[ PM L A
theories and
methodologies
The Thinking Voice:
When Listening
Trumps Celebrity
licia fiol-matta
LICIA FIOL-MATTA, associate professor of
Latin American and Puerto Rican stud-
ies at Lehman College, City University
of New York, is the author of A Queer
Mother for the Nation: The State and Ga-
briela Mistral (U of Minnesota P, 2002)
and scholarly articles on gender and
sexuality in Latin America and the Ca-
ribbean, from Sor Juana to Myrta Silva.
She is completing a book manuscript on
voice, gender, and music, under con-
tract to Duke University Press.
1092
IN THE BRIEF SPAN OF 1952–68, PUERTO RICO SPED THROUGH ITS
INDUSTRIALIZATION PROCESS. MIDDLE-CLASS RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUC-
tion dotted the city of San Juan. Hotels replaced the mansions along
its Condado waterfront. he spanking new Medical Center prom-
ised health for the sickly, undernourished population, a health that
the developmentalist program of the Commonwealth of Puerto
Rico—Operation Bootstrap—desperately needed, as it endeavored
to offer a cheap, obedient, and presumably bilingual labor force
to American capital.1 he “Golden Mile,” the inancial district es-
tablished in the area of the sometime royal hacienda, Hato Rey,
emerged as the centerpiece of a new downtown. he mythic mall
of Plaza Las Américas (formerly a cattle ranch that bred cows for
the milk industry) became the social hub of a polis that increasingly
turned to consumerism for its exercise of citizenship. Newspapers
and magazines were illed with consumer fantasies of every variety.
Along with everything else that was dazzling and new, Puerto Rico
consumed a new object for sale, the celebrity pop star.
Of the various pop artists that came of age in Operation Boot-
strap Puerto Rico, Lucecita Benítez was possibly the most musically
gited and the most iconic. She entered the celebrity arena slightly
ater the peak of developmentalism, exactly before the society’s steep
and painfully obvious fall from its carefully crated modernization
fantasy. Her body’s hypervisibility through successive iconic stages
(the dashing auteur of the 1960s, the socially conscious artiste of the
1970s, the hyperfeminine diva of the 1980s) exists in contradistinc-
tion to the decline of the country’s dream of progress. Yet, also in
contradistinction to her mutable, celebrity-dictated image, the con-
stant in her career is the crucible that was her voice in Puerto Rico’s
social history and music culture.
Lucecita intuited the thinking voice.2 he thinking voice is an
event that can be apprehended through but is not restricted to mu-
sic performance. It exceeds notation, musicianship, and fandom, al-
though it partakes of them all. No artist owns the thinking voice; it
[ © 2011 by the moder n language association of america ]
126.4 ] Licia Fiol-Matta
cannot be marshaled at will or silenced when
inconvenient. Its aim is not to dazzle or en-
thrall, although it may do so. Lucecita lived
her long career negotiating the twists and
turns of celebrity culture in late colonialism.
Yet her endurance as a star does not result
merely from successful navigation of celeb-
rity and serendipitous coincidence with his-
torical events. Her vocal phenomenon may
be regarded as an unwitting outmaneuver-
ing of celebrity culture whereby something
resistant, the thinking in the voice, points
to, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “participation,
sharing, or contagion” versus the “imaginary
capture” of the visual, which has dictated the
terms of the artist’s critical and popular re-
ception (10).3 Lucecita opened up the visual
register dominant in celebrity culture to
Nancy’s “resonance” of listening by orient-
ing the listener toward the intangible sense of
hearing through her multifold performances
across decades of Puerto Rican and Latin
American life. his event of music, voice, and
listening that is the thinking voice is repeated
in other musical celebrity examples through
time and space and possibly in nonmusical
celebrity contexts where performance, voice,
and embodiment are key.
