¡Azúcar!: Celia Cruz and black diasporic feminist interjection

Abstract

ABSTRACT The flamboyant performances of Afro-Cuban singer and pan-Latina icon, Celia Cruz, blurred the lines of latinidad and blackness. Where latinidad often ignores blackness beyond its historical contributions to mestizaje, Cruz’s example provides a more complex framework through which to imagine the performative relationship between latinidad, mestizaje, and gendered blackness, especially as it relates to questions of diaspora and belonging for black women. Through close reading, Cruz’s outbursts of ‘¡azúcar!’ (sugar!) underscore the historical contributions of blackness while stretching its everyday possibilities as a black feminist grammar across the diaspora. Understood here as a black diasporic feminist interjection into mainstream Latin music, ¡azúcar! attempts to construct a pleasurable, alternative modernity within and beyond linearity as a repetitive act of black women’s self-insertion.