About the Book:On September 29, 1927, Cuban soprano Rita Montaner walked onto the stage of Havana’s Teatro Regina. The cross-dressed actress sang the premiere of Eliseo Grenet’s tango-congo, “Ay Mam Ins” and cemented the song as a classic in the Cuban repertoire. More importantly, her performance heralded the birth of the Cuban zarzuela, a Spanish-language light opera with spoken dialogue that originated in Spain but transformed popular entertainment in Cuba. Susan Thomas’s award-winning book offers the first comprehensive study of the Cuban zarzuela. Created by musicians and managers to meet a demand for family entertainment, the zarzuela revealed the emerging economic and cultural power of Cuba’s white female bourgeoisie within the entertainment industry. Thomas explores zarzuela’s function as a pedagogical tool that composers, librettists, and business managers hoped would control their troupes and audiences by presenting desirable and problematic images of both feminine and masculine identities. Focusing on character types such as the mulata, the negrito, and the ingnue, Thomas uncovers the zarzuela’s richly textured relationship to social constructs of race, class, and especially gender.Table of Contents: Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Cuban Lyric Theater in Context 11 2. Eminently Feminine: The Politics of Gender and Genre 26 3. The Mulata Makes an Entrance: The Salidas of Maria Ia O, Cecilia Valdes, and Amalia Barista 40 4. From the Negrito to the Negro Tragico: The Changing Representation of Black Masculinity 81 5. Ingenues and Fallen Women: Representations of White Femininity 109 6. Ambivalent Heroes and Sensual Peasants: The Galan and the Criollo 154 Epilogue 177 Appendix 183 Notes 191 Bibliography 221 Index 237