Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities 0816539367, 9780816539369

Table of contents :
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities: An Introduction / Frederick Luis Aldama and Arturo J. Aldama
PART I. HYBRID FORMS
1. Billy the Kid’s Corpse and the Specter of Mexican Manhood / John-Michael Rivera
2. Trump’s Poetics of Caca: Shitty “Bad Hombres” and “Shithole” Latin American Countries / Sergio A. Macías
3. “Noizy Minorityz”: White Republicans Trapped in the Cypher / Wayne Freeman
4. Homage to an Undocumented Heartbreak / Alberto Ledesma
5. Urban AlterNative Masculinity: Men, Land, and Re-Indigenization in Black Chicago’s Food Autonomy Movement / Pancho McFarland
6. Learning with Norma Montoya: Scholarship as Accompaniment, Accountability, and the Advancement of a Conscientious and Caring Masculinity / Jonathan D. Gomez
PART II. TRANSMEDIAL DETOXIFICATIONS
7. Decolonizing Predatory Masculinities in Breaking Bad and Mosquita y Mari / Arturo J. Aldama
8. Fighting the Good Fight: Grappling with Queerness, Masculinities, and Violence in Contemporary Latinx Literature and Film / T. Jackie Cuevas
9. Latin Lovers, Chismosas, and Gendered Discourses of Power: The Role of the Subjective Narrator in Jane the Virgin / Kristie Soares
10. Fea, Firme y Formal: Decolonizing Latinx Female Masculinity / Ellie Hernández
11. Chicano Dracula: The Passions and Predations of Bela Lugosi, Gomez Addams, and Kid Congo Powers / Paloma Martinez- Cruz
PART III. TROUBLING STORYWORLDS: UNSETTLING MASCULINITIES
12. The Hyperpatriarchal Games: Machismo and Its Discontents in Contemporary Young-Adult Latinx Literature / Lisa Sánchez González
13. The Uncertain Harbor of Home: Fragments, Familia, and Failure in Manuel Muñoz’s “Bring Brang Brung” / William Orchard
14. Unsettling Monuments of Chicanx Masculinity in Estela Portillo Trambley’s “Rain of Scorpions” / Francisco E. Robles
PART IV. WHY THE LATIN-X MATTERS: FROM PERFORMANCE TO ACTIVISM
15. Trans*lating the Genderqueer -x Through Caxcan, Nahua, and Xicanx Indígena Knowledge / Jennie Luna and Gabriel S. Estrada
16. “Eres Cuir, or What?”: Latinx Disidentificatory Practices of Becoming / Laura Malaver
17. Decolonizing Heteronormativities and Patriarchy Within Dominant Immigrant Rights Discourse / Alejandra Benita Portillos
18. A Rodeo to Call Their Own: LGBTQ Vaqueros and the Gay Rodeo of the American West / Nicholas Villanueva Jr.
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

DECOLONIZING LATINX MASCULINITIES

Latinx Pop Culture

SERIES EDITORS

Frederick Luis Aldama and Arturo J. Aldama

DECOLONIZING LATINX MASCULINITIES Edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Frederick Luis Aldama

The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu © 2020 by The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2020 ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3936-9 (paper) Cover design by Leigh McDonald Cover art: Los Putasos by Raúl the Third Typeset by Sara Thaxton Fonts used: 10.5/13.5 Warnock Pro (body) and Futura Std (display) Publication of this book is made possible in part by financial support from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Aldama, Arturo J., 1964– editor. | Aldama, Frederick Luis, 1969– editor. Title: Decolonizing Latinx masculinities / Arturo J. Aldama and Frederick Luis Aldama. Other titles: Latinx pop culture. Description: Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, 2020. | Series: Latinx pop culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019052047 | ISBN 9780816539369 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Hispanic American men— Social conditions. Classification: LCC E184.S75 D43 2020 | DDC 305.38/8968073— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052047 Printed in the United States of America ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For all future-gen Latinxs to live and create with unbounded masculinities

CONTENTS Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities: An Introduction Frederick Luis Aldama and Arturo J. Aldama

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PART I. HYBRID FORMS 1. Billy the Kid’s Corpse and the Specter of Mexican Manhood John-Michael Rivera 2. Trump’s Poetics of Caca: Shitty “Bad Hombres” and “Shithole” Latin American Countries Sergio A. Macías

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3. “Noizy Minorityz”: White Republicans Trapped in the Cypher Wayne Freeman

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4. Homage to an Undocumented Heartbreak Alberto Ledesma

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5. Urban AlterNative Masculinity: Men, Land, and Re-Indigenization in Black Chicago’s Food Autonomy Movement Pancho McFarland 6. Learning with Norma Montoya: Scholarship as Accompaniment, Accountability, and the Advancement of a Conscientious and Caring Masculinity Jonathan D. Gomez

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PART II. TRANSMEDIAL DETOXIFICATIONS 7. Decolonizing Predatory Masculinities in Breaking Bad and Mosquita y Mari Arturo J. Aldama 8. Fighting the Good Fight: Grappling with Queerness, Masculinities, and Violence in Contemporary Latinx Literature and Film T. Jackie Cuevas 9. Latin Lovers, Chismosas, and Gendered Discourses of Power: The Role of the Subjective Narrator in Jane the Virgin Kristie Soares

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10. Fea, Firme y Formal: Decolonizing Latinx Female Masculinity Ellie Hernández 11. Chicano Dracula: The Passions and Predations of Bela Lugosi, Gomez Addams, and Kid Congo Powers Paloma Martinez-Cruz

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PART III. TROUBLING STORYWORLDS: UNSETTLING MASCULINITIES 12. The Hyperpatriarchal Games: Machismo and Its Discontents in Contemporary Young-Adult Latinx Literature Lisa Sánchez González

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13. The Uncertain Harbor of Home: Fragments, Familia, and Failure in Manuel Muñoz’s “Bring Brang Brung” William Orchard

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14. Unsettling Monuments of Chicanx Masculinity in Estela Portillo Trambley’s “Rain of Scorpions” Francisco E. Robles

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Cont ent s

PART IV. WHY THE LATIN-X MATTERS: FROM PERFORMANCE TO ACTIVISM

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15. Trans*lating the Genderqueer -x Through Caxcan, Nahua, and Xicanx Indígena Knowledge Jennie Luna and Gabriel S. Estrada

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16. “Eres Cuir, or What?”: Latinx Disidentificatory Practices of Becoming Laura Malaver

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17. Decolonizing Heteronormativities and Patriarchy Within Dominant Immigrant Rights Discourse Alejandra Benita Portillos

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18. A Rodeo to Call Their Own: LGBTQ Vaqueros and the Gay Rodeo of the American West Nicholas Villanueva Jr.

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Contributors

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Index

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DECOLONIZING LATINX MASCULINITIES

DECOLONIZING LATINX MASCULINITIES An Introduction Frederick Luis Aldama and Arturo J. Aldama

The shaping of our sense of masculinities begins early. It grows along with our continuously expanding reach into and interaction with the world: from proximate and extended family to community to society to nation to the planet. Paradoxically, the more our sense of self engages with an increasingly voluminous social space, the more we are straitjacketed in our sense of self as Latinxs. The above will resonate in unique ways with each of our brothers and sisters. For the two of us brothers, it began with our ever-present yet totally absent Mexican father. Letters, phone calls, and very infrequent visits made him a god in our minds. Being Latinx boys hungry for a role model, as we grew older we sought his approval. Even with college degrees and professorships, it never came. As much as our father tried to break free of his own father’s draconian, machista ways, he couldn’t help but replicate these with us. And yet, and yet, this was also the father who, during his infrequent visits with us, would hold our hands, give us hugs, share complex feelings and thoughts with aplomb. As he continues to struggle with how he wants to be with us, meanwhile, our late Guatemalan-Irish American mamá tried to push her father’s John Wayne– styled masculinity on us: guns, cowboy hats, burnt-yellow cigarette-stained fingers and lips, and shitkicker boots— a cara de palo and total emotional lockdown that hid secrets of his sexual abuse of his children and us grandchildren. As next-gen Latinxs we’ve chosen to break free from these seemingly prescriptive legacies. We’ve chosen to embrace ways of thinking, acting, and feeling that express our ever-shifting tectonic masculinities. Trigger warnings: Below are a range of hateful labels and terms that cause pain, trauma, and disassociation to human bodies and minds. We put these pervasive hateful terms on full display to call them out for what they are. The widespread use of these hate-speech terms and labels denigrates, shames, and violates folx, and is part of making bodies and beings “docile” in 3

the face of heteropatriarchal systems of gender formations. As Latinx folx, we live in constant “survivance” against these tropes and aggressions: 1.

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Spic, beaner, wetback, illegal alien, thug, gangster, lazy, tonto, mow my lawn, thief, liar, rapist, bad influence, domestic terrorist, stupid, illiterate, shifty-eyes, savage Puto, maricón, chavala, puta, crybaby, lloroncito, bitch, pussy, niñita, where are your huevos?, mamahuevos

Latinx boys and men live and grow within these sites of ongoing violence(s) both discursive and real. As young children, when we interact with other boys, older youth, fathers, uncles, and others, we all get messages about how to be a “man.” As boys and men, we feel surveilled, and in many cases we develop a hypervigilance against ongoing threats of state power: la chota or 5.0 (both slang terms for the police), la migra (INS and ICE), racist teachers, security guards, and parole officers. We boys to men also feel surveilled and questioned by other Latinx vatos/dudes who use the famous callout “Where you from, homey?” which can easily end in chingazos (fistfights or more), or by callouts from white boys to men who want to see if a “spic” can fight like a “real” man and/or want to teach “wetbacks” and “spics” who is boss. Latinx boys and men are encouraged to become misogynistic and homophobic in order to be rewarded by vatos, dudes, and bros with affirmations such as “homeboy is down,” “homeboy is firme,” “homeboy tiene mucho huevos,” “homeboy is cold,” “homeboy handles his business,” “homeboy got serious game with the chicas [girls],” and so on. Why are boys taught that the way to perform masculinities and gain approval and support from other men and within patriarchal family structures is to define ourselves through a denigration of girls, womxn, and the “feminine” (yet at the same time to be fierce and violent protectors of our sisters, primas, and mother, even seeing our mother as a disembodied santa/saint)? Boys to men are taught to front and to never allow themselves to ever be suspected of being/becoming “feminine” (code for “weak”) or nonbinary in their love, affection, and ways of being. The feared consequences of wanting to live a non-binary-gendered life are real for boys and men, as they are for all others: homophobic violence (from emotional or psychic violence to full-on beatings) by fathers, uncles, and older brothers; expulsion from the “sagrada” (sacred) family and home and being left to fend for yourself in the “street”; homophobic and racist violence in dominant mainstream culture; or getting “called out” in the hood, together with beatdowns, bullying, taunts, and other violence ranging from “soul-hurting” microaggressions to full-on deadly transphobic/homophobic hate crimes.

The creative and scholarly voices that make up Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities don’t appear out of nowhere. Indeed, we stand arm-locked in solidarity with those who have struggled to make visible a world that tries to

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Some questions that are difficult to answer are the following: (1) How much of this learned and reinforced toxic masculine swagger is a product of colonially imposed systems of patriarchy, reinforced by Catholicism and other hyperpatriarchal religious systems where nuanced precolonial performances of gender have been “straitjacketed” into Spanish and Eurocentric norms? (2) How much are Latinx men, like other nonwhite men, resisting structural subjugations by white supremacist patriarchal systems of power in the U.S. body politic by becoming loud in their heteromasculine pose and swagger? (3) To what extent do Latinx men mimic/enforce/reproduce rape culture and the exaltation of toxic masculinities in U.S. white patriarchal culture (e.g., Trump, who loves to grab womyn by their “p****s”)? (4) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a set of questions that drives one of the aims of this book: What will it take for Latinx folx, families, and communities to decolonize toxic/macho masculinities and rigid systems of patriarchy and misogyny? When and how will Latinx families and communities be able to love all children for what they are and honor how children feel, how they want to express themselves, and how they want to grow into adults? When will Latinx boys and men be encouraged to really listen to, learn from, and support muxeres (women), and listen to, learn from, and support transgender human beings and their struggles for survival and respect; and when will Latinx boys be encouraged to practice ways of being that are “strong” and “down” with a deep politics of caring, compassion, and love for all humans and nonhumans in a world of ever-increasing racist, misogynistic, and homo/ transphobic violence(s)? When will Latinx human beings be able to live with a sense of freedom, safety, and hope that lets them enact fluid and complex forms of agency, love, and intimacy that have broken free of the prison house of racialized neocolonial heteropatriarchies? Thus, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities aims to identify how legacies of colonization and capitalist exploitation and oppression continue to twist tightly around our souls and rope-burn them— at once within our familias, our communities, and society at large. The volume also seeks to celebrate the ways we are untangling and bursting free from a legacy of living with these abrasive, violently cutting cords that have led to a singular, self-destructive form of masculinity. Collectively we affirm the many beautiful ways in which our translocating, healing masculinities are us.

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brand us with its reductive, destructive, and toxic construction of masculinity, which traffics in misogyny and homophobia. We stand together to push against a Twitter space that brands us as rapists, narcos, predators, and diseased people— as “bad hombres.” We stand together to quash those patriarchal narratives that force Latinas into corners by defining them as bad mothers, daughters, and sisters. Together we fight an executive branch and mainstream media that champion heterothuggery and promulgate xenophobia. We do so by actively building on and strengthening the queer, feminist, Indigenous-affirming borderland decolonial praxis and practice of our cultural activist predecessors and coeval partners. Looking back in order to look forward, we recognize the significant work of our queer Latinx cultural and scholarly activist hermanas y hermanos. Pushing against a racist mainstream and violently delimitative practices of gender and sexuality within the Latinx community, people like Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa cleared new spaces in which to grow complex ways of Latinx being in the world. We see this in 1981 with the many voices collected in This Bridge Called My Back. And we see this more systematically formulated in Anzaldúa’s 1987 Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Here Anzaldúa identifies how “men, even more than women, are fettered to gender roles.”1 In these and other Latinx creative-activist spaces, there is a call not only to reevaluate gender roles but to begin to open a space for the expression of a wondrous spectrum of intersectional existence as Latinxs who decisively dash to the ground erstwhile binary and polarized models. Along with this these Latinx creators offer a space for us to begin to see dynamic, multispectrumed, ever-shifting masculinities as a way of existing for Latinxs. It’s not surprising that much of this work— and the work we do today— centers on family. The deep-seated sexism and homophobia within Latinx families became especially visible during the political activism of the 1960s and 1970s, with its violent sidelining and willful erasure of women and LGBTQ kin. The two central concepts used to unite members of the Chicano Movement were la raza and carnalismo; both concepts were tied to the championing of the straight male, when in actuality the family and community are much more complexly configured. The different Latinx movements and their cultural products— from Luis Valdez’s teatro to the poetry of Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, and the Nuyorican Café— celebrated a heteromasculine idea of the Latinx family unit that violently erased and subordinated women and LGBTQ family members. In many ways, Anzaldúa’s celebration of queer women of color as atravesadas demanded that the Latinx heteromasculine activist movement reconfigure its concept of family to be gender- and queer-inclusive. And with this we see the genesis of the articulation of different kinds of masculinities.

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Our contemporary LGBTQ Latinx activist scholars continue to add to and expand this work by making visible our complex intersectional identities. We think readily of the work of José Esteban Muñoz, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Robb Hernández, Daniel Contreras, Larry La Fountain-Stokes, Doug Bush, Juana María Rodríguez, José Quiroga, Ernesto J. Martínez, Michael Hames-García, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, David William Foster, Marivel Danielson, Ricardo Ortiz, Licia Fiol-Matta, Norma Cantú, Ray González, and Jackie Cuevas, among many others, including the contributors to this volume. For instance, Robb Hernández formulates the concept of “mariconógraphy,” whereby queer Latinx artists trouble straight, masculinist formulations and practices of Latinidad (see his “Drawing Offensive / Offensive Drawing: Toward a Theory of Mariconógraphy”). In Reading Chican@ Like a Queer, Sandra K. Soto uses the indexical “Chican@” to identify a performative Latinoness made up of “the unpredictable, polymorphous, and often contradictory representations of the mutual constitution of racialization and sexuality.”2 In On Making Sense, Ernesto J. Martínez formulates the concept of “epistemic decolonization” to identify Latinx queer masculinities that in practice and praxis bring new ways of enunciating knowledge into the world. Richard T. Rodríguez insists that our “reconfigured kinship arrangements need not be established in mutual exclusivity from biological relations.”3 Ellie D. Hernández (another contributor here) excavates the rich array of pop cultural phenomena related to jotería to show how it gives voice to a wide spectrum of Latinx intersectional identities. In Lázaro Lima’s The Latino Body we see formulated a spectrum of masculinities (transgender, queer, and feminist bodies) that disrupt the “national symbolic order.”4 In The Avowal of Difference, Ben SifuentesJáuregui formulates a “queer grammar” of an “epistemerotics” that reveals an ever-mutable range of masculinities that trouble the heteromasculine theories of those from south of the border (Octavio Paz, for instance) who privilege a heterosexist national subject. And in “Becoming Joaquin and Mind if I Call You Sir?: Exploring Latino Masculinities,” Lourdes Torres sets her analytical focus on the ways in which a stage performance and a documentary film demand that audiences experience a spectrum of Latinx masculinities from female masculinity to female-to-male transgender. Torres importantly shows how these spaces reconstruct everyday acts by people who crisscross “a wide range of femininities and masculinities” in our community, vitally redefining erstwhile restrictive and binary gender categories.5 We see a similar concern in the work of Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, who considers how New York City’s bisexual Latinxs negotiate, modify, and perform masculinities in different spaces: familial, barrio, and metropolitan. Again, we see how the everyday actions, thoughts, and feelings of bi Latinxs move along a complex spectrum of masculinities, at once maneuvering through heterosexual spaces

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and expressing a plurality of sexual practices within different social spaces. Muñoz-Laboy succinctly states that “the plurality of sexual activity across partners with multiple gender identities, experiences of ethnic and sexual acculturations, moving through distinct social spheres of life (home, work, streets, political, and cultural spaces) may be shaping a variable gender ideology among some behaviorally bisexual Latino men, creating configurations that maintain a value on traditionally masculine traits while allowing for flexibility in different contexts.”6 (See also Robb Hernández’s “Drawing Offensive”; Ellie D. Hernández’s “Cultura Jotería: The Ins and Outs of Latina/o Popular Culture”; Ellie D. Hernández’s Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture; and M. Cristina Alcalde’s “What It Means to Be a Man? Violence and Homophobia in Latino Masculinities On and Off Screen.”) The development of Latinx masculinities within the familia and community today is increasingly complicated by the increasingly visible (and surveilled) presence of queer and trans migrant and undocumented Latinxs. Indeed, we see this in the work of Lionel Cantú Jr., whose ethnographic excavations attend to the ways in which material reality structures the expression of a range of masculinities as they intersect with and are informed by questions of national origin and citizenship (see Cantú Jr.’s coedited Queer Migrations, as well as his posthumously published The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men, edited by Nancy A. Naples and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz). Here and elsewhere we see how the concept and practice of familia— the site and source of the shaping of practices of masculinities— is being actively redefined. This scholarship, along with the UndocuQueer movement’s on-the-street activism, enriches the ways in which those kept in the shadows of the immigrant rights struggle are bending and expanding a restrictive sense of masculine belonging and citizenship. A lot of time and energy has been spent excavating one type of masculinity: the machista. We see this in ethnographic scholarship focused on early hetero gender development of boys and sites of all-male labor. For instance, in Richard Mora’s “‘Dicks Are for Chicks’: Latino Boys, Masculinity, and the Abjection of Homosexuality,” we see clearly how middle-school boys of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent perform hyper-heteromasculine identities in their violent rejection of queerness, which is perceived as a threat to their sexuality, personal safety, and physical dominance. And in “Masculinity in the Workplace,” Hernan Ramirez sheds light not only on how L.A.’s jardinería communities, typically populated by Latinx immigrants, replicate a working-class machista masculinity, but also on how performances of this masculinity are inflected by citizenship status. Of course, ethnographic studies are not the only place for digging deeply into understanding the growth and consequences of a toxic machista mascu-

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linity. There is a long and deep literature touching on the subject, including by creative authors such as Ray González, Dagoberto Gilb, Juan Felipe Herrera, Elías Miguel Muñoz, Arturo Islas, Luis Urrea, Luis Rodriguez, Richard Rodriguez, and many others. For instance, in the introduction to his Muy Macho, Ray González notes how asking the Latinx creators included in the volume to “write about their fathers, sexuality, and the cult of silence between men” was a first move toward detoxifying generational reproductions (ongoing since our colonization) of toxic masculinity.7 We see this interrogation of toxic masculinities in the novels, short stories, and poetry of the late Arturo Islas, a Latinx creator whose forceful rejection of his father’s machista ways intertwines in complex ways with his rejection of assimilationist pressures. His embrace and articulation of a complex range of masculinities (in settings ranging from working-class El Paso to super-elite Stanford), however, did lead to a life lived as a stigmatized Latinx— exacerbated by living with a differently abled body (including a post-polio limp and post– ulcerated colon colostomy bag). Ultimately, however, his dashing to the ground of his father’s violent attempts to instill a machista sensibility in him led Islas to a deep celebration in his creative work of a range of masculinities untethered from sexuality and genitalia (see Frederick Luis Aldama’s Dancing with Ghosts). Some scholars have sought to think in a more nuanced way about how machismo as a masculinity practice informs our Latinidad, or Latinoness. For instance, in Hombres y Machos, Alfredo Mirandé locates the origin of macho masculine practices in the violence of colonization, but also seeks to complicate understandings of these practices by identifying them as both negative (patriarchal violence and emotionlessness) and positive (loyalty, modesty, standing up for rights). In Beyond Machismo, Aída Hurtado and Mrinal Sinha put macho masculinity under a Chicana feminist borderlands theory microscope, revealing how Latinx men can grow a feminist consciousness that dismantles singular and violent practices of masculinity. (See also Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez’s “‘Y Yo Soy Cubano, and I’m Impatient’: Frequency and Functions of Spanish Switches in Pitbull’s Lyrics.”) Jennifer Domino Rudolph seeks to complicate our understanding of how Latinidad is constructed in and through situated acts of masculinity, from jail cells and churches to sports fields and music performance spaces. In her work, such as Embodying Latino Masculinities: Producing Masculatinidad, we see a range of examples of how singular, reductive practices of masculinity reproduce macho, masculinist acts of violence that bolster a Latinidad that constrains our full identity expression. In Macho Ethics, Jason Cortés puts front and center the need to broaden our sense of masculinities by considering a more expansive Latinidad informed by our Caribbean Latinx histories and cultural practices. Such a lens allows us to see how the construction of Latinidad in

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a fictional work by Junot Díaz such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) is built on the assertion of a masculinist alternative to the violence of Trujillo’s patriarchal nationalism that destabilizes “traditional hierarchies based on heteronormative masculinity.”8 Finally, this troubling of erstwhile rigid masculinist constructions and formulations of Latinidad is taking place in the decolonial space cleared by those working at the intersections of Latinx hemispheric and Indigenous studies. We see this most forcefully in the scholarship that Arturo and his coeditors bring together in Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands. They seek to excavate and affirm our Indigenous, “alter-Native” ancestral practices, identifying them as important shapers of a complex Latinidad that allows for the expression of multiple masculinities and “challenges the coloniality of power that artificially disconnects and pulls apart race from gender and from sexuality.”9

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When we invited our writers to lend their voices to this volume, we left the format open: creative, scholarly, or a hybrid mix of both. To this end, we open the volume with chapters that lean more toward the creative or hybrid, and which put pressure on the construction of Latinx masculinities within a U.S. society of surveillance. The chapters in part 1, “Hybrid Forms,” identify how agentive performances of Latinx masculinities can on the one hand resist surveillance and criminalization, and on the other hand continue to participate in the replication of a coloniality of power informed by practices of patriarchy and homophobia and reinforced by the Catholic Church and the biopower of the state. We open this section with John-Michael Rivera’s multigenre, autoethnographic semio-text chapter “Billy the Kid’s Corpse and the Specter of Mexican Manhood.” In his quest to excavate the corpse of Billy the Kid, or “El Bilito,” a Spanish-speaking Irishman and father of three mestizo children, Rivera takes us on a journey into a deep history of U.S. land-grab expropriations as well as a “nostalgic search for masculinity and rebellion in my own family, an ancestral link to a Mexican Revolutionary past that is so distant from the life we all have made for ourselves— we now are a family of academics.” We follow this with Sergio Macías’s chapter, more contemporary in its setting: “Trump’s Poetics of Caca: Shitty ‘Bad Hombres’ and ‘Shithole’ Latin American Countries.” In this incisive critique of President Donald Trump’s “poetics of caca”— his punctic trafficking in discourses of criminalization and abjection of the other to bolster his support among white nationalist xenophobes— Macías argues that for Trump, “Latinx immigrants, like filthy caca, carry disease and infection, and they contaminate. According to this rhetoric, Latin caca, as undesirable waste, supposedly poses an eminent

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(health) threat to the American way of life, as well as to the racial composition of this country. Trump’s poetics of caca gorges on this fear and vomits it back.” Trump’s identifying of Latino men as “bad hombres” is another way he traffics in a poetics of caca to construct these men as criminal, sexually predatory, disease-ridden, and intrinsically violent. Wayne Freeman’s chapter, “‘Noizy Minorityz’: White Republicans Trapped in the Cypher,” compares how African American and Latinx rap artists have critiqued both Pete Wilson and Donald Trump and their campaigns to vilify Latinx immigrants and criminalize Latino men in particular. Freeman considers how rap tracks like “Noizy Minorityz” perform “hypermasculinity” as a resistive stance to Wilson’s and Trump’s white supremacist nativist rhetoric and actions. Freeman argues more generally of community-based Mexican American rap artists that they “clique up” to express and display strength and love. Alberto Ledesma’s autobiographical visual-verbal hybrid chapter “Homage to an Undocumented Heartbreak” recounts how a woman he dated in high school ended the relationship because Alberto was sin papeles. Ledesma provides deep insights into how teenage rituals of first loves, first crushes, and the desire for intimacy and companionship are inflected by the ongoing pressures of a broken immigration system, and how living in the shadows as an undocumented teen circumscribes one’s emotional and psychic life. As such, Ledesma also critiques the social constructions of Latinx masculinity, including the way in which his father both epitomizes what Ledesma calls the “feo, fuerte y formal” postures of a traditional Mexican patriarch and polices the young Ledesma so that he will mold himself into the hegemonic Latino male: cold, tough, womanizing, and macho. In Pancho McFarland’s authoethnographic chapter “Urban AlterNative Masculinity,” he argues for the need to critique “Eurocolonialist capitalist masculinity” and explore the “possibilities of developing an antiauthoritarian, anticolonial, alterNative (AAA) masculine praxis in urban settings.” He shows how the masculinity learned by Chicano youths is detrimental to people, communities, and the planet, and that a combination of “hypermasculinity, white supremacy / racism, colonialism, and capitalism” directs / impinges on / informs toxic Chicano masculinities. McFarland then recounts his own decolonial journey from childhood to working with the Zapatistas, and on to his current work with the community food movement of “Black Chicago.” He speaks of his desire to perform a masculinity that is more liberatory and less violent, as he learns from and listens to elders in an African American community in Chicago as well as Indigenous elders who share knowledge about how to live with the land and with deep, loving respect. McFarland concludes by calling out the misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic hatred in colonized and racially oppressed communities. We end this section with Jonathan D. Gomez’s autoethnographic chapter

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“Learning with Norma Montoya.” Here Gomez weaves a narrative of self and community that includes his journey with artist and youth rights activist Norma Montoya and the way in which this led to the decolonizing of the tough shell Gomez had grown while living in East L.A.’s City Terrace barrio. Gomez credits what he calls his “accompaniment” of Norma, a longtime community and youth rights activist and muralist for the housing projects in Boyle Heights. In this deeply personal and theoretically rich chapter, Gomez challenges all academics, especially men, to think deeply about their privilege, the ethics of how to work with structurally oppressed communities, and how to really listen to, learn from, and support women of color activists and community leaders. Transitioning to part 2, “Transmedial Detoxifications,” we begin with Arturo’s “Decolonizing Predatory Masculinities in Breaking Bad and Mosquita y Mari.” Here Arturo continues to critique the criminalization of Latinx men by the dominant discourses of white patriarchy, as well as the way some become complicit in this criminalization by denigrating the feminine and the queer in an attempt to meet the seeming immanence of white patriarchs in the U.S. body politic with swagger. In particular, Aldama contrasts the representations of racialized hegemonic masculinities in the award-winning five-season AMC series Breaking Bad (2008– 13) with the ways in which Aurora Guerrero provides a full-length feature-filmic space for Xicanx teen womyn to resist attempts at coercion, the imposition of docility, surveillance, and formal/informal violence(s) by arguably neocolonial heteropatriarchies in the award-winning film Mosquita y Mari (2012). T. Jackie Cuevas’s “Fighting the Good Fight” follows. Here Cuevas provides a compelling reading of a recent film, We the Animals, in which a young Boricua leaves the house to search for a “queer future” and a safe space away from ongoing patriarchal violence. In doing so, Cuevas places this film in dialogue with two other films that call out patriarchal homophobic violence in the Chicanx and Latinx communities: La Mission (2009), by Benjamin Bratt, and Bruising for Besos (2016), by Adelina Anthony. The latter features a young queer Xicana who struggles with the domestic violence inflicted on her mother and the way in which violence inflects her relationship with her girlfriend. Cuevas considers the ongoing tensions between queer desires and the “heteropatriarchal imperatives” enforced in Latinx families. Cuevas argues that these films call out these ongoing violent tensions and provide compelling ways to think about love, caring, and self-worth— especially when the “love” in families can be driven by heteropatriarchal norms— and ends by stating that these films can provide ways to see how “queer Latinx masculinities can move beyond heteropatriarchal violence toward thriving queer Latinx lives.” In “Latin Lovers, Chismosas, and Gendered Discourses of Power,” Kristie Soares con-

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siders the complex representational politics of the “Latino” male narrator of the popular show Jane the Virgin, which was written by non-Latinx writers. In doing so, Soares calls out a type of representational “brownfacing” in which the discourses and humor of the purportedly Latino narrator are invented by non-Latinx writers. At the same time, Soares also highlights how the simulacrum of the Latino narrator— performed with just enough accent, Spanish words, and pauses by a Dominican American actor, Anthony Mendez, who rarely gets parts otherwise— tells the audience that they are listening to a “real” Latino and also critiques and problematizes hegemonic tropes of Latino masculinities. In Jane, the Latino narrator shows feelings and does not come off as domineering, macho, hard, or representative of the predictable tropes of the Latin lover. Soares’s nuanced critique values this nonhegemonic performance of Latinx masculinities but also decries the appalling lack of Latinx writers, directors, producers, and studio heads. Ellie Hernández’s chapter “Fea, Firme y Formal: Decolonizing Latinx Female Masculinity” offers a compelling read of Latinx female masculinities— or, as Hernández describes, butchas, machas, and mariconas— in network and cable TV shows and in Mexican popular culture. Through a theoretically rich series of insights and arguments, Hernández excavates precolonial and colonial female masculinities to decolonize and disidentify with the quintessential trope of Mexican manhood: feo, firme y formal (ugly, tough, and formal). Hernández discusses how Latinx female masculinities, whether in the case of famed Mexican singer and performer Chavela Vargas or recent shows like 2018’s Vida and Madam Secretary, need to be understood through a dual lens: that of the articulation of female masculinities in white normative LGBTQ theory and practices, and that of conquest, colonialism, and the imposition of patriarchal and homophobic norms, laws, and practices. In particular Hernández looks at the Starz series Vida, which features two sisters who return to East Los Angeles after their mother passes away and must decide what to do with the bar their mother owned. In this analysis, Hernández discusses the pivotal role that Eddy, a butcha and their mother’s former lover and partner, plays in the series, exploring how Eddy displays a nuanced, soft, empathetic female masculinity and subsequently becomes a victim/survivor of brutal homophobic violence. Hernández argues that “director and show creator Tanya Saracho engages the poetics of Latinx culture by keeping all the key elements of what it means ‘to live’ a queer life— all the love, hate, difficult decisions, and honesty. Central to this depiction of queer life is its gesture toward the butchas and mariconas who reside in L.A.” We end this section with “Chicano Dracula,” wherein Paloma Martinez-Cruz considers how the representations and remixing of Count Dracula in literature, film, and TV shows play off and reinforce the tropes of the predatory Latin lover.

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The chapter looks at the original Bela Lugosi performance of Dracula in the context of the performative archive of the Latin lover trope canonized by Rudolph Valentino, as well as more contemporary performances such as that of Raúl Juliá as Gomez Addams. The chapter argues that while Universal Pictures shows a “will . . . to style Latino maleness with an emphasis on sexual predation” in its original depiction, “Chicano Dracula’s subaltern, hemisexualizing valences provide a disidentifying turn that rejects the dominant culture’s fixed construals of Latino masculinity and reappropriates, either wholly or partially, mainstream pop-culture tropes.” Martinez-Cruz then considers the racialized disidentifying “queer performativity” of Kid Congo Powers, a second-generation Mexican American and a precedent-setting practitioner of what is now called “queercore,” based on the fact that queer and punk cultures share “spatial and aesthetic families of resemblance.” Martinez-Cruz argues that Kid Congo disidentifies with the tropes of the predatory Latin male of Dracula lore, performing a working-class swagger with a loud grace that represents nonnormative masculinities. The chapters that make up part 3, “Troubling Storyworlds,” provide a series of theoretically rich and politically salient readings of the complex politics of masculinity, gender codes/norms, and violence(s) within Chicanx and Latinx literary spaces. These critiques look at how short stories and novels show ways in which heteropatriarchies can be challenged and ways in which subjects resist and form new types of kinship bonds, families without a patriarchal center, and spaces where the agency of racialized queer, feminist, and alternative forms of masculinity and power relations is fostered. In the first chapter, “The Hyperpatriarchal Games,” Lisa Sánchez González makes a series of very pointed critiques of racialist/racist constructions of machismo made by the U.S. nation-state to pathologize Latinxs. The chapter argues that the “term machismo (treated here as an English word) tends to pathologize not just Latinos but Latinas as well, who are depicted in scholarship as handmaidens to and victims of a toxic spectrum of extraordinarily patriarchal gender roles.” Sánchez González argues that the “discursive field” of literary texts written by Latinxs that explore “Latinx life and culture” can provide a way to counter the “pathologizing force of mainstream cultural stereotyping.” The chapter examines “the representation of gender politics in four recent and socially engaged Latinx YA literary texts written by Chicanx, Boricua, and Cuban American writers.” The YA texts that the chapter considers run “the gamut from queer coming-of-age stories to cisgender teen angst tales,” all of them exploring “what it is to grow up Latinx in the center of U.S. imperialism.” The stories, in their similarities and disjunctures, as they depict young adults working out their racialized gender identities, offer nuanced “insights into Latinx sexuality” and a “shared humanity.” In “The Uncertain

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Harbor of Home,” William Orchard considers how the stories of Manuel Muñoz, set in the Central Valley of California, contribute to ways to think about the fragility of families and bonds that reproduce heteropatriarchies. Orchard focuses on the story “Bring Brang Brung,” from the 2008 collection The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, and considers how this story embraces a queer Chicanx “political force” that decenters “heteropatriarchal masculinity.” At the same time, Orchard argues, the “queerness” of the protagonist Martín becomes more intersectional, literally, when Martín is forced to think about his patriarchal privilege and the way in which he “othered” and attempted to dominate younger women as a teenager. Martín’s journey toward an intersectional queer consciousness is marked by his reconsideration of his views on and relationships with Chicanas and their struggles with gender, race, class, and patriarchy within and outside of Chicanx communities. Orchard argues that “Bring Brang Brung” is focalized through a gay subject who learns his queerness by unlearning the forms of economic, gender, and ethnic privilege. We end this part of the book with Francisco E. Robles’s chapter, “Unsettling Monuments of Chicanx Masculinity in Estela Portillo Trambley’s ‘Rain of Scorpions.’ ” Robles revisits this foundational multigenre text of Chicanx literature by Tejana author Estela Portillo Trambley. Robles uses a “set of decolonial tactics” informed by Chicana and women of color theorists to discuss how the 1975 edition of Rain of Scorpions unsettles “monuments” of Chicano masculinity that undergird Chicano nationalism. In the process, Robles argues that the book’s titular novella presents a representational politics that puts into a practice a complex, nuanced, ecocritical decolonial episteme, thus narrativizing a range of social and communal struggles that showcase gendered agencies and rejection of the gender codes of patriarchy. Robles considers the range of literary criticism on this text and does a reading of certain moments in different stories to argue that Portillo Trambley’s work is far ahead of its time in its articulation of a transnational Chicana feminist consciousness during the late-1960s and early-1970s boom of male-dominated Chicano literary voices and texts. Robles argues that by “employing an understanding of Chicana feminism within a hemispheric and transhistorical tradition of decoloniality, Portillo Trambley’s variegated tactics of unsettling the monuments of Chicanx masculinity form an energetic alternative.” Launching part 4, “Why the Latin-X Matters,” we present Jennie Luna and Gabriel S. Estrada’s chapter, “Trans*lating the Genderqueer -x Through Caxcan, Nahua, and Xicanx Indígena Knowledge.” The authors employ an Indigenous-based transfeminist epistemic frame to understand gender practices and gender discourses grounded in Nahua and Caxcan language, culture, and ceremonies. Both Caxcan and Xicanx scholars, Jennie and Gabriel

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met in a program where they were learning Nahuatl in Zacatecas, Mexico— the ancestral homeland of both. As they learn Nahuatl grammar, philosophy, and ceremonial knowledge, they begin to think deeply about what it means to decolonize gender binaries, read Mesoamerican texts that have been filtered through Spanish patriarchal and racialist thought, and decode the palimpsests in which Indigenous knowledges, ideas, and values have been subjected to Spanish and Euro-white translation. In the process, the chapter discusses the decolonial turn of using X in identity terms such as Xicano and Xicanx, and even the name México rather than Méjico (as it was first written by the priest-scribes of Spanish colonial societies). The chapter also complicates the “Indigenized genderqueer” impulse that draws people of Mexican descent to claim the use of the -x. In the chapter “‘Eres Cuir, or What?’: Latinx Disidentificatory Practices of Becoming,” Laura Malaver formulates a complex poetics of disidentification and becoming in an analysis of an episode of NPR’s Alt.Latino podcast titled “Queer, Punk and Latin: A Discussion About Sexual Identity.” Malaver’s chapter is in direct dialogue with the Hernández, Cuevas, and Soares chapters, which are focused primarily on television and filmic spaces, and it extends this focus into womxn-centered genderqueer Latinx music, bands, and performances in public spaces. It also expands on the final aspect of Martinez-Cruz’s discussion of Kid Congo Powers: disidentification practices in early “Chicano-tinged” queer punk performances. Grounded in a theoretical matrix that draws from a range of frameworks— disidentification, queer of color critique, and trans* feminism— the chapter first focuses on queer Latina/Latinx musicians, in particular the band Fea, who chose their name, meaning “ugly,” as a literal “f*** you” to the misogynist microaggressions of a toxic masculinist audience who tried to body-shame them. Then the chapter considers the gender and class politics of a telenovela titled Las vías del amor (The Tracks of Love), whose watching was a type of “bonding practice” for the author and their family when they moved from Bogotá, Colombia, to Golden, Colorado. Malaver argues that the protagonist’s psychic visions can be read as a type of queer futurity. Alejandra Benita Portillos’s chapter, “Decolonizing Heteronormativities and Patriarchy Within Dominant Immigrant Rights Discourse,” levels a much-needed critique against the heteronormative practices and logics that drive much of contemporary U.S. immigrant rights activism and scholarship in their response to criminalization, state violence, and the racist vagaries of ICE enforcement and U.S. immigration policies. Here Portillos “seeks to theorize how and why queer and trans persons are underrepresented in the dominant immigrant rights discourses and scholarship,” grounding the discussion in the violence of colonization and the imposition of heteropatriarchies

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on Indigenous families and communities, as well as the attempts to silence, discipline, and dispose of queer Indigenous bodies and practices. Portillos calls out the heteronormative silencing of trans and queer immigrants in such movements as #keepfamiliestogether and focuses on the social death of and near-total media blackout concerning Roxana Hernández, a trans migrant fleeing violence in Honduras who died because of medical neglect by ICE, as well as the homophobic/transphobic aggressions directed at queer/ trans/two-spirit migrants in the migrant caravans coming up from Central America. Deploying a resistive politics articulated by Vargas’s queer analytics of “lo sucio,” Portillos argues that these human beings deemed “sucia” (dirty) by heteronormative violences and practices in Latinx families and communities need to be valued as full persons and that their bodies, love, and survival should be at the center of advocacy and activism for immigrant rights. The “violent mechanisms that continue to oppress queer and trans undocumented immigrants” need to be exposed and deactivated/decolonized “in hopes of moving toward healing, collectivity, and the enactment of social change.” We end this section, and the volume, with Nicholas Villanueva Jr.’s chapter, “A Rodeo to Call Their Own.” Here he discusses how Latinx rodeo participants both reclaim the rodeo tradition from Euro-white patriarchies and provide a space for nonbinary Latinx vaqueros. Villanueva argues “that Latinx LGBTQ rodeo participants are reclaiming the figure of the vaquero as the authentic cowboy, and that, by doing so, they have made the vaquero identity a more inclusive and gender-nonconforming one in the hegemonic masculine sport of rodeo.” In specific, the chapter considers how the LGBTQ Latinx community in Colorado helped to organize the “Rocky Mountain Gay Rodeo and Denver’s Latino Gay Pride,” which celebrate queer vaqueros occupying nonbinary spaces of gender. Villanueva argues that the Latinx vaqueros show a collective attempt to recover rodeo traditions— perhaps even decolonize them— from Euro-Christian white heteronormative masculinist appropriations of the rodeo’s cultures and spectacles that came about as part of the Manifest Destiny legacies of the U.S.-Mexico War and its aftermath. In doing so, the Latinx LGBTQ vaqueros arguably decolonize the tropes of the white cowboy, which glamorize the toxic masculinity of genocide, colonial violence, and false notions of “superiority” over Mexican/Indigenous denizens of the West and Southwest. As Villanueva states: “For nearly a century, Latinxs’ identity as vaqueros of the rodeo was appropriated by Anglo cowboys, and the marginalization of LGBTQ Latinx people within the larger Pride festivals continues to exist.” As we wrap up this introduction tracing the many ways in which folx are actively interrogating and detoxifying the misrepresentations of actual

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practices of a wondrously varied spectrum of masculinities, we want to reiterate what should already be loud and clear: the work in this volume, and that of others before us, seeks to clear new expressive paths for all variety of nonbinary ways of existing that actively free us from being shackled to norms tied to biology. We also seek to identify how today’s fearmongering and violence against our communities continue to be built on racist misconceptions of our Latinidad constructed in and out of images that gender and sexualize as monstrous. We seek to identify and embrace a model of nonbinary, decolonial masculinities to empower and provide new ways of knowing us. We end with the assertion that a decolonial masculinity practice of listening, learning, and practicing humility with all members of our community will grow a stronger, more resilient, more compassionate new generation of Latinxs.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 84. Soto, Reading Chican@, 121. Rodríguez, Next of Kin, 167. Lima, Latino Body, 3. Torres, Becoming Joaquin, 463. Muñoz-Laboy et al., “I Kick It,” 146. González, introduction to Muy Macho, xiii. Cortés, Macho Ethics, 1. Arturo J. Aldama, Sandoval, and García, “Introduction,” 9, 19.

