GETTING OFF ... THE NATION

In a 1973 interview, the mercurial Puerto Rican singer, entertainer, and entrepreneur Myrta Silva stated, "I'm a winner. I only failed at the beginning of my career ... ever since I became a public figure, I have never once failed." Despite the singer's confident declaration, Silva was well aware of the entanglement between "figure" and "failure." She learned that failure was always around the corner when she set foot in New York City as a barely teenaged immigrant, circa 1938. She emigrated, she said, to become an artist. Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in 1923, Silva lived in poverty in the big city along with thousands of Puerto Rican and Latino immigrants, working an average of twenty-five revue shows a week as a means of support and a way to initiate her music career.

In a milieu Ruth Glasser lucidly describes as dominated by U.S. recording companies and their demand for "ethnic music," Silva advertised her talent to RCA Victor as a guaracha singer. She staked her claim on her special affinity with the genre by describing herself as matching the genre's temperament in personality terms: "On my own initiative, I went to the RCA Victor offices, and asked to speak to the head of the Latin department, making it clear that if he did not see me they would lose out on the best guaracha singer there was, of this new Latin American genre." Approximately three decades after Silva's daring stunt, in 1966, TV Radio Mirror would run a bilingual spread on Silva, "The Fat Golden One/La Gorda de Oro."

In 1939, a young lady walked into radio station WARD in Brooklyn, said she was a great star and so impressed people that she was put to work singing and doing commercials. After her first show, for which she was paid one dollar, she sent herself one hundred fan letters. The young lady was Myrta Silva and she was thirteen years old. Today, Myrta doesn't have to send any fan letters to herself, since she has one of the most devoted audiences in television. Myrta's show, An Hour with You, is aired live over Newark's WNJU-TV, the New York metropolitan area's first commercial UHF television. And that hour — Monday evening from 9 to 10 — is seen by over 90 per cent of the area's Spanish-speaking viewers.

In 1967, Silva was awarded the TV Radio Mirror prize for producing TV's Top Variety Show in New York, and WNJU-TV received the award for Outstanding Programming in the Broadcasting Arts, for The Myrta Silva Show. Silva had become a beloved representative of the Puerto Rican community in New York of the 1960s. While hers was a Spanish-language show, the prize was for all New York–area television, not just Latino TV. Puerto Rican newspapers ran the news, citing the magazine's circulation of six million and the prize's standing as the oldest such prize at the time in the U.S. radio and TV industry. Silva is quoted as saying,

I accept this prize in the name of all us hispanos who live in New York City, so that it may serve as an incentive, so that you can see that your sacrifices and struggles have not been in vain. I am humbly grateful, because, above all things, this prize equals the recognition of Puerto Rican talent wherever we may find ourselves. Personally, I can say this is the greatest prize I have received in my twenty-seven years in show business. Most significant is the fact that this prize has been awarded to me in this city of New York, the greatest city on earth, and where I started my career going hungry and earning a miserable salary of fifteen dollars a month.

From the beginning of her career, she had cared about Latinos in the city. She had been one of them. Silva debuted at the Atlantic Theater in Brooklyn in 1939, became a regular in New York venues like the Teatro Hispano, Teatro Puerto Rico, and Carnegie Hall, and kept a residence so she could maintain New York as the home base of her artistic operations. Among her many leadership actions in her crowning, 1960s years, she joined a protest against Playboy magazine for running a spread offensive to Cuban women and led a protest against Ed Sullivan in 1968 for derisive remarks about Puerto Rican women in one of his TV broadcasts.

While she triumphed in New York City, and pioneered Latino television in the United States, her beloved Puerto Rico had become viciously split about its biggest star. Viewers were quick to question her national allegiances and harbored an uncomfortable-to-repulsed attitude toward her unmarried, yet sexual status. Silva's declaration of her greatest love — for her mother, Mamá Yeya — surfaced on occasion as palliative: "Es lesbiana, pero buena hija" [She's a lesbian, true, but she's a good daughter]. Other viewers simply went into panic mode, ordering their children to "turn off the TV; we don't watch that dyke in our house." The epithet of the Fat Golden One encapsulates the quandary of simultaneous hatred and adoration: Being called fat in Puerto Rico was completely insulting, and certainly desexualizing, but the adjectival phrase "de oro" conveyed feelings of appreciation and a statement about sterling character.

Even today, music critics and journalists use this soubriquet that Silva resented, in addition to the infantilizing diminutive gordita or nuestra gordita. Beyond these problematic appropriations and rejections, perusing music history books yields the conclusion that Silva, arguably the single most successful Puerto Rican twentieth-century pop star, appears as a footnote to a history narrated around male figures, a history written in lockstep with national-popular teleologies of cultural identity and progress. Figures like Silva have merited only a few lines or, at best, cursory mentions in brief articles devoted to women artists or composers. How can this narrative be written otherwise? What did Silva crystallize as an artist, and how did it happen? What are the stakes of this career and why has its illustriousness been all but forgotten? This chapter steps back in time to provide an archive-based genealogy to contextualize this shocking oblivion — an account based on music culture, not patriarchal and heteronormative fantasies.

Silva had a developed and conceptual understanding of her voice. At her most memorable, she used this vehicle against enforced strictures of sexual and gender behavior, targeting dominant bourgeois morality. She was never malleable and saleable. Silva believed completely in her artistic, individual, and social autonomy while refusing to be expelled from belonging and her right to have opinions, no matter how unpopular. Silva's triumph despite gender strictures (including her accomplishments in the business arena of the music industry) made the establishment very uncomfortable indeed. This discomfort was displaced onto insidious characterizations of her personality and artistic temperament. The few authoritative accounts of Myrta Silva's career have contributed to naturalize the dominant culture's construction of Silva. This gendered writing hampers Puerto Rican music...