Gypsified minorities on the Atlantic stage: visualizing and performing alternative identities in Spain and Cuba (1900-1959)
Creators: name: Roldán Eugenio, David
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: This dissertation examines the transatlantic impact of the cultural phenomenon of Gypsification, exploring how this visual and performative trend enabled queer, non-white, and (neo)colonized minorities in pre-revolutionary Cuba to shape novel conceptualizations of collective identity and sociocultural solidarity. My study expands upon the widespread, ambivalent understanding of Gypsification, a set of signifiers including the shawl, fan, and flamenco and bullfighting attire, reductively associated with Andalusian (Southern Spanish) culture, and problematically attributed to the Spanish Roma. Notwithstanding its pejorative connotation, I seek to revisit this understudied term by sharpening the critical lens and widening the focus to include Cuba, where Gypsified aesthetics and performance emerged in the wake of Spanish colonialism and immigration. While contemporary Gypsification played a propagandistic role in hegemonic discourse during Spain’s Franco dictatorship (1939-75), I show how its cultural dissemination in pre-revolutionary twentieth-century Cuba intervened in the construction of Cuban counter-hegemonic identities and ideas of nation in visual, performative and print culture. Through analyses of performance repertoires and cultural productions that focus on questions of race, gender and nation-formation, I identify moments of exchange and cultural synergy between Gypsified subjects and marginalized Cuban groups in a variety of cultural spheres. This study delves into unexplored Spanish and Cuban subjects’ particular contributions to alternative modes of contemporary Gypsification, illustrating how racialized and gendered Cuban and Spanish minorities incorporated Gypsification into their repertoire, developing syncretic music and dances but also foregrounding subversive forms of desire and humor. Chapter One examines the Cuban Consuelo Portela’s erotic spectacles in early twentieth century Madrid, illustrating how the melding of rumba and Gypsification in her songs foregrounds non-heterosexual, non-white forms of desire. Chapter Two investigates how Afro-Cuban clowns and musicians based in Madrid incorporated Gypsification into the Spanish tradition of toreo bufo or charlotadas (comedic bullfighting) in early twentieth-century Spain. I consider the Afro-Cuban bullfighters Jacinto Padilla (“El Mulato Meric”) and Aquilino Calzada González (“El Negro Aquilino”), who favored experimentation with bullfighting techniques and advanced intercultural musical relations between Cuba and Spain during their shows. Chapter Three examines the “Gypsification boom” in mass-circulation Cuban magazines such as Bohemia, Revista Social and Carteles (1916-1959) prior to the 1959 Cuban Revolution, complicating existing narratives of the impact of Afro-Cubans on the reconfiguration of national identity among the white Cuban bourgeoisie and middle classes. Chapter Four investigates the intersection of Gypsification, Spanish hyper-masculinity and more racialized Gypsified Cuban femininities and masculinities in the 1950s film industry. Through the Spanish-Cuban co-productions Bambú (1945), Una cubana en España (1951), Bella, la salvaje (1953) and ¡Olé…! Cuba (1957) I argue that Spain is portrayed as a culturally conflicted nation, seeking to reconcile not only with the formerly colonized, but also with “the other” inside each Spaniard. Gypsification, in conjunction with the characters’ heterosexual union, prompts modes of cultural coexistence with Cuba, as it reconfigures Spanish national identity within a broader transatlantic context. My project reframes Gypsified transatlantic individuals as subjects, rather than representational objects, who appropriate this aesthetic to subvert white power. At the same time, this dissertation departs from the tendency in the humanities to prioritize moments of contestation and liberation and focuses instead on explaining how minorities’ own practices within dominant discourses exemplify strategies of coexistence with hegemonic populations. Even as I focus intensively on minoritarian practices, I elucidate whether widely circulating media texts promote white subjects’ assimilation of non-white contributions, or if they reflect any desire to craft a shared understanding of modern Western identities. My tracing of racialization through analysis of circulating corporeality and media foregrounds the consolidation of Spanish and Caribbean identities within the broader networks connecting Europe, Africa and the Americas.