ABSTRACT
Myrta Silva (Puerto Rico, 1923–1987) is known as one of the all-time best singers of Cuban guarachas. This chapter explores the psychoanalytic object a cause of desire as the voice and queer performance by examining at the Puerto Rican singer Myrta Silva, working from her repercussions performance brought by a humorous song created jointly by written for her, Silva and the Cuban composer Nico Saquito (Antonio Fernandez), “Camina como Chencha” (“Chencha’s Gait”). This song and its performance fused the real-life Silva with the fictive Chencha. Silva, who had embodied sexual desire as both “Myrta” and “Chencha” in a brilliant career, was remembered only as the “Chencha” of the end of her career, when seen as a disgusting object. The chapter takes the reader back to Silva’s beginnings as actress Silva‘s musicianship and performative genius musician, theorizing by examining the status of how she mobilized the voice as the typical Lacanian part-object, thereby holding audiences in thrall throughout the hemisphere before she sang that famous song. What happened was the splicing of two signifiers, first joined by metonymy, that became involved in a struggle ultimately won by metaphor, queering notions of authenticity and sexual performance. Still today, Silva is mostly remembered as a disgusting object, as the “Chencha” birthed by the song. Audiences have fused the real-life Silva with a fictive character of an oversexed and vulgar woman. The chapter seeks to refute the common-sense, sexist and homophobic perception that “Chencha” merely reflected Silva‘s own temperament, discussing Silva’s brand of queer performativity and how it pivoted on her uncanny understanding of voice as object as the nothing.
