She worked against that reduction persistently. She took vocal coaching in the early 1930s and developed a singing voice capable of genuine emotional range. She starred in films: *Siren of the Tropics* in 1927, *Zou-Zou* in 1934, *Princesse Tam-Tam* in 1935. She added a pet cheetah named Chiquita to her stage act, an animal that occasionally escaped into the orchestra pit and created scenes that newspapers reported with evident delight. She added new elements to her performances — comedy, sentiment, spectacle — and gradually built an artistic identity that went beyond the original “exotic dancer” framing.
Her 1931 hit recording “J’ai deux amours” — “I have two loves, my country and Paris” — became her signature song. The country referenced was France; the song expressed with unusual directness the specific attachment she had developed for a place that was not her birthplace but had become her home in every way that mattered.
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## French Citizen
In 1937 Josephine Baker married Jean Lion, a wealthy French Jewish industrialist and aviation pioneer. The marriage gave her something she had been denied: French citizenship. She was thirty years old.
The timing was not incidental. The year 1937 was the year the Spanish Civil War was grinding toward the Fascist victory that would install Francisco Franco as Spain’s dictator, the year that Germany and Italy signed the Pact of Steel, the year that Japanese forces attacked China. The specific shape of the coming catastrophe was visible to anyone paying attention, and Baker was paying attention.
As a French citizen, Baker’s relationship to the coming war was not the same as an American expatriate’s would have been. France was not a country she had been born to; it was a country she had chosen, and that had chosen her, through the specific mechanism of citizenship. The legal fact of citizenship changed her obligations under French law; it also, by her own account, changed her sense of personal obligation. France was her country now, and France was in danger.