The Drag of Puerto Rican Blackness: Javier Cardona’s You Don’t Look Like (1996)

• In Event: Reinterpreting Space and Genre: Transnational Latino/a Identities in Contemporary Literature, Performance, and Audiovisual New Media

Abstract

The Puerto Rican actor, dancer, performer, and choreographer Javier Cardona explores issues of race, gender, and sexuality in his one-man show You Don’t Look Like (1996), engaging perceptions and stereotypes that exist about blacks in the Caribbean and how this racial system serves to exclude and marginalize those who supposedly “don’t look Puerto Rican” because they are of African ancestry. The plot focuses on a actor who is looking for work and is only offered stereotypical roles that reinforce the absurd images most often found in the common racist imaginary; Cardona’s response is to transform this exclusion into an expressive dance. In my presentation I discuss the performativity of race as a type of drag, following the theorizations of Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, and Jossianna Arroyo. I explore the images of Cardona dressed as a woman and in stereotypical male costumes and show how Cardona destabilizes preconceived notions of Puerto Rican national identity and hegemonic forms of gender and sexuality. I also highlight competing notions of blackness and linguistic identity based on the ruptures caused by migration and transnational experience.

Author

• Lawrence M La Fountain-Stokes, University of Michigan