Lucecita’s reputation was made on her
talent at delivering high melodrama—for
example, in her Spanish remakes of the Dix-
ies’ “Chapel of Love” (“Vete con ella”), Dusty
1093
Springfield’s “You Don’t Have to Say You
theories and methodologies
Love Me” (“Yo que no vivo sin tí”), and Pino
Donaggio’s “La vita” (“La vida”). Her voice’s
beauty, as well as her youthful good looks,
perfectly suited the colonial fantasy of success
through increased consumption. Artists’ lives
were favorite consumer objects in the 1960s,
and Lucecita became the most appealing such
object in mid-1960s Puerto Rico. Her many
albums displayed the image of a beautiful
woman through a pastiche of European and
American models. Playing the vinyls on a
portable record player magically conveyed
the illusory conidence, even braggadocio, of
Puerto Rico’s dependent, accelerated mod-
ernization. he principal fantasy of this time
concerned the wondrous leap forward of
an entire society into the middle class, and
middle- class taste reigned and determined
print, aural, and visual expressive encodings
in the late colony.
Lucecita’s most important track of the
1960s is undoubtedly “Génesis,” a ballad that
haunts the Puerto Rican collective memory
to this day. Under contract to her irst man-
ager, Alfred D. Herger, Lucecita competed in
the irst edition of the Festival de la Canción
Latina (later renamed the Festival OTI), held
in 1969 in Mexico (ig. 1). She was a member
of the Puerto Rican cohort. Lucecita handily
FIG. 1
The auteur. Lucecita
Benítez performing
“Génesis.” Primer
Festival de la
Canción Latina,
Mexico City, 1969.
Costume designed
by Martin.
 1094 The Thinking Voice: When Listening Trumps Celebrity
won the first prize for singing, while Gui­
theories and methodologies
llermo Venegas Lloveras, also Puerto Rican,
won the first prize for songwriting. Puerto
Rico experienced these irst prizes as an apo­
theosis. Throngs greeted the singer at the
airport; children watched her arrival on tele­
visions brought into the schools; newspapers
documented a parade for her through down­
town San Juan. Lucecita met with the leaders
of the two dominant political parties, Gover­
nor Luis A. Ferré of the pro­statehood party
(the New Progressive Party) and Senator Ra­
fael Hernández Colón (then president of the
Senate, elected governor as the candidate of
the pro–status quo Popular Democratic Party
in 1972, defeating Ferré). Neither politician
wasted the opportunity to be photographed
with the star and to appeal to the public’s
heightened afect.
“Génesis” correlated with both the fear of
annihilation that the Cold War implanted and
Puerto Rico’s colonial anxiety over its “small­
ness,” which became more intense as the
cracks of a failing economic miracle started
to show. We sense musical overcompensation
in the song’s symphonic, semiclassical ar­
rangement and wall­of­sound recording, with
bombast to spare.4 “Génesis” alludes to the
destruction of the world from its irst verse
(“Cuando nada en la tierra quede / que tibie
el sol” [“When nothing on earth remains /
for the sun to bathe in its warmth”]) and ends
with an image of love’s survival, as a flame
gently rising from the disaster. The lyrics’
stark portrayal of the immediate future runs
head­on into the orchestra’s musical embel­
lishments (recalling Hollywood movie music)
and the artist’s elaborate melodramatic sing­
ing. Anyone with access to the Internet can
witness the magniicence of the singer’s voice
and her spectacular performance onstage
four decades after, thanks to YouTube. Lu­
cecita’s performance of “Génesis” catapulted
her into celebrity status beyond Puerto Rico,
providing a blueprint for future Latin Ameri­
can baladistas (including the 1970 debut per­
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formance of the Mexican pop idol José José,
who, barely a year later, sang “El triste” with
similar pomposity and symphonic accompa­
niment, as well as a Little Prince costume).
