Concrete disavowal: Re-placing Colombian communities into the New York landscape before World War II

In 1918, the Centro Hispano Americano and the Comité Latino Americano hosted a “bella festa”—a massive Liberty Bonds gala—in the 49th Regiment Armory, Twenty-Fifth and Lexington, New York City (La Prensa de San Antonio 1918). This event meant to raise their profile in the United States effort in Europe for the Great War. For one observer, “this is but one feature of the Latin Americans that reside in the United States that speaks strongly in favor of the tendency to extend the solidarity that must exist between them and this country, bringing out that it is in these acts that the future of humanity will be decided, that allied nations will be able to save in the name of justice” (Evolución 1918). Prompted partly because organizer Gerardo Echeverria worked for the Committee for Public Information, the Comité Latino Americano used a quintessentially “American” place to perform their desire to belong in the United States (Kim 2011; Lieu 2011; Portes 1994; Garcia 1996; Pérez 2015). Even as the event celebrated Latina/o solidarity with the US war effort, the gala also featured physician Alirio Diaz Guerra, the Colombian author of the neo-picaresque immigrant novel Lucas Guevara. This ribald account traced a young Colombian man’s journey as an object of desire with “certain skins bronzed by the tropical sun, certain black, sleepy eyes; and certain anatomical features not commonly found in the people of North America” (Diaz Guerra 2003, p. 144) through import–export shops, bordellos, Long Island mansions, sweatshops, boardinghouses and tenements, all capped by a difficult marriage to an immigrant white woman with a tragic denouement: the protagonist’s suicide at the Brooklyn Bridge. The narrative reminded Latin American readers in the United States of their “alien citizenship” and the lack of Latino solidarity in the United States (Ngai 2004; Kanellos and Hernandez 2003). Diaz Guerra populated the book with rumors enabled by contingent access to elite white New York spaces that some Latinos and Latin Americans gained as servants, lust objects and native informants to commercial investments in Latin America. The gala’s broad Americanism and the Colombian physician’s published skepticism mark key public tensions in the ways Latino communities connected with each other and with American culture.