steyn 127-33). At the same time, these same whites are often seen as inauthentic representatives of their respective nations, which are portrayed as non-white. In the case of Asia and Latin America, they are also often seen as not really white, and therefore are understood to be “faking” white modernity (Bonnett 46-77). They are therefore “fake” in both the national and the modern worlds. Though they may often try to sell nationality to those abroad, and modernity to those within the nation, foreigners would rather bypass national whites to get the more “authentic” experience from “the natives.” Nationals, on the other hand would rather import foreign modernity directly from “the source” (Takhteyev 210). In short, whites who inhabit “non-white nations” are not always “integrated” into the national imaginary, but they often see themselves—not always successfully—as building bridges to the “integration” of their countries into the “modern” (white, Europeanized) world. Based on the latter discussion: can we say that European immigrants to Brazil “integrated”? What did they “integrate” into? In particular, where did European immigrants to Brazil and their descendants fit in this context where belonging to the “nation” and belonging to the “modern” world were not always consistent, but often in contradiction? And last but not least, are there other “entities” immigrants may have “integrated” into? One resolution is to see how immigrants “integrate” into competing constructions of Brazil. As I have argued in this paper, historically there have been–and there still are–competing constructions of Brazil. We might even contrast the construction of the Brazil of the past and present with the construction of the Brazil of the future. Within the construction of the Brazil of the future, the image of a modern, and often whiter Brazil has been historically consistent with the view of the country as currently backward and nonwhite (See Skidmore, 1995). Temporal discourses about Brazilian nationality have also been reflected in regional identities, and the way

47 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. that different regions contribute to the national character. While Rio and the Northeast have established themselves as contributors to the national “culture,” with its African past and its “mixed” present (Vianna 61-62, 111; See also Blake 2011), discourse about São Paulo is about its role as the “locomotive” of Brazil, which attempts, with much hard work and discipline (allegedly absent from the rest of the population), to bring the country from the backward past into the modern, economically advanced (and whiter) future. In some narratives, it is immigrants’ hard work that drive the São Paulo locomotive (Weinstein 273). While this is often a narrative of whiteness that European immigrants are able to make, Lesser, in “A Reflection on Foreigness and the Construction of Brazilian National Identities,” has found similar claims among Brazilians of Asian descent. In the south of Brazil, descendants of German and Italian immigrants narrate their ancestor’s role as colonizers, settling on land and contributing to the country’s “civilized” culture (Seyferth, “A Idéia de Cultura” 168-72; Zanini 125-44). Other immigrants and their descendants have inserted themselves into the more “cultural” narrative of mixture. In Hotel Trópico, Dávila argues that Portuguese immigrants have, in the 1960s, encouraged the Brazilian government to support the ideology of Luso-Tropicalism, which claimed that the Portuguese were relatively benevolent colonizers, being able to “mix” well with people in the tropics (23-33). Lebanese and Syrian immigrants also inserted themselves into a similar narrative, claiming that Portuguese colonizers were partly Arabic, and thus Arabs were part of the Brazilian “mixture” (Lesser, Negotiating 41-79). Another possibility is to think about “integration” into “mainstreams” other than the nation-state, as referring to geographic or social units beyond or within the nation-state. In Brazil the “national” (racially “mixed”) mainstream, which represents the Brazilian “people” (povo) and the national identity contradicts the “mainstreams” of local, privileged and predominantly white spaces (e.g., the “middle-classes,” certain Brazilian regions). Brazilians of European immigrant descent disproportionately occupy these latter spaces, into which they did not simply “integrate,” but often replaced nonwhites who used to occupy them before (Dávila, Diploma de Brancura 147-98). Their personal family background is dominated by whiteness, with not so much experience of mixture. Moving beyond the nation-state (but also in the context of the relationship between nation-states and the broader world), one can think of “integration” as the role of immigrants and their descendants as similar to “Creole elites” as well (B. Anderson 49-68). When in the country, they are understood, and see themselves, as relatively less “Brazilian,” but more civilized and modern (See Norvell, 2001). When abroad, their whiteness,

48 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. civilization and modernity get questioned, and they become associated with a (nonwhite) Latin American identity (See Beserra, 2007; McDonnell and Lourenço, 2009). Conclusion This paper sought to show how, for European immigrants coming to Brazil, there was a contradiction between being “modern” and being Brazilian. At the turn of nineteenth to the twentieth century, European immigration fit well with Brazilian political elites’ efforts to create a Europeanized and thus purportedly “modern” national identity. However, while political elites’ whitening and Europeanizing projects continued through the 1920s and 1930s (and arguably, in some respects, continue today), other political, economic and cultural interests ensured that this project would not be successful, contributing to creating a “mixed-race” national identity. First, as the history of samba suggests, the emergence of a recording and radio industry in the 1920s created a national and international audience for the cultural production of urban black and lower-class artists from Rio de Janeiro, which in turn created a national black or mixed-race cultural identity. Second, starting with the Vargas government of the 1930s, the governments’ efforts to curb immigrants’ (and European and Japanese “ethnic” Brazilians) national betrayal led to increased government control and nationalization of educational and media institutions. Although this nationalization still privileged Europeanized content and contained a heavy dose of cultural censorship, it also provided support for the growing Brazilian cultural industry, which served to further diffuse the idea of Brazil as a mixed-race nation. When we look at the racial identities and social position of contemporary descendants of European immigrants, we see that they disproportionately occupy economically privileged social spaces, while overwhelmingly identifying as white. At the same time, they generally subscribe to the idea that Brazil is racially mixed. Thus, they seem to be well-“integrated” into a white, socioeconomically privileged world, but not so much as part of the Brazilian povo. This bifurcation of the meanings of integration among European immigrants and their descendants in Brazil is not surprising, given the concomitant historical development of the relationship between race, nationhood and practices and ideologies associated with “modernity.” In this context, some countries became defined as white and modern, while others were defined as not white and primitive. In this world, different countries had to reinvent for themselves a story where a bright national future was possible, by either inverting racial hierarchies discourse (as in China), delimiting the boundaries of national belonging (as in South Africa, North

49 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. America and Australia) or through employing ideologies of mixture and whitening, as in much of Latin America. Differently racialized immigrants were thus evaluated in the context of these national identities and global racial and civilizational hierarchies. White nationals of nonwhite nations thus become liminal or intermediary figures between global whiteness/modernity and local nonwhiteness/national authenticity. In this context, the descendants of European immigrants in Brazil, caught between white foreign modernity and nonwhite national backwardness, are faced with a different meaning of “integration” than that which immigrants from the Global South to Europe and North America face. For them to identify as Brazilian and retain their modernity, they often identify Brazilian-ness in a different way, one where they place themselves as the modernizing agents of their country, and thus the less wealthy and less white Brazilians, the Brazilian povo, as passive recipients of civilization.

Appendix Figure 1 - Total number of immigrants arriving yearly to Brazil

(Source: Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística) Table 1A - Percentage of immigrants by nationalities arriving to Brazil in different periods 1884- 1894- 1904- 1914- 1924- 1945- 1950- 19551893 1903 1913 1923 1933 1949 1954 1959 German 3% 1% 3% 6% 9% 6% 4% 2% Spanish 13% 12% 22% 19% 7% 5% 16% 16% Italian 58% 63% 20% 17% 10% 19% 18% 13% Japanese 1% 4% 15% 0% 2% 12% Portuguese 19% 18% 38% 40% 33% 33% 36% 39% Syrian/ 0% 1% 5% 4% 3% Lebanese Others 8% 5% 11% 10% 23% 37% 25% 19% Total 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% Source: Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística

50 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. Table 2A. Percent agreeing that “A good thing about the Brazilian people is race mixture” Percentage

N

96% 93% 96% 100% 97% 96% 100% 94% 97% 95% 96% 91%

1,850 339 502 49 29 605 32 233 147 948 56 69

Combination of races/colors from parents and grandparents black and white 96% white and indigenous 97% white, black and indígena 96% only white 95% Other 94%

1,858 512 538 1,277 703

Immigrant family? No (family was always Brazilian) Yes Portuguese* Spanish Italian German Other (incl. Japanese, Arabic, Latin American)

96% 95% 95% 94% 97% 96% 94%

1,031 3,857 332 84 375 100 140

Total

95%

4,888

Racial self-identification (open question) Branca Preta Parda Amarela Indígena Morena clara Mestiça Negra Morena escura Morena Mulata Other categories/no reply

(*Family’s country of origins here refers to the first origin that the respondent mentioned Source: calculated from microdata from the Fundação Perseu Abramo).

51 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018.

Notes 1“In

the context in which the competitive social order was originally formed and consolidated in the city of São Paulo, the former slave worker was expelled toward the marginal or ancillary occupations of the capitalist production system. The immigrant emerges as the true agent of free wage labor, while monopolizing almost all real opportunities for economic improvement or upward social mobility that had become available as the servile regime was dismantled and the society of classes was constituted.” (My trans) (All translations found in this paper have been done by the author unless a different source is explicitly indicated). 2 Rita: Nowadays, in our society, there isn't anyone who isn't more or less mestiço. Author: And in your family, is there any índio, negro? Rita: No. Let me think. If there is it's very distant, or nobody I ever knew. There is something wrong, but surely, at some point in history, some miscegenation happened, especially here, we live in Brazil, you see? 3 “Because my skin color is white, I have white facial features, . . . and . . . because I am part of a Western white culture, that is, I'm part of the white middle class.” 4 While contemporary U.S. and European scholarship acknowledges the existence of national minorities, the changing racialization of the mainstream (e.g., Alba and Nee, 2003), and the bifurcation of immigrants’ paths of integration (e.g. Portes and Zhou, 1993), or the existence of distinct “national models” that differentially affect the integration of immigrants (for a review, see Bloemraad, Korteweg and Yurdakul, 2008), all of this scholarship posits that the “core” or “mainstream” of the host society has–at least initially–a higher racial and socioeconomic status than the immigrant group.

52 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. Works Cited Abud, Katia M. “Formação da Alma e do Caráter Nacional: Ensino de História na Era Vargas.” Revista Brasileira de História, Vol. 36, No. 18, 1998, pp. 103-14. Alba, Richard, and Victor Nee. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and the New Immigration. Harvard University Press, 2003. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1993. Anderson, Kay J. Vancouver’s Chinatown: racial discourse in Canada, 1875-1980. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 1991. Andrews, George Reid. Blacks and Whites in São Paulo. University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Appelbaum, Nancy P., Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, “Introduction.” Race and Nation in Modern Latin America. Ed. Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt. University of North Carolina Press, 2003, pp. 1-31. Azevedo, Celia M. Marinho. Onda Negra, Medo Branco: O Negro do Imaginário das Elites do Século XIX. Paz e Terra, 1987. Backhouse, Constance. Colour-coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950. University of Toronto Press, 1999. Bashi Treitler, Vilna. “Social Agency and White Supremacy in Immigration Studies.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2015, pp. 153-165. Beserra, Bernadete. “Sob a sombra de Carmen Miranda e do Carnaval: Brasileiras em Los Angeles.” Cadernos Pagu, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2007, pp. 313-44. Blake, Stanley E. The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality: Race and Regional Identity in Northeastern Brazil. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. Bloemraad, Irene, Anna Korteweg, and Gökçe Yurdakul. “Citizenship and Immigration: Multiculturalism, Assimilation, and Challenges to the Nation-State.” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 8, No. 34, 2008, pp. 1–8. Bonnett, Alastair. White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives. Prentice Hall, 2000. Boyd, Monica, Gustave Goldmann and Pamela White. “Race in the Canadian Census.” Visible Minorities: Race and Racism in Canada. Ed. Leo Dreidger and Shivalingappa S. Hali. Carleton University Press, 2000, pp. 98-120. Cooper, Frederick, and Ann L. Stoler. “Introduction: Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule.” American Ethnologist, Vol. 16, No. 4, 1989, pp. 609-21. Dávila, Jerry. Diploma de Brancura: Política Social e Racial no Brasil, 1917-1945. Editora UNESP, 2005. ---. Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950-1980. Duke University Press, 2010. Dikötter, Frank. “Group Definition and the Idea of ‘Race’ in Modern China (1793– 1949).” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1990, pp. 420-32. Eltis, David. “The volume and structure of the transatlantic slave trade: a reassessment.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2001, pp. 17-46. Fernandes, Dmitri C. “‘E fez-se o samba’: Condicionantes intelectuais da música popular no Brasil.” Latin American Music Review, Vol. 32, No.1, 2011, pp. 39-58. Fernandes, Florestan. A integração do negro na sociedade de classes. Dominus Editora, 1965. Fischer, Brodwyn. A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro. Stanford University Press, 2008. Freyre, Gilberto. Casa-grande e senzala: formação da família brasileira sob o regime da economica patriarcal.

53 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. J. Olympio, 1933. Fundação Perseu Abramo. “Discriminação racial e preconceito de cor no Brasil, 2003 (Banco de dados). São Paulo, 2003. Available in Consórcio de Informações Sociais, 2009. . Guimarães, Antônio Sérgio. “A Modernidade Negra.” Teoria e Pesquisa: Revista de Ciência Política, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2003, pp. 41-61. Holt, Thomas C. The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938. John Hopkins University Press, 1992. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. “Apêndice: Estatísticas de 500 anos de povoamento.” Brasil: 500 Anos de Povoamento. Rio de Janeiro, 2000. pp. 225-26. Retrieved from ˂https://brasil500anos.ibge.gov.br/estatisticas-do-povoamento˃ Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard University Press, 1999. Lake, Marilyn, and Henry Reynolds. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality. Melbourne University Publishing, 2008. Lesser, Jeffrey. Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil: 1808 to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2013. ---. Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. Duke University Press, 1999. ----. “A Reflection on Foreigness and the Construction of Brazilian National Identities.” LusoBrazilian Review, Vol. 50, No. 2, 2013, pp. 53-63. Loveman, Mara. National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America. Oxford University Press, 2015. ---. “Whiteness in Latin America: Measurement and Meaning in National Censuses (18501950).” Journal de la Société des Américanistes, Vol. 95, No. 2, 2009, pp. 207-34. Marx, Anthony W. Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. Cambridge University Press, 1998. McDonnell, Judith, and Cileine de Lourenço. “You’re Brazilian, right? What kind of Brazilian are you? The racialization of Brazilian immigrant women.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 32 No. 2, 2009, pp. 239-56. Norvell, John M. “Race Mixture and the Meaning of Brazil: Race, Class, and Nation in the Zona Sul of Rio de Janeiro.” PhD. Diss. Cornell University, 2001. Paranhos, Adalberto. Os desafinados: Sambas e Bambas no Estado Novo. Intermeios, Casa de Artes e Livros, 2015. Portes, Alejandro, and Min Zhou. “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and its Variants.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 530, 1993, pp. 74–96. Reis, Letícia V. de Souza. “‘O que o rei não viu’: música popular e nacionalidade no Rio de Janeiro da Primeira República.” Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2003, pp. 237-79. Ribeiro, Renilson R. “Exóticos, infantis e submissos na colônia identitária: As representações dos negros nos livros didáticos de história do Brasil.” História e Perspectivas, Vol. 38, 2008, pp. 43-77. Roediger, David. Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Verso, 1999. Schwartzman, Simon, Helena M. B. Bomeny and Vanda M. R. Costa. Tempos de Capanema. Fundação Getúio Vargas e Editora Paz e Terra, 2000. Seyferth, Giralda. “A assimilação dos imigrantes como questão nacional.” MANA, Vol. 3, No.

54 | Farah Schwartzman, L. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018. 1, 1997, pp. 95-131. ---. “A Idéia de Cultura Teuto-Brasileira: Literatura, Identidade e os Significados da Etnicidade.” Horizontes Antropológicos, Vol. 10, No. 22, 2004, pp. 149-97. ---. “Construindo a Nação. Hierarquias Raciais e o Papel do Racismo na Política de Imigração e Colonização.” Raça, Ciência e Sociedade.. Ed. Marcos Chor Maio and Ricardo Ventura Santos. Editora Fiocruz, 1996, pp. 41-58. Skidmore, Thomas. Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. Oxford University Press, 1995. Stasiulis, Daiva, and Nira Yuval-Davis. Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class. Sage Publications, 1995. Stepan, Nancy. The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Cornell University Press, 1991. Steyn, Melissa. 2005. “‘White Talk:’ White South Africans and the Management of Diasporic Whiteness.” Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader of Race and Empire. Ed. Alfred J. López, State University of New York Press, 2005. pp. 119-36. Takhteyev, Yuri V. Coding Places: Software Practice in a South American City. MIT Press, 2012. Telles, Edward. Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America. The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Thobani, Sunera. Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2007. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998. Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European states, AD 990-1992. Blackwell, 1990. Torpey, John. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Vianna, Hernano. O Mistério do Samba. Editora Jorge Zahar, 1995. Weinstein, Barbara. The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil. Duke University Press, 2015. Wimmer, Andreas. Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Wimmer, Andreas and Nina Glick Schiller. “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology.” International Migration Review, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2003, pp. 576-610. Winter, Elke. Us, Them, and Others: Pluralism and National Identities in Diverse Societies. University of Toronto Press, 2011. Zanini, Maria Catarina Chitolina. Italianidade no Brasil Meridional: a Construção da Identidade Étnica na Região de Santa Maria, RS. Editora UFSM, 2006.

UC Merced TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World Title Whiteness as Airmindedness: Juan de la Cierva (1923-1925), Film and the Airplane

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Whiteness as Airmindedness: Juan de la Cierva (1923-1925), Film and the Airplane ______________________________________________ EVA WOODS PEIRÓ VASSAR COLLEGE Abstract Spanish film culture of the 1920s celebrated the aspirations of technological power and the enjoyment of or anxiety around technology. This chapter historicizes a set of propaganda films made in Spain between 1923 and 1925 about Juan de la Cierva’s invention, the Autogiro, a machine that fused the airplane and helicopter. These short hybrid media artifacts—a coalescence of documentary, actualité, and advertisement—promoted de la Cierva’s invention while also drawing upon and furthering ideas about whiteness and its intimate, if not generative, connection with technology. Balancing theoretical frameworks provided by Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler with Richard Dyer and Judy Wajcman’s arguments about the raced and gendered construction of technology, I argue that these cinematic objects, which entertained cinemagoers and served military interests, were deeply saturated with the discourse of whiteness. The implicit assumptions of this race rhetoric, which were built into the material specificity of the airplane, were the control of the Spanish and European-identified race over this conquest of the air and the maintenance of the white viewer-driver-pilot. Key Words Whiteness, Airmindedness, Juan de la Cierva, Film and Airplane, Spanish Film. Spanish film culture of the twenties showcases the convergence of cinema and aviation. Producers of media across the spectrum—avant garde and popular fiction, the visual arts, cinema magazines and speciality ones too—celebrated both aspirations of technological power and the enjoyment of, or anxiety around, technology.1 Such contradiction and complexity characterized the rhetoric of industrial progress that stimulated and fascinated Spanish cinema audiences through its mechanical tricks and surprises; it bore the mark of enlightened cosmopolitanism and was a mystical source of wonder. The counterweight—the dystopian view of speed and the shock of technological progress—scripted machines as instruments of destruction and oppression, harbingers of a crisis of confusion, motors of irrational and unstoppable power. Historicizing early and silent cinema helps us understand how cinema’s reflectionproduction of reality has engaged in questions of war, will to empire, and international flows of power. Returning to this earlier cinematicity allows us to better theorize how the transnational, indeed global, conversation on technological empire was mediated by the rhetoric of whiteness. Whether they were elevated by religious language as vehicles for transcending time and space (releasing humanity from its earthly limits), or modern incarnations of Columbus’s ships, or seen as manifestations of a utopian and democratic mode of mass travel, racial discourses structured

74 | Woods Peiró, E. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018.

cinematic practice at the level of production and consumption. The implicit assumptions of this race rhetoric, built into the material specificity of the airplane, were the control of the Spanish and European-identified race over this conquest of the air and the maintenance of the white viewer-driver-pilot. In this essay, I examine a set of propaganda films made in Spain between 1923 and 1925 about Juan de la Cierva’s invention, the Autogiro, a machine that fused the airplane and helicopter.2 These short hybrid media artifacts—a coalescence of documentary, actualité, and advertisement—promoted de la Cierva’s invention while they also drew upon and furthered ideas about whiteness and its intimate, if not generative, connection with technology. Balancing theoretical frameworks provided by Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler with Richard Dyer and Judy Wajcman’s arguments about the raced and gendered construction of technology, I argue that these cinematic objects that entertained cinemagoers and served military interests were deeply saturated in the discourse of whiteness. Lines of Sight As an expression of capitalist modernity, film shares discursive and material affinities with the airplane. As Angela Della Vache cogently writes, “the airplane and the cinema redefined the boundaries of vision, and consequently, of subjectivity” (444). Paul Virilio has argued that the evolution of photo-cinematic reproduction cannot be separated from what he calls the “history of the line of aim” or the “line of sight,” a visual epistemology that inexorably weds the act of seeing to the acting of shooting. Understanding the relationship between cinema and aviation involves a brief consideration of the epistemological link of the lens and the weapon. For Virilio the trajectories of the chronophotographic rifle (invented in 1882) and the serial-shot camera invented by Etienne-Jules Marey, the President of the French photographic society, were elemental to cinema. The principal of the chronophotographic rifle, which allowed its user to shoot at and photograph an object at instants during its movement through space (Virilio, War 15), was that it not only enabled the taking of pictures in the same moments that bullets were fired, it also enabled mechanized destruction, that of one’s immediate opponent and also a series of targets (15). Like the Colt revolver, used against Native Americans, or the Maxim machinegun, designed to be aimed at indigenous people in colonized domains after its debut in 1884, photographic guns were deployed to manage race.


The technology was not foreign to Spain. During its colonial war with North Africa, fought between 1859-1957, weapons were outfitted with cameras. As in other colonial conflicts, what began as a camera mounted on a dove or a kite, quickly evolved to cameras attached to dirigibles, trains (1898), and then planes. The “triad of the train, steamship and telegraph” had achieved the conquest of space (Schivelbusch 194) but the airplaine had conquered the air. And whereas “panoramic perception” enabled by windows on moving trains was structured into film montage (130), so would vision from a plane become imbricated into the experience of cinema which had internalized the history of lensed weaponry. As the chronophotographic gun dealt out and recorded mechanized death, it also perfected what Virilio terms “eye-less vision,” that is, “vision in which the naked eye no longer plays a role, and seeing loses its direct quality because vision is realized through mediation” (War 19). Seeing targets through a lens or a window empowered the viewer, despite the more highly mediated interface. In this sense, airplanes originated as the ultimate military weapon through their ability to destroy entire populations from distances and positions hitherto impossible (the sky) by pilots viewing their target through a window/screen. For Wolfgang Schivelbusch, this “new reality of annihilated in-between spaces” was emblematic of how cinema (or the airplane, for Virilio) brought objects closer to the viewer (42). But greater mediation also meant the loss of empathy triggered by physical intimacy. Automated perception allowed the feeling of racial superiority to flourish. Thus while the camera produced the images that fed pro-war cinematic propaganda, the airplane turned the tide of the war, escalating it to genocidal measures between 1923 and 1925 when Spanish pilots dropped mustard gas bombs on Rif civilian inhabitants.3 That this episode of the Spanish-Morrocan conflict remains understudied proves the effectiveness of mechanized death for racilialized others—targets acquired by a lens of racially superiority and impunity. Who or what constituted the subject, or the eye of the camera? These questions occurred to the earliest film theorists. A return to early films about aviation offers the opportunity to reconsider formulations of subjectivity according to both racialized schemes and the mechanized mediation of our visual frame. As the camera and the rifle merged, the question of a human subject’s perception became ambiguous. The dilemma of “knowing who is the subject of the state and the subject of war in the era of modern warfare,” Virilio says, “will be of exactly the same kind as the problem of knowing who is the subject of perception” (War 2-3). Determining


the location of the viewing subject, whether it be the cockpit, behind the camera, the spectator position on the ground or in the cinema, or the targeted individual of an aerial attack, became an epistemological challenge. While the camera challenged the formerly discrete categories of perception, the technology as well as photographic representations promoted a white-centered subject of camera perception. Such concurrence was not accidental but, to the contrary, a result of the mutually constituted condition of technology and society. As David Lyons has said in reference to surveillance, technologies are neither good nor bad, but they are not neutral (n.pag.). And neither the cinema nor the airplaine is politically neutral. Human actors made specific decisions to create them, while at the same time these actors were mediated by the techno-social networks in which they were embedded.4 Yet, some scholars may argue that gender, or race, have little bearing on the creation of technology, but technology is “socially shaped” and “part of a system which is never merely technical but also economic, organizational, political and cultural” (Wajcman 34; Dyer 83). In this sense the maintenance of white supremacy depended on its ability to secure a position of dominance behind the camera or in the cockpit of the airplane. This white-centered technological vision seemed ubiquitious and without boundaries, but accessible only to white subjects who enjoyed individualized and high-relief definition. As Richard Dyer writes, “the invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white (which is to say dominant) discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity” (3) because photographic media “privilege and construct whiteness” (89). The materials used to manufacture cameras were “developed making the white face as the touchstone,” yet the history of this whitening was forgotten; the camera would be seen as an apparatus that was a priori “fixed and inevitable” (90). Mid-century Hollywood films displayed the white face as the norm, and Dyer argues that the technological privileging of whiteness “contribute[d] to specific perceptions of whiteness . . . making the white man not only more visible but also more individualized” (99). So even though the airplane was fetishized as pilot-less, as we shall see later in this essay, when there was a pilot, he or she was a priori white. Traditionally, historians have treated as separate categories industrially manufactured objects (planes and films), repertoires of progress (where airmindedness and racialization intermingle), and social and material networks. But these artificial categories mask the dialectical process in which film and aviation participated. For boundaries become increasingly muddied