Lucecita’s performance struck a disqui­
eting, dissonant chord. he public marveled
at her bravura but was shocked by her mas­
culinity; the Mexican press commented on
her masculine wear and hairdo,5 and gossip
about her sexuality soon followed in Puerto
Rico. After four or five years of pleasing
images meant for ready consumption and
singular performances that did not strike
a nerve in the social fabric, Lucecita’s first
moment of artistic maturity surprised ev­
eryone. his icon clearly did not conform to
the well­honed imaginary of the Caribbean
woman either visually or sonically, as it had
been drawn in campy stereotypes of danc­
ing bodies since the classic Ninón Sevilla ve­
hicle Aventurera (1950). Certainly Lucecita’s
costume, a native version of the Yves Saint
Laurent female tuxedo, helped capture the
public’s imagination. Lucecita sported a boy­
ish look reminiscent of Italy’s Rita Pavone,
who was all the rage. Pavone was probably
the model for Lucecita’s new look, but there
are no apt models for her vocal performance.
She had spoken of learning to sing by listen­
ing to Lucho Gatica’s rendition of the classic
bolero “El reloj.” Contemporaries, in part en­
couraged by Lucecita’s manager, compared
her with Olga Guillot, sometimes accusing
Lucecita of imitation. She possessed a dif­
ferent instrument with a wider register and
rock­stadium power. She had truly let it rip
and initiated an auteur phase in which she
identiied with the predominantly masculine
position of the songwriter. Part of her trans­
gression involved her incursion into realms of
meaning reserved for the male creator.
Lucecita’s performance of “Génesis” re­
mains disturbing and nonnormative, despite
being her ticket to a celebrity beyond 1960s
covers of pop hits from the United States and
Europe and being remembered as a moment
126.4 ] Licia Fiol-Matta
of pride for Puerto Rico. In 1969, her star
body, up to then a veritable Deleuzian assem-
blage, was forever altered by the eruption of a
thinking voice and proved capable of rattling
Latin America’s long fascination with queer
stars only as the conirmation of naturalized,
nationalist gender roles. Lucecita triggered
the work voice can make us go through, call-
ing forth what Mladen Dolar invokes when he
writes of the voice as a “bodily missile.”6 his
voice showed at the moment when bounty of
talent coincided with the uncanny alignment
of celebrity culture with global danger and
colonial and neocolonial shits, when mascu-
line embodiment erupted through the con-
ventional, fashion-driven vehicle of celebrity
in modernity’s periphery (with its grossly un-
even distribution of capital and its increasing
emphasis on commodiied symbolic culture).
Only a few months later, in 1970, Lu-
cecita inaugurated her second iconic moment.
Fashion, to which the artist’s body so natu-
rally took for the camera lens, probably led
her and her team to the “African look,” as it
was called at the time. In Lucecita’s mythol-
ogy, this change was about black pride, social
justice, and control of her image. It was about
snubbing TV producers and radio’s infamous
payola.7 All these elements are present in this
artiste incarnation. Yet all artists in a celebrity
culture must engage in multiple negotiations
to stay at the top. We are not privy to the con-
tents of any such negotiations or to the artist’s
interiority. he consensus that Lucecita grew
into an enlightened black identity, discarding
an inauthentic 1960s celebrity as a whitened,
oppressive image, may occlude the complexi-
ties of Lucecita’s career as well as her mercurial
personality and star tendency to speak in the
terms reserved for divas, a discourse that can
be delightful but is hardly ever transparent.
