Enjajaja!

To Enya Umanzor, being Latina is a joke.

Enya is a Vine star: She has made her name posting Vines, seven second videos filled with slapstick comedy, cursing, and child-like ridiculousness, on social media for her thousands of followers. Enya’s comedy is deeply intertwined with her Latinidad and womanhood. But, both in content and form, it also challenges notions of how laughter and marginalized identity can coexist.

Enya challenges us to ask: What does it mean to laugh, not with, but at, Brown bodies? What does it mean, that is, to be a minstrel?

Minstrelsy is the performance of caricature. As in caricature, the political and ethical power of the marginalized body is neutered, reduced to the status of a plaything. And, as has caricature, minstrelsy has largely disappeared from the realm of high art, while low art’s resistance to standards of taste opens itself up to the practice. No low art form better demonstrates this than that guerilla, pubescent form of comedy we call Vines, which even after the official site was archived have continued to circulate across social media. Dubbed digital Blackface, social media comedy has seen a rise in the use of Black and Brown mannerisms and bodies for comedic effect. Enya is no exception.

In one Vine, Enya complains: “How are some kids so fucking rude to their parents? If I was that rude my parents would throw a tortilla so fast at me it would chop my head off!” Enya often plays off of her Latinidad. Her urban femme Latinx identity is a punchline. Enya listening to Big Poppa is a punchline. Enya not liking President Trump (because he will buy more toupées!) is a punchline. Enya liking tacos is a punchline.

Enya does not portray a Latina woman, but a racist, misogynistic notion of a Latina woman. She, in a move reminiscent of Auntie Walker, lets herself become a caricature. Enya is a force, a pubescent bruja who reeks of inner-city-Miami absurdity and Gen Z transgression. She barrels through life, camera in hand, loudly cursing at her parents, God, and country. She mimes “sitting on dicks”; she screams “We want some pussy!”; she punches her siblings.

In so embodying caricature, Enya lets those watching her, including and especially white folks, laugh at her being Latina. What can this be but minstrelsy? And why should we ever embrace such an aesthetic?

How can a marginalized artist be other than a minstrel? Like SOPHIE, they would have to construct a presentation of their identity that frees itself from the gaze of those in power.

But this depends on a hermetic art, an art that exists solely for marginalized people. Is this possible, in a world where mass art is made accessible for all, where low art is defined by its universality, where white consumption of Brown art is not an exception, but the rule? Perhaps the attempts of marginalized artists to escape the racializing, gendering glare of the powerful are futile.

If freedom is impossible, if the marginalized artist will always be viewed by those in power, and in that consumption be rendered into an object stripped of humanity, a caricature, then what hope is there for an aesthetics of freedom, an artistic project of self-definition?

Enya is not the first artist to become a minstrel. The theorist José Esteban Muñoz explores minstrelsy through the Cubano performance style of choteo, an underground, low form of theater in which the performer both becomes and mocks the role performed. Performance, in choteo, becomes an interrogation of, not assimilation into, socially mandated roles.

This is exactly what Enya does. She performs, for the sake of her white viewers, the American nightmare of the sexed-up, drugged-up, foul-mouthed Latina girl. Minstrelsy has never been an accurate representation of authentic Blackness or Latinidad. It is a performance thereof, an absurd heightening of the features of marginalized existence that does not align with the lived experience of those identities. And in this performance, there is power.

The performance of the minstrel, to quote Muñoz, is “forced labor.” The slave dances, twisted grin like a noose wrapped around their neck, because they must, or they will die. They play the part they are given, because they must, or they will die.

But Enya chooses to perform. If we think of performance as the playing of a role that one is not, Enya reveals that the twisted notion of Latinidad that America holds dear is a joke in reaching so far away from the standards of good taste — in heightening Latinidad to levels of absurdity.

Enya’s performance is parody. And like all good parody, it utterly deconstructs the object of its humor. For Enya, this object is not Latinidad (Enya is not advocating for postracialism) but rather the twisted caricature forced upon Latinx people. Enya deconstructs this caricature not by rationally arguing against it, nor by presenting an alternative, but by leaning into it. To laugh at Enya is to laugh at the racist caricature itself.

Low art, that is, gives us a final, thrilling possibility. We need not become lost in a desperate game of respectability politics. That will only bind us to a never-ending game of power and privilege. Nor do we need to make futile attempts to escape the gaze of those in power.

The raw materials for liberation are already at hand. They are not the master’s tools, but rather the master’s garbage, that which he has foolishly cast away. The minstrel embodies every distasteful notion and expectation placed against marginalized peoples. Rather than flee these notions, the minstrel causes them to self-detonate.

It is in the most profane moments, when one is most firmly in the dung-filled chasm of the low, that the cracks in the crystal castle of whiteness begin to show.

All it takes is one good laugh, one sharp outtake of breath, and it all comes crashing down.

—Contributing writer Nicholas P. Whittaker’s column, "Low End Theory,” digs deep into the archive of bad, taboo, and ugly art, seeking political liberation in the low.