Where is the line between pretending to be and becoming?

Passing is the ability of a person to be considered a member of another group or identity category different from their own. A common concept since the late 1920s in the United States to refer to people who, due to their features and skin color, being black, can pass for white to avoid stigmatization, be socially accepted (and therefore suffer rejection from their community). This term, now 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 scholarship, which tells the story of a woman who passes for white. At this time, Federico García Lorca came into 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 with this vision from the otherness that he makes the center of “Poet in New York.” He writes “Burned Negro” and wants to accompany it with a descriptive image, probably a postcard of the massive lynchings published in “The Crisis.” These postcards of torture and burning of people, mainly 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 denunciation that appears in Lorca’s poems where the elements are polysemic, some pass for others and at the same time are several. An incendiary Lorca, full of death and life, demands 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 happens to be death? As a chronicle of a death foretold, in Spain he tries to deliver to his friend and editor Bergamín the draft of “Poet in New York” with 18 images, his drawings and photographs referenced to where each one should go: “Dear Pepe, I have been to see you and I think I will return tomorrow. Hugs Federico”. But Lorca did not return, the photos disappeared and “Negro quemado” never accompanied his poem. Would the same hurtful photograph have been transformed into his poetry book? Would it have become something else? What is transformation if not a change of perspective?