Carmelita Tropicana's performance last Friday in Collis Common Ground of her short play "Milk of Amnesia" gave insight into the lesbian Latino artist's attempt to regain her past culture.
The play is a fictionalized version of Tropicana's real-life visit to her birthplace, Cuba, three years ago. Throughout the work, the audience sees her constant attempt to recall, and step into, her native Cuban culture.
After having lived in America for so long and having been "whitewashed" in order to fit into the mainstream dominant culture, Tropicana said she wanted to immerse herself in, and again become intimately familiar with, the Cuban culture of her early childhood (she left Cuba at the age of seven).
In writing her material, Tropicana collaborates with her sister Ella, and her friend Uzi Parnes.
Earlier in the day, Latino and Queer theory scholar and New York University professor Jose Munoz delivered a lecture titled "Cuban Exilic Memories" at La Casa explaining Tropicana's works.
Munoz spoke of the state of cultural exile in which Cuban-Americans find themselves, as a result of not being part of the "dominant culture" -- that of white Americans.
He also discussed the art of remaking prevalent stereotypes created by the dominant culture. Cuban-Americans such as Tropicana, he explained, take stereotypes and change them by injecting a positive self-image into them, while still accepting part of those stereotypes, as opposed to simply denying the stereotypes in their entirety.
He said stereotypes are manipulated so as to produce "a dissonant relationship to the dominant culture."
Munoz emphasized that Latino queers face three levels of alienation in America.
First, they are estranged from mainstream white American culture by virtue of being Latino. Second, they are snubbed by conventional Latino culture because of their queer sexual preferences. Finally, they are denied a place in mainstream queer American culture, which tends to focus on white queers.
These issues played out strongly in Tropicana's performance that night. She burst onto the stage at the beginning of the show, garbed in comic male attire, cast in the persona of Pengalito, the "Cuban Alistair Cooke."
Telling several Cuban jokes and making several positive, generalized comments about Cubans, she had the crowd laughing ecstatically.
She made comments about how beautiful the Cuban land is, but that it just does not compare to the Cuban "human landscape."
Speaking of one woman, Tropicana declared that one could place a full drink on her rear end, and that she could "walk several feet without spilling a drop!"
In the performance, Tropicana attempts for the first time to revisit Cuba, but discovers she is not dressed in conventionally flamboyant Cuban attire.
The plainly-dressed Carmelita resolves to try again, this time with "one of those fantastic hats, with all those fruits on them!" In affirming the beauty of Cuban fashion, Tropicana accepts the stereotype that Cubans dress flamboyantly, but rejects the possible judgment that such dress is extremely gaudy and in bad taste.
Never giving vent to pure anger, Tropicana employed humor in dealing with her themes of cultural alienation, yet still without trivializing them to the point of complete insignificance. Rather than succumbing to frustration at being ignored by dominant culture, she welcomed the opportunity to rework old stereotypes, playing extensively with inherited images.
She employed a number of metaphors to present the contrast between Cuban and American cultures, metaphors which usually involved food. For instance, she talked about disparate kinds of milk, and different kinds of fruits.
For her, American milk is bland and "homogenized," which represents the perception that dominant American culture is relatively homogeneous and boring, while Cuban milk is replete with condensed and juicy elements, signifying fantastic diversity.
Similarly, she says, "Americans are apples -- nice, clean, easy to eat. Cubans are mangoes ... you'll have to wash your face and floss your teeth after eating them."
At the end of the play, having completely regained her past culture, she assumes the full persona of Carmelita Tropicana, employing a strong Cuban accent and talking of now being "interconnected" between the two cultures.
"Now," she declared, embracing both cultures, "I can drink both kinds of milk." She then finished the play by cueing up a recorded song, "Todos Para La Misma (Everybody for the Same Thing)," and relaying the message from Cuban friends that "the trade embargo is killing us."
After the play, Tropicana explained to the audience that sometimes when she does the show, she employs larger props specially crafted by artist friends, like a giant pig, for example.
She said she did not have it with her for this show, because, she quipped, "How are you gonna carry a six-foot pig on a plane?"
She also explained the origin of the Carmelita Tropicana stage persona, something which arose out of the first play in which she was cast. The play involved Tropicana trying to start her own "Cuban revolution."
