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14 - Oratory, Memoir, and Theater

Performances of Race and Class in the Early Twentieth-Century Latina/o Public Sphere

from Part III - Negotiating Literary Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2018

John Morán González
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
Laura Lomas
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
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Summary

This chapter gives an overview of oratorical practices in a variety of Latina/o performance and memoir texts of the early twentieth century. It argues that the artistic and political effects of speaking aloud as Latinas/os in public and private during the period are simultaneously ephemeral (lost in the moments of embodied, unrecorded speaking occasions) and enduring (marked by listeners and speakers in their auditory systems and memories and traced by the materials of print culture and the archive). The Latina/o radicals and artists (often one and the same) of oratorical performance participated in labor organizing, cigar-factory lecturas (readings), poetry recitals, and the phenomenon of “Afro-Latina/o-on-Afro-Latina/o” blackface theater. Emma Tenayuca, Luisa Capetillo, Eusebia Cosme, and Alberto O’Farrill deliver the power and beauty of the raised, resisting, entertaining voice in Mexican America, transnational Puerto Rico, and Afro-Cuban America during Latina/o modernism
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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