when we interrogate their content.5 As a social construction, a plane or a helicopter is not a discrete vehicle, but a “network of heterogenous relationships . . . a network that traced a compromise between different concerns, considerations and actors” (Law and Callon 170). In this sense, films about aviation are not only produced by airplanes, but create airplanes, their virtual possibilities and lines of flight. Films and planes, or cinema and aviation, form a set of relations, a network or “a compound reality” (170). Conversely, such as those who have the technology to fly come to dwell within a different “reality” than those who do not possess access to such technology. For Law and Callone, these opposed groups become indissolvably mapped onto the network of relations between aviation and cinema (173). Producers of cinema, pilots in the cockpit, or inventors of flying craft end up on the other side of the race and technology boundary from those produced and captured by cinema, or those targeted or killed by aerial weaponry. Over time, this arrangement is (mistakenly) seen and understood as natural, and from this naturalization are born the singular identities of aircraft (objects with their own consistent qualities) and pilots (individualized and autonomous actors) (174). During the expansion of film culture in Spain in the mid-teens, and perhaps because of it, Spaniards began to identify with pilots, airfield spectators, or the aircraft themselves. Inexpensive and accessible, the cinema was often the most likely place for people to see airplanes, while racialized others—Moroccans, most often—would invariably be seen as spectator-victims, targets of these planes. Yet the airplane’s automated power and fetishistic allure concealed its participation in a network of relationships that maintained racial hierarchies. Like the pilots who dropped the gas bombs, spectators could not see the plane’s imbrication in the social and political network that sustained the colonial race wars. Consequently, when the public saw images of Harkas and Moroccan Regulars mounting a Spanish plane to quell the Asturias uprising in 1934 or carry out the coup d’etat in 1936, sheer terror began to spread among spectator-citizens who had only seen or imagined (through film or air spectacles) Spaniards and other whites as pilots or passengers, but not victims of planes carrying racialized others. “Cinema isn’t I see, it’s I fly”6 Film and airplane mirrored each other’s potential space. The early development of the Spanish film industry’s insfrastructure—the proliferation of movie theatres and increased production and distribution—parallels the expansion of the Spanish airforce.7 Spatial convergence of plane and


film, however, tended to be imagined more often outside the realm of war. The Spanish architect Fernández Shaw’s 1930 design for a triple-screen cinema was destined to be used as a drive-in movie theatre for both cars and airplanes. Although we might consider Shaw’s design visionary, at the time it was logical to assume that aerodromes were like movie houses since airfields, like the one used in the promotional composite film, Juan de la Cierva, were arenas of the spectacular, places for recordmaking and flights of competition and voyeurship, “with frequent crashes and risks for both those flying and watching on the ground” (Urry 137). The Autogiro, instead, was seen as a strange windmill of the sky. Neither plane nor helicopter, it was essentially a WWI airplane fuselage with a massive tri-partite helicopter propeller mounted between the nose and the cockpit of the airplane and a second smaller propeller on the nose. In a memorable sequence from Juan de la Cierva, men drag the Autogiro, with its painted face, from a warehouse; immediately, the ground crew prepares the body and the propellors for the upcoming demonstration. The pilot mounts the craft and the crew pulls a cord to start the massive blades of the propeller, an extremely dangerous operation for both crew and bystanders. In the next sequence, the autogiro descends in front of the warehouse in a long arc and continues to fly low to the ground. Will it fly through the warehouse, as do the barndusters? The airfield as a site of attraction was here mediated by film, which inadvertently, through its own internal dualism as a war machine and an entertainment machine, advertises the Autogiro as both military tool and symbol of utopian possibilities in air travel and novel forms of entertainment. The airfield as cinematic attraction also figured prominently in the Spanish fiction film, Boy (Benito Perojo 1925). In this feature-length adventure, two central characters travel to Cadiz seeking distraction from the navy exercises performed with dirigibles and hydroplanes. The review of the film in the newspaper ABC in 1926 praised the scenes in which the Spanish Navy and Air Force had supplied equipment, commenting that these particular scenes “fueron recibidas por el público con una gran ovación” (Gubern, Perojo 105). Even when the focus of the film lay more on fair attractions, the spatial and symbolic convergence between airplanes and cinema was visible in the logic and structure of the amusment rides and skill games which featured flight and an airplane-mounted gun with a moving target. In the 1930 short film, Esencia de verbena: Poema documental en 12 imágenes, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Spain’s premier aesthetician of fascism, mounted a collage of live filmed images from the Festival of San Antonio de la Florida in addition to intermittent footage of Madrid’s summer


fairs, or verbenas, such as the Festival of Saint Carmen (Gubern, Proyector 430-445). In its fourth chapter, we see a shot of a spinning ferris wheel (la noria) taken from a standing position, and then two shot-reverse shots in which the three second reverse shots cut to the dizzying view from a seat on the revolving wheel. The film then jumps to the carousel (el tiovivo) where the camera focuses on the continuous movement of the carousel, allowing the spectator no respite from the constant rush of people whirling past like unsutured film frames that disorient and destabilize the film spectators. The film cuts to a collage that frames images of the carousel, the ferris wheel, and static spectators. Even more daring fare rides are the subject of the ninth chapter, in which mechanical flyers (volatines or the “huytoma”), swing riders in small chairs hanging from cables fixed to a revolving columnar base that ironically simulates a zootrope. In another short take we witness the vertical free-fall nose-dives of a mechanical seesaw swing. These haptic images thereby simulate the sensation of flight while recording the experience of amusement rides meant to simulate flying.8 Again, the question of perception and its relationship to the “darker” side of modernity reemerges in the sixth chapter, which centers on the shooting stall, or the “atracción del pimpampúm.” After the playfulness of the vanguardistas and the exhilarating fair attractions, the question becomes, what kinds of individuals or nations are posited as the subjects of perception or consumers of this technology? Even then, race and the technological divide shadow forth the theatre of war in a spectacular microcosm: the shooting stalls at fairs. Esencia de verbena’s footage of the shooting stall focuses on moving targets, a series of papel maché and wooden dolls– stereotypes such as don Juan and, more notably, a turbaned figure. This specter of race and the promise of sexuality throught the film underscore the amusement of Esencia. Corella Lacasa’s summary of Esencia echoes this point: Esencia, he argues, is an amalgamation of “el lenguaje vanguardista y el casticismo, el canto a la máquina y la devoción mariana, el culto a la urbe y a la esencia mística del paisaje castellano, el recuerdo de la picaresca española y el de la voluntad de imperio” (58).9 The forces necessary to win wars—precision, propulsion, velocity, duration, vigilance— preoccupied scientists and military officials, but they also drove the work of engineers, pilots, and filmmakers. Connections between the airplane and the cinema were played out on the level of the individual. Engineers, filmmakers, politicians, businessmen, military officers, aristocratic aviation buffs, and fans of movies and air shows were socially connected through cinematic and


aeronautical circles as well as by the war and the government. All of these agents were mired in the politics of colonial race-wars. At the end of the nineteenth century, for example, the producer Billy Bitzer made short films based on variety shows while he was going to Cuba, sent by the American Mutoscope company to film the events of the Cuban War of 1898. Similarly, Roman Gubern tells us that the film career of one of Spain’s most important directors, Benito Perojo, was in large part boosted by the creative impulse and technical proficiency of Perojo’s brother, an aeronautical engineer (Benito 20). The Spanish engineer, Juan de la Cierva, who invented the Autogiro, was the son of the criminal lawyer, conservative politican and businessman, Juan de la Cierva Peñafiel. The latter, as War Minister in the administration of Antonio Maura, and supported by Africanistas, had firmly directed the reconquest of territories lost in the Disaster of Annual in which Spanish soldiers suffered a crushing defeat by the Rifian forces of Abdel Krim. He was also responsible for placing General Sanjurjo in Melilla. In En alas de la gloria (1926), a historical documentary of the first transatlantic flight by seaplane, the male “lead” is Ramón Franco, the younger brother of Francisco Franco, who pilots the Dornier Do J Plus Ultra on January 26, 1926. Ramón Franco had made routine reconnaissance flights over Rif enemy territory, earning the reputation as a courageous and daring pilot in the Spanish army in Morocco. In 1924, two years before in the film En alas, Ramón Franco had been the first to fly the aerial route from Melilla to the Canary Islands via the northeast cape of Africa. While Ramón Franco satisfied the collective need for a heroic war aviator, the cult of the aviator hero in Europe and North America, as Michael Paris has shown, had already taken off through the vehicles of novels, pulp magazines and cinema imagery (Paris 5). Where war propaganda began or ended in relationship to cinema’s own propagation is hard to say. For instance, figures like Alfonso XIII, a collector of mechanical gadgets and enthusiast of aerial gas bombardment, promoted war for the sake of war. For Alfonso XIII, engaged in what Michael Walzer describes as a tournament between aristocratic men whose best, brightest and mightiest weapons win, war existed for war’s sake: it was a disciplined, consensual game of fatal play (Walzer 25).10 The targets of these war games were, as he called them, “the savages” of northern Morocco. The same political and socio-economic forces regulated both film and aviation industries. State and private financiers, legislators and insurance companies shared weather predictions


(crucial for either flying or filming), scientific reports and technical manuals, experiments with technology, and inter-technological competition for the conquest of the third dimension. Which technology would secure the confidence of the mass public, cementing an ideology of airmindedness and a white nation of flyers? Airmindedness vs. Military Needs: Juan de la Cierva In Juan de la Cierva, objects and networks begin to blur in response to the rhetoric of airmindedness, the slogan of mass flying, and the demands of the Spanish colony in Africa. As filmic images show, far from being technologically neutral, the Autogiro constituted a dynamic site for the contestation of military and commercial interests. Through the medium of film, the promise of the Autogiro as a domesticated vehicle for urban transit gained a sensational visual perspective. At this same time, cinema maintained its networked complicity with military aviation in its repeated allusions to the Autogiro as a specialized machine for warfare. What we see as “the movie” of Juan de la Cierva is in reality a collection of filmed actualities (events filmed as they occurred) that were collapsed into a weekly news compilation: an assemblage of different newsreels, publicity films and filmed public exhibitions about the Autogiro produced between 1923 and 1925. The footage was run together, without reference to individual directors, although the Pathé news company did receive acknowledgment in one of these reels. English was used for some of the intertitles, but the national provenance of the various pieces of footage is hard to assess, nor does examination of the filmic materials reveal at what point these shorts were pasted together into one continuous filmstrip. Their subsequent integration, however, creates cause for reflection. The forced linking of these separate reels, each with its own history, national focus and aesthetic emphasis, was symptomatic of ideas about what film should be: feature-length, coherent and unitary (transparent editing would smooth out film’s inherently fragmentary nature); and at this point in time, cosmopolitan instead of nationalistic (although the seeds of nationalism are easily perceived). Like the discourse about the airplane that fetishized it as a coherent object and erased the network in which it was embedded, the filmic medium would cast the plane as a dream of modernity at the expense of its larger socio-cultural constructedness. Twentieth-century archivists of Madrid’s Filmoteca internalized this thinking into their classificatory scheme while historians of twentieth century Spanish cinema dutifully transferred the airplane-as-icon into the archive of disciplinary knowledge.


The various pieces of footage are an assemblage of generic instability—is this an advertisement, a documentary, or a heroic narrative about the possibilities of the aircraft, the prowess of the pilot? A nodal point within this object-network that allows for viewing pleasure is the question of who or what comprises the subject of this film: is the subject Juan de la Cierva, after whom the film is titled, or is it his invention, the Autogiro? Viewers of filmed actualities were accustomed to seeing the airman as hero, and every flight as a major triumph for the pilot, the hero of the skies (Paris 19). In Juan de la Cierva, however, the attention is not on a particular pilot, but on the inventor’s creation, and on various individuals who potentially could all be pilots. The film’s focus on the unique Autogiro reflected its contested position within debates over which kind of rotary wing craft (helicopters, gyroplanes, gyrodynes, rotodynes, etc.) should prevail. Helicopters existed at the time, but they were either very complex—requiring nine rotors and propellers—or extremely unstable, like balloons tethered to the ground (Mody 516). De la Cierva was emphatic about the differences between the Autogiro and the helicopter or the airplane. In fact, [De la] Cierva saw the autogiro as a kind of airplane with a wing that just happened to move independently of the fuselage, whereas he and other proautogiro engineers saw the helicopter as a ‘flying machine designed to rise by means of a vertical air screw or propeller.’ The autogiro’s rotor, unlike the helicopter’s, would be unpowered; like a yacht tacking into the wind, it [drew lift from] the relative wind generated by an ordinary airplane propeller mounted on the front of the fuselage by a process called ‘autorotation’ (hence the name “autogiro”). (De la Cierva and Rose 16) The Autogiro’s free-wheeling rotor, and its ability to maneuver by generating windspeed, made it seem more intuitive than other aircraft. Less experienced pilots could also fly Autogiros more easily, a benefit for those who wished to promote mass flying. The Autogiro was thus unique, offering technical capabilities heretofore unseen. Its aerodynamism, in the opinion of De la Cierva, was far more sophisticated than the skill of any pilot. The filmic display of the Autogiro, especially in the first seven minutes, privileges its maneuverability in a mis-en-scene devoid of human figures. Granting sole agency to the Autogiro, this sequence begins with long and medium shots of the body, then showcases in a close-up the ingenious design of the rotor and the articulated blade, and documents repeated take-offs of the machine.


The different audiences of this film about the Autogiro—the military, the aviation experts and enthusiasts, and cinemagoers (and mixtures of all three)—would read these same images differently. Experts and engineers would focus on the film’s shots of the blades that were hinged to the root of the rotor and thus capable of moving freely up and down. This achievement, de la Cierva had hoped, would solve the problems of ascension and propulsion and the gyroscopic force that had complicated take offs (Mody 515, 518). The military was after warcraft that could hover and safely descend vertically. The Autogiro was capable of near-vertical descent but this was reserved for emergency landings or for demonstrations, like the ones in the film. If the Autogiro could perform this, as its supporters claimed it could, other national militaries would invest in the technology. Ultimately the U.S. military, despite showing initial support, would invest in the helicopter, even though helicopter technology was less safe and reliable, and required far more pilot training than the Autogiro. Film audiences comprised of experts and educated elites who consumed aviation discourse might have viewed what seemed to be fairly vertical dives and landing as images as proving possible the idea of domestic aviation. If these images showed the Autogiro competing with the pilot for symbolic and technological importance, they also demonstrated “airmindedness”: that the Autogiro could take off and land in areas of urban congestion, and how it was going to modernize, or whiten, the nation and its citizens, who would consume it as a safe domestic product. The second sequence, for instance, features the indexical trace of humans—row houses in back of the parked Autogiro, a reminder that this strange mechanical creature can be domesticated. Featuring the Autogiro so close to homes promoted the notion that normal people could fly the Autogiro from a private back yard or the roof of a house, just as they would park the car in a garage (Mody 520). De la Cierva and engineers and businessmen who promoted the Autogiro through both mass media and specialized journals for experts all argued that driving the Autogiro was the same as driving a car. Civilian pilots could go wherever they wanted, unrestrained by train stations and airports as they could learn to read flight instruments and interpret ground signals, thus eliminating the need for ground personnel. Impresarios like Harold Pitcairn, the owner of the commercial sector of De la Cierva’s company, even tried to obtain immunity from laws that regulated air flights. The NY Times predicted that “the day will come when the Autogiro will be used in the air as the automobile is driven on land” (16 November 1930). Although the Autogiro


never won such popularity, it was used in U.S. cities to fight forest fires; to fight criminals and patrol traffic; to crop dust and chart tree diseases; and to track both game and hunters. But for businessmen, realizing the symbolic capital of the Autogiro—its appeal as a utopian machine capable of bringing on mass democratic flying—required the Autogiro’s conversion into a mass-produced reality. Again, what had to be established in the public mind was the habit of “airmindedness,” a term invented by Arthur Blessing, a transportation expert of the twenties. Considering the options for a long-distance journey in the 1920s, Blessing wrote: No business can last if it does not at least pay expenses, and capital will not be forthcoming to develop aviation unless there is a reasonable profit in sight eventually. While mail and express can furnish some revenues to the air carriers, passengers must be attracted and held in order that air transportation may compete successfully and provide service. For most persons, Blessing continues, travelling in the air is rather revolutionary and a spirit of “air-mindedness” will have to be fostered; just as we have acquired “automobile-mindedness” and “radio-mindedness.” (Blessing 54)11 It was forward-thinking to promote the idea of average citizens, women and children as subjects of aviation. Indeed, the fight for the woman’s vote was in full swing and figures like Amelia Earhart (who broke an altitude record in an Autogiro during a transcontinental flight) were featured in the press and in some films. Nevertheless Blessing was writing during sanctioned racial segregation. And while cinema captured this same utopian impulse, imagining possibilities for air travel whether they could be fully realized or not, these possibilities were limited to those who fit the mold of the modern white family. As the film Juan de la Cierva suggested to some expert audiences, and also perhaps average cinemagoers, the Autogiro could be accessible to the “weekend Autogirists,” as they were called in 1931 in Autogiro News. The presentation of the allinclusive nation-family was perfectly suited to this democratic image of the Autogiro. In a major sequence, the film shows a small crowd gathered around the aircraft. De la Cierva himself hoists children up onto the nose where they pose as if for a portrait. Men assist a woman into the cockpit and the plane takes off. Women were not only safe but they could also drive this machine and potentially buy one. Commercial necessity, of course, was the main incentive for getting the public to think more about air travel, specifically, public or private mass air transport, even though aviation


would not attain a mass commercial profile until after the sixties or even the seventies; until then, airplanes and aircraft remained the exclusive terrain of the financial and military elites. That said, aviation entered the public imagination through cinema as early as 1901 with the one-minute moving picture (trick photography) that showed a pedal powered airship flying over Paris in A la Conquête de l’Air (The Flying Machine, dir. Ferdinand Zecca, 1901). The successful flights of the Wright brothers and Count von Zeppelin, the first flyers’ convocation, and Bleriot’s flight across the English Channel in 1908 were testimony that the air age had begun. Film reflected this reality through shorts about “flying machines” that evolved into narrative-length comedies and dramas using airplanes in chase scenes with trick photography and elaborate sets (Paris 11-12; 19). After 1914, as Michael Paris writes of British aviation films before the twenties, “film accentuated the dramatic and dangerous aspects of flying and, by implication, elevated the airman to heroic status—a man who continuously risked his life as he struggled with nature and attempted to develop this new technology” (20). Hero narratives and the thrilling danger of flying sutured white cinema fans into the realm of cinematic aviation. Unsurprisingly, this merging of cinema and aviation implied competing ideologies. In Juan de la Cierva, for instance, there is tension between humans and the impressive aircraft. Cinema pandered to both rhetorics—on the one hand, air travel for everyone (the Autogiro could be operated by lay people), and on the other, the militaristic assumption that only a small elite of highly trained technical experts or pilots should maneuver planes. In his quest to perfect his Autogiro, de la Cierva had wanted to eliminate the human factor, or human error, to prove that it could maintain stability without being controlled by pilots, whom he considered to be on par with chauffeurs (Mody 515-16). His belief in the superiority of machines over human agency was founded on experience. The tri-motor bomber that de la Cierva had designed in 1919 had tainted his reputation as a competent technological inventor. The crash occurred because the pilot was accustomed to flying smaller planes (Mody 515-516). This accident led him to conceive the Autogiro. The film record of the Autogiro’s capacity to fly at a low altitude without crashing was essential for proving its reliability. In the film Juan de la Cierva, after a medium shot of a group including “Captain Courtney, the famous Test Pilot and the inventor” we see an accident: an Autogiro has crashed and rolled over. A crowd gathers around the fallen machine, men lift the craft and set it upright. The machine is intact. This real-time event allows for drama but


reinforces the superiority of the machine, since for de la Cierva, the Autogiro was superior to the man who drove it. Yet this conceit contradicted how Spanish and American experts and engineers felt about it. Up to this point, interest in Autogiro technology had been limited to American businessmen. But the Spanish military’s propaganda campaign for colonialist war in Africa would raise the profile of the triumphant white airman. If air vehicles could be piloted by anyone, if there could be Model Ts of the sky—to borrow the vernacular of mass flight—air travel could transcend social divisions. The airplane, however, would follow a different international destiny. The military and its experts employed the airplane to improve troop morale, and to reinforce racial and national consciousness, not only only in Germany or in the U.S. but also in Spain. As Navas Pagán confirms in the Spanish military journal, Militaria, “La aparición de los aeroplanos levanta el ánimo y el entusiasmo de los soldados españoles y alegra sus espíritus” (64). Seen as heroes, “Estos caballeros del aire,” he says, “llevan a cabo una relevante misión psicológica con su habitual intrepidez y vuelos rasantes ‘a la española’, que asombran tanto a propios como a enemigos” (68). Referring to the war with Morroco as “la larga y penosa guerra que sostuvo nuestra Patria para pacificar el Norte de África (territorio que nos había sido cedido en calidad de Protectorado por la Conferencia Internacional de Algeciras de 1906)” (61), he explains, contrary to fact, that Spain had debuted the airplane as a war weapon: En esta Guerra del Norte de África está madurando extraordinariamente la joven aviación militar española, a base de espíritu de sacrificio y de abnegación, sereno valor, disciplina y excelente técnica sin faltar en grandes dosis las proverbiales furia y audacia hispánicas. El rápido proceso de desarrollo de la aviación military española en la campaña de África y las muchas enseñanzas de sus expertos y hábiles pilotos cautivan pronto la atención de las aeronáuticas europeas en unos momentos de grandes tensiones internacionales. No poco han aprendido estas aviaciones de los ejemplos y orientaciones que está dando la hispana, que ha sido la pionera en emplear el aeroplano como eficaz arma de combate. (Las Navas Pagán 65) For both the army and for proponents of mass flight, aircraft displayed a vast potential. The ability of an air machine to land on a rooftop, for instance, was a valuable practical maneuver, and midway through Juan de la Cierva we see the Autogiro ascending and apparently remaining


immobile in the air. An intertitle appears: “It can hover and land almost like a bird!” But could it? Mody admits that “It is necessary here to confront the realist criticism that perhaps, hovering ‘really was’ required for the military’s needs, and that the helicopter ‘really was’ the only vehicle that could supply it” (533). By 1959 the US Armed Forces was insisting that rotary aircraft must hover—and this would ultimately decide which technology would get funding from either the military, academia, civilians or the industry (Mody 534). Flying quickly prompted Western national militaries around the globe to restructure, and the Spanish military followed suit: flying would change the Spanish military strategy in Morroco to one that was more lethal, stealth, and covert. Airplanes enabled reconnaissance in the mountainous terrain of the Rif, which was difficult to traverse either by automobile or on foot. Planes made it possible to drop supplies, and even more importantly, to drop bombs. In the twenties, during bombing runs, the pilot himself had to take in his hands a bomb full of mustard gas and drop it from the plane (Balfour 134; 141-42). It was also necessary to fly at a low altitude at daybreak or even at night in order to avoid the muhayeddin snipers, since sixty percent of downed Spanish planes were caused by these shots (Balfour 134; Navas Pagán 70). The Spanish colonialist army was keen to avoid losing soldiers to mustard gas. But with planes soldiers could avoid exposure to towns and market places that had been contaminated by gas. The enormous threat to military pilots, who were primary targets, was mitigated by tales—and films—that exalted the bravery and audacity of these aviators in these kamikaze runs. The argument for greater human agency in aviation thus supported and even mythified these men, who as Navas Pagán says, went to “pacify North Africa” (61). According to Alfonso XIII in 1925, “lo importante era la exterminación de las bestias maliciosas, las tribus más aliadas a Abdel Krim” (Balfour 135). The rhetoric of a new conquista seem to justify racist genocide—Primo de Rivera had compared the war in Morocco with the spiritual conquest of the pagans of the Americas (Balfour 117)—and it placed the “caballero del aire” at the head of this “new” white crusade. Conclusion Planes and cinema were neither symptoms of modernity, nor material reflections of an economic model. But the fusion of airplane and cinema did project a racialized modernity and exercised a true political function, their technical developments supporting hierarchies of power and social


relations. By decentering the naturalized categories through which we have understood cinema and airplanes—cinema has taught us a mediated vision and renders this natural—we can discern the linked circuitry of racialized thought, airmindeness, and the pleasure/anxiety of aviation. Flight on film or films about flight shown in Spain almost exclusively celebrated the individual as agent, masculine, and in control of his own mobility, even while anxiety about air travel accompanied the spectator-passengers of these films. Some of this anxiety lay in the excitement of the ride, the thrill of a bird’s eye view, the rush of adrenaline stoked by intertitles. And some anxiety bespoke an unspeakable terror of the other—an Other in the form of irrational fear before the spector of violence and pain wrought by an accident; or in the form of a racialized, unknown ethnic other, an after-image of the devastation of innocent people. Cinema masked and distracted spectators from the destructive features of technology even while they watched its deathly force on film. When specatators no longer saw its larger context, (the networks of actors, objects, and discourses that irremediably structured, defined and created cinema and the cultural reality that it reflected), their vision had merged with the line of aim. Deconstructing the apparent autonomy of these organizational categories of modernity can help to shed light on the forms of knowledge that covertly naturalize geopolitical divisions and racist violence.


