| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Yeidi M. Rivero. Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television. (Console-ing Passions: Television and Cultural Power.) Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 264. Cloth $74.95, paper $21.95.
In a work whose theoretical sophistication and historical breadth is matched by its cultural sensitivity, Yeidi M. Rivero explains how and why blackface comedy and imagery continued to be constructed and consumed as a valid form of popular entertainment in Puerto Rico as late as the 1990s. Complementing and expanding on Rine Leal, Robin Moore, and Jill Lane's pioneering studies on Cuban blackface, Rivero shows that early uses of blackface structured white supremacist values into depictions of blackness while also articulating blackness as a quintessentially anticolonial, nationalist condition.	1
As in late nineteenth-century Cuba, "blackface and blackvoice [in post-1898 Puerto Rico] became protected political masquerades for criticizing U.S. colonialism, the Puerto Rican government, and the oppression of the working class" (p. 25). Particularly responsible for this was Ramón Rivero, an actor, writer, and producer whose characterization of the negrito in theater and radio from the 1930s through the early development of television in the 1950s transcended evolving media forms. In Ramón Rivero's hands, the black buffoon transformed into a trickster figure, symbolic of organic political wisdom, who rejected traditional elite representations of the poor and working class through the image of the white peasant, or jíbaro. Eventually, Rivero's negrito became popular-class Puerto Ricans' hero and "the jíbaro's nemesis," rejecting the triumphalist discourse of paternal politicians that glossed colonial collaboration and class injustice under the rubric of la gran familia puertoriqueña. Yet, as the author contends, the complex dimensions of sociopolitical critique embodied in Rivero's negrito were increasingly eliminated after his death in 1956, when transnational contact with radical ideologies of black liberation and transnational migration (first of anti-Castro Cubans in the 1960s and then of impoverished black Dominicans in the 1980s) rendered the cultural landscape of nationalist debates a veritable battleground. In many ways, public consensus on the meaning of blackface and blackness did not so much as expand in progressive directions as retract into reactionary patterns.	2
Officially, Puerto Rico's government has never recognized that racist ideologies or practices permeate society and institutions, let alone commercial television (p. 104). Consequently, televisual popular culture remains a central site for both confirming and contesting the white ideal and related myths of racial equality, especially because television, until the early 1990s, was a largely national affair. Using poignant examples of fan mail, personal testimonies, popular press, surveys, and anecdotes, Rivero illustrates how most islanders maintain that racism does not exist in Puerto Rico, that any discrimination is the outcome of individual moral failings, and that those who complain of racism are importing U.S.-derived sensibilities that have no place there. More often than not, Rivero argues, television and media professionals, journalists, and average citizens have justified the ridiculing of blacks through blackface as well as the celebration of white ideals of beauty and power with the argument that because racism does not exist in Puerto Rico, such actions and attitudes are entirely acceptable and possibly complimentary—even to black Puerto Ricans (pp. 75, 85–88, 95–96, 150). Moreover, particularly threatening images of U.S. black activism have been translated into forms that serve the purpose of culturally distancing Puerto Rico from its colonizer and making Puerto Ricans appear comparatively innocent of all race problems. Thus, a satirized version of Angela Davis appeared in a 1970s comedy show while a Puerto Rican black family posed as a "colorless" version of the Cosbys in the 1990s island sit-com, Mi Familia (pp. 114; 147–159).	. . .

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