¡Azúcar!: Celia Cruz and black diasporic feminist interjection

ABSTRACT

The flamboyant performances of Afro-Cuban singer and pan-Latina icon, Celia Cruz, blurred the lines of latinidad and blackness. Where latinidad often ignores blackness beyond its historical contributions to mestizaje, Cruz’s example provides a more complex framework through which to imagine the performative relationship between latinidad, mestizaje, and gendered blackness, especially as it relates to questions of diaspora and belonging for black women. Through close reading, Cruz’s outbursts of ‘¡azúcar!’ (sugar!) underscore the historical contributions of blackness while stretching its everyday possibilities as a black feminist grammar across the diaspora. Understood here as a black diasporic feminist interjection into mainstream Latin music, ¡azúcar! attempts to construct a pleasurable, alternative modernity within and beyond linearity as a repetitive act of black women’s self-insertion.

KEYWORDS:

• African diaspora
• black feminism
• black performance
• Celia Cruz
• interjection
• mestizaje

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my appreciation to the cross-university Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean (BLAC) working group, especially Nicole Ramsey and Vanessa Castañeda, for giving me critical and caring feedback on previous versions of this piece. Also, to Tianna S. Paschel, Juana María Rodríguez, and Darieck Scott, for encouraging me to always go beyond the set plan in order to further explore my interests, to have fun, and to save old ideas for another day. To my adopted Colombian mother, Nancy Yolanda Cortés González, who gave me my first salsa education all those years ago. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Celia, her voice, and her playful artistry for my own enjoyment and my perhaps overly indulgent scholarly engagement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. This well-known story translates as ‘When we finished eating, like they do with everyone, they ask you if you would like coffee. Ah, well, of course. “With or without sugar?” No, young man, you know very well that coffee – you’re Cuban! – and you know that our coffee is very bitter. With suuugar, of course! With suuugar!’ Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this text are my own.

2. A note on political grammar: I have kept ‘black’ in lowercase here, and will throughout, to make room for all forms of black consciousness across the diaspora, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, where it is often not capitalized. And, out of respect and admiration for the gestures of contemporary AfroLatinx feminist scholars, I, too, do not insert a hyphen between ‘Afro’ and ‘Latinx’ in order to re-center blackness in latinidad while signaling the inextricability of blackness and latinidad from each other in Latin America and the U.S. Yet, I do maintain the hyphen within national designations (e.g. Afro-Cuban) to particularly demonstrate the discursive work of Latin American national identities to distance themselves from blackness.

3. With the case of Celia Cruz, in particular, I favor black diaspora over African diaspora due to her own ancestral and lived displacement. While she is a constituent of the African diaspora, the legibility of her blackness changed over time and space, first with her defection from Castro’s Cuba to the United States, and continuing over the course of her career as the press frequently favored her latinidad over her blackness. As Michelle Wright contends (2015), my preference for ‘black diaspora’ here also allows for different forms of blackness to appear simultaneously and makes space for a phenomenological blackness which, while reflecting shared histories of dispersal and racialization, may not always refer back to a Middle Passage epistemology.

4. The greatest contribution of Ortiz’s essay, his term ‘transculturation,’ refers to the cultural melding of white Spaniards, black Africans, and indigenous Taínos into a Cuban national identity that is fundamentally mixed-race. At a time of expansive economic development in the first half of the twentieth century in Cuba, Ortiz reads this process onto the cultivation, processing, and exportation of tobacco and sugar whereby, for our purposes here, these products become performative of national identity within Cuba and to the outside world.

5. Fidel Castro declared that the Revolution had eliminated racism by 1963 after he enacted anti-discrimination laws, and he considered any racial discourse deviating from national mestizaje narratives to constitute a political threat. Several exiled Afro-Cuban scholars, activists, and artists – most notably, Carlos Moore – have declared the inexistence of anti-blackness in Cuba to be patently false. For this reason, it is imperative that we recognize Celia Cruz’s anti-Castro views and her unambiguous blackness on- and off-stage to be neither hypocritical nor mutually exclusive.

6. The first verse of ‘Azúcar Negra’ is ‘Soy dulce como el mela’o./Alegre como el tambor,/Llevo el rítimo tumbao,/Llevo el rítimco tumbao/De África en el corazón./Hija de una isla rica,/Esclava de una sonrisa,/Soy de ayer, soy carnaval./Pongo al corazón mi tierra./Mi sangre es azúcar negra./Es amor y es música.’ These lyrics translate to ‘I’m sweet like cane syrup,/Happy like the drum,/I carry the rhythmic tumbao,/I carry the rhythmic tumbao/Of Africa in my heart./Daughter of a rich island,/Slave of a smile,/I am from yesterday, I am Carnaval./I put my land in my heart./My blood is black sugar,/It is love and it is music.’

7. While most would translate ‘me gusta’ into English as ‘I like it,’ the literal translation is ‘it pleases me.’ This chant translates as ‘Sugar, black sugar!/Ah, how much she pleases me and makes me happy!’ However, like ¡azúcar!’s own ambiguity and Cruz’s personification of azúcar negra, the subject giving pleasure could, grammatically, be ‘she’ or ‘it.’ As slavery blurred the lines between human and commodity, I have chosen here, like Celia, to personify azúcar negra as ‘she’ in my translation.

8. This song has been widely translated into English as ‘The Black Woman Has Style.’ While this translation is correct, I reiterate the necessity to keep tumbao in Spanish due to its varied meanings across race, gender, history, and musical genre.

9. These lyrics translate as ‘I enjoy life to the fullest/Although with restraint.’

10. Dating back to the early sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Mexico, Califia is the mythical black queen of a realm of all black women warriors believed to inhabit California (then believed to be an island). There, everything, including clothing, was made of gold. This myth was popularized in fiction to the point that Hernán Cortés, conquistador-governor of Mexico, sent an actual mission in pursuit of Califia and her riches in the sixteenth century. Though the mission was unsuccessful, the Mexican states of Baja California and Alta California – now, the U.S. state of California – were named after the mythical black queen.

11. This recurring couplet translates as ‘She is a modern woman, she’s not easy./She knows everything, don’t waste time.’

12. This lyric from the chorus translates as ‘Live your life and enjoy all of it (Oh, all of it!).’

13. This comment translates as ‘Oh, how delicious it is!’

14. These two lines directly following the first chorus translate as ‘It’s not that I remember but that I don’t forget./That is forgiveness: to remember without pain.’

15. My sincerest gratitude to my friend and colleague, Ra Malika Imhotep, for helping me to synthesize these thoughts.

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John A. Mundell

John A. Mundell is a Ph.D. candidate in African American & African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in Latin America and the Caribbean through an interdisciplinary cultural studies lens. His doctoral dissertation re-centers sex and sexuality in Brazil’s ideology of racial democracy via queer readings of mainstream cultural production.