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Works Cited

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Alcalde, Cristina M. “What It Means to Be a Man? Violence and Homophobia in Latino Masculinities On and Off Screen.” The Journal of Popular Culture 47, no. 3 (2014): 537–53. Aldama, Arturo J., Chela Sandoval, and Peter J. García. “Introduction: Toward a Decolonial Performatics of the US Latina and Latino Borderlands.” In Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands, 1– 29. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Aldama, Frederick Luis. Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color. Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 2002. Cantú, Lionel, Jr. The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men. Edited by Nancy A. Naples and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

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Cantú, Lionel, Jr., and Eithne Luibhéid, eds. Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Cortés, Jason. Macho Ethics: Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino-Caribbean Narrative. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2015. González, Ray, ed. Muy Macho: Latino Men Confront Their Manhood. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. Hernández, Ellie D. “Cultura Jotería: The Ins and Outs of Latina/o Popular Culture.” In The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Pop Culture, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, 291– 300. New York: Routledge, 2016. Hernández, Ellie D. Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Hernández, Robb. “Drawing Offensive.” MELUS 29, no. 2 (2014): 121–52. Hurtado, Aída, and Mrinal Sinha. Beyond Machismo: Intersectional Latino Masculinities. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Lima, Lázaro. The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory. New York: NYU Press, 2007. Loureiro-Rodríguez, Verónica. “Y Yo Soy Cubano, and I’m Impatient: Frequency and Functions of Spanish Switches in Pitbull’s Lyrics.” Spanish in Context 14, no. 2 (2017): 250– 72. Martínez, Ernesto J. On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Mirandé, Alfredo. Hombres y Machos: Masculinity and Latino Culture. Boulder: Westview, 1997. Mora, Richard. “‘Dicks are for Chicks’: Latino Boys, Masculinity, and the Abjection of Homosexuality.” Gender and Education 25, no. 3 (2013): 340– 56. Muñoz-Laboy, Miguel, Nicolette Severson, Jonathan Garcia, Richard G. Parker, and Patrick Wilson. “‘I Kick It to Both, but Not in the Street’: Behaviorally Bisexual Latino Men, Gender, and the Sexual Geography of New York City Metropolitan Area.” Men and Masculinities 21, no. 1 (2018): 131– 49. Ramirez, Hernan. “Masculinity in the Workplace: The Case of Mexican Immigrant Gardeners.” Men and Masculinities 14, no. 1 (2011): 97– 116. Rodríguez, Richard T. Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Rudolph, Jennifer Domino. Embodying Latino Masculinities: Producing Masculatinidad. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Ben. The Avowal of Difference: Queer Latino American Narratives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Soto, Sandra K. Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Torres, Lourdes. “Becoming Joaquin and Mind if I Call You Sir?: Exploring Latino Masculinities.” Biography 34, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 447– 66.

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Suggested Further Reading

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Cantú, Lionel, Jr. “Entre Hombres / Between Men: Latino Masculinities and Homosexualities.” In Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez, 147– 67. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo. Queer Latino “Testimonio,” Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Quiroga, José. Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America. New York: NYU Press, 2000. Salcedo, Jared. “Deconstructing the Outreach Experience: Renegotiating Queer and Latino Masculinities in the Distribution of Safe Sex Materials.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 21, no. 2– 3 (2009): 151– 70.

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PART I Hybrid Forms

Figure 1.1. Billy the Kid (1906).

Chapter 1

BILLY THE KID’S CORPSE AND THE SPECTER OF MEXICAN MANHOOD John-Michael Rivera

Some facts, agreed upon and found on Wikipedia: •

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•

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Billy the Kid (born Henry McCarty on September 17 or November 23, 1859, died July 14, 1881, also known as William H. Bonney) was an American Old West outlaw and gunfighter who killed eight men before he was shot and killed at age twenty-one. He participated in New Mexico’s Lincoln County War, during which he allegedly took part in three murders. McCarty was orphaned at age thirteen. The owner of a boarding house gave him a room in exchange for work. His first arrest was for stealing food at age sixteen in late 1875. Ten days later, he robbed a Chinese laundry and was arrested, but he escaped only two days later. He tried to stay with his stepfather, then fled from New Mexico Territory into neighboring Arizona Territory, making him both an outlaw and a federal fugitive. After murdering a blacksmith during an altercation in August 1877, Bonney became a wanted man in Arizona Territory and returned to New Mexico, where he joined a group of cattle rustlers. He became a well-known figure in the region when he joined the Regulators and took part in the Lincoln County War. In April 1878, the Regulators killed three men, including Lincoln County sheriff William J. Brady and one of his deputies. Bonney and two other Regulators were later charged with all three killings. Bonney’s notoriety grew in December 1880 when the Las Vegas Gazette in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and The Sun in New York City carried stories about his crimes. Sheriff Pat Garrett captured Bonney later that month. In April 1881, Bonney was tried and convicted of the murder of Brady, and he was sentenced to hang in May of that year. He escaped from jail on April 28, 1881, killing two sheriff ’s deputies in the process and evading capture for more 23

•

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than two months. Garrett shot and killed Bonney— aged twentyone— in Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881. During the following decades, legends that Bonney had survived that night grew, and a number of men claimed to be him. “Save and Defend us from our ghostly enemies.” Scarcely has the news of the killing of William Bonney, alias McCarthy, but known the wide-world over as “Billy the Kid,” faded from the public mind before we are again to be startled by the second chapter in the bloody romance of his eventual life— the disposal of his body. The stiff was brought to Las Vegas, arriving here at two o’clock in the morning, and was slipped quietly into the private office of a practical “saw-bones,” who, by dint of diligent labor and careful watching to prevent detection, boiled and scraped the skin off the “pate” so as to secure the skull. The body, or remains proper, was covered in the dirt in a corral, where it will remain until decomposition shall have robbed the frame of its meat, when the body will be dug up again and the skeleton “fixed-up”— hung together by wires and varnished with shellac to make it presentable. —Las Vegas Optic, 1881 For over a century, Mexicans have claimed that Billy the Kid was their father and two Mexican governors have had close associations with him during their political careers. Mexicans refer to him as El Bilito. — Edits by “La memoria” to Wikipedia, October 31, 2018, erased November 3, 2018

Today The above facts frame the mythos of Billy the Kid. Lost between Wikipedia entries and official annalists’ histories is the reality: Mexican men are haunted by the corpse of Billy the Kid. I am not immune to this appropriation; the specter of Billy the Kid has haunted me for the better part of my life. The haunting didn’t begin in 2013, but it is in this year that I find myself driving through the Carrizozo Malpais lava fields, searching for his dead body, his elusive tombstone. I travel through masses of black fissured lava as large as a horse, and I am myself lost in the Valley of Fires. I try to gather my bearings— the map points me toward the east. My journey is a search for Lincoln County, where the last words of Billy the Kid mark the public imagination of the southwestern United States. “¿Quién es?”— the last question Billy uttered was one answered with a bullet, and here would begin the public’s

fascination with a Spanish-speaking Irishman with three mestizo children and one great-grandson who has been fighting the courts to exhume Billy’s body for his DNA. I end up in the now-famous hotel where Billy the Kid stayed. Spanish and Western art deco frames a merchandise emporium that sells the legend of Billy the Kid. I am tempted to buy yet another shirt made in Aubrey Landing that reads, “I am Billy the Kid’s Kid.” I walk into the room where he slept. I stutter: “¿Quién es?” Did he dream here? Was his corpse laid on this floor? Did he write the elusive memoir so many of us have been searching for in the floorboards of these buildings, sold to us as a relic of our Western masculine past? How does Billy’s corpse capture the spectral essence of the masculine Southwest, a space where corpses are exhumed in order to reconstitute the temporal boundaries between the dead and the living in hopes of reifying masculinity? “¿Quién es?”

The kid was disappointed that the mob did not attack the car since it would have unquestionably resulted in his escape. He was on the friendliest terms with the native element of the country; he had protected and helped them in every possible way. . . . In Santa Fe we were allowed to visit the Kid in jail, taking him cigarette papers, tobacco, chewing gum, candy, pies, and nuts. He was very fond of sweets and asked us to bring him all we could. The kid’s general appearance was the same as most boys [sic] of his age. I was one month older than Billy. I liked the Kid very much, and long before we even reached Santa Fe, nothing would have pleased me more than to have witnessed his escape. He had his share of good qualities and was very pleasant. He had a reputation for being considerate of the old, the young, and the poor; he was loyal to his friends and above all, loved his mother devotedly. He was unfortunate in starting life and became a victim of circumstance.

B ill y t he Kid ’s Corp se and t he Sp e c te r o f Me xi c a n M a n h o o d

Yesterday

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In looking back to my first meeting with Billy the Kid, my impressions were most favorable and I can honestly say that he was a “man more sinned against than sinning.” — Miguel Antonio Otero, the first Latino territorial governor of New Mexico, in The Real Billy the Kid: With New Light on the Lincoln County War, 1936

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At the turn of the nineteenth century, Miguel Antonio Otero and Teddy Roosevelt met in a brief encounter, though an important one for Otero. The rumor was that Otero was being considered for vice president, or at least a post in Roosevelt’s administration. He had already been passed over by McKinley, so perhaps Otero felt this time he would leave New Mexico and enter the White House. His political ambitions would be realized with this meeting. The day Otero met Teddy Roosevelt, Otero wore a traditional eastern suit and tie, to show that he was as civilized as any other white politician. But beneath his slacks and in his pocket were two hidden objects that would connect him with his Mexican past— the spurs of Billy the Kid and a pocket knife, which had been given to him when the two men met in 1880. This story, as true as all Billy the Kid lore, reveals that Otero’s desire was to resurrect Billy the Kid’s corpse by wearing a part of him, embodying him through an object, so he could match the masculinity that Roosevelt himself fostered and exploited while he rose as a politician. To understand Otero’s spectral self-fashioning, it is important to point out that he witnessed a period of profound change in masculinity, as it was affected by the expansion and consolidation of the southwestern United States. He was born in 1859, a decade after the Mexican-American War and two years before the Civil War— two wars that would drastically alter the cultural and geographic landscape of America. As his works attest, the most notable changes to occur for Otero would be the closing of the frontier and the annexation of the former Mexican territories as states of the republic. When Otero began his political career in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner gave his famous “frontier thesis” paper at the American Historical Association’s first meeting, held at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The paper, titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” was a narrative that nicely captured the transition occurring in this period. The frontier experience, he argued, was the defining ethos of American democracy and the American character. After praising America for its imperialist conquest of Native lands and peoples, he concluded his paper with a rather disturbing lament: “Four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”1 Though he argued this thesis in 1893, Turner’s

words are rooted in a much more long-standing discourse of white masculinity that began with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War and ceded to the United States millions of acres of Mexican frontier land. On one narrative level, Turner’s statements implicitly summarize the imperialist doctrine that America was now in control of the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. For Turner to state this boldly meant that Mexican and Native American bodies had now become “part” of the American republic’s body politic, but only by means of assimilation, erasure, or dehumanization.

The political control of New Mexico, one of the last and economically richest territories of the Southwest, was a particularly enticing prospect for eastern businessmen: its abundant resources, pastoral beauty, and trade routes would garner them millions of dollars. Because New Mexico was mostly Mexican and Native American in population, as well as being politically controlled by bourgeois Nuevomexicanos, the dynamics of Anglo political and economic control were extremely volatile. Indeed, as Miguel Otero recounts in numerous writings both private and public, in the years before Turner’s statements, the territory of New Mexico was undergoing profound economic and social changes. What was at stake for bourgeois Nuevomexicanos, Otero would recount, was maintenance of control over the political and public spheres during the transitional period from the old Hispano Nuevo Mexico to the “new” New Mexico. Otero’s writing of Billy the Kid’s biography, coupled with his “wearing” of Billy, is a moment of inscriptive resurrection, what I have called ghost

B ill y t he Kid ’s Corp se and t he Sp e c te r o f Me xi c a n M a n h o o d

Turner’s thesis represents a pivotal juncture in Anglo-American/Mexican contact because it also marks an important change that first manifested itself shortly after the Mexican-American War and continued through the late nineteenth century: the realization that America’s Manifest Destiny was ending on the continent and that America was entering a period of limitedresource capitalism. Moreover, as Mark Seltzer reminds us, the closing of the frontier consolidated the domination of the nation’s topography by the white male body and created a crisis by leaving no more terra incognita to be conquered, which in turn led to heightened public discourses of racism and imperialism in the United States.2 Therefore, what was of particular importance for the definition of Anglo-American masculinity and the grounds for its authority was a white male professional-managerial-class annexation of the former Mexican territories, an act presumably ensuring that the Southwest would enter the national body politic as a white member, thus legitimating and maintaining white masculinity as the dominant culture defined it.

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writing in other spaces; it is an act of haunting that effectively enabled him to challenge Turner’s frontier discourses through Billy’s corpse, a rendering of Billy’s dead body as a symbolic representation of Mexican barbarism on the frontier. In this way, Otero’s rendering of Billy the Kid’s biographical corpse creates a prosthesis for Otero’s own living body and ironically connects him to a Mexican gente he struggled for years to connect with while in New Mexico. Indeed, through Billy, Otero would foster a political persona wherein he would declare in a speech that “[my] blood relations are Mexican” and “[my] ancestors are full-blooded Mexicans.”3 Otero’s participation in the cultural construction of Billy the Kid reveals much about his own masculine desire to foster “Mexican public spirit,” as New Mexico’s first modern politician would so aptly use in his political speeches. What Otero represents is his own distinctive ability to rise within and, indeed, mimic white masculine discourses of the mass- produced ideas of outlaw manliness, with the result that Billy’s body becomes a site for the mediation of Otero’s most public cause, New Mexican statehood. We need to remember that at the turn of the last century New Mexicans’ bodies were documented as tainted, for they were both “Indian” and “European,” and hence constituted in the public sphere as “semicivilized.” Therefore, their mestizo bodies were not worthy of being a part of the fraternal brotherhood of the white body politic. Indeed, politicians went so far as to say that New Mexico was far too Mexican and thus should never be a full member of the United States. Billy the Kid’s dead body, which Otero resurrects in his biography, allows Otero to challenge such discourses and resurrect a distinctive Mexican manliness, one that could be documented as part of the United States.

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We have not put our impressions of him into print. And our silence has been the cause of great injustice to The Kid. — Martin Chavez, in Otero, The Real Billy the Kid

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It is important to remember that not only for Otero, but also for various dime novelists, and, arguably, for the nation, one of the most publicized characters to represent the dynamic of this period was New Mexico’s notorious citizen Billy the Kid. A legend even before his death in 1881, Billy the Kid— personified as both a devil and a saint of the Southwest— would become a mediated corpse through which Euro-Americans and Nuevomexicanos forged a quest for public power in the “new” New Mexico, a colonial

This colonial discourse on which Turner’s frontier thesis was predicated was represented throughout the literary and political spheres through images of Billy the Kid and later rewritten with Otero’s own The Real Billy the Kid. In this work, written over the course of his life, Otero transcribes the words of Martin Chavez that I have used as the epigraph to this section. Chavez was one of the old Nuevomexicano “natives” who rode with Billy the Kid shortly before his death in 1881. After criticizing previous works about Billy the Kid, Chavez tells Otero that Mexican Americans’ impressions of Billy the Kid have not been heard in the public literary sphere; Mexican Americans have not been able to participate in America’s emerging document culture. Chavez’s lament is important for a number of reasons, most notably because it shows how the American public is constructed through documentality. Chavez reveals, and Otero enacts through his biography, the fact that print enables them to rewrite the previous stories of Billy the Kid, which characterized the Kid and, by association, Mexicanos in the public imagination as “semicivilized” citizens. In part, what Otero and, by association, Chavez intend to rewrite through the corpse of Billy the Kid is the “official” discourse within the American literary public spheres, which has associated Billy the Kid’s ruthless behavior with Mexican Americans, as seen especially in the new form of mass publicity that framed discourses about the Kid in the literary public sphere when Otero was a politician: the popular dime novel. The discourse to which Otero responded was first seen throughout the literary sphere of U.S. industrial popular culture in turn-of-the-century dime novels and was continued by Otero’s political foes, Pat Garrett and the Santa Fe Ring. In his landmark study Inventing Billy the Kid, Stephen Tatum points out that between the years of 1881 and 1906, “dime novels specifically devoted to the Kid’s real and imagined exploits were published and sometimes reprinted in New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, and Denver by such houses as Beadle and Adams, Street and Smith, Richard Fox (publisher of the National Police Gazette), Frank Tousey, and John W. Morrison.”4

B ill y t he Kid ’s Corp se and t he Sp e c te r o f Me xi c a n M a n h o o d

endeavor predicated, I want to stress, on competing discourses of American manhood. Like the deaths of Joaquín Murieta in California and Gregorio Cortez in Texas, the death of Billy the Kid, an Irishman named El Bilito in nineteenth-century Mexican corridos, ironically marks an important transition in Anglo-American dominance and colonial contact with Mexicans on the frontier. Implicitly, it is the slaying of the Kid, as well as of these other border hero bodies, that enables Frederick Jackson Turner to argue that the frontier, as a geographical line dividing civilization from savagery, has been closed a little over a decade later.

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Most of these dime novels cast Billy the Kid as a barbarian and used racial stereotypes to describe his Mexican surroundings. One of the most popular fiction writers who wrote about the Kid and perpetuated a racist discourse about Mexicanos was Emerson Hough (who used the picture drawn by N. C. Wyeth that begins this chapter), a friend of Pat Garrett and the New Mexican Anglo power structure known as the Santa Fe Ring. In these dime novels, Emerson Hough perpetuated an image of Billy the Kid as a devilish savage and associated the Mexican American people of New Mexico with his savagery. Therefore, for Hough, the killing of Billy the Kid symbolized the fact that “the Anglo-Saxon civilization was destined to overrun this half-Spanish civilization.”5 We should note that though Hough’s depiction is of a masculine El Bilito, most other dime novelists and fiction writers would characterize Billy the Kid’s body as small, racially marked, effeminate, and devilish, which was, coincidentally, the same rhetoric used to characterize Mexican bodies in the Southwest at the turn of the last century. This negative corporeal association was spread throughout the Northeast, for the dime novels about the Kid would sell upward of 150,000 copies, and parts of Hough’s works were even published in mass-cultural magazines. Dime novel after dime novel constructed metaphors wherein the Kid’s “bloodthirsty” body and “devilish” character were allied with a “border civilization” controlled by corrupt Nuevomexicanos like Otero.6 When considering the discursive power of these fictional treatments, one must not forget what was at stake for Anglo-Saxon manhood during the pivotal decade before Turner would declare the frontier closed and under Anglo-American control. It is no coincidence that while these dime novels were being mass-produced and perpetuating a racialized discourse about Mexicanos, white Anglo-Americans were attempting to consolidate the former Mexican territories into a replica of the white republic. As I mentioned earlier, New Mexico was especially desired for a number of reasons: its mineral resources, trade routes, and pastoral beauty. However, unlike other territories, New Mexico’s population was mostly Mexican and Indian, and families like the Oteros had been political scions for generations before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

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Reacting to this popular sentiment, Otero addresses the reading public in the preface to The Real Billy the Kid, noting that his biography is pure fact and thereby countering those narratives of “pure fiction wholly devoid of fact” that have helped construct the Mexicanos, the Oteros, and the southwestern body politic as uncivilized.7 Otero’s Billy the Kid, by being made a tragic hero

who was “more sinned against than sinning” and helped Nuevomexicanos fight against the Santa Fe Ring for Mexican lands, symbolically revealed the injustices that the Mexican American people had endured after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. What Otero’s biography explains, then, is how Billy the Kid’s body becomes marked in the Mexican community as distinctly Mexican, as El Bilito, a hero of the Mexican American people. His work was in effect the first call to pardon Billy the Kid, for Billy was, to Otero and other Mexicanos, a “man more sinned against than sinning.”

Today The past makes me read slowly, searching for the poetic pardon hidden within the newspaper ink . . .

December 31, 2010, by Rick Rojas, Los Angeles Times Reporting from Phoenix— Despite a flurry of publicity and public agonizing, 19th century outlaw Billy the Kid won’t be pardoned, outgoing Gov. Bill Richardson announced Friday. The Democratic governor had considered pardoning the Kid since at least the start of his term but finally focused on the issue as his term wound down. Friday was the last day he could act. “It was a very close call,” Richardson told “Good Morning America.” “The romanticism appealed to me, to issue a pardon, but the facts and the evidence did not support it, and I’ve got to be responsible, especially when a governor is issuing a pardon.” Richardson considered pardoning the Kid for one killing, not for any of his other killings or crimes. The governor reviewed historical evidence and a pardon petition submitted by Albuquerque lawyer Randi McGinn, but concluded the facts were ambiguous. McGinn’s petition said territorial governor Lew Wallace had promised the Kid a pardon if he testified about a killing he’d witnessed. The Kid, also known as William Bonney and Henry McCarty, offered to testify in return for a pardon in the 1878 slaying of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady. Wallace responded: “I have authority to exempt you from prosecution if you will testify to what you say you know.”

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No Pardon “No Pardon for the Kid,” New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson says. “The romanticism appealed to me . . . but the facts and the evidence did not support it.”

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Bonney testified but received no pardon. Instead, he was convicted and sentenced to hang. In 1881, he broke out of jail, killing two deputies as he fled. Lawman Pat Garrett tracked him down and killed him months later. The Kid’s subsequent conduct factored into his decision, Richardson said Friday. “What I think maybe tipped the scales with me is that Billy went ahead after not getting this pardon and killed two deputies,” he said. He added that “a lack of conclusiveness and the historical ambiguity” also contributed to his decision. Descendants of Wallace and Garrett had campaigned against the pardon, saying it would have smeared their ancestors’ names. William N. Wallace, great-grandson of the then-governor, expressed relief Friday. “I was gratified to learn that Gov. Richardson had given up his effort to pardon Billy the Kid,” Wallace said. “It seems to me he thus followed a rational, correct route, although I am still mystified as to why he commenced this nonsense.” But McGinn found victory in the debate. “We won the battle, which was proving the broken promise by Gov. Wallace,” she said. “But we lost the war. It’s great being Billy the Kid’s lawyer.”

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Governor Richardson never pardoned Billy the Kid, despite flirting with his corpse for nearly a decade. Like Otero, Richardson used Billy the Kid in his own political self-fashioning. He ordered a special commission to study the case of Billy the Kid, gave him a court-ordered lawyer, and debated the idea of digging up his body to test his DNA and see if he was related to Elbert Garcia. Richardson used the corpse of Billy the Kid as a distraction, a way to connect with the Mexican people whom he never truly connected with during his term. His digging up of Billy the Kid enabled him to deflect the political turmoil he had been enduring for over a decade. It is no coincidence that he would connect with his Mexican past and Billy the Kid at the same time that late-night talk shows were using his administration to talk about corruption in New Mexican politics and discussing accusations that he used campaign funds to pay off a woman who accused him of sexual harassment. Governor Richardson was a “Mexican Clinton,” some would joke. Even Billy can’t help some men. Am I as despicable as these men? Have I, too, used the corpse of Billy the Kid to claim my own Mexicanness, to advance my own career as a Latinx male in academia? I have worked with Billy the Kid for longer than my daughter has lived. I have presented my arguments to Anglo retirees in their

B ill y t he Kid ’s Corp se and t he Sp e c te r o f Me xi c a n M a n h o o d

communities; to Western audiences dressed like Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, and Billy the Kid, with me in a ten-gallon hat; to academic audiences; to television audiences; and even to Mexicans at a la raza conference. Billy— I am allowed to call him by his first name now— has become an institution of the public sphere for me. He has enabled me to get the job I have today. I am in San Diego with my in-laws. My colleague in Boulder calls me. “PBS’s American Experience is looking for you. Everywhere,” she says. “You need to call them.” Sitting on a park bench in Shelter Island listening to Lyle Lovett practice for his concert at Humphreys, I make a declaration of fact— I tell the producer, “Billy the Kid was a Mexican . . . No, not a real Mexican, a Mexican like Beck, the singer.” Long pause. I don’t think he gets it. My entire phone call, my entire contention, centers around a book I recovered while working for the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project and which I would later introduce, edit, and partly translate: The Real Billy the Kid by Miguel Antonio Otero. The producer googles the book. “So, Billy the Kid was an honorary Latino?” he asks. Was he then, to them? Back then, to me now? “Perhaps,” I say. “What are you saying, then?” I interrupt, “OK, he is to me. Billy the Kid was as Mexican as I am Mexican.” Long pause. He wanted a black-and-white answer to a brown question. Billy’s phantom publicity, his ability to be anything to anyone, his ability to take on so many truths, so much history and memory, allowed for Latinxs to use him— no, strike that, to embody him. “So is there a real Billy the Kid?” he continues the conversation. “No, no more than there is a real George Washington.” Long pause. “I’ll get back to you,” he says. I sense his skepticism. I retrace my steps back to Lyle Lovett. I stand on the other side of the marina. I can barely make him out on stage. He is wearing a bolo tie and a hat. I wish I could tell you he was singing his song “Me and Billy the Kid.” Wait, I will tell you that. While I had the conversation with the producer, Lyle Lovett was singing “Me and Billy the Kid.” It was memorable. I wanted to tell him I began working on Billy the Kid in the middle of what I call my Chicano years. The years in graduate school when I reread all of Latinx history, searching for Chicanxs everywhere. Elvis, not El Vez, I swore was Chicano. Martin Sheen, his kids: yeah, Latinxs. Even today, I secretly search for Chicanxs. I search in vain for Chicanxs in the public sphere in

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Figure 1.2. La Casa Teatro.

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order to locate my own identity. I think I am a Chicano because I know they are out there. Why else would I search for them in the present and in the past? Miguel Antonio Otero (1859– 1944) stood as my first interlocutor about Billy the Kid. My first exploration of “Mexicanness.” As I have said above, like me, he, too, would use the Kid to fashion his own Latino identity. And like him, I would write a book about Billy the Kid to fashion my own masculinity within the academy.

But I am not alone. Other Mexican scholars and writers would turn to Billy the Kid for their own reasons. No less than the first winner of the Premio Quinto Sol, Rudolfo Anaya, would also resurrect Billy the Kid . . . Act 1 The men pull Paco away. They cover Billy with a sheet, then slowly raise the bed and carry it out as if carrying a coffin. Rosa follows, the other women comforting her. Paco remains. Ash rises from his stool and looks at the audience. The actors sing “El Corrido de Billy the Kid.” Fue una noche oscura y triste En el pueblo Fort Sumner Cuando el sheriff Pat Garrett A Billy the Kid mató A Billy the Kid mató Mil ochocientos ochenta y uno Presente lo tengo yo Cunado en la casa de Pedro Maxwell Nomás dos tiros le dio Nomás dos tiros le dio

Ay, qué tristeza me da Ver a Rosita llorando, Y el pobre Billy en sus brazos Con su sangre derramando Con su sangre derramando Vuela, vuela palomita, A los pueblos de Río Pecos Cuéntale a las morenitas Que ya su Billy murió Ash: You Mexicans. Yes, you had a soft spot in your heart for Billy. He spoke Spanish like a native . . .

B ill y t he Kid ’s Corp se and t he Sp e c te r o f Me xi c a n M a n h o o d

Vuela, vuela palomita, A los pueblos de Río Pecos Cuéntale a las morenitas Que ya su Billy murió Que ya su Billy murió

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Figure 1.3. Billy the Kid’s current grave site.

Paco: He treated us like hombres! Mexicano or Gringo, todos éramos iguales.8

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I stalk Anaya, write him countless letters asking him why it is he decided to write about Billy the Kid, spending so much time with this Irish white boy. He responds to me in a letter, telling me Billy was an important figure for New Mexicans, and he wanted to capture the man who has been so misunderstood for generations.

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I read and reread Anaya’s letter weeks before I begin my journey through the lava fields, this New Mexican Valley of Fires, lost, searching again for Billy the Kid’s grave in every fissure. I hum the corrido “El Bilito” and drive parallel to the train rails that have not been used in decades. I wonder if my great-grandfather, Manuel Pérez, who drove the train of the exiled Pancho Villa, ever made it down this far. The search for Billy leads me to my nostalgic search for masculinity and rebellion in my own family, an ancestral link to a Mexican Revolutionary past that is so distant from the life we all have made for ourselves— we now are a family of academics. I have never even been on a train. So I am left searching for the public grave of Billy the Kid, a white Irish immigrant, uncovering his Mexican past with every news story. I still search, of course, but now through my rearview mirror. I am not sure what the truth is anymore. Was Billy the Kid Mexican? Was my grandfather really a conduc-

tor, or did he tell us a story about the revolution and trains that somehow over the years turned him into a bandit’s accomplice? I plan on sending out my DNA, someday. I finally find Billy’s tomb— a plaque ends my search, pointing me to a stone relic marking the remains of William Henry McCarty Jr. Born 1859. Died 1881. I am underwhelmed. Two weeks after I visited the stone in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, a group of vandals attempted to steal it. The two thousand pounds of unbearable weight was too much for the vandals, however. They only managed to make off with the plaque that marks the way to his remains. Now an iron cage like a jail surrounds the tombstone. Billy’s corpse is finally entombed. But his ghost is long gone.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Turner, Frontier in American History, 62. Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 56. Las Vegas Optic, 1897. Tatum, Inventing Billy the Kid, 61– 64. Hough, Story of the Outlaw, 307. See Hough, Story of the Outlaw, 307– 11; Tatum, Inventing Billy the Kid, 61– 64. Otero, Real Billy the Kid, 34–35. This passage quoted from Anaya, Billy the Kid.

Anaya, Rudolfo. Billy the Kid and Other Plays. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. Hough, Emerson. The Story of the Outlaw: A Study of the Western Desperado. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. Otero, Miguel Antonio. The Real Billy the Kid. New York: R. R. Wilson, 1936. Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992. Tatum, Stephen. Inventing Billy the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America, 1881– 1981. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Dover, 1996.

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Works Cited

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Chapter 2

TRUMP’S POETICS OF CACA Shitty “Bad Hombres” and “Shithole” Latin American Countries Sergio A. Macías

Etymologically, the word caca descends from the Latin cacare, to defecate. In Spanish, caca is a colloquial term equivalent to excrement or feces. In recent years, caca made its debut crossover into the English language and Anglo pop culture. The word— a direct borrowing from Spanish— has been widely popularized in the United States, to such an extent that caca operates synonymously with other English colloquialisms such as shit, poop, and crap. Caca, a byproduct of digestion, the vivid evidence of a natural bodily function, evokes a wide array of reactions and associations in different people and across societies and cultures. Whether we feel fascination, repulsion, or something in between, caca remains a universal taboo. Notwithstanding our recent fixation on the poop emoji, two attitudes prevail toward caca in the United States: repulsion and indifference. The former has a protective evolutionary purpose; foul smells often signal health threats typically associated with death and disease. The latter has more to do with social etiquette and serves to reinforce a set of moral values. Our indifferent attitude may also be attributed to the efficient elimination of undesirable waste through the engineering of sewer systems, the installation of waste management facilities, and, of course, the invention of toilets.1 In fact, in 2007, readers of the British Medical Journal voted modern sanitation— the toilet— as the most important medical advancement since 1840.2 Taboo or not, the importance of caca as a mode of expression and communication is real and tangible. We utilize it to convey a multiplicity of cultural and linguistic significations. Indeed, 83 percent of all foul words in English derive from excrement and defecation; likewise, “many Spanish swear words and insults cover similar territory to their English counterparts.”3 As we cast light on this messy topic, we observe that caca matters, literally and metaphorically, and so does the anus— a.k.a. the shithole— the organ associated with caca. As stated in The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters: “How a society disposes of its human excrement is an indication of how it treats humans too.”4 38

Tr u mp’s P oet ics of Caca

From his GOP candidacy in 2015 to his current administration, Donald Trump has consistently evoked excrement and the anus when addressing immigration issues. Trump has depicted illegal immigrants of Latin descent as undesirable waste excreted by their countries of origin and referred to Latin American countries as shitholes. The question then becomes, Why? What underlies Trump’s divisive rhetoric? What is the nature of Trump’s scatological fixation on Latinx caca, particularly on Latino masculinities? This scatological study of Trump’s rhetoric subjects his words— his crap— to a search for complex, contradictory, and perhaps unconscious messages. Besides discussing the obvious— the use of foul and vulgar language to denigrate— my main motive in this chapter is to impose some structure and sense on the hostile political climate we currently endure under the Trump administration, employing analysis of some bold and humorous scatological language and cultural expressions. By all means, these are some shitty times, especially for those of us who have been recipients of Trump’s attacks. I even dare to respectfully disagree with Michelle Obama’s recommendation: “When they go low, we go high.”5 On the contrary, when Trump goes low with his poetics of caca, we go lower, all the way down, to the root of it all, the anus. To the bottom of the pile of shit. I coin the term the poetics of caca to describe Trump’s stand on immigration issues, which embroils Latinxs and Latin America. It entails, as well, a type of leadership, one characterized by its null practice of inclusive excellence and the absence of affirmative action. The poetics of caca refers to a specific type of political rhetoric erected upon fear. While Trump’s words may seem off-script and improvised, his speech is a premeditated and conscious public act that resurrects obsolete (post)colonial racial, sexual, and ethnic stereotypes about Latinxs and Latin America, which is why I employ the Spanish word caca. Not only does this rhetoric draw upon foul language and scatological references typically associated with excrement, defecation, and the anus, but it also operates through similar hermeneutics. Caca denotes xenophobia toward the Latinx presence in the United States. It is a product of, and a reaction to, the rapid cultural, linguistic, and racial transformation that this country is experiencing. For instance, in just the last decade, Latinx communities grew exponentially and became the largest ethnic group in the country after non-Hispanic whites. At this rate, predicts Juan González in Harvest of Empire, “it is likely that by the end of this century a majority of the U.S. population will trace its ethnic heritage to Latin America, not to Europe.”6 Furthermore, the United States recently became the country with the second-largest number of Spanish speakers in the world.7 Such drastic change has awakened fear and anxiety among non-Hispanic whites, primarily those “who have had very little social interaction with people who were cul-

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turally and linguistically different to themselves.”8 These groups are voicing their fear and discontent. For them, Trump’s racial rhetoric seems congruent. Latinx immigrants, like filthy caca, carry disease and infection, and they contaminate. According to this rhetoric, Latin caca, as undesirable waste, supposedly poses an eminent (health) threat to the American way of life, as well as to the racial composition of this country. Trump’s poetics of caca gorges on this fear and vomits it back. This type of speech evidences the “specific yet highly significant manner in which fear is used for political purposes,” seeking to agitate the masses, manipulate public opinion, and distract attention from urgent matters such as a long-due conversation about immigration reform.9 By painting a negative image of Latinxs as people to be feared, the poetics of caca breaks down civil discourse, taking reasonable solutions off the table in favor of impulsive, radical, and impractical measures; for example, the deportation of eleven million immigrants becomes less objectionable if they are perceived as dangerous, filthy waste. The poetics of caca is, as well, a peculiar form of nationalism that dines at the tables of white supremacy, isolationism, and right-wing populism. It is an effective political tactic because it toys with the idea of survival and existence, therefore it is rationalized (and justified) as a matter of (inter)national safety and security. It is fearmongering catered to a specific audience: people who have “determined that ideology is more important than facts.”10 For the last five years, the poetics of caca has managed to displace truth and facts in the service of ideology. Metaphorically speaking, as caca settles in, it acts as a fertilizer for hate and intolerance, and it stimulates the growth of outdated, fearbased perceptions of otherness. Consequently, the poetics of caca finds fertile ground in societies that manifest an attitude of egocentrism, ignorance, and/ or indifference. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze Trump’s political rhetoric as a poetics of caca, which is essentially the continuation of a (post) colonial legacy, a long-lasting tradition of fearing the “other” and fueling racial tension and division among ethnic groups, as is occurring nowadays in the United States. Of particular interest is the ambivalent nature of Trump’s foul rhetoric, a nature that is essentially a paradox, finding its meaning by continually oscillating between the equal but polarized forces of attraction and repulsion. Trump’s poetics of caca suggests an underlying desire for or fixation on Latinx caca, chiefly felt toward filthy Latino masculinities, thus exposing a homoerotic undertone. Trump’s rhetoric exists as a type of coprophilia, in other words; Trump’s speech suggests his (sexual) fascination and satisfaction provoked by excrement. For Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, (post)colonial racial stereotypes are essentially single stories enacted through repetition: “You tell people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they [eventually]

On June 16, 2015, Trump announced his candidacy as the GOP nominee for president. He immediately rolled out his poetics of caca, painting Latinx immigrants as shitty people and using the political stage to take a dump on them. He began with the fear-inducing statement, “Our country is in serious trouble! We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories. We don’t have them anymore. They are beating us.”17 In just a few phrases, Trump delivered a persuasive and disturbing image of the United States in which weakness and deterioration have become, according to him, normalized to an extent that no one but he is ingenious enough to discern, “and nobody talks about it.” If we define the present as the moment when he enunciates his message, meanings arise through the juxtaposition of temporalities— past versus present— in which the present signifies a loss, a lack or absence of something— a glorious past— hence the urgency of addressing the country’s current state of crisis. The past becomes nostalgic— that is, we are no longer what we once were, and as the past defined our entire existence, we cease to exist. The present state of affairs is suddenly an existential crisis in which the country must reconcile its fall onto the dung heap. Trump’s rhetoric provokes

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become.”11 Racial stereotypes are, therefore, incomplete narratives defined by one fundamental principle, power, which determines “how they [single stories] are told, who tells them, when they are told, and how many stories are told.”12 Power then becomes “not only the ability to tell the story of another person, but make it into the definitive story of that person.”13 (Post)colonial racial discourse(s) promoted the white Western European male, positioning everyone else lower on the hierarchical scale. Waste, filth, and disease are key concepts implemented in (post)colonial racial stereotypes to enact fear and marginalize historically oppressed groups by (re-)creating differences between “self ” and “other.” For Homi Bhabha, racial stereotypes are essentially a reiteration of difference that operates on two perceivable planes: (a) as a discourse, and (b) as a (dis)identification process. Bhabha further explains that both planes, which together constitute the paradox of otherness, oscillate between the polarizing forces of attraction and repulsion, as well as everything in between.14 Following this premise, Robert Young suggests that “in this characteristic ambivalent movement of attraction and repulsion, we encounter the sexual economy of desire in fantasies of race, and of race in fantasies of desire.”15 Trump’s poetics of caca, which reproduces racial stereotypes about Latinxs— primarily men— and Latin America, has something in common with nineteenth-century racial narratives: “Blackness [in this case, brownness] evokes an attractive, but dangerous, sexuality, an apparently abundant, limitless, but threatening, fertility. And what does fear suggest if not desire?”16

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fear through a “simple binary logic, following the formula ‘this is the way things are, and there is nothing (else) you can do about it.’ ”18 In this fashion Trump paved the way for what would become his political slogan, Make America Great Again. This supposed message of hope contradicts the fatalistic and irrevocable image he himself fabricated. To this end, the new enemy of America has no clear identity beyond the third-person plural pronoun. The irony of what would eventually become America First, an isolationist policy, and his Make America Great Again slogan is that these slogans betray the very nature of an all-white heterogeneous America in which an Other, an enemy, is necessary in order to obtain meaning. If the Other is further categorized as filth, as excrement, the distinction between Self and Other is easily discernible. Trump’s egocentric vision of “Self ” cannot stand alone without this Other. For example, when he states that “there are no jobs. Because China has our jobs. And Mexico has our jobs. They all have our jobs. But the real number is 18 to 19 percent, and even 20 percent, not 5 percent,” not only does he improvise statistics— pulling lies out of his ass and feeding them to the American public, rearranging the functions of oral and anal cavities— but he also relies yet again on an Other to make his shit (and fear) relevant.19 His poetics of caca also invokes the Other to incite a fear reaction in the crowd; we are left wondering if a discussion of unemployment that did not have job-stealing Mexicans to blame— a problem without an Other-faced enemy at its core— would inspire the same level of passion and enthusiasm. Trump’s incendiary remarks about Mexicans, Latinxs, and Latin America were a fundamental aspect of his campaign and the backbone of many of his promises. This discourse was pivotal in the GOP presidential nominee race, and later in the presidential race against Hillary Clinton. Back in June 2015, Trump stated:

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When do we beat Mexico at the border? They laugh at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend. Believe me, but they are killing us economically. The U.S. have become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. It is true. When Mexico sends its people. They are not sending their best. They are not sending you. They are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are sending those problems with us. They are bringing drugs, they are bringing crime. They are rapists. And some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and tell us what we are getting.20 Trump breaks down Latinx identities into three fundamental categories: (a) abject immigrants (and, judging by recent remarks about the caravan, carriers

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of diseases), (b) criminals, and (c) Latinxs who possess a dangerous masculinity. The image of Latinxs as abject immigrants is not new. In 1848, the end of the Mexican-American War was marked by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico was forced to cede half of its territory; with this land came 10 percent of Mexico’s population at that time, roughly 116,000 “new” Mexicans who lived north of the Rio Grande.21 The treaty granted U.S. citizenship to these Mexicans, but assimilation into the expanding fabric of the United States was accompanied by racism and prejudice: “From the start, the Anglo settlers saw the Mexicans as an obstacle to progress, and routinely cheated them out of their land.”22 Their inability to speak English and ignorance of the Anglo-American legal system facilitated these abuses, thus violence against Mexicans became a common occurrence, to such a degree that “lynching of Mexicans continued into the early 1900s.”23 Furthermore, “Mexicans who dared challenge the Anglo encroachment were often branded as bandits and outlaws.”24 Later in American history, the need for human labor during World War II made it possible for the United States to import seasonal farmworkers from Mexico to work in the fields through the bracero program, which lasted until 1965. As many as a hundred thousand farmworkers crossed the border legally each year with temporary work visas.25 Unfortunately, these hardworking, visa-holding seasonal farmworkers continued to be characterized as different, as lesser: Mexicans who did the jobs Americans did not want. A message that was broadcast on national television reinforced the image of Latinxs as poor, uneducated, unskilled, and dirty: “All farm jobs which are tough, dirty, or unpleasant are generally referred to as stoop labor. Understandably, then, this is the only area in which American labor supply runs short and is supplemented by Mexican citizens.”26 This 1960s advertisement for the bracero program and others similar to it were meant to explain to the American public the advantages of allowing seasonal farmworkers. Unfortunately, they also increased the perceived gap between “us” and “them” and propagated negative stereotypes of Latinxs as abject immigrants, an image that persists into the present. Trump may insist that illegals are not “Hollywood actors,”27 but Hollywood did play a crucial role in the creation of negative racial stereotypes, such as a criminal nature. Between the 1940s and 1990s, Hollywood films portrayed Latinxs as “lazy, dirty, dishonest,” and “immoral, with a low regard toward life.”28 In the ’50s and ’60s, Hollywood films took a step further, branding a specific type of Latino masculinity as el bandido, a figure who, according to Charles Ramírez Berg, “embodies a specific array of negative traits” such as “dirtiness, ugliness, sneakiness, ignorance, and a proclivity toward criminality and violence.”29 Ramírez Berg comments further about the nature of el bandido:

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The bandido’s darker skin immediately marks him as an individual outside the white Anglo norm. He presents a threat to the dominant society’s purported racial purity. . . . He is a threat that needs to be eliminated in order to return the diegetic world to its tranquil, pre-threat status quo. . . . This character will act in predictably despicable, antisocial, sneaky, violent, criminal ways. . . . [T]he bandido is at the very least a simpleminded sociopath, though from decades of experience with his various screen incarnations, we gather that he is also maladjusted and unstable, alcoholic and sadistic, and a sexual psychopath. The organizing principle of el bandido as an ideological force is his fundamental antiestablishmentarianism. Because his entire being stands against the nation’s values and ideals, his very existence threatens dominant American ideology.30 This is precisely the negative stereotype that Trump conjures and disseminates as he constructs an enemy. His poetics of caca departs from a genderless abject immigrant, going on to brand this stereotype as a dangerous form of Latino criminal masculinity. For example, during a presidential debate, Trump made the following statement:

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One of my first acts will be to get all the drug lords, all of the bad ones. We have some bad, bad people in this country that have to go out. We are going to get them out. We are going to secure the border. And once the border is secured, at a later date we’ll make a determination as to the rest. But we have some bad hombres here and we are going to get them out.31

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Trump evokes a concrete image of male criminality, the drug lord or the bandido 2.0, one that in recent years has gained notorious momentum in popular culture in television shows like Narcos, Infiltrator, and Paradise Lost, and mainstream films such as Gringos, Sicario, and American Made. When Trump says, “These are people with problems,” what he is really trying to convey to the American public is that the enemy is mostly Latino men, not women, not children (though they too have been targets of his racism).32 Drugs, crime, and rape consequently become permanent signifiers of Latino masculinities in a newly constructed semiotic field in which race, gender, and criminality intersect and become one horrific signifier that trespasses out of the big screen and infiltrates the political stage. In Trump’s poetics of caca, rape evokes not only sexual violence, but also the phantasmagoric aura of the phallus. The danger of Latino men is not just that they bring drugs and crime, but that attached to their dark bodies is a virile penis, a biological tool with

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which they are able to break the law and threaten national security. Trump thus positions Latino men on top of the food chain and depicts them as the largest predator standing against Anglo-American values. Trump’s poetics of caca echoes the nineteenth-century pseudoscientific discourse that rationalized criminality “as a matter of constitutional degeneracy.”33 Trump’s poetics of caca conceives the criminal nature of Latino masculinities in terms of “criminal eugenics, or the belief that certain socially disadvantaged classes of people and races were intellectually inferior by nature.”34 Therefore, the physiology of “non-white peoples,” like that of illegals, particularly that of Latino men, is assumed by Trump’s poetics of caca “to be primitive, fundamentally degenerate, or neurologically diseased.”35 In a recent interview with Fox News, when asked about the migrant caravan from Central America, which contained nearly seven thousand people of all ages and genders, Trump reiterated Latino men as the largest threat: “When you look at that caravan, and you look of largely, very big percentage of men, young, strong, a lot of bad people, a lot of bad people in there. People that are in gangs, we don’t want them in this country.”36 Ultimately, he articulates a specific fear: that of the fertility of interracial unions. Once more, Trump verbalizes racial, ethnic, and sexual (post)colonial stereotypes: his fear alludes to an absolute fear that was a subject of debate during the nineteenth century, a fear that found its basis in the “alleged degeneration of those of mixed race.”37 Trump manages to contradict his phallic, virile, Latino masculine enemy. In this paradox, he introduces yet another layer of signification, degeneracy not in terms of fertility, but in terms of the diseased body: “We don’t know what people have. Some of these people are sick. They are bringing disease with them.”38 Taking Trump’s argument as truth, Fox News followed up and compiled a list of diseases that posed a serious health threat to the American public, according to Trump’s poetics of caca. This list included HIV, measles, pertussis, rubella, and rabies.39 As a prophylactic measure, Trump deployed 5,200 soldiers to the southern border, to stop the remaining 4,000 immigrants who had made it to Tijuana. Trump’s poetics of caca presents the protection of the southern border as an essential factor in the existence of a nation like the United States: “They are coming in illegally. Drugs are pouring in through the border. We have no country if we have no border.”40 This recalls the importance of one of his campaign promises, the Trump wall: “On day one, we will begin working on an impenetrable physical, tall, powerful, southern border wall.”41 Reflecting on Donald Trump’s political rhetoric and executive actions when addressing illegal immigration and border security, and on his depiction of Latinxs, it’s increasingly difficult to avoid establishing scatological associations. In concrete terms, Trump’s rhetoric brings to mind excrement and the anus.