Any exercise of a thinking voice in the
colony at the close of the 1960s and into the
explosive 1970s was dangerous. Lucecita was
a celebrity and made money and therefore
could defy the expectations of the consumer
1095
culture that had made her famous. Her reso-
theories and methodologies
lute queerness onstage and her capacity to
outvocalize anyone in an asphyxiatingly het-
eronormative society had the potential to be
world-transforming. In this context, Lucecita
and her team’s adaptation of black pride ico-
nography must have come as something of
a relief to multiple sectors because, however
startling the Afro may have been, it was fasci-
nating, readable, containable, deployable, and
punishable, while her voice in performance
and its queer embodiment demanded more
complicated thought.8
Her signal track of the 1970s is the hit
song “Soy de una raza pura” (“I Belong to a
Pure Race”), another classic of the Puerto
Rican late colonial sound track. he graphic
artist Antonio Martorell created an intense
album cover to illustrate the song, represent-
ing Lucecita with her Afro in the nude, her
arms outstretched, using red and blue to cre-
ate a powerful and alternative image of the
star body in a racist, homophobic, sexist, and
classist society (ig. 2). Musically, the track re-
fers to blackness by enlisting elements of soul.
Lucecita works mostly melodically, with her
typically crystalline delivery but without her
characteristic melodramatic technique. Audi-
ence members waited, some in thrall, others
in disgust, until the moment when the artist,
performing live on television, raised her let
ist in the verse “también sé gritar, ¡a guerra!”
(“I also know how to cry out, To war!”). She
inscribed, through a momentary dissonance
in the star body, the proindependence and
difusely letist gesture forever into the song
and collective memory.
It was, yet again, the artist’s performance
that made “Soy de una raza pura” a classic
and touchstone. It climbed the charts and rep-
resented an unusual moment when celebrity
and the thinking voice coexisted. he artist,
however, felt estranged from her recording
and image. A closer look at the iconography
of 1970–73 reveals an unexamined tug-of-war
between the tuxedo and the Afro—social,
 1096 The Thinking Voice: When Listening Trumps Celebrity
theories and methodologies
FIG. 2
The artiste. Cover
of the album
Lucecita (Hit Parade
61), 1973. Cover
design by Antonio
Martorell.
mainly sartorial and visual signs that the art-
ist most likely experienced as secondary to the
sonorous event of the voice. Having become
overdetermined by the social (read mostly vi-
sually), Lucecita risked losing her grasp of the
thinking voice; she risked merely being con-
sumed as a celebrity, albeit a nonconforming,
controversial one. Although as a young artist
she had stated she coveted fame, when fame
arrived it let her a little cold, perhaps because
it became notoriety. It no longer was about the
thinking voice. he artist lost interest in ce-
lebrity and singing, lamenting, on the release
of her “Soy de una raza pura,” that “yo puedo
[ PM L A
cantar, pero no hablar” (“I can sing, but I can-
not speak” [“Con Lucecita”]).
In 1974, finally freed from contractual
obligations to Paquito Cordero, Lucecita was
ready to create true artistic trouble with the
landmark concert Traigo un pueblo en mi voz
(“I Bring a People in My Voice”), in which
she switched to a cantautor (“male singer-
songwriter”) repertoire, mostly penned
by two Argentines: the folk-revival icon
Atahualpa Yupanqui and the sentimental
(bordering on corny) Alberto Cortez. Unfor-
tunately, no recording of the concert is com-
mercially available. The gorgeous program
126.4 ] Licia Fiol-Matta
booklet provides a visual trace of this brief
but signiicant attempt to change the terms of
Lucecita’s celebrity existence, encapsulated in
the limpid image of the artist singing, sim-
ply emanating sound from an open mouth
(ig. 3). Yet this contestatory, scintillating con-
cert appearance soon gave sway to a conser-
vative mode featuring a stylized performance
of progressive politics, joining middle-class,
corporatist taste in music with a vaguely
let-leaning repertoire, an unlikely marriage
structuring the 1975 concert En las manos del
pueblo (“In the Hands of the People”).
Troubled with what her own vocalizing
had become, Lucecita arrived at the quandary
of vocality, of the human voice: “The voice
is sound, not speech. But speech constitutes
its essential destination” (Cavarero 12). Vo-
cal performance, as it existed in the colony
in the mid-1970s, was possibly curtailing her
attempts at speech. She started to mention
writing a book about her life. She enrolled in
classes at the University of Puerto Rico, where
she could be spotted performatively travers-
ing the Río Piedras campus, surrounded by a
dancing coterie of hip women. She appeared
in political protests, sang in union events and
for an array of let-wing groups, and expressed
sympathy for the Cuban Revolution, activities
that would continue for the rest of the decade.
