La Mulata.

Canel, Eva. La Mulata: Drama original en tres actos y un prólogo. Habana: La Universal, 1893. 23 cm, 68 pp.; in orig. decorative wraps, fragile with chipping, losses, and a closed tear affecting the first six pages. Rear wraps with more losses. Fair only.

The prolific Spanish author Eva Canel (1857-1932) lived and wrote in the Americas, predominantly in Cuba. La Mulata was written in response to the colonial and racial anxieties of passing, and she offered it up later as an example of her antiracist sentiments. Although it is in the tradition of sentimental abolitionist literature, Canel’s main character, Patria, disrupts racial and class stereotypes in surprising ways. Patria, a Venezuelan mulata woman who serves as the moral anchor of the play, upholds peninsular ideals of domestic femininity against the villainy of a white aristocratic class. Rather than the more common figure of a sexualized or tragic mulata, Canel’s main character is a virtuous mother and wife. With transnational action in Venezuela and Spain, the play ends with Patria’s son, who has been passing as the white heir to the Marqués de la Trinidad, renouncing his father, his inheritance, and “the fiction of being white.”   

La Mulata was written in 1891 in Barcelona, just before Canel left Spain for Cuba in March. A small run of the first edition was published in Spain but never performed. Canel addresses the play’s history in a short introduction to this, the second and corrected edition, printed in conjunction with its world premiere in Havana.

The play made a deep impression on audiences of both European and African descent in Havana, 7 years after the final abolition of slavery. A letter published in 1916 in the Diario de la Marina (reviewing Canel’s book Lo que vi en Cuba) by an Afro-Cuban author recalls La Mulata’s reception: the “sublime drama (...) rang like a bell of vindication,” and Canel was celebrated in the Afro-Cuban community as a “redeemer and defender of women oppressed by their color.”  

Fewer than 10 copies indexed in OCLC. Possibly 2 copies of the first edition, never performed, exist in institutional holdings.

See:

Copeland, Eva María. "Racialized Female Domesticity and Racial Passing in Eva Canel’s La mulata (1891)." Journal of Gender and Sexuality Studies / Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades. Vol. 47, No. 2 (2021), pp. 1-20.

Meteors, Ana. “Aren’t we mothers all the same?’: Personhood and Patria in Eva Canel's La mulata.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. Vol. 99, No. 8 (2019).