Notes In particular, Misterio en la puerta del sol (Francisco Elías 1927), which contains an eleven-minute airplane ride sequence. 2 In Madrid’s Filmoteca these short films are categorized as Juan de la Cierva. 3 For analyses of Spanish images and films on northern Morocco and the colonial war see: Eloy Martín Corrales, La imagen del magrebí en España: Una Perspectiva histórica, siglos XVI-XX, Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2002; Alberto Elena, La llamada de África: Estudios sobre el cine colonial español. Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2010; and María Dolores F. Fígares; Romero de la Cruz, La colonización del imaginario. Imágenes de África. Diputación de Granada, 2003; and the essential Susan Martin-Márquez, Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. 4 See also Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communication. Basic Books, 2005. 5 By rhetorical repertoire I mean “patterned ways of representing the world through discourse . . . that actors can deploy to advance their interpretation or to seal up formally contradictory facets of those interpretations” (Mody 515). 6 See Friedrich Kittler, 1996. 7 La “Escuela Práctica de Aerostación, or the School for Balloonists, was established in Guadalajara in 1896 by Pedro Vives y Vich and the Aeroclub of Madrid in 1905. In 1911 in Cuatro Vientos, on the outskirts of Madrid, the school for military pilots was inaugurated. 1911 saw the first Spanish aerodromes, one in Cuatro Vientos and another in Melilla, which anticipated the centrality of aeronautical armaments in the campaign of shock and awe that was unleashed to avenge the disaster of Anual in 1921 (Balfour 139-53). 8 One of the few photos depicting Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel together shows them sitting in a cardboard plane as if they were on a fair ride. 9 Thanks to Román Gubern for pointing this out. 10 Thanks to Timothy McCormick (Vassar, 2013). 11 For more on aeromobility see John Urry, 136-37. 1


Works Cited Balfour, Sebastian. Deadly Embrace. Oxford University Press, 2002. Blessing, Aurthur. “Airplanes vs. Airpships.” The North American Review, Vol. 226, No.1, 1928, pp. 53-63. Callon, Michael and John Law. “After the Individual in Society: Lessons on Collectivity from Science, Technology and Society.” The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1997, pp. 165-82. Corella Lacasa, Miguel. “Ernesto Giménez Caballero, o la estetización de la política.” Res Pública, Vol. 6, 2000, pp. 57-70. Dalle Vache, Angela. “Femininity in Flight: Androgeny and Gynandry in Early Silent Italian Cinema.” A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, Eds. Jennifer M. Beane and Diane Negra. Duke University Press, 2002, pp. 444-75. De la Cierva, Juan and Don Rose. Wings of Tomorrow: The Story of the Autogiro. Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1931. Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997. Ginger, Andrew. “Space, Time, Desire, and the Atlantic in Three Spanish Films of the 1920s.” Hispanic Research Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2007, pp. 69–78. Gubern, Román. Benito Perojo: pionerismo y supervivencia. Instituto de la Cinematografía y las de las Artes Audiovisuales, Ministerio de Cultura, 1994. ---. Proyector de Luna. La generación del 27 y el cine. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1999. Kern, Stephen. The culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Harvard University Press, 1983. King, Rob. “‘Uproaroarious Inventions’ The Keystone Film Company, Modernity, and the Art of the Motor.” Film History, Vol. 19, 2007, pp. 271-91. Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford University Press, 1996. Las Navas Pagán, Ángel Gabriel. “La Aviación Española en la Campaña Militar de Marruecos.” Revista de Cultura Militar, Vol. 3, 1991, pp. 61-72. Lyons, David. Surveillance After Snowden. Kindle, Polity, 2015. Mody, Cyrus C. M. “‘A New Way of Flying:’ Difference, Rhetoric and the Autogiro in Interwar Aviation.” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2000, pp. 513-43. Paris, Michael. From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun. Manchester University Press, 1995. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrializatio of Time and Space in the 19 th Century. The University of California Press, 1986. Urry, John. Mobilities. Polity, 2007. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller.Verso, 1989. ---. The Vision Machine. Trans. Julie Rose. Indiana University Press, 1994. Wajcman, Judy. Technofeminism. Polity, 2004. Walzer, Michael. Just and unjust wars: a moral argument with historical illustrations. Basic Books, 2006.

UC Merced TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World Title Spain Is (Not So) Different: Whitening Spain through Late Francoist Comedy

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Author Repinecz, Martin



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Spain Is (Not So) Different: Whitening Spain through Late Francoist Comedy ______________________________________________ MARTIN REPINECZ UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO Abstract This study argues that the popular comedy cinema of late Francoism (roughly 1960-75), known as comedia sexy, comedia celtibérica, or simply landismo, aimed to shift the international perception of Spain away from racialized stereotypes of the nation’s Africanness in order to move it closer to a white European identity. Troubled by the reputation of Francoism as anachronistic in a context of global decolonization, civil rights in the U.S., and rapid social and economic change within Spain, the regime used the popular cinema industry, which was closely aligned with it ideologically, to portray Spain as upwardly mobile on a geopolitical hierarchy that was imagined as a black/white racial paradigm. Specifically, by intertwining the macho ibérico/sueca narrative trope with racist caricatures of blacks, this cinema aimed to accentuate Spain’s upward geopolitical and racial mobility by contrasting it with the fixity of racial others, while simultaneously retaining a deracialized, commodifiable “difference” as a competitive advantage on the world stage. Key Words Whiteness, Late Francoism, Landismo, Popular Film, Racialization. Critical studies of racial ideologies in Spain have tended to emphasize the national context rather than linking Spanish racial discourses to global rhetorics of whiteness.1 The scarcity of whiteness scholarship on Spain is, to some extent, understandable, given that Spain was long perceived as racially distinct from white countries. This perception was due to the entrenched vision of the Spanish race as derived from a mixture of various racial heritages, including Roman, Visigoth, Arab, Romani and Jewish (Goode 1-3; Woods Peiró 6-8). It was also a consequence of the Black Legend, in which Spain’s Northern European rivals linked its perceived cultural backwardness to its racial mixture, thus producing the “Africa of Europe” stereotype (Martin-Márquez 40-42). However, while it is true that Spain was long imagined as nonwhite, or at best, less white than other European countries, it is also inarguable that the country played a crucial historical role in establishing what W.E.B. Du Bois has described as a global color line predicated on worldwide white racial domination.2 Given Spain’s legacy as one of Europe’s foremost colonial powers, its imposition of Eurocentric racial hierarchies throughout its global empire, and its extensive participation in the transatlantic slave trade, the present study begins from the premise that further examination of Spain’s shifting and unstable relationship to global whiteness is both productive and necessary.

92 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 Specifically, this article explores a key moment in the whitening of Spain’s global image: namely, the later decades of Francoism, roughly 1960-1975. To understand what I mean by “whitening,” we must consider the marked evolution in how Spain was perceived by other Western nations at the beginning and at the end of the twentieth century. Since the sixteenth century, the propagation of the Black Legend in countries such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands created a widely disseminated imaginary of Spain as a racialized other within Europe. As Barbara Fuchs notes, the idea of Spain as “black” served to highlight both its perceived moral depravity, given its purported abuses of indigenous peoples in the New World, as well as its racial associations “with Islam, with Africa, with dark peoples” (117). This international perception of Spain endured for centuries and travelled beyond European boundaries. For example, as María de Guzmán attests, during the Spanish-American War of 1898, United States literary and popular cultures exploited Black Legend discourses to portray Spain, a rival colonial power, as “the colonized” while portraying the U.S. as the “superior race and civilizer’” (xxix). Yet, by the end of the twentieth century, the global imaginary of Spain was not nearly as circumscribed by the “Africa of Europe” or “Black Legend” mythologies as it had been a century earlier. As Baltasar Fra-Molinero points out, this shift in perception can be attributed to at least two major factors. The first is the cultural, political, and economic Europeanization of Spain, a process that began in the later decades of Francoism and reached a symbolic culmination in Spain’s admission in 1986 to the European Union, “the unofficial international club of white countries” (Fra-Molinero 147). Secondly, immigration to Spain, which first became significant in the 1980s and quickly transformed Spain into a multiracial society, also played a crucial role in reinscribing the nation’s image as white. For Fra-Molinero, the increasing presence in Spain of Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans has caused cultural traits traditionally associated with Spain to be perceived as less different than those of other European or white countries. In other words, “the more immigrants it receives, the whiter Spain becomes” (153). Although Fra-Molinero’s analysis of Spain’s racial shift focuses primarily on the postFranco era–that is, after 1975–the phenomenon can be traced farther back. Cultural efforts to establish Spain’s belonging in global whiteness can be found throughout the twentieth century, particularly in the realm of cinema, well before the advent of democracy, EU membership, or immigration. For example, in a study of popular musical cinema from the 1920s to the 1950s, Eva Woods Peiró compellingly illustrates how the “simultaneous whiteness and Gypsiness” of

93 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 screen Gypsies, that is, on-screen Romani performers who were played by non-Romani actresses, served to “[index] Spain’s paranoid fears of backwardness” and, consequently, to assert the nation’s modernity (27). I argue that another effort to articulate Spain’s whiteness can be found in the popular cinema of late Francoism, especially in a widely consumed, yet aesthetically uninventive genre known as the comedia desarrollista, the comedia celtibérica, or simply landismo. This highly formulaic subgenre, which garnered great commercial success in its day and remains well-known to contemporary audiences,3 epitomizes the later regime’s anxiety about Spain’s place in the geopolitical hierarchy of nations. Troubled by the international perception of Francoism as anachronistic in a context of global decolonization, civil rights in the U.S., and the postwar democratization of Western Europe, the regime relied on the popular cinema industry, which was closely aligned with it ideologically, to suggest to Spaniards that Francoism could offer unmatched modernity and prosperity. Yet, as I will demonstrate, these promises were intertwined with global racial discourses. In what follows, I will offer an overview of the comedia desarrollista subgenre and its sociocultural context. I argue that this cinema’s effort to locate Spain’s place on a racial spectrum with black and white poles ultimately aims to represent Spain’s ascendance into European whiteness while still conserving a deracialized, commodifiable version of Spanish “difference.” I will then offer a close reading of two films—El alma se serena (dir. José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, 1970) and Una vez al año ser hippy no hace daño (dir. Javier Aguirre, 1969)—that are especially emblematic of the regime’s desire for Spaniards to see themselves as belonging to a global modernity racialized as white. Unearthing Racial Discourse in Late Francoist Comedy In the 1960s, numerous social and economic changes were underway in Spain, such as the tourism boom, increased urbanization, shifting gender mores, and a marked increase in ownership of television sets, automobiles, and other appliances. For these reasons, as Teresa Vilarós has argued, late Francoist comedies functioned as a “tecnología estatal” whose function was to manage the construction of a citizen-subject newly integrated into global consumerism (52). The construction of this new subject is perceptible in the genre’s recurring tropes and plotlines that often revolved around the humorous hijinks of rural Spanish bumpkins in a predictable range of modern settings, such as large cities (La ciudad no es para mí, dir. Pedro

94 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 Lazaga, 1966), newly built beach resorts (El turismo es un gran invento, dir. Pedro Lazaga, 1968), or in a Northern European country (Vente a Alemania, Pepe, dir. Pedro Lazaga, 1971). An extremely common narrative trope is that of the macho ibérico/sueca plot, in which a sexually repressed Spanish Everyman, usually played by an emblematic actor such as Alfredo Landa or José Luis López Vázquez, was constantly either chasing or being chased by suecas, the sexually uninhibited female tourists from Northern Europe. As Justin Crumbaugh has demonstrated, in late Francoist rhetoric, although the macho ibérico’s sexuality was considered deviant by some for chafing against traditional sexual mores, his penchant for “selling himself to foreigners” only served to reaffirm his virility, thus allegorizing Spain’s successful modernization (103). The macho ibérico/sueca formula was legible through racialized discourses. An emblematic example is the opening scene of Manolo, la nuit (dir. Mariano Ozores, 1973), which begins by showing a gaggle of suecas rubbing sunscreen on their tanned skin under a blinding Spanish sun. Curiously, the suecas are unimpressed when a chiseled, blonde sueco struts past them; however, they are titillated by the sight of a scantily clad Alfredo Landa, who sports a short frame, a receding hairline, plain looks, dark body hair, and a stocky physique. A narrating male voiceover explains this conundrum by declaring that only one kind of man can fulfill the women’s romantic fantasies: “el racial celtíbero español,” which he defines as “ese colosal producto que salió del cruce de dos pueblos fuertes, rudos y primitivos: los celtas y los iberos.” As this scene illustrates, the macho ibérico and the sueca were portrayed as representing different degrees of whiteness. On one hand, the sueca, who was svelte, attractive, and unburdened by the conservative sexual mores of Francoist Spain, was visually identifiable with a global, white modernity associated with Northern Europe. In addition to her physical perfection, the fact that she is naturally pale-skinned yet tanned is a key indicator of her whiteness. As Richard Dyer explains, tanning became a ubiquitous marker of whiteness in global twentiethcentury visual culture, not only because of its associations with wealth and luxury, but also because it “displays white people’s right to be various”—that is, it underscores the malleability of whiteness as one of its distinctive qualities (49-50). The macho ibérico, on the other hand, was recognizable through his off-whiteness, which the voiceover explicitly links to his distinct racial origin. It is precisely this racialized difference that makes him exotic and desirable to the suecas. Yet even as they underscored the exoticism of the macho ibérico, late Francoist comedies also sought to undermine the idea that the macho ibérico and the sueca were essentially different. For as Crumbaugh has noted, the regime’s marketing of Spain’s exoticism to attract European

95 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 tourism through the “Spain is Different” campaign paradoxically underscored Spain’s resemblance to the rest of Europe by “skillfully refashioning difference as a commodity” (68). In popular cinema, the regime’s effort to transform tropes of backwardness into signs of modernity is perceptible in the seemingly infinite malleability of its protagonists, whose incessant, often barely coherent changes of costume and identity within a single film represent Spain’s capacity to shed its anachronism and don the guises of an imported modernity. In this way, despite their apparent off-whiteness when compared to suecas, Spanish characters of these films were portrayed as possessing the elasticity and flexibility necessary to establish parity with suecas—and, therefore, their belonging in the suecas’ white modernity. The aim of popular cinema to portray Spaniards as capable of achieving the whiteness of suecas becomes especially conspicuous when we consider its highly stereotypical representation of non-European racial groups such as blacks, Chinese, and indigenous people. Significantly, racist humor about these groups features prominently in many films of the comedia desarrollista subgenre. In a multi-year study of over 200 popular Spanish films produced from 1966 to 1975,4 a team of researchers headed by Miguel Ángel Huerta Floriano and Ernesto Pérez Mora enumerate a plethora of proregime, popular films that deployed transnationally recognizable, stereotypical humor about these nonwhite groups in an effort to “mofarse de lo extranjero y a ensalzar por contraste lo hispánico” (El cine popular del tardofranquismo, location 5993). Spanish caricatures of Chinese and indigenous people during this period were often attributable to the Spanish film industry’s mimicry of foreign genres, such as martial arts and Western films, where these groups featured prominently. Examples of films featuring racist caricatures of Chinese people include Operación Cabaretera (dir. Julián Esteban, 1967) (El “cine de barrio tardofranquista,” location 11541185), and Los Kalatrava contra el imperio del kárate (dir. Francisco Martínez Celeiro, 1973) (El cine popular del tardofranquismo, location 4786-4831), among others. Similarly, films featuring racist depictions of Native Americans include La carga de la policía montada (El cine popular del tardofranquismo, location 495-544), and Los que tocan el piano (dir. José Luis Dilbidos, 1968) (El “cine de barrio” tardofranquista, location 1368-1411), among others. However, further analysis is necessary to understand the recurrence of racist black caricatures in late Francoist comedy—especially in films featuring the homegrown macho ibérico/sueca narrative. Despite the scarcity of critical commentary on this issue, such caricatures are abundant in these films. A notable example is Ligue Story (dir. Alfonso Paso, 1972), where the most striking racist joke (indeed, there are several) occurs when a large, aggressive black woman

96 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 vigorously kisses a Spanish male protagonist at an international orgy, thus enabling him to prove his sexual prowess to women from all over the world. Another example is El alma se serena, where two macho ibérico characters demonstrate their lack of sexual judgment by attempting to seduce black African women, thus prompting a racist rant from the Spanish female protagonist. We may also recall a boxing scene in París bien vale una moza (dir. Pedro Lazaga, 1972) where Alfredo Landa’s character, nicknamed “El oso de los Pirineos,” unexpectedly defeats an African muscleman dubbed “el Gorila de Camerún” in a whimsical David-and-Goliath scenario. Similarly, in Una vez al año ser hippy no hace daño, the hippy-inspired song “Los negros con las suecas” is accompanied by a visual montage in which black men—a clear stand-in for Spaniards—chase suecas on a beach without regard for taboos against interracial sex. Given Spain’s extremely limited black population in the 1960s and 70s,5 the recurrence of racist black caricatures in films of the period may be interpreted as a visual signifier of Spain’s efforts to free itself from the Black Legend. In all of the above-mentioned films, the remixing of familiar stereotypes such as black hypersexuality, animality, or stupidity underscores Spain’s capacity for modernization by contrasting Spanish elasticity with the fixity of blackness. In addition, in numerous films, racialized humor also served as an indicator of Francoism’s attitude toward a variety of post-World War II global racial shifts, such as the disintegration of European colonial empires and the U.S. Civil Rights movement. In Francoist popular cinema, these global antiracist currents were often parodied alongside other transnational countercultural movements, such as feminism and hippy culture. As Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego observes, Spaniards of the late Franco era, especially those who were restless for political change, became intimately familiar with countercultural movements from abroad through mass media, and thus began to feel that they belonged to a “comunidad imaginada global” despite the ideological strictures of Francoism (159). She particularly notes that the Spanish left developed a fascination with the U.S. Civil Rights movement, although their coverage of it often failed to transcend racist stereotypes of African Americans (169). But it was not only the Spanish left that paid attention to decolonization and civil rights. The Franco regime too watched these processes with apprehension. Having long glorified Spain’s imperial legacy, the regime was loath to embrace the trend toward global decolonization; consequently, it tenaciously resisted international pressure to relinquish control over its African colonies in Equatorial Guinea and Spanish Sahara until 1968 and 1975, respectively.6 At the same time, the regime was also suspicious of the U.S. Civil Rights

97 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 movement because it, like other anti-establishment movements of the time, underscored the power of organized dissidence to subvert the social order—a prospect anathema to any dictatorship. Yet, ever keen on convincing Spaniards that Francoism would bring about modernity and prosperity, the regime endeavored to exploit these movements’ popular appeal while neutralizing their political radicalism. The global black/white racial imaginary provided a convenient, accessible language to do just that: by reducing antiracism to a faddish commodity of white modernity, pro-regime filmmakers suggested that Spain could shed its “Africanness” and approach fuller participation in European whiteness. To illuminate late Francoist cinema’s various strategies of affirming Spain’s whiteness, I will offer a detailed reading of two emblematic films. In El alma se serena, Spain’s status as an exotic “Africa of Europe” is celebrated as a path to prosperity, even as the embodied sexuality of black women is disparaged as detrimental to Spain’s whiteness. Similarly, although the musical numbers in Una vez al año ser hippy no hace daño superficially extol the virtues of global antiracist movements, the film’s plot demonstrates that Spain’s modernization is contingent on expelling its racial alterity while conserving a marketable, deracialized difference. Consequently, both films aim to move Spain upward on an imaginary black/white racial spectrum while protecting the nation’s ability to profit from its perceived exoticism. These films, therefore, suggest that in order to be modern, Spain must be different, but not too different. Playing in the Mud: The dangers of miscegenation in El alma se serena José Luis Saenz de Heredia’s 1970 film, El alma se serena, tells the story of a young, small-town woman, Chelín (Concha Velasco) who attempts to wean her childhood crush, Manolo (Alfredo Landa), off of his dissolute, urban lifestyle so he will marry her. Once she succeeds, Manolo’s “soul” becomes “serene”—in other words, his sex drive decreases drastically, leaving Chelín constantly searching for ways to arouse his sexual interest. A recurring ideological message in the movie is that Spain’s capacity for modernization is contingent on transformation of its perceived backwardness into a competitive advantage. However, as we will see, this theme is dependent on racist humor that explicitly displaces the idea of blackness as an internal contaminant of Spanish heritage by portraying it as a fully external other of the nation’s identity. Given that Black Legend discourses conflated Spain’s cultural backwardness with its supposed racial difference, the film illustrates that Spanish backwardness must be deracialized if it is to be reimagined as a signifier of modernity. To this end, the film promotes two distinct visions of Africanness: first, the idea of

98 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 Spain as an “Africa” of Europe, which is redefined as a source of national triumph; second, the embodied Africanness of black women that must be denigrated to illuminate Spain’s belonging in European whiteness. The idea that Spain can profit from its historical portrayal as an “Africa” of Europe first surfaces when the urban revelers Manolo and Bernabé decide to take the naïve, provincial Chelín to a hippy orgy, where the men expect to engage in free love, drugs and abundant alcohol. In this film, hippy women substitute the sueca stereotype: although Spanish, they are contaminated by Anglo-European mores, and are presented as attractive and sexually carefree. Predictably, Chelín stands out because of her rustic demeanor; she is especially befuddled when several hippies around her order unusual cocktails such as “astronauta muy seco,” “descapotable con petardo,” and “vietnamita doble.” When the waiter asks Chelín for her order, she requests a “congoleño con mochila,” a fictional drink from her region that no one other than the waiter has ever heard of. Her hippy companions look on in shock when the waiter brings her a tall glass filled with a dark green liquid with a clam shell on the rim (the clam, she says, “es la mochila”). Downing the drink in one gulp, Chelín is suddenly transformed into a hippy who seeks to overcome her “complejo de paleta.” She quickly changes clothes, interrupts the band, and belts out a traditional tune in ye-yé style, declaring coarsely that “¡las de provincias… sabemos hacerlo como la que más!” The next morning, Chelín wakes up as her normal self, embarrassed, and hung over. Chelín’s circular transformation from rural prude to hippy hedonist and back again is a telling metaphor for the late Franco regime’s desire to portray its own metamorphosis from backwardness to modernity. The cocktails that Chelín and her hippy companions consume are especially emblematic of the regime’s geopolitical ambitions. On the one hand, the hippies order drinks whose names glorify Western technology. “Astronauta,” for example, evokes the Cold War Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that culminated in the 1969 U.S. moon landing; similarly, “vietnamita” refers to the then ongoing Vietnam War, another example of U.S.-led anticommunist efforts; finally, “descapotable” recalls the rapid assimilation of Spain into a market-based, consumer economy during the 1960s. On the other hand, Chelín’s drink, the regional oddity called a “congoleño con mochila,” draws on the stereotype of African backwardness in order to reinforce Chelín’s status as a paleta and, by extension, Spain’s outsider status as a “Congo” within Europe. The fact that this drink catalyzes her sudden transformation into a chica ye-yé who defends rural sexual prowess mirrors the regime’s goal of turning Spain’s Africanness into a competitive advantage.

99 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 However, the film later stipulates that any capitalist exploitation of Spanish exoticism must be accompanied by a clear affirmation of Spanish racial whiteness. As the film develops, Chelín’s efforts to woo the promiscuous Manolo toward traditional married life are frustrated by Bernabé, who wants to keep Manolo as a companion in his sexual escapades. Roughly halfway through the film, Bernabé brings two black, African women to his house in hopes of seducing them. Specifically, he invites Manolo to play drums with him while they watch the women dance, a strategy which Bernabé hopes will serve to “calentar el horno.” The scene spectacularizes the women’s blackness through a dizzying concatenation of camera angles that accentuate the frenetic movement of their hair and bare feet, as well as their revealing, pseudo-tribal attire. Although Bernabé also wears a skimpy, pseudo-African costume to express his eagerness about the encounter, Manolo feels decidedly conflicted about it, yet remains at Bernabé’s side to protect his own womanizing reputation. The tension eventually produces a heated confrontation between Manolo, Bernabé and Chelín in which Chelín, enraged that Manolo would choose “unas negras” over her cooking, declares that Manolo must “dejar de ser un degenerado que se refocila en el lodo arrastrado por un gurrumino sin escrúpulos.” She also screams that the only meal Manolo deserves is “¡que [le] frían las negras un explorador!” In this climactic scene, Chelín’s strident reaction to Manolo’s fraternization with African women marks a key juncture in the film. For shortly after Chelín’s outburst, Manolo reconciles with her and agrees to marry her; the plot then veers toward Chelín’s machinations to maintain his sexual attention. Thus, the film depicts Chelín’s intervention as a turning point where Manolo is rescued from sinking to the inconceivable moral low of racial miscegenation. Unlike the symbolic Africanness of Chelín’s “congoleño con mochila,” which is presented as a sign of Spain’s capacity for modernization, the function of embodied Africanness in this scene is one of abjection: black skin, including the desire for it, is portrayed as external and inferior to Spanishness. For Chelín, sex between Spaniards and blacks is a problem precisely because it brings Spain, long racialized as an Africa of Europe, too close to that which it yearns not to be. This fact becomes especially conspicuous when we consider that the black women in this scene are clearly an inversion of the sueca stereotype. Like suecas, they are foreign and beautiful; yet, their spectacular, racialized primitiveness marks the exact opposite of the sueca’s white modernity that, as we saw in the hippy scene, is closely associated with Western capitalism. Despite late Francoist comedy’s celebration of Spanish male sexual prowess, which exalted sex with suecas as a universal Spanish fantasy, in this film, the combined factors of Manolo’s ambivalence and Chelín’s

100 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 derogatory tantrum clarify that sex with black women should be regarded as beneath Spanish men’s dignity. Chelín’s remarks during her angry eruption are especially revealing of her desire to separate Africanness from Spanishness. For example, her reference to miscegenation as “refocilarse en el lodo” conjures the image of a white-skinned person sullied or contaminated by dark mud. Similarly, her insinuation that Manolo must rid himself of Bernabé’s “mud” suggests a need to wash racial contamination off the national body. Chelín further calls attention to need to improve Spain’s racial stature by calling Manolo a “degenerado,” a term that connotes deterioration, and Bernabé a “gurrumino,” an epithet that connotes weakness and effeminacy. These insults indicate her perception that sex with black women will degrade Spain’s already tenuous racial stature. She reiterates this idea by sarcastically wishing that the women “frían . . . un explorador” for Manolo. With this comment, she implies that the men’s perverse sexual “exploration,” which she likens to the explorations of early modern colonizers, may result in the cannibalization of the Spanish race altogether. However, despite portraying Manolo and Bernabé as emasculated by their perverse desires, her statements ultimately reinforce not only the black/white racial binary, but also, and more importantly, Spain’s decision to be identified with the white side of the racial line. After all, her reference to past Spanish colonizers is ultimately a call to restore a destabilized racial order in which Spain, formerly at the vanguard of European imperialism, established itself as unquestionably superior to, and distinct from, inferior races such as blacks. The contradictory meanings of Africanness surface again toward the end of the film, after Chelín and Manolo have wed and are presumably living a happy married life in the countryside, away from the temptations of Madrid. The problem, however, is that Chelín’s sex drive now exceeds Manolo’s, whose libido has lessened with the passing of time. The film shows several scenes where Manolo tries to escape his wife’s advances, suggesting that Chelín’s sexual intensity far surpasses that of his previous life as a hedonistic bachelor. In one scene, Chelín plans to seduce Manolo by dressing up as a flamenco dancer. Declaring that “¡Yo estoy dispuesta a ser sueca, negra, chica de cabaret o tanguista!” to meet her husband’s desires, she pounces on the unsuspecting Manolo in full flamenco costume, and then forces him to drink a spicy potion that she hopes will increase his sex drive. When that fails, she chases him around the house shouting, singing, and blocking every possible exit.

