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view of ‘blackness’? All of these issues might have informed Rivero’s constructions of
blackface and ‘black’ voice. Nonetheless, his representations of ‘blackness,’ his political and
social satire, and his popularity with audiences recreated the complexities and contradictions of
‘race’ in Puerto Rico and the ideological negotiations within the colonized socio-cultural space
during the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.
In several descriptions of Rivero’s creations (all of them referred to as Diplo), the negrito
was narrated as, “a portion of the tropics’ humanity, a man who philosophizes, who thinks and
acts between the waves of greatness and meanness,” as “a character extracted from our people's
roots. He is el negrito who played to be shocking yet harmless” and a “sentimental negrito who
possessed the 'Cuban wit' and used his ingenuity for personal gain"
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The ‘tropics,’ Puerto Rico,
and Cuba became an imaginary borderless Caribbean space which was merged by a
masqueraded ‘blackness.’
Although
negritos were fictional citizens who transgressed the rules and questioned the
social, political, and economic system, their actions were framed through a rhetoric of
individualism. Even as Rivero tried to establish some class-based political empowerment, the
negritos were narrated, remembered, and reproduced as human, noble, and sentimental, yet lazy
and self-interested individuals. As a result, ‘black’ men were part of both the Puerto Rican
nation and the CubaRican symbolic space, however, as infantilized youthful figures who never
assumed the responsibilities of adulthood. More importantly, the negritos were structured
through the discourse of ‘whiteness.’ They were not Puerto Rican/CubaRican ‘black’ subjects;
rather they were hegemonic representations of a trans-Caribbean embodied ‘blackness.’
Nevertheless, the audience adored Rivero and his negrito personifications. I argue that
besides identifying with the ambivalent negritos who defied the system and always ‘triumphed,’
Convention