"Castles Made of Sand": Racial Ambiguity and Mid-twentieth Century American Musicians

Racial Ambiguity in the Age of Integrationism: Lena Horne

One musician whose career was shot through with complicated dynamics of racial ambiguity was Lena Horne. An investigation into her family history reveals that she had relatively little African ancestry, but all her family were firmly rooted in the Black bourgeoisie.

Her complicated sense of identity was aggravated by the experiences she had in the entertainment industry, where she was shunned by some venues because they didn't think her style was Black enough, and who often encouraged her to pass as a Latina woman, an option she fiercely rejected. "My entire life until then had been a succession of attempts to by other people to give me what nowadays I suppose would be called 'an image,'" she later wrote. "But who was really me? The respectable middle-class Brooklyn girl, the rootless child, the band singer, or maybe just a chick who would end up faking it as Spanish or as a blues shouter? I was still grabbing my identity on the fly."

Despite her defiance of requests to pretend to be "Spanish," in her breakout mainstream film appearance, Panama Hattie, she portrayed a Latina woman. For that part and others, the movie studio actually darkened her skin with makeup to ensure that audiences would not think she was a white woman performing with Black men.

Later in her career, after she had left the Hollywood machine, and as she became more secure in her identity as a Black woman, her portrayals of Latina women seemed to bother her less. On a song off her 1957 album, At the Waldorf Astoria, she confidently took on the persona of a Latina woman enraptured with an American man, but unable to communicate her affections. And on a 1963 album, Lena Like Latin, she performed almost entirely as a Latina woman, both on the cover art and in the music.

She placed a good deal of distance between her work as an entertainer and her personal identity, allowing herself to become more comfortable with the sexualized, exotic images of her used to sell records and movie tickets.

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