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Figure 2.1. Photo by Evan Vucci (AP).

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Bias aside, such correlations are unavoidable for various reasons: (1) Trump’s explicit insults. On numerous occasions he has evoked graphic and vulgar images— for example, using the word “shithole” to describe Latin American countries and classifying illegals as undesirable waste. The words from his own potty mouth make the direct connection to excrement and the anus. (2) Trump’s personal and public statements on important topics like immigration, border security, and amnesty, as well as his generally dismissive and derogatory behavior toward Latinxs, which can be classified as a shitty attitude. Trump uses the political stage— an elevated position— to publicly humiliate and defame vulnerable groups; that is, to take a dump on them. (3) Trump’s antics and gestures— particularly the way he tends to contract his lips, which have an uncanny resemblance to an anus, but also the fact that Trump, like no other politician in (post)modern American history, is able to talk out of his ass; that is, to lie, to make up facts on the spot— which invert the positions and functions of the oral and anal orifices. What issues from his mouth is not just words; those words are caca. (4) Trump’s overall political persona, which can be described as anal expulsive: in Freudian terms, a personality type characterized as volatile. Anal expulsive individuals display a tendency toward temper tantrums, use unfiltered speech, display cruelty toward others, and manifest neither signs of remorse nor fear of consequences. (5) Poetic justice, according to the richly layered meanings and interpretations of verbal expressions based on excrement and the anus. There exists a principle in the use of foul language, not unlike Newton’s third law of motion: for every scatological insult directed at someone, there exists an equal and opposite scatological expression in

Notes 1. 2. 3.

Hanson, “How the Toilet.” Coombes, “Toiling for Toilets,” 31. Planas, “13 Spanish Curse Words.”

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response. This is neither vindictive nor inflammatory; rather, it represents a clever way to reassert one’s dignity while standing up to a bully. The Spanish expression El que pega primero se jode reminds us that words have consequences, that “what you say can bite you back (in the ass).” Trump’s poetics of caca oscillates between repulsion toward and fixation on Latinxs, especially Latino masculinities, evidencing a underlying homoerotic desire for these “bad hombres,” whom he also describes (almost in a drawl) as “strong, young men.”42 I concur with what John Leguizamo stated on Steven Colbert’s The Late Show when promoting his Latin History for Morons: “It is terrifying. Being a Latin man in this administration is terrifying. But luckily, Trump has a positive side. He is like the enema of this country who is going to release all the misogyny, and homophobia, and racism out of the anus of America.”43 In a way, Trump’s poetics of caca is the next logical step in (post)modern American politics, for several reasons. First, American politics, for the last seventy years, has been heavily dependent on the need for an enemy. As Erickson observes: “This is exactly the kind of response we have seen in recent decades, especially after the conclusion of the Cold War and the collapse of the ‘evil empire,’ the Soviet Union. Since that time there has been a desperate hunt for a new ‘bad guy’”— or “bad hombres,” to quote Trump.44 Second, we are a consumerist society that consistently chooses instant gratification over substance. We love reality television because it blurs the line between what is real and what is not. Our fixation on the poop emoji belies prevalent attitudes of “Who gives a shit?” and a craving for more of the same. American consumers reach for the biggest and the best, but primarily the cheapest— that is, potentially the crappiest. These principles apply to our consumption of shit or crap in the form of products, entertainment, and ideas, including political ones. We love our shit, we acquire and accumulate more, until its mass begins to stink and occupy space. Politics finds its consumer appeal by providing the masses with a satisfying narrative, never mind that this narrative may be a load of shit. Trump’s poetics of caca, as an example of a political narrative based on fear, has fed us some of the finest, largest, and cheapest shit to be had in American politics. Given American consumer tastes and habits, it’s hardly surprising that so many have lined up at the trough for another helping of fear-flavored shit.

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

George, Big Necessity, 2. Obama, “DNC Full Speech.” González, Harvest of Empire, xvi. González, xvii. González, xvii. Erickson, Poetics of Fear, 1. Koppel, “Sean Hannity Is Bad.” Adichie, “Danger.” Adichie, “Danger.” Adichie, “Danger.” Bhabha, Location of Culture. Young, Colonial Desire, 86. Young, 86. Trump, “Watch Donald Trump Announce.” Erickson, Poetics of Fear, 6. Trump, “Watch Donald Trump Announce.” Trump, “Watch Donald Trump Announce.” González, Harvest, 47. González, 100. González, 100. González, 101. González, 101. Gjelten, “Why Braceros?” Trump, “Trump Clashes with Jim Acosta.” Berg, Latino Images in Film, 86. Berg, 86. Berg, 96– 97. Trump, “Trump on ‘Strong Borders.’ ” Trump, “Trump on ‘Strong Borders.’ ” Terry and Urla, Deviant Bodies, 137. Terry and Urla, 134. Terry and Urla, 134. Ingraham, “President Trump Goes One-on-One.” Young, Colonial Desire, 83. Belluz, “Fox News Says.” Ingraham, “President Trump Goes One-on-One.” Ingraham, “President Trump Goes One-on-One.” Trump, “Border Wall with Mexico.” Ingraham, “President Trump Goes One-on-One.” John Leguizamo, “Latin History.” Erickson, Poetics of Fear, 6.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” Filmed on October 7, 2009, Oxford, United Kingdom, Ted Global Conference. Video, 19:16. https://www.ted.com /talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story. Belluz, Julia. “Fox News Says the Migrant Caravan Will Bring Disease Outbreaks. That’s Xenophobic Nonsense.” Vox, November 1, 2018. https://www.vox.com/science-and -health/2018/11/1/18048332/migrant-caravan-fox-news-disease-smallpox-outbreaks -vaccines-xenophobia. Berg, Charles Ramírez. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Coombes, Rebecca. “Toiling for Toilets.” British Medical Journal 341, no. 7773 (September 2010): 582–83. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c5027. Erickson, Chris. The Poetics of Fear: A Human Response to Human Security. New York: Continuum, 2010. George, Rose. The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. New York: Picador, 2014. Gjelten, Tom. “Why Braceros? (1962) Mexican Guest Workers— Reel American Preview.” Aired on May 28, 2016. Video from C-SPAN3, 4:53, https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=lhikWfQB6SU. González, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2011. Hanson, Joe. “How the Toilet Changed History.” Filmed on February 14, 2017. Video from PBS, It’s Okay To Be Smart, 7:14. https://www.pbs.org/video/how-the-toilet-changed -history-brjgoe/. Ingraham, Laura. “President Trump Goes One-on-One with Laura Ingraham.” Filmed on October 29, 2017. Video from Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 21:17. https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=Juk7wCe0ZNg&t=895s. Koppel, Ted. “Ted Koppel on Why He Thinks Sean Hannity Is Bad for America.” Aired on March 26, 2017. Video from CBS Sunday Morning, 0:43. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=tmaKl0Zm2c4. Leguizamo, John. “John Leguizamo Teaches Latin History for Morons.” Aired on November 23, 2018. Video from CBS, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, 10:04. https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=SidNKw7NPuc&t=183s. Obama, Michelle. “Michelle Obama’s DNC Full Speech.” Filmed at 2016 Democratic National Convention, Jul 25, 2016. Video from PBS NewsHour, 14:45. https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=4ZNWYqDU948. Planas, Roque. “13 Spanish Curse Words That Make No Sense in English.” Huffington Post, May 2, 2013. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/spanish-curse-words _n_3204253.html.

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Works Cited

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Terry, Jennifer, and Jacqueline Urla. Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Trump, Donald, J. “Trump Clashes with Jim Acosta in Testy Exchange.” Aired on November 7, 2018. Video from CNN News. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdFe -LmFRV8. Trump, Donald J. “Trump on ‘Strong Borders’ and ‘Bad Hombres.’ ” Filmed on October 19, 2016. Video from PBS News Room, 1:56. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= KER9b3yMFs0. Trump, Donald J. “Trump’s Border Wall with Mexico Takes Shape.” Aired on December 4, 2017. Video from CBS News, 9:28. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= DzfCZ6W7NeE. Trump, Donald J. “Watch Donald Trump Announce His Candidacy for U.S. President.” Aired on June 16, 2015. Video from PBS News Hour, 46:33. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=SpMJx0-HyOM&t=388s. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

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Chapter 3

“NOIZY MINORITYZ” White Republicans Trapped in the Cypher Wayne Freeman

In the mid-1990s, Republican California governor Pete Wilson spearheaded a racist, nativist, and anti-immigrant campaign to pass Proposition 187, a law intended to deny health care, social services, and education access to California’s undocumented population. California hip hop was not silent, with Bay Area Chicano rap artists B.S.A., Choco, and PWee collaborating to lyrically roast Wilson (as well as then– Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole) in their 1996 track “Noizy Minorityz.” In the same year, Tupac Shakur famously went at Wilson in his classic “To Live and Die in L.A.,” in which he also proclaimed, “It wouldn’t be L.A. without Mexicans.” Exactly twenty years later, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump would base much of his 2016 campaign on a Pete Wilson– esque style of racism, nativism, and antiimmigrant rhetoric. This time, hip hop would respond on a national scale, including the Baltimore amateur youth video that went viral, “CIT4DT”; YG and Nipsey Hussle’s track and video “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump)”; and the all-Chicanx cypher “Donald Trump’s Nightmare.” In this chapter, I compare the political rhetoric and lyrical responses from 1996 and 2016. I argue that, in lyrically attacking powerful white male politicians, these mostly male Black and Brown rap artists have often drawn rhetorical power by invoking a problematic masculinity that involves feminizing these powerful white men, by relying on an (unrealistic) “dark alley” fantasy (let me catch you on the street!), and by collaborating and “cliquing up,” which functions by using the threat of Black and Brown male bodies and voices in groups. Though these rhetorical strategies contain their own problematics and contradictions, figures such as Wilson and Trump have, ironically or not, also served as an impetus for explicit calls for Black and Brown unity in California, in the United States, and in hip hop. These calls have spread beyond Black and Brown coalitional politics, or racial politics in general, to become calls for widespread unity in a struggle against bigotry. To provide some context, I will begin by turning to a brief analysis of hip hop and Black and Brown politics, and the centrality of masculinity in these 51

discourses. Finally, I will discuss the importance of a united struggle beyond any boundaries, racial or otherwise, in which hip hop may serve an important role, especially in the face of the continuing Trump era in the United States.

Hip Hop Masculinity in Black and Brown

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Though hip hop music and culture is generally understood as having African American origins, Latinx and Caribbean youth were also among its earliest practitioners.1 During hip hop’s early days in the Bronx, Latinxs, mostly youth of Puerto Rican descent, were present every step of the way and played a part in developing its various elements.2 As the culture spread west, Chicanxs in the Southwest were early adopters, attesting to the region’s long history of African Americans and Chicanxs living near each other, experiencing similar economic and social situations, and participating in mutual cultural exchange (including hip hop music and culture). Nevertheless, there have been ongoing tensions between the two groups that have sometimes served as impediments to interethnic political coalitions between African Americans and Chicanxs.3 Some hip hop artists have gone so far as to call explicitly for African American and Chicanx unity, including Sick Jacken, M.E.D., and Ice Cube, among others. Hip hop— African American, Chicanx, or otherwise— has generally been much more racially inclusive than gender-inclusive, however. Rap music, for example, tends to privilege male voices and male-centered narratives, may include misogynistic lyrics, and often conceives of power as an exercise in physically or sexually subordinating women and other men.4 Baker-Kimmons and McFarland provide a lyrical analysis of rap songs by both African American and Chicano male artists, finding remarkably similar conceptions of masculinity among both groups of male rappers, which they attribute to “horizontal affiliations” among Black and Brown men that consist of a recognition of shared stakes in U.S. society, as well as a long history of cultural exchange, especially in the West.5 The authors find that both groups of male rappers use hypermasculinity as a defensive mechanism against marginalization and frequently perform displays of physical and sexual power, an attempt to turn the tables on the dominant white male group, a strategy that, however ironically, tends to rely on the same logic of subordination that it attempts to combat. The salience of masculinity and Black-Brown relations are both key features in analyzing hip hop’s response to the nativist and anti-immigrant rhetoric of two powerful white men, Pete Wilson and Donald Trump.

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Pete Wilson and Hip Hop Response, 1996 In 1994, Republican California governor Pete Wilson was up for reelection, centering much of his campaign around Proposition 187, a state ballot

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measure that would deny California’s undocumented population access to health, education, and social services.6 Wilson ran various anti-immigrant advertisements to bolster his bid for reelection, which depicted ominous hordes of Mexican immigrants draining California’s tax base and economy and asserted, “Enough is enough.” In campaign speeches, Wilson vowed to “take back California for the working, taxpaying families of this state.” These rhetorical strategies tapped into what Alvarez and Butterfield have called “cyclical nativism,” based on the economic fears of people in a struggling economy and the racial and cultural fears of white Californians in a state that was becoming increasingly Latinx, using coded language that pitted “lawabiding,” “hardworking” “taxpayers” (read: white Californians) against Latinx immigrants.7 The proposition passed, and Wilson was reelected, serving his second term from 1994 to 1998. He announced his reelection with a promise to “make California shine again.” But Prop 187 would spur protests and student walkouts across the state, and the law would spend years in court battles as opponents attempted to block it. The law was never enforced, and in 1999 it was effectively killed by the incoming Democratic governor, Gray Davis. During Wilson’s four-year second term, however, the specter of the enforcement of Prop 187 was a source of fear for the state’s undocumented Latinx community, and the status and constitutionality of Prop 187 was a topic of fierce debate across the state. California’s hip hop community was not silent, and some artists chose to take the battle to wax. In this section, I will analyze two 1996 hip hop songs that addressed Pete Wilson directly: “Noizy Minorityz,” by Bay Area Chicano rap artists B.S.A., Choco, and PWee; and Tupac Shakur’s classic “To Live and Die in L.A.” In “Noizy Minorityz,” B.S.A., Choco, and PWee (all Chicano) collaborate to lyrically roast Pete Wilson, as well as then– Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole. As young Chicano male rap artists who were relatively obscure outside of California Chicanx hip hop circles, it was quite impossible for B.S.A., Choco, and PWee to approximate the sort of abstract power wielded by powerful men like Dole and Wilson. Various scholars of masculinity have noted that for men who find themselves without the necessary means to perform aspects of hegemonic masculinity (such as economic success and achievement, workplace authority, political power, or abstract forms of social and cultural power and dominance based on race or ethnicity), hypermasculinity may become a rhetorical tool.8 This may include the sort of physical and sexual power performances in rap music described by BakerKimmons and McFarland as “defensive mechanisms to marginalization.”9 For African American and Chicano men, already viewed as threatening, violent, hypermasculine, and hypersexual in popular discourse and media, embracing the stigma and drawing power from it for use in political resistance is a potential strategy, and one commonly found in rap music.

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This is, perhaps, a productive way to understand the rhetorical choices made by B.S.A., Choco, and PWee in “Noizy Minorityz.” The track begins with the hook “You ain’t ready for no bald-headed bangers,” as the rappers attempt to harness the power of fear embedded in stereotypes of Chicano males as gangbangers with shaved heads and channel it toward a lyrical attack on Wilson and Dole. PWee begins the first verse, speaking directly to Wilson: “You wanna stop me? 187 my people?”— a double entendre that equates Proposition 187 with “187,” a slang synonym for murder (referring to section 187 of the California penal code, which defines the crime of murder). He goes on to remind Wilson and the listener that “this is Mexican land,” pointing out the irony of denying social services to Mexican people on land that was once Mexico, and rapping, “But now you wanna toss us back where we came from, well, I come from this block, you just scared of us cliquing up, making everybody drop.” Cliquing up becomes a strategy to evoke fear in the white consciousness: of Chicano “bald-headed bangers” either physically attacking the lone Wilson and others, or collaborating on a rap track to combine their collective voices, “making everybody drop.” Simultaneously, it also serves as an indictment of Wilson and white Californians, who only support Prop 187 out of fear of the collective power of Latinxs in California. He finishes his verse by rapping, “Get ready to get clowned by the 5′8″, 132 pound of brown.” With the absence of the sort of political, social, and economic power held by men like Wilson, PWee describes his body as his weapon of choice (perhaps his only weapon?)— that which allows him to use his voice on the track, or with which he can threaten physical violence. At 5′8″ and 132 pounds, the rapper with the diminutive nickname of PWee is not a large man, but he is nevertheless willing to use his body as a source of physical power. Or perhaps he suggests that his Brownness is what gives him superhuman strength, which could be interpreted by some as a rearticulation of stereotypes of Brown “savagery,” and by others as testament to the power of pride in oneself. As White argues, performances of hypermasculinity in hip hop may both perpetuate negative stereotypes and serve as an act of resistance that reverses the gaze and rejects comforting images.10 Choco takes the second verse, pointing also to the collective power of Latinxs, rapping, “Pete Wilson and Bob Dole might call us minorities, but on the West Coast, fool, we the majority.” Like PWee, he also threatens these powerful white Republicans with violence, rapping, “Smokin’ you both is gonna be my first priority.” In the final verse, B.S.A. uses his time on the mic to feminize and sexualize Dole and Wilson, rapping, “Whatcha gonna do when I come for you? You’re gonna run like a bitch, that’s what you’re gonna do,” and referring to Wilson as “puto ass Pete Wilson” (puto is a Spanish epithet meaning a male “whore,” pointing to a constellation of meanings

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around being gay and being a coward), instructing him to “gobble up these nuts.” By using this rhetorical strategy, B.S.A. attempts to establish himself as more masculine than Wilson through sexual subordination, a tactic that is only effective to the extent that it relies on a subordination of femininity and queer masculinities. This is reminiscent of Baker-Kimmons and McFarland’s finding that male rappers often use hypermasculinity in an attempt to turn the tables on dominant white males, yet in the process rely on the same logic of subordination that they attempt to subvert.11 Tupac Shakur also addresses Pete Wilson in his hit song “To Live and Die in L.A.,” also released in 1996. Though he only dedicates a few lines to Wilson, Shakur’s— and the song’s— high profile has allowed his contribution to reverberate to an extent far beyond that of “Noizy Minorityz.” Pac begins the third verse by proclaiming, “It wouldn’t be L.A. without Mexicans, Black love Brown pride and the sets again / Pete Wilson trying to see us all broke, I’m on some bullshit, out for everything they owe.” The first line here acknowledges the centrality of Mexicans in the culture and history of Los Angeles (which was, of course, a Mexican town originally) and extends an olive branch to Mexican Americans despite the tensions between “sets,” or gangs. In the next line, he moves beyond recognition, making common cause with Mexicans in opposition to Pete Wilson, who, in addition to spearheading Prop 187, has also been credited with signing into law California’s infamous three strikes law, which devastated Black and Brown communities and filled up the California prison system. He finishes off the line by proclaiming that he is “out for everything they owe,” a statement that refers to another one of his songs, titled “Everything They Owe,” in which Tupac fantasizes about going back in time and taking over a slave ship, armed to the teeth, to take vengeance for the crimes committed against African peoples. By including this line here, Tupac positions himself as an ally willing to fight alongside Chicanxs and Mexicans as well, using his position of influence to signal a need for BlackBrown coalition building and mutual cooperation. Nevertheless, it must be noted that in the song “Everything They Owe,” Tupac’s time-traveling struggle and triumph is pure fantasy, and when he awakens to reality in his second verse, his home is invaded by police officers without a search warrant. Though he attempts to defend himself, he is beaten and imprisoned by the law, paying everything he owes. Tupac, then, projects power in his violent fantasy, only to be confronted by the reality of his own powerlessness. Perhaps Choco, PWee, and B.S.A. also challenge Wilson in a state of masculine fantasy, imagining confronting him or Bob Dole alone in a fair fight, a sort of “dark alley” fantasy, a world in which they could get close enough to these powerful white men to actually turn the tables. Without a highly organized political bloc strong enough to challenge white supremacy

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on political, social, and economic grounds, perhaps this masculine fantasy simply fills the void.

Donald Trump and Hip Hop Response, 2016 In 2015, Donald Trump began a bid for president of the United States, basing much of his campaign on anti– Latinx immigrant sentiment (as well as antiMuslim rhetoric and sexism), in a manner reminiscent of Wilson’s scapegoating of immigrants in his 1994 reelection bid in California. Trump threatened mass deportations and the construction of an enormous wall on the U.S.Mexico border. His campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, was eerily similar to Wilson’s 1994 promises to “make California shine again” and “take back California.” As Larry Sheingold, a longtime Democratic campaign consultant in California, put it, “Trump’s anti-immigrant tactics are straight out of Pete Wilson’s playbook in 1994.”12 Sheingold also pointed to other similarities in the tone of the two political campaigns and the conditions under which the elections took place:

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In both cases, the electorate is awash in economic angst— California faced a paralyzing financial crisis in the early ’90s; now the entire country is struggling to recover from another—and enraged by a seeming lack of response from a government that has been deadlocked for years. Like United States voters today, California’s were older and whiter than the population as a whole and responded to Wilson’s argument that the state’s budget woes required a get-tough approach to immigrants without documentation, whom he blamed for draining state resources.13

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The same article notes, however, that Trump’s rhetoric in 2016 was intensified to a degree that Pete Wilson never approached, stating that Wilson, in comparison to Trump, was the “epitome of subtlety.”14 While Wilson argued in 1994 that the state of California simply could not afford to provide services to undocumented immigrants, Trump has engaged in explicitly racist attacks, even referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “criminals.” Not only did Trump intensify Wilson’s rhetoric, but the fact that it occurred at the level of a presidential campaign rather than a campaign for state governor expanded its scope considerably. The demographic shift occurring in the state of California in the mid-1990s, as the state’s Latinx population became threateningly large to the state’s white population (California is now a minority-majority state), was perhaps a precursor to the demographic changes happening currently in the nation as a whole. And

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much like California’s economic downturn of the 1990s, the nation’s slow recovery from the Great Recession has, perhaps, produced a “cyclical nativism,” echoing the observations of Butterfield and Alvarez, except this time one that cycles at the level of the nation-state. In this way, Trump has both intensified and expanded the scope of Pete Wilson’s “playbook” in the modern era. This Wilson-on-steroids approach has, like Wilson’s campaign, been extremely successful in galvanizing white voters, this time across the nation. Just as Wilson won reelection with his anti– Latinx immigrant rhetoric, Donald Trump secured the presidency. Hip hop has responded in kind; even in the early days of Trump’s campaign, it reacted more swiftly and forcefully than in 1996 (which was two years after Wilson had already won reelection). The response of both Chicanx and African American hip hop artists has included the Baltimore amateur youth video that went viral, “CIT4DT”; YG and Nipsey Hussle’s track and video “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump)”; and the all-Chicanx cypher “Donald Trump’s Nightmare: The Cypher.” As Trump’s campaign began to pick up momentum, a group of Baltimore teens went viral with a video for a hip hop song called “CIT4DT,” an acronym for “Choppa in the Trunk for Donald Trump,” with a “choppa” referring to an automatic firearm, a violent threat not unlike that made in 1996’s “Noizy Minorityz.” The 2016 song also features many of the other rhetorical strategies employed in “Noizy Minorityz,” as the young amateur rappers collaborate or “clique up,” taking turns threatening, feminizing, and attempting to sexually subordinate Trump (calling him a “pussy ass” and a “bitch and a half ”), at times using a cacophony of voices to sonically demonstrate a strength-in-numbers effect. The viral music video features a large group of mostly Black male youth, one carrying a shovel, as if they are searching for Trump, perhaps a similar masculine fantasy of catching Trump in the streets, where his abstract power is diminished. The question remains, then, if countering Trump’s brand of violent masculinity with their own brand of violent masculinity is useful. High-profile African American rap artists YG and Nipsey Hussle took this strategy to mainstream hip hop with the release of their song and video “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump).” They begin their video with an announcement urging American citizens to register to vote, then move straight into the hook of the song: “Fuck Donald Trump.” The video consists of a large crowd of African American and Chicano men, protesting/rioting in the streets of Los Angeles, holding signs that read, “Fuck Donald Trump,” and scrawling the same words in graffiti on the sides of buildings. Much of the song is a call for coalitional politics. For example, YG, who is affiliated with the Bloods gang, and Nipsey Hussle, affiliated with the rival Crips, collaborate in an attempt to unify their rival African American gangs in opposition to the possibility of

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a Trump presidency. As YG raps, “When me and Nip link, that’s Bloods and Crips.” In addition to this, the rap artists make a concerted effort to identify with, and make common cause with, Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. For example, in the second verse, Nipsey Hussle seems to suggest Black-Brown unity on both sides of the border, telling Trump, “You build walls, we gon prolly dig holes.” As an African American, his use of “we” in this line suggests an intimacy and identification with Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, along with a mutual opposition to his border wall. The third verse is especially rich, as YG and Nipsey Hussle take turns reaching out to Mexicans. YG starts it off: “Hold up, I fuck with Mexicans, got a plug with Mexicans / When the low low need a switch, who I call? A Mexican / This Comedy Central ass nigga couldn’t be the President / Hold up, Nip, tell the world how you fuck with Mexicans.” In these lines, YG states that he “fucks with” or associates with Mexicans, and points to lowrider car culture (“When the low low need a switch,” he calls a Mexican) as an example of the long history of cultural exchange between Chicanxs and African Americans. First establishing the obvious cultural affinity between the two groups, he then refers in the next line to Trump as a “Comedy Central ass nigga,” demonstrating solidarity with Mexicans who are insulted by him and fear his presidency. He then hands it off to Nipsey Hussle, who raps, “It wouldn’t be the USA without Mexicans / And if it’s time to team up, shit, let’s begin.” In this line, Nipsey Hussle moves from YG’s statement of cultural affinity and solidarity to an overture to Mexicans to “team up” if need be. Especially salient here is his strategic use, and remix, of Tupac’s line from 1996, “It wouldn’t be L.A. without Mexicans.” But because Wilson’s rhetoric in the mid-1990s was a more local concern and Trump’s rhetoric is nationwide in scope, Nipsey Hussle changes the word L.A. to USA, also expanding the scope of the statement. Furthermore, because Trump’s rhetoric is also so much more intensified, Nipsey Hussle adds a second line, one that argues explicitly for coalitional politics, “team[ing] up,” in this time of crisis. So, just as Trump’s tactics are straight out of Pete Wilson’s “playbook,” except intensified and on a larger scale, YG and Nipsey Hussle’s response is straight out of Tupac’s playbook, yet also reflecting the larger scale and intensification of the 2016 moment. Finally, YG and Nipsey Hussle also subsequently intensified their calls to unify by “teaming up” or “cliquing up” beyond their original track, releasing an “FDT Part 2,” which moves beyond the Black-Brown and Blood-Crip binaries by adding anti-Trump white American rappers Macklemore and G-Eazy to the lyrical onslaught and making explicit calls for unity among Muslim and queer people as well. In the face of the sort of threat presented by Trump and his campaign, this radical call for a unified response against such a tide of bigotry is urgent.

The final hip hop response to Trump’s campaign that I will analyze here is the cypher and video “Donald Trump’s Nightmare: The Cypher,” consisting entirely of Chicanx rappers and hosted by the Centro Cultural de México in Santa Ana, California. Though explicitly directed at Trump, the various raps generally do not mention him directly; instead the performers rap about various topics from their skills on the mic to their pride in themselves and their community. By not threatening or dwelling on Trump, these Mexican American rap artists “clique up” only to demonstrate their love for themselves and one another, using the community-based cypher format to support one another and build on each other’s ideas and talents— a display of strength and love rather than a violent threat based on a “dark alley” fantasy or sexual subordination. This rhetorical strategy suggests, instead, that the Latinx/ Mexican/Chicanx community is prepared for a necessary political struggle. This cypher is also the only hip hop response I have encountered that features a rapper who is a woman, Chicana rapper Joules, making this a response that is not entirely male-centric. Trump is mentioned briefly at the very end, when rapper Fig states, “The whole crew got ‘Fuck Donald Trump’ on replay,” perhaps indicating their embrace of, and dialogue with, the unity call offered up by YG and Nipsey Hussle in their influential song. This cypher, then, is a complex response that is not based solely on masculine fantasies, unfounded threats, and sexual subordination, but rather displays, and has the potential to build further upon, political and communal solidarity. In this cypher, hip hop serves as a unifying force among Latinx hip hoppers, championing pride and mutual support. When we put this cypher in dialogue with “FDT,” we also may view hip hop as a bridge that connects, allowing groups to dialogue using it as their medium and maybe even serving as a vehicle for large-scale “cliquing up” in the form of a robust coalitional politics. Perhaps this is Donald Trump’s worst nightmare after all, and the realest threat that hip hop can make.

It is difficult to know what Trump, or the hip hop community, will do next. Perhaps with more political organization in communities across the country that oppose Trump, his toxic brand of masculinity, and his white male supremacist rhetoric and policies, hip hop’s responses can take a step beyond the masculinity-centered fantasies and sexual subordination tactics so common when attempting to counter powerful white men like Trump, and Pete Wilson before him. By the time of the election, hip hop’s response had already surpassed that of its more locally based response in the mid-1990s. Various artists called for pride, unity, and coalitional politics to a greater extent than

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Conclusion: Late 2016

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during Pete Wilson’s campaign or tenure as governor of California, before Trump had even served his first day in the White House. For example, the high-profile call for coalitional politics in “FDT” was monumental. Perhaps somewhat ironically, then, the threat posed by figures such as Wilson and Trump often serves as an impetus for groups and factions to put differences aside and dialogue or engage in coalitional politics. Hip hop in particular provides a medium for Black-Brown dialogue, or other dialogues across constructed racial categories. For example, Pete Wilson spurred Tupac Shakur, a rap icon, to make common cause with Mexican Americans in 1996. The specter of a Trump presidency immediately moved the needle even more, with prominent artists like YG and Nipsey Hussle making explicit calls for African Americans to “team up” with Mexican Americans. YG’s album Still Brazy, which features “FDT,” also contains a track titled “Blacks and Browns” in which YG collaborates with a Chicano rap artist, Sad Boy Loko, in order to build bridges between the two groups. When discussing the content of Still Brazy, YG talks about current events changing the course of his career, saying, “It’s so much bigger than California. . . . I was like, I’m gonna say something and use my platform for something real . . . that was my first time making a meaningful record. . . . We [rappers] gotta say something, cause if not, it’s like we’re out here standing for nothing, like we ain’t got no morals.”15 The age of Trump necessitates a response and a rethinking of our collective priorities. As such, a united front in opposition to Trump and his administration goes well beyond Black-Brown coalitional politics, or racial politics in general, as we need to move toward a common cause among all who oppose the racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Earth, and anti– human being tenor that was laid out clearly from the beginning of his campaign, regardless of our racial, ethnic, or religious identities. For example, in addition to his attacks on Mexican immigrants, Donald Trump has proposed a ban on Muslims entering the United States, has alluded to “punishing” women for having abortions, and has denied climate change, among other things. While the reality of identity politics and coalitions is always a complex impediment, it must not prevent us from organizing, resisting, and struggling for what we have in common, our humanity and respect for one another. With the rise of the white male supremacist “alt-right” movement (which also involves a fair amount of right-wing coalitions), the necessity of unity is greater than its difficulty. I am not suggesting that hip hop is the answer to all of this, especially considering the hip hop community’s own internal struggles around issues such as sexism and homophobia. What I am suggesting is that hip hop, as a culture that bridges various communities, has mass appeal, includes a philosophy of racial justice and radical multiculturalism,

and functions as a sounding board for the oppressed, especially through rap music, is an important component in any modern struggle for large- scale cross-cultural or coalitional politics. This approach is exemplified in “FDT Part 2,” which, as mentioned, includes anti-Trump white rappers Macklemore and G-Eazy and makes calls for unity with Muslims and queer people, going beyond the Black-Brown, Blood-Crip calls in the original “FDT.” As YG put it, “They’re the two biggest white rappers in the game! I’m like, if I get two of the biggest white rap dudes in the game on this ‘Fuck Donald Trump’ record, that shit is gonna mean something.”16 In late 2016, Mike Pence, the vice president in Trump’s administration, attended the hip hop Broadway theatre play Hamilton. Before Pence was able to leave, the performers read a message to him, one that combined the radical multicultural politics of hip hop with the etiquette of the Broadway musical: We, sir, we, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us—our planet, our children, our parents—or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us. All of us.17 But if Hamilton doesn’t do the trick, all who oppose the direction our nation is headed in, and the toll it will take on our people, must find some common ground. As the description in the video “Donald Trump’s Nightmare: The Cypher” states, “In a world that does everything possible to silence us, we decided to make some noise!”

This chapter was originally conceived while Donald Trump was still on the presidential campaign, and all of these songs were produced during the campaign season. Reflecting back on this piece today, in 2019, I am dismayed by what has transpired since then. Donald Trump, of course, has won the presidency, the alt-right has risen to prominence, and it seems as though every progressive change that has been won in this country over the last few decades has either been rolled back or is in danger of being rolled back. Nipsey Hussle, like many others in history who have attempted to forge unity in the face of racism and bigotry, has been murdered. Too often, when the need to work together is so urgent, our communities, organizations, and movements are instead plagued by infighting, suspicion of one another, the breaking of struggles into competing factions, and, often, toxic masculine violence against

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Addendum: Reflecting on This Chapter Three Years Later

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one another, even as we go on barking at those in positions of power. All of this is haunted by the divisions created by real and/or perceived infiltrators within these communities, movements, and organizations, sowing the seeds of suspicion and the destruction of our resistance struggles. Rest in peace Nipsey Hussle. He will be remembered not only for his inspiring music, but for his vision, courage, leadership, and dedication to his community.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Chang, Can’t Stop. Hinojosa, “Latino History.” See Macias, “Bringing Music to the People”; Luis Alvarez, “From Zoot Suits”; McFarland, Chicano Rap; Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left; Kaplan, “More Than Just the Latinos-Next-Door”; Kun and Pulido, introduction to Black and Brown in Los Angeles; Pastor, “Keeping It Real”; Quinones, “Race, Real Estate”; Sandoval, “Politics of Low and Slow.” See McFarland, Chicano Rap; Harrison, Hip Hop Underground; Jeffries, Thug Life; White, From Jim Crow to Jay-Z. Baker-Kimmons and McFarland, “Rap on Chicano and Black Masculinity.” Martin, “Proposition 187”; R. Michael Alvarez and Butterfield, “Resurgence of Nativism.” R. Michael Alvarez and Butterfield, “Resurgence of Nativism,” 168. See Oliver, “Black Males”; Katz, “Building a Big Tent Approach”; Mutua, Progressive Black Masculinities. Baker-Kimmons and McFarland, “Rap on Chicano and Black Masculinity,” 335. White, From Jim Crow to Jay-Z. Baker-Kimmons and McFarland, “Rap on Chicano and Black Masculinity.” Quoted in Cadei, “California Roots.” Cadei, “California Roots.” Cadei, “California Roots.” Manning, “YG Sounds Off.” Manning, “YG Sounds Off.” Mele and Healy, “‘Hamilton’ Had Some Unscripted Lines.”

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Works Cited

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Alvarez, Luis. “From Zoot Suits to Hip Hop: Towards a Relational Chicana/o Studies.” Latino Studies 5 (2007): 53– 75. Alvarez, R. Michael, and Tara L. Butterfield. “The Resurgence of Nativism in California? The Case of Proposition 187 and Illegal Immigration.” Social Science Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2000): 167–79.

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Baker-Kimmons, Leslie, and Pancho McFarland. “The Rap on Chicano and Black Masculinity: A Content Analysis of Gender Images in Rap Lyrics.” Race Gender and Class 18, no. 1/2 (2011): 331– 44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23884882. Cadei, Emily. “The California Roots of Trumpism.” Newsweek, July 5, 2016. http://www .news week .com /2016 /07 /15 /proposition - 187 - anti - immigration - donald - trump -477543.html. Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop! A History of the Hip Hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005. Harrison, Anthony K. Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. Hinojosa, Maria. “A Latino History of Hip-Hop.” Latino USA, NPR, September 2, 2016. Podcast, 54:23. http://www.npr.org/programs/latino-usa/492389350/a-latino-history -of-hip-hop-part-1. Jeffries, Michael P. Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Kaplan, Erin A. “More Than Just the Latinos-Next-Door; Piercing Black Silence on Immigration; and Plugging Immigration’s Drain on Black Employment.” In Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition, edited by Josh Kun and Laura Pulido, 255– 60. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Katz, Jackson. “Building a Big Tent Approach to Ending Men’s Violence.” Building Partners Initiative, United States Department of Justice, 2003. Kun, Josh, and Laura Pulido. Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Macias, Anthony. “Bringing Music to the People: Race, Urban Culture and Municipal Politics in Postwar Los Angeles.” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004): 693– 711. Manning, Emily. “YG Sounds Off on His Anti-Trump Crusade.” i-D, July 27, 2016. https:// i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/zmxpzx/yg-sounds-off-on-his-anti-trump-crusade. Martin, Philip. “Proposition 187 in California.” The International Migration Review 29, no. 1 (1995): 255– 63. McFarland, Pancho. Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Mele, Christopher, and Patrick Healy. “‘Hamilton’ Had Some Unscripted Lines for Pence. Trump Wasn’t Happy.” The New York Times, November 19, 2016. Mutua, Athena D. Progressive Black Masculinities. New York: Routledge, 2006. Oliver, William. “Black Males and the Tough Guy Image: A Dysfunctional Compensatory Adaptation.” Western Journal of Black Studies 8 (1984): 199–203. Pastor, Manuel. “Keeping It Real: Demographic Change, Economic Conflict, and Interethnic Organizing for Social Justice in Los Angeles.” In Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition, edited by Josh Kun and Laura Pulido, 33– 67. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

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Pulido, Laura. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Quinones, Sam. “Race, Real Estate, and the Mexican Mafia: A Report from the Black and Latino Killing Fields.” In Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition, edited by Josh Kun and Laura Pulido, 261– 300. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Sandoval, Denise. “The Politics of Low and Slow / Bajito y Suavecito: Black and Chicano Lowriders in Los Angeles, from the 1960s Through the 1970s.” In Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition, edited by Josh Kun and Laura Pulido, 176–202. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. White, Miles. From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.

