Where is the boundary between impersonating and becoming?
Passing is the ability of a person to be considered as a member of another group or identity category different from his or her own. A common concept since the late 1920s in the United States to refer to people who, because of their features and skin color, being black, can pass themselves off as white to avoid stigmatization, to be socially accepted (and therefore may suffer rejection by their community). This term, today also used with respect to sexual orientation, gender, disability or even social class, was established after the novel "Passing" (1929) by Nella Larsen, the first African-American woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, which narrates the experience of a woman who passes herself off as white. At this time, Federico Garcia Lorca comes in contact with Larsen and the Harlem Renaissance, a critical literary circle and activist in the newspaper "The Crisis" a publication by and for black people. Lorca connects in this vision from the otherness that he makes central in "Poet in New York". He writes "Burnt Negro" and wants to accompany it with a descriptive image, probably a postcard of the mass lynchings published in "The Crisis". These postcards of torturing and burning people, mostly black, were free to send. They spread fear and hatred throughout the country, but when published in the press, the same photo became a denunciation. The same denouncement that appears in Lorca's poems where the elements are polysemic, some are passed off as others and at the same time are several. An incendiary Lorca, full of death and life, claims the freedom of black lives that do not reject their origins, claims to be oneself even when that means death, because what is life if not what becomes death? As a chronicle of a death foretold, in Spain he tries to deliver to his friend and publisher Bergamín the draft of "Poeta en Nueva York" with 18 images, his drawings and photographs referenced where each one should go: "Dear Pepe I have been to see you and I think I will be back tomorrow. Hugs Federico". But Lorca did not return, the photos disappeared and "Burnt Black" never accompanied his poem. Would the same hurtful photograph have been transformed into his poetry book, would it have become another, what is transformation if not a change of look?