As part of her exploration of what voice
meant, Lucecita embarked on a trip to Cuba in
the summer of 1975, just ater the concert En
las manos del pueblo. here she participated
in various consciousness-raising activities and
sang at the opening of a school in Matanzas.
When she came back, she found that her na-
tive country had declared her persona non
grata, contrary to 1969 and her triumphant
return from the Festival de la Canción Latina.
Lucecita was blacklisted. She could not record
or appear in entertainment venues or on tele-
vision, and her songs were not played on the
radio. Notwithstanding her previous celebrity,
vocal brilliance, and unending supply of “It,”
she could not ind work and became further
1097
FIG. 3
Attempting to exit
celebrity. Program
booklet cover for
Traigo un pueblo
en mi voz, May
1974. The cover is
printed in black,
white, and grays.
demonized as a leftist extremist. While in
1969 the Cold War had intersected with her
performance of “Génesis” and other songs in
her repertoire in a putatively positive way, her
1975 performances transected world crisis and
the Cuban Revolution in a way that proved
near catastrophic for her career; her celebrity
was all but wiped out. he state had succeeded
in making her notorious.
Despite continual harassment and dii-
culty landing gigs, Lucecita remained stead-
fast in her commitment to the independence
of Puerto Rico and to social justice. She
thus became intrinsically related to mean-
ing and truth beyond the realm of celebrity.
hrough the Socialist Party’s annual Festival
de Claridad and other such open-air events,
principally Puerto Rico’s numerous fiestas
patronales, or patron-saint town festivals,
she retained a live connection with an audi-
ence. Still, left circles, looking to the futu-
rity of the “new man,” had a hard time with
sentimental song, deeming it an instance of
“false consciousness” unless it straightfor-
wardly represented equality between a man
and a woman. Indeed, the topic recurred in
the Socialist Party newspaper’s estimable cul-
tural supplement, En rojo, in which a wide
array of articles dissected the nueva canción
and nueva trova movements and the potential
 1098 The Thinking Voice: When Listening Trumps Celebrity
harm sentimental songs could portend for
theories and methodologies
“the masses.”9 he let’s support of Lucecita
was important but partial. It ultimately did
not know what to make of her and continued
to be patriarchal and normative, homopho-
bic, and sexist, thereby reducing thought.
Eventually, because of her dire inancial
situation, she accepted somewhat perverse
but well-paid invitations to appear at private
parties of wealthy liberals, where she was in-
variably asked to perform “Génesis,” a song
she had outgrown. For these occasions, she
was outitted ater this elite’s taste, in designer
gowns evoking a normative femininity that
was the opposite of the 1969 “caped tux.” hus,
elites manipulated the artist through their
twisted and privatized exercise of memory
and their acquisition power. hey purchased
a memory of the elusive moment when Puerto
Rico broke into world fame but stripped this
performance of thought and reformatted it to
comply with heteronormativity.
It is incorrect to blame the artist’s so-
called diicult personality or her alleged per-
sonal alictions or her political “turn” for the
derailment in her career, as many commenta-
tors, fans, and associates have done. Several
social actors—right, left, and center—had
a share, in part through damaged or absent
listening and a refusal to “think” voice. he
right was the most problematic, since it aimed
for outright sufocation of the voice. Imitat-
ing repressive regimes in South America and
Spain, the state promoted what Daniel Party
has termed the “placer culpable” (“shameful
pleasure”) of the 1970s balada, supporting
artists who worked in this dominant, pre-
sumptively apolitical, and certiiable celeb-
rity music (72–78). Lucecita had little choice
but to return to the more normative realm of
celebrity as it was expressed in music culture
in the atermath of the 1970s.