101 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 The scene’s logic is patent: Chelín, aware of her husband’s past penchant for foreign women, must harness stereotypes of Spain’s racialized hypersexuality, such as the screen Gypsy trope, to gain his attention. In doing so, Chelín’s performance recalls Woods Peiró’s argument about how musical films featuring Gypsy characters played by white female stars enacted “both the whitewashing and the racialization of the face of Spain” (2). Nonetheless, given Chelín’s forceful disavowal of black/white sex earlier in the film, her Gypsy performance in this scene serves to accentuate the whiteness of that stereotype. For although Chelín can embody a variety of exotic, racialized identities, such as Gypsy, black, Northern European, and Latin American, she is never bound to any of them; rather, her malleability as a performer calls attention to “white people’s right to be various” (Dyer 49-50). Black women, by contrast, must remain forever associated with colonial stereotypes that uphold the superiority of white societies—a category in which, the film argues, Spain must be grounded. Commodifying Antiracism in Una vez al año ser hippy no hace daño A second example of late Francoist popular cinema’s efforts to portray Spain as moving toward European whiteness can be found in Javier Aguirre’s 1969 film, Una vez al año ser hippy no hace daño. Also featuring Concha Velasco and Alfredo Landa in lead roles, this film narrates the story of a struggling group of travelling musicians named “Flor de Lis y los dos del Orinoco,” which includes three members: Lisarda (Concha Velasco), Ricardo (Alfredo Landa) and Silvestre (Manolo Gómez Bur). To realize their dreams of success in the booming coastal resort town of Torremolinos, they must modernize their kitschy, folkloric repertoire by embracing Beatles-style pop-rock and hippy protest music. To succeed, they must blackmail a powerful guru of Indian meditation, Anaskira Matuti, who is actually a duplicitous Spaniard in disguise. As in El alma se serena, the film’s dichotomy between backwardness and modernity is interwoven with discourses of whiteness and racial alterity. However, unlike El alma, Una vez al año explicitly compares Spain’s ascent into whiteness to ongoing racial struggles, such as the U.S. Civil Rights movement and global decolonization. This film specifically establishes an analogy between the upward mobility of peoples of color around the world and the imagined upward mobility of Spaniards under Franco. Consequently, the film commodifies and depoliticizes the allure of global antiracist movements to suggest that Francoism could liberate Spain from the “Africa of Europe” stereotype and usher it into full-fledged whiteness.

102 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 The film begins by portraying the musical trio as trapped in a cycle of performing outdated kitsch for rural and small-town audiences. In the opening scene, the trio perform a 1940s hit called “Mi casita de papel” as an Alps-themed yodel number, complete with matching costumes and pseudo-yodeling, in a Spanish town nestled in the mountains. The visibly bored audience does not even applaud when the group finishes; instead, they begin dancing immediately when a rock-and-roll recording is played. Soon thereafter, we see the trio in another town performing a Cuba-themed song, “Frenesí tropical,” in which all three musicians, including the men, are dressed in frilly, midriff-baring outfits, and singing a rhythmical song about a “negra linda” and a “negro loco.” Although the audience is initially skeptical, they react with enthusiasm when Lisarda accelerates her hip-shaking. These two opening performances imply that Spain’s geopolitical position is caught between two racialized poles: the Alps, which evoke Northern Europe, and Cuba, which is explicitly associated with blackness and racialized alterity. On the one hand, the unsuccessful Alps number underscores Spain’s unfulfilled aspiration to achieve the whiteness of Northern Europe. On the other hand, the Cuba-themed song about black lovers, applauded for its extravagant sexuality but not for its musical style, calls attention to Spain’s anxieties about its racial standing and its colonial past. Given Spain’s past colonial relations with Cuba, the caricatured depiction of Cuba as specifically black accentuates Spain’s nostalgia for a past where its racial and cultural supremacy was undisputed. Likewise, this image also articulates Spain’s fear that its status as a former imperial power might cause the nation to be perceived as closer to the colonized rather than the colonizer. The polarity between European whiteness and Spain’s racial and colonial status anxieties is further implicit in the group’s name, “Flor de lis y los dos del Orinoco”: the fleur-de-lis was a symbol of the French monarchy, while the Orinoco, one of South America’s longest rivers, evokes connotations of tropicality and wilderness. Thus, these two opening performances establish a foundational premise for the film: namely, that its narrative arc about cultural modernization is also a narrative of reasserting Spain’s lost colonial prowess. By acquiring a more modern, Anglo-European musical vocabulary, the group’s trajectory allegorizes not only the regime’s desire to participate in modernity, but also its aspiration to revive Spanish colonial power symbolically through its assertion of belonging to European whiteness. As the film develops, the trio meets Johnny, a Spaniard who joins the group as a fourth member to teach them new musical genres. The foursome’s first effort at a hippy anthem, “Los

103 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 negros con las suecas,” portrays the beach of Torremolinos as an antiracist utopia through lines such as: “Los negros a las suecas perseguirán, / las suecas a los negros divertirán, / todos juntos y unidos se abrazarán.” The lyrics also feature several references to the then ongoing American Civil Rights movement, such as: “No existirá el color ni lucha antirracial,” “La playa es un hogar sin discriminación,” and “no se puede jugar con la segregación.” As the group sings, a montage shows fast-forwarded shots of black men and suecas chasing each other up and down the beach. At one point, a black man takes a break from chasing suecas and sits on the sand, rubbing conspicuously white-colored sunscreen all over his body. Shortly thereafter, the black men are replaced by Alfredo Landa who, wearing an animal outfit with horns on his head, pursues a gaggle of suecas in their stead. At the end of the song, we see several shots of (tanned) white women and men running together and holding hands. Despite its antiracist lyrics, this sequence only shows black men at the beginning of the song; by its end, the beach is populated only by white people. Pointedly, the montage implies that the black men do not disappear, but rather, that they are gradually whitened to the point that they become indistinguishable from other beachgoers. The first stage of their whitening occurs when one of the black men stops chasing suecas to rub white sunscreen on his skin. Recalling Dyer’s observation that tanning is a quintessential sign of whiteness, this image is the first indicator that the black man is about to undergo a process of whitening (49-50). The second stage occurs when the black man is substituted by a horned Landa in an animal costume. Although Landa’s skin is not black, his animal costume suggests that, as a Spaniard, he shares the black man’s racialized hypersexuality. The next phase in the progression, in which Landa’s animal suit disappears and in which the all-white beachgoers revel in harmonic unison, constitutes a full achievement of whiteness—one where the racial difference between blacks, Spaniards and suecas has been negated, and all are equally white. The whitening of blackness that occurs in this sequence reflects the late Franco regime’s efforts to move the country upward on a geopolitical ladder that was imagined in racial terms. Therefore, the sequence shares a marked resemblance to Chelín’s racist tantrum in El alma se serena: in both scenes, blackness represents the various contaminants of Spain’s racial identity that must be overcome or discarded in order for the nation to achieve full belonging in white modernity. Importantly, though, the depiction of Alfredo Landa as a sex-crazed animal selfconsciously alludes to the regime’s strategy of selling Spain’s exoticism as a commodity. For although Landa is replaced by racially unmarked whites in the sequence, the entire film, like the

104 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 entire corpus of landismo cinema, revolves around the premise of Landa’s irrepressible sexuality as a source of infinite jokes. Thus, the sequence establishes parity between Spaniards and suecas, both by whitening black men and by underscoring the artificiality of Landa’s “difference,” one that is potently symbolized by his outrageous, over-the-top animal costume. The film deploys superficially antiracist rhetoric yet again in another musical number, “Ama y odia.” By the time this number is performed, Johnny has convinced the group to radically transform their image: their name is now “Los Hippyloyas,” they wear Beatles-style costumes and hairstyles, and they advertise themselves as visiting from Liverpool. In the song “Ama y odia,” each of the four verses describes the preferences and dislikes of the musicians, stipulating that they love modern activities such as winter sports, free love, and driving, while hating colonialism, segregation, and discrimination. The lyrics that describe the singers’ disgust for racial inequality are accompanied by presumably real photographic and filmic images of blacks being beaten by police, marching through the streets, and turning over a car in protest. However, the song’s outward defense of antiracism is further belied by the plot events that unfold before and after it, which imply that Spain’s ascent into modernity requires an expulsion of its racial alterity. These plot events specifically concern the highly stereotyped character Anaskira Matuti, an Indian meditation guru who turns out to be a camouflaged Spaniard. Given the large foreign population of Torremolinos, Matuti, whose character is always accompanied by Orientalist tropes such as foreign-sounding music, offers meditation courses to gullible, wealthy socialites so as to extract large sums of money from them. At one point, Alfredo Landa’s character, Ricardo, becomes entranced by Matuti’s spiritual magnetism, renounces the freewheeling environment of Torremolinos, and gives Matuti all his money. Later, however, he discovers that Matuti’s real name is Marcelo Bonet and that he is a cook by profession. The musical group thus blackmails Matuti/Bonet, forcing him to arrange gigs for them at socialites’ parties in exchange for keeping his secret. Matuti/Bonet ultimately cannot stand the pressure and, by the film’s end, escapes to Tangiers to avoid being exposed. Although both the musical group and Matuti highlight the malleability of Spanish identity, they represent opposing geopolitical directions for Spain’s performance of modernity. On the one hand, the musical group, with its trappings of Britishness, represents a marked turn toward Anglo-European culture, a reflection of many Spaniards’ fascination with Europe and the outside world during the late-Franco era. Matuti’s character, on the other hand, implies the possibility that Spain might be contaminated by the cultures of an increasingly decolonized

105 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 world, which are stereotyped as deserving of suspicion, vilification and ultimately expulsion. Furthermore, Matuti is strongly associated with effeminacy: in addition to his own physical frailty, his closest disciple is Pololo, a flagrantly campy homosexual who accompanies him on his flight to Tangiers. Matuti and Pololo’s escape represents a restoration of the established racial, colonial and masculine order: their feminized alterity is banished to Morocco, the perennial other of Spanish nationalism, while Spain’s performance of Britishness emerges triumphant. Given the patent contradiction between the Orientalist stereotypes of foreign spiritual practices and the ostensible antiracism of the song “Ama y odia,” we must read the song as an attempt to harness the trendy desirability of antiracist movements while emptying them of political content. The film’s banishment of Matuti/Bonet, a Spaniard who has been contaminated by racialized alterity, is analogous to the whitening of black men in “Los negros con las suecas” and to Chelín’s call to remove the “mud” from the national body in El alma se serena. By emphasizing the idea that Spain must be decontaminated of otherness, these cases illustrate the regime’s desire to assert Spain’s belonging in global modernity by simultaneously affirming its whiteness. In addition, like El alma, Una vez al año suggests that even though Spain must stake a claim in global whiteness, it must conserve a deracialized, marketable “difference” to retain a competitive advantage on the global market. After the final performance of “los Hippyloyas” in Torremolinos, where the group sings a euphoric, English-language pop song called “Love, love, love,” an abrupt transition transports us back to the rural mountains, where the foursome performs the film’s closing number: another Alps-themed rendition of “Mi casita de papel.” Given this number’s initial symbolism of Spain’s failure to incarnate the whiteness of Northern Europe, the fact that it is played at the end of the film is intriguing. Whereas at first, the song was almost immediately followed by the Cuba-themed number “Frenesí tropical,” the absence of the latter song from the film’s ending implies that Spain’s blackness has finally been erased. In this way, the film’s ending reiterates the theme of “Los negros con la suecas” that also portrays the erasure of Spain’s blackness. At the same time, by returning to kitschy folklore while eliminating the problem of racial inferiority, the film suggests that Spain can achieve its geopolitical objectives: it can successfully portray itself as white while continuing to exploit artificial notions of “difference” to remain competitive on the world stage.

106 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 Conclusion In this article, I have traced how the popular cinema of late Francoism aimed to affirm Spain’s capacity for modernization by asserting the nation’s belonging in European whiteness. Given the regime’s anxiety about being perceived as an anachronism in an era of rapid social and economic change at home and abroad, Francoist popular cinema used the readily recognizable iconography of a black/white racial spectrum to present Spain as capable of reaching a desirable, white modernity while dissociating the nation from blackness and from its legacy of colonial failure. Yet the strongly racialized humor that surfaces in films such as El alma se serena and in Una vez al año ser hippy no hace daño served not only to reinforce Spain’s global racial standing, but also to suggest that the nation could still exploit a deracialized version of Spain’s “difference” as a national marketing strategy. Although the expression “lavarle la cara al país” is often associated with post-Franco Spain’s efforts to scrub the unflattering traces of dictatorship from the nation’s global image, this phrase could also be used to describe the later years of Francoism, when the regime was deeply invested in “washing the nation’s face” of its perennial status as a racialized other of Europe. Consequently, the popular cinema of late Francoism played a crucial role in articulating and implementing a national vision of Spain’s white, European identity—a vision that remains perceptible in many facets of Spanish culture today.

107 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 Notes See monograph studies such as Susan Martin Márquez’s Disorientations (2008), Christiane Stallaert’s Etnogénesis y etnicidad en España (1998), and Joshua Goode’s Impurity of Blood (2009). 2 The concept of a global color line, which has been tremendously influential in whiteness studies and in other fields, is drawn from several of Du Bois’s writings, and is especially associated with an oft-cited quotation from The Souls of Black Folk: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (Ch. 2). 3Since 1995, Televisión Española has featured a weekend program called Cine de Barrio that rebroadcasts popular films from the late Francoist era (Smith 113). The familiarity of late Francoist comedy to contemporary audiences is also evidenced by the pervasive presence of its narrative tropes and stock characters in contemporary media. A notable example is the extremely successful Torrente saga of the late 1990s and 2000s, which recycles the stereotype of the macho ibérico (Triana Toribio 150). Another is the film Perdiendo el norte (2015), whose narrative about Spanish emigration during the economic crisis of 2008-2014 bears numerous references to Vente a Alemania, Pepe (1971), a well-known comedy that addresses emigration during late Francoism (Gómez Tarín and Rubio Alcover 71). 4 In this article, I cite two volumes that were edited by Huerta Floriano and Pérez Mora: El “cine de barrio” tardofranquista and El cine popular del tardofranquismo. Despite their distinct titles, these two volumes are the fruit of a single multiyear study of late Francoist popular cinema that was funded by Spain’s now defunct Ministry of Science and Innovation and that was conducted in collaboration with numerous scholars between 2009 and 2012. 5 Although it is difficult to estimate the black population of Spain during this period, it is undisputed that it remained very small until in the 1990s, when immigration from Sub-Saharan Africa began to accelerate. Donato Ndongo Bidyogo, a major Equatorial Guinean writer who spent many years exiled in Spain from the 1960s onward, describes Spain’s black community during the 1960s as “marginal,” “escaso” and geographically scattered, consisting only of small populations of “guineanos, la mayoría estudiantes; los cubanos que huían de la revolución de Fidel Castro . . .y, por último, los afro-americanos de las bases de Torrejón, Rota y Zaragoza.” Although the population of Equatorial Guinean exiles increased after the country’s independence in 1968 due to the brutality of its dictator, Francisco Macías Nguema, this community remained statistically small, amounting only to about 6,000 in 1978 (Fraguas). 6 Although the Franco regime reluctantly recognized the independence of Equatorial Guinea in 1968, it soon designated all news from its former colony as materia reservada, or classified material, in an effort to hide the country’s descent into the brutal dictatorship of Francisco Macías Nguema, which the Franco regime found unflattering. Similarly, due to the hasty and incomplete decolonization of Spanish Sahara in 1975, the territory, now known as Western Sahara, remains bitterly locked in a dispute for independence from Morocco to this day. 1

108 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 Works Cited Cornejo-Parriego, Rosalía. “Black is Beautiful: Cuerpos negros en Triunfo.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 2017, pp. 157-73. Crumbaugh, Justin. Destination Dictatorship: The Spectacle of Spain’s Tourism Boom and the Reinvention of Difference. SUNY Press, 2009. De Guzmán, María. Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire. U of Minnesota P, 2005. Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Project Gutenberg, 2008 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/408/408-h/408-h.htm. Accessed 1 Feb. 2018. El alma se serena. Directed by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, Universal Films Española, 1970. El turismo es un gran invento. Directed by Pedro Lazaga, Filmayer, 1968. Fuchs, Barbara. Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain. U of Pennsylvania P, 2009. Fraguas, Rafael. “Seis mil guineanos viven marginados en España.” El País, 29 July 1978, https://elpais.com/diario/1978/07/29/ultima/270511201_850215.html. Accessed 1 Feb. 2018. Fra-Molinero, Baltasar. “The Suspect Whiteness of Spain.” At Home and Broad: Historicizing TwentiethCentury Whiteness in Literature and Performance, edited by La Vinia Delois Jennings, U of Tennessee P, 2009, pp. 147-69. Gómez Tarín, Francisco Javier and Agustín Rubio Alcover. “Lecturas y reflexiones sobre el cine y el mundo.” El viejo topo, no. 327, 2015, pp. 67-74. Goode, Joshua. Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870-1930. Louisiana State UP, 2009. Huerta Floriano, Miguel Ángel and Ernesto Pérez Mora. El “Cine de barrio” tardofranquista: reflejo de una sociedad. Kindle ed., Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 2012. Huerta Floriano, Miguel Ángel and Ernesto Pérez Mora, eds. El cine popular del tardofranquismo. Kindle ed., Editorial Los Barruecos, 2012. La ciudad no es para mí. Directed by Pedro Lazaga, Pedro Masó Producciones Cinematográficas, 1966. Ligue Story. Directed by Alfonso Paso, Arturo González Producciones Cinematográficas, 1972. Manolo, la nuit. Directed by Mariano Ozores, Filmayer, 1973. Martin-Márquez, Susan. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. Yale UP, 2008. Ndongo Bidyogo, Ndongo. “Una nueva realidad: los afro-españoles.” Asociación Gerard, 11 Jan. 2011, http://gerardenlablog.blogspot.com/2011/11/una-nueva-realidad-los-afro-espanolesi.html. París bien vale una moza. Directed by Pedro Lazaga, Estudios Roma, 1972. Perdiendo el norte. Directed by Nacho G. Velilla, Warner Bros., 2015. Smith, Paul Julian. Spanish Lessons: Cinema and Television in Contemporary Spain. Berghahn Books, 2017. Stallaert, Christiane. Etnogénesis y etnicidad en España: una aproximación histórico-antropológica al casticismo. Proyecto A Ediciones, 1998. Triana-Toribio, Nuria. “Santiago Segura: Just When You Thought Spanish Masculinities Were Getting Better…” Hispanic Research Journal, vol. 5, no. 2, 2004, pp. 147-56. Una vez al año ser hippy no hace daño. Directed by Javier Aguirre, Ágata Films, 1969. Vente a Alemania, Pepe. Directed by Pedro Lazaga, Filmayer, 1971. Vilarós, Teresa M. “Banalidad y biopolítica: la transición española y el nuevo orden del mundo.”

109 | Repinecz, M. Transmodernity. Special Issue. 2018 Desacuerdos 2: sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado español, edited by Jesús Carrillo, Ignacio Estella Noriega and Lidia García Merus, Arteleku, MACBA and UNIA arteypensamiento, 2005, pp. 29-56. Woods Peiró, Eva. White Gypsies: Race and Stardom in Spanish Musicals. U of Minnesota P, 2012.

UC Merced TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World Title From Impurity of Thought Toward the Glocalization of Whiteness in Spain

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Author Persánch, JM



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From Impurity of Thought Toward the Glocalization of Whiteness in Spain ______________________________________________ JM. PERSÁNCH WESTERN OREGON UNIVERSITY Abstract This paper is structured in three parts. Firstly, the introduction aims to visualize the trajectory of Spain’s racial rhetoric in relation to whiteness, and its European counterparts’ historical processes of racialization, thus offering an explanation to the acute lack of studies regarding Spanish whiteness. Subsequently, I offer a study that revisits the cultural, symbolical transformation following the Transición Española through Amanece, que no es poco (1988) to examine how Spain disregarded notions of mestizaje in this period, beginning to bound up Spanish whiteness with European multiculturalism, as much as with a long-imagined, Western modernity. The analysis demonstrates how Spain instrumentalized blackness merely as an ideological means to raise awareness of social distance in the Spanish white racial formation, while subsuming the experience of blackness into the cultural practices of whiteneness. To conclude, I link the study to the present day’s racial conceptions, assuming that, in a culturally globalized world, Spain may have decisively integrated into a relatively homogeneous, glocal sensibility of whiteness. Key Words: Whiteness, Hispanic Whiteness, Racialization, Black Legend, Glocalism, Racial Formation, Spanish Film, Amanece, que no es poco.

“In the wider representation of whiteness, the very struggle for whiteness is a sign of whiteness.” (Richard Dyer, White, 2017. p. 208) Impurity of Thought: Whiteness(es) and Spain Extensive scholarly research exists in the field of Whiteness Studies regarding the American, Australian and South African white racial formations and representations.1 However, critical studies of race on European whiteness(es)–except for some research on the United Kingdom– continue to be vague.2 With rare, punctual exceptions, most critical commentators in the field of Hispanic Studies still seem to be devoting their scholarly agendas to examine the construction of subalterns’ identities. The overwhelming emphasis that these studies have traditionally placed on the scrutiny of “an immigrant Other” is, to great extent, reasonable in the aftermath of the Second World War (1939-1945) and the subsequent rise of multicultural societies. Due to the atrocities of Nazism and Fascism–two ideologies which overtly propagated white supremacy principles–racial rhetoric of any kind regarding Europe became stigmatized. One of the consequences of this stigmatization of racial rhetoric was that European identities, as much as other Western nations, sought shelter in multiculturalism–the promise of a color-blind, more inclusive, tolerant and unprejudiced society–to regain the moral authority of historically white-

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centered institutions. Accordingly, they eradicated any racial predicament from the public sphere. As result whiteness grew globally into a taboo in those historically white-dominated societies. Yet this historical process of stigmatization cannot be regarded as fully explaining the acute lack of whiteness studies centered on Spain. Rather, given that Spain’s journey toward present-day multicultural societies followed a distinct, longer path compared to that of its European counterparts, Spanish white formation signals a much more complex, troubled history. Traditionally, Spain had presented a situational rhetoric of racial exceptionalism establishing a twofold image of Spain as both alien and part of Europe, which constantly hindered European ideals of whiteness’ racial purity. In turn, Spain’s rhetorical ambiguity contributed to consolidate the long-lasting European conception of “a nation that is at once Orientalized and Orientalizing” (Martin-Marquez 9). This impure vision of Spain as a racial “other” in Europe could, in fact, be traced back to sixteenth century Italian imperia-phobia which morphed leading to the rise of European Hispano-phobia through the propaganda of the Black Legend. The Black Legend, according to Stanley Payne, “había sido asumida por los intelectuales y artistas españoles, como puede apreciarse en los retratos de la España negra de pintores como Ignacio Zuloaga, José Gutiérrez Solana, y Darío de Regoyos” (20). Julián Juderías y Loyot (1877-1918) was a pioneered in denouncing this tendentious, historical propaganda about Spain thorough Europe which had now been absorbed by Spaniards too. In his book La leyenda negra y la verdad histórica: Contribución al estudio del concepto de España en Europa, de las causas de este concepto y de la tolerancia religiosa y política en los países civilizados (1914), Juderías y Loyot accurately described the distorted image of Spain which Eurpeans had had (and had produced) for centuries: las acusaciones que en todo tiempo se han lanzado contra España fundándose para ello en hechos exagerados, mal interpretados o falsos en su totalidad, y finalmente, la afirmación, contenida en libros al parecer respetables y verídicos y muchas veces reproducida, comentada y ampliada en la Prensa extranjera, de que nuestra Patria constituye, desde el punto de vista de la tolerancia, de la cultura y del progreso político, una excepción lamentable dentro del grupo de las naciones europeas. (Juderías 5) Paradoxically, despite the intention of Juderías y Loyot to eradicate this vision of Spain, his work circulated immensely contributing to the opposite. Acclaimed writers of the Generación del 98 replicated the old tropes to explain Spain’s presently decadence. For example, ten years after the publication of Juderías y Loyot, Ramón del Valle-Inclán literally wrote in Luces de Bohemia (1924):

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“La leyenda negra, en estos días menguados, es la Historia de España. Nuestra vida es un círculo dantesco. Rabia y vergüenza . . . España es una deformación grotesca de la civilización europea” (217-218, 225). Almost a hundred years after Juderías’s book, proving the persistence of this theme in Spain, María Elvira Roca Barea’s study on the Black Legend has argued that similar derogatory tropes have historically been generated for every empire due to what she terms “Imperia-phobia.” According to Roca Barea todas las leyendas negras se parecen, no solo las distintas versiones de la española . . . en realidad, son un conjunto de tópicos poco variados: inferioridad racial (sangre mala y baja), incultura y barbarie, orgullo y deseo de riqueza desmedidos, incontinencia sexual y costumbres licenciosas, Imperio inconsciente y poco más . . . su semejanza resulta de las circunstancias análogas que provocan su nacimiento: orgullo herido y necesidad de no sentirse inferior (o agradecido), y oligarquías regionales asentadas desde antiguo que se ven en peligro. (128) There has traditionally been a profuse discussion regarding the origin of the Spanish Black Legend. Until the 1960s it was considered that the Black Legend found its origins in the Netherlands, as much as what it is Germany today. However, more recently, some scholars have argued that it had actually originated in Italy first and, then, had been reproduced and amplified in protestants regions during the European Religious Wars (See Sverker Arnoldsson, 1960). Meanwhile some others openly denied one single origin but parallel, simultaneous processes (See William S. Maltby, 1971). According to literary and historical evidence, it seems more logical to contend that the Spanish Black Legend firstly found predicament in Italy simply because the Spanish Empire initially expanded into the Mediterranean Sea. The entrenched prejudices against Spain of sixteenth century Italian humanism “proceden–Roca Barea explains–del malestar que surge en un pueblo culto, rico y que se considera heredero del imperio romano, cuando tiene que vivir en la órbita de un poder nuevo, el español” (158). Racism of any kind requires to build the fantasy of an-other’s racial impurity to assert one own’s moral authority, in turn, justifying cultural superiority. Ethnocentrism is thus at the heart of racism as a tool for establishing difference. Italian ethnocentric humanism grounded its anti-imperial prejudices in the Spanish miscegenation with Jewish and Moor bloods, as well as their alleged Spanish Gothicism (antiroman, medieval, barbarian). Hence, “los españoles son malos cristianos, necesariamente, por su contaminación semita” (Roca Barea 129). Italian humanism used Spanish religious tolerance towards Jews and Moors as a source of weakness to develop their Hispano-phobic rhetoric. Subsequently, a linguistic racialization followed: the term “Marrani”–a term that Spaniards had long used to refer to Jewish conversos–became in the sixteenth century synonym for “Spaniard” in