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Chapter 4

HOMAGE TO AN UNDOCUMENTED HEARTBREAK Alberto Ledesma

I still remember the crimson hue of the Safeway marquee illuminating her scowl, how it flickered on and off on the contours of her smooth skin as she declared that she could no longer continue being my girlfriend. Three months earlier, I had waved goodbye as she boarded the midnight Aeromexico nonstop to Guadalajara. Since then, I had been waiting, impatiently fantasizing about all the things we would do once she was back in East Oakland. But now, as the motor of my father’s station wagon idled and sputtered, all our dreams of a long and blissful life together were being shattered by the reality of her rebuke. “I just can’t see myself being happy with someone who is also an illegal like me,” she asserted matter-of-factly, her brown irises focused on some distant point along Fruitvale Avenue. I tried to think of something clever to say, to defuse the sudden tension with humor, as I usually did when faced with similar situations. But nothing I had ever experienced could begin to compare with this. So I sat paralyzed, clutching the steering wheel of my father’s station wagon tightly, frozen by the weight of that awful word she had deployed to refer to me— to “us.” I tried to understand why this was happening, sniffling and finding myself unable to look in her direction. Instead, I stared at my black sneaker resting lightly on the wagon’s pedal even as I fought back a torrent of tears that was beginning to well in my eyes. “I liked you when I thought you were a citizen,” she summed up, then crossed her arms and turned toward the passenger-side window. “A citizen?” There was no argument to be made on my part, no words that could undo the essential fact of who I was not. After a few breaths of air, I wiped the tip of my nose with the back of my hand, blinked a few times to clear the remaining tears from my eyes, and put my father’s wagon into drive in order to taxi us to the front of her house. I was eighteen years old, just starting my first year as a Berkeley undergraduate, and my world already felt as if it was falling apart. I walked around in a daze for months after she left me, constantly mulling over the painful and bizarre nature of her departure. She had certainly not 65

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Figure 4.1. Station Wagon. Drawing by Alberto Ledesma.

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been the first girl to dump me; indeed, since the last year of middle school I had been dumped by more than a few girlfriends who all enjoyed dramatic and often heartless exits. And yet something about her reason for abandoning me, something about the offense she had taken at my deception, irritated me like a stubborn splinter stuck under my fingernail. And so I wafted between longing for her and being fascinated by what she thought I had actually been. “¡Ay, pos qué ciudadano tan chillón!” my father would tsk-tsk. “¡Ya para colgando la jeta, muchacho, y vete a buscar a otra vieja!” he would dig, questioning just what kind of man I could be if any song by Los Terrícolas could bring me to such tears “a moco tendido.” Chilaquiles, the brunch special she and I had once shared at the Otaez Restaurant on East 14th Boulevard, now tasted like mushy Doritos. When I commuted on the 8 a.m. BART to the university where I was just starting my studies, I opted to stand by the large window, hoping to get a glimpse of her rose-colored house below in East Oakland as the train sped on its elevated track toward Berkeley. And every curvaceous silhouette I spotted meandering across Fruitvale Avenue or drifting along East 14th Boulevard made me think that she might still come back to me. So who was this woman who so thoroughly carved up my spirit like a piece of tenderloin tossed on the griddle at the Benihana? And why was it that I was always thinking of her even though we dated for only a few months? I will call her Sonia Eugenia Flores, though, as you might suspect, this is not her real name. Why Sonia? Well, suffice it to say that I am a big fan of Sonia López— “La Chamaca de Oro” when she was still the lead singer of La Sonora Santanera. The surnames? Those are random. You should know, of course, that a real person upon whom I base my Sonia Eugenia Flores does exist. Indeed, just a few years ago, after a chance encounter with one of my close friends from high school at the San Leandro Target, I learned that not long after our graduation the real Sonia had gotten married and, after many years in one job or another, was now working as a

In high school, Sonia first appeared to me and the other guys I normally hung around with as a hazel-eyed force of nature, a younger and more athletic version of María Victoria, the actress my parents idolized each week on

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sommelier in some restaurant in the Contra Costa Valley. I learned that in the thirty-four years that had transpired since she broke things off with me, she had become a mother of two, and that she now lived in one of those gated suburban furnaces along California’s Interstate 5 heading toward Sacramento. In many ways, Sonia’s life seemed so similar to my own as an upwardly mobile, middle-class post– undocumented immigrant. But how she had gotten to where she now was, I didn’t know. And, truth be told, it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it was because of Sonia Eugenia Flores that I came to understand, even if momentarily, the ways in which my undocumented immigrant experience— as enlightened as it might have been by the many years of education I received— had still been blind to who Sonia was as an undocumented immigrant woman. And what also matters is that at this time of crisis, when all undocumented immigrant people in the United States, but especially women, are being so relentlessly vilified by callous political forces that assume that our individual pre-American experiences don’t really amount to much, well, maybe this is the time for me to interrogate the ways my younger self had been dealing with a masculine blindness that kept me from truly understanding how women and men live our undocumentedness differently. Of course, in order to better comprehend why Sonia’s departure became so significant for me, we first need to go back to when and where our lives first intersected— John C. Fremont Senior High School in East Oakland in the early 1980s. I have to admit that whenever I reflect on the strain I felt as an undocumented immigrant student attending Fremont High School, I again taste that tartness in my mouth caused by the clumsy chomping of molars as they dig into flesh. That’s not to say that I was not a polite and respectful kid when I was young. To a degree, I was. It’s just that I am now beginning to comprehend the extent to which my life as a teenage indocumentado with dreams and aspirations of a brighter future was filtered through what I now recognize to be a red-blooded lens of unconscious masculine values affixed to my skull, informed as my life has always been by decades of feo, fuerte y formal Mexican gender indoctrination. “Oye m’ijo. ¡Ya deja de llorar y olvida a esa ingrata que te a causando tanto dolor!” “I’m okay, Ma.” Sniffle. “De veras, I’m okay.” Fucking liar.

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Televisa’s La criada bien criada. She was a girl seemingly comfortable in her own bronze skin— a tall, long-haired, small-waisted mestiza already adept at the mysteries of applying smoky eye shadow, who caused the corridors of 1980s Fremont High to fall silent every time she strode from one classroom to the other. At lunchtime, when she marched down the hallway of Fremont’s main instructional building, her hips swaying like an unhurried metronome, pausing only by her locker to drop off her algebra books before continuing to the cafeteria, there wasn’t a boy in all of East Oakland who didn’t seem to get whiplash just trying to catch a glimpse of her regal form gliding toward the free lunch line. “¡Órale vato!” My friend Sergio would elbow me as we filed along with the rest of Fremont’s lunchtime crowd toward the bustle of a free meal. “Mírala, dude!” he would say while biting his lower lip. “Now that’s a real woman!” Although I had known about Sonia from the moment my friends and I first spotted her during Fremont High’s freshman orientation, long before my senior year, I didn’t think our paths would ever cross. After all, in spite of all my efforts to blend in, I was a hopelessly bookish boy who mostly kept to himself and usually just slouched around Fremont’s quad with a halfread copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago appended to my left hand. She, on the other hand, was the perfectly trimmed homecomingqueen-to-be, seemingly surrounded by a perpetual cadre of the more articulate members of Fremont High’s varsity football team or by one or more of the boys at school who actually owned their own car. What chance could I ever have to compete for her attention when I literally draped my body with the accoutrements of my immigrant insecurity in the form of oversized Ben Davis khakis, a red Pendleton shirt, and a black Derby jacket (though my thick glasses and preference for speaking in complete sentences meant that I could never pull the vato loco schtick off )? During our first few years at Fremont, Sonia and I coexisted happily apart from each other, each unaware of how the other was dealing with the realities of our undocumentedness. Seemingly on the college track, I was often put forth by my teachers, in spite of my awkward dress, as a good example of what a supposedly studious student should act like. None of them, of course, officially knew that I didn’t have papers, or that every time they cited me as a model of a young man who was taking full advantage of his education, I died a little inside. All they seemed to know was that I was devouring each and every book they plopped in front of me and that I volunteered to do all the extra-credit homework they made available. I did this, of course, because I thought that my life as a student in the United States was about to come to an inglorious end. Indeed, every morning after I got up, after I slid my

binders and textbooks into the tight cavity of my gray backpack, and before heading for school, Mamá would remind me that “la vida para nosotros los pobres es muy dif ícil, Alberto. Por eso, tienes que estudiar.” If we ever got deported, my father would usually add, very little of our American education was going to be any good in Mexico. Learn as much as you can, they seemed

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Figure 4.2. Young Beto. Drawing by Alberto Ledesma.

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to implore together; learn so that you can get a decent enough job once we are inevitably forced to return. It would be such a vergüenza, my mother would say in dread, if we were asked to redo our years of elementary school just to keep up with our Mexican cousins. All of that, of course— our resignation to staying hidden and working as hard as we could while we were in the United States— was at the core of my family’s fatalist identity; in order to survive, we needed to suffer in silence. Secretly, however, I hoped that all of those extra hours of studying I was putting in at school would someday show that I could be worthy of becoming an American resident, if not a citizen altogether.

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It was in my senior year, then, as I was trying to grapple with the imminent end of my American education, that something peculiar happened. Because I had been encouraged by more than a few of my teachers to compete for a student government position, I found myself elected as Fremont High’s senior class secretary. The campaign had gone smoothly enough because I had run unopposed. Still, being secretary was no easy task given that our student government class met very early each morning, an hour before the first period of the day, and that, as the official notetaker of our student government cohort, I was obligated to attend every session. Still, in spite of my penchant for staying in bed until the last possible minute, I managed to make every class and to submit complete and copious notes regarding all student government business. It was not all that surprising, then, my fellow class officers eventually told me, that when Edward W., the straight-A student who had originally been elected as Fremont’s student body president, resigned, our student government teacher appointed me to the vacant position. I still remember that afternoon after I had been selected, when Principal Holmstedt announced my name over the school’s loudspeakers shortly after lunch. “Effective immediately,” he mumbled in his gravelly drone, “Alberto Ledesma will assume the position of Fremont High’s new student body president.” I had been sitting at the front of Mr. Lettich’s English class, silently reading Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, when the staticky message echoed throughout the school, and I slowly smiled as each of my fellow students raised their heads from their own books and turned toward me in apparent surprise to nod their approval. That day, as I rushed past the school’s front office, angling toward my locker before heading for home, I received dozens of high-fives and all-rights, mostly from students I didn’t know. “That is so cool!” Sergio said as we squeezed onto the overcrowded AC Transit bus heading for home. “Maybe now I’ll even come to the next school dance, vato. You gotta be able to get me in for free! Right?”

“Hola, Alberto?” The girl’s voice spoke my name as if whispering. “How are you doing?” I could not place the sound of her voice at first, those honeyed and melodic vocalizations that seemed to know exactly who I was. “Irma gave me your number.” She paused, as if expecting me to know immediately who she and Irma were. “I hope that it is okay that I called you.” I continued struggling to place her, confused because I had never really heard my name spoken by the person on the other side of the line. Then it hit me: the soft volume with which she pronounced her syllables; the way she finished all her sentences as if they were questions. It was Sonia Eugenia Flores! The exact girl all of my friends in my sixth-period gym class had lusted after earlier in the day as we had played pickup games of twenty-one on the basketball court. “Hey, congratulations on becoming our student body president,” she said, and again waited. For a moment, before I told her that I recognized her, I felt suspicious and unsure about her motivation for calling me. Maybe one of the guys at school had put her up to it? Maybe it was Sergio who had convinced her to reach out to me, knowing full well that a boy like me would never really have a chance with a girl like her? “Hey, I just want to get to know you better and was wondering if you would want to hang out one of these days?”

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By contrast, my parents seemed puzzled about what my new role meant. “¿Y qué es eso?” Mamá asked as she placed a steaming plateful of red pork mole with nopalitos in front of me. I told her that I would now be working on behalf of all the students at school, organizing social events and fundraisers, and that I would need to meet with Principal Holmstedt every now and then to coordinate school assemblies. Mamá nodded as I tried to explain, reflexively dipping her rolled tortilla into the steaming brown-red mole as I spoke. She shrugged; secretary or student body president, it all seemed the same to her. An hour later, as I was sitting on the side of my bed with my chemistry homework spread in front of me, it was Papá who shouted for me to come to the front room because some girl was on the phone. “A girl?” I wondered as Papá handed me the receiver. “Tell her that you can’t be too long because I am expecting Tío Elías to call us from Jalisco,” he replied.

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Man, I could not get the words out fast enough. In spite of my initial apprehension, I heard myself willfully rushing into whatever trap she had laid for me. “Heck yeah! Of course I want to go out with you!” I blurted, instantly ecstatic about the chance she had offered me, one that all of my friends would surely jump at had they been given it. But as she went on to describe the times that she had “seen me” hanging out in the school courtyard, as she spoke about how impressed she had been by my concentration when I immersed myself in my lunchtime reading in spite of the hundreds of boisterous students running around in the middle of Fremont’s quad, my nervousness returned. Why was it that I never walked up to her to talk? she asked. Did I already have a girlfriend? Wouldn’t it be cool if we could go to a Friday dance together now that I was helping to coordinate them? “You really seem to have it together,” she summarized. “I bet you are even going to go to college.” In that moment, as she waited for me to speak, I again hesitated. Did she already know that the only reason I had any chance of getting into college was because I had confessed my undocumented status to our counselor, Mr. B., and he had gone on to submit the application on my behalf? I didn’t even know what he had written on the final parts of that document because I had only completed half of it when I handed it to him. Maybe someone in the office had noticed him slipping the envelope with my name into the outgoing mail and somehow she had found out? Maybe she was getting a kick out of the charade, out of the seeming futility of everything that I was trying to do when everybody knew that Mexican immigrant boys from East Oakland never really went anywhere besides the green deportation van? Maybe she even knew that though we were many months away from graduation, Papá was already asking me about the kind of job I would take on as soon as I was done with Fremont altogether? I could only stutter as I began to reply that, in my opinion, she was the prettiest girl at school and that, in truth, I was also disappointed that we had not had any classes together. She giggled, her laugh rising and falling with a purr, as if from just talking to me she was deriving a pleasure she had never enjoyed before. Still, that laughter, that buoyant but controlled coo with which she uttered every sentence, made me want to keep listening to her in spite of all my reservations. Her presence on the other side of the call delighted me: the rustle of her clothes, the way she inhaled right before she spoke. Suddenly Papá nudged me to remind me that he was still waiting for his call from Jalisco, and so Sonia and I quickly agreed on the location of our first date and she hung up.

For the next several months after our initial conversation we went everywhere in East Oakland I could afford to take us with the small amount of money I earned from my part-time work at Chuckburgers Family Restaurant in San Leandro. Every Saturday and Sunday night I filled my pants pockets with the fistfuls of quarters I received as tips for cleaning tables and busing dishes and coffee cups at the restaurant. And though I felt awkward stacking all those quarters on the counter whenever we went to the McDonald’s by Alameda’s South Shore Mall, that tip money was still enough to pay for our weekend bus fares or for gas when my father lent me his station wagon. With it, we went to the movies at the Grand Lake Theatre or to Fenton’s for milkshakes. And when the quarters were scarce, it was Mamá who would save the day by making us sandwiches, and I would just take Sonia for walks around Lake Merritt or along the Berkeley Marina. In all, Sonia seemed happy as we held hands, as if, in spite of my poverty, she could actually see us making a life together. It was a cool Friday night in early April, a few days after I had finally received the thick envelope from Berkeley that was supposed to tell me whether or not I would be going to college, when I noticed that Sonia lingered a little longer than usual when we returned from our date. Boy George’s “Karma Chameleon” had been playing on the radio as I pulled my father’s station wagon up to the front of her house. She turned toward me, smiled as she gave me a peck on the cheek, and began to get out of the car. Then, right as she was about to close the door, she turned and asked if I could do her a big favor. Moments before, we had shared a bucket of popcorn at the Century Theatre near the Oakland Coliseum while watching Kevin Bacon contorting to the music of Kenny Loggins in the film Footloose. It had been a short

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That whole night I remained stunned, uncertain about the rare fortune that had befallen me. “This is going to be fun,” she had said right before she hung up. That assertion had struck me because it sounded like the things my older sister said whenever Papá took the family to the Great America amusement park and we lined up to get on a particularly scary ride. But what kind of ride was I about to get on? I wondered as I walked back to my room. Still, whatever I had done to deserve such a turn of events, it must have been good, I rationalized as I threw myself on the clutter of books and binders covering the little bed my parents had squeezed against the back door of our small rented house. Yes, I was un pobre riding the high-school roller coaster with no certainty as to where I would be going after that; but now, after her call, I felt as if I had won the lottery.

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night out, however, as if, in spite of the loud and upbeat soundtrack playing around us, and in spite of the syrupy sweetness of our soft drinks and the salty and overly buttered crunch of the freshly popped popcorn, our minds were somewhere else. For my part, I worried about the letter I had just received, which I had waited to open for almost three days. Finally, the previous night, I had gone into our bathroom after everyone in the house was asleep and torn the envelope open to see what the final decision had been. There, in the gloom of the moonlit bathroom, as I sat on the closed toilet, I had had to temper my euphoria at being admitted, because the letter also included a bill for several hundreds of dollars that needed to be paid before I could enroll. How was I going to begin to pay even part of these registration fees when all I had was a part-time job that barely provided enough money for a few cheap snacks and movie tickets? Papá had already warned me that, though he wished he could support me more, he could afford to put very little money toward my studies, that with four other mouths to feed, I might end up having to fend for myself. Like me, Sonia had also seemed distant that night, as if while we watched the movie, there was some other drama filling her thoughts. And so, as soon as the movie was over, as soon as we had walked to where I had parked the station wagon, she asked me to take her home and I agreed without complaint.

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“Sure, anything,” I said as she held the station wagon’s green door ajar and stood with one foot on the pavement and the other on the curb, a few yards from the front porch of her house. For the first time since we had met, it was she who seemed hesitant and nervous, as if what she was about to entrust me with was a terrible secret her family had kept hidden from one generation to another. “It’s just that my mom, my sister, and I . . .” Her thin eyebrows furrowed as she searched for the right words. “Well.” She paused, while I became mesmerized by the way her unblinking eyes reflected the headlights of the cars whooshing by behind us. “It’s just that we need to take an urgent flight back to Mexico a week from today and no one has been there to do us the favor. My mom is getting desperate and asked me to ask you.” Sonia took a deep breath and the glassy surface of her eyes began to glisten. “Would you be able to borrow your dad’s station wagon to give us a ride to the San Francisco airport next week? We leave at midnight.” You should know, of course, that for Sonia Eugenia Flores I would have done anything. Still, in that moment I panicked at the thought that she would be leaving forever. “We will only be gone a few weeks,” she said, seeming to recognize the fear that had taken hold of me.

I smiled to reassure her and told her that I would be happy to help her. And though I also wanted to talk to her about my own anxiety about attending Berkeley, I kept that quiet.

I tried to drive my father’s station wagon across the Bay Bridge flawlessly that night, but the sea of cars that crowded at the tollbooth required me to tap on the brakes more frequently than I wanted to. Not that Sonia or her mother seemed to notice. Though it was a little past eight, a wall of red taillights brought us to a crawl, and I tried to merge into the lanes that would get us to San Francisco most quickly. Sonia’s sister sat next to me. “I hope everything goes well with your trip,” I said, trying to break the ice. Sonia’s sister was the only one to respond with a tentative “I hope so too” and a faint smile. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that Sonia had tears in her eyes and that her mother had placed her hand on Sonia’s shoulder. Every now and then I would try to make eye contact with her, but Sonia hardly looked up and would instead lean closer to her mother to whisper. With the whir of the traffic, and because I was focused on giving them a smooth ride, I could only catch passing glimpses of what seemed like a tense conversation happening behind me. Still, occasionally I could discern words like “lawyer,” “consulate,” “papers,” and “deportation,” enough for me to figure out that whatever was being discussed, it had something to do with their immigration status. It was past nine when we finally drove into the airport’s parking lot, with Sonia, her mother, and her sister all possessed by the same stillness as I headed toward the international flight terminal. By now Sonia’s face had

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At home, Papá seemed bothered because I had volunteered to use his station wagon without first asking him for permission. “How do you know that I will not be using the station wagon myself?” he said as I gave him back the keys. “You can’t just go around promising to do things for people that you might not be able to do.” He was agitated. But as I got ready to go back to school the next Monday, it was Mamá who came to my room to tell me that she and Papá were proud that I had been admitted to such a prestigious university, and that they had decided together to let me use la camioneta. “Look, you have to make better decisions from here on, Alberto,” Papá said as he walked up behind Mamá. “I will try to help you as much as I can. But I also need you to think about your actions ahead of time.”

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assumed a constant stoicism, her eyes weary from all the crying. Both she and her mother got out of the station wagon warily and said nothing as we unloaded the luggage and placed it on a metal cart that someone had conveniently left nearby. “Let me know if there is anything I can do for you while you are away,” I again said to Sonia and her mother as I pushed the loaded cart toward the elevators. Sonia smiled and touched the back of her hand gently to my face as the elevator doors opened. It wasn’t until we were out of the station wagon and under the airport terminal’s bright lights that I noticed how differently Sonia was dressed compared to her mother and sister. The midnight jetliner ride to Guadalajara was supposed to take five hours, and her mother and sister were identically attired in blue Levi’s and dark sweatshirts, something I thought was practical for the long trip. Sonia, though, wore a sheer black silk blouse and a knee-length, form-fitting checkered skirt. She looked stunning, like a femme fatale about to do a close-up on the silver screen, and I was suddenly self-conscious about the shabbiness of my own work clothes, the stains of ketchup and coffee on my sleeves, and the web of wrinkles on my black jeans after a full day of work. I also wondered how comfortable she was going to be on the plane, but as she moved through the crowded terminal, I could only hear echoes in my mind of Sergio jeering at her as she walked down Fremont’s hallway— “¡Ay mamacita!” The Aeromexico counter was crowded with people waiting to see the attendants. Kids in shorts and T-shirts and grandmothers dressed all in black stood in front of us as the line inched along. A couple of times I tried to reach for Sonia’s hand, but she seemed to draw away. I thought that it was because of her mother standing there with us. Finally, after I had spent close to an hour saying nothing, trying to reassure her mostly with my smile, the attendant called them over and gave them their boarding passes. Only ticketed passengers were allowed to go past security. So, right before she walked through the metal detectors along with her mother and sister, she turned toward me to say goodbye. “I hope that everything goes well for you in Mexico, Sonia. I will be waiting for you,” I said as I took her hand. She gave me a quick hug and a kiss on my right cheek. And I will never forget what I said to her next, right as she was about to turn around to get into the security queue. “Look, it seems to me that you and your family are having some kind of immigration issue. Don’t worry about it. Whatever I can do to help, please count on me. After all, I am also undocumented.”

That was the last time that Sonia Eugenia Flores looked into my eyes without disdain. Though she was supposed to be gone just for a few weeks, though I waited for the mail to arrive each day, desperately hoping to learn if everything had gone okay, three months passed before I saw her again. And when she returned, when we finally sat in my father’s station wagon so that she could let me know what had transpired in Mexico, it was clear that the relationship had ended the moment I had confessed my immigration status to her. It has taken me more than three decades to realize that what Sonia Eugenia Flores allowed me to see that night when she broke up with me, even if momentarily, was the inextricable way that survival for the children of Mexican undocumented immigrants who aspire to a better life is tied to our ability to manage gendered illusions. In many ways, you may think that the story that I have related here is one-sided, a chronicle that casts Sonia Eugenia as nothing more than the antagonist of a Mexican telenovela. But that is exactly my point: the truth is that I never really knew who Sonia Eugenia was; I was never really able to peer into her mind to understand her motivations. How long would we have lasted if I had in fact been a citizen? How long would it have been before we revealed our true selves? Did my lack of status mean that those things that had originally attracted her to me were no longer valid? The tragedy of our encounter was that we might have been too much alike— each of us donning a disguise in order to better our lives and that of our families— only to discover too late, after the fatal flaw had been revealed, that our similarity would only compound our misery. And that is the danger of even a low level of machismo, of that subconscious set of patriarchal assumptions about what men and women should ideally act like. That supposed patriarchal benevolence at the heart of feo, fuerte y formal idealization flattens the earth into gendered shortcuts and prevents us from truly noticing the subtle details that contextualize our lives and make us who we are. No matter how much fun I thought we had, I was never able to remove those cultural biases from the way I perceived her. Not until it was too late. Initially, I felt shocked and hurt because I thought that Sonia had not seen the real me, that she had misunderstood my sincere desire to make her happy. But of course, I had also not seen the real Sonia. I was so caught up in my desire to impress her and others with my act of being the model immigrant that I could

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The confused look on her face after I spoke was unlike any expression I had seen her make before. For a moment she remained frozen, as if she were having trouble processing what I had just disclosed. Then her mother called her to come, and she was off.

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Figure 4.3. Bella. Drawing by Alberto Ledesma.

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not notice that the sultry persona she was projecting was also a disguise. In fact, a large part of my desire to be with her was precisely the result of how each of us had fooled the other: She was the unattainable beauty who had expressed interest in me as opposed to my friends. And in her eyes, I was probably the immigrant student “most likely to succeed.” Each of us projected a façade, like in Ellison’s Invisible Man, of the kind of image we thought would save us from our undocumentedness. But these façades were also intertwined with all of the cultural blind spots and biases that have produced harmful models of masculinity and femininity for Mexican immigrants as a whole. The fact is that I forgot that I was pretending to be someone, that it was all an act. After years of playing the same role, I came to believe that I had indeed become the person in that manufactured script I had consciously and subconsciously constructed about the kind of Mexican immigrant boy who I thought could make it in the United States; I came to believe that I was that hardworking immigrant paragon, that teenage, ascetic, feo, fuerte y formal Mexican provider whose principal purpose is to supply material stability while the women have the supposed luxury of remaining at home. And this script made me unable to clearly perceive Sonia for who she was. That is why

my regret is that I never really got to know her: What dreams did she have about her future? What was her true definition of happiness?

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For three months, being with Sonia made me feel less depressed about my undocumentedness, more hopeful. And maybe that was her true gift and the reason I will always be grateful for the time we spent together. It is no exaggeration to say that one of the main reasons I chose to go to college, and to become the person that I am today, was the momentary confidence she gave me.

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Chapter 5

URBAN ALTERNATIVE MASCULINITY Men, Land, and Re-Indigenization in Black Chicago’s Food Autonomy Movement Pancho McFarland

“Sorry for laughing, bro!” he blurted out between chuckles. “When I think of gardening, I think of old ladies!” My Chicano friend couldn’t contain his surprise when I told him of my summer plans to spend most of my days in the community garden. In that same year, when I described how I hosted “Preservation Parties” through our community organization, the Green Lots Project, a friend and administrator on my campus, Chicago State University, could barely contain her fascination at the fact that a man would can and pickle. My colleagues’ responses to my horticultural and homesteading activities reflect central stereotypes about Chicano masculinity that serve to limit our possibilities for living full lives and for decolonizing and re-Indigenizing ourselves and our communities. Through autoethnography, or autohistoriateoría, I develop a critique of Eurocolonialist capitalist masculinity, with its hierarchically ordered spirituality, individualism, and consumerism, and discuss the possibilities of developing an antiauthoritarian, anticolonial alterNative (AAA) masculine praxis in urban settings. My critique of Eurocolonialist capitalist masculinity and my understanding of an AAA masculinity developed as a result of a long history in anticapitalist, anti-racist activism epitomized by my deep involvement in the sustainable food movement in Black Chicago over the past thirteen years. My autohistoriateoría begins in the mountains of New Mexico and ends, for now, in abandoned lots turned into urban oases on the South Side of Chicago. It moves from a childhood steeped in hypermasculine culture to a “macho” approach to revolutionary Chicanidad in my early adulthood to a deep study of gender in hip hop to lessons from elders and the land that shape my alterNative masculinity. I first outline a theory/praxis of antiauthoritarian, anticolonial, alterNative masculinity that I believe is necessary for any successful anti/decolonial movement. Then I briefly describe my journey from Eurocolonialist, capitalist hypermasculinity toward an aspiring AAA masculinity through practice and instruction in anarchist, Chican@, and 80

Black American movements. The bulk of this chapter relies on ethnography and autoethnography to examine how an alterNative masculinity does and does not develop in Chicago’s food movement through land-based practices.

Gender is performance.1 Heteropatriarchal masculinity, though depicted as strong and resilient, is fragile. In order to be considered masculine under the Eurocolonialist heteropatriarchal framework, one must continuously prove oneself to be hypermasculine or risk the stigma of being called “fag” or “pussy.” Without evidence of masculinity, one is confined to the “inferior” realm of homosexual or woman. Thus, young and older men alike learn to act, move, talk, and emote in ways that make it clear that they are a “man.” We perform in spite of desires to behave differently and in spite of what is good for us. Importantly, we pass on these ideas of masculinity to our children as they watch us act like “men.” The sex-gender system in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States equates masculinity with dominance and power over others. This power over others manifests itself differently depending on one’s social status but generally includes five ways of displaying one’s conformity to the masculine norm: (1) violence; (2) power over women, including promiscuous sex; (3) daring and fearlessness (drug use, danger); (4) financial power; and (5) power over one’s body (e.g., the kind proven in sports). Economic status often determines the means by which we perform our masculinity. Financial power is reserved for the wealthy, and wealthy men can prove their masculinity through their bank accounts and their positions. An employer can display masculinity through his money and his ability to control others, including and especially women whose conditions of employment entail sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and constant reminders of their “inferior” gender status, such as lower pay and work conditions that differ from those of male employees. Poor men without such financial power must display their masculinity in other ways. For many, masculinity and consumerism come together, as we go into debt through the conspicuous consumption of accoutrements of masculinity such as “muscle” cars, tennis shoes, and “bling” (flashy jewelry). We may also make up for our lack of financial power by overemphasizing physical power. Some displays are considered legitimate, including sports prowess, while others are illegitimate, including violence outside of state-sanctioned activities (e.g., the military and police). If these schemes do not adequately prove our masculinity, then we can take drugs or engage in other dangerous activities. All of these aspects of masculine performance cause trauma to male performers as well as others in our society. Crime,

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Antiauthoritarian, Anticolonial, AlterNative Masculinity

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violence, drug addiction, and many other social ills involve disproportionate numbers of men. Many scholars have drawn a direct link between these social ills and hypermasculinity.2 More specifically, I argue that the masculinity I learned as a Chicano youth has detrimental effects for us as individuals, for our community, and for the planet.3 The combination of hypermasculinity, white supremacy / racism, colonialism, and capitalism steers Chicano masculinity in a toxic direction. This is a mix that contributes to higher-than-normal death rates from accidents, violence, and drug use, disproportionate incarceration rates, and intensified racist stereotypes of us as “macho.” These facts have led me to the question: If hypermasculinity dominates our ideals of manhood and these ideals are damaging, then what should replace hypermasculinity? Over the past two decades, my quest to answer this question has led me to what I call an antiauthoritarian, anticolonial, alterNative masculinity.4 I recognize that if we seek a better world, then it is not enough to “simply” change how we perceive our masculinity; rather, we must recognize and act on the understanding that our masculinity is intimately tied to authoritarian thought and culture, white supremacy, and capitalism. To decolonize Chicano masculinity, each of these pillars of domination must be addressed. While rejecting hypermasculinity and the ideologies of dominance, capitalism, and racial superiority, an AAA approach would look to our Indigenous traditions for a masculinity that is empowering for ourselves, our communities, and all of our relations, that sees gender in complex, multifaceted ways, and that provides space for creative existence. In studying the contributions made by Indigenous thought, anarchism, two-spirit insight and critique, and transnational feminism to decolonial masculinities, I have distilled these down to a number of components.5 An AAA masculinity would be:

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anticapitalist antimisogynist gender-fluid

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anti-state place-based communal

anti-industrial antihierarchical participatory decentralized inclusive of all our relations

AAA masculinity rejects capitalism, the state, and industry, which destroy life while elevating those men (and some women) who control the state and the economy. AAA masculinity also rejects all forms of domination, including and especially those resulting from patriarchy. In place of these Eurocolonialist values and structures, an AAA masculinity seeks an understanding and praxis of gender in which individuals and communities redefine and/or reject “gender.” For the full development of our individualities and our communities, we must be able to express all aspects of our selves freely.6

Instead of falling victim to hegemonic masculinity taught by the state and capitalism, AAA masculinity offers freedom and fluidity. AAA masculinity conforms to the needs of our communities and looks toward our more-thanhuman relations for lessons on how to be a “man.” Our place and all of our relations within it teach a liberatory, caring humanity/masculinity.

My childhood masculinity training as a male human of Mexican descent in Raton, New Mexico, involved my male peers, family, role models, coaches, and others valuing what was powerful, aggressive, dominating, sexist, and tough in me and shaming and stigmatizing the kind, caring, creative, and egalitarian tendencies I displayed. Perhaps this is why I valued sports and hip hop as a preteen and teen. My socialization into Chicano manhood in the 1970s and 1980s came with a great deal of trauma, since to perform my Chicano maleness I often engaged in dangerous behavior. Getting into fights, running from various authorities, taking drugs, and other acts of bravado proved I was “crazy,” or “loco” in our Chicano street talk.7 Being described as “crazy” was a high honor. Our value system and behaviors as working-class Chicano men reflected our position in the colonial capitalist white supremacist society. As a working-class person, I had no financial power. I could not dominate someone by spending money or show my superiority through conspicuous consumption. I learned that my power as a working-class Chicano rested primarily on physical power and daring. I could fight, use drugs, and be sexually promiscuous. I drove fast along dangerous mountain roads, sometimes intoxicated. I learned that first-class maleness in the United States meant possessing things, so I learned consumerism. I aspired to trendy things that earned “respect” from my peers. Before I learned the concepts, I understood well that full citizenship in the United States means hypermasculine upper-class whiteness. Movies, music, sports, politics, school, religion, and family taught me to value a Eurocolonial capitalist heteronormativity and trained me to be a “macho” or stereotypical hypermasculine Mexican. I learned from boxing and my street mentors that the Mexican macho was the epitome of maleness. From my peers and mentors in the Chicano activist/revolutionary tradition, I learned that to be a Mexican revolutionary was to be a “chingón”— a big badass who would physically take on the gringo colonizer. Even our Indigenous ancestor heroes were depicted in words and symbols as chingones and our history of resistance included mostly violent resistance. Never did I learn that resistance might involve care work and the struggle to retain our egalitarian ways— for example, gender roles. I learned that Zapata and Villa were the

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Becoming Chicano

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leaders of the Mexican Revolution and that women played secondary roles, as illustrated by the Adelita stereotype. Men were “macho,” and they “led” while women played the “traditional” (in the patriarchal tradition, that is) role of helpmate. Not only were women and their work less valued than men and theirs, women were reduced to sexual objects for male control and domination. Much of the media landscape during my youth, from the movies I viewed to late-night programming on HBO to Lowrider magazine and MTV, portrayed women as sexual objects to be possessed by the ideal Man. In an effort to come to terms with my own gender socialization through media, I researched and wrote the books Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio (2008) and The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje (2013). These books, along with the third in the trilogy, Toward a Chican@ Hip Hop Anticolonialism (2017), aimed to help me and people like me, Chican@s who love hip hop, understand the complexities of gender in our contemporary society, and to suggest ways to overcome the colonizer’s heteropatriarchy. Hip hop and other media showed me that men are sexually dominant. This belief is central to our gender identity development. Thus we ruthlessly guard against the feminine. Our socialization tells us that we should stamp out anything that smacks of “women’s roles” or “women’s behavior” in our lives. The Chicano, the sexually dominant man, must be heterosexual according to heteropatriarchal logic, since women are the submissive and subordinate ones in a sexual relationship. A “real” Chicano would never be sexually submissive the way gay men are perceived to be. Becoming Chicano, I/we ridiculed any deviance from the heterosexual patriarchal norm, but most especially we learned to hate homosexuality. “Faggot” was a favorite epithet used to keep us in line, sexually and otherwise. We could also hide our insecurities about gender and sexuality behind it. We could use “faggot” as a means to pronounce our macho heterosexuality.

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Decolonial Beginnings

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Three things began to alter my perception of Chicano manhood and my own Chicano male identity: (1) corrections from Chicana/Mexican elders (primarily in my family) and activista/scholar camaradas; (2) Chicana feminist and queer theory;8 and (3) fatherhood. My tías, with their rebellious and rough Chicananess and their quiet, knowledgeable Indigeneity, were my first teachers of Xicanisma and the beginnings of my questioning of the Eurocolonialist masculinity masquerading as Chicanidad. They refused the role of the suffering mother or madre do-

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lorosa. While the women of the Cortez family would kill for their children, they weren’t simply tied to the role of mother. Nor were they housewives subordinated to husbands who were the “true” head of the household. They were loud and brash, not pious. They fought against racism and for workers. Their teachings of northern Nuevo Mexicano and southern Coloradoan foodways in kitchens, markets, farms, and gardens were subtle but all the more powerful for the lasting impact they had. Their lessons became clearer for me once I became enveloped in food justice/autonomy work and in healing the land. Both their brash Mexicanidad and their stereotypically feminine roles as caretakers and food preparers became a coherent whole when viewed holistically through the lenses of Xicanisma, ecofeminism, and Indigeneity. The problems I was having with my masculinity and my incomplete understanding of the complexity of my tías and other elder women came from the inability to disentangle “warrior” from “masculine” and the mixed messages coming from family, church, and others. It felt contradictory and confusing. Eventually I learned that my aunts, mother, and others were not contradictions but examples of a complex Mexicanidad in between Indigeneity and assimilation into Eurocolonialist capitalist ways. In fact, their Xicana way of being provided early examples of decoloniality and how I might decolonize my own masculinity. By the time I read Xicana scholarship, ecofeminism, and queer theory and participated in radical Xican@ spaces, I was ready for a more intense battle with Eurocolonialist masculinity. The writings and actions of the Zapatistas, especially the women and their insistence on being seen and heard on their own terms, provided a model to explore as I engaged with the hegemonic masculinity of my youth and all that surrounded me. Their Women’s Revolutionary Law and their leadership helped me understand the complexity and fluidity of gender in an Indigenous context. In the late 1990s I spent time in Zapatista territory for my dissertation work. There I encountered a complex array of gender roles, with women doing most of the care work (but certainly not all of it) as well as a good deal of physical, political, and intellectual labor. The men engaged in physical labor and politics but pursued this division of labor without a notion of superiority and with love. Their quiet dignity and ethic of respect left no room for masculine violence. Of course, men in Zapatista territory do act out in hypermasculine ways. However, Indigenous governance structures mitigate the impact of patriarchal violence, and such violence is relatively rare. It is almost always related to colonialism, because of either the violence of poverty or substances like drugs or alcohol that are imported into the communities and nearby towns. Indigenous forms of decision-making seek restorative and, occasionally, punitive justice. On my return from Zapatista territory, fatherhood awaited. It also set me on a path toward strong engagement with Eurocolonialist masculinity and

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toward anticolonial Xican@ masculinity, or what I have been calling AAA masculinity. Having children is often life-altering for parents. It led me and others in my circles to question the direction of our lives. I now had to model the type of man/Xicano that I agreed with Xicanistas and others would be ideal. Now, instead of theorizing hypermasculinity or critiquing it in others or in our world, I had to teach through example. I had to put theory into practice or risk replicating toxic masculinity in my sons. My sons grew up watching my complex masculinity change and develop. They saw the Eurocolonialist heteropatriarchal masculinity and its effects in my anger. They saw the re-Indigenizing and decolonizing masculinity in my care work with them, from feeding them, changing them, and rocking them to sleep as babies to the breakfasts and dinners I continue to make for them twenty years later and the heart-to-hearts we have. They saw and continue to see my commitment to caring for and regenerating the land while helping people feed themselves and providing healthy food for my family. My fierce commitment to re-Indigenizing my masculinity and caring for the land and the people in my community intensified when I moved to Chicago to pursue a job at Chicago State University. There my decolonizing has matured and come together thanks to lessons from elders and the land.