Her third and inal iconic moment hap-
pened with her turn to hyperfemininity in
the 1980s. Lucecita resorted to producing
her own records, eventually releasing albums
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under her own label, Lobo. he second Lobo
release, Éxitos callejeros (1984), was apoliti-
cal, but the singer’s deployment of a think-
ing voice resurfaced at the intersection where
fans across classes, many women, many
queer, met as nomadic subjects (Deleuze and
Guattari), outside the political deadlock in
the island nation. Diferent from the abstract
appeal of “Génesis” in the Cold War and from
the liberal-to-let recourse to the people or the
nation during the debacle of the 1970s, the
call of this music was to the calle (“street”).
he meeting ground proposed was abjection,
a sort of bottom power, a sentimental politics.
“Éxitos callejeros” is a musician’s term
for a repertoire played live in street festivals
and other such events, from which most of
the working musician’s income derives, a
repertoire that in theory diverges from the
songs chosen for recording in an album.
Therefore, in a way the title alludes to the
work that Lucecita had gone through, toiling
through years of downfall and then relative
obscurity, performing for left-wing, inde-
pendence, and social-justice causes in Puerto
Rico. Indeed, the concerts and continued ap-
pearances in open-air events kept alive, so to
speak, the artist’s symbolic representation
of such causes, even if her performance mo-
tifs were almost completely altered from the
1960s and 1970s and the politicized voice had
ostensibly disappeared.
All the tracks re-create conservative por-
trayals of heterosexual love, sometimes in the
moment of sex, sometimes unrequited love.
he repertoire belonged to established balada
stars, like Roberto Carlos, Raphael Martos,
Ángela Carrasco, and Rocío Dúrcal. It is
probable that Dúrcal, a Spanish singer, was
the primary model for Lucecita’s new look.
In the album’s signature track, “Fruta verde,”
copied with few modifications from Dúr-
cal’s 1983 recording, her performance works
a saucy content into a melodramatic tour de
force targeting the “feminine” listener and in-
jecting pathos into a casual song. It is a depar-
126.4 ] Licia Fiol-Matta
ture from the more abstract versions of love
that Lucecita had represented until then and a
vast improvement over Dúrcal’s rather blood-
less interpretation. She gleefully unleashed
kitsch, her main 1980s code, inciting the jou-
issance of soap opera in her listeners. (In fact,
both versions were soap opera themes: Dúr-
cal’s was used in Spain, Lucecita’s in Argen-
tina.) Low-budget and low-tech, the song was
recorded in a makeshit studio, in the home of
her former artistic director and the “Génesis”
arranger, Pedro Rivera Toledo. It was squarely
aimed at lowbrow taste, coded as feminine.
As such, the recording went against the grain
of her more typical masculine identiications.
Fans responded with near frenzy at her
encapsulation of hurt yet soulful feeling in
this virtuosic power ballad. Bafflingly, Lu-
cecita is not regularly included in lists of
Spanish-language pop divas of the time, al-
though arguably she executed the full melo-
dramatic form in a more masterly way than
the singers on such lists. Virtuosic vocal
breaks, pitch contrast, and climaxes, delivered
in a haunting low register, distinguished her
from other pop stars, male and female, with
their thinner, higher voices and monotonous
renditions. Her delivery overcame the clichés
that abounded in the songs, as all the while
she cut an imposing figure in a feminine,
full-length gown or elegant suit, salon hair,
and sequins or star-studded jewelry (ig. 4).
Despite the accoutrements, she was as strik-
ingly butch visually as were her performances
musically, doling out pianissimos and fortis-
simos in equal measure.10 Possibly her butch-
ness is the reason she is excluded from diva
lists. Compare her performances to those of
her counterparts across the Spanish-speaking
world, and she emerges as unmistakably, ar-
restingly queer in a voice that thinks.
he success of “Fruta verde” led to a se-
ries of records in which Lucecita exploited
fans’ desire to hear her performance of can -
cion es cortavenas (literally, “slit-your-wrists
songs”), exaggerated, sentimental songs about
1099
unrequited love that re- create a depressed
theories and methodologies
afect. Her fandom divided into two camps.