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Italy.3 This anti-Semitic rhetoric of Italian humanism toward Spain circulated widely across Europe. Thus, when the Spanish Emperor Carlos V advocated an Universitas Christiana–the ideal of unifying Europe religiously, administratively, and militarily under his reign to defend Christendom from the Ottoman Empire–several European regions opposed to annexation, giving rise to Northern European nationalisms which led to the Protestant Wars against Catholicism (roughly 1524-1648) promoted by the Lutheran Sacro Imperium, as well as Calvino and William of Orange in the Netherlands. Martin Luther and Protestant Sacro Imperium’s anti-Semitism were as profound as frequent. For example, in Sobre los judíos y sus mentiras (1541), Luther wrote: Ya me he convencido de no escribir más sobre los judíos o en contra de ellos. Pero desde que me enteré de que aquellos miserables y malditos no cesan de ser un engaño para ellos mismos y para nosotros los cristianos. Yo he publicado este pequeño libro para que yo pueda ser encontrado entre aquellos que se oponen a las actividades ponzoñosas de los judíos y como alguien que advierte a los cristianos para que no bajen la guardia contra ellos. (1) Although Luther acknowledged the legitimate rule of the Emperor Carlos V and loathed Spain, France, Bohemia, among others, for evicting the Jews, he had also absorbed the rhetoric of Italian Renaissance. This becomes evident in the following question, for example, when Luther purposely equates the alleged abuses of Spaniards in Italy with Jewish impunity in Europe: “¿Por qué los diabólicos judíos tienen impunidad para cometer crímenes entre nosotros y en nuestra contra? Sufrimos más nosotros a causa de ellos de los que sufren los italianos a causa de los españoles” (98). Accordingly, German humanism had learned from the Italians that the Spaniards were racially impure due to their Semite contamination and, obviously, this was their primary accusation during the first twenty years of the sixteenth century, when anti-Spanish propaganda was propagated in coalescence with anti-Catholicism. In 1531, los príncipes protestantes forman la Liga de Esmalcalda. Pronto se les une Francia, lo que demuestra que el enemigo verdadero es el imperio y que las razones religiosas son en realidad una pantalla para encubrir una rebelión antiimperial . . . El vínculo entre protestantismo y nacionalismo ha existido desde sus mismos principios. De manera que ser católico en Inglaterra, en Alemania o en Holanda, ha sido, por decirlo suavemente, muy problemático. (Roca Barea 190) In the Netherlands Juan Calvino and William of Orange mimicked Germanic Lutheranism, while Henry VIII’s Anglicanism confirmed the emergence of national churches in northern Europe as a political instrument to counteract Spanish hegemony in the continent. Given the origin of

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northern nationalisms and Protestantism, Hispano-phobia became an integral part of the northern outlook. In England, “la hispanofobia se convirtió en parte constitutiva de la nación inglesa en la segunda mitad del siglo XVI, como de otras naciones europeas, . . . la construcción nacionalista exigía que para ser buen inglés había que ser anticatólico y antiespañol” (Roca Barea 225-226).4 Similar nation-building processes in opposition to Spanish hegemony occurred across the globe. Thus, besides Protestantism, the French Illustration, the Napoleonic wars, the War of Spanish Independence, the Bourbon Dynasty, the Latin American independences, and the Spanish-American War of 1898, all moulded the European understanding of Spain as inferior, and informed about their insidious, impure Spanishness. To the gradual loss of control over physical territories, Spain began to lose the production of cultural hegemony. In the nineteenth century, France began to disseminate the image of Spain as an exotic, non-white, or at least, less white racial “Other. Note that “para la Europa de la Ilustración, los conceptos de raza y cultura van unidos. La cultura europea no solo es superior, sino que justifica la conquista y la explotación de las razas vencidas e inferiores, cuyas culturas son igualmente de segundo orden” (Fra-Molinero 50). Consequently, France produced the racializing discourse of “Africa begins in the Pyrenees” to recast Spain’s cultural backwardness, as well as Spaniards’ racial inferiority. Consequently, it was in this period when the anti-Semitic “marrani” trope morphed into an African trope creating the off-whiteness image of Spain. The origin of this Africanizing expression has been attributed to M. de Pradt (Dominique Georges Frédéric) when, in Mémoires historiques sur la révolution d’Espange (1816), he wrote: “c’est une erreur de la géographie que d’avoir attribué l’Espagne à l’Europe; elle appartient à l’Afrique: sang, moeurs, langage, manière de vivre et de combattre; en Espagne tout est africain” (168). At this junction, to understand Pradt’s reasoning the reader must be reminded to contextualize his words to two years after the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleonic France, as much as to Spain’s imperial decay, with it beginning to be reduced to a decadent, marginal power which had culturally and economically fallen behind. This backwardness, to a great extent in coalescence with Spain’s proximity to Africa, provoked the production of the aforementioned Spain’s off-whiteness image. Be that as it may, this French blackening expression on Spain was widely propagated across Europe in the nineteenth century, for example, through the literary production of Victor Hugo (as well as travellers and Spanish Romatic writers) 5 in the same fashion Italian Renaissance had circulated the anti-Spanish “marrani” rhetoric. The following extract from Les Orientales (1829) signals how well-established this trope was:

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Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. les couleurs orientales sont venues comme d’elles-mêmes empreindre toutes ses pensées, toutes ses rêveries; et ses rêveries et ses pensées se sont trouvées tour à tour, et presque sans l’avoir voulu, hébraïques, turques, grecques, persanes, arabes, espagnoles même, car l’Espagne c’est encore l’Orient; l’Espagne est à demi africaine, l’Afrique est à demi asiatique. (69; Emphasis added)

This process of racialization of Spain was important because, as Susan Martin-Márquez noted, “colonial powers attempt to gain control over the space of the Orient by ‘mapping’ it, both literally and metaphorically” (9; Emphasis added).6 In part, Spain’s inadequate response to, and absorption of, the long-standing tropes of the Black Legend(s) were to remain at the core of Spanish claims of racial exceptionalism. In this regard, José María Cordero Tórres explained how los franceses pusieron en circulación la frase que ‘África empezaba en los Pirineos’ ante la protesta de los españoles coetáneos. Pero, en un momento dado, los españoles cambian y empiezan a meditar las ventajas de ser africanos: Coello, Costa, Saavedra, Ferreiro, Reparaz, acogen con entusiasmo y exageración la tesis de la unidad hispano-marroquí . . . con la solitaria protesta de Maura Gamazo, la idea llega hasta nuestros días . . . perfeccionada y corregida. (6) Nonetheless, Tomás García Figueras (1892-1981)–an Africanist writer, historian, who lived for thirty years in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco–confronted the Africanization of Spain claiming that, in fact, “es más al sur, en el Sáhara, donde empieza verdaderamente África; en realidad, la afirmación de que Europa termina en el Atlas, en oposición a la de que África empieza en los Pirineos, es perfectamente exacta” (112). Joaquín Costa also nuanced the French off-whiteness rhetoric observing in Los intereses de España y Marruecos son armónicos (1906) that Spaniards had formed a wrong idea of Moroccans, “tan equivocada como la que tenían de nosotros los ingleses y franceses hace pocos años, y tal vez aún hoy . . . Marruecos ha dejado de ser un pueblo oriental. Ahora viene el hacer de él un pueblo occidental, y por decirlo así, europeo” (28). However, as the colonial presence of England and France consolidated in Africa, the rhetoric of racial ambiguity of Spain invigorated. At this juncture, it is noteworthy to establish that in the aftermath of 1898, when Spain lost what remained of its credibility as a global force and imperial anxieties passed through one of their most critical phases, the scramble for Africa by the European powers left little to appropriate. Equatorial Guinea would become, along with Morocco, the essential locus for covering the economic and psychological trauma and contributing to the formation of a public imperial imaginary. (Sampedro Vizcaya 343)7

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This “new” locus conditioned Spain to simultaneously position the nation on and off whiteness in order to simply justify colonial aspirations. In this sense, Spain also played a role in producing a problematic, ambiguous discourse of Spanish racial exceptionalism off-whiteness following the French rationale. Yet, beyond rhetoric, Spain’s political, geo-strategical and commercial interests has often been overlooked regarding the production of Spain’s rhetoric of racial ambiguity. As Emilio Castelar y Ripoll (1832-1889) revealed, Spain’s anxiety was over economy rather than race. This is so because Spaniards feared that England and France sacarán del Norte de África los productos que hoy vienen a buscar a nuestros puertos, y nuestra agricultura, falta de mercados, se enflaquecerá y decaerá hasta el último extremo del enflaquecimiento y la decadencia. La cuestión de África es una cuestión de vida o muerte para nuestro porvenir, para el porvenir de esta heroica raza española. (150) Likewise, Gabriel Maura Gamazo (1879-1963)–the son of the five times Prime Minister of Spain–saw in Spain’s colonial enterprises in Africa a critical matter for the very nations’ survival: “Harto tiene España a la espalda con un Gibraltar, para que vayamos a consentir que surjan, en un momento de debilidad nuestra, una legión de Gibraltares franceses detrás del Rif, y, como consecuencia, hoy o mañana, un segundo Gibraltar inglés en Tánger” (33). Juan Donoso Cortés (1809- 1853)–a conservative politician descendant, through his father Pedro Donoso Cortés, ancestry of Hernando Cortés–coincided in the absolute necessity to expand Spain’s territories in Africa because “Si asentar nuestra dominación en el África es para nosotros una cuestión de engrandecimiento, impedir la dominación exclusiva de ningún otro pueblo en las costas africanas es para nosotros una cuestión de existencia” (911). These three examples of Castellar y Ripoll, Maura Gamaza, and Donoso Cortés, may evidence how Spain–a country whose army was obsolete and devastated after the war of 1898–opted to continue to play the French “offwhiteness card” in the wake of the twentieth century to defend Spain’s geo-strategical and commercial interests in colonial Africa, aiming to gain access to greater material wealth. After the Spanish Civil War, the Franco Regime embarked on a foundational process of ideological reaffirmation that sought political legitimization, as well as the renovation of national identity. To promote this “new” national identity successfully, Franco founded the Departamento Nacional de Cinematografía in 1939, appointed to Falangist Dionisio Ridruejo y Manuel García Viñolas. By creating this National Department of Cinematography, the Francoist Regime showed its acute intention of controlling the film industry in order to expand their political ideology, ideal social values, as well as their imperial racial imaginings. This propagandist process particularly heightened between 1939 and 1959, resulting in a proliferation of films that exalted

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Spanish superior values. In doing so, Franco mimicked his Nazi German and Fascist Italian allies’ strategy to indoctrinate the masses. Undoubtedly, José Luis Saenz de Heredia’s Raza (1942)–as part of the so-called cine alcazareño–helped to shape this period’s Francoist ideal nation in the public mind.8 The narrative, based on Franco’s novel, encapsulated the dictator’s vision of Spanish historical and moral duties bound in the concepts of racial exceptionalism and spiritual superiority. Imbued in this nostalgic narrative, the army and the church soon came to symbolize the nation’s true spirit in addition to serving as the best epitome for the so-called “Spanish race.” Conversely, films emphasized the conception of a magnificent, exceptional, and united race making use of ordinary people, religious figures, and war heroes who sacrificed themselves in the name of the nation. Within two decades, Spanish production aimed to define the spirit of an age by which “the fate of Spanish cinema was to be the mirror of a race” (Taibo 27) narrating the motherland’s history. Accordingly, the film industry acquired the moral duty of building models that would signpost Spanish racial virtues in tandem with traditional values. The subsequent national fervor led Francoist rhetoric to claim the Will of Isabelle of Castile as a historical right to rebuild the Spanish Empire in Africa and the Mediterranean.9 At first, the rise of fascism in Europe provided Spain with the ideological legitimation to satisfy imperial aspirations. In fact, Franco’s negotiations with Adolf Hitler at Hendaya were fundamentally part of these imperial dreams.10 However, after the German defeat in WWII, Spain ideologically and racially “self-camouflaged” to avoid being overthrown in the rise of European democratic states. Thus, while the multicultural revolution began to reformulate the logic of European states, their structures, and their social practices, Spain–a dictatorship– remained excluded from all international organizations during the European post-WWII reconstruction period. Hence, internationally isolated and unable to follow the democratic processes toward multiculturalism, Francoism conflated an amalgamation of parallel, contradictory counter-discourses to preserve Spain’s moral authority.11 The Francoist regime found in Portugal’s Lusotropicalist model a legal stratagem that sought shelter from the United Nations’ push for decolonization in Africa. Therefore, Spain skewed its national rhetoric to endorse the propagation of Hispanotropicalism aiming to regulate the status of overseas colonies in Africa as national provinces.12 Moreover, to make these cultural transformations effective, the Franco Regime reshaped the ideals of a grandiose imperial past which promoted simultaneous national narratives that emphasized the strength of racial fusion such as, for example, the “Reserva espiritual de occidente” image in Europe, the discourse of hispanidad in Latin America, the use of hispanotropicalism in Equatorial Guinea, and the claim of Spain’s brotherly ties regarding North Africa.

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Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. One example of the conflated, contradictory array of racial discourses produced by

Spain–perhaps the clearest illustration, but certainly not the only one–arose when “Spaniards claimed an African past in Morocco and denied it in Equatorial Guinea” (Tofiño-Quesada 146) to justify colonialism.13 This twofold discourse signals how Spanish whiteness has traditionally been “situational,” that is, conceived as a highly rhetorical, cultural tactic of assimilation of nonwhites aiming to subsume their racial difference’s experiences into the margins of Spanish whiteness, thus totalizing, silencing dissidence (Persánch, Blancura situacional 2016). In essence, Spain’s situational rhetoric aimed to capitalize on its colonial legacy of mestizaje in order to legitimize neo-colonial enterprises. Nonetheless, in practice, Francoist film production reproduced schemes of White supremacy portraying non-white stereotypes as either the black savage (uncivilized, irrational, dangerous, lazy, and intellectually inferior), or the good savage (happy, obedient, and infantile). While this was in fact a Western phenomenon, Spain added a religious component to already racialized narratives contributing towards the imbrication of a strong messianic appeal in Spanish whiteness grounded in the Francoist crusade “Contra la tiranía de los sin Dios” to save Christian civilization. This national, racial discourse prevailed until Franco’s death. This introduction–by no means intended to be exhaustive but to provide a concise survey–has aimed to help to visualize the trajectory of Spain’s racial rhetoric in relation to whiteness, and its European counterparts’ historical processes of racialization, thus offering an explanation to the acute lack of studies regarding Spanish whiteness. Altogether, I have suggested how Italian humanism, central and northern Protestantism, the French Africanization rhetoric of Spanish Whiteness, as much as Spain’s colonial legacy, all contributed to largely shaped an ambiguous conception of Spanishness that has often been held off-whiteness. What follows is a study that revisits the cultural, symbolical transformation following the Transición Española through Amanece, que no es poco (1988) to examine how Spain disregarded notions of mestizaje in this period, beginning to bound up Spanish whiteness with European multiculturalism, as much as with a long-imagined, Western modernity. The analysis demonstrates how Spain –regardless of the new multicultural ideals– instrumentalized Ngé Ndomo’s blackness merely as an ideological means to raise awareness of social distance in the Spanish white racial formation. Specifically, the essay proves how Spanish film continued to replicate colonial tropes using blackness in order to redefine Spain’s white national identity, while silencing the black subaltern voice by subsuming the experience of blackness into the cultural practices of whiteneness. The essay also shows how this film strengthened the problematization of the presence of blackness regarding national identity coding hierarchical structures which

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established patterns of racial behavior that privileged the centrality and subjectivity of whiteness. To conclude, I will link the study to the present day’s racial conceptions, assuming that, in a culturally globalized world, Spain may have decisively integrated into a relatively homogeneous, glocal sensibility of whiteness. The White Man has hanged too in Amanece, que no es poco Spain, a country that had long been shaped “as the dark child of Europe and the light child of Africa” (Piedra 304), and whose access to Europeanness had been troubled–racialized–by European Imperia-phobia and Hispano-phobia, was no longer a dictatorship. With the advent of “democracy”–understood here not as formal democracy but uniquely as the granted right to individual freedom (freedom of the person in going and coming, equality before the courts, security of private property, freedom of opinion and its expression, and freedom of conscience subject to the rights of others and of the public)–the Spanish film industry, as it had happened during dictatorship, continued to go hand in hand with politics because “Spain needed a new democratic national cinema which would announce and explain to the world at large the death of old Spain and bring the nation together” (Triana-Toribio 109). Under the new “democratic” paradigm, Spanish filmmakers sought to redeem the past by constructing anti-hero narratives that primarily exalted individual liberties (the liberty of an individual to exercise freely those rights generally accepted as being outside of governmental control). This meant a liberation from traditional, master narratives bringing about, for example, the sexual boom of destape films as a political experience intricated in a whitening process. Moreover, not only did this new paradigm promote the circulation of films which had been banned during the dictatorship, but it also endorsed the adaptation of leftist literature to celluloid. Spanish cinema now “had to fulfil a national and transnational role . . . good films had to be constructed in terms that could travel” (Triana-Toribio 113; Original emphasis). In this transnational process, filmmakers reversed Francoist tropes mocking the Spanish grandiloquence of its imperial past to export a modernized image of Spain. As a result, Spanish cinema came to narrate the nation’s history through individual stories which were highly allegorical in nature, and which in appearance moved away from conservative, imperial, colonial, heroic, messianic, sacrificial, grandiose whiteness. José Luis Cuerda belongs to a generation of Spanish filmmakers whose works are conventionally grouped under the cinematic Tercera vía: “un cine que pretende reflexionar sobre algunos aspectos de la vida española, con un tratamiento sencillo . . . una especie de propuesta de encontrar una salida digna al cine español tanto desde un punto de vista industrial como

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temático” (Caparrós Lera 57).14 This tercera vía promulgated a cinema for social reflection that presented political, historical reverberations in everyday life. Amanece, que no es poco is a surreal comedy structured as a road movie, “a film genre in which the main characters leave home to travel from place to place, typically altering the perspective from their everyday lives” (Danesi 256). However, Cuerda altered this concept to make the main characters return–not leave–home. This modification symbolized the return of exiled republicans to Spain. As such, they–Teodoro (Antonio Resines), a Spanish professor at the University of Oklahoma and his father, and Jimmy (Luis Ciges)–are the main characters serving to reveal the locals’ peculiar way of life, rewriting Spain and recasting Spanishness. The film is a depiction of rural Spain. Cuerda rooted it in the Spanish tradition of absurd humor, drawing on, for example, Miguel Mihura’s plays (1905-1977), Miguel Gila’s stand-up shows (1919-2001), and the influence of directors like Luis García Berlanga (1921-2010) and Rafael Azcona (1926-2008). According to Cuerda, due to this sarcastic, absurd humor, Amanece . . . appeared to be placed “. . . entre la nada lógica y la realidad” (Cuerda en Guillén Cuervo, Versión española: Amanece . . .). Out of this conception, Cuerda developed a surreal comedy deploying absurd situations that parodied the present implying a severe criticism of the past. This absurd humor was his vehicle with which to ridicule the pseudo-magnanimity of politics, degenerate the harsh national-Catholicism, mock conservative values, reveal the heavy weight of history in daily life relations, and denounce the omnipresence of the de facto powers throughout the history of Spain. Thus Cuerda attempted to portray a trustworthy reflection of Spanish society: he reflected the persistence of national-Catholicism including a parish priest who still governs the daily life of the village; he decried the lack of culture of the masses that childishly cheer on the authorities which manipulate and oppress them; he alluded to the Spanish picaresque tradition in several of his characters, such as Cascales (Enrique San Francisco), a white character with the awareness of being a character who tries to swap his role with that of others; he also exposed the false appearances of Spanish democracy by making the people of the village vote to decide on the mayor, the teacher, the whore, the adulteresses . . . and to even decide if the Americans were allowed to stay in the town, or whom they preferred to serve as law enforcement officers. In short, Cuerda used the film to manifest the falsity of the filmic representation of Spanish reality, as well as to question the myth of democracy that the Transición had brought to Spain.15 Among the characters Cuerda chose to include in the film, we find Ngé Ndomo (interpreted by Cuban actor Samuel Claxton). With the inclusion of this black character in a remote village of Spain, Cuerda signaled a political change symbolizing the opening of national

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borders and represented the cultural incorporation of Spain into Europe after forty years of dictatorial isolation. Furthermore, these changes enforced a variation in representation to modernize–as a euphemism for Europeanizing and vindicating Spanish whiteness–the racial conception of the Spanish public mind. Cuerda’s inclusion of Ngé Ndomo also granted the director the means to maintain a dual discourse. Cuerda’s representation of blackness highlighted the fact that both Spain and Europe’s racial models were ambivalent and dichotomous, resulting in hierarchical subjection of black bodies and minds. Cuerda’s depiction stressed how the discourses of Spain and Europe, past and present, were essentially one and the same. On the one hand, the presence of a black man in the narrative attested a process to redefine Spanish white Europeanness, moving away from Francoist hispanotropicalism and the said amalgamation of conflated discourses. Where and when a black character had a voice for the first time in Spanish film is hard to say, as whites appeared in black faces naturally in the Western cinematic traditions, where the actual black actors were pure ornament. Here, Ngé Ndomo’s blackness was the representational tool with which to assimilate Spain culturally into the post-WWII European postmodern discourse of white tolerance for ethnic diversity and respect for minorities. It is this discourse that propelled Spain towards the realization of a multicultural society. On the other hand, making use of Spanish traditional ambivalence regarding Europe, Cuerda also posed a veiled counter-discourse against the European racial model. The disrupting presence of Ngé Ndomo’s blackness revealed how the European discourse of white tolerance reproduced the very colonial tropes they appeared to contravene. This racial tension is seen from the opening scene when Teodoro and Jimmy express their surprise at seeing a black person in Spain. Naturally, they assume that he must not be a Spaniard. Thus Ngé Ndomo serves from the very beginning to naturalize a racial discourse of whiteness that circulates between the Spanish, European, and transatlantic traditions: Teodoro: Anda, coño, padre ¡Ahora un negro! Jimmy: Déjame a mí, déjame a mí. Buenos días, good morning. My name is Jimmy, mi nombre es Jimmy. ¿Habla usted español? Ngé Ndomo: Es lo único que hablo. Jimmy: Buenos días, yo me llamo Jimmy y mi hijo se llama Teodoro. Ngé Ndomo: Yo me llamo Ngé Ndomo. Jimmy: Éste es mi hijo Teodoro. Es profesor ingeniero en Oklahoma. Está de año sabático, ya sabe, trabaja seis y descansa uno. Yo soy su representante. Ngé Ndomo: ¿Y cómo les va a los compañeros por Oklahoma? ¿Siguen con el algodón?

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Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. (Cuerda, Amanece . . .)

This connection between a “disoriented” black man settled in a remote Spanish village with the slaves of the Southern United States invites us to rethink how the discourses on whiteness could be understood as a global ideology that is grounded in racial, as well as cultural, processes of Western homogenization at the expense of blackness.16 The apparent, natural transit Ngé Ndomo enables between the local and the transnational could help us reexamine how the vestiges of colonial history lie entwined in contemporary, democratic, “white societies.” Particularly, “the democratic Spain of the post-Francoist period is far from having freed itself completely from nostalgic attitudes towards colonial Guinea, which continued to operate at several political and public levels” (Sampedro Vizcaya 347). In Amanece . . ., Ngé Ndomo became the bodily materialization of a colonial echo who shadowed the Spanish fantasy of racial reconciliation that the idyllic Transición professed. He likewise disrupted the Spanish collective amnesia regarding the woes and atrocities of colonialism. In this further fragment from the latter scene, Jimmy insists in interrogating the presence of Ngé Ndomo in a white village: Jimmy: Pero usted Ngé, ¿De dónde es? Ngé Ndomo: Yo he nacido aquí en este pueblo. Jimmy: ¿Pues estamos en un poblado negro? Ngé Ndomo: Que va hombre, que va. Aquí el único negro soy yo. Yo heredé de mi padre el nombre, la raza y el acento. Y de mi madre los dos apellidos y el lugar de nacimiento. (Cuerda, Amanece . . . ) The exogenic conception of blackness is noteworthy as well as the explicit contrast made between “pueblo” y “poblado.” Uttered by Ngé Ndomo and Jimmy respectively, this contraposition underlines a colonial trope by which a dividing line is established between white, civilized towns, and underdeveloped, savage, black villages. Ngé Ndomo’s attire–dressed in a worn away, wool shepherd khaki vest which leaves his black torso visible down to his waist, a handkerchief around his neck, khaki pants, and a shepherd leather pouch of the same color– visually reinforces the conception that links blackness to backwardness. “Clothes–as Richard Dyer noted–are bearers of prestige, notably of wealth, status and class: to be without them is to lose prestige. Nakedness may also reveal the inadequacies of the body by comparison with social ideals” (146; Emphasis added). Hence, in the Spanish mind the presence of Ngé Ndomo’s inadequacy of the body disrupts the social ideal of a territory that is being racially redefined as an absolute white space.