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AAA Masculinity in Chicago’s Food Movement

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My autohistoriateoría and praxis in relation to masculinity have matured in the fertile soil of the food movement in Black Chicago. Here in Chicago my community activism as executive director of the Green Lots Project, a community gardening and food justice organization, led me into liberatory anticolonial relationships with Black American elders and the land. Through my deep place-based education and praxis in sustainability and community organization, I was free to see the truly anticolonial potential that my masculine Chicanidad (Indigeneity) and anarchism had. The land and all our relations reject Eurocolonialist capitalist masculinity with its fetishizing of a dominating hierarchical form of power over others. My Indigenous Chicanidad, like that of many Indigenous scholars and others throughout Turtle Island, is a source of knowledge in relationship with other humans and more-than-human beings.9 As in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s discussion of Indigenous resistance using Nishnaabewin (Nishnaabeg knowledge), my knowledge, including that concerning masculinity, results from interaction with the land, with my hands in the soil and my body, spirit, and mind working with and learning from all my relations in the gardens, fields, and prairies where I work-live.10

The ecofeminism I began engaging with theoretically in the 1980s through my study with Devon G. Peña, and encountered in real life (IRL, as they say online) through Indigenous Zapatista women and camaradas, began to make sense. The language of Gaia or Pachamama, concerning a living, creative, and feminine world, which I had fully endorsed theoretically, became a part of how I lived and interacted with all my relations. My daily practice involved working through the masculine violence of most of our actions in this colonial capitalist world. By engaging with the land and Indigenous knowledge, I learned to act with all my relations in mind, toward regenerative practices that healed my landscape. I began to use my body to heal colonial wounds I suffered, as well as ones that have been inflicted (and that I have inflicted) on the land. And through this kinetic intellectual mode, my understanding deepened and new decolonial behaviors emerged. This mode of being, learning, and acting on and from the world relied on making mistakes and carefully observing how my actions affected the world around me. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson expresses this as a Native mode of knowledge writing:

Certainly my anticolonial journey in Chicago involved lots of failures, but the constant interaction and reciprocity, the doing of it, especially with elders in the movement, has led to an AAA masculinity that is self-reflective, interactive, and flexible. This masculinity does not shy away from generative, creative, and loving acts. Through my land-based practices using traditional ecological knowledge, I see masculinity as demanding creativity and love. The more regenerative and loving the acts, the more I learn. Like a healthy ecosystem, the cycle regenerates itself, producing knowledge and life and deepening my journey of re-Indigenization. Over the course of my decade-long interaction with the Black Oaks Center for Sustainable Renewable Living and Black elders Fred Carter and Dr. Jifunza Wright, we have deepened our commitment to re-Indigenizing our practices. Over the past ten years, the Carter-Wrights have been teaching African heritage knowledge (a form of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge) and permaculture on their forty-acre eco-campus in rural

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Kinetics, the act of doing, isn’t just praxis; it also generates and animates theory within Indigenous contexts, and it is the crucial intellectual mode for generating knowledge. . . . Practices are politics. Processes are governance. Doing produces more knowledge. . . . Mistakes produce knowledge. Failure produces knowledge because engagement in the process changes the actors embedded in process and aligns bodies with the implicate order.11

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Pembroke, Illinois. Their efforts have included the class “Local Food System Development with Permaculture Design Certification,” which we co-taught over the course of eight months in 2017. In the fall of 2016 Baba Fred and Mama Jifunza invited me to co-teach this course, the first in their Lifeboats series. They wanted to begin teaching Indigenous knowledge through permaculture design to primarily Black people in Chicago. Over a long series of conversations we began to design the curriculum. The structure of the class emphasized the three primary ethics of permaculture taught by most permaculturalists: earth care, people care, and fair share.12 However, none of us was satisfied with the established discipline of permaculture and its erasure of Indigeneity. We wanted to design a permaculture class that would help in our re-Indigenization. We wanted an Indigenous permaculture curriculum. Thus, the structure of our class became three eight-week sessions devoted to the Indigenous ethics of respect (in lak’ech), relationships (mitakuye oyasin and ubuntu), and reciprocity (potlatch or gift-giving ceremonies). Respect is similar to people care. We called this ethic in lak’ech, from the Lacandon Mayan language, often translated as “you are my other me.” How could you harm something that embodies yourself? Our second ethic involves the importance of interdependency in our relationships with others. Mitakuye oyasin (“all my relations,” from Lakota) and ubuntu (“I am because we all are,” from Nguni Bantu) reflect a notion of the Earth and all of its beings as intimately bound together through relationships of interdependency. We could not live without the bees and worms. How then do I act toward others? Our third ethic is reciprocity. We give without expecting anything in return, knowing, though, that the structure of our Indigenous relationships will ensure that we are taken care of and get what we need. Incidentally, this principle jibes with the anarchist principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” The potlatch and similar gift-giving ceremonies/ practices modeled this ethic. Baba Fred made sure that we “checked in” with our Indigenous ethics at every step in the journey toward successfully completing the course. Each session began with a “check-in” and a discussion of Zone 0 or our “internal landscape.” The check-in served to provide the “people care” of permaculture that is so often missing in Eurocolonialist capitalist societies and to look at how we were integrating respect, reciprocity, and relationships (the three Rs) into our lives and our growing projects. Thus, caring and sharing were part of almost every moment of the class and our “eco-practicum” (class project) work. For me and my development of an AAA masculinity within the confines of inner-city Chicago, the constant emphasis on caring and sharing in class and at my community gardens was and is necessary. The checking-in with Indigenous ethics and ways of being as we understand them (remember,

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we are re-Indigenizing, and our journey is far from complete) epitomized the constant vigilance required to combat the effects of colonialism on our bodies and minds. It also epitomizes the rewards of re-Indigenization. My gendered being could be freed to engage in acts of creativity, regeneration, and love. Learning to care and share without any expectations but with the certainty that I will be cared for has solidified AAA masculinity in me. In addition to these valuable lessons from deep, sustained engagement with the land, I also learned from other men committed to a different life and society, especially in regard to land, sustainability, and their Africanness understood as Indigeneity. In the community surrounding the Black Oaks Center and the Healthy Food Hub, men express care and love. Baba Fred hugs men, women, and children alike. He is unafraid to tell male friends that he loves them. As a central figure in the community/movement, his caring behavior influences others. The words “peace,” “love,” and “blessings” are liberally infused into conversations between men. Commonly, men in this community touch their chest near their hearts and bow slightly in greeting. Men throughout the food autonomy/sustainability movement in Chicago, especially in Black Chicago, model to lesser or greater degrees a freer and more liberatory masculinity. Fewer consciously attempt to decolonize and re-Indigenize their masculinity, but from the men in this community I have learned a great deal about the freedoms and struggles associated with the decolonization and re-Indigenization processes. However, as always, in recent years my primary teachers of Indigenous ways, especially as regards gender, have been elder women. While Fred Carter and Gregory Bratton have been my primary mentors in horticulture, permaculture, and sustainability, I work daily alongside women like Dr. Jifunza Wright, Dorothy J., Sandra P., Jacqueline Smith, and Linda. As in much of the radical resistance to colonization, enslavement, and capitalism over the past five-hundred-plus years, women perform much of the regenerative work. From elder women I have learned most of what I know about the daily tasks and strategies of caring for and regenerating the land. Importantly, women like Dr. Jifunza Wright and Mama Dorothy have taught me key strategies, skills, and perspectives such as herbalism, foraging, and a better understanding of my place in relation to the plant nations who share the lands I occupy. Women lead our movement. While men are far from absent, women put in most of the work hours at the food autonomy events that I have participated in over the past thirteen years, including and especially gardening and farming. Since 2011 I have kept daily records on participation in the Green Lots Project gardens. More than 90 percent of the people who visit and work are women and their children. Additional evidence of women’s leadership in our movement comes from our permaculture course.

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Twenty-seven people completed our permaculture design course focused on using Indigenous concepts to develop a food community around shared understandings and identities as Indigenous people; this class of community leaders consisted of nineteen women and eight men. Along with Dr. Jifunza Wright, one of the three co-teachers, women like Jacqueline Smith and Safia Rashid taught classes and used their expertise to assist novices. Others like Ana, B. C., Dr. A., and Rebecca did a great deal of the work of organizing the class and making sure it ran on schedule.

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A Persistent Malady

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Heteropatriarchy is a key aspect of the wétiko diseases of colonialism and capitalism.13 The resurgent revolutionary politics of decolonialism and reIndigeneity that I advocate must confront heteropatriarchy with as much zeal as we have had in confronting private property, land grabs, wage labor, and the state. The colonizer’s rigid gender system of heteropatriarchy has been an effective structure for dividing us from one another, creating hate toward nonbinary/noncisgender people and limiting the possibilities of expressions of gender and sexuality that are free and generative of knowledge and culture. Many Indigenous men, including some Black Americans I am surrounded by in the food movement, accept heteropatriarchy and are openly hostile toward LGBTQ2 people and culture. Members of my food community who are cisgender heterosexual men have expressed in conversations with me their distaste for LGBTQ2 people, stated their belief that there is a white gay agenda to feminize Black men and disrupt the Black family, and unapologetically stated that they are homophobic. A recent Facebook thread including a Black nationalist camarada and member of our food movement/community, Joe, saddened me, as it epitomized the anger and violence with which many colonized and decolonizing men approach anything that does not resemble a cisgender heterosexual patriarchy. Joe posted a short video that discussed “Drag Queen Story Time.” The video centered on a drag queen who went to elementary schools and read to children, teaching them to feel and act free and to express that through story and art. Joe commented with a series of violent epithets against drag queens and anyone who condoned “these sick minded people.” What is significant about Joe’s response is that he has been mentored in the community, and his attitudes have not been significantly challenged. Joe has interned with and worked for a number of movement-related groups as well as with important elders in the community. He spends time on the land with Black elders. He is supported in our community. What does this mean about how our food community and the broader Black nationalist commu-

nity sees gender and sexuality, and how does this limit us in our efforts to decolonize and re-Indigenize? Significantly for this project of autohistoriateoría, what does it say about my anticolonial masculinity that I did not denounce his heteromasculinist violence and that I have failed to have this conversation with others holding similar views? Simpson answers this question without reservation in her clear-eyed analysis of the needs of Indigenous struggles for freedom: When we engage in gender violence or are silent in the face of homophobia, transphobia, heterosexism, discrimination, and ongoing gender violence, we are working in collusion with white men and on behalf of the settler colonial state to further destroy Indigenous nationhood.14 Simpson’s admonition includes women, since men are not the only ones who assist Eurocolonialist heteropatriarchy. Some women in my community, including elder women, have made it clear that they have accepted the colonizer’s gender and sexuality binaries and have a disdain for anyone who is not “straight.” One elder had no qualms about labeling herself a homophobe in a group conversation. As I described earlier in the essay, an AAA masculinity and liberatory praxis has no room for hate or for division of our people along the gender and sexuality lines established by Eurocolonialism. We and I have room to grow and develop, but in spite of the trans- and homophobia that continues to limit our movement, I have decolonized and see this hatred for what it is: a strategy on the part of the colonizer to undermine the power of women and of two-spirit, lesbian, gay, queer, and trans people, to separate us from the knowledge that comes from two-spirit people, to drive a wedge between men and women, and to ultimately destroy Indigenous people.15

My journey away from a settler colonial–influenced masculinity has led me to the food autonomy movement. Being cured of wétiko has been difficult. I only began to make real progress against this disease of greed and individualism once I put my hands in the soil next to Mexican@ and Black elders. While the journey is far from complete and I continue to encounter many roadblocks coming from inside and outside our movement, I am certain that attention to Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge is the correct path. As such, I have distilled the best of what I know from Indigenous, anarchist, and transnational feminist scholars and activists into an antiauthoritarian, anticolonial, alterNative framework whereby I can strategize and implement

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(In)Conclusion

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“new” (at least to some of us) ways of being a man interdependently with all of our relations. As Simpson advises, I learn from the land and use my place and all of my relations residing upon it to engage my fellow humans in exercises of decolonizing our minds and bodies. Through intimate, sustained interactions with our place, we begin to dismantle the master’s hypermasculine house with decolonial tools. We reject the master’s gender identities, roles, and expectations, and we question all of his categories, including “Latinx,” “Chican@,” and “Other.” To further develop our urban alterNative masculinity, we can reach back for our Indigenous stories, which will move us beyond our current understanding. These anticolonial practices are the first steps toward the radical reorganization of our society that we require.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

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10. 11. 12.

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13.

Butler, Gender Trouble. Katz, Tough Guise; Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia.” See also, for example, McFarland, Chicano Rap; McFarland, Chican@ Hip Hop Nation; and McFarland, Toward a Chican@ Hip Hop Anticolonialism. McFarland, Toward a Chican@ Hip Hop Anticolonialism. McFarland, Toward a Chican@ Hip Hop Anticolonialism. Individual freedom is perhaps the highest good under anarchist systems. As well, individuality, including as it relates to sexuality, is encouraged in most Indigenous communities, as we recognize that what is best for our community is for individual members of our communities to be encouraged to pursue their talents and desires. See McFarland, Chican@ Hip Hop Nation, for analysis of the “loco episteme.” See, for example, Bañales, “Jotería”; Driskill et al., Queer Indigenous Studies; Hall, “Indigenist Intersectionality”; and E. Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary. See Alfred, Wasáse; Alfred, Peace, Power and Righteousness; Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Simpson, As We Have Always Done; Wildcat, Red Alert. Simpson, As We Have Always Done. Simpson, 20. The three principles are controversial in some corners because the original principles as theorized by Bill Mollison have changed. Principle three, which most render as “fair share,” expects people to return surplus to the Earth and share it with others. Mollison’s third principle is actually to reduce consumption and control population. Its unfortunate association with population control has caused many to offer “fair share” instead of considering seriously Mollison’s concerns. Wétiko is an Algonquin term for the disease of greed, excess, selfishness, and individualism that ultimately “cannibalizes” the host; in this case, capitalist colonialism and its heteropatriarchy are destroying Turtle Island, the very place that sustains life for all our relations. See Jack Forbes’s influential Columbus and Other Cannibals.

14. Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 52. 15. For detailed discussion of issues concerning two-spirit people and the importance of gender fluidity among Indigenous people, see Simpson, As We Have Always Done; and Driskill et al., Queer Indigenous Studies.

Alfred, Taiaiake. Peace, Power and Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto. Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2009. Alfred, Taiaiake. Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2005. Bañales, Xamuel. “Jotería: A Decolonizing Political Project.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 39, no. 1 (2014): 155– 65. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Driskill, Qwo-Li, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, eds. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011. Forbes, Jack. Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. Rev. ed. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008. Hall, Laura. “Indigenist Intersectionality: Decolonizing and Reweaving an Indigenous Eco-queer Feminism and Anarchism.” Perspectives in Anarchist Theory 29 (2016): 81–94. Katz, Jackson, narrator. Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity. Directed by Sut Jhally. Media Education Foundation, 1999. Kimmel, Michael. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.” In Theorizing Masculinities, edited by Harry Brod and Michael Kaufmann, 119– 41. New York: Sage, 1994. McFarland, Pancho. The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013. McFarland, Pancho. Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. McFarland, Pancho. Toward a Chican@ Hip Hop Anticolonialism. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017. Wildcat, Daniel. Red Alert: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge. London, U.K.: Fulcrum, 2009.

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Chapter 6

LEARNING WITH NORMA MONTOYA Scholarship as Accompaniment, Accountability, and the Advancement of a Conscientious and Caring Masculinity Jonathan D. Gomez

In the spring of 2013, I began a conversation with Chicana mural artist Norma Montoya that has had a lasting impact on who I am and what I stand for in the world. Our initial conversation was about a mural project that she envisioned collaboratively and painted with youths from the Cleland House youth center in a service alley located in the City Terrace barrio of East Los Angeles in 1976. I did not know it then, but our exchange about the past would develop into an ongoing collaborative project in the present. Our aim is to place paintbrushes in the hands of youths at the Estrada Courts housing project in Boyle Heights, California. Through our work together, my academic training toward a doctoral degree in sociology with an emphasis in Black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was augmented by firsthand engagements with a Chicana artist and community organizer at a historical juncture when dominant social groups deny working-class women of color their dignity and force them to debate their very right to exist. This chapter focuses specifically on how my accompaniment of Montoya provided me with lessons in community-based, gender-conscious, and equityoriented dialogic thinking at an important period in my doctoral training. Working with Montoya was part of my own personal journey of envisioning and becoming the type of scholar, and the type of man, who is caring of and attentive to the needs of oppressed people and their communities. I inhabited the practice that Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz name as accompaniment: an important collective sensibility and form of social science inquiry that emerges from friendly, humble, and mutually respectful relationships with the members of aggrieved groups who are the frontline eyewitnesses to exploitation and exclusion. In an era of neoliberal hegemonic individualism, accompaniment compels scholars to place an emphasis on what Tomlinson and Lipsitz describe as “making connections with others, identifying with them, and helping them.”1 Through this way of knowing and being, scholars can better understand the work we do in relationship to the world in which 94

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we live, not as distant, detached, and disengaged practitioners of professional advancement, but as social justice seekers looking for people who are looking for us. Distinct from “dropping science” on people as a method of community engagement, accompaniment is interested in learning from and acting with oppressed communities, in order to figure out how to appropriately face up to the challenges that wreak havoc in their lives.2 It identifies the terrains of collective struggle and collaborative study as sites where research questions are asked and answered from the ethical vantage points of the eyewitnesses to hierarchy and injustice.3 Unlike previous research and community engagements that I have been a part of, I learned that key to the practice of accompanying Norma Montoya was the development and recognition of trust. Developing trust with her specifically meant keeping my word and taking the initiative to utilize my academic skills to purposefully serve the various projects we agreed to work on together. This did not mean that I thoughtlessly followed her lead or that she reflexively followed mine. It meant honestly voicing my opinions about and critiques of her ideas and plans of action, and being open to her opinions about and critiques of me. In the end, we developed a firm but informative and fluid way of working together on various projects. When we first met, I listened to stories Montoya shared with me about her previous unhappy attempts to collaborate with scholars. I learned she had given permission to men affiliated with different universities across California to access her personal archive of photographs from the historical Chicano Movement for their own private research projects. More than a few times, after accessing and using what they needed from her archive, they walked away without keeping their promises to assist in the community-based art projects that she was involved in at the time. In the worst cases, they presented Montoya’s photographs in a way that misrepresented the social and material contexts in which they had been taken. Moreover, these researchers too often analyzed her photographs through the standards of bourgeois aesthetics, treating them as mere ornamental form rather than recognizing the political art– based community making that they embodied. Moreover, Montoya pointedly expressed to me her objections to the ways in which mural art in East Los Angeles in particular and the greater city more generally, whether of the past or the present day, is almost always discussed as artwork made by males, a gesture that centers heteromasculine aesthetics.4 Although she was consistently open to speaking with me about her art work in the community, her past mistreatment by male scholars and the ubiquitous patriarchal milieu of mural art discourse in the city generated a healthy suspicion in her about my motives as a Chicano graduate student showing interest in her work. Developing trust with Montoya was a long and deliberate process, one that

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eventually led to invitations to work with her. These invitations provided new opportunities for accompaniment. I learned that keeping my word, lending my academic skills to our projects, and stepping up to assist her in unexpected tasks led to opportunities for co-creation grounded in a foundation of trust built out of our common commitments to speaking up and standing up for overpoliced yet underprotected youths. It was this work that in turn offered me opportunities to forge and embody a new masculine social and scholarly identity for myself based on connecting with and supporting her dedicated efforts to serve communities of barrio residents. It is my hope that my words might offer an example to others in the academy, showing that the acquisition of academic skills and the development of social and scholarly identities require us to genuinely listen to and learn from aggrieved communities, especially working-class women of color. This is a social process rooted in collective action. Reflecting on the lessons I have learned from working with Montoya as a graduate student and now as an assistant professor, I contend that there is never only one way to accompany people, as there is never only one kind of person, one kind of scholar, or one kind of struggle for social justice.5 I do stress, however, that in any instance of accompaniment, academics like me are privileged when we can be the beneficiaries of the knowledge that is generated in oppressed communities’ struggles to reclaim social rights.6 This chapter is organized in three parts: First, I present an overview of how I met Montoya, the work she currently does in the community, and how she developed her own process of accompanying youths in the barrio. Next,

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Figure 6.1. Jonathan working with Norma Montoya. Photograph by Yami Duarte Montoya.

I describe how my formal education led to various transformations in my life: how I came to envision new social identities for myself, and how I came to enact them in my engagements with Montoya. Then I move to a conclusion that discusses the leading principles that I have learned from accompanying Montoya. In short, this is an essay about how the various forms of education and mentorship that I have received from teachers across diverse and multiple campuses and community spaces have enabled me to develop masculine social and scholarly identities that are ready, willing, and able to work respectfully and responsibly with women of color community organizers at the grassroots. Working with Norma Montoya has taught me important lessons about how gender functions as a social force. It has helped me see how the standard stance of academic research not only demeans and dismisses important work done by women in struggles for social justice, but also subtly inculcates in us an individualist and masculinist search for singular heroes and triumphs. Montoya has done much that is heroic, but the essence of her art and activism rests in a distinctly feminist understanding of mutuality and caretaking relations. Accompanying her did more for me than simply add a woman’s name to the already existing list of male art activists; instead it made me rethink the core premises of what art is, why it matters, and how it functions in the world as a social force. At the same time, our conversations across genders showed me how social movements whose histories are so often told through tales of male leaders and masculine bravado actually survive and thrive because of women’s networks and women’s ways of being and ways of knowing.

The Art-Based Community Making of Norma Montoya I met Norma Montoya in the course of conducting research for my doctoral dissertation, “El Barrio Lindo: Chicanx and Latinx Social Space in Postindustrial Los Angeles.” My study evidences the ways in which people who have been dispossessed and displaced take possession of abandoned spaces as strategies for refusing the unlivable destinies to which they have been relegated. It includes a chapter on the transformation of alleyways from overlooked places into prized social destinations by Chicanx and Latinx punk rock youths in the City Terrace barrio of East Los Angeles during the 1980s. I learned that when public administrators decided in the early 1980s to close down prized youth centers and after-school programs that had been started by the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty in the 1960s, youths turned to service alleyways to achieve their own social needs. The winding and narrow service alleys that run throughout the hillside barrio provided youths

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PUNK ROCK AND MURAL ART IN CITY TERRACE

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with many spaces to choose from as social sites, but I was told that none compared to “Rainbow Alley.”7 Rainbow Alley is the name that youths gave to a deserted alleyway within this system in large part because it contained colorful murals that were painted there in 1976 under the direction of Norma Montoya. Shortly after it was painted, Los Angeles County officials abandoned maintenance of the alleyway, and most of the murals became covered in colorful graffiti. The walkway was overwhelmed by trash and weeds. The weeds, trash, and graffiti kept most people away, but for punk rock youths, these characteristics, together with the alley’s location away from busy Eastern Avenue, offered them a space in which to congregate out of the sight of adults, the police, and other youths who might challenge them for their choices in style and music.8 Following this finding, I conducted an online search for Norma Montoya’s contact information. Locating an email address, I reached out to her to inquire about the production of the murals in Rainbow Alley. To my pleasant surprise, she replied with an invitation to meet with me at her home in City Terrace to discuss my questions concerning her mural art. I made my first trip from Santa Barbara to City Terrace to meet with Montoya in May 2013. At this meeting, I found out that the official name of the artwork at Rainbow Alley was El Paseo de los Barriles. When I continued to refer to the murals as “your art,” Montoya unfailingly corrected me by declaring the work to be “our” murals. She emphasized the fact that she collaboratively envisioned and enacted the project with youths from the Cleland House youth center in East Los Angeles. Their hope was that “El Paseo,” as Montoya referred to it, would serve as a place where families from the surrounding neighborhood could spend time with one another and where children would come to play.9 Although the neighborhood surrounding the alleyway is filled with lush trees, the Los Angeles Sheriff ’s Department designated the hillside as off-limits to the community.10 Montoya believed the murals, which included paintings of trees and animals, were a solution to the community’s lack of access to green public space. Given the context of their project, Montoya did not like the fact that officials from the county had chosen to cease maintenance of the alley shortly after it was painted, but she was happy to learn that youths gave the space a new meaning for themselves and continued to socialize there despite its abandonment. At the conclusion of our first meeting, Montoya invited me back to her home the following month to further discuss the other mural projects she had been involved with during the 1970s. Over the next few months, I engaged in many face-to-face conversations with her, and at her invitation I accompanied her to several community meetings. Through these activities, I learned a lot about Montoya and gained

a great deal of admiration for her imagination and community-engaged art making. She remains busy with multiple public art projects but prioritizes teaching courses in studio art to incarcerated youths and attending housing meetings at the Estrada Courts projects. In addition to these endeavors, she is part of a network of Chicanx and Latinx community organizers concerned about housing needs and youth justice for low-income residents of East Los Angeles. Montoya did not simply stumble upon her principles and her commitments, she developed them as an active participant in social movement organizing and mobilizing during the late 1960s and the 1970s. As a student at Belmont High School, Montoya was one of thousands of youths who walked out of their schools to demand equitable and culturally sensitive education in 1968.11 Thinking back to this time, she recalls refusing to go along with a formal education system that did not take her seriously as a student. It was a system, she believed, that “boxed me into this role as a good little Mexican.”12 This included racialized, gendered, and class-based assumptions about the education she needed and what kinds of services she would perform for the economy and the family. Following high school, she moved from downtown Los Angeles to East Los Angeles to “join the movement.”13 A couple of years later, she and her friends took part in the Chicano Moratorium against the war in Vietnam.14 While she was definitely shaken up by the deadly violence wrought by police agencies to disperse the crowds of Chicana/o students and anti- war demonstrators, Montoya and a group of her peers were emboldened by the energy of the broad-based community organizing taking place under the banner of the Chicano Movement.15 Together they established the Estrada Courts Mural Program (ECMP) at Estrada Courts in 1973. The ECMP sought to use mural art as a means to address the needs of Chicanx and Latinx youths who were daily demonized and disrespected by dominant social groups in the city.16 Between 1973 and 1978, Montoya was a key member of a group of youths in their late teens and early twenties who would organize and execute the collaborative production of eighty-eight murals at the Estrada Courts.17 In the process of planning and executing murals, they succeeded at supplementing limited government assistance with community support so that they could offer children and teens summer jobs, free lunches, field trips, and daily mentorship around the clock and year-round. Montoya and the other ECMP artists were not paid for their efforts, yet their youth and their involvement in a movement provided them with consciousness, companionship, and confidence to move forward with their plans to achieve social change in the barrio.

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THE ESTRADA COURTS MURAL PROGRAM

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According to Montoya, most youths she worked with at Estrada Courts during this time faced diverse and multiple injustices. At school, administrators and teachers denied them an equitable education and often treated them as gang members simply because of their racial and ethnic identities and the places where they lived. In their neighborhoods, they were repeatedly and aggressively reprimanded by police agencies for going beyond the physical boundaries of the housing projects.18 Inside their homes, the paint cracked, pipes leaked, mold grew, ceilings sagged, and refrigerators lacked food.19 Frustrations over these conditions, competition for limited opportunities, lack of spaces to socialize in, and even competition for romantic partners led to radical divisions among youths, which sometimes resulted in death.20 The deleterious living conditions in the Estrada Courts revealed to members of the ECMP that while the Chicano Movement had successfully set in motion an organized fight for civil rights and dignity, structural racism is not easily defeated.21 Recognizing the growing injustices at Estrada Courts, the ECMP developed and deployed art-based community-making activities to simultaneously intervene in increasing conflicts among youths and claim resources for them. They faced many hardships and received close to no support for their work, but they did not give up. Driving forward their efforts was a spatial imaginary that I refer to as el barrio lindo. My scholarship shows that for the ECMP, el barrio lindo was a way of being and knowing that connected a heterogeneous group of people to one another across difference and divisions at Estrada Courts. Montoya informed me that a daily activity she engaged in to enact social change in the barrio with youths consisted of what she refers to as developing “mural teams.” These teams were social formations established in everyday art planning and painting that sought to break down isolation and build up unity among youths who were clashing with one another, or who had been made weary and dispirited by the unfavorable social and material conditions of the barrio. Mural team projects gave them the responsibility and resources to collectively develop ideas for future murals and community service projects. Montoya contends that this work supported the development of the “self-confidence” of youths who were overlooked by officials at school and in their neighborhoods.22 This was believed by the ECMP to be a crucial step in encouraging impoverished youths to develop collective ownership of their neighborhoods and to view themselves as members of a community who were capable of providing for themselves the things that housing and city officials were unable, or unwilling, to provide for them. Despite their success and their dedication to the youths of Estrada Courts, challenges caused by new Housing Authority arrangements related to art approval and the real need for paid work to make ends meet forced ECMP

organizers to disband the organization in 1978. Yet Montoya’s activities as a member of the ECMP enabled her to utilize the lessons she learned in the 1970s to carry on el barrio lindo, although transformed in various ways. It is not always easy for her, especially since many of the social and material conditions associated with inequitable education, hunger, and policing that she struggled against as a member of the ECMP have only gotten worse with the crises posed by deindustrialization, the rise of the prison-industrial complex, and the amplification of anti-Latinx xenophobia across the Bush-ObamaTrump eras.23 Belonging to a community of people, however, makes it possible for her to stay in touch with others willing to take a stand for youths who are overpoliced yet underserved by dominant social groups. At a meeting in February 2014, Montoya asked me what I thought about organizing an event to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the ECMP at Estrada Courts. We had been talking so much about the work she had done and continues to do there that she supposed it might be a good idea to recognize all the people who had taken part in the ECMP, especially the young women who arrived every day to join in. Additionally, news from monthly housing meetings at Estrada Courts was grim. Needs were growing, threats of ICE raids at Estrada Courts and in surrounding neighborhoods were mounting, divisions among residents were rising, and parents were expressing their interest in how they might bring together the community to figure out what they could do collectively. Considering everything that she had shared with me and all that I had learned from studying the mural movement at Estrada Courts, I thought the commemoration was timely. More than merely agreeing with her, I showed my encouragement by demonstrating all I had learned from her, reiterating the important points she highlighted to me about why this event was needed, sharing with her my own research findings about Chicanx mural art that aligned with her social vision of art-based community making, and explaining why I believed such an endeavor would support her ongoing commitment to bringing attention to the fact that the youths at Estrada Courts require a range of resources immediately. I thought it was necessary for me to engage Montoya in this way because it had become a regular occurrence for some of the very well-known local artists who had been invited by the ECMP to paint at Estrada Courts during the 1970s to quickly discourage the idea of organizing an event that focused on the ECMP as part of a social movement.24 In many instances, these artists expressed the desire to hold an event that focused not on the ECMP but on individual murals. For a collective thinker like Montoya, this approach was problematic. She believed a focus on the finished art object would occlude the

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“I’M NOT SELLING WOLF TICKETS, AM I?”

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creative acts performed by the youths who took part in the social process of art making, as well as the social context that called people together to use murals as a means to organize and mobilize for resources. Following one particular meeting where comments made her feel as if she might be out of touch with the community, she asked me, “I’m not selling wolf tickets, am I?” I informed her that she was not hyping up anything that was not there. In fact, I expressed to her that she was on to something. Moreover, I informed her that I would support her efforts to make the event happen. Although we had been working together for almost a year, I believe this was a point in our relationship where Montoya recognized that I had not arrived to her home to take things from her and then retreat to the university without stepping up to the work she was engaged in. Rather, I was trying my best to practice reciprocity, and willing to advocate for her project in the best way that I knew how; that is, through community-engaged research and writing.25 I cannot paint like Montoya, organize a neighborhood like Montoya, or testify to decades of art-based community making like Montoya. I cannot even take away the hurt she endures as she tries to carry on the struggle. But I can accompany her, providing her with a listening ear, a willing heart, and a helping hand as she forges onward. With support from mentors in the academy, I was able to navigate this situation respectfully and realize important challenges I faced in accompanying Montoya. For example, in my efforts to support her at moments of crisis, I initially allowed the frustrations I felt at her bad treatment in the past and present to lead me to make claims that had unintended negative consequences. For instance, I would claim that she was an exceptional artist in order to validate her, not realizing that in making that very claim I was diminishing other artists in her social network. Without realizing it, I was starting to do to them what they had been doing to her. Meeting with my graduate research advisors to discuss my work with Montoya, I was encouraged to remember that there is more than one way to make a mural in the barrio, and that these murals have different meanings and importance to different people, which should not be understood as right or wrong, or as better than or less than. The objective, they suggested to me, is not to create a hierarchy of mural art and mural artists. Rather, I should consider questions such as, “Why is this particular form of mural making important, especially now, in a context of neoliberal abandonment?” Through this line of thinking, I was able to recognize that while I thought I was being “radical” in my approach to supporting Montoya, I was really being “revanchist.”26 My advisors’ suggestions allowed me to re-center the importance of Montoya’s collective call to make art as a means to bring together multiple and diverse constituencies of the housing projects at a time when widespread social inequality is giving rise to social breakdowns and radical divisions.

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Going forward with the event we planned, Montoya organized the “Blessing of the Murals Committee.”27 The idea behind organizing the event as a blessing was a tactic she had learned to use in the historical Chicano Movement as a way to bring together a heterogeneous group of Chicanx and Latinx people through their shared faith in Catholicism. Additionally, this was a means for people to construct a collective ethical obligation to stand up for the youths who were and are suffering there at Estrada Courts. For her part, Montoya worked with the assistance of her daughter (Yami Duarte Montoya) to create a timeline of the ECMP with a corresponding arrangement of photographs that Norma had taken of the mural-making process in the 1970s. I shared my joy with Norma and Yami and informed them that this was the very kind of work that students, staff, and faculty at UC Santa Barbara would love to see. When they expressed enthusiasm at this idea, I organized a campus visit for them on July 23, 2014.28 At UCSB, Norma and Yami delivered a powerful lecture about the ECMP and the fortieth anniversary event in the making, and they explained why murals matter today.29 The campus community was thrilled by their presentation, and many students expressed delight in the work that Montoya had done with youths in the past and the work she continues to do with them in the present. A few months after the UCSB lecture, Norma and Yami delivered their presentation at the Monterey Park Library on October 14, 2014.30 For this event, I invited a group of students I had been working with at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. During the summer of 2014, I facilitated workshops with students that examined Montoya’s art-making engagements with the ECMP, the historical Chicano Movement, and the need for social movements in the present. At the event, students were thrilled to meet the artist they had been learning about and to see the many different photographs she took that captured young people like themselves engaged in the muralmaking process and taking action in their community. If there was any doubt still about whether or not Montoya should organize an event to commemorate the work of the ECMP, the excitement exhibited by students from UCSB and Garfield High School demonstrated to her that it struck a chord with the very generation of youths she had hoped the commemoration would allow her to connect with. Several dozen people gathered at Estrada Courts to honor the fortieth anniversary of the ECMP on October 26, 2014. Following a blessing of the murals that faced Olympic Boulevard by Pastor John Moretta from Resurrection Catholic Church, different community members spoke to the growing crowd about what the murals meant to them. Following the last speaker from the community, Montoya thanked everyone for attending. After a short pause, she illuminated the fact that the murals produced by the ECMP were made

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through a collective effort, with countless sacrifices made by many people. Norma went to great pains to give thanks to the many young women and “homies” who played a central part in the everyday organizing and mobilizing that had made the ECMP possible, yet whose hard work and dedication have gone unrecognized in retrospective accounts of what took place at Estrada Courts. She went on to remark that while many murals are signed by an individual artist, the majority were produced as a “team,” and all were possible because of the broad-based community organizing and mobilizing of the ECMP. Montoya’s attention to the social process of art making elicited marvelous testimony from the audience. One woman spoke about how her tías had been part of the mural teams, contributing to the preparation of walls for mural art and lending their energy to painting. Another woman shared that her grandmother had been a part of the mural-making efforts as a youth, and she took pride in knowing that someone in her family had contributed to the organizing that was going on there. A young man stated that as a child, whenever his parents passed by Estrada Courts, they would share with him that his grandfather took part in the painting of the murals there. Still others shared with one another in conversation that their loved ones had contributed to the ECMP’s efforts by sharing food, water, and moral support. They had done this in large part because they believed in what the ECMP was doing for the youths at Estrada Courts. I left Estrada Courts that day with great appreciation for the work of the committee and with new lessons for my own scholarship. As I drove back to Santa Barbara, I thought deeply about how Montoya’s emphasis on the social process of mural making had focused on women and their influential everyday roles in the ECMP. This specifically gendered contribution has often been ignored by both academic and arts institutions, analysts, and interpreters. Women have not been recognized as key participants in the art making because their names were not signed on the completed murals. Yet Norma Montoya and other women like her have “written” their testimony through thousands of small actions organizing and enabling others. I came to understand that accompanying Montoya equipped me with a grounded perspective that is equipped to recognize and refute the sexism that can stem from seemingly impartial approaches to and assessments of community-based art making. I also saw for myself something that Montoya often declares about communal contributions to social change: that they were integral to what kept the movement alive during the 1970s, but they are very difficult to recognize when retrospective accounts of mural making at Estrada Courts become isolated from social movement organizing and portray the murals only as the product of individual artists.

Becoming the Person I Want to Be I wish I could say that I was always already the person I needed to be in order to work respectfully with Montoya, but I was not. As a Chicano born and raised in the City Terrace barrio of East Los Angeles, I owe much of my own personal and scholarly development to educational initiatives and community-based programs designed to enroll and support impoverished youths in college and help them achieve their full potential. In addition, I have benefited from the extra efforts made by conscientious teachers and dedicated family members at every stage of my college education. At East Los Angeles College (ELAC), I reckoned with the fact that I did not know how to study, read, or write systematically. With support from a broad network of engaged educators within campus Educational Opportunities Programs and Services offices, I was provided with access to academic enrichment programs to begin a process of serious study. Transferring to the University of California, Santa Cruz, I was invited to be a part of multiple and diverse cultural, scholastic, and social spaces that helped me to develop into a serious student. I became involved in university-community programs such as the Pescadero School Program. I joined marches for immigrants’ and workers’ rights, and I began to listen to and learn from undocumented student organizers, especially members of Students Informing Now. I involved myself in discussion groups on Black and Brown solidarity in the United States. I embraced identities as a poet and a Chicano while tending to my own contradictions as a cisgender, heteromasculine, and light-skinned man through reflections and readings prompted by feminist and Chicana feminist peers, professors, and community organizers.31 At ELAC and UCSC, historical consciousness was the greatest tool I acquired. My experiences served me well, but on their own they did not provide me with the analytic skills to also consider the implications of structural forces in the world. Transferring to UCSC, I had the opportunity to learn how to systematically study the neighborhood I grew up in. Walking more freely on campus than I had in my own neighborhood, I began to study structural racism and how it creates radical divisions between neighbors competing for limited resources. In the absence of sheriff ’s helicopters hovering overhead every single night, I began to question the militarized policing that is omnipresent in working-class neighborhoods of color. Among the overabundance of healthy food in dining halls located throughout campus, I began to think deeply about my childhood and the way I used to blame my mother right away for the shame and anger I experienced because of the scarcity of food

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in our home. With a newfound understanding of the fact that impoverished conditions in working-class communities are not natural, necessary, or inevitable, I developed the willingness to use my education to serve communities similar to the one I had grown up in.32 As a graduate student in the Department of Sociology with emphasis in Black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), I was offered further mentorship, training, and resources that assisted me in becoming a scholar. I participated in teaching, research, and community-based endeavors that engaged students, faculty, and community members to honestly and openly explore critical questions of racialized and gendered hierarchy and exploitation.33 These projects drew on the experiences and imaginaries of diverse populations, including high-school students, adult continuation students, college students, incarcerated youths, and houseless people of all races across the state of California. These experiences were crucial in making me aware of the vexing effects of racialized and gendered austerity, unequal education, and the impacts of the prison-industrial complex on both documented and undocumented communities, especially working-class youths of color.

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Sociology, as taught at UCSB, provided me the training necessary to study the cultural production of Chicanx and Latinx communities that are resourcepoor but rich in imagination and social networks. I enhanced my expertise on Chicanx and Latinx communities through a graduate emphasis in Black studies. Examining Chicanx and Latinx communities through the prism of Black studies provided me instruction in exploring how cultural texts such as mural art, poetry, and music are themselves performative of social identity, functioning as repositories of interracial and interethnic solidarity and sites for countering hierarchical hegemonic discourse.34 Furthermore, I was trained by practitioners of the Black radical tradition, which Cedric Robinson wrote is a “collective intelligence gathered from struggle.”35 Collective intelligence in Robinson’s teaching and mentorship was very much about encouraging his students to study actively and to set foot in the world, talk with people, learn with them, and blend the knowledge we acquire from systematic thinking in the academy with the knowledge we acquire with people engaged in struggles for social justice.36 Professor Robinson and other mentors at UCSB taught me a lot about the importance of blending knowledge, but I did not fully understand what it would mean for me to do this work in the world until I met Mr. Leo Stegman in the fall of 2012. Associated with POOR Magazine, a landless people’s social movement in the California Bay Area, he was curious about what it meant

for me to be a graduate student of color enrolled in a doctoral program. Following our conversation, he asked if I would help him with a problem he had encountered in a project he was working on to meet the needs of houseless Black students in Berkeley High School. After sending numerous emails to various school administrators and public officials, he had received no reply. He was certain that my credentials as a graduate student would produce a different result compared to the treatment he received as a proud, community-engaged, impoverished Black man. He was right. In a very short time, I received emails and had helped him set up meetings with various people whom he had been attempting to reach for months to no avail. Following his meetings, Mr. Stegman and I talked by phone. One thing that he emphasized to me is that my formal education is “a” tool for justice in the world, but it is not “the” tool.37 My tool helped him access a school so that he could use his tools for addressing and redressing the unjust conditions of impoverished Black youths in Berkeley, California. Mr. Stegman went on to encourage me to remember that anything we build of importance for social justice requires different tools and skill sets from different people, and at various times “some tools and skills will be used instead of other ones. It doesn’t mean one tool or skill is more important than others. It just means these things are needed for what is in front of us.”38 In hindsight, I recognize this experience to be a very influential point in how I came to transform my formal education privilege into an obligation to stand up for people whom sociologists like myself are often trained to study without considering the important tools already present in the community.

When I met Montoya, I was not the person that I am today. While I was someone willing to stand up for people, I became a man and scholar capable of listening and learning with people through my accompaniment of her. To this day, I leave every meeting I have with her with new lessons and new work to do. It is not unusual for me to receive a phone call from Montoya to inquire about something we talked about the last time we spoke. Sometimes she might ask me to read a book that she just concluded reading so that we can have a conversation about it to determine whether or not it helps our own work. Although we experience many wonderful moments like this, not all the efforts that we undertake are successful in achieving what we set out to do. In fact, our applications for funding to buy supplies for painting and carry out our ideas for programming are often declined by different grant agencies. On numerous occasions, our volunteer plans for arts education at Estrada Courts

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Concluding Thoughts: The “We” Instead of the “Me”

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have been ignored by housing authority staff charged with enlisting people from the community to take part in civic engagement programs. In spite of the losses that rack up, our team pushes on. Currently, we are gathering and reading different books of photography that we believe serve as good examples for a book we want to publish featuring her original photographs from the ECMP. According to Montoya, we are working on a book that allows us “to tell a story about people coming together and taking action at Estrada Courts.”39 Her insistence on the collective practice of mural making and her “team” approach to problem solving are precisely the kinds of principles that I have learned from her. With Montoya, it is not about “me.” It is about “we.” This became apparent to me during our first meeting, when I overlooked the role of the youths from the Cleland House in the production of the murals that made up El Paseo de los Barriles. I know that murals have different meanings to different people. But I like to think of them similarly to how Norma thinks of them— as vehicles for creating new social identities, social spaces, and social relationships. It might be safe to say that Norma Montoya approaches the markings made on a wall by paintbrushes in the hands of youths at the Estrada Courts the way a scholar reads a book. She looks for consciousness and forms of communication that might lead to empowering human connection. Events like the Blessing of the Murals or engagements with students from Garfield High School, East Los Angeles College, and UC Santa Barbara provide her with much-needed encouragement to continue the work she does at Estrada Courts. It can be extremely difficult to do work that is not recognized. For Norma, however, what is most troubling is the fact that racialized and gendered hierarchy and exploitation relegate working-class and impoverished Chicanx and Latinx barrio dwellers to urban landscapes of containment and disinvestment, to what Henry Giroux calls “zones of social abandonment.”40 Yet Norma teaches me that people who live in zones of social abandonment do not abandon others. They pull together what they have, and what they can, to stand together and stand up for one another. They invent new uses for overlooked areas, transforming decrepit walls designed to enclose impoverished public housing residents into zones of self-active creativity and collective empowerment. This is an ongoing process that requires commitment and a willingness to get back up when you fall down. For scholars interested in developing honest and respectful masculinities, I believe that the life, art, and activism of Norma Montoya offer important insights about how to become the people we need to be in our own times of crisis. Within university campuses and across them, we confront challenging problems that stem from what Dr. King called a “thing-oriented

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society.”41 In this social world, we embody masculine social identities marked by an impulse that seeks fame and fortune, that desires things and turns us as humans into things. A rich alternative tradition embodied in the art and activism of Norma Montoya leads us in another direction, toward the development of spaces, identities, and relationships that are invested in being more in touch with our own humanity and the humanity of others. While scholars study and teach about the material and social consequences of racialized and gendered inequality and injustice, the systematic attack by powerful political officials and dominant social groups on working-class communities, especially women of color and seemingly nonnormative communities, threatens to naturalize hierarchies that wreak havoc all over the world. Working-class women of color should not be seen as people to be helped, but rather as people to learn from and walk with. The survival strategies they have devised in the face of unlivable destinies can serve as guidelines for all people, especially those blinded by the privileged epistemologies and social positions that accrue to cisgendered heterosexual masculinities. If not approached with the broadest forms of social justice, these problems are sure to cause severe epistemological problems for the academy and society at large. As dedicated scholars, we have to reckon with the fact that it is time to add methods to our tools and skill sets that provide us with interlocutors capable of registering and challenging power from the position of the experiences of the most vulnerable— often, as in Montoya’s case, they are also the most resistant, resilient, and perceptive. By accompanying Montoya, I found a woman working with the displaced, dispossessed, demonized, and deportable in ways that bring together unexpected tools and skill sets. In the work of inviting diverse groups of people together to stand with one another, she has often shared with me that one goal is to help people achieve, as she puts it, “a break from the circles around their lives.”42 For her, circles are a metaphor that speaks to physical and social isolation caused by oppression. As much as we might wish to, it is not easy to break out of circles. It requires the effort of physically showing up and standing with people doing practical work to make their communities and neighborhoods a place they deem worth living in. I have learned many lessons from Montoya that are now vital to my scholarship as I attempt to document, describe, analyze, and advance the ways in which people can use the tools available to them to maintain or reclaim their dignity and social rights. Developing trust with her, I have learned a lot about the social processes of becoming the kind of scholar who refuses to go along with the dominant social relationships in society and the academy. She has helped make me a man who recognizes the importance of listening to and learning

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from women who are on the ground and standing up for social justice. I know that I still have much to learn about disinvesting from male privilege, about accompanying women, about the difficult tasks ahead if I am to become the person I will need to be in order to be worthy of Montoya’s trust and respect. But she has started me down the path and I know I cannot turn back.