One delighted at the artist’s change and pre-
sumptive end of the long political-song night-
mare. Another experienced something akin
to a loss of meaning, a cultural melancholia.
Full disclosure: I was one of those forlorn fans
who continued attending concerts through-
out the 1980s waiting for the real Lucecita to
come back. Like all fans worth their salt, I
was convinced I knew what she should sing. I
did not like the repertoire, costume, afect, or
anything else of this 1980s incarnation. With
time and study and critical listening, I’ve re-
alized that a thinking voice lurks also in that
last iconic moment of her career.
Nearing seventy, Lucecita is still singing
and occupying her role, however emptied,
as la voz nacional de Puerto Rico (“Puerto
Rico’s national voice”). Yet no renewed ico-
nicity emerged ater the 1980s. Instead, she
regularly recycled her three prior avatars into
concerts appealing to the nostalgia market. In
the neoliberal 1990s, anything could be con-
sumed, and everything was lattened to suit
consumption, so that her live appearances,
CD releases, and rereleases of her old records
all became the same cultural-nationalist
product, drained of a thinking voice.
FIG. 4
The diva. Cover
of the album
Criollo folklore
(Grabaciones
Lobo 001), 1983.
Photograph by
Jochi Melero.
 1100 The Thinking Voice: When Listening Trumps Celebrity
From queer masculinity (the auteur
theories and methodologies
of “Génesis”), through Puerto Rico’s “wild
transference” in the political sign in the 1970s
(the artiste of “Soy de una raza pura”), to hy-
perfeminine yet butch normativity (the diva
of “Fruta verde”), she showed remarkable
dexterity as an artist reluctantly immersed
in celebrity culture and paradoxically con-
strained precisely by her innate star quality
and capacity to transmute visually. Against
any demand on the artist to confess to sala-
cious truths that would settle and conine her
voice’s meaning, throughout her career her
reticence—her desire to signify only her per-
sona and keep her person to herself—stands
out. Unwittingly or not, she danced around
celebrity’s strictures and kept the focus on vo-
cal performance, impelling her public toward
thought through the sense of hearing and
the act of listening. his is, in Heideggerian
terms, the “git” of the thinking voice.
In terms of community, something Lu-
cecita cared about since she was young, the
artist was let with a trite insistence on love
and an unresolved demand for restitution.
“Puerto Rico doesn’t love me,” she has re-
peated insistently. Yet, as listeners today, we
can orient our sense of hearing to what is alle-
gorical in the voice, to its pastness, tuning into
the artist’s call to restitution by listening to
“the contemporaneity of the audible” (Nancy
16). More than most artists of her time, Lu-
cecita embodied and stood by voice’s desire
to articulate truth and speech in unjust late
colonial modernity and its celebrity culture.
As an object culled from recordings, footage,
recollections, archives of images, and print,
through which she lives in a celebrity aterlife,
she continues to compel us to think voice.
NOTES
1. “Operation Bootstrap” is the English for Manos a
la Obra, or, literally, “put your hands to work,” the 1947
[ PM L A
economic program intended to spur the modernization
of Puerto Rico through the replacement of a rural with an
industrial economy. It was the centerpiece of the found-
ing in 1952 of the current political entity, the Estado Libre
Asociado (Commonwealth of Puerto Rico). he program
relied heavily on a corporate tax exemption for United
States companies that operated in Puerto Rico, provid-
ing cheap labor to the companies, and on state-sponsored
mass migration to the United States. he heyday of Oper-
ation Bootstrap occurred roughly between 1955 and 1970.