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Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. According to Homi Bhabha, “space and time cross to produce complex figures of

difference and identity, past and present, inside and out, inclusion and exclusion” (2). The presence of hybrid identities like Ngé Ndomo’s in perceived homogeneous societies contributes to inquiry as to the limits of master narratives. In turn, these complex hybrid figures “crean nuevos signos definitorios y cuestionan la idea de homogeneidad en la sociedad, articulando a su vez una nueva hibridez cultural a nivel global” (Corbalán 195). Thus Ngé Ndomo’s blackness and hybridity (“Yo heredé de mi padre el nombre, la raza y el acento. Y de mi madre los dos apellidos y el lugar de nacimiento.”) become the means to biologically and culturally redefine the white, majority society to which he belongs, and Spanishness. In this regard, Paul Gilroy suggests that all blacks in the West stand between (at least) two great cultural assemblages, both of which have mutated through the course of modern world that formed them and assumed new configurations. At present, they remain locked symbiotically in an antagonistic relationship marked out by the symbolism of colours which adds to the conspicuous cultural power and their central Manichean dynamic–black and white. These colours support a special rhetoric that has grown to be associated with a language of nationality and national belonging. (1-2) We detect another colonial reverberation that threatens to neutralize Ngé Ndomo’s pernicious blackness in the way that Jimmy racializes him. Note that Jimmy–a white Spaniard–uses the word “negro” when referring to Ngé Ndomo. This use supposes an ethnocentric synecdoche which projects social distance of blackness regarding a normativity of Spanishness that is conceived white. Ngé Ndomo’s response, calling Jimmy “hombre,” is of equal significance. The interaction reveals a racial, Western attitude towards black objectification whereas whiteness is simply humanized. Taking this argument further, the conception of whiteness as an unracialized, extemporal ideology demolishes the rigid cultural dialectics between an old fashioned, hierarchical Spanish hispanotropicalist model for assimilation, other European colonial models, and the supposedly modern, progressive, post-WWII multicultural ideal. In fact, the persistence of whiteness across cultures equates all discourses simply as branches that derive from a common ideological white root. The capabilities of whiteness to morph culturally, socially, ideologically, and institutionally over time while maintaining its discursive centrality, historical normalcy, cultural invisibility, universal agency, social privilege and institutional power, shatters any contemporary fantasies of reconciliation and equality installed in the Western cognizance. Cuerda’s prolongation of colonial tropes during this historical period exemplifies these intrinsic

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synonymies in the construction of structural power. Beyond the neutralization of blackness, plausibly, as a constitutive vestige of both Spanish and Western identities, Jimmy racializes Ngé Ndomo twofold: firstly, as a racial other and, again, as a foreigner, regardless of what Ngé Ndomo says. Moreover, the film also evidences a neat instrumentalization of Ngé Ndomo’s blackness to foster a white racial formation in the Spanish public. For example, we find a dialogue between Cascales and Ngé Ndomo that corroborates the latter statement: Cascales: Ngé, te cambio el personaje. Ngé Ndomo: Tú eres lo más bajo y miserable que hay en la tierra. Las serpientes usarían tu sombra. Y ni siquiera eres negro, ¿Cómo vas a hacer mi personaje? (Cuerda, Amanece . . . Emphasis added) Ngé Ndomo confirms, therefore, how Cascales/Spanishness is being construed white in absolute terms. Conceived as a joke within the limits of Cuerda’s surreal and absurd humor, the scene could raise a smile from the audience. Yet it is appalling to realize that Ngé Ndomo is doomed to play the only role for which he is deemed suitable, that of the black character while Cascales–a blue-eyed, blond, white Spaniard–may aspire even to play the role of a black character. This notion, while echoing the past of a blackened conception of the Spaniard which is now significantly refuted, also reflects upon the fluidity and malleability of whiteness attached to its capability for social mobility, when compared to the restricted opportunities for black people in modern, “white contemporary societies.” Far from being anecdotal, Cuerda’s approach involved national interests as it consolidated a racial ideology. Barbara Jeanne Fields defines an ideology as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence, through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re-create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume . . . As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand. (134) In turn, the ideology of race (racism) is imbued with a set of socially constructed categories that are legitimized institutionally as part of a greater national discourse. Of course, this ideology is vast, much as these categories are represented in an array of cultural forms that are socially naturalized and individually rendered as “normal” (only at times truly negotiated). In sum, racial categories are a system of beliefs articulated in an all-embracing (social, political, and cultural) discourse that classifies humans in such a way as to justify the distribution of wealth, rights and privileges. Hence, the ideology of race builds a paradoxical trap, for it is a system that replicates

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the same social conditions and structural practices that it claims to fight against. In this sense Ngé Ndomo’s interactions with both Jimmy and Cascales show that racial categories transcend the reductionist conception of racial materialism. Seen from this angle, imbued in a whitenessblackness dialectic, race ideologies shape whiteness as an identitarian axis helping to preserve the limits among distinct groups, functioning to regulate the several degrees of non-whites’ social distance regarding their proximity to “white normativity.” Only then, one can then infer the reasons for Cuerda’s characterization of Ngé Ndomo defaults in a pastiche of colonial stereotypes that indeed verge on whiteness. Due to the latter explanation regarding racial ideologies, whiteness and normalcy, the cultural practices exercised by Cuerda do not suppress the process “by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings. Crucial to this formulation is the treatment of race as a central axis of social relations which cannot be subsumed under or reduced to some broader category or conception” (Omi y Winant 16). Quite to the contrary, as Cornel West rightfully argues, non-Europeans are walking abstractions, inanimate objects, or invisible creatures. Within all three white supremacist logics–which operate simultaneously and affect the perceptions of both Europeans and non-Europeans–black, brown, yellow, and red peoples personify Otherness and embody alien Difference. (23) Among the representational uses practiced by Cuerda, Ngé Ndomo’s blackness is objectified as a walking abstraction that stands for an exoticized body, an inanimate, animalized sexual myth, and a culturally problematized, socially stigmatized Other. For example, in the following scene Ngé Ndomo poses in the mountains at night surrounded by goats while muttering to himself: “¡Quieta! Anda, que no debe estar bonito esto: la cabra ahí quieta, y yo aquí de perfil como un Masai . . . Pues no viene nadie a verme” (Cuerda, Amanece . . .). The scene continues with a dialogue between Ngé Ndomo and a guardia civil: Ngé Ndomo: ¿A usted le gusta la estampa que hago yo allí con las cabras? Guardia Civil: Hombre, claro que me gusta. Son muy bonitas, muy curiosas. (Cuerda, Amanece . . . ) On the one hand, Ngé Ndomo shows his yearning to be liked as well as his need for the white observer’s approval. Both aspects prompt the audience to guess the black man’s position in the white village while revealing his lack of agency among the locals. On the other hand, Ngé Ndomo’s racial isolation in a village of whites alienates him so far as to pretend that he is a Masai in Africa, instead of being in the mountains of Spain; that is, imagining himself as an inhabitant

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of southern Kenya or northern Tanzania. This self-demarcation undermines his actual Spanishness. Consequently, Ngé Ndomo’s actions reveal how deeply he has interiorized “his” racial difference despite having been born a Spaniard and, therefore, postulating himself as the abstraction of an imagined African other. Conceived as a parody, Cuerda’s representation exceeded Ngé Ndomo’s physical materiality. A parody, paraphrasing Linda Hutcheon, entails a critical mimesis by which the individual dissociates himself from easily recognizable identities, thus escaping from the rigidity of the social categories, an escape that allows the subaltern to reaffirm his difference positively against the social structures that exclude him (183-185). However, by parodying primitivism through the black character, Cuerda did not reaffirm Ngé Ndomo’s blackness positively; rather, he used it to question the European racial discourse that Spain was absorbing, stipulating the impossibility of cultural assimilation of the blackness in western societies. In fact, Cuerda’s representational use underscored the rejection of blackness exercised by a white, dominant society several times throughout the film. In another scene, Ngé Ndomo is explaining to Teodoro and Jimmy–the characters through which the spectator experiences the life of the village–that everyone is at mass but him. To justify his absence, Ngé Ndomo says: “Yo no voy porque soy catecúmeno, y no me dejan entrar” (Cuerda, Amanece . . . Emphasis added). As a catechumen, Ngé Ndomo is a “persona que se está instruyendo en la doctrina y misterios de la fe católica, con el fin de recibir el bautismo” (DRAE). Such religious instruction–as his mother later explains–has already taken thirty years. This exclusion has three implications: firstly, it evidences how the church–an institutional, moral authority–had essentially segregated Ngé Ndomo from birth; secondly, it expresses an incompatibility between the Christian faith and blackness; lastly, as this white village celebrates mass daily, the black man is de facto spatially and culturally alienated from society. It is also acutely significant that Ngé Ndomo opts to lie to Teodoro and Jimmy to mitigate the fact and consequences of institutional racism. Cuerda alerted us in this fashion how racism becomes a taboo under the European racial model, one that remains latent in stigmatized bodies silencing their subaltern voices. Nevertheless, in a later scene, Cuerda did expose the naked truth through a conversation with Álvarez (Chuz Lampreave), his white mother: Álvarez: Ahí viene tu pretendienta, y lo que no puede ser, hijo, es que te pasees a la luz del día del bracete de la mujer de otro, como un pagano, luego te quejas que llevas treinta años de catecúmeno. A este paso no vas a entrar nunca en el seno de la Iglesia.

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Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. Ngé Ndomo: No es por eso por lo que no entro madre. No entro porque soy negro. Gabriela: Eres minoría étnica. Ngé Ndomo: Bueno, minoría étnica y negro como un tizón. (Cuerda, Amanece . . . Emphasis added)

The fact that both his mother and girlfriend classify Ngé Ndomo belonging to an ethnic minority exemplifies the hazards of European discursive euphemisms. This occultation of the cultural problematization of blackness behind a white, euphemistic, European discourse becomes recurrent. In another instance, Gabriela (Rosalía Dans) reiterates: “de todas formas, tú eres un poco llorón porque el respeto que se tiene hoy por las minorías étnicas . . . fíjate el comportamiento que tengo yo contigo delante de todos por ejemplo” (Cuerda, Amanece . . . Emphasis added). In response, Ngé Ndomo reproaches his girlfriend for her hypocrisy, making explicit how he actually feels: Gabriela: Quítate del medio, que después del susto y del ridículo que me hiciste pasar delante de todo el mundo por tu culpa. Ngé Ndomo: ¿Y por qué te hice yo hacer el ridículo? Gabriela: Porque sí, porque parecía yo también una cualquiera. Allí con la Susan esa esperando que bajaseis el alcalde y tú. Ngé Ndomo: ¿Y qué tiene de malo eso? ¿O es que te da vergüenza esperar a un negro? Gabriela: No digas tonterías. Ngé Ndomo: Porque tú mucho “minoría étnica” y mucho camelo, pero luego te da vergüenza esperar a un negro. Gabriela: Déjame en paz. Ngé Ndomo: Para los coitos sí que valgo ¡Eh! Y para bailar para Changó. (Cuerda, Amanece . . . ) Together with white cultural prejudices and social hypocrisy regarding Ngé Ndomo, Cuerda introduced the trope of an exotic blackness. Note that “Changó (Shangó) is the owner of fire, lightening, thunder, and war, but he is also the patron of music, drumming, and dancing. He represents male beauty and virility, passion and power” (Duncan n. pag.). Ngé Ndomo’s characterization subscribes to the Orisha’s meaning, as when the black character tells Carmelo “El borracho” (Miguel Rellán) that “yo le doy a tu mujer unas aportaciones sexuales muy buenas” (Cuerda, Amanece . . .). Even his white mother appears fascinated by Ngé Ndomo’s sexual attributes, something that she proudly acknowledges as a trophy to her neighbor: Vecina: Parece que a tu muchacho se le va aclarando el color del cuerpo.

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Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. Álvarez: No sé qué decirte, como no sean las palmas de las manos o las plantas de los pies . . . porque el resto . . . si le vieras las ingles. (Cuerda, Amanece . . .)

While the white, female neighbor’s irony signals Ngé Ndomo’s acculturation in the practices of whiteness, his white mother responds with a corporeal synecdoche that fixes Ngé Ndomo’s racial difference as an insuperable, biological fact: Ngé Ndomo is black, totally, and authentically black, full stop. Besides his overt sexualization, white characters reiterate Ngé Ndomo’s blackness as a source of problems. Ngé Ndomo’s relationhip with his uncle Pedro (Alberto Bové) perhaps synthesizes the white problematization of blackness in western societies. When Pedro learned of his sister’s pregnancy, he lamented: “Calabaza: se acaba un nuevo día y como todas las tardes quiero despedirme de ti. Quiero despedirme y darte las gracias . . . yo no puedo olvidar que en los momentos más difíciles de mi vida: cuando mi hermana se quedó preñada del negro” (Cuerda, Amanece . . . Emphasis added). In his monologue, Pedro links his most difficult moments in life to his sister’s sexual miscegenation and unborn child’s blackness which is animalized using the word “preñada.” His attitude reflects Spanish acquired racial anxiety over mestizaje, which is not perceived as being at odds at all with Spanish colonial history in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. As evidence of this shift in a racial model, Pedro’s attitude persists with the passing of years. In the following scene, we see Ngé Ndomo coming downstairs as he runs into Pedro: Pedro: ¡Coño! ¡El negro! Ngé Ndomo: Me cago en mi nombre. ¿Es que no se va a acostumbrar nunca este hombre? ¿Es que tiene que dar un respingo y echar a correr cada vez que me ve? Álvarez: Tu tío es un campesino Ngé. No puedes tenerle en cuenta esas cosas. Ngé Ndomo: Es que son cuarenta años viviendo juntos. Álvarez: Pues a su edad, si no lo ha aceptado, ya no lo acepta, para que nos vamos a engañar. (Cuerda, Amanece . . . Emphasis added) The justification that Ngé Ndomo’s white mother finds for Pedro is his humble, uneducated social class. Note that Álvarez explicitly substitutes the words “actitudes racistas” with “esas cosas,” lessening the importance of her brother’s racist behavior. This reasoning indicates how racist claims can be easily diverted into other overlapping categories such as class or education, in the same way the specificity of whiteness as a racial category is immediately replaced by those of ethnicity and nationhood. Furthermore, the presence of Pedro in Amanece . . ., because of his

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racist attitude toward, and unconcealed fear about Ngé Ndomo, along with his racial anxiety, manifests how rapid social changes in Spain affected muchos españoles, sobre todo los que carecen del necesario nivel cultural, social y educacional para adaptarse a estas nuevas formulaciones culturales, se encuentran desorientados y enajenados de una cultura nacional en la que el ser español ya no está basado en una cómoda homogeneidad blanca y católica, sino que ha sido trastocado y abierto a la fuerza por la heterogeneidad y la hibridez . . . la perspectiva blanca, ibérica, católica ‘dominante’ sobre el mundo es cuestionada y desafiada: ya no es el centro desde donde se construyen, se juzgan y se dominan los márgenes, sino que el centro mismo es racializado como solo uno de los componentes del círculo. (Davies 106-108) Therefore, paradoxically, when Spain was redefining the nation as purely white, the presence of Ngé Ndomo in Amanece . . . postulated the acquisition of a decentered whiteness: with the opening of Spanish borders and the Europeanization of the nation, as well as Spain’s economic integration in international markets; and because of transnational, intercultural dialog, Spain was simultaneously forced–after forty years of dictatorship and lengthy history of racial “impurity of thought”–to accentuate whiteness while renegotiating Spanishness/Whiteness as a manifold space whose limits could become alterable and highly unstable. This idea of a decentered whiteness also permeates the last scenes analyzed in this essay. Toward the end of the film, Ngé Ndomo joins the mayor of the village to share the gallows. The black man for the first time shares the same space, a fact that perplexes the white mayor. In this surreal moment, with ropes around their necks, the black and white characters hold a conversation before the entire village: Alcalde: Sé que lo haces para que no esté solo. Ngé Ndomo: La soledad es muy mala señor alcalde. (Cuerda, Amanece . . .) The fact that the mayor knows why Ngé Ndomo wants to die highlights the notion of white ethnocentrism: the white mayor projects his beliefs as knowledge, and therefore silences the black character’s motives. Furthermore, the white mayor assumes that the black man wants to keep him company as an act of solidarity in his inability to conceive that Ngé Ndomo is as desperate as he is. Plainly, the white mayor thinks that the black man acts thus to keep him from feeling alone, which is how Ngé Ndomo feels in this white village. As the scene continues, Ngé Ndomo even seeks the white mayor’s approval to committing suicide together: “a no ser que le moleste que siendo yo negro . . .” (Cuerda, Amanece . . .). The white mayor responds that it is foolish to think that he would be bothered by dying alongside a black person. He consequently

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exempts himself from being racist. However, while trying to convince Ngé Ndomo that he should not hang, the mayor reasons why he would not mind sharing the gallows with a black person: Alcalde: ¿No estuvo Jesucristo en el Gólgota clavado con dos ladrones? A parte de que hoy se tiene un respeto imponente por las minorías étnicas. Por eso me extraña que quieras colgarte conmigo. Pues a ti, Ndomo, no te falta de nada. Hasta tienes una novia guapísima . . . y blanca. (Cuerda, Amanece . . . Emphasis added) The comparison of Ngé Ndomo with the thieves of Golgotha explains the sacrifice he–the white man–makes by sharing his fate with a black man, paralleling what Jesus underwent on the cross for sinners. Cuerda’s continued, intentional use of blackness underpins his view of Spanish modernity, as well as accentuate the white Europeanness of Spain. Moreover, “though infrequent, the recourse to crucifixion can be a key moment in establishing the moral superiority of not specifically Christian characters” (Dyer 150). Given the history of slavery, hanging here might be understood as “an-Other” symbol for crucifixion regarding black moral authority over whiteness. The last remark of the white mayor concerning Ngé Ndomo’s girlfriend (“Hasta tienes una novia guapísima . . . y blanca”) suggests a complete negation of the existence of racism in Spain. This negation of racism reinforces the notion of Spain as a modern, multicultural nation. Additionally, the white mayor may be in fact indicating to Ngé Ndomo how the white female body could be the path for him to access his hoped-for social, material well-being. In other words, Cuerda suggested that Ngé Ndomo must be integrated into society legally through marriage and abdicate his blackness, thereby whitening his descendants so that they may have an opportunity of social mobility. Lastly, the instrumentalization of Ngé Ndomo symbolized the return of a spectre of color which echoed Spanish colonialism in a period of racial, national amnesia. His black body ambiguously entailed an indication of colonial past as much as an annunciation of future immigration. In the latter sense, Ngé Ndomo was merely the tool to reflect upon the transformation of Spain in its gradual integration in Europe while transitioning between whitenesses. The white totalization of the black experience caused the spatial and temporal dislocation of blackness forcing the disintegration of Ngé Ndomo’s African-ness while refuting his Spanishness, one that was now conceived unquestionably white, European and modern.

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(Conclusions) Toward the Glocalization of Spanish Whiteness Certainly, Spain changed decisively after the country’s economic, political, military, and cultural integration in Europe as of the 1980s, proving that “the reality is that the European Union seeks to push Spain to demonstrate its Europeanity by closing the gates to the millenarian African migration . . . to be as European as possible” (Toasije 349-350). The racial discourse of Amanece . . . anticipated how multiculturalism and race relations would become the experience of Spain’s everyday life due to the influxes of immigration. However, given that almost three decades have passed since Amanece . . ., it is not only fair to wonder but vital to respond to how–if so–these representational uses of blackness and Spain’s process of white racial formation have changed over the subsequent decades. Significantly, only two years after Amanece . . ., Spain proved to have absorbed the European multicultural discourse offering centrality for the first time to a black character in Montxo Armendariz’s Las cartas de Alou (1990). A boom of immigration cinema immediately flourished in Spain expressing the same anxieties other European nations had been long voicing since the end of WWII. In this fashion, Spain also joined Europe figuratively through developing a common white gaze. Thus, as argued in “Identidades fantasma: alteridad étnica y regional en Las cartas de Alou, Catalunya Über Alles! y Flamenco” (2014), in Spanish cinema of the 1990s through the early 2000s los inmigrantes y la españolidad étnica gitana encarnan la existencia de alteridades espectrales, ausentes en su presencia, negados en su existencia y olvidados por conveniencia. El cuerpo blanco se transforma en símbolo de poder y privilegio frente a la alteridad estigmatizada. De esta manera, el blanco, como entidad relacional no marcada, se concibe como individuo y norma de carácter universal, al tiempo que racializa a la alteridad no blanca y establece la ficción de una jerarquía natural. (Persánch, “Identidades fantasma” 158) This could be so because–as shocking as it may sound–not a single black filmmaker has, to my knowledge, directed a Spanish film production. If one exists, she or he is so marginal that no one knows about it (not even the internet search engines are able to find any independent “AfroSpanish” filmmakers!). In other words, Spain neither knows “Spanish” Spike Lee nor Sidney Poitier. Afropean cinema is, simply, not a phenomenon in Spain (yet?). Films remain white, and extremely so. Whether by excluding black characters from the cast or removing their voices through the types of instrumentalization this essay has examined, the Spanish film industry is yet to address the question Armando Buika raised during the Goya Ceremony of 2017: ‘Soy actor, negro y español, ¿Por qué tengo que hacer siempre de inmigrante?’ . . . ‘Buscamos a actores negros para interpretar a dos antagónicos secundarios. Se

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Persánch, JM. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. trata de personajes sin diálogo, de aspecto rígido e intimidante.’ Esta es la norma entre las agencias de casting españolas que ofertan papeles para personas negras. Nunca son protagonistas y apenas se escapan de estereotipos como el de inmigrante irregular o, como en el ejemplo, de figura secundaria y amenazante. (Zas Marcos n. pag.)

Perhaps, one could venture an answer to this question, assuming that, in a culturally globalized world, a relatively homogeneous sensibility of whiteness may have emerged. The glocalization of economy, politics, and culture may well be mediating how Spain–as well as many other nations– deals with racial discourses of both normalcy and difference. The term “Glocalization” refers to the simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems. The term, a linguistic hybrid of globalization and localization, was popularized by the sociologist Roland Robertson and coined, according to him, by Japanese economists to explain Japanese global marketing strategies. In practical terms, glocalization represents a challenge to simplistic conceptions of globalization processes as linear expansions of territorial scales. Glocalization indicates that the growing importance of continental and global levels is occurring together with the increasing salience of local and regional levels. Tendencies toward homogeneity and centralization appear alongside tendencies toward heterogeneity and decentralization. But the notion of glocalization entails an even more radical change in perspective: it points to the interconnectedness of the global and local levels. (Blatter n. pag.) This fluid translocation between global and local frameworks of representation regarding race may be redefining whiteness as a glocal ideology which regulates, at large, the several degrees of non-white social distance regarding their proximity to white standards of moral values and culture. In today’s world, racial ideologies circulate transnationally more than ever, triggering global responses and effects. Consider as just one example of many, the response to the terrorist attacks of the twenty-first century and, as relatively recent exemplar, the Paris terrorist attack of November 13th, 2015. The killings of innocent people in Bataclan mobilized western civic societies and political leaders under the motto “Je suis Paris.” Over the course of events, the Western discourse produced a palpable racial undertone that equated “terrorism” with “radical Islam”–or plainly Islam–over the subsequent weeks. Such discourse was absorbed quickly by the “global mind,” having the immediate effect of racializing violence as an irrational feature of Arab countries. This example is significant to illustrate how today, racial ideologies circulate

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transnationally between diverse cultures, making local events global and, in turn, serving to unify Western principles, ideologies and goals through the lens of whiteness faster than ever before, thus demonstrating the fact that “whiteness is based on its historical duration and its ideological coherence and effective power” (Hartigan 498). A similar process may be occurring regarding cultural representation when Europe and the United States widely distribute their “must-seemovies of the year” in film festivals like Cannes, the Golden Globes or the Oscars. More so, when Spain’s culture has even started to be produced in English–the allegedly preeminent language of whiteness–, for example, in films like Goya’s Ghost (2006; Dir. Miloš Forman), Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona (2008; Dir. Woody Allen), Finding Altamira (2016; Dir. Hugh Hudson), and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018; Dir. Terry Guilliam), or series like the Emmy-Nominated Genius: Picasso (2017-2018; Dir. Keneth Biller), to name but a few, all including Spanish characters in both leading and supporting roles. Weather this relatively homogeneous glocal sensibility will continue to gradually strengthen ties or not, only time will say. Nonetheless, to me, in the view of Spain’s trajectory, this process concerning the glocalization of whiteness in Spain seems irreversible.