Acknowledgments I would like to say thank you to my teachers. They are people inside and outside of the academy who invest their time and energy in efforts that provide me with lessons on how to think creatively, act compassionately, and work collaboratively with others. By example, they teach me how to lead my everyday life with a “modest audacity” (Gomez, Ramirez, and Illescas, “Cedric J. Robinson”). Readers will see that with their support, I embody masculine social and scholarly identities devoted to achieving the broadest forms of social justice in a society structured by dominance (Hall, “Race, Articulation”).

Notes

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

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Tomlinson and Lipsitz, “American Studies,” 10. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 9. Hale, Engaging Contradictions. See also LaTorre, Walls of Empowerment. I want to thank Professor Diane Fujino. During my graduate studies, Dr. Fujino served as director of the UCSB Center for Black Studies Research. With her dedicated mentorship, I was provided many marvelous lessons in how to be a scholar who stands with community. Additionally, I am grateful to the School of Unlimited Learning (SOUL) at UCSB. When I arrived at UCSB, Professors Clyde Woods and George Lipsitz cofacilitated this collective learning space. Following the passing of Dr. Woods in 2011, Dr. Lipsitz has continued to bring people together at SOUL, which provides me with wonderful models of community-engaged scholarship and face-to-face interactions with scholars doing the work I want to do. 6. See also Vargas, Catching Hell. 7. Alvarado, interview with the author, 2013. 8. Gomez, “El Barrio Lindo.” 9. Montoya, interview with the author, 2013. 10. Several Los Angeles County facilities are located just beyond the hillside adjacent to the alleyway. They include a fire station, as well as the Biscailuz jail and the Sybil Brand Institute for women. Since the mid-1990s, the two latter facilities have been closed off from the public and no longer used as detention centers. Their property sites are used for police training. 11. Bernal, “Grassroots Leadership.”

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Montoya, interview with the author, 2015. Montoya, interview with the author, 2015. See also Oropeza, “Antiwar Aztlán.” See also Escobar, “Dialectics of Repression.” Sanchez-Tranquilino, “Mi Casa No Es Su Casa.” Sanchez-Tranquilino, “Mi Casa No Es Su Casa.” Vigil, Projects. Montoya, interview with the author, 2015. Meehan demonstrates how federal policy makers wrote regulations for public housing that would rely on a percentage of the rent paid by tenants to maintain housing infrastructure instead of creating a fully capitalized fund to maintain it. The more impoverished residents became, the less they paid in rent, and the less money was available for maintenance costs. See Meehan, Quality of Federal Policymaking. Moore, Garcia, and Chicano Pinto Research Project, Homeboys. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors. For a brilliant essay on structural racism, see Walter Johnson, “What Do We Mean.” Montoya, interview with the author, 2015. Gooding-Williams, Reading Rodney King; Camp and Heatherton, Policing the Planet; De Genova and Peutz, Deportation Regime. Daniel Widener provides a provocative study of how the Black Arts Movement was an integral driving force of the Black Power Movement. See Widener, Black Arts West. See also Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Why Advocacy Research?” Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The committee members were Anna Siqueiros, Norma Montoya, Francis Garcia, and Rita Valenzuela. Norma Montoya, arts lecture, July 23, 2014, Broida Hall, University of California, Santa Barbara. See also Gomez and Güereña, “At the Crossroads.” Norma Montoya and Yami Duarte Montoya, arts lecture during Hispanic Heritage Month, September 15, 2014, Monterey Park Bruggemeyer Library, Monterey Park, California. See also Anzaldúa, Borderlands. As an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, I was part of an engaged learning community that revolved around Black and Latinx solidarity study circles and action. See Ortiz, “Making History Matter,” for an overview and analysis of what drew this community together. Fujino et al., “Transformative Pedagogy.” Gaye T. Johnson, Spaces of Conflict; Woods, Development Arrested. Robinson, Black Marxism, xxx. See also Gaye T. Johnson and Lubin, Futures of Black Radicalism. I want to thank Mr. Leo Stegman for sharing this important observation with me.

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Mr. Leo Stegman, personal communication. Montoya, interview with the author, 2018. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War, 2. King, “Time to Break Silence,” 240. Montoya, interview with the author, 2018.

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Works Cited

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Alvarado, Jimmy. Interview with the author. April 20, 2013, Los Angeles, California. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Bernal, Dolores Delgado. “Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized: Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts.” Frontiers 19, no. 2 (1998): 113–42. Camp, Jordan T., and Christina Heatherton. Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter. London: Verso, 2016. De Genova, Nicholas, and Nathalie Peutz. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Escobar, Edward J. “The Dialectics of Repression: The Los Angeles Police Department and the Chicano Movement, 1968–1971.” The Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (1993): 1483– 514. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum, 2000. Fujino, Diane C., Jonathan D. Gomez, Esther Lezra, George Lipsitz, Jordan Mitchell, and James Fonseca. “A Transformative Pedagogy for a Decolonial World.” Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 40, no. 2 (2018): 69– 95. Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014. Gomez, Jonathan D. “El Barrio Lindo: Chicanx and Latinx Social Space in Postindustrial Los Angeles.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2017. Gomez, Jonathan D., and Salvador Güereña. “At the Crossroads of Chicana/o Art and Music: East L.A. Muralists and Punk Rockers.” Diversity Forum: University of California, Santa Barbara 9, no. 1 (Fall 2014). Gomez, Jonathan D., Jorge Ramirez, and Ismael Illescas. “Cedric J. Robinson, Modest Audacity, and the Black Radical Tradition.” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 3, no. 2 (2016): 288– 97. Gooding-Williams, Robert. Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising. New York: Routledge, 1993. Gutiérrez, David. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Hale, Charles R. Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

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Hall, Stuart. “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.” In Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, edited by Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, 16– 60. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. “Why Advocacy Research? Reflections on Research and Activism with Immigrant Women.” The American Sociologist 24 (Spring 1993): 56– 68. Johnson, Gaye T. Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Johnson, Gaye T., and Alex Lubin, eds. Futures of Black Radicalism. London: Verso, 2017. Johnson, Walter. “What Do We Mean When We Say, ‘Structural Racism’? A Walk down West Florissant Avenue, Ferguson, Missouri.” Kalfou 3, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 36– 62. Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “A Time to Break Silence.” In A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, edited by James M. Washington, 231– 44. New York: Harper Collins, 1986. LaTorre, Guisela. Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Meehan, Eugene J. The Quality of Federal Policymaking: Programmed Failure in Public Housing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979. Montoya, Norma. Interview with the author. February 13, 2013, City Terrace, Los Angeles, California. Montoya, Norma. Interview with the author. November 27, 2015, City Terrace, Los Angeles, California. Montoya, Norma. Interview with the author. August 21, 2018, City Terrace, Los Angeles, California. Moore, Joan W., Robert Garcia, and Chicano Pinto Research Project. Homeboys: Gangs, Drugs, and Prison in the Barrios of Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978. Oropeza, Lorena. “Antiwar Aztlán: The Chicano Movement Opposes US Intervention in Vietnam.” In Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945– 1988, edited by Brenda Gayle Plummer, 201–20. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Ortiz, Paul. “Making History Matter: Teaching Comparative African American and Latina/o Histories in an Age of Neoliberal Crisis.” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 125–46. Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Sanchez-Tranquilino, Marcos. “Mi Casa No Es Su Casa: Chicano Murals and Barrio Calligraphy as Systems of Signification at Estrada Courts, 1972–1978.” Master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991.

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Tomlinson, Barbara, and George Lipsitz. “American Studies as Accompaniment.” American Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2013): 1–30. Vargas, João H. Costa. Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and Meanings of Blackness in South Central Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Vigil, James Diego. The Projects: Gang and Non-gang Families in East Los Angeles. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Widener, Daniel. Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Woods, Clyde A. Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso, 1998.

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PART II Transmedial Detoxifications

Chapter 7

DECOLONIZING PREDATORY MASCULINITIES IN BREAKING BAD AND MOSQUITA Y MARI Arturo J. Aldama

This chapter contrasts representations of racist and racialized hegemonic masculinities in the award-winning five-season AMC series Breaking Bad (2008– 13) with Aurora Guerrero’s portrayal of Xicanx teens resisting coercion, docility, surveillance, formal/informal violence(s), and arguably neocolonial heteropatriarchies in her award- winning feature film Mosquita y Mari (2012).1 The first half of the chapter, which addresses Breaking Bad, will consider: (1) the distorted, ahistorical, predictable deployment of the tropes of the pathological and hyperviolent male Chicano and Native subjects of New Mexico and the borderlands; and (2) the way in which Walter White consumes Brown bodies in his will to power as the most lethal meth chemist (“cook”), beginning in New Mexico and expanding to México and further south in the hemisphere. This analysis documents how White’s deployment of “whiteness” and pathological masculinity destroys bodies, lands, and communities to feed his neocolonial hunger for entitlement and power, and how writer Vince Gilligan attempts to sterilize/normalize this predatory violence. The second half of the chapter discusses how the film Mosquita y Mari provides a decolonial rupture from predictable tropes of the representation of Latinx subjects, showing Xicanx teen mujeres who navigate and resist the practice of compulsory heteronormativity/ies, patriarchy, and surveillance. In doing so, these Xicanx youth in working-class Huntington Park, California, create liberatory spaces that challenge heteropatriarchy and put into practice gestures of liberatory sexual futures.2 The chapter addresses the politics of space and intimacy, and how cars and car culture, in the form of either cruising around with friends or parked and/or abandoned cars, contribute to both a reification of heteropatriarchal norms and a liberation to explore feelings. The chapter concludes by discussing the threat and immanence/ imminence of patriarchal heteronormative violence that circumscribes “safe spaces” and reinforces the sexualized masculine gaze upon and consumption of these young teens. 117

By bringing these seemingly dissimilar sites of representation and gender performances into conversation, my hope is to provide a discussion of how masculinities are constructed and performed in racialized neocolonial social, symbolic, and cultural economies. After considering the representations of predatory masculinities in Breaking Bad and Mosquita y Mari, I end the chapter with a reflection on the complexities of negotiating the violence(s) of being criminalized by Euro-Western norms and the state. I do so by asking how Latinx men can decolonize the legacies of misogyny and homophobia imposed through the Spanish invasion of the Americas and reified by the Catholic Church, and how they can resist the ongoing male-to-male violence(s) that drive the exaltation/glorification of performances of toxic masculinities in our current body politic (e.g., Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and other white men in power who relish their ability to violate the bodies and sovereignties of the “other”).

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Part One: Who Is the Real Cannibal? White Patriarchy and the Consumption of Brown Bodies on NDN Lands in the AMC Series Breaking Bad

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The final episode of AMC’s series Breaking Bad attracted 10.3 million viewers, ranking third in number of viewers among all cable series finales, after The Sopranos and Sex and the City. The series has inspired a huge range of fan clubs, self-published books, and series tours in New Mexico. Forbes provides six reasons for its incredible success: stunning landscapes, acting, writing, science, humor, and the soundtrack. As a Chicanx studies scholar, I first started watching Breaking Bad because I was curious to see a show set and filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Before I started watching the series, the questions that I asked myself were: Will there be “brownfacing” à la Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, the quintessential border noir film, in which Charlton Heston paints his face with what I assume is brown-tinted shoe polish to represent a chilango detective, or will there be fully rounded and complex representations/self-representations of Chicanx and Native Puebloan and Diné characters?3 Will the enduring legacies of Hispano and Native American communities be represented, including food, ceremonias, and the living complex historicity of New Mexico, or will there be tokenistic visual references to locate the series in what many call the heart of Aztlán to create ambience and make the narrative arc of Walter White’s apotheosis more interesting and colorful? My perhaps naïve/utopic desires to see what one New Mexican writer calls the Heart of Aztlán— in his novel of the same name set in an Indigenous-

Chicanx barrio of Albuquerque, New Mexico— shown in a TV series were quickly dashed.4 The refracted ethno- and ecoscopes that drive the geospatial imaginary of the series quickly become a playground for Walter White’s rise to power. The landscapes, tribal lands, adobe houses, and barrios are just fodder for White’s destruction of his enemies and his will to power as he moves from being a frustrated, cancer-ridden public-high-school chemistry teacher to becoming an active, predatory, and highly powerful agent in the necropolitics of the borderlands and the neocolonial consumption of bodies, including his toxic effluence of chemicals and waste in Indigenous lands. Chicanx and Native people are either there as backdrops, a twenty-first-century Tonto to Hank’s (Walt’s DEA agent brother-in-law) Lone Ranger fighting the “bad hombres” of the borderlands (a predictable trope),5 or else they are constructed with such grotesque exaggerations that they serve to somehow make Walter’s rise to power seem less homicidal and violent, normalizing his ascendant subjectivity.6 In fact, I agree with the sustained fan base and critics’ zealous praise of Vince Gilligan’s “masterful writing”; however, my reasons for saying he is a skillful writer are that he works extremely hard to refract Walter’s homicidal empire building through a “savagizing” of nonwhite subjects in the first season of the series, and that he deploys a wide range of cinematic techniques (flashbacks, montages, and humor) and narrative sequences to diminish, or perhaps sterilize, Walter’s pathological violence.

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Figure 7.1. RV spewing toxic contaminants.

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I want to start by focusing on some early sequences from season 1: the scenes featuring Domingo Molina, known as Krazy-8, played by Max Arciniega, a Chicago-born television and stage actor. Walter, not by happenstance, makes an active decision to murder Krazy-8 by strangling him with a bike lock in a basement and then dissolves him with hydrofluoric acid to literally disappear him. Domingo “Krazy-8” Molina ostensibly complicates stereotypical notions of Latinos, as he is a college graduate with a BA in business administration from UNM and a frustrated musician, he comes from a middle- or perhaps even upper-class family, and his father owns the Tampico Furniture store— all outward signs of social mobility, yet he still distributes meth in New Mexico. When we study profiles of serial murderers and the act of murder itself, we find that many times the perpetrator needs to completely objectify the victims, to literally dehumanize them and attempt to possess them in their entirety. In addition, to strangle someone implies a type of intimacy as well as a dominance of and literal imposition of your physical will and force upon this person. In sum, strangling someone is much closer and more personal than shooting someone from a car, or being a sniper— situations in which you are hidden from view, pinpoint a target, and pull the trigger. Furthermore, the buildup to the murder is made even more intimate when Walter confesses that he went shopping at Domingo’s family store and remembers the commercial jingle of the store; in fact, this rehumanizes Domingo, so that he is not just a mid-level meth dealer but a member of the ABQ (Albuquerque) community. Domingo is killed along with Walter’s first rival Emilio Koyama, Domingo’s mixed-race Asian-Chicano cousin, and their bodies are disappeared/ dissolved by hydrofluoric acid (HF). This act of murder and the dissolution of nonwhite male bodies are marketed to the audiences in ways that somehow lessen the vicious brutality of these acts. One of the tactics employed by Gilligan is to somehow add a bit of what is supposed to be humor with Jesse Pinkman’s (Walter’s former flunky high-school student and now meth business partner) innate incompetence and unwillingness to listen fully to Walter’s expertise as a chemist, when he fails to get the right plastic bins to dissolve the bodies in. As an example of the deep level of fan obsession with this series, chemists weighed in on the scientific possibility of reducing a body down with HF, arguing that lye is more effective, while HF is somewhat limited because it will not melt bone very quickly and the fumes will be very toxic. Jesse does not get the plastic bins, instead throwing the bodies in the bathtub on the second floor of his large yet run-down house. The bathtub collapses through the floor, causing a huge mess of “slop” due to Jesse’s in-

Figure 7.2. Walter White intentionally strangles Chicano rival.

THE COUSINS

Tuco’s cousins, played by real-life brothers Daniel and Luis Moncada, in contrast to the hyperloud Tuco (visually so, with his bright gaudy shirts and shiny grill of teeth), are clearly presented as borderline mute, completely lacking in empathy, and possessed of a single-minded drive to exterminate their rivals and get revenge. When Gilligan tries to translate the ways in which Chicanxs/Mexicanxs practice their devotion and sacrifice to santos (saints), the importance of mandas (vows), and the travels some communities make to offer their prayers— whether the pilgrimages made in México to Tonantzin /

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competence. Season 1, episode 3, begins with Walter remembering back to his earlier days as a scientist as he tries to clean up the “slop” of his dissolved bodies. Do Walter’s flashbacks serve to disconnect us from the fact that he murders and dissolves/disappears human beings? Do they allow the viewers to disavow the violence and destruction by breaking the bodies down to their literal elements in the periodic table? The sterility of scientific discourse and chemical analysis sees living organisms or beings as just a percentage and array of chemicals, notwithstanding the 0.111958 percent not composed of known elements of the periodic table. By “disappearing” them, Walter consumes Domingo’s and Emilio’s position in the meth trade. In a sense, he destroys and eats the middleman, to get himself to the next level of distribution, Tuco Salamanca.7

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La Virgen de Guadalupe at the Cerro del Tepeyac, or Basílica de Guadalupe, especially on December 12, or those made by Chicanx families to Chimayó, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, every Easter— he denigrates the importance of prayer and ceremonies in our communities. Mexican and Chicanx prayer and sacrifice present an opportunity for Gilligan to portray Mexicans in the borderlands in what should be a solemn or joyous event, but he purposefully casts these characters as filthy, unkempt, and in some cases with purposefully crazed looks. They then crawl in a clearly reptilian fashion toward the altar of La Santa Muerte, with the cousins joining in. For Gilligan, La Santa Muerte, whom many in Mexican culture leave offerings to— those who cross the U.S.-México border and ask not to die in the extremes of heat and cold or at the hands of ruthless smugglers or armed militia men; those involved in dangerous professions; and those who want to purify bad energies in their lives— is fetishized and distorted. In Gilligan’s depiction, La Santa Muerte is a way for the cousins to commit to the murder of Heisenberg (Walter White) in revenge for Tuco’s death. In Gilligan’s Euro-Western positivist imaginary, Mexican, Indigenous, and borderlands spiritual practices exist in a more primitive and supposedly “less evolved” snake- or lizard-like state of being. Walter, the evolved and scientific white man, stands above Gilligan’s colonialist depictions of gente fronteriza (U.S.-México borderlands denizens). Thus, when a disgruntled white high-school chemistry teacher working at a car wash to make extra money decides to enter into the meth world, he is more evolved and thus

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Figure 7.3. Cousins crawling in a reptilian fashion to the altar of Santa Muerte.

better equipped to dominate even Mexican and Latino drug cartels when he chooses to do so. Gilligan arguably depicts these practices in deeply fetishized and colonialist terms. A decolonial reading of these fetishistic scenes requires acknowledging how, for Indigenous communities, the snake or coatl memorialized in the Mexican flag, which depicts the founding of Tenochtitlán, is understood in deeper and more nuanced ways. The coatl is not the snake of temptation from the King James Bible; instead it is honored by traditionalists as a teacher of how to live in this world, how to regenerate yourself, and how to “listen” to Mother Earth, la madre tierra.

Mosquita y Mari (2012), the award-winning feature-length film by youth activist and filmmaker Aurora Guerrero, provides a narrative space that centers the lives of working-class Xicanx teenagers. This is done in a range of ways, including showing how they negotiate and navigate the community and familial pressures of compulsory heteronormativity, the formal and informal gaze, misogynistic chisme (gossip), and attempts to discipline and coerce their bodies, feelings, and desire within the patriarchal panoptic urban ethnoscape of Huntington Park, Los Angeles. The film, inspired by the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, attempts to put into a filmic space something that Aurora Guerrero, in a July 2012 interview in Women and Hollywood, describes in response to the reporter’s question about the press notes: “As a writer I have consistently centered the invisible in my films from my characters to the place they call home. . . . I’m talking about the marginalized— the Xicana, the female, the queer, immigrant, of color. I identify with all of these communities and part of what has kept me going in my career as a filmmaker is striving to share stories where these communities are made visible and human. It’s the lens from which I work and will continue to work.”8 The film, shot in eighteen days with a huge infusion from a Kickstarter campaign ($80,000), does a tremendous job of presenting a rich, complex, and nuanced story of two Xicanx teens navigating the pressures of schools, families, and, in the case of Mari, near-homelessness as her mother struggles to keep a roof over their heads. Within that space, Guerrero brilliantly and effectively uses cars, bikes, mobility, and lack of mobility within this highly industrialized, congested urban space. Anyone who has spent time in Los Angeles and its neighboring cities and barrios understands that cars play a significant role in the daily lives of most folks, and those without cars must spend hours on the public buses, sometimes to travel only five or so miles.

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Part Two: Desire and the Decolonial Promise

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In Mosquita y Mari it is interesting to note that when Mosquita becomes involved in the typical/predictable teenage ritual of cruising around with las cuatas, twin sisters, there is formal and informal pressure to also engage in the compulsory heteronormative practices that are usually the subject of the double-standard gaze for many Latinx families, where parents/ brothers obsess over their teenage daughters/sisters getting into cars and try to prevent them from doing so, especially if there are boys. The famous sayings that drive so much of gender double standards and, arguably, compulsory heteronormativity and misogyny in many Latinx families and communities are: “¿Qué van a decir la gente?” or “Qué vergüenza, pena, mi hija no es . . .” — and you can fill in the rest. When Mosquita— the nickname that Mari (played by Venecia Troncoso) gives Yolanda (played by Fenessa Pineda)— goes cruising around listening to cumbias, the expectation of her peers, within the rituals of teens, is that she will be the girlfriend of one of the former “Boner Boys” from the video interviews Mosquita and her friends did. Arguably, these interviews are a successful maneuver to reverse the male heteronormative gaze, for, in addition to having control of the car, these Xicanx teens ask high-school boys about their erections. Ironically and interestingly for Mosquita and Mari, the locations that end up becoming safe places to hang out, bond, and have fun are either parked cars or an abandoned warehouse containing abandoned cars. At approximately minute 19 of the film, while the two are in an abandoned car, the camera pans and shows the inscriptions and etchings of love that couples have left to mark that they were there, such as “I love Chuy,” and other predictable male/female names and indications of hetero couples. Both Yolanda and Mari read these inscriptions, which are carved, painted, drawn in ink, and so on. Mari immediately steps out of the abandoned car and writes in dust on the windshield: “Mosquita y Mari and fuck the rest . . .” This scene shows an amazing form of agency and resistive/declarative gestures and ac-

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Figure 7.4. Mosquita and Mari find a safe space in a parked car.

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tions by Mari, but perhaps it also shows the ephemeral nature of writing in dust, rather than carving, painting, or inscribing, as is done with the presumably hetero couples’ declarations. In another scene (approximately at minute 43), Mosquita and Mari break into an unlocked parked car, where they almost dance together in public communal space and almost cruise around in a car: they have the fun of pretending to cruise while listening to cumbias on a shared old-school Sony Discman, feeling a sense of joy and freedom. Perhaps in the same declarative yet highly ephemeral way as with Mari’s writing on the car in the warehouse, these shared moments of disidentifying with the rituals and spaces that are normalized for hetero teenage couples looking for ways to have fun away from their parents’ gendered regaños/reprimands have an irony that can’t be lost on the audience. If Mosquita and Mari want to participate in the same types of “fun” as their Latinx peers, they don’t have a “safe space” in the barrio to go to a party and dance together, and there are a host of difficulties including lack of money, no driver’s license, no car to cruise around in, and gender double standards from families. They just have Mari’s BMX bike, which provides no protection from the literal public/community/male/hetero gaze(s) and intersectional micro/macroaggressions. Ironically, in minutes 44 to 46 of the film, Yolanda and Mari’s fleeting moments in the parked car become the source of toxic chisme perpetuated by the carnicero / shop owner, Don Pedro. His gossip perhaps evinces how these informal practices of chisme in the local mercado / tienda / grocery store migrate across borders and still create the same toxic gendered violence for Latinx subjects, whether in a small town in Jalisco, Mexico City, or Huntington Park. The infamous rhetorical gesture that usually opens the chisme is “Me contaron por ahí . . .” (translation: I have been told by many), followed by calling into question the virtue and honor of a womxn, teen, or girl in a family or implying that someone is not “straight”— there exists a whole slew of highly pejorative terms used to call into question someone’s nonbinary gender expressions. In this case, Don Pedro, the chismoso del barrio, tries to shame both of Yolanda’s parents and Mari’s mother, who are shopping in his store, with this famous start: “Me contaron por ahí,” he says, that a girl got into a car, and you know what happens when girls get into cars with boys. He then recounts his own exaggerated machista sense of virility. The irony is that Yolanda’s mother’s response to this toxic chisme and the fears that her hija will be shamed or bring shame to the family is to encourage Yolanda to go to and from school together with her friend Mari, and to limit her activities to spending time with Mari. This ironic development brings a huge smile to Yolanda. The chapter “Gestures in Mambo Time” in Juana María Rodríguez’s Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings cites the obituary

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of the “dyke club” promoter behind the club Mango, which states, “It’s nice to be able to go someplace, let loose, be yourself, and not worry about shit.”9 For Mosquita and Mari, safe places are the abandoned car in the warehouse, a parked car, and a rooftop. Significantly, Yolanda’s “docile” routine is comprised of the following strict schedule: go to school, go back home, study, and get near-perfect grades, especially in STEM classes. Her parents work endlessly so that she does not have to, leaving her time to get the good grades necessary to go to college. The arguably tragic ending is that Mari and Yoli’s safe space becomes a site where the teenage Mari engages in survival sex with an older Latino male so that she can help her mother and young sister with funds to avoid being evicted. The clash of material necessity and Mari’s attempt to “provide” for her familia is traumatic. The liberatory promise of these two young Xicanx mujeres’ growing feelings for each other is brutally cut short by pervasive heteronormative and violent sexualizations and the need to survive. I would like to end this section of this chapter by asking if and when there will be inscriptions written in public spaces in Latinx barrios where José can declare his love for José, Juana for Yolanda, and so on. Perhaps the following call to action (arguably decolonial and resistant) from José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) can speak the feelings of hope and liberation that struggle against the “prison house” of heteronormative violence(s): “The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”10

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Getting Real from the Reel: Thoughts on the Urgent Need to Resist Toxic Masculinities and Decolonize Machista “Ways”

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My analysis of these “reel” sites deconstructs the performance of masculinities and the predatory threats and actions that are at the core of how male power is performed. In the case of Breaking Bad we see how Walter White’s predatory and arguably cannibalistic violence against NDN and Latinx bodies and communities is glorified, deflected, and sterilized by the tired redeployment of fierce and noble savage tropes. In Mosquita y Mari we see how these teens disrupt the patriarchal and heteronormative gaze and attempts at policing their bodies, feelings, and gestures, yet are still caught by cisgender pedophiliac predatory sexual violence(s). I therefore end this chapter by getting “real” and asking cisgender Latino men in particular a series of questions, while providing some observations.

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My principal question is this (and this is not a “pass” or a justification for reproducing misogyny and homophobia): How is the “toughness” that many have been taught to exhibit a response to violence from other men, especially men in the dominant culture, either literal or discursive, but also men in our own communities who reify toxic masculinities? Examples of this violence could be a white police officer who already assumes you to be a criminal, thief, or rapist, who pulls a gun on you for jaywalking, or who pulls you over, immediately handcuffs you, and attempts to shame and intimidate you;11 or a white ICE officer who assumes you are “illegal,” a drug lord, or a drug mule; or a white-supremacist officer of color (in the case of ICE, or, as it is called in our community, la migra, almost 70 percent of officers are Hispanic) who reifies the racist norms and discourses of criminalization; or another vato/dude in the barrio, street, park, mall, alley, or wherever who decides to call you out and tries to feminize you by calling you a chavala, the p-word, or a homophobic slur like marica or puto; or, in the case of the current political theater centered around Trump’s vocal criminalization of Latinx men to drive his election campaign, the cheers of his followers who relish his alt-right othering and deflections of his own acts of sexual violence and seem to feel better about themselves when they join it; or, as seen in early 2019, Trump’s attempts to create racist narratives that generate fear of invasion and attack by families who have arguably been fleeing the violence of neoliberal capitalism in the Americas and the consequences of the unlawful deportation of angry and disillusioned youth who formed part of the Mara Salvatrucha gang in response to predatory male violence from other Latinx men.12 I think about the imperialist stereotype of the Latin man as “macho,” perhaps used to displace the patriarchal Euro-Western violence(s) of manifest destiny (lynching, and sexualized massacres of Indigenous bodies and nations, of which Sand Creek and Wounded Knee are stark and horrifying examples from the nineteenth century) and deflect the spectacle of violence by white men in power today (rape culture, sexual assaults, the continued wholesale warehousing of people of color). As Latinx men who feel affronted by this “stereotype,” then, how can we decolonize our upbringings in both patriarchal family systems and in barrios where boys, teens, and men are always calling each other out for being too feminine, queer, soft, or sensitive and rewarding each other for being tough, hard, cold, domineering, violent, mujeriego/womanizing, and homophobic?13 The crux, as I see and feel it, is the following: How do we resist the feelings of shame, anger, fear, and sadness that criminalization causes and how do men avoid reproducing the criminalization and shaming of the feminine, the queer, the trans, and the nonbinary Indigenous, among other “queer” subjects?

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In doing so, what does it mean, then, to become a true ally to scholars, artists, activists, family members, and communities who live on the intersecting borders of racialized, gendered, and sexual violence(s)? How do we respect and support the complex intersecting agencies of racialized, gendered, and sexually othered subjects? Perhaps we can learn from the provocative words of Jack Forbes (que en paz descanse) in Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, where he argues that the European colonization of the Americas, with its genocidal onslaught on Indigenous civilizations and the enslavement and violence enacted on colonized peoples, unleashed a cannibal spirit that feeds on the consumption of bodies, land, and living beings to gain glory, wealth, and power. Jack Forbes argues that “colonialist-imperialist systems seek to create wétikos. They recruit them because colonialism is maintained by means of properly controlled wétiko behavior. More especially they need to recruit wétikos from within the native population in order to keep the group divided, exploited, and in a hopeless frame of mind.”14 Forbes goes on to state that “Europeanization introduces the concept of male dominance and an authoritarian family structure, especially whenever Roman Catholic, Mormon, or other male-dominated sub-cultures are involved. On the other hand, a deeper truth is involved here: the subjugation of women and their use as means instead of ends is part and parcel of the wétiko psychosis.”15 Thus, can true acts of decolonization of Latinx masculinities really be not about glorifying patriarchal interpretations of an Aztec past, but rather about really honoring the complex gender fluidities that thrived in precolonial societies, and continuing to thrive notwithstanding the panoply of heteropatriarchal aggressions ranging from hate crimes against trans/ two-spirit Indigenous beings, among other nonbinary communities, to the constant onslaught of racist, sexist, and homophobic microaggressions and panoptic and predatory gazes and violence(s)?16

Notes

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Xicanx is a term that many students of Mexican descent involved with youth leadership activities on college campuses have coined to honor nonbinary gender formations and challenge how the Spanish language, like most Romance languages, uses masculine and feminine endings in the spelling and pronunciation of words. The use of the letter X is also seen by many in the Mexican American community as a decolonial nomenclature that attempts to restore the use of X found in the Nahuatl language. A specific example of this is the fact that the Nahuatl term for México was meztli-xictli-co, which was Hispanicized to Méjico by the Spanish chroniclers and

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

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clergy. So Xicanx is seen by many as a way of honoring Indigeneity and challenging the imposition of gender binaries. See Rodríguez, Sexual Futures. I am indebted to the scholarly work of Juana María Rodríguez and the powerhouse book titled Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings, especially the way in which Dr. Rodríguez theorizes the agency of gestures, touch, and desire as acts of erotic “sovereignty” for Latinas. For an excellent read of the “brownfacing” in Touch of Evil, see Nericcio, “Of Mestizos and Half-Breeds.” Heart of Aztlán: A Novel, by Rudolfo A. Anaya, published in 1988 by the University of New Mexico Press, is part of a trilogy that features the complex Indo-Hispano cultures of New Mexico, including their spirituality, food, language, and struggles. The trilogy begins with Bless Me, Ultima and ends with Tortuga. For a good analysis of how the tropes of the traditional Western movie are depicted, see Dawe, “Western Men.” For an excellent critique of the clash of masculinities and the tropes of the hyperviolent macho Latin figure, see Jason Ruiz’s nuanced read of Latinidad: Ruiz, “Dark Matters.” For a brilliant discussion of the Tuco Salamanca figure in Breaking Bad, please see Ruiz, “Dark Matters.” Ruiz argues the following: “Tuco’s capacity to terrorize Walt and Jesse as well as audiences is partly constructed through the particularities of his performance of Latino masculinity. Through his swagger and brutal nonchalance, Tuco embodies the excessive and eccentric masculinities that audiences have come to know through popular culture. In fact, popular culture in the United States has fixated on Latinos’ imagined and hyperbolic machismo since the nineteenth century.” Ruiz, “Dark Matters,” 48. Women and Hollywood, “Interview with Aurora Guerrero.” Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, 115. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. For an extremely provocative ethnographic study of the violence directed at young boys of color by the police, please see Rios, Punished. For a compelling discussion of the deportation of Central American youth from Los Angeles and other urban areas as part of the origins of Mara Salvatrucha in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras and the gang’s continued practicing of predatory and toxic masculinities (sexual violence, extortion, femicides, robbery, and murder), see Ward, Gangsters Without Borders; and Wolf, “Mara Salvatrucha.” For a compelling discussion of the imposition of patriarchal norms and homophobic violence, please see Hardin, “Altering Masculinities.” For a provocative creative and theoretical discussion of the denigration of the feminine in Latinx identities and the need to honor the feminine, the dark, and the creative, please see Estrada, “Aztec Two-Spirit Cosmology.” Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals, 87.

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15. Forbes, 93. 16. My thinking is informed by the horrific transphobic hate crimes committed by working-class Chicano men. Such men murdered two-spirit (trans) teens here in Colorado—specifically Angie Zapata in Greeley, Colorado, and Fred Martinez, who is Diné (Navajo) and Chicano, in Cortez, Colorado— because of what is arguably a misogynistic and transphobic “disease,” to cite Jack Forbes’s ideas on the wétiko disease in Columbus and Other Cannibals.

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Works Cited

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Dawe, Ian. “Western Men: Breaking Bad’s Outlaws and Family Men.” In Masculinity in Breaking Bad: Critical Perspectives, edited by Bridget Roussell Cowlishaw, 33–52. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishers, 2015. Estrada, Gabriel. “An Aztec Two-Spirit Cosmology: Resounding Nahuatl Masculinities, Elders, Femininities, and Youth.” In “Gender on the Borderlands,” special issue, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 24, no. 2/3 (2003): 10–14. Forbes, Jack. Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. Rev. ed. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008. Hardin, Michael. “Altering Masculinities: The Spanish Conquest and the Evolution of the Latin American Machismo.” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 7, no. 1 (January 2002): 1– 22. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Nericcio, William A. “Of Mestizos and Half-Breeds: Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.” In Chicanos and Film: Essays on Representation, edited by Chon Noriega, 53– 66. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Rios, Victor. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Rodríguez, Juana María. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Ruiz, Jason. “Dark Matters: Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, Suburban Crime Dramas, and Latinidad in the Golden Age of Cable Television.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 40, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 37– 62. Ward, T. W. Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Wolf, Sonja. “Mara Salvatrucha: The Most Dangerous Street Gang in the Americas?” Latin American Politics and Society 54, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 65– 69. Women and Hollywood. “Interview with Aurora Guerrero—Writer/Director of Mosquita y Mari.” Women and Hollywood, July  31, 2012. Accessed February  7, 2020, https://womenandhollywood.com/interview-with-aurora-guerrero-writerdirector-of -mosquita-y-mari/.

Chapter 8

FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT Grappling with Queerness, Masculinities, and Violence in Contemporary Latinx Literature and Film T. Jackie Cuevas

At the end of the film adaptation of Justin Torres’s novel We the Animals, the young protagonist walks away from his family’s home in rural upstate New York, intending to run away to a big city in search of a queer life that seems impossible to live at home. As he is leaving his house for good, he recovers his personal writing journals, which his family discarded in the outdoor rubbish bin. Armed with his writing, in which he has fantasized about erotic encounters with men, he sets off toward a presumed queer liberation. A jubilant queer reading of the ending might lead viewers to rejoice at the young boy’s following through on his desire to move toward a queer future, particularly given what he is walking away from— a violent family life in which his father physically abuses his mother. It is this walking away from patriarchal violence that brings this film into conversation with two other contemporary Latinx queer films: La Mission and Bruising for Besos. Like La Mission (written and directed by Peter Bratt, 2009) and Bruising for Besos (written and directed by Adelina Anthony, 2016), We the Animals (2018, directed by Jeremiah Zagar and based on the novel by Justin Torres) grapples with complex relationships between and across queerness and masculinities. All three films decouple violence and masculinity, making significant moves to delink violence from queer Latinx masculinities. To interpret how these films, along with the novel on which We the Animals is based and the original play version of Bruising for Besos, construct new forms of queer Latinx masculinities, I engage with Sara Ahmed’s poststructuralist and phenomenological feminist theory. Ahmed’s work on what she terms “unhappy queers” proves productive for reading these contemporary cultural texts. Through queer imaginings, familial leave-taking, and a combination of queer Latinx survival movidas, the “unhappy queers” in these narratives productively reject heteropatriarchal violence in favor of Latinx queer worldmaking. I suggest that what these contemporary films and their attendant literary works offer us are visions of Latinx masculinities delinked from intimate 131

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relational violence. In these texts, Latinx masculinities are delinked not only from hegemonic conceptions of masculinities as heteronormative but also from hegemonic misconceptions of Latinx masculinities as somehow more predisposed to violence, criminality, and/or dominance than other forms of masculinities within patriarchy. These queer Latinx texts interrogate, critique, and ultimately transform Latinx masculinities. Ahmed’s analytic approach proves particularly useful for thinking about the subjugated subjects around whom these queer Latinx films are organized. Ahmed, in her book The Promise of Happiness, points to tropes such as the “feminist killjoy” and the “unhappy queer” to think through happiness as a damaging social imperative with particularly harmful impacts on minoritarian subjects. While it might not seem that we could productively apply her analysis of the “affect alien” to a dominant category such as “men” within patriarchy, we can use it to nuance the category of masculinity to account for the ways in which hierarchical violence plays out even within the dominant category, among men who find themselves not the normative kind of men— people who embody and perform effeminate, queer, trans, or queer Latinx masculinities, for example. This is not to say that everyone is an affect alien or to imply some kind of broad relativity that flattens difference or overlooks the power effects of structural oppressions. It does, however, allow us to pinpoint one of the myriad ways in which gender orthodoxy makes impossible demands. The impossibility of any subject achieving and sustaining an ideal performance of hegemonic masculinity means that the violence inherent in enforcing masculinity among its adherents perpetually continues; indeed, idealized hegemonic masculinity’s impossibility is part of the point of regulating and enforcing gender normativity. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s figure of the “affect alien,” I suggest that these films construct queer Latinxs as affect aliens who orient themselves toward queer desires that put them at odds with heteropatriarchal imperatives imposed by their Latinx families. Ahmed says, “Affect aliens can be creative: not only do we want the wrong things, not only do we embrace possibilities that we have been asked to give up, but we create life worlds around these wants.”1 The creativity of the queer Latinx affect aliens in these narratives works toward delinking the toxic from masculinities to create more expansive experiences and performances of queer Latinx masculinities. In thinking through how the narratives deploy masculinities, we can turn to scholars such as R. W. Connell and Lionel Cantú. Connell’s research on hegemonic masculinities and Cantú’s on nonhegemonic Latino masculinities prove useful here. According to Connell, “Hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which

The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples,

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guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women.”2 The perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity is compounded by practices of toxic masculinity, such as aggressive dominance, misogyny, homophobia, and violence. Connell points out that “normative definitions of masculinity . . . face the problem that not many men actually meet the normative standards,” and claims that “the number of men rigorously practising the hegemonic pattern in its entirety may be quite small.”3 However, it seems erroneous to suggest that achieving the performance of hegemonic masculinity “in its entirety” is even a possibility, especially considering how masculinities shift across time, place, and intersecting structures of power, and how hegemonic masculinity perpetually remakes itself to reap the benefits and social rewards of patriarchy. Connell’s formulation of hegemonic masculinity can be more useful than a reliance on racialized language that stereotypes Latinos, such as “macho.” Many scholars and activists have become wary of using the term machismo and related words, as they often get used uncritically in popular media and are typically projected onto Latino Brown men as a default descriptor and an unquestioned essence. For example, Lionel Cantú, in his study on gay Latinos, draws on Connell’s work on hegemonic masculinity and describes queer Latino masculinity as “a nonhegemonic masculinity.” Cantú stresses, “The terms ‘macho’ and ‘machismo’ are often abused in the [scholarly] literature by racist discourse.”4 He rightfully points out that “social science scholars have argued that Latino machismo is a symptom of a traditional culture and ‘an inferiority complex based on the mentality of a conquered people.’ ”5 To Cantú, “machismo is a racialized marker of gender oppression, a ‘culture of masculinity’ that is read as a pathological cultural trait. The structural dimensions of sexism thus are displaced under the racist subterfuge of machismo.”6 The uncritical deployment of the concept of machismo, then, is part of the structure of thought that denigrates Latinx peoples, and the Latinx cultural productions discussed here are performing much more complex maneuvers than simply deploying so-called machismo. The narratives under analysis here are ones that interrogate Latinx masculinities and situate the people who embody them at the intersection of queerness, responding to and critiquing heteropatriarchal violence. The texts engage in what José Esteban Muñoz and others, including Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, call “queer worldmaking.”7 Berlant and Warner, in “Sex in Public,” call queer culture a “world-making project” and describe this project as the following:

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alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies. World making, as much in the mode of dirty talk as of print-mediated representation, is dispersed through incommensurate registers, by definition unrealizable as community or identity. Every cultural form, be it a novel or an after-hours club or an academic lecture, indexes a virtual social world, in ways that range from a repertoire of styles and speech genres to referential metaculture.8 Muñoz, in Disidentifications, which he says is in dialogue with Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, argues that queer of color cultural producers enact a kind of queer worldmaking through artistic productions that disidentify— that is, they critique and strategically reassemble majoritarian culture in new ways. For Muñoz, “the concept of worldmaking delineates the ways in which performances— both theatrical and everyday rituals— have the ability to establish alternate views of the world.”9 He goes on to say, “These alternative vistas are more than simply views or perspectives; they are oppositional ideologies that function as critiques of oppressive regimes of ‘truth’ that subjugate minoritarian people.”10 The queer Latinx narratives I examine engage in Latinx queer worldmaking to construct new frameworks of meaning that supersede their familial patriarchal contexts and allow them to question the function and effects of violence.