2. I employ “thinking” ater Heidegger: “Everything
thought-provoking gives us to think. But it always gives
that git just so far as the thought-provoking matter al-
ready is intrinsically what must be thought about” (4).
3. “[T]he visual is on the side of an imaginary capture
(which does not imply that it is reduced to that), while the
sonorous is on the side of referral/renvoi (which does not
imply that it exhausts its amplitude). In still other words,
the visual is tendentially mimetic, and the sonorous ten-
dentially methexic (that is, having to do with participa-
tion, sharing, or contagion), which does not mean that
the two tendencies do not intersect” (10).
4. he festival’s contract stipulated that the winner
record the winning song right ater the festival’s conclu-
sion. It was then released as a single.
5. “La cancionista puertorriqueña Lucecita, vistiendo
ropa masculina y corte de pelo a la usanza varonil, pero
con personalidad muy femenina, interpretó de forma im-
presionante la canción titulada ‘Génesis’ en representa-
ción de Puerto Rico para obtener la mayor puntuación”
(“he Puerto Rican singer Lucecita, wearing masculine
dress and hairdo, but with a very feminine personality,
was impressive in her performance of the song titled ‘Gé-
nesis,’ representing Puerto Rico and obtaining the high-
est score in the competition”; Inclán; my trans.).
6. “In a curious bodily topology, it is like a bodily
missile which separates itself from the body and spreads
around, but on the other hand it points to a bodily inte-
rior, an intimate partition of the body which cannot be
disclosed—as if the voice were the very principle of divi-
sion into exterior and interior” (71).
7. For examples of Lucecita’s self- discourse at this
time, see the interviews by Magali García Ramis (“La
transfor mación de Lucecita” [“Lucecita’s Transforma-
tion”]); by Luz Raquel Ávila (“Lucecita en el Coliseo: ‘A
mí no me controla nadie’” [“Lucecita at the [Roberto Cle-
mente] Coliseum: ‘No one controls me’”]); and by Manuel
Ra mos Otero and Rosario Ferré (“Con Lucecita” [“With
Lucecita”]).
8. For a groundbreaking discussion of Lucecita’s Afro
and its reception in the early 1970s, see Rivero 72–85.
9. Nueva canción and nueva trova refer to late-1960s
and early-1970s musical movements in Chile and Cuba,
respectively, with a wide continental appeal. hese move-
ments were let wing, anticommercial, and oten revival-
ist, aligned particularly with Salvador Allende’s Popular
126.4 ] Licia Fiol-Matta
Unity Front (nueva canción) and the Cuban Revolution
(nueva trova).
10. Eliseo Colón Zayas perceptively analyzes Luceci­
ta’s album covers and the semiotic codes through which
her 1980s visual butchness is visible. Colón follows Rich­
ard Dyer’s inluential, semiotic analysis of lesbian stars.
WORKS CITED
Benítez, Lucecita. “Con Lucecita.” Interview by Manuel
Ra mos Otero and Rosario Ferré. Zona de carga y des­
carga 1.6 (1973): 22–23. Print.
———, perf. “Fruta verde.” By Rafael Pérez Botija. Éxitos
callejeros. Lobo, 1984. LP.
———, perf. “Génesis.” By Guillermo Venegas Lloveras.
Génesis. Hit Parade, 1969. LP.
———. “Lucecita en el Coliseo: ‘A mí no me controla na­
die.’” Interview by Luz Raquel Ávila. Avance 11 Nov.
1974: 54–57. Print.
———, perf. “Soy de una raza pura.” By David Ortiz and
Tony Croatto. Lucecita. Hit Parade, 1973. LP.
———. “La transformación de Lucecita.” Interview by Ma­
gali García Ramis. Avance 6 Aug. 1973: 20–25. Print.
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Cavarero, Adriana. For More han One Voice: Toward a
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Colón Zayas, Eliseo. “Imagen discográica e identidades:
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