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Notes See the introduction to this special issue “Another Turn of the Screw Toward Hispanic and Lusophone Whiteness Studies.” 2 For studies on whiteness in the United Kingdom, see, for example, the publications of Peter Jackson (1998), Paul Gilroy (2004), Steve Garner (2009; 2012), Kristoffer Halvorsrud (2017) and Alastair Bonnett (1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2008, 2011). 3 According to Marcos R. Caña Pelayo’s study, although the term “Marrano” is found as early as 1380 in Juan I’s texts, “No existe, pese a ser un debate mantenido durante muchas décadas, un consenso entre los investigadores acerca del adjetivo marrano, empleado como despectiva manera de señalar a los judíos recién convertidos al cristianismo. Buscando el origen de la palabra, algunos autores han apostado por ubicar sus comienzos en el árabe (murain, que vendría a significar “hipócrita, o el propio término mumar, con el que los islámicos señalaban a los apóstatas). Por el contrario, otros autores han buscado en la propia lengua hebrea el origen del insulto, señalando que la expresión mara ata o maharanna ata, de origen arameo, invocaciones al Señor, y de marrar o errar en su elección de credo. De hecho, hay incluso corrientes que han expuesto que la posibilidad más sencilla sea recurrir al propio castellano, aludiendo al insulto debido a su negativa a comer cerdo” (36). 4 According to Roca Barea, “Durante la época vitoriana se produjo una reescritura completa del periodo isabelino, etapa que pasó a considerarse como el momento cumbre del nacimiento de la Iglesia nacional y, por tanto, de la nación inglesa. Aquí se afianzaron los tópicos de la leyenda negra creados durante las guerras de religión y más tarde en la forma remozada que les dio la ilustración. Pasaron a formar parte indisoluble e indiscutible de la historiografía oficial de Europa, tal y como ha pasado al siglo XX y XXI” (226). 5 Many travelers romanticized Spain, Washington Irving (1783-1859), for example, wrote three fundamental works of the period that orientalised Spain: Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), Tales of the Alhambra (1832) and Moorish Chronicles (1835), translated in Spanish as Crónicas moriscas: Leyendas de la conquista de España. However, as Bernabé López García noted: “el romanticism hispano, a diferencia del extranjero, encuentra en suelo propio nuestro Oriente doméstico, que atrae también viajeros, escritores o pintores de otros países” (42). Thus “En esta lucha contra la oficialidad, otros orientalistas arabistas destacables como Pascual de Gayangos y Arce (1809-1897), José Moreno Nieto (1825-1882), Francisco Fernández y González (1833-1917) o Eduardo Saavedra (1829-1917) promueven una posición positiva de lo árabe que superen los prejuicios historiográficos, religiosos y raciales. Además del liberalismo político, en esta postulación arabista influye también el tardío romanticismo español de José de Espronceda (1808-1842), Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870), Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885), Gaspar Núñez de Arce (1834- 1903), Mariano José de Larra (1809-1837), José Zorrilla (1817-1893) y Moral, Ángel de Saavedra (Duque de Rivas) (1791-1865), que puso en circulación narrativas alternativas al moro de la tradición castellana como ejemplifica Martínez de la Rosa en su Abén Humeya de 1830 o El moro expósito (1834) del Duque de Rivas. Estas narrativas románticas son absorbidas de manera entusiasta por arabistas como Leopold Eguilaz o el mencionado Simonet, quienes publican El talismán del diablo. Novela fantástico oriental (1853) y Leyendas históricas árabes (1858) respectivamente” (Persánch, Blancura situacional 88-89). 6 While Martin-Márquez’s study unwarily built on Hugo’s vision establishing a dialogue with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to explore the Spanish traditional, racial ambivalence regarding the processes which forged Spain’s national identity in relation to the Islamic and African heritage, María DeGuzmán had already inspected the representation of the Spanish figure in American literature proving the crucial American contribution to racialize Spain as “the blackened figure of alien whiteness” (1). In Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (2005), DeGuzmán suggested that the Anglo-American literary production contributed to racialize and Orientalize Spain by taking “what Spanish empire had endeavored to expel (Moors, Gypsies, Jews) from the Iberian Peninsula and those whom the Spanish empire in the Americas had worked to death (Native Americans and Africans) and put them under the skin of, or transformed them into physical marks on, the imagined body of the Spaniard” (74-75; Emphasis added). From a psychoanalytic stance, DeGuzmán contended that such representations of the Spaniard enlightened more about the needs, anxieties, racial fantasies and fears of the United States over mestizaje than a factual image of Spanishness. However, the effects of this American racialization of Spain remain vigorously present as a piece of the giant jigsaw which problematizes Spanish whiteness. 7 To know more about how Equatorial Guinea, as an entity and as a point of reference, has been co-opted in the Spanish popular imaginary, through the representation and consumption of a range of historiographical sources and cultural icons that have, collectively, re-invented it as a racialized other, a space of difference and alterity. See Benita Sampedro Vizcaya’s study “Rethinking the Archive and the Colonial Library: Equatorial Guinea,” published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, Nov. 2008, pp. 341-363. DOI: 10.1080/14636200802563600 8 Raza exploited the formula of the so-called cine alcazareño, an Italo-Spanish “under-siege cinema” that came to symbolize the Francoist psyche. See the relevant study of Daniela Aronica Censura y propaganda: El paradigma de L'assedio Dell'alcazar/Sin novedad en el Alcázar (1940), de Augusto Genina, 2001. 9 See the detailed study of Gustau Nerín and Alfred Bosch Pascual–Prefaced by Paul Preston–in El imperio que nunca existió (2001) for further examination on the Franco Regime’s colonial ambitions in Africa. 1

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Although what really happened during the negotiations between Hitler and Franco remains a secreto de estado, speculations claim two versions. One version alleges that they did not reach an agreement for Spain to join Nazi Germany in World War II due to the excessive demands that Franco made (regaining the sovereignty of Gibraltar once the UK was defeated, the incorporation of French Cameroon to Spanish Equatorial Guinea, and the annexation of French Morocco and part of French Algeria). The other version claims that Franco’s real intention was to place a high bid so that Hitler would dismiss Spain’s involvement in the war. As a matter of fact, though Spain remained officially neutral, Franco changed the Spanish time zone to align with the German time zone and allowed Spain to serve Germany geo-strategically. For further reading on this topic consider Stanley G. Payne’s Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II published by Yale University Press in 2008. 11 Although Spain did not follow the same path toward the multicultural society, it could be argued that the nation indirectly did experience a certain level of multiculturalism based on tourism influxes during the so-called desarrollismo in the 1960s. Spain, however, did not embrace a true multicultural transformation roughly until the 1980s–having already incorporated to NATO in 1982 and the Economic European Union 1986–and, most definite, by the 1990s when Spain received the first immigration influx since the Civil War. 12 Gustau Nerín i Abad borrowed the term “hispanotropicalismo” from Gilberto Freyre’s “lusotropicalismo,” adopting it for the Spanish context. In his article “Mito franquista y realidad de la colonización de la Guinea Española,” he described this concept as a racial practice for the assimilation of colonial blackness in Equatorial Guinea. Nerín i Abad noted how Spain “procedió a fundir tres ideologías coloniales distintas: la hispanidad, el lusotropicalismo y el regeneracionismo de Joaquín Costa y de los africanistas civiles españoles del siglo XIX” (11). In practical terms, this ideology would encompass a very rare ideology of cultural absorption of blackness into the practices of Spanish whiteness by simultaneously making a cynical use of Equatorial Guinean blackness, and forcing cultural whitening over its African other. Susan Martín-Márquez nuanced that “although Nerín argues that Hispanotropicalismo did not emerge until the Franco era . . . in fact, the discourse had circulated among Spaniards since the prior century, as largely intact throughout the colonial period and into the postcolonial period” (72-73). 13 See Ignacio Tofiño-Quesada’s Spanish Orientalism: Uses of the Past in Spain’s Colonization in Africa (2003), where he sketched how Spanish orientalism projected a twofold fantasy that “both allowed the inherent [African] vocation argument and capitalized on European’s exoticized, Orientalized fantasy of Spain . . . Spain suffered from a kind of schizophrenic identity in which it was both ‘self and other,’ both Christian and Moorish/Islamic . . . (using the past and denying it at the same time) [which] has informed the identity of the country” (145-146). 14 Tercera vía was the term used to describe a Spanish cinematographic trend of the 1970s. It was promoted by pioneering producer José Luis Dibildos and directors like José Luis Garcí, Jaime de Armiñán, and Roberto Bodegas. The other two paths of Spanish cinema, according to Caparrós Lera, responded to political as well as intellectual ambitions: “exquisitez minoritaria” and popular “zafiedad” (57). 15 The chronology of la Transción Española has been said to be between 1975 and 1978, that is, since Franco’s death to the restoration of democracy with the Constitution of 1978. However, dating this period has proven problematic given that many people consider the Transición to really conclude when Felipe González–the first socialist president after a forty-year-right wing dictatorship–was elected in 1982; others extend this period to 1996, when José María Aznar’s right-wing Partido Popular returned to power “peacefully.” Moreover, perhaps a minority of the population and scholars claim that the Transición ended when the King Juan Carlos I, who had “brought democracy” to Spain, abdicated in his son Felipe VI as recent as 2014. Last but not least, Antonio Trevijano (1927-2018)–who promoted a rupture with Francoism at the time instead of implementing a reform for the conception of the Constitution of 1978–and his “Repúblico” Cultural Movement of Citizens of Libertad Constituyente, contend that the period of Transición will end when a Constitutional Republic be restored in Spain, replacing the current post-Francoist Parliamentary Monarchy. Due to this disagreement to fix the period, and inspired by Trevijano’s view, I understand the Transition to encompass several phases of an unfinished process: a legal and political phase of the transition, 1975-1978; a cultural and symbolical transformation of the transition, 1982-1995; a validation of the transition, 1996-2004; a revisionist period of the transition’s socio-political status quo, 2004-2011; a decadent period of the regime of the transition, 2012-2018). It is in these terms that I situate Amance, que no es poco within the context of a representational–cultural and symbolical– transformation. For further information on this debate, see Antonio Trevijano in La clave (Antena 3, 1992), available on Youtube “500 claves de la Transción.” Libertad constituyente Tv. Jan. 16, 2013. Also consider Luisa Elena Delgado’s study on La nación singular. Fantasías de la normalidad democrática española (1996-2011). Siglo XXI, 2014. 16 This analysis remains even more pressing today after decades of a galloping globalization which has accentuated– as this presently paper contends–the processes of white homogenization in the West. For further discussion on this topic, see the conclusions of this essay, and consider recent publications such as “When Whiteness Means Imagining Blackness and Signifying Socio-Cultural Difference in ‘Cuando los hombres querían a las mujeres’” (Palgrave, 2018), and “The Rest in the White West: After the Empire is Buried, Shadows of your Black Memory are Born” (Brill, Forthcoming 2019). 10

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Works Cited Amanece, que no es poco. Dir. José Luis Cuerda. Perf. Fernando Valverde, Luis Ciges, Porfirio Enríquez, José Nieto, Antonio Resines, y José Sazatornil. Compañía de aventuras comerciales, 1988. Aronica, Daniela. Censura y propaganda: el paradigma de L’assedio Dell’alcazar/Sin novedad en el Alcázar (Augusto Genina 1940), 2001, N. Pag. Arnoldsson, Sverker. La leyenda negra: Estudios sobre sus orígenes. Almqvist and Wiksell, 1960. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Bogardus, Emory. Immigration and Race Attitudes. D.C. Heath, 1928. Blatter, Joachim. “Glocalization.” Enciclopaedia Britannica. 21 of May 2013. ˂https://www.britannica.com/topic/glocalization˃ Cañas Pelayo, Marcos R. Los judeoconversos portugueses en el Tribunal Inquisitorial de Córdoba: Un análisis social (Siglos XVI-XVII). Ph.D. Diss. Universidad de Córdoba, 2016. Caparrós Lera, José María. El cine español bajo el régimen de Franco (1936-1975). Universitat de Barcelona, 1983. Castelar y Ripoll, Emilio. Miscelánea de historia, de religión, de arte y de política. San Martín y Jubera, 1875. Corbalán, Ana. “Cartografías de la otredad: Nuevo racismo en el cine español.” Nuevas aproximaciones al cine hispánico: migraciones temporales, textuales y étnicas en el bicentenario de las independencias iberoamericanas (1810-2010). Eds. Santiago Juan-Navarro and Joan Torres Pou. Promociones y publicaciones universitarias, 2011, pp. 195-211. Cordero Torres, José María. “Marruecos: Su unidad y sus límites.” Cuadernos de Estudios Africanos, 1946, pp. 1-42. Costa, Joaquín. Los intereses de España y Marruecos son armónicos. Imprenta de España en África, 1906. Danesi, Marcel. Dictionary of Media and Communications. Sharpe, 2008. Davies, Ian. “Raza y etnicidad: Desafíos de la inmigración en el cine español.” Letras Hispanas, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2006, pp. 98-112. DeGuzmán, María. Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire. University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Donoso Cortés, Juan, Manuel Donoso Cortés et al. Obras de Don Juan Donoso Cortés. Sociedad Editorial de San Francisco de Sales, 1893. Duncan, Cynthia. “Changó, Lord of Fire and Lightning.” About santería. ˂http://www.aboutsanteria.com/changoacute.html˃ Dyer, Richard. White. Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Routledge, 2017. García Figueras, Tomás. Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, Vol. 30, No. 1-2, Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2005. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press, 1993. Guillén Cuervo, Aitana. Versión española: Amanece, que no es poco. RTVE 20 Nov. 2009. ˂http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/version-espanola/version-espanola-amanece-nopoco/633661/˃ Fields, Barbara Jeanne and Karen Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso, 2012. Fra-Molinero, Baltasar. “La educación sentimental de un exiliado africano: Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra, de Donato Ndongo.” Afro-Hispanic Review, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2000, pp. 49-57. Hartigan, John. “Establishing the Fact of Whiteness.” American Anthropologist, Vol. 99, no. 3, 1997, pp. 495–505. JSTOR, ˂JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/681737˃. Hugo, Victor. Les Orientales: Les feuilles d’automme; Les chants du crépuscule. Hachette, 1884.

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Hutcheon, Linda. “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History.” Cultural Critique, Vol. 5, 1986, pp. 179–207. Juderías, y Loyot, Julián. La leyenda negra y la verdad histórica: Contribución al estudio del concepto de España en Europa, de las causas de este concepto y de la tolerancia religiosa y política en los países civilizados. Revista de Archivos, 1914. Luther, Martin. Sobre los judíos y sus mentiras. (1541) Librodot, 2004. Maltby, William S. The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 15581660. Duke University Press, 1971. Martin-Márquez, Susan. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. Yale University Press, 2008. Maura Gamazo, Gabriel. La cuestión de Marruecos: Desde el punto de vista español. M. Romero, 1905. Nerín, Gustau, and Alfred Bosch. El imperio que nunca existió: La aventura colonial discutida en Hendaya. Plaza y Janés, 2001. Nerín, Gustau and Gustau Abad. “Mito franquista y realidad de la colonización de la Guinea Ecuatorial.” Estudios de Asia y África, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1997, pp. 9-30. Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. Payne, Stanley G. En defensa de España: Desmontando mitos y leyendas negras. Espasa, 2017. Persánch, JM. “Identidades fantasma: Alteridad étnica y regional en Las cartas de Alou, Catalunya Über Alles! y Flamenco.” Agentes de cambio: Perspectivas cinematográficas de España y Latinoamérica en el siglo XXI. Eds. Fátima Serra de Renobles and Helena Talaya Manso. Pliegos, 2014, pp. 136-58. ---. “Blancura situacional e imperio español en su historia, cine y literatura (s.XIX-XX).” PhD. Diss. University of Kentucky, 2016. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.13023/ETD.2016.102 Piedra, José. “Literary Whiteness and the Afro-Hispanic Difference.” New Literary History, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1987, pp. 303-32. Pradt, M (Dominique Georges Frédéric). Mémoires historiques sur la révolution d’Espange. V. Perronneau and A. Egron, 1816. Roca Barea, María Elvira. Imperiofobia y leyenda negra. Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y el Imperio español. Fifteenth Edition. Siruela, 2017. Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita. “Rethinking the Archive and the Colonial Library: Equatorial Guinea.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, Nov. 2008, pp. 341-63. DOI: 10.1080/14636200802563600 Taibo, Paco Ignacio. Un cine para un imperio: Películas en la España de Franco. Obrerón, 2002. Toasije, Antumi. “The Africanity of Spain.” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2009, pp. 348 55. Tofiño-Quesada, Ignacio. “Spanish Orientalism: Uses of the Past in Spain’s Colonization in Africa.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 23, 2005, pp. 14148. Triana-Toribio, Núria. Spanish National Cinema. Routledge, 2003. Valle-Inclán, Ramón. Luces de bohemia: Esperpento, lo-saca-a-luz. Imprenta Cervantina, 1924. West, Cornel. “Marxist Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Repression.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg. University of Illinois, 1998. Zas Marcos, Mónica. “Soy actor, negro y español, ¿Por qué tengo que hacer siempre de inmigrante?” ElDiario.es 30 of Jan. 2017. ˂https://www.eldiario.es/cultura/cine/Visibilidad-racial-premios Goya_0_605439788.html˃

UC Merced TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World Title Mar de plástico: Masculinity, Whiteness, and Eastern European Migrants in Spanish Prime Time Television

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Mar de plástico: Masculinity, Whiteness, and Eastern European Migrants in Spanish Prime Time Television ______________________________________________

KATHLEEN CONNOLLY WESTERN OREGON UNIVERSITY Abstract The following essay analyzes representations of whiteness and its imbrication with both masculinity and the construction of Eastern European migrants in the Spanish TV drama Mar de plástico (2015). The violent, white masculinity of the protagonist, Héctor Aguirre, frames him as a protector of the weak and victimized, and the type of man needed to resolve the many problems plaguing Spanish society. By contrast, the whiteness of Eastern European migrants is portrayed as insidious and threatening to the safety and social structure of the community. Both of these engagements with whiteness stem from feelings of uncertainty and anger in broader Spanish society with entrenched economic and class hierarchies, as well a reaction to changing demographics and new influxes of immigrants. The innovative aspects of the show: a desire to create a well-produced, cinematic experience as well as engage with socially-relevant topics, unfortunately are only skin deep, because the narrative falls back on stereotyped portrayals of immigrants and a white, warrior-hero masculinity. Keywords: Spain, masculinity, whiteness, Prestige TV, Eastern European migrants, interracial couples, Mar de plástico, race relations, Spanish Television Produced by Boomerang TV/Atresmedia, Mar de plástico is set in the liminal, unstable space of the “Plastic Sea:” the dry, windswept plateaus of Almería that, in the last forty years, have gone from poverty-stricken to an economic boom due to the greenhouse agriculture. The fictional town Campoamargo, a silent protagonist in the show, is a lugar de encuentro for characters and events which represent various preoccupations of contemporary Spanish society, such as gitanos, Eastern European and African migrants, burgeoning right-wing extremism, young people's uncertain economic future, and mixed couples. The conflicts and tensions portray Spain as struggling to adapt to the challenges of the twenty-first century, failing to articulate new models of family, masculinity, and femininity in the face of an exploitative and corrupt system. In Mar de plástico, immigrants are portrayed as both victims and perpetrators of crime, always instigators of instability and chaos. As the individual responsible for the murders in Campoamargo is revealed to be the secret offspring of an Eastern European migrant, societal unrest is ultimately traced back to a problem of paternity and an unstable masculinity— of dead or absent fathers, legitimate and illegitimate offspring, and fears of incest. The chaos unleashed by the immigrant “return of the repressed” must be resolved, the series suggests, by a violent masculinity, represented by the detective, sergeant Héctor Aguirre (Rodolfo Sancho).

139 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. In what follows, I will analyze representations of whiteness and its imbrication with both masculinity and the construction of Eastern European migrants.1 The violent, white masculinity of the protagonist, Héctor Aguirre, frames him as a protector of the weak and victimized, and the type of man needed to resolve the many problems plaguing Spanish society. By contrast, the whiteness of Eastern European migrants is portrayed as insidious and threatening to the safety and social structure of the community. Both of these engagements with whiteness stem from feelings of uncertainty and anger in broader Spanish society with entrenched economic and class hierarchies, as well a reaction to changing demographics and new influxes of immigrants. The innovative aspects of the show: a desire to create a well-produced, cinematic experience as well as engage with socially-relevant topics, unfortunately are only skin deep, because the narrative falls back on stereotyped portrayals of immigrants and a warrior-hero masculinity. American Prestige TV and Spanish Prime Time Drama: Sharing the White Gaze Spanish television has been experiencing a renaissance in response to the convergence era of television, and the exports of the current “Golden Age” of American TV. Recent examples include Atresmedia's Gran Hotel (2011), Bajo sospecha (2015) and La casa de papel (2017), and TVE's international sensation El Ministerio del Tiempo (2015), among a handful of others. All four series are carried by Netflix streaming in an example of their international appeal, with El Ministero del Tiempo currently produced by Netflix as well. Mar de plástico is a police procedural which has adopted many of the trappings of Prestige TV, such as high production values, heavy themes, and a desire for more narrative complexity. Both the aesthetic and thematic goals of “Prestige,” or “Quality,” television, have a significant impact on the performances of masculinity and overall framework of the show.2 A result of the “Third Golden Age” of American television, this new movement-—and market— came about during the late 1990s, reaching a defining moment by the mid to late 2000s (Albrecht 4). New devices such as TiVo, the prevalence of DVD sales and rentals, OnDemand, and Netflix, allowed consumers to watch television in different ways (Leslie 4). In the past, most television viewing was episodic and interspersed with frequent commercials. In the convergence era, the digital medium and new technologies have encouraged the growth of a serialized format, which has allowed programs to develop a more “novelistic, multi-layered” style of show (Leslie 6). The subscription cable network HBO's hits such as The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood, and The Wire were defining products of the new Prestige era, though other networks such as FX,

140 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. Showtime, and streaming services on Netflix and Amazon are participants in the new Golden Age. Historically, television was disdained as a mass-produced, unrefined, even “debased” medium. Part of television's lack of cultural prestige was due to its association with lower-status individuals in society: women, the elderly, and children (Newman and Levine 5). Cable and some of the larger broadcast networks now seek to cultivate a more serious, “high art” aesthetic, with a cinematic look and a determination to tackle more complex social and cultural issues (Albrecht 6).3 These programs, like Mar de plástico, overwhelmingly foreground the experiences of white men and tend to showcase aspects of hegemonic masculinity. While traditionally television was a more feminized medium, particularly daytime television, the “masculinization” of the medium corresponds with an elevated discourse around TV production: it is “cinematic,” “novelistic,” and analyzed as an art form (Newman and Levine 10). While the kingmakers of Prestige TV overwhelmingly foreground white masculinity, some authors do argue that the shows also destabilize these discourses through the development of complex, damaged characters.4 However, it is difficult to ascertain whether the performance of tortured male anti-heroes such as Don Draper (Jon Hamm) Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), or Walter White (Bryan Cranston) translate to the audience as critical representations of masculinity, or, by presenting them as tragic protagonists on an almost operatic scale, function to fetishize the white male hero even more. Mar de plástico features many of the characteristics of Prestige television, superimposed on what is essentially a police procedural. The production values are notably more cinematic than run-of-the-mill prime time fare: the wide shots of the landscape, evocative of the Western genre, as well as more contemplative close-ups and medium shots of characters, some without the intrusion of dialog. The yellowish-brown filters or sepia-tinted tones of the show give it a gritty and desolate feel, and the music is filled with angst, often featuring either sharp, unsettling percussion or whining, tortured-sounded vocalizations. These production qualities convey a sense of danger, anger and tension, alluding to the fact that the show is tackling serious and complex issues that are troubling Spanish society. While Mar de plástico is serialized, it is at heart a cop drama, and as such the mystery must be kept spinning for so long that almost the entire main cast is set up as possible suspects. The occasionally unconvincing level of suspense and unrelenting severity tend to weigh it down. And, while it does confront some of the most complex issues in recent Spanish society, the manner in which the series portrays these issues is ultimately damaging to migrants and their representation. Further, it fails to allow for an

141 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. expression of masculinity that is not conservative and violent. On the contrary, in the face of societal change and capitalist economic structures, the show posits the need for a violent, alpha masculinity to assert control and restore order. Masculinity and Whiteness in the Police Procedural As a police procedural, the discourses of hegemonic masculinity, even hypermasculinity, are an integral part of the construction of the male characters, both “good guys” and “bad.” To quote Philippa Gates: “The detective film is concerned with a hero who triumphs over injustice and evil,” and most of those heroes are white (20). It is a critical commonplace that masculinity is not fixed, but rather a flexible discursive and performative construction.5 When entwined with other identity markers such as class, race, and sexuality, its manifestation may be altered. Erica Scharrer, a scholar of gender and violence in the media, has published extensively on portrayals of masculinity in American police and detective dramas. She notes that in cop dramas and detective shows, a mixture of portrayals and representations may be found, but very often it is common to find a representation of hypermasculinity, although the “good guys (namely police officers and detectives)” exhibit more of a range of masculine traits (93, 99). Significantly, though not surprisingly, her research demonstrates that white characters are the most prevalent, and that the police procedural as a genre has “been a largely White phenomenon” (104). While the “good guys” may have exhibited more nuanced or less hypermasculine traits over time, the villains have not evolved. Scharrer has categorized “physical aggression,” a “calloused attitude towards sex,” negative behaviors towards women, “stoicism” and “thrill seeking” as some key hypermasculine traits that are displayed in the genre (91-93, 99). Héctor Aguirre, while cast as the hero and good guy of the franchise, displays many of the characteristics of hypermasculinity, a fact that aligns him more closely with his nemesis, Juan Rueda (Pedro Casablanc) and with the other bad guys of the series. Mar de plástico mounts a critique that reflects Spanish society's overall frustration with corruption and predatory market capitalism in part through the negative portrayal of Juan Rueda. He is the older cacique owner of Rueda greenhouses, and the richest and most powerful man in Campoamargo. Lola (Nya de la Rubia), Aguirre’s partner, describes Rueda: “Todo empieza y acaba en su bolsillo. . . . es una especie de terrateniente a la antigua.” His performance as a kingpin or mafioso type coincides with many of the hypermasculine and patriarchal qualities outlined by Scharrer in her studies. While he is not portrayed as physically violent, he has the

142 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. power to order acts of violence and intimidation. He frequents a strip club, and is married to Agneska (Lisi Linder), a Russian trophy wife, with whom he is portrayed as intimidating and having rough sex. He also is the secret father of Ainhoa (Mara López), the young woman whose unsolved murder serves as the impetus for the entire show. Rueda, like almost all of the main cast, is posited as Ainhoa’s killer for a time. Before his innocence of the crime comes to light, there is an “incest scare” in which, as a noted philanderer, he is suspected of sleeping with his daughter (while ignorant of his paternity). The inclusion of the incest theme underscores the repercussions of secrets and the consequences of the sexual exploitation of women—both key plot and thematic points of Mar de plásico (Sheffer 3). Both Rueda and the other main entrepreneur in town, don Francisco, who owns the gas stations and the strip club “Kasandra,” made much of their initial money in human trafficking, specifically transporting Romanian women to Spain. Juan's connections with his former supplier of women, Borislav, are in fact how he met Agneska. The consequences of treating humans as merchandise fall disproportionately on women in this series, thus reinforcing the heteronormativity displayed throughout the First Season. The first example of this is Ainhoa, murdered during the pilot and revealed to be Juan Rueda’s natural daughter. Her body is drained of blood, which is then piped into the sprinkler system, raining down on the workers and the crops, in a very vivid dramatization of the human costs of business. In addition, the deaths of seventeen Romanian prostitutes by asphyxiation during their transport to Campoamargo are discovered. This horrific incident has bound Rueda, don Francisco, the chief of police, as well as others in Campoamargo in a pact of silence and corruption for twenty years. While Rueda and Francisco are powerful characters, they are portrayed as toxic due to their complicity in murder and exploitation. Furthermore, they are failures as fathers, a quality that symbolizes a damaged or insufficient masculinity. Mar de plástico is rife with paternity issues and critiques of weak or outdated masculinities. These include patriarchs like don Francisco, who have abandoned their families for Russian trophy wives, or fathers who are dead or rendered incompetent due to addiction. The illegitimacy and impotence of Rueda, and thus the consequences of the traditional political and social structures of Spanish society, are particularly shown in the representation of his children. Sergio Rueda embodies Juan's metaphorical impotence, because he has a mental disability and (in a stereotypical and problematic portrayal of mental impairment) is thus rejected by his father and portrayed as an unviable heir to carry out

143 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. the Rueda legacy. Juan Rueda’s other son, Fernando, is blonde and pale, and does not resemble Rueda at all. In the end his true identity is revealed; Fernando is actually Boris, the son of one of the Romanian migrants who died twenty years earlier, and the only one who was intentionally murdered to ensure her silence. The failures of these paternal figures are a failure of societal systems and mores, which, particularly since the economic crash of 2008, have left the youth in Spain, much like the youth in Campoamargo, with an unstable reality and uncertain future, in which many feel they have few options except to leave. The young people in Mar de plástico are bitter and disaffected, turning to violence, vandalism and racism in the absence of other models and opportunities. But while the show critiques, it does not put forth any new system to replace the old. The solution, in the form of maverick Héctor Aguirre, is in many ways merely an extension of the very systems of power, privilege and masculinity that the show castigates. Whiteness and the Warrior Hero Spain's historically complex access to European identity or even “whiteness” is circumvented and treated as unproblematic in Mar de plástico. In large part, this is because the two main male characters, Juan Rueda and Héctor Aguirre, correspond with rather set, archetypal frames of a white male hero, popular in film and television. Aguirre, for example, is essentially a Hollywood “man of action,” who embodies a heroic masculinity that allows him to take the law into his own hands, but only because his use of violence and “rugged individualism” are tempered by a concern for the greater good (Holt and Thompson 428). Though he is an outsider, he is easily ceded power and authority, a role that he comfortably inhabits as both white and male. Much like masculinity, whiteness maintains its discursive power by its virtual invisibility, its role as an unquestioned standard of normality.6 As both Dyer and Gates have asserted, “whiteness secures its dominance by seeming to be nothing in particular . . . only when the experience presented on the screen belongs to a racial 'other' do we note that race is an issue” (Gates 20). In Campoamargo, whites are in positions of power. They are members of the military, entrepreneurs and business owners, the mayor, police officers, and forensic pathologists. Their positions are unquestioned and unremarkable, whereas migrants and gitanos, cast as phenotypically different, are noted both for these distinctions and the fact that they operate on the margins of society.

144 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. Though Aguirre is in many ways a typical “good guy” of a cop or detective show, his character is lent nuance and depth in a similar fashion to the recent anti-heroes showcased by Prestige TV. Characters such as Tony Soprano or Don Draper portray a troubled, damaged white masculinity. They are men who, while they may present a façade of stoicism and power to the outside world, demonstrate to the viewer that they may not be entirely under control, and may suffer from loneliness, panic attacks, and even need therapy. Aguirre certainly exhibits many of the standard features of a hegemonic masculinity, particularly as a former solider in Afghanistan. Prividera and Howard, in a discussion of the “Warrior Hero,” note that “Military archetypes themselves operate in a hierarchy with the ‘warrior hero’” at the top. He is independent, disciplined, strong, sexually potent, and above all masculine” (31). These features are highlighted in the first episode, in which Aguirre, new to town, defends a humble African migrant who is being verbally and physically threatened. Aguirre takes on several locals in a bar fight and dispenses with them in swift hand-to-hand combat. His strength and speed, as well as his refusal to be cowed by local authority figures, are features of his warrior hero persona. He is protective of Marta (Belén López) and her son Nacho (Máximo Pastor), acting as a surrogate father at different moments in the series. Aguirre is, in fact, the only positive father figure seen in Season One, a circumstance that shores up his heroic image. Yet his “super” hero persona is disrupted by the post-traumatic stress he suffers due to his deployment in Afghanistan.7 While Aguirre is strong in hand-to-hand combat, he visibly shakes when holding a firearm; he is prone to sudden aggression with suspects and loses physical and emotional control. While he is not an anti-hero (he is firmly in the category of “good guy”), Aguirre's struggles make him a more sympathetic, darker, and vulnerable character, imbuing the performance of “warrior” masculinity with more complexity. In particular, his anxiety with wielding a gun is a nuance rarely, if ever, seen in a police procedural. Yet, for all that the writers of Mar de plástico attempt to infuse Héctor Aguirre with nuance, his character does not stray very far from the key features of hypermasculinty delineated by Scharrer as typical of police procedurals. While Aguirre is not violent towards women, he is aggressive and maintains a remote bearing. Thus, violence, and the capacity to enact it—whether or not one does—is the key symbolic element to behaving like a “real man,” in the construction of hegemonic masculinity (Persánch 12). He deals with his PTSD and volatile emotions by hitting a boxing bag and by resorting to workaholism, never resorting to “feminine” or “weak” behaviors like talking about his feelings. His weakness and discomfort holding a gun and his difficulties managing his PTSD indicate a damaged and troubled

145 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. masculinity. But at the end of the First Season, Héctor saves Nacho, shooting Fernando when he holds Nacho hostage in the final standoff of the series. Thus, in successfully apprehending and injuring the killer, Héctor has recovered his masculinity as a warrior hero who enacts violence and wields a gun in the service of protecting both the greater good and “his” woman and child. Racism, Migrants, and Marginalized Whiteness in Mar de Plástico Midway through the pilot episode, Lola, Aguirre’s partner, gives him a tour of Campoamargo, the better to acquaint him and thus, the viewer, with the locale. Lola describes the people who built the greenhouse industry in Almería as humble and hardworking, “gente currante,” though we never see those individuals. Rather, the tour presents Campoamargo as a space filled with Others: “Como ve, es un pueblo muy pequeño, pero tenemos un poco de todo. Tenemos gitanos, marroquíes, morenos… y rusas, también tenemos rusas.” The Others must be explained and commented upon because, as Dyer has asserted, “This assumption that white people are just people, which is not far off saying that whites are people whereas other colours are something else, is endemic to white culture” (2). During the tour, Lola mostly points out groups categorized as foreign (and racial) others. However, as they drive by a group of young Spaniards Lola says: “Mira esos. Esos se las dan de malotes.” This group of young adults are the neo-Nazis, or racists. They are violent towards the migrants (in particular black migrants) throughout the show, even going so far as to douse Khaled (Will Shephard) with gasoline, threatening to burn him alive, when he becomes the prime suspect in Ainhoa’s murder investigation. It is significant that this group is relegated to the list of Others or “non-Spanish” outsiders that Lola enumerates, given that they are Spanish and white. However, I argue that they manifest a damaged, or “deficient” whiteness (Wayne 210). In American cinematic culture, and in Prestige TV, this role is usually filled by characters who represent a form of “white trash,” corresponding with a “marginalized class status” and openly racist behaviors (Wayne 210). This relegates race as a problem for only certain groups and thus, the mainstream viewer, who identifies with the hero (in this case Aguirre), is not branded as racist. Aguirre is never depicted as holding racist views nor commenting on racial matters. This limits racism to the beliefs and actions of a minor group within the community, isolating the hero and other main characters from having to engage in more complicated racial interactions and negotiations—for example, Héctor’s lack of comment on Lola’s status as “gitana y guardia civil,” and his general silence on all things migration or race related. This further hides the structural elements of racism, distilling

146 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. it down to a series of interpersonal choices and actions, and giving the impression that it’s “only a few extreme, dangerous whites who are really racist” (Hartigan 324). The mainstream viewer, of course, is not expected to identify with these extremists, but rather only with the heroic and nonracist good guys. Interestingly, Lola others herself, humorously remarking on the fact that, indeed, she is both “gitana y guardia civil,” at which Aguirre only chuckles, amused. Though Lola is Aguirre's subordinate, she functions more as a sidekick or partner. Her role echoes that of the AfricanAmerican or biracial partner of the Hollywood buddy cop films of the 80s and 90s. Lola, estranged from her family, is made more familiar to a mainstream audience by being isolated from her community (who are portrayed as having strong criminal elements), similar to the ways in which African-American sidekicks were made to appear less threatening to white, middle-class viewers (Gates 21, 27). Again, those portrayed as white do not have to explain or justify their roles, but Lola’s ethnic identity and her profession are incongruous and in need of contextualization for the viewer. “Gypsy” is an identity and a community in Western discourse that is the antithesis of law and order, nation, and whiteness. Thus, the writers of Mar de plástico incorporate a framework for the viewer that includes both an explanation by Lola herself, as well as a portrayal of physical and emotional distance from her family and community. Though immigrants are overall associated with crime, Mar de plástico generally portrays African migrants sympathetically, as workers, victims of violence or, in the case of Fara (Yaima Ramos), a love interest. The majority of African migrants portrayed on the show are black, and the show steers firmly away from engagement with North Africans, who are seen only briefly. This avoids any explicitly negative portrayal of Moroccans or Muslims, which could leave the show open to obvious critiques. However, the issue of terrorism plays a key role, as Héctor Aguirre’s past military service in Afghanistan and the possible involvement of his best friend with Al Qaeda become a plot point. Racism as matter of personal choice, versus a structural and societal problem is brought to bear in the rehabilitation of the character Lucas (Jesús Castro) through his relationship with Fara, a Guinean migrant. Lucas begins the series as a violent, disaffected neo-Nazi, who participates in mob violence and tries to murder Fara’s brother Khaled by almost lighting him on fire. Later, however, Lucas saves Fara’s life, and the two rather improbably fall in love. Lucas’s rehabilitation through love is a personal and sentimental transformation, in which he rejects his former ideology and has his swastika tattoo removed.

147 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. Like relegating racism to something only “deficient whites” do, interracial relationships “situate the problem of race in personal and emotional terms, suggesting that whites’ positive feelings towards blacks’ mark the end of racism” (Thornton 227). The program, thus, frames integration and racism in the private and emotional realm, not in a public or political one. Indeed, the plot line of the interracial or mixed couple is a common trope used to represent unification (or lack thereof) between disparate racial, cultural or religious groups within a nation or community. However, in Mar de plástico the mixed union is not employed as a fully-realized, structural conceit. Instead, the metaphor functions as an easy solution and avoids treatment of racism as a broad and complex theme. Typically, once the relationship is solidified through marriage, the characters disappear, and indeed, Lucas and Fara leave by the end of the First Season. The “disappearance” of the mixed couple is also a fate met by many black characters in Spanish television, who usually exist to serve the plot points of the white characters and fade away once that goal is achieved (Santaolalla 159). Thus, the complexities of integration and cultural negotiation are not yet of overwhelming interest to contemporary Spanish cultural production.8 Fara acts as Lucas’s emotional savior, and their wedding is a cheerful, if melodramatic highlight in what is otherwise quite a dark television show. Spanish mixed-race romance often portrays a black (usually foreign) female as an acceptable partner to a Spanish male if she embodies a more traditional femininity, which Fara certainly does.9 Her submissive, more traditional demeanor contrasts with that of Agneska and Pilar, Lucas’s former girlfriend, who is confrontational and violent, not characteristics associated with femininity. Pilar is also racist and a member of the neo-Nazi group. Fara is constructed as closely as possible, culturally, to “Spanish” identity. She is portrayed as a Guinean migrant, and the Cuban-born actress Yaima Ramos has emphasized that the creation of a Guinean identity and an authentic Guinean accent—a Northern Castilian dialect— were a major part of her preparation for the role (Rosado). Thus Mar de plástico extends aspects of Hispanotropicalism into the post-colonial era; Guineans, as former colonial subjects, are “brothers” in la Hispanidad (Nerín 11-16).10 This historical and cultural connection, albeit from a subaltern position, allows Fara to be comfortably assimilated into Spanish identity, as both her femininity and close linguistic dialect compensate for her racial otherness. This contrasts starkly with the other “foreign wife” character, Agneska, who is marked as irrevocably other and antagonistic to Spanish identity.

148 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018.

Insidious Whiteness: Eastern Europeans on Spanish Television In contrast to the representations of Africans, Eastern European migrants are portrayed with clear negativity. They are highly dangerous, sly, conniving, and used throughout the show in sex scenes and sexual situations. As a geographical group, Eastern European migrants are a newer population in Spain as compared to Latin Americans or North Africans. However, as of 2016, Romanians comprised the largest group of foreigners in Spain, followed closely by Moroccans. In the same year, Bulgarians, Romanians and Ukrainians made up roughly 2.1 percent of the population, constituting almost 22 percent of the foreign population in Spain, based on preliminary data (“Cifras”). The suspicion and unease with which they are viewed in Campoamargo reflects the ambivalent welcome of Slavic countries into the European Union. The incorporation of Central and Eastern European nations in the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the EU was accompanied by a moratorium on the movement of individuals from certain countries, though not goods. The imposition of “conditionality,” or prerequisites to entry was not required of countries in earlier extensions of the European Union (Nikolova 394). The official story was that restrictions were a necessary part of reforming rampantly corrupt, formerly communist countries. In reality, Eastern Europe’s image as a marginalized, even Orientalized space is a centuries-old construction. The term itself, “Eastern” Europe, qualifies the geographical space as “inferior and in need of a civilizational remake” because the states and individuals are subaltern (Ivasiuc 5).11 More acutely, Bulgaria and particularly Romania, have been the focus of a marginalizing rhetoric because of the status of the Roma, or “Gypsies” as an inferior race that threatens Western identity and infrastructures. Ruth Ferrero Turrión argues that the negative perception of Romanians and Bulgarians influenced the impediments and stricter controls placed on many Eastern Bloc countries. This includes stereotypes such as “son más proclives al crimen organizado, a la corrupción, a asaltar casas de forma violenta, a la mendicidad o a la explotación de niños” (54). Access to white, European identity for citizens of the former Soviet Bloc is problematized and claims they may have assumed were automatic regarding phenotypic, ethnic, or cultural similarities may be invalidated in Western European countries. The negative perceptions of individuals from the former Soviet Bloc extends throughout Western Europe. Studies of Russian-speaking migrants in Finland document their struggles to be recognized as “white” and “legitimate” due to their lower social class and status. These migrants,

149 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. much like Romanians in Spain and the UK, are often cast as shifty “welfare abusers” (Krivonos 1). These immigrants are stigmatized due to working low-paying or lower-skilled jobs, along with language barriers and cultural stereotypes, all of which complicate their reception as “white,” though their actual phenotype remains unchanged (Fox 1882). In Spain, Romanians have been specifically targeted as a problem, such as in Xavier Garcia Albiol’s 2015 mayorial campaign, in which he took out a billboard with his photo next to the phrase “Limpiando Badalona.” This was part of his anti-immigrant stance that openly targeted Moroccans and Romanians, particularly Romanian gypsies (Roger). In the case of Albiol’s billboard, the act of cleansing Badalona signifies expelling those groups perceived as contaminating the purity of the national community. The Eastern Europeans on Mar de plástico are disqualified as legitimate national subjects. Like the disaffected youth, Russians and Romanians are cast as possessing a deficient whiteness, which endangers Spaniards. In fact, the show presents their capacity to insinuate themselves into the Spanish “family” and a high socioeconomic status as insidious and dangerous. There’s a sinister quality to the characters “from the East” because although they are not Spanish, they are incorporated into the fabric of Spanish society, passing more easily than, for example, African migrants. They are adopted sons, like Fernando; second wives, like Agneksa; and trusted foremen, like Eric; but they are not authentic, and they are portrayed as unstable, greedy, and untrustworthy. In the case of Fernando Rueda (whose “true” identity is revealed to be Boris) even when raised as Spanish, he turns his back his adopted father, which may entail a symbolic conflict with his adopted nation. The casting of Eastern Europeans for Mar de plástico involved stock Hollywood characterizations of Russians as individuals with high cheekbones, often blonde, who speak with heavy accents. The producers auditioned Russians for the part of Agneska, but ended up choosing the actress Lisi Linder, originally from Cádiz, because she was “más rusa que las rusas” (Linder). I interpret the epithet “más rusa que las rusas” to mean that Linder can correctly perform the stereotype of what a Spanish audience thinks of as “a Russian,” and embody what that Otherness should mean to the audience. Robert Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, has remarked upon some of the stereotypes of Russians found in Hollywood and television portrayals: “Humorless, cold. Overly, ruthlessly logical. Robotic. A really thick accent. We know that Russian villain” (Goldstein). Agneska, true to type, is cruel to her Moroccan maid and she and her group of friends prance around Campoamargo, lunching, shopping, and generally being haughty.

150 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. Fernando Rueda’s revelation as Boris, and his subsequent betrayal of his family and friends, is a variation on the theme of the Russian double-agent. In the American media and thus in Hollywood, the Russians have been an enemy who could pretend to be exactly like “us.” Examples abound, but the most recent is FX’s award-winning The Americans, about a family of integrated Russian spies living in the United States, set during the waning years of the Cold War. The title of the show is ironic, pointing to the fact that the two Russian agents appear to be wholesome and successful American business owners and parents. This speaks to the portability in both the U.S. and Europe of the stereotype of the “untrustworthy” Slavs, who insinuate themselves into the nation or home while maintaining an agenda contrary to those of the greater community. This is reflected as well in attitudes towards Eastern European women employed as in-home caregivers in the EU. These women, although doing essential tasks for the well-being of their employers and working in an intimate capacity, continue to be seen as untrustworthy and capable of abuse (Ivasiuc 7). The sexualization of Russian women also informs the construction of Agneska in Mar de plástico. In Spain, there has been an increase in mixed marriages not only due to the rising migrant influx, but also because of a spike in Spanish men searching for a younger partner in the style of the “mail order bride.” Russia, Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries, together with Latin America (especially Brazil), are the main destinations for these international searches. The anthropologist Jordi Roca Girona has demonstrated, through extensive interviews, that among the many reasons given, preconceptions or stereotypes about Slavic women's sexuality are a significant motivator for choosing them as partners, and that international trips to meet a potential wife are also opportunities for sexual tourism (“Rebuscando” 494-501, “El color,” 391). Agneska’s blonde pallor, heavy accent, and cold, callous demeanor are also part of her characterization as a Russian femme fatale, a feature used by the writers to create sexual tension. She relates to the male characters primarily through her sexuality and uses it to attempt to manipulate them, a ploy that does not work on Aguirre, who turns the tables on her more than once. Agneska’s status as the fatal woman and her Otherness work as an alibi to objectify her body; it “allows” the writers to represent Agneska as a sexual object. As a callous woman, she “deserves” rough treatment, and as such, she has the most graphic and rough sex scenes in the show. She and her Eastern European friends, also trophy wives, are viewed as interlopers and home wreckers, as opposed to Fara and the other Spanish women in the program.

151 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. Agneska also has a series of awkward scenes with Fernando, her step-son, laced with a mixture of loathing and sexual tension, which, like Juan's suspected liaison with Ainhoa, plays on the incest theme and its personification of the consequences of secrets, betrayal, and female exploitation.12 In this instance, the allusion to incest further pathologizes Agneska and Francisco’s sexuality and represents them as degraded and untrustworthy individuals “from the East.” In one interview, Linder was asked how she thought audiences would react to seeing such stereotyped characters on screen. Her response, in line with the goals of Prestige TV, circumvented the issue of stereotypes in favor of cultural diversity, as she defended the characterizations in the program: lo que va a generar es mucho interés, mucho interés porque es una realidad que la vemos de todas las ciudades de España, que hoy tú te montas en el metro y en el metro pues te ves a un chino hablando madrileño, te ves al negro . . . y hay tantas culturas hoy en día integradas en España que. . . a mí como espectador . . . a mí eso me genera curiosidad de verlo . . . porque creo que es hora de hablar de eso porque es España hoy en día también. (Linder 2015) However, while the series does show a variety of different cultures in one geographical location, it does not overall demonstrate integration but rather an Othering of liminal communities. While the conflicts between characters of different races and nationalities certainly generate drama (and thus “interest”), they merely reinforce negative preconceptions about the Roma, Africans and Eastern Europeans. And so, Season One comes full circle, beginning and ending with the murders of Spanish women, first Ainhoa, then Marta. While it is true that Spain is more multicultural, within Mar de plástico, that signifies chaos, crime, and death. Conclusion For all its faults—heavy-handed melodrama, uneven or unconvincing plot lines—Mar de plástico has truly taken the pulse of Spanish society, which is beating in anger and frustration. The series demonstrates the apparent failure of old heteronormative models of masculinity, metaphors for a predatory market capitalism that has enriched some, but excluded many more, and has not provided for a strong future for the youth. The deep distrust in the government, the police, the military, and the economic system, is very clearly portrayed. Certainly, it would be satisfying, as a Spanish viewer, to watch Héctor Aguirre blow into town and tersely tell off all representatives of

152 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. higher authority, refusing to play their corrupt power games. But for all of that, the show is deeply ambivalent, because it presents no new solution. Steamrolling old, overblown mafiosos and replacing one form of entrenched corruption with the actions of a military-trained maverick isn’t really a viable alternative, though it may feel good to watch (and write) in the moment. Moreover, this ambivalence ultimately protects white, patriarchal, heteronormative identities, by continuing to reproduce them as heroic, via the figure of Aguirre. In recent years, there has been a rise of far-right nationalism and white supremacist movements all over Europe and the United States. The hypermasculine, military-trained hero who bucks the system when it suits him reflects the more conservative and violent ideologies of these right-wing groups, who may find the idea of taking the law into one’s own hands acceptable. Further, while the cultural diversity of Spanish society is rehearsed on screen, in fact the series represents Spanish identity in a closed circle of local, white protagonists, who are surrounded by encroaching others—some benign, but mostly threatening. Efforts are made on the part of the writers and producers to distance the hero, and thus the mainstream viewers, from racism, or even engaging with race very much at all. The young neo-Nazis enact such virulent behaviors that the other white characters, who are contrasted favorably, are further isolated from dealing with race or racial hierarchies. Interestingly, these racist characters, as well as the Eastern European migrants, are portrayed as possessing a deficient whiteness. This degradation others them and distances them from the heroic, masculine whiteness of Aguirre. This leads us to ask: how can Spanish television meet the expectations of a newer, more demanding market, weaned on the style of Prestige TV, yet also demonstrate innovation and creativity in the representation of race? The full answer exceeds the capacities of this article, but I believe that my essay demonstrates that in large part, it would involve the development of less hegemonic portrayals of masculinity, and a mode of representation that does not utilize racial others as placeholders for multiculturalism, but which instead also considers the negotiations and privileges of whiteness.

153 | Connolly, Kathleen. Transmodernity. Special Issue, Spring 2018. Notes My analysis will focus on the First Season, which premiered in 2015. "Quality television" is the term used most often by media scholars. Michael Newman explains that, since the 1970s and 80s, "Quality" referred to the efforts made by the major networks to court a more upscale audience, among other characteristics (“Re: Quality”). I prefer the newer term, "Prestige TV," which is associated with the rhetoric of the new Golden Age of television. I find the moniker of "Prestige" to be a more accurate term for my purposes. To possess or lack quality is a subjective evaluation, while "prestige" speaks to the aspirational designs of the writers, producers, and networks. I will use the term "Prestige TV" throughout this article to refer to what might otherwise might be known as "Quality television." 3 Television has certainly become more legitimized, as evidenced by “Canneseries,” the first Cannes television festival, inaugurated in 2018. That same year also witnessed, at the Cannes film festival, the controversy over Netflix’s participation, with Pedro Almodóvar stating that the Palme d’Or should not be awarded to a film that did not have a theatrical release (Keegan). 4 See Albrecht 2015, Lotz 2014, Martin 2013, and Newman 2016. 5 See Connell 1995 and Horlacher, “Configuring Masculinities,” pp. 3-5. 6 See “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” by Peggy McIntosh, in Oppression, Privilege and Resistance. The author also briefly applies her methodology to heterosexual privilege in the article. 7 I interpret both the PTSD and the specter of ISIS terrorism as an influence (partly) of the Showtime series Homeland and its antihero, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis). These similarities reinforce the connection between newer Spanish television fare and the products of the so-called “Golden Age,” with its international influence, due in part to the digital medium and satellite broadcasting. 8 Fara and her brother, Khaled, are Guinean migrants, yet neither has a Guinean name. Many Guineans have both traditional or autochthonous names as well as Spanish ones, reflecting the influence of Spain and Spanish as the language of colonization. However, both the names Fara and Khaled are derived from Arabic, which does not reflect either the current or historical heritage of Guinea. This is yet another example of non-white characters’ identities existing as placeholders for the dominant culture, the result of which is a representation that has nothing to do with, in this instance, Guinea. 9 See Kim 188-89; Flesler 146-46, and Martin-Márquez, “A World” 268. 10 See also Martin-Márquez, Disorientations 49. 11 This idea of Eastern Europe as a space “between Europe and Asia,” with a culture that vacillated between civilization and barbarism, extends further back into history than the concept of the Iron Curtain, and begins with the construction of a civilized “Western” Europe in the 18th Century (Wolff 3, 357). 12 Agneska's overt sexualization also panders to viewers in an attempt to garner higher ratings, which is a common practice for programs produced by premium networks such as HBO. This has led to an occasional over-reliance on graphic sex or nudity as a focal point. For example, the international sensation Game of Thrones was critically lampooned when it repeatedly employed what critics dubbed "sexposition," a portmanteau of sex and exposition that exposes the tendency to rely on nudity and sex to keep viewers engaged during scenes with heavy dialogue (Hann 2012). 1 2

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