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La Mission positions queerness as capable of disrupting hegemonic heteronormative masculinity’s violent tendencies. The film follows a father-son relationship and the shift in their dynamic when the father reacts violently to the discovery that his son is gay. The father and son live together in San Francisco’s Mission District, a historically Latinx district of the city. Che Rivera (the father, played by Benjamin Bratt) has been formerly incarcerated and is now working as a bus driver. Che is well-known in his community, which is evident when he walks down the street and his neighbors call him by name. Che’s son Jes (played by Jeremy Ray Valdez) is gay, but the father does not know this for the first portion of the film. When Che discovers Jes is gay, the two have a series of dramatic encounters in which the father reacts violently toward his son and the son makes it clear that he is not interested in following the prescriptive norms enforced by his father. Although mainstream viewers may focus on the main story line of Che’s homophobia and his ejection of Jes from their family home, the film performs an important disruption of heteropatriarchal violence by having Jes refuse to return home after Che has attacked him physically and rejected him. Jes,

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the young queer Latinx man, declares his autonomy and refuses his father’s control, opting instead to stay with his boyfriend’s family and then leave for college. Jes, then, becomes a version of what Sara Ahmed terms the “unhappy queer,” the figure who is resolutely dissatisfied with the family structure’s imposition of heteronormativity as a default form of supposed happiness and with Che’s use of violence to try to enforce his narrow vision for Jes’s life. Prior to his expulsion from home by his father, Jes participates in practices of queer pleasure and queer worldmaking. Unbeknownst to his father, Jes visits his boyfriend and goes clubbing with him at a queer venue instead of studying for school. Jes has been a hardworking student, performing normative models of academic success, which serves as a cover for his queerness. When he enters the club, Jes’s face conveys a sense of being stirred and overjoyed at the sight of many men dancing together freely. The scene suggests a stark contrast with his heteronormative home life and experience thus far. It highlights how queer nightlife in bars and dance clubs can serve as an important space of connection, sexual awakening, and community making for queer youth. During their night of drinking and carousing at the queer club, Jes and his boyfriend have their picture taken, and Che discovers the photographs in Jes’s room while Jes sleeps. When Jes awakes, Che confronts him with the pictures and expresses surprise and disgust. Che charges physically at Jes, and their exchange ends with him shouting at Jes, “You’re dead to me!” The violent confrontation contrasts with the tender verbal exchanges and shared moments they have had in the film prior to this dramatic eruption. The intense confrontation sets off a series of entanglements, making their estrangement one of the main conflicts for the remainder of the film. However, Che’s propensity to use violence to respond to situations he cannot control becomes the clear focus of their struggle. Jes’s queer worldmaking is supported by the feminist interventions of his neighbor Lena. Lena’s character, played by Erika Alexander, is temporarily Che’s love interest but grows to serve a larger role in the narrative as a voice of nonviolence and justice. Lena moves into the same apartment building as Che and Jes after several neighbors move out due to rent increases, raising the issue of the gentrification of the Mission District. Lena’s presence as a newcomer to the neighborhood also adds nuance to the question of gentrification in that she is a Black woman with more progressive ideas about feminism and nonviolence which trouble Che’s traditionally patriarchal worldview. After seeing Che threaten Jes’s boyfriend with violence, Lena confronts Che and shares her experience of working with domestic violence survivors. She admonishes Che, and although he initially balks at her truth telling, he later takes her words to heart as he begins to examine his violent past.

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Through Lena’s intervention in Che’s violent ways, the film situates Che’s homophobic violence in the context of the use of interpersonal violence more broadly. Che resorts to violence in targeted ways against Jes when he finds out he is gay, and also in generalized ways, such as by punching a stranger on the street out of anger. Che’s fixed, narrow way of moving through the world contrasts with Jes’s in that Jes’s sexual world makes his life more expansive, giving him exposure to various forms of pleasure, connection, and love. The film features caring relationships between men in the form of longtime neighborhood friendships and scenes of Che and his buddies hanging out talking about their lives. In this regard, Jes can be seen as following Che’s model of being with and caring for other men, except that Jes’s form of loving men also involves having intimate sexual relations with them. By giving the troubled father a name like Che, after the iconic revolutionary Che Guevara, the movie raises the question: What does revolutionary love look like for men? And what does it not look like, or how is it rendered impossible when men use violence to control other people’s actions and life choices? These questions come to the fore after a young neighborhood man accosts Jes and his boyfriend with homophobic slurs and shoots Jes in the chest. Jes survives, but while his boyfriend is visiting in him in the hospital, Che threatens the boyfriend and tells him not to return. Che does this in the hallway where Jes cannot see them, but Lena, the neighbor, witnesses Che pushing the boyfriend against the wall. This incident causes Lena to distance herself emotionally from Che, and she confronts him later about the various ways in which he uses violence to try to solve his problems. Che goes on a drinking binge and, upon seeing a street memorial and danza ceremony honoring the death of the young man who shot his son, he has a series of flashbacks to all the ways in which he has mistreated people with violence. Soon after, he tries to reconnect with his son. Che’s transformation away from violence as his expression of a dominant form of masculinity is also aided by Jes’s uncle Rene (played by the inimitable Jesse Borrego), depicted by the film as an alternative model of heterosexual masculinity. After Che throws his son out of the house, Rene tells Che a story about how he felt when his own son was born with a disability. He tells this story as a way to connect with Che over his emotional struggle. He says that he first misunderstood the disability as a deficit, but then came to be grateful his son was alive. By comparing disability to sexuality, the film resorts to a problematic comparison that flattens difference yet captures the dominative way in which physical disability and queer sexuality have historically been constructed as failings to be overcome. Rene tells Che, “You know, for what it’s worth, man, nobody’s trippin’ [about the fact that Jes is gay],” to which Che responds, “Nobody’s tripping because it ain’t their son.” Rene tries to

Fighting the Good Fight in We the Animals We the Animals, the novel by Justin Torres, tells the story of three young brothers who live with their mother and father in rural upstate New York.

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reassure Che about Jes’s queerness by telling him that “maybe it ain’t such a big deal.” Che’s talk with the uncle sets the film up to resist the notion that all Latinx families are homophobic. Jes’s Uncle Rene and Aunt Ana support him emotionally after Jes is outed to his father. After Che throws Jes out of the house, Rene and Ana are the only family members who attend Jes’s high-school graduation. The contrast of Rene and Ana’s attitudes with Che’s situates Latinx queerness not as a problem, the way it is in Che’s mind, but as a part of their family reality. Characterizing Che as a middle-aged, formerly incarcerated, recovering alcoholic cholo, the film attempts to walk a line between drawing on the recognizable semiotics of Latinx stereotyping, which Frederick Luis Aldama rightly refers to as “Hollywood’s essentialized ethnosexual phantasmagoria,” and critiquing those racialized filmic codes through the character’s struggle and transformation.11 M. Cristina Alcalde says La Mission is “a film that seeks to provide a counterstory to stereotypical on-screen depictions of Latinos in the United States.”12 She goes on to say that “the image of Latino masculinity the film presents is more multifaceted and realistic than images found in mainstream media. On the other hand, the discursive construction of masculinity in the film is also problematic because it, too, may reinforce— even as it seeks to deconstruct— elements of the Latino macho as uniquely violent and homophobic.”13 In an interview with Lisa Kennedy in the Denver Post, actor Benjamin Bratt refers to the film as “a coming-of-age story, not of the son, but of the father.”14 Bratt says of Che: “He’s battled his demons, but he has a long way to go. And learning that his son is gay starts him on the next path.” According to Bratt, “The trick was not to demonize Che.”15 Bratt suggests that love is a driving force for the Che character and that films typically do not make space for cholos to be shown as motivated by love: “I’ve never seen a movie about a cholo where it’s love that drives him.”16 The film ultimately offers a redemptive narrative in that Che seems to wrestle with his demons through deep soul-searching after falling off the wagon, an episode that seems to end with his decision to reach out and reconnect with his son, who has left San Francisco to attend UCLA. The reuniting of father and son is only intimated by Che driving toward the UCLA campus, but the suggestion is that the father has chosen to accept his son and attempt to reconnect with him. The film suggests that if la familia has a problem with a family member’s queerness, it is la familia that needs to correct its ways.

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Throughout the first half of the novel, the point of view is one of a collective “we,” using the first-person plural perspective to situate the three siblings as one brotherly unit: “We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more” (1).17 The family lives in poverty, with the boys frequently going hungry: “We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry” (1). The children live a rough-and-tumble life, playing together and roaming through the woods without adult supervision and stealing food from the neighbor’s garden to survive. The father, described as Puerto Rican and “dark and Afroed” (26), physically abuses the boys and their mother, described as white and a “confused goose of a woman” (2). The mother’s sorrow is made clear early in the narrative when she declares, “I hate my life” (6). The father’s violence is a pervasive part of the family’s daily dynamic. The kids, whom the father calls “mutts” (10), are no strangers to beatings from their father: “And when our Paps came home, we got spankings. Our little round butt cheeks were tore up: red, raw, leather- whipped” (2). The boys imagine that there is a point to the corporal punishment meted out by their father: “We knew there was something on the other side of pain, on the other side of the sting” (2). In this way, the boys do not seem to perceive their father’s violence as senseless; they see a logic to it that makes sense within the world of their family. The father uses violence frequently throughout the narrative, and his abuse becomes a particular point of contention when he severely injures the mom. He punches her and then lies to the boys, claiming that her face was injured by a dentist fixing her teeth (12). The father’s recurring violence periodically causes the family’s tenuous home life to erupt into deeper crisis. The father’s violence creates an atmosphere of perpetual terror which the mother and boys tiptoe around and attempt to navigate. The father uses intimidation and the threat of violence to control the boys, at one point holding the protagonist over the edge of Niagara Falls. The boy looks down at the rushing water and contemplates death: “I wanted to feel the slip and pull of the currents and be dashed and pummeled on the rocks below, and I wanted him to let me go and to die” (99). It is right after this moment of terror over Niagara Falls that the father reveals to the protagonist that he has always thought of him as the “pretty one” of his three sons (102). This Niagara scene brings up the specter of the high suicide rates among LGBTQ youth in the United States.18 Soon after this in the narrative, queerness becomes a marked point of difference that grows harder for the protagonist to manage. The boy reveals that he has been exploring queer thoughts and feelings that eventually put

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him at odds with his heteronormative family. His brothers begin to exclude the youngest from their adventures, calling him “runt” (107) and “faggot” (90). The boy notices how they begin to treat him differently than before, and he describes them as sensing his queerness: “They smelled my difference— my sharp, sad, pansy scent” (105). He fantasizes about violent erotic encounters with men and records his thoughts in a journal he keeps hidden from his family. He eventually ventures out to seek sexual adventure with men at a bus station, where he has sex with a bus driver. It is important to note that, after the boy’s sexual encounter, the author switches from using “we” to using “I” to relay the young boy’s story. The switch from the first-person plural to the first-person singular mimics the radical break experienced by the young boy. This individuation and separation deepens as the author also begins to use “they” instead of “we” to speak of the family. When his family discovers his journal, they find the content deeply disturbing and assume that he must be unstable. When they confront him with it, he thrashes about and threatens the mother with violence. The family commits the queer son to a mental institution against his will, caging him like an “animal.”19 Like Jes in La Mission, the unnamed protagonist in the novel We the Animals does not “come out” but is unexpectedly forced out by his family, becoming the “unhappy queer” described by Sara Ahmed. This figure, Ahmed explains, is “the queer who is judged to be unhappy; the judgement of unhappiness creates unhappiness.”20 This suggests that the mark of unhappiness is projected onto the queer person by others who see them as unwilling to perform heteronormative happiness. The novel sets up the young boy as the unhappy queer by contrasting his experience of familial disapproval with his growing joy at discovering his queerness: he is elated once he has sex with a man (115). The boy had also been previously comforted by togetherness with his brothers prior to their exclusion of him. It is not his queerness per se that he may be unhappy about, but his family’s rejection of him and his father’s perpetual abuse. Because of his family’s misapprehension of his queerness as mental instability, the queer protagonist’s sexuality becomes more of a point of contention for the other family members than the father’s extreme violence does. The violence, then, while part of the family’s daily rhythm of crisis and trauma, is rendered as allowable within the bounds of familial normativity. On the other hand, the family communicates through their expulsion of the queer young boy that queerness is considered so abject in their world that it must be removed from their family’s realm, even at the expense of ejecting a family member. The family’s break from their son by institutionalizing him emphasizes how the collective “we” of family, even as its members believe

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themselves inseparable, can be provisional and conditional, based on narrow strictures of gender and sexual normativity. Setting up the boy’s queerness as a vector of difference that sets him apart from his family serves the narrative by highlighting the queer subject’s low status within the hierarchy of the heteronormative family and provides a mechanism for conveying the queer subject’s feeling of nonbelonging. Yet pitting the queer subject against the family— or the family against the queer subject— in this narrative also serves to make queerness a productive site of critiquing not only normativity but also heteropatriarchal violence. The family’s singling out of the boy for violence and banishment reveals how heteropatriarchy perpetuates itself by targeting and attempting to obliterate women, queers, and minoritarian subjects within its ranks. The unhappy ending, in which the boy lives in a mental institution and declares, “I’ve lost my pack” (125), performs important cultural work. First, it sets up the boy as having a safe and even pleasurable life compared to the starving, violent experience of his home life. He describes the other patients in the institution as “animals” who revere him: “They adorn me, these animals— lay me down, paw me, own me— crown me prince of their rank jungles” (125). This contrast between his experiences acts as a critique of the violence and neglect he experienced at home with his family. The tragic ending also serves as a reminder of and point of reflection concerning how unhappy the normative world continues to be for queer people. Sara Ahmed argues that unhappy endings in queer texts serve as “an enduring sign of how unbearable it can still be to live in this world . . . as queers.”21 The ending of We the Animals imagines no release from that social unhappiness. The message here is not necessarily that the young queer protagonist winds up unhappy; it is that the violence of heteronormativity makes him unhappy and targets him for mistreatment by his own familia. The film adaptation, directed by Jeremiah Zagar, with the screenplay written by Zagar in collaboration with Daniel Kitrosser, initially maintains the use of “we” through voice-over narration; however, it forgoes leaving the narrator unnamed. In the film, the main character is called Jonah, and his brothers are named Manny and Joel, as in the novel. The film’s aesthetic is dark and sometimes ominous, with stark lighting and slow camerawork that seems to capture a sense of waiting as the brothers tiptoe around the volatile adults in their home. Scenes alternate between moments in small spaces within their home, such as the boys’ shared bed or an attic crawl space where they play, and wide-open outdoor spaces where they roam together. Throughout most of the early scenes, the brothers are shown together, as viewers learn about their collective experience as three young brothers. As the second half of the film shifts toward centering the experiences of Jonah,

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the youngest brother, we see Jonah imagine interstitial sequences of animated drawings in which his journal scribblings and musings on bodies come to life. Through the drawings, we catch a glimpse of the wildness of Jonah’s imagination and also perhaps his sense that his queer imaginings are unreal, seemingly beyond the grasp of his actual life. Jonah eventually finds moments of solace with a neighbor, a white boy who shares his beer and porn with the three brothers. When his brothers are not around, Jonah works up the nerve to kiss the neighbor boy, who returns his kiss. The neighbor says he wants to move away to Philadelphia, and Jonah asks to go with him. Although they do not make any definite plans, their connection and shared desire for escape certainly make an impression on Jonah. In the novel, the main character wanders into a bus stop looking for a sexual connection with men without knowing how to go about making any moves; he says, “I didn’t know how to show these men I was ready” (113). He manages to do so, however, and has sex with a stranger, a bus driver who happily takes his cue. In the film, however, Jonah has a sweet kiss with the boy next door. The film does not venture, as the novel does, into the desire for anonymous sex, instead opting to make itself more wholesome by having the main character be drawn to the odd boy next door instead of strangers at a bus station. The film also shies away from the protagonist’s secret desires for sadomasochistic sex, which, in the novel, he records in his private journal. The film opts instead to allow the boy’s desire for queer worldmaking to come across through his flights of fancy, as he pictures himself soaring above the trees, imagines erotic encounters through his drawings in his journal, and declares that he wants to escape to a big city. Jonah’s longing allows the film to enact what Muñoz refers to as “cruising utopia,” in which “queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality.”22 The boy longs for a future queerness that eludes him in the novel but becomes a possible horizon when he leaves home at the end of the film. In both versions of the narrative, the boy has no access to visible queer community, yet he makes do by finding ways to imagine and forge queer connections. In addition to making the queer content less focused on promiscuity and taboo desires, the film makes another unfortunate move that shifts the way in which its narrative deals with violence. The filmmakers attempt to make the mother appear less sympathetic than she does in the novel, and conversely attempting to make the father more sympathetic to viewers. The film leaves out crucial details about the father’s violent pattern and about how he targets the mother and the youngest boy in particular. The film does show some of the same scenes of the father’s violence. For example, an incident in which the father tries to “teach” the mother and youngest son to swim by dumping them in the deepest part of a lake without warning appears in both the novel

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and the film. After the father suddenly lets the mother and Jonah go in the lake, he tells the mother, “How else is he supposed to learn how to swim?” His question emphasizes his sense of not being able to imagine any other form of learning, such as swimming lessons, which they presumably cannot afford, and it also stresses his belief in using life-threatening intimidation as a so-called teaching tactic. While this lake vignette from the novel does occur in the film, another critical moment from the book does not get transposed into the film narrative, which shifts the father’s cinematic representation. In the novel, the father takes the protagonist on a work trip to Niagara Falls, and upon seeing the boy dancing blithely in a small roadside museum, he comments to the boy, “Goddamn, I got me a pretty one” (102). It remains ambiguous whether the father knows at this point that the boy might be gay, but his comment about the boy’s looks and effeminacy intimates that he does. On the same trip, the father holds the boy over the edge of Niagara Falls, and the boy— fearing for his life— feels a desire to die. In the film, however, the father merely makes the comment about the boy’s appearance, but the scene with the father dangling the boy over the falls is not included. Leaving out this salient scene in which the father threatens the boy allows the film to present the father as less violent and the boy’s situation as less ominous than in the novel. The film also suggests the mother’s complicity in the domestic violence more strongly than the book does. In the novel, one vignette (called “Ducks”) lingers on the mother’s attempt to leave her abusive husband and take the kids with her, but she finds herself unable to do so when the boys do not verbalize their support for her plan. She drives the boys to a lake, where they hang out all day, talking about the possibility of moving away to somewhere like Spain. But as the day wears on and the mother realizes the boys might be hungry, she asks them whether they really want to leave their father or not. She says to the boys, “We can go home, but we don’t have to. We don’t ever have to go home again. We can leave him. We can do that. But I need you to tell me what to do.” After a tense silence, she whispers, “Say something! You think this is easy?” Manny responds with, “Something” (71). The mother takes this as a nonanswer and drives them back home. When the boys are alone later, the older brothers express violent thoughts about the mother for not having taken them all away from the father. In the film, the scene of the mother’s attempt to leave with the boys is brief and less fleshed out, making her desire to leave seem fleeting. In both versions of the narrative, the father digs a large rectangular hole in the backyard, and the boys fear he his digging their mother’s grave. The hole is never explained, and it becomes a place where the youngest boy lies down and stares at the sky while fantasizing about escaping. But by leaving out some of the details of the father’s behavior, the film downplays the extent of his violence and the fact that it is

Fighting the Good Fight in Bruising for Besos Originally conceived of as a play by Adelina Anthony, Bruising for Besos depicts the journey of Yoli, a queer Xicana, as she struggles with the legacy and continuation of violence in her life. The play was published in 2010 in

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a recurring pattern. This move may have been an attempt on the filmmakers’ part to avoid reducing the father to a stereotypical depiction of Latino men as “macho.”23 However, it muddies the picture of the father as the abuser, which remains clear in the novel: the film makes the abuse appear to be mutual between the husband and wife despite the power differences between them. The film also transforms the ending into a more joyful one for the queer protagonist than the novel offers. At the end of the film, the camera zooms outward from a shot of Jonah to a flyover shot of the vast woods around his house. This is the second time in the film that the audience gets an aerial view of the protagonist’s surroundings. The camera soars high above the trees and away from the home life that constrains his queer imaginings. On the other hand, the novel’s ending, with the queer protagonist in a mental institution, offers no clear resolution or possibility for living a full queer life, but it does emphasize the ways in which queerness is socially constructed as something to be quarantined or obliterated. This horrific ending does not let readers look away from the queer protagonist’s tragic fate. Sarah Ahmed notes that unhappy endings for queer subjects can be a productive form of social critique in cultural productions, in that “to narrate unhappiness can be affirmative; it can gesture toward another world, even if we are not given a vision of the world as it might exist after the walls of misery are brought down.”24 We the Animals certainly narrates queer unhappiness. While the novel allows unhappiness to be the lingering state in which the main character dwells, the film transforms the ending into a more positive take on the queer protagonist’s will toward happiness or demand for happiness. Both the devastating novel We the Animals and the challenging film based on it bring queer Latinx survival movidas to the fore. While the novel leads the queer protagonist to a crushing ending in which his family institutionalizes him, he is nonetheless separated from his father’s violence, which may be one distorted form of freedom for the effeminate queer son. The film avoids this type of closed ending for the queer protagonist and leaves Jonah’s future open with possibility as he soars away from home. Whether through separation by institutionalization or by leaving home for the big city— one brutal ending and one potentially joyous— the novelistic and filmic narratives, each in their own way, effectively delink violence from queer Latinx masculinity.

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Chicana/Latina Studies, the journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), a Chicana/Latina and Native American women’s scholarly organization established in 1982.25 In the play, the main character is Yoli Villamontes, described as a “queer Xicana daughter.”26 Among the other characters are “Younger Yoli” (which is Yoli as a young child), “Teenage Yoli,” her mother, her lover, and her high-school friends. The play centers around Yoli’s realization that she is a lesbian, the history of domestic violence in her family, and the confusion of experiencing violence in her tumultuous relationship with her girlfriend. Recalling a painful incident from the vantage point of her older self, Yoli recounts reacting negatively upon learning about her best friend and high-school basketball teammate’s attraction to other women. Yoli insults her friend with racist and homophobic slurs and tells her she will go to hell for being gay. In this way, the play addresses the character’s struggle with internalized homophobia and racism. Yoli’s experiences are set within the context of a breakup with her current, possibly abusive girlfriend and her return home to San Antonio to see her own ailing mother. Giving the play of sense of timeliness and at the same time a specificity in terms of a Chicanx-centric sense of place, Anthony describes the time in which it is set as “Yesterday and Today (fall season)” and the geographic place as “West of San Antonio, somewhere off I-10”— Anthony’s own hometown.27 In the introduction to the play, Anthony describes her plays and performances as a series of offerings: “They are first and foremost the offerings I promised my mother— that I would take the experience of what she and my family have survived (and also what we haven’t survived) in order to make peace with the legacies of violence I inherited.” Anthony stresses that, although some of her creative work may be based on her life experience, the artistic products that emerge should not be equated with her reality: “These are not necessarily auto-dramas; they are fiction; they are art; they are spirit work. These plays take up the knowledge of surviving domestic violence, and through the transgressive process of honest art-making, I allow the story to shape itself.”28 Anthony situates her dramatic production as part of a creative and spiritual practice of healing and transforming trauma into art. This practice aligns with the artistic traditions of Cherríe Moraga, the iconic Chicana writer who mentored Anthony and served as the initial dramaturg for the play. In 2016, Anthony premiered a film version of Bruising for Besos, which she developed with a cadre of queer of color producers, actors, and collaborators. In the film, the fact of Yoli’s queerness and its realization do not factor into the narrative: the movie is more concerned with Yoli in her love relationships. Instead of having a high-school setting, the film focuses on Yoli as an adult, offering a greater range of emotional entanglements as well as physical settings for the various scenes set in Los Angeles. Its narrative follows Yoli,

Gender-wise, this first feature film version of Yoli is presented as a butch lesbian. This choice in part is due to how easy it is to

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played by Anthony, as she begins dating a Puerto Rican woman named Daña and struggles against using violence in their relationship. Yoli lives with her best friend, a trans man named Rani, played by D’Lo, who identifies as a “queer/transgender Tamil-Sri Lankan-American actor/writer/comedian.”29 Rani counsels Yoli on her dating life and advises her to reconsider dating Daña, suggesting that she seems controlling like Yoli’s previous girlfriends. One of the brilliant moves Anthony’s film makes is to use the moviewithin-a-movie technique to provide an interior mental landscape in which Yoli imagines a form of healing from her family’s history of violence. This alternative world, which is enacted through puppetry, becomes a space in which Yoli explores her past experiences of domestic violence through dreams and memories. While Yoli attends college, one of her personal goals is to enter a film contest, and she makes puppets that she intends to use to make a short film. When she goes to sleep at night, she enters a dreamworld where her traumatic childhood memories play out through puppets. The puppets are in the style of cartonería mexicana, handmade papier-mâché dolls. In the miniature world of the puppets, a young Yoli witnesses her father physically and emotionally abusing her mother. In a key scene, Yoli and her grandmother are visiting the mother in the hospital because the father has severely hurt her. The father tries to downplay the incident, but the young Yoli tells him off. It remains ambiguous whether the puppet scenes are grown Yoli’s direct memories or whether they are merely dreamscapes where she imagines speaking back to her abusive father. Yoli’s puppet world allows her to work through her memories of childhood trauma as she attempts to sort through her present waking life. The puppet scenes become a backdrop for understanding the history behind the currentday Yoli’s dilemmas. Yoli finds herself trying to disentangle herself from her relationship with Daña after they physically fight. As the film alternates between scenes featuring the childhood puppets and scenes of the present-day Yoli, it grows clearer that Yoli sees herself as trying to break a multigenerational chain of violence. In addition to imagining a process of shifting away from a history of domestic violence, Bruising for Besos works to delink violence from queer and trans masculinities within its narrative. The character of Yoli is presented as a queer butch, donning markers of a classic Chicanx butch style of dress, such as a guayabera or a bandanna worn on her head. Daña, Yoli’s girlfriend, is presented as a queer high femme. In an interview conducted by Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Anthony explains her choice to make Yoli a butch character:

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fetishize and objectify femme on femme lesbianism in the medium of film. A butch mujer stirs anxiety in some people, queer or nonqueer, and she’s also not considered the “object of desire” by most. Bruising for Besos hopes to challenge these assumptions and asks the audience to confront butchphobia by following a butch Xicana lesbian as the protagonist of the story.30

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The narrative turns the tables on the audience’s potential presumption that the more masculine-presenting person in a femme-butch lesbian couple would be the perpetuator of physical abuse in an abusive relationship. Instead, the film complicates this by having both Yoli and Daña use violence against each other. In one scene, Daña slaps Yoli, and in another, Yoli and Daña have a physical altercation when they both express jealousy and anger about other lovers. In a moment when rage and sexual passion converge, Daña tells Yoli, “Hit me like your papi hit your mami,” suggesting that Daña has a blurry sense of the line between the erotics of S-and-M power play and actual abuse. Yoli also turns to violence in her relationship with her best friend Rani. The two fight after Rani learns that Yoli kissed Rani’s lover. They later make up when Rani reminds Yoli that they have lived as chosen family members with each other for ten years, suggesting that their form of family should not accept violence as part of its practice. Through presenting butch and transgender identifications as nonhegemonic masculinities oriented toward nonviolence and the critique of heteropatriarchal violence, Bruising for Besos effectively delinks queer and trans masculinities from heteropatriarchal violence. The film suggests that although the imperative to use violence to exert dominance over others is an integral part of the systemic structure of hegemonic masculinity for those socialized into it, those who embody and engage in practices of nonhegemonic masculinity may be able to construct new kinds of masculinities by refusing to engage in violence. About the play version of Bruising for Besos, scholar Tiffany Ana López points out, “The fact that mothers and queer women participate in continuing the cycle of abuse makes clear that while men commit the acts of violence represented in the play, violence is not rooted in men or masculinity, per se, but in systems of heteropatriarchy.”31 Although the film does not suggest that the mother also engages in violence, we can extend this analysis to the film in that the queer women and transgender man engage in violence, and some of them work through a desire to heal from violence, shifting their ways of being toward nonviolence in intimate and familial relationships. Butchness, in the Bruising for Besos cinematic narrative, goes beyond gender identity to encompass a queer ethic of relational nonviolence.

Two factors in particular seem to propel Yoli toward a sense of clarity about how damaging her relationship with Daña is and about her own need to return home to visit her ill mother: recalling or imagining her younger self performing resistance to violence in the puppet dream sequences and reconnecting with her commitment to making queer and trans familia with Rani. Yoli and Rani intentionally practice a communal queer worldmaking, in particular by doing what Cherríe Moraga has called “making familia from scratch.”32 Here, Moraga’s formulation is transformed to become making queer and trans familia from scratch. Through these queer Latinx survival movidas, Yoli critiques her father’s heteropatriarchal violence and transforms her own queer butch Chicana life into one where queer and trans masculinities are delinked from violence.

As contemporary queer Latinx narratives, La Mission, We the Animals, and Bruising for Besos work to delink masculinity from violence and the imperative to use it to enforce dominance, opening up the boundaries of what masculinity can mean. As the protagonists urge themselves toward developing lessdamaging relationalities, they construct new forms of queer Latinx masculinities that leave violence and violent patriarchs behind, orienting queer Latinx masculinities as being against violence. The main characters in these queer Latinx narratives deploy various strategic survival movidas, such as Latinx queer worldmaking and making queer and trans familia, to delink violence from their lives. As they do so, the “unhappy queers” bring attention to the structural and familial reasons behind their unhappiness. Sarah Ahmed argues that those who are unable and/or unwilling to be happy or make themselves happy within current structures of normativity may be seen not only as “unhappy queers” but also as unwilling subjects. Such unwilling subjects do not bend to the will of the patriarchs or the structures of power and normativity that work to impose men’s dominance and circumscribe women, femininity, and queerness. Happiness in its normative formation is impossible for these subjects because violence is used to wield power and suppress women and queer people. They become unwilling subjects of normativity and its violent enforcement by refusing to accept the brutal punishments, by leaving violent home spaces, and by demanding that queerness become central to their lives. Although La Mission may appear to be the least progressive of the three films because of its overreliance on stereotypes of machismo even as it critiques them, it does its own kind of particularly important cultural work because it is actually the only one of the three films in which a queer Latinx character is targeted for violence overtly for being queer, first by his father

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and then by a local gang member who shoots him. Rather than distinguishing the kinds of homophobic violences that target queer subjects, the film gathers the various types of violence into a broader category. In the final montage of the father Che’s memories and healing, all of the various scenes of violence in the film replay in his mind, connecting the forms of violence under the sign of Che’s nonhegemonic but nonetheless dominant masculinity. In We the Animals, both the novel and film make violence a pervasive condition perpetuated by the family patriarch, through which the queer subject becomes isolated but potentially free, either through being rejected and confined to a mental institution in the novel, or through his leaving home for Philadelphia in the film. In Bruising for Besos, the violence takes place in Yoli’s childhood and in her current intimate love relationships, and she struggles with being not only a recipient but a perpetuator of violence. In this way, the film interrogates the complex dynamics of the use of violence in familial and sexual relationships. In La Mission and Bruising for Besos, the rejection of heteropatriarchal violence is explicitly expressed by the main characters through their words and actions, while in We the Animals it is intimated through the protagonist’s leaving home for a different life. All three narratives raise critical questions about what love can and should look like, what queers can do for themselves and each other when a family’s form of “love” is damaging and dangerous, and how queer Latinx masculinities can move beyond heteropatriarchal violence toward thriving queer Latinx lives.

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 218. Connell, Masculinities, 77. Connell, 79. Cantú, “Entre Hombres,” 165. Cantú, 165. Cantú, 166. Muñoz, Disidentifications; Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public.” Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 558. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 195. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 195. Aldama, Brown on Brown, 120. Alcalde, “What It Means to Be a Man?,” 537. Alcalde, 538. Kennedy, “La Mission.” Kennedy, “La Mission.” Kennedy, “La Mission.”

17. All in-text citations in this chapter refer to page numbers in Torres, We the Animals. 18. See CDC, “Sexual Identity,” for data that show that lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are five times more likely to attempt suicide than non-LGB youth. See Family Acceptance Project, “Family Rejection,” for data on how “LGB youth who come from highly rejecting families are 8.4 times as likely to have attempted suicide as LGB peers who reported no or low levels of family rejection.” See James et al., 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, for data on how “40% of transgender adults reported having made a suicide attempt” and “92% of these individuals reported having attempted suicide before the age of 25.” 19. For the author’s discussion of the autobiographical facets of this aspect of the narrative, see Torres, “My Story.” 20. Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 93. 21. Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 105. 22. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 23. The father’s Puerto Rican identity is referred to only a couple of times in the novel, reducing it to a detail rather than a focal point. See Ralph Rodriguez, Latinx Literature Unbound, for an analysis of how some Latinx texts undo readerly expectations about the role of Latinidad in Latinx literature. 24. Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 106. 25. See the MALCS website for the organization’s history and mission: http://malcs.org /about/herstory/. 26. Anthony, “Bruising for Besos,” 64. 27. Anthony, “Bruising for Besos,” 64. 28. Anthony, “Bruising for Besos,” 62. 29. D’Lo, “D’Lo.” 30. Anthony and Carrillo Rowe, “Adelina Anthony Interview,” 362. 31. López, “Staging of Heteropatriarchal Violence,” 48. 32. Moraga, Giving Up the Ghost, 58. Also see Richard T. Rodríguez, Next of Kin, for a brilliant analysis of how biological and chosen notions of family have been deployed in cultural productions by Chicano men.

Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Alcalde, M. Cristina. “What It Means to Be a Man? Violence and Homophobia in Latino Masculinities On and Off Screen.” The Journal of Popular Culture 47, no. 3 (June 2014): 537– 53. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12144. Aldama, Frederick Luis. Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Anthony, Adelina. “Bruising for Besos.” Chicana/Latina Studies 9, no. 2 (2010): 64–95. Anthony, Adelina, dir. Bruising for Besos. AdeRisa Productions, 2016.

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Works Cited

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Anthony, Adelina, and Aimee Carrillo Rowe. “Adelina Anthony Interview with Aimee Carrillo Rowe.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 21, no. 3 (July 3, 2017): 351–69. https://doi .org/10.1080/10894160.2016.1156429. Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 547– 66. Bratt, Peter, dir. La Mission. 5 Stick Films, 2009. Cantú, Lionel. “Entre Hombres / Between Men: Latino Masculinities and Homosexualities.” In Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez, 147– 67. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. CDC (Centers for Disease Control). “Sexual Identity, Sex of Sexual Contacts, and HealthRisk Behaviors Among Students in Grades 9– 12: Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2016. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. D’Lo. “D’Lo.” D’Lo (website). Accessed November 4, 2018, https://www.dlocokid.com/. Family Acceptance Project. “Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes in White and Latino Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young Adults.” Pediatrics 123, no. 1 (2009): 346– 52. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978. James, S. E., J. L. Herman, S. Rankin, M. Keisling, L. Mottet, and M. Anafi. The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Transgender Equality, 2016. Kennedy, Lisa. “‘La Mission,’ a Labor of Bratt Brothers’ Love.” The Denver Post, June 2, 2010. https://www.denverpost.com/2010/06/02/la-mission-a-labor-of-bratt-brothers -love/. López, Tiffany Ana. “The Staging of Heteropatriarchal Violence and Its Traumatic Aftermath in Adelina Anthony’s Bruising for Besos and Dulce Maria Solis’s Chela.” Chicana/ Latina Studies 13, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 38– 59. Moraga, Cherríe. Giving Up the Ghost: Teatro in Two Acts. Los Angeles: West End Press, 1986. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Cultural Studies of the Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Rodriguez, Ralph E. Latinx Literature Unbound. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Rodríguez, Richard T. Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Torres, Justin. “My Story, and ‘We the Animals’: Justin Torres at TEDxStanford.” TEDx Talks, Stanford, Calif., 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST4JS67J0Y4. Torres, Justin. We the Animals. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Zagar, Jeremiah, dir. We the Animals. Cinereach / Public Record, 2018.

Chapter 9

LATIN LOVERS, CHISMOSAS, AND GENDERED DISCOURSES OF POWER The Role of the Subjective Narrator in Jane the Virgin Kristie Soares

Jane the Virgin, a prime-time television show that debuted in 2014 on the CW network, is a melodrama made self-conscious by the inclusion of an unnamed, subjective Latino narrator.1 The seemingly omniscient narrator provides recaps, background information, and reflective metacommentary on our protagonist— the twenty-three-year-old virgin Jane Villanueva, who finds herself artificially inseminated by accident during her yearly visit to the gynecologist. Jane received only one Emmy nomination after its first season, which was surprising given the show’s critical success and actress Gina Rodriguez’s Golden Globe wins. The nomination was for Anthony Mendez, who voices the narrator, in the category of “Outstanding Narrator.” This chapter examines how the narrator is central to Jane’s messaging in seasons 1 and 2. It argues that through the inclusion of a fallible narrator, Jane offers a critique of masculinist authorial power. In this text we see an unraveling of the idea of white male objectivity— that is, the idea that an objective narrator exists and that this person is unencumbered by identity markers such as gender and race and must therefore be a white male. Jane unpacks the hierarchies of power upon which the idea of objectivity relies through the inclusion of a Latino narrator who initially appears objective, but is soon revealed to be emotionally invested in the characters’ situation and, occasionally, caught off guard. In presenting a narrator who is both subjective and unreliable, Jane echoes the critiques of objectivity put forth by many generations of feminist thinkers.2 Additionally, the fact that Jane’s narrator is Latino also serves to rewrite hegemonic notions of Latino masculinity. Although the character appears at first to be a stereotypical depiction of the “Latin lover” trope— he is named as such in the script— in actuality the narrator exhibits multiple characteristics that upend traditional ideas of Latino masculinity. Among these are his nonromantic investment in Jane, his willingness to display emotion, and his 151

propensity to lose control of the narrative. As such, the depiction of Jane’s subjective narrator forces viewers to question their assumptions about masculinist authorial power, while also encouraging them to reconsider the very notions of Latino masculinity upon which these assumptions rely— namely, the idea of the Latin lover as suave, sexual, and in control. Unfortunately, credit for writing Jane’s narrator goes disproportionately to non-Latinx writers. Of concern is not just the fact that Jane is written in a predominantly non-Latinx writers’ room, but also that the show demonstrates a concerning trend in television whereby Latinx writers are concentrated at the lower levels.3 During season 1 and most of season 2, Jane did not have any upper-level Latinx writers on its staff, only adding one upper-level Latina writer as a consulting producer at the end of season 2. The disproportionate presence of Latinx writers at the lower levels can create an atmosphere in which Latinx writers do the work of validating “diversity” while not being allowed to drive the storytelling, receive producer credit, or share proportionately in the profits. This is of particular concern in Jane, because the inclusion of a Latino narrator gives the impression that a Latino is telling the story, while obscuring the inequitable distribution of both income and credit among the actual storytellers. As we will see, this also misleads Latinx audiences by suggesting that through their viewership they are supporting largely Latinx content producers. This chapter will first examine the role of the narrator in seasons 1 and 2 (2014– 15 and 2015– 16), with particular attention to how he is used to critique masculinist authorial power and offer a nonhegemonic notion of Latino masculinity. It will then consider how the demographics of the Jane writers’ room, the CW network, and the industry at large can help shape our understanding of the work the show’s Latino narrator does to conceal the structural inequities of the writers’ room. It will end by suggesting that the complicated work performed by Jane’s narrator points toward the larger power dynamics that affect Latinxs behind the cameras in Hollywood.

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Living with her mother and grandmother, Jane is religious, and thus has decided to wait until marriage to lose her virginity to her boyfriend, police officer Michael Cordero. The show’s action begins when she is accidentally artificially inseminated by her doctor, Luisa Alver. Luisa impregnates Jane with sperm donated by Rafael Solano (Luisa’s brother, a rich hotel magnate), which was intended for his wife Petra Solano. In the episodes that follow, Jane and Rafael must figure out what to do with this unintended baby while also— much to their respective partners’ dismay— developing feelings for each

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other. This complicated situation is made even more volatile by the fact that Rafael and Petra are involved with the criminal underworld, which means that the show is intermittently punctuated by murders and disappearances. Many have noted that one of Jane’s most compelling components is the narrator. Jennie Snyder Urman— the show’s creator, who is incidentally a white non-Latina woman— has said the following of the narrator: “Incorporating the narrator, having a connection between the narrator and the narrative, at least in my mind, all of those things unlocked the piece.”4 Snyder Urman notes here that it is important that audience members understand narrator and narrative as two separate entities that are ultimately connected. The narrator makes this understanding possible by having a particular personality and point of view, which he uses to reflect upon the narrative laid out in the show. In this way the narrator mediates between the audience and the narrative, offering his own take on the action and thus unlocking the show for viewers, who can become invested not only in the protagonist but also in the narrator himself. Moreover, the narrator is compelling as a character. As Laura Bradley describes it in a Slate think piece, the narrator has “Jane’s kindness, mixed with her father Rogelio’s bravado. He also has an occasionally wicked sense of humor.”5 These characteristics intentionally mark the narrator as subjective, according to showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman. She notes: “I know who it is. It’s not a connection that unfolds, at least not for the first two seasons. But he’s definitely somebody with a point of view and skin in the game.”6 Although the audience does not yet know who the narrator is in the first two seasons, his presence serves a function. He makes manifest that this narrative— like all narratives— is told from a particular point of view. In this way he situates the show as critiquing the notion of objectivity, by consistently reminding viewers that the character whom they trust to tell them the truth is, too, telling them his version. Indeed, the insertion of the narrator marks the show as a postmodern narrative of sorts, in which an objective narrative is neither provided nor desired by Snyder Urman and the show’s creative team. Rather, the narrator’s subjectivity becomes one of the show’s calling cards as he regularly intervenes in the narrative. In this way he performs all five of the narratorial functions Gerard Genette first presented in his study of narratology.7 The narrator of course narrates, but he also interrupts (directing function), addresses the viewers (communication function), expresses his emotions (testimonial function), and makes larger sociopolitical commentary (ideological function). He does all of this as either a semiomniscient narrator or a character recounting the story from the future. The fact that this narrator is Latino— identified by his accent, his sporadic use of Spanish, and occasionally his point of view— is of particular

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interest because it means the character is simultaneously undermining the notion of objectivity and rewriting tropes of Latino masculinity. He performs a double move: both pushing viewers to question their assumptions about masculinist authorial power and encouraging them to reconsider the very notions of (Latino) masculinity upon which these assumptions rest. Indeed, the narrator is referred to in both the script and the closed captioning as “Latin Lover Narrator.” This trope— usually identified by a male character’s exoticness, his suave way with women, and his effortless control of the situation— has been identified by scholars such as Daniel Enrique Pérez as a fantasy projection of white culture.8 In fact, when voice actor Anthony Mendez, a Dominican American actor who previously had trouble landing roles because of his accent, was first contacted about voicing the narrator, he had the following reaction:

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“It said telenovela announcer with a Hispanic accent. The role literally said ‘Latin Lover Narrator.’ And I was like, I don’t wanna do this. This sounds like a joke. Stereotypical stuff. So I put it away,” he says. At first glance, Mendez thought it was yet another role poking fun at Latinos.9

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Mendez decided to take the role, however, and play it in a way that did not sound stereotypical, yet provided viewers with an aural reminder of the Spanish language (he narrates in English). His choices include performing the role with a Spanish accent, while speaking slowly and overenunciating. The result is an identifiably Latino narrator who sounds not just polished but thoughtful. Additionally, Mendez incorporates pauses into the narrator’s speech, which occur before he announces a particularly juicy piece of gossip. The result is a comedic effect akin to the narrator winking at the audience. Mendez describes the character he ended up with as “almost Antonio Banderas– ish, a smooth talker. Sassy pillow talk.”10 Although the narrator does display characteristics of the Latin lover trope— his accent can be read as exotic and he does in fact sometimes take control of situations— he also inverts this trope in his own narration. Mendez’s use of the term “sassy pillow talk,” a formulation usually gendered female, points toward this inversion of masculinist tropes. Both Mendez’s performance of the narrator and the writers’ crafting of the character present a version of nonnormative Latinx masculinity that includes displaying a nonromantic interest in Jane, expressing emotions, and losing control of the situation. For instance, the narrator begins the first episode with the words “Our story begins . . .” The inclusion of the word “our” is indicative of his place in the story itself. He is invested in the outcome and in the fate of our protag-

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onist Jane. Unlike Jane, however, he is either semiomniscient or narrating from the future, so he is able to help the viewer understand how certain events will affect Jane’s life. For example, as early as the second episode, he prophesizes the fate of Petra and Roman’s relationship by stating, “But there would be no later. Not for them.” This foreshadows the fact that Roman will eventually die (or so the viewer thinks), then die again (this time for real) when Petra impales him with a rod later in the season. Informing the reader of this early on is a way to signal that if viewers dislike Petra and Roman— they are, after all, painted as antagonists in Jane’s story— then they will be relieved to learn that their story does not end happily. Likewise, when Rafael states his intention to form a family with Jane by saying, “And I’m not giving up,” the narrator responds, “Oh, if only it were that easy,” referring to the host of relationship troubles that will befall them in future episodes. This serves as a way to build suspense, but also potentially as a way to warn viewers of Jane’s impending struggles. The narrator’s masculinity is key here, inasmuch as it draws attention to the way we are accustomed to thinking about authority. He, the male narrator, tells us, the audience, what to think about the female protagonist’s life. The narrator’s point of view is shaped, however, by his own investments. Rather than performing objectivity, the narrator lets us know that he is favorable to certain outcomes and certain characters. In the first season, he is clear what he does and does not care about. For instance, after describing how Jane is a virgin who is not sleeping with her boyfriend Michael, the narrator states: “It is important to know that Michael Cordero Jr. is not a virgin. Well, it is important to him. I don’t really care about it too much.” The statement that “it is important to him” makes clear that the narrator’s sympathies are not with Michael at this point in the plot. In order to make sure that the viewer understands Jane as the protagonist and continues to identify with her, the narrator also periodically inserts caring comments about her. In episode 1.11, when Jane is having trouble writing a scene for her father’s show The Passions of Santos, the narrator tells us cheekily, “However, Jane did manage to write a cute scene anyway. In my entirely unbiased opinion.” Once again, he lets go of the idea of the Latin lover who must always be debonair, replacing him with a person who uses the word “cute.” In episode 1.17, after a touching scene between the three Villanueva women, the narrator comments while holding back tears: “Excuse me. I seem to have something in my eye. Just give me a moment.” Often the narrator’s reactions to Jane are also rooted in his personal experiences, thereby letting the reader know that there is a specific “I” behind the narratorial voice, as the show’s creator has suggested in interviews. As Bradley puts it, “The best moments are when it becomes unclear who the

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Figure 9.1. Episode 1.17 ( Jane the Virgin), the narrator comments, “I seem to have something in my eye.”

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narrator is speaking for—himself, the character he’s narrating, or us.”11 For instance, when Jane’s baby is born in the last episode of the first season, he reacts by saying, “OK, I am not a huge baby person, but that is one cute kid.” Sometimes his personal interventions are even more explicit, such as in episode 1.15, when he tries to explain why Rafael has misread Jane’s desire to get married by stating, “See, I recently watched a few episodes of a premium cable drama that touches on subjectivity.” He then goes on to use flashbacks and subtitles to explain the misunderstanding to us. This particular intervention is also interesting because it suggests that our narrator watches television shows, meaning that he is not just a creator of content. He, like us, is a viewer. Like us, he has opinions. The narrator’s investment in Jane presents a version of Latino masculinity in which a man can care about a woman in a nonromantic and nonsexual way. We do not get the sense that he is in love with her or desires her, as might be the case traditionally with the Latin lover trope. Rather, he seems to genuinely care for her while respecting her as a writer, a mother, and an individual with agency. Additionally, as the show develops, it becomes clear that one of the narrator’s main roles is to express his investment in Jane through his emotions. He may have relative power, but he uses that power mostly to tell us how he genuinely feels. This is in contrast to the trope of the Latin lover who presents a suave version of himself in an attempt to woo a woman into bed. Where the Latin lover trope assumes Latino men only display emotion— and only particular emotions, such as desire— within the confines of courting women, the narrator refuses that hegemonic notion of masculinity.

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Freed from the confines of hegemonic notions of male sexuality, the narrator can gossip with us. For instance, in episode 2.1, the narrator recaps the previous season’s plotlines. In the middle of this recap— a typical convention of telenovelas— he shouts, “OMG!” and, “Straight out of a telenovela!” In episode 1.1, when Jane gets a call from Rafael after they’ve kissed, the narrator responds “OMG! It’s him! It’s him!” This could be interpreted as the narrator giving voice to Jane’s inner monologue, or as his own genuine excitement. If we understand it as the latter, then we can note that the narrator’s masculinity is not in fact that of a “Latin lover.” He is what we might call in Spanish a chismosa (a gossip).12 Likewise, when Petra’s character becomes more developed— she turns out to be not just a manipulative person but also someone who is being manipulated by a crazy ex-boyfriend— Jane and the narrator both become more sympathetic toward her. In a scene in which she tries to outrun Roman, who is threatening to kill her, the narrator yells: “Run, Petra! Run!” This suggests that we, the viewers, are supposed to be on her side, even though previously she has been the antagonist. The narrator tells us where our allegiances should lie by telling us where his own allegiances lie— inevitably with Jane. Because the narrator is more invested in sharing his emotions with us than he is in controlling the narrative, he often loses his grasp on the plot. In contrast to Jane’s character, who always seeks to be in control, the narrator is consistently surprised by twists in the show or even confused by plot points. In these instances, the narrator’s masculinist authorial power is undermined. He not only doesn’t know everything, but also fails to see things coming. In episode 1.12, the show unveils its biggest plot twist up to that point when it reveals that the villain Sin Rostro is in fact Rafael’s stepmother Rose. It does this by placing subtitles that say “Rose” underneath the character’s face and then adding and replacing the letters necessary to turn the name “Rose” into “Sin Rostro.” At this point, as the audience is assimilating the fact that Rose is actually a villain, the narrator says, “I don’t know what to say. I’m as surprised as you are.” Positioning the narrator as surprised or confused chips away at assumptions about Latino masculinity in particular and masculinist authorial power more generally, inasmuch as it pushes us to see the narrator as not only imperfect but also willing to admit it. The narrator does not embody the aspect of the Latin lover trope that assumes suaveness or extreme selfpossession in any situation. Rather, he loses control, then admits it. In another example, episode 2.5 ends with Michael being fired and getting into his car, only to be held at gunpoint by his former partner Nadine. At this point the narrator admits that he has become overwhelmed, stating, “OK, you know what, this is way too stressful. I’m out.” The screen then cuts to white, followed by the words “To be continued.” Here the narrator,

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unlike the audience, has the power to dictate how we experience— or stop experiencing— the action via a carefully timed cut to a blank screen. Similarly, after Jane gives birth in episode 2.1, the narrator says, “Let’s give her some privacy,” when she is about to breastfeed her baby, Mateo. There is then an immediate cut to another scene. In these examples, when the narrator feels overwhelmed with emotion, he has the power to change the narration. The narrator also occasionally changes the narration out of concern for the viewer. He is invested, it would seem, in making sure the viewer keeps up with Jane’s version of the story. In episode 1.13, after Jane finds out that Sin Rostro is Rose, the narrator says: “I don’t want to interrupt. But I do think it’s important that you know what Jane’s thinking.” Of note here is the fact that although he does shift the order of the narration, he does so begrudgingly— “I don’t want to interrupt”— and only to make sure that Jane’s voice is heard. At that point subtitles appear, telling us exactly what Jane is thinking. The word “important” here is key, because this information is only “important” inasmuch as it maintains our connection with Jane as the protagonist. In this way the narrator is exerting his narratorial power in order to make sure that we, the viewers, still empathize with Jane. However, the narrator does not always have absolute control of the narration. In episode 2.1, the narrator displays his ability not only to know something that the viewer does not, but also to forget it. As the episode seems to be ending, the narrator stops the closing credits from appearing by exclaiming that he forgot something. We are then transported to a scene in which a villain orders that Jane and her baby be targeted. This is the missing information necessary for the viewer to understand why Jane’s baby was stolen after its birth. Yet, after the narrator presents this scene, he seems rattled. He states: “I could really use some ‘It’s going to be OK’ theme music right about now.” He does not actually get any music, however, and his statement is uncharacteristically followed by several seconds of silence and then the words “To be continued.” This suggests that someone else is in control of the narrative, effectively stripping the narrator’s authorial power from him. It reminds the viewer that although the narrator has more power than us, he has less control than the people who actually shape the narrative (the showrunner and writers). There are times as well when the narrator is aided by textual elements superimposed on the screen. In episode 1.6, as Jane is falling in love with Rafael, the narrator’s voice announces the following: “And so Rafael left Jane with a terrifying thought. A thought she wouldn’t even say aloud.” Typed onscreen, the following words appear: “What if it’s meant to be?” The narrator and the textual elements appear to be working in conjunction in this instance to offer insight into Jane’s experience. However, it is not clear whether or not the two forms of narration represent the same narrative voice. For instance,

Figure 9.2. Episode 1.6 (Jane the Virgin), subtitles on the screen communicate Jane’s inner thoughts about Rafael.

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beginning in the first episode of the series, text message conversations are displayed on-screen. The text message conversation between Jane and Michael in the first episode offers insight into each of the characters’ personal thoughts. While superimposing the content of text messages on the screen is not unusual in television series made around this time period, in this particular series it is one of the more common ways to gain insight into Jane’s motivations. In this way the text messages function as a sort of soliloquy for Jane, inserted into most episodes as a way to express to the reader what Jane herself cannot express aloud. The on-screen text here is not necessarily coming from the narrator, and thus it represents a dispersal of narratorial power. He is once again in control, but only up to a point. In conjunction with the text messages, there are also titles that appear on the screen to either express Jane’s point of view or support it, thus further marginalizing the narrator. About the on-screen titles, the show’s creator has said: “I think it adds another layer, and it adds another meta layer as well, because we are, in some ways, a meta telenovela. I find that that helps and also just gives it a whole other canvas for telling jokes, making comments, showing the audience how to watch the show.”13 It is indeed “another meta layer,” which further exposes the limited point of view of our already meta narrator. In general, the narrator and the textual elements guide the action and the audience’s perceptions in Jane’s favor. In this way both the narrator and the titles are invested in Jane, and thus they put forth a version of events that benefit her. This is true even when Jane herself is not on-screen. In episode 1.5, when Michael and Rafael are becoming competitive over Jane, the two have

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a seemingly polite conversation, the true intentions of which are translated via subtitles below them: “Stop screwing with us, you arrogant, rich, pretty boy” / “I had an amazing sex dream about Jane the other night.” The fact that Michael and Rafael are pretending to be friendly but are really quite hostile toward each other proves to the viewer that Jane is not in fact imagining this tension. Jane is right, and the screen titles tell us that. Likewise, in episode 1.10 we see Petra trying to get Rafael to trust her once again after the series of lies she has told him. In response to this, Rafael says, “Should we go over all of the crazy lies and the things you’ve done just in the last six months? Because we can.” The narrator, without skipping a beat, replies, “Ooh, yes, let’s,” and immediately titles enumerating Petra’s various lies begin to populate the screen. These titles once again serve to tell us what Jane herself would tell us if she were in this scene— that Petra is a liar and that Rafael should not trust her. The enthusiasm of the narrator’s response— “Ooh, yes, let’s”— points toward his emotional investment in Jane as well as his love of gossip.

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While the narrator’s voice provides a compelling portrait of nonhegemonic Latino masculinity, the credit for, and profit from, crafting his voice in the first two seasons goes largely to upper-level, non-Latinx writers. This follows a trend in Hollywood whereby Latinx and other writers of color are often present principally at the lower levels. The concentration of writers at the lower levels is due in part to the lower cost of paying a staff writer or story editor as opposed to a writer receiving producer credit. These lower-level writers are oftentimes not promoted to upper-level positions, thereby allowing writers’ rooms to claim diversity while maintaining the concentration of writers of color at the bottom.14 As Darnell Hunt’s research has shown, showrunners of color are vastly more likely to advance the careers of writers of color than are white showrunners.15 In the case of Jane, showrunner Jenny Snyder Urman is not Latina, and for the show’s first season and most of its second season it had no upper-level Latinx writers. Fans were unlikely to notice this, however, because during season 1, press around Jane often focused on Latina writer Carolina Rivera.16 Rivera is a successful writer and producer of Mexican telenovelas. During the first season of Jane, however, she held a staff writer position— the lowest level of writer on the series.17 In season 2, Rivera would become a story editor (the next level of writer, still a lower-level position).18 She was joined during the last five episodes of season 2 by Valentina Garza, who was brought on to Jane as a consulting producer while wrapping up work on Bordertown. Garza would be the first and only upper-level Latinx writer on the show during this

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time period. Although Garza’s presence was significant in diversifying the show, her upper-level position was the exception rather than the rule. The problem of an almost all white writers’ room writing the experience of people of color has been well documented. As Darnell Hunt concludes from his analysis of 234 series airing in the 2016– 17 season, writers’ rooms that underrepresent writers of color are more likely to engage in the underdevelopment and/or stereotypical representation of characters of color, as well as the systematic tokenization and underpromotion of the lower-level writers of color in the room.19 Of additional concern for this chapter is the question of what role the narrator of Jane plays in obscuring the power dynamic of the writers’ room. The narrator, unlike the other characters, shapes the audience’s perception of the show. Because the show is framed by a Latino voice, the narrator comes to serve as a Latino proxy for a mostly non-Latinx writers’ room, giving the false impression that there is some element of equity in the production of the show. It should be noted that other CW shows have relied upon a self-aware narration style. Both Gossip Girl and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, for instance, are shows that center white female protagonists and accordingly have a subjective narrator who is a white female. In both of these instances, the narrator represents one more character (or version of a character, in the case of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s musical numbers) with whom the viewer can identify. In the case of Jane, the Latino narrator is likewise a character with whom Latinx fans can identify. A significant difference between Jane and the other CW shows, however, is that in the case of both Gossip Girl and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the white women who created, developed, and were upper-level writers on these shows align more clearly with the narrators and protagonists.20 Although audience members can understand that the narrator and the show’s writers’ room are two separate entities, it is not always apparent to the average viewer who the writers of a series are. Even a viewer who searches for this information online may be unable to decode the complex power dynamics of a writers’ room when provided only with the names of the writers and their credits. In particular, because press about Jane has focused disproportionately on the existence of Latina writers Carolina Rivera and, later, Valentina Garza, it would not be unreasonable for an audience member during the time period I analyze to assume that Jane was written largely by Latinas. This assumption might be strengthened by the demographics of the actors and the insertion of a Latino narrator. In seeking to understand the narrator, we must contend with the fact that some but not all of his intersectional identities are being represented in the writers’ room. For instance, I have argued that the depiction of the narrator’s nonnormative masculinity is admirable. These critiques of normative

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masculinity are being written by several upper-level writers who identify as both male and female. The fact that the narrator’s character specifically offers a critique of Latino masculinity, however, is of concern because only one episode in seasons 1 and 2 credits a Latino writer (Christopher Oscar Peña in season 1, episode 10), and because, as mentioned, only one upper-level Latinx writer is credited at all during this time. Thus the critique of Latino masculinity is being written largely by non-Latinxs, making it not so much a selfrepresentation of nonnormative Latinx masculinities as a fantasy projection of Latinx masculinity conceived by non-Latinxs. I do not mean to suggest that the show’s Latinx writers have no voice in the process, but rather that the power dynamics of the writers’ room make it so that upper-level writers and writers who embody privileged identities have more say in shaping the narrative and getting the credit. The identifiable Latinoness of the narrator is important when we consider the state of Latinx involvement in the television industry beyond Jane. The lack of Latinx presence in Hollywood has been well documented, and its reflection in Jane’s creative team may be a cause of concern among Latinxs searching for self-representations in Hollywood.21 We know, in fact, that “in the 2010 to 2013 period, Latinos comprised none of the top ten television show creators, 1.1% of producers, 2% of writers, and 4.1% of directors. . . . Even more dramatic, no Latinos currently serve as studio heads, network presidents, CEOs, or owners.”22 Jane has mostly managed to avoid criticism for lack of diversity in the popular press, in large part because of its diverse cast and because it benefits from the continued attention to Carolina Rivera and Valentina Garza. Latinx presence on-screen and press about Rivera and Garza have unfortunately helped to mask the demographics of Jane’s writers’ room, and of the power structure of the CW overall. Rick Haskins, the network’s executive vice president of marketing and digital platforms, actually said of the Latinx audience: “I personally think it [the Hispanic market] is white space and I think that as the Hispanic population becomes more acculturated, those types of shows are going to become more important on this type of broadcast network.”23 This positioning of the Latinx demographic as “white space”— that is, as a population defined only by acculturation— points toward the network’s lack of understanding of Latinx cultures. This may be one reason why Jane does not have an unusually large Latinx viewership. Although the narrator gives the impression that the viewer is watching alongside a Latino, this is not reflected in the ratings. In truth, Jane has a largely white non-Latinx viewership.24 Although the show has a higher percentage of Latinx viewers than any other non-Spanish-language show on the air (24 percent), the total number of Latinx viewers is actually lower than for several other comedies that center the experiences of non-Latinx people

of color, such as Blackish and Fresh Off the Boat.25 These statistics may be shocking to some, given the show’s adaptation of the telenovela genre, its casting of primarily Latinx actors, its use of Spanish, and its complex depictions of Latinx characters. It is not that Jane fails to appeal to Latinx viewers, but rather that it is not connecting with Latinx audiences at the rate one might expect given its on-screen talent. Although this is also likely a result of the CW’s previous lack of Latinx-centered programming, we must still consider the largely non-Latinx writers’ room as one possible contributing factor. Finally, even if the writers’ room produces a compelling Latino narrator despite its demographics, we might additionally consider who makes money off of this critique of hegemonic Latinx masculinity. While the highest-paid actors in the series are Latinx, the same is not true for the highest-paid writers during the time period analyzed. The highest salaries go to writers who earn producer credits, followed by mid-level writers, and so on. In sum, even if we ignore the question of self-representation, we must contend with the fact that the distribution of salaries in Jane’s writers’ room replicates the existing inequitable power dynamics of Hollywood. The fact that the narrator gives the perception of Latinx authorship helps to obscure this problematic fact.

The premiere of season 4 of Jane begins with the voice of a Latina narrator. The female narrator, the episode soon reveals, is there to push back against the male narrator’s version of the story. She inserts backstory that the Latin lover narrator did not provide and corrects him on small details. She also, at one point, calls him “a dick.” This Latina narrator is unnamed, and disappears from the series after this episode. The writing team’s decision to include her as a counterweight to the male narration is further proof of the show’s investment in critiquing masculinist authorial power. Her role is to highlight the male narrator’s subjectivity, and to offer an alternative non-“dick” version of the story. The fact that the male narrator is effectively put in his place by the Latina narrator— she rearranges his storytelling and argues with him about the facts— also serves to push back against the Latin lover trope. She is not amused by him, much less charmed by him. He fails as a Latin lover. It is perhaps because of this failure that the imperfect and emotional version of Latino masculinity presented in the narrator is beloved by fans, who consistently name him as their favorite character in the show.26 The critique of both masculinist authorial power and the Latin lover trope are thus key to Jane’s success. Given that Jane has offered poignant critiques of pressing political issues such as immigration reform, we might reason that the likeability of the narrator is also crucial to the show’s ability to expose its viewers to its political views. Creator Jennie Snyder Urman has suggested, in response to the

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show’s overt messaging on immigration reform: “The hope is that by making a personal connection it just changes the politics and we start to think about the people behind it.”27 This quotation is likely a reference to the grandmother character who is almost deported when she seeks treatment in a hospital. It is also, indirectly, a commentary on the role of the narrator, however. The narrator is one way for the writers to make a “personal connection” between audience and text and thus prompt the audience to start to look at “the people behind it”— presumably the Latinx people whom the show chronicles. Still, to look at “the people behind” the show is to see an entirely different demographic. Because the Jane writers’ room in its first two seasons reflects Hollywood’s propensity to staff white writers at the upper levels and Latinx writers either not at all or at the lower levels, we must stop short of heralding it as a show with “an inherently Latino perspective.”28 Such a claim would need to rely, at least in part, on valuing Latinx voices in the way the inclusion of the Latino narrator suggests. Ultimately, we must see Jane for what it is— a show producing a compelling critique of white male objectivity and rewriting tropes of Latino masculinity, while also perpetuating the inequitable power dynamics for Latinxs behind the cameras in Hollywood.

Notes 1.

2.

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3.

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4. 5.

Throughout this essay, I use the nonbinary Latinx in place of the gendered Latino. Where Latino is used, it references a male-identified Latinx person. Latina is used to refer to female-identified Latinx persons. Many feminist writers have presented critiques of objectivity and of the presumed universal subject. I find Linda Alcoff particularly compelling on this point: Alcoff, “Problem of Speaking for Others.” Although I do not claim that Jane is a feminist text, I do believe that it contributes to feminist theorizing on the notion of objectivity. For more on the complexities of applying an English-language feminist label to telenovelas, see Acosta-Alzuru, “I’m not a Feminist.” Linda Alcoff ’s Visible Identities and Arlene Dávila’s Latino Spin have argued for the importance of the concept of “ethnorace,” a hybrid category of ethnicity and race. For Latinxs, as Alcoff and Dávila have argued, this is a particularly salient category because changing conceptions of Latinidad can mark certain Latinxs as ethnically “Latino” but racially white. It is thus difficult to determine how Jane’s writers may identify ethnically or racially. Still, because the category of “Latino” remains salient in U.S. popular discourse, as Dávila argues, it is important to continue to consider it as a category through which meaning is made, even if the boundaries of classification are constantly shifting. Andreeva, “Showrunner.” Bradley, “Why Latin Lover.”

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

Andreeva, “Showrunner.” Genette, Narrative Discourse. Pérez, Rethinking Chicana/o. Pérez goes on to argue as well that the trope has queer dimensions. Although I do not go so far as to call the narrator queer in this chapter, his nonnormative masculinity could certainly lend itself to a queer reading. Chow, “How the Narrator.” Shattuck, “‘Jane the Virgin’ Narrator.” Bradley, “Why Latin Lover.” Lizeth Gutierrez builds on the work of other Chicana feminists when she argues that chisme, or gossip, is actually a form of feminist knowledge production: see Gutierrez, “Queer Chisme.” Andreeva, “Showrunner.” Wrapped up in this as well is the influence of diversity programs run by major networks, which encourage shows to staff writers from underrepresented groups by paying their salaries for one season. After this season, some showrunners will choose to let the staff writer go, instead bringing on another new hire who will be paid for by the network. While this particular situation did not occur in the Jane writers’ room, it does point toward the practice of not promoting writers of color to higher levels throughout the industry. This is in keeping with Darnell Hunt’s study of the power dynamics of the Hollywood writers’ room, which suggests that hiring people of color as showrunners is important because white showrunners are vastly less likely to hire Black writers than are Black showrunners. See Darnell Hunt, “Race.” When asked about including Latinxs in the writers’ room, showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman responded in 2015: “One writer, Carolina Rivera, came from writing telenovelas in Mexico. This is her first job on an American show. Also, I gave two scripts this year to my writers’ assistant, Emmylou Diaz.” Urman would consistently point to Rivera when asked about diversity during Jane’s first two years. She would also occasionally reference her Latina writer’s assistant, who would eventually become a lower-level writer before leaving the show. Stacey Wilson Hunt, “‘Jane the Virgin’ Boss.” Rivera was accompanied by lower-level Christopher Oscar Peña, who received writing credit on one episode, and writer’s assistant Emmylou Diaz, who received credit on two episodes. In season 2, Diaz would become a staff writer and Peña would leave the show. This finding is in keeping with Dávila’s assertion in Latino Spin that Latinxs are often inserted into institutions (such as museums, universities, or politics) in ways that prevent them from changing the organization’s culture. In this case, having Latinx writers at the lower levels prevents them from shaping the culture of the writers’ room. As of the writing of this chapter, Rivera is a mid-level writer and has yet to earn producer credit for the series. Garza remains a consulting producer. Emilia Serrano served as a co-producer during season 3. Other Latinx writers have also written for the series as lower-level writers.

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6. 7. 8.

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19. Darnell Hunt, “Race.” 20. See information for both shows on the website IMDb: Gossip Girl, https://www.imdb .com/title/tt0397442/; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4094300/ ?ref_=nv_sr_1. 21. See Dávila, Latino Spin; Báez, In Search of Belonging; Beltrán, Latina/o Stars. 22. Negrón-Muntaner et al., Latino Media Gap, 3. 23. Holloway, “CW’s Male-Pattern Boldness.” 24. Nielsen, “Mass Appeal.” 25. According to a 2018 Nielsen study, only 24 percent of the viewers of Jane identify as “Hispanic” (an estimated 288,000 “Hispanic” viewers per episode in season 1, and 229,000 in season 2). In contrast, Spanish-language show El Señor de los cielos, which airs on Telemundo, has a much larger overall viewership that is 98 percent “Hispanic” (2.1 million “Hispanic” viewers per episode). This means that Jane’s “Hispanic” viewership is roughly equivalent to that of Superstore, which stars Honduran actress America Ferrera. It is lower, however, than the average number of “Hispanic” viewers who watch other popular sitcoms with a majority–people of color but non-Latinx cast, such as Blackish (estimated 336,000 “Hispanic” viewers per episode in 2018) or Fresh Off the Boat (estimated 306,000 “Hispanic” viewers per episode in 2018). See Nielsen, “Mass Appeal”; TV Series Finale, “Season 2 Ratings.” 26. Chow, “How the Narrator”; Bradley, “Why Latin Lover.” 27. Andreeva, “Showrunner.” 28. Martinez, “Jane the Virgin Proves.”

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Works Cited

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Acosta-Alzuru, Carolina. “‘I’m Not a Feminist . . . I Only Defend Women as Human Beings’: The Production, Representation, and Consumption of Feminism in a Telenovela.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 3 (September 2003): 269–94. Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 20 (Winter 1991– 92): 5–32. Alcoff, Linda. Visible Identities. London: Oxford University Press, 2005. Andreeva, Nellie. “Showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman on Almost Passing on ‘Jane the Virgin’, Pace, Title Change and How Will It End.” Deadline, May 22, 2015. https:// deadline.com/2015/05/jane-the-virgin-jennie-snyder-urman-interview-1201431968/. Báez, Jillian. In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media, and Citizenship. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018. Beltrán, Mary. Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Bradley, Laura. “Why Latin Lover Narrator is the Best Character on Jane the Virgin.” Slate, May 11, 2015. https://slate.com/culture/2015/05/jane-the-virgins-narrator-is-the-best -thing-about-the-cw-show.html.

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Chow, Kat. “How the Narrator of Jane the Virgin Found His Voice.” NPR, May 16, 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/05/16/477737210/how-the-narrator -of-jane-the-virgin-found-his-voice. Dávila, Arlene. Latino Spin. New York: NYU Press, 2008. Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Gutierrez, Lizeth. “Queer Chisme: Redefining Emotional Security in Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 42, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 118– 38. Holloway, Daniel. “The CW’s Male-Pattern Boldness.” Broadcasting and Cable, October 27, 2014. https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/cw-s-male-pattern-boldness -135128. Hunt, Darnell. “Race in the Writers’ Room: How Hollywood Whitewashes the Stories That Shape America.” Color of Change Hollywood (website), October 2017. https:// hollywood.colorofchange.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/COC_Holly wood_Race _Report.pdf. Hunt, Stacey Wilson. “‘Jane the Virgin’ Boss on Avoiding Stereotypes and the Show’s Surprising Superfans.” Hollywood Reporter, April 27, 2015. https://www.hollywood reporter.com/live-feed/jane-virgin-boss-avoiding-stereotypes-790819. Jane the Virgin. Warner Bros. Television and CBS Television Studios. Poppy Productions, RCTV, and Electus. The CW, 2014– 18. Martinez, Diana. “Jane the Virgin Proves Diversity Is More Than Skin Deep.” Culture, The Atlantic, October 19, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015 /10/jane-the-virgin-telenovelas/409696. Negrón-Muntaner, Frances, with Chelsea Abbas, Luis Figueroa, and Samuel Robson. The Latino Media Gap: A Report on the State of Latinos in U.S. Media. New York: Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, 2014. Nielsen. “Mass Appeal: A Look at the Cross-Cultural Impact of On-Screen Diversity.” Nielsen (website), June 28, 2018. https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2018 /mass-appeal-a-look-at-the-cross-cultural-impact-of-on-screen-diversity.html. Pérez, Daniel Enrique. Rethinking Chicana/o and Latina/o Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Shattuck, Kathryn. “‘Jane the Virgin’ Narrator on His Role and His Emmy Nomination.” New York Times, August 19, 2015. http://nyti.ms/1J52H9B. TV Series Finale. “Jane the Virgin: Season 2 Ratings.” TV Series Finale (website), May 17, 2016. https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/jane-the-virgin-season-two-ratings-38644/.

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Chapter 10

FEA, FIRME Y FORMAL Decolonizing Latinx Female Masculinity Ellie Hernández

Butchas, machas, and mariconas may not capture the attention of as wide a readership as do our two-spirit female counterparts, but their image, their swag and defiance, cannot be rivaled. Latinx female masculinity, however enigmatic, delivers a complexity that rewrites queer abjection by maneuvering through the uneven historical terrain into a desired effect as lesbian agent and sexual subject whose aesthetic presence commands power. Jack Halberstam, in Female Masculinity, correctly regards the construction of female masculinity as a type of fiction that becomes legible or is expressed through the “styles” and “potentialities” of gender and sexualities, a meaning that is fashioned and expressed for the first time, not yet visible but yearning to become so.1 In employing this notion of visibility without a legible record or past, I would like to consider the possibility of Latinx female masculinity in terms of style, cultural play, and historical representations. Depictions of Latinx female masculinity have decidedly been a part of the fabled record and anecdotal accounts across the Americas, most of these accounts residing outside of the historical mantelpiece and relegated to the margins of gender and sexual histories. Network and cable media have been slow to represent any form of Latinx female masculinity. Recently, however, a few examples have altered that trend. For instance, Vida, a relatively new show on the Starz cable network that premiered in May 2018, demonstrates how far we have come in representing Latinx machas on television.2 The show commences with two estranged, presumably straight Latinx sisters, Lyn (played by Melissa Barrera) and Emma (played by Misha Prada), returning to East Los Angeles for their mother Vidalia’s funeral. Slowly we come to realize, as told through the lens of the sisters, that their mother was in a relationship with a butch woman. Lyn and Emma’s mother leaves behind a down-and-out bar in the thick of the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, and the secrets of her life begin to unravel. When discussion of the bar’s fate arises, it is then that the sisters realize that the butcha managing the bar is Vidalia’s grieving spouse/ 168

Figure 10.1. Eddy struggles with grief after the death of Vidalia, her wife. Vida, season 1. Courtesy of Starz.

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lover Eddy, played by Ser Anzoategui (figure 10.1). The bar represents more than a watering hole; it occupies a special place in Eddy’s heart, and Eddy struggles to convince the sisters of the importance of keeping the bar open for the sake of the community. Ser Anzoategui, an established performance artist known for genderqueer style as an actor, commands a “soft butch” performance in Vida by drawing on the more subtle aspects of butcha representation. The show, based on the short story “Pour Vida” by Richard Villegas Jr., captures the endearing aspects of Latinx community with an intersecting queer Brown experience that features a variety of butchas, machas, and mariconas in many of the bar scenes. Eddy deploys a sensitivity that contrasts with the harshness of the sisters Lyn and Emma in their response to their mother’s unexpected death. The contrast simultaneously dispels the “toughness” associated with Latinx male masculinity and allows alternate forms of ardently demonstrative masculinity to come forth. Eddy looks depressed, cries, mourns, and drinks heavily, while the sisters plot their next move and seem disconnected from their mother’s death. Marked by a blend of genuine sensitivity and noble courage, Eddy intervenes at one point when a drunk patron pressure-flirts with one of the women in the bar. Soon thereafter, Eddy suffers a vengeful homophobic attack in the bathroom, which leaves her hospitalized in the

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final scene of the last episode of season 1. Eddy represents a real-life barrio butcha who has been thrust into a situation in which she has to deal with loss and healing. What is compelling about this drama is that the show intersperses a salty, sardonic wit with queer scenes of explicit sex, which makes for a strangely realistic and yet psychologically surreal depiction of life and love in East Los 2018. Director and show creator Tanya Saracho engages the poetics of Latinx culture by keeping all the key elements of what it means “to live” a queer life— all the love, hate, difficult decisions, and honesty. Central to this depiction of queer life is its gesture toward the butchas and mariconas who reside in L.A. Another television show quietly features a hip contemporary macha: CBS’s Madam Secretary. Sara Ramirez plays the role of Kat Sandoval, a political strategist for the secretary of state (the titular Madam Secretary), played by Tia Leone. In the year preceding Vida’s appearance, 2017, without much fanfare, CBS decided to create a macha character who is cool, suave, intellectual, astute, and politically down. Sara Ramirez has undergone a transformation of sorts in her own life, announcing that she is bisexual.3 Not only has Kat Sandoval’s character evolved out of the professional queer persona, but her character shows sartorial displays of “butchness.” Impeccably dressed, Kat Sandoval stages the modern dyke look and turns away from the flannel-andjeans stereotype. Intellect overrides any emotional possibility of romantic urges in her character: as a queer Latinx macha character who resists sexualized stereotypes, and one who is positioned in the echelons of political power, Kat Sandoval represents a radical turn for network television. “Butchas,” “machas,” and “mariconas”— their mere presence and being decolonizes masculinity by refusing public conformity. Latinx female masculinity defies one of the major tenets of colonization, which is the mandatory dominance of heterosexuality and heteronormativity in social relations. In this book, we have taken up the issue of decolonizing masculinity. The visual and especially public optics of butchas, machas, and mariconas resists the heterosexual and heteronormative systems of dominance over normative gender and sexual reality. In order to facilitate this effort, we must also consider variations of masculinity beyond those assigned to men/boys/males. My own inclination (as a butcha) is to consider the ways in which “female masculinity” commands the public space by traversing gender and sexual boundaries and undoing colonization at its symbolic core. The optics of female masculinity projects a gender anomaly that captures second glances and curious stares— the unfamiliar. This unfamiliar visual encounter—¿eres o te pareces?— forms an uncanny reflection of the masculine in a female body. The adage “fea, firme y formal” intends to describe the gendered and sexual

embodiment of female masculinity in the Latinx decolonial context. The familiar Mexican credo often refers to Mexican men, their social demeanor, and the quiet reserve that is considered masculine in Mexicano culture.4 Captured in this adage is both the normative and its transgression; it is a cultural script that is learned and bound up in the ideology of family, community, and the patriarchal ordering of cultura. The adage captures the traditional expression of reserve and silence within the privacy of home and culture that are the most familiar signals of masculine constructions. Lionel Cantú’s “Entre Hombres / Between Men: Latino Men and Homosexualities,” for example, recognizes the varied incitements to Latino masculine expressions as having varied and often uneven displays of power.5 The main critical element here is that macho and masculine attributes are too often collapsed together to mean the same thing, while varied forms of masculinity and their resignification of expression in and across genders have not been written about in the scholarship. In other words, masculinity can travel across genders and sexualities freely without prohibitive restraint, and female forms of masculinity often encounter prohibitive questioning. The aim of Latinx female masculinity as a category of observation and recognition is to render legible a code for reading expressions of masculinity in the female body. In order to demonstrate masculinity as a self-assuming facet of identity and cultural expression, what is first needed is a decolonizing perspective that debunks the idea of a natural order of gender, and

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Figure 10.2. Foreign policy expert Kat Sandoval, Madam Secretary. Courtesy of CBS.com.

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masculinity should be viewed as an ideology, a set of beliefs that can take hold or misfire. Richard Rodriguez plays with the same masculine coding in his autobiography, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. The chapter “Complexion” details aspects of his Mexican father that demonstrated the “feo, fuerte y formal” manner of masculinity. In an honest characterization of his father’s attributes as a “macho,” he describes numerous aspects related to his style of communication. With respect to this, his mother, like other women, would mention that a (Mexican) man should be “feo, fuerte y formal.”6 What that means is that he should be reserved in temperament, strong, tough, and handsome. Part of the allure or fascination with Rodriguez’s use of the “dictum” is that it allows him to formulate a conversation about Mexicano masculinity and how it differs from masculinity in the United States. Gender codes and sexuality are implied in this depiction by Rodriguez, and these are most notably expressed in some of the more revealing aspects of Hunger of Memory. While it is well established that Richard Rodriguez struggled with the Mexican notion of masculinity, he essentially rejects that expectation for himself. He elects not to follow his father’s example, and we see by virtue of that decision that the Latino code of masculinity is not a fact of Latino life but an ideological choice that instructs masculine desires upon identity and culture. Likewise, there is nothing that prohibits female masculinity from embracing and upholding the moniker fea, firme y formal, from which I have drawn the title of this chapter. I suggest that Latinx female masculinities have taken up the adage or dictum successfully and in keeping with traditional forms of Latinx masculinity, with a gendered twist. This is the decolonial turn with which Latinx masculinities create variation in the form and the cultural script. In drawing from Hunger of Memory, I am also thinking more about the arcane aspects, the embodiment of a masculinity that is deep and resonant and reflective of Latinx cultura in its depictions of honor and chivalry and its debonair imaginings, and one which is accessible to female bodies as well. Mexican ranchera singer Chavela Vargas comes to mind when I reflect upon the adage “fea, firme y formal.” Chavela, as she is fondly remembered, embraced her female masculinity throughout her life and career. Although she was born in Costa Rica in 1919, she always identified as a Mexicana. Vargas came of age as a singer-songwriter during the Mexicana/o cultural nationalist period, a time when artists and performers actively sought to re-create the Mexican identity outside the colonial model. Elsewhere in this book, Laura Malaver traverses similar ground in their chapter “‘Eres Cuir, or What?’: Latinx Disidentificatory Practices of Becoming,” which locates some of the complication of the visual aspects and politics of seeing oneself through the “cuir” lens. Malaver notes:

What is exhilarating about Malaver’s strategic placement of Latinx “flexible performativities” as part of the decolonial process of revealing or disclosing the inherent presumption of toxic colonial masculinity is that it invokes the possibility of masculinity shouldering decolonial possibility. We might consider this seriously as a reading through which to look at Chavela Vargas and the type of masculinity she inhabited and destabilizes. This historical time frame is also critical because it allows us to see forms of resistance begin to take shape around gender and sexuality. Chavela is not only representative of the artistic and socially vibrant socialist class throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. She is also representative of Mexico’s cultural elite, and she lived on the edge and developed a reputation as a lesbian party girl. Rumors about Chavela’s lesbian encounters with Frida Kahlo, among others, were the subject of a recent documentary, the eponymous Chavela (2017), by directors Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi. In it, Chavela Vargas explains how it seemed impossible for her to don female clothes and assume a role as a typical female Mexican singer. She fully embraced her female masculinity in a way that became her trademark style. Vargas ushered in a daring drive with her stylishness and her music, which breaks with Mexicano tradition by creating an imaginative space where female masculinity could participate in the representation of her music. Her song “Macorina,” which is easily interpreted as a play on the word maricona, elicits a sultry play of sex and gender otherwise unheard-of in Mexico’s history of romantic songs. The conditions for coming out were different for a performer like Chavela Vargas. The more pertinent critical concern is what it means to be “out in the Latinx world.” Chavela navigated her world in a particular way that defied and defined an era of radical elegance. Mexican women like Chavela had to traverse a highly patriarchal society, and she found the music world to be a welcoming space. Her close friendships with José Alfredo Jiménez and

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That is, I trouble the associations of masculinity with toxicity in Latinx culture by (re)envisioning the fixity of colonial masculinity and transforming or transporting such fixity into flexible performativities of decolonial capacities. These capacities take into consideration the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the formulation of social practices by orientating ourselves toward the past in order to live in the present and imagine possible futures. These articulations are supported by queer of color critique; this lens invites us to question boundaries of identity in order to (re)imagine identities within spaces of contestation that simultaneously address “social contradictions that nationalism strives to conceal.”

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Figure 10.3. Poignant moment from Chavela documentary, 2017, directed by Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi.

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Pedro Almodóvar provided her