UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Speaking bodies : body bilinguality and code-switching in Latina/o performance Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1wf8v1h1 Author Power, Jade Y. Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Speaking Bodies: Body Bilinguality and Code-switching in Latina/o Performance A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the degree requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Drama and Theatre by Jade Y. Power Committee in Charge: University of California, San Diego Professor Jorge A. Huerta, Chair Professor Nadine George-Graves Professor Rosemary George Professor Emily Roxworthy University of California, Irvine Professor Frank B. Wilderson III 2012 The dissertation of Jade Y. Power is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ Chair University of California, San Diego University of California, Irvine 2012 iii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated with great love and respect to my partner José who accompanies me in my daily acts of code-switching, integrating and anchoring the many worlds through which we together move; to my parents Vivian and Jack and my sister Taína for teaching me about bilinguality; and finally, to Amaury for helping me in these last months to daily rediscover and understand my own embodied self. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page……………………………………………………………… iii Dedication………………………………………………………………….. iv Table of Contents…………………………………………………………... v List of Figures……………………………………………………………… vi Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………… vii Vita ………………………………………………………………………… viii Abstract …………………………………………………………………..... ix Introduction: Speaking Bodies………………………..……………………. 1 Chapter One: The Bilingual, Code-switching Body….…………………….. 17 Chapter Two: The Bilingual and Code-switching Body Onstage: Spanglish/Dominicanish, Puerto Rico/New York…..………………………. 55 Chapter Three: Facing the Island: Teatro Diplo, Blackface Performance and National Identity in Puerto Rico……………………………………..…..….. 112 Chapter Four: ¡Habla!: Speaking Bodies and Puerto Rican Bomba… in California………………………………………………………………..... 170 Conclusion: …………………………………….…………………………..... 238 Works Cited………………………………………………………………….. 245 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 4.1: Facebook logo for Teatro Diplo…………………………………… 145 Figure 4.2: Statue in Naguabo built in honor of Ramón Rivero.……………… 154 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the many people who have helped me grow as a scholar and an intellectual, an artist and a writer. Sally Miller Gearhart was the first person I knew to have a PhD, and those long conversations in the car, in our family living room or chopping wood have often surfaced in the process of writing this dissertation. I am eternally indebted to my mentor Jorge Huerta who was the first person to make me believe I could complete a PhD and who has shepherded me through the process with unmatched kindness and devotion, serving as an inspiration for what a teacher and a mentor should be. I am thankful to my many peers, colleagues and students who have always generously provided advice, insight, and moral support: from the CILAS women to all the folks in the Theater and Dance Promotions/Theatre Forum Office, especially my dear friend and colleague Megan Strom whose special brand of humor mixed with honesty and love got me through some of the most challenging moments in these last years. I am also deeply grateful for the San Diego bomba community who has anchored me in this process, never allowing me to become disconnected from children and elders, music and dance, and my own dancing body. Finally, I am grateful to my partner José who has served as my greatest teacher in graduate school, my greatest intellectual and emotional support. Sin ti nada de esto sería posible. vii VITA 1996-2000 Bachelor of Arts, University of California, Santa Cruz 2004-2006 Master of Arts, University of California, San Diego 2006-2012 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California San Diego viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Speaking Bodies: Body Bilinguality and Code-switching in Latina/o Performance by Jade Y. Power Doctor of Philosophy in Drama and Theatre University of California, San Diego 2012 University of California, Irvine 2012 Professor Jorge A. Huerta, Chair In the last decades, there has been a proliferation of scholarship on embodiment and the body in performance. Likewise, the politics of language and the representation of hybrid, mestizo identities have been central in the study of Latina/o theater and performance. However, few scholars have attempted to discuss how the body works in relationship to bilingualism itself. In this dissertation, I argue that the body itself speaks and is thus a maker of meaning, just as it also receives and processes information. In looking at the specific sites of inquiry for this study, I show how the body articulates an argument that situates the performing subject in a web of intersectional identities, ix demonstrating how identities are produced through movement itself. The “speaking body” both draws upon and circumvents our understanding of language as a logocentric process and also as the principle way through which identity is perceived and the self is made knowable. Thus, I address theories of social construction that help us question the essential and fixed link between language and identity, while also insisting that the politics of language, in this case spoken and corporeal, continue to matter in very important ways. In doing so, I analyze how the performing, code-switching body can reveal racial construction, enact the contradictions of mestizaje, queer the way in which Latinidad is read through lenses of gender and sexuality, and finally, privilege the embodied experience of “bilinguality” over logocentric understandings of bilingualism. Looking at the work of primarily Puerto Rican performers, I engage this concept across a variety of performative registers, including solo performance, historical blackface performance, and the traditional Puerto Rican dance practice of bomba. I demonstrate that there are instances where the code-switching body re-enacts hierarchical power relations, and yet it in doing so, makes visible how power is enacted on and through the body in performance. Body bilinguality is thus a strategy for moving between and across codes of meaning-making, contesting narratives of fractured subjectivity through embodiment, and resisting hegemonic systems of representation, revealing sites of relative privilege and oppression. x Introduction Speaking Bodies US Latina/o subjects are imagined and imagine themselves through a multitude of lenses: hybrid, code-switching, mestizo/o, bilingual, transcultural, transnational, circulating around and across borders, moving, yet fixed in a perpetual state of in- between-ness, caught in the web of nationalisms, post-coloniality and internal colonization, between constructs of hyper-femininity and exaggerated masculinity, between not-quite-white and always already brown/black, simultaneously la virgen and la puta, la chingada and el conquistador,1 using embodied practices to confront, engage, and contest narratives of genocide, slavery, immigration, and to recount the stories of survival. This dissertation is an effort to interrogate and understand these slippery constructs, this complex set of relations, through specific embodied performances that demonstrate the use of what I have termed the “code-switching body.” In doing so, I not only theorize the many discursive levels of signification the Latina/o body encounters and employs, but also re-imagine the body as a site for meaning-making that is simultaneously an object upon which social construction is enacted, as well as a subject with experience and individual agency. Privileging the speaking body in this process is particularly important given the binary framework through which ontologies of Latina/o subjects are so often read, a framework that inevitably finds recourse in other problematic dualities upon which much of traditional humanist ideology is constructed: nature/culture, sacred/profane, male/female, and most importantly, mind/body. My work in this project, therefore, is an attempt to inscribe a counter-discourse of bodily 1 “the virgin (feminine), the whore (feminine), the fucked one (feminine), the conquerer (masculine)” 1 2 subjectivity. Despite the fact that I am attempting to accomplish this through the logocentric act of writing, something that has “paradoxically come to stand in for and against embodiment” (Taylor, Archive 16), I aim, through writing, to corporeally invade and occupy ongoing conversations about identity. My goal is to contribute to discourse about Latina/o performance, not by discussing the body object of the marginalized subject, but rather by foregrounding the marginalized subject as experienced through the body. Having grown up in a completely bi-cultural, bilingual household, moving to California from Puerto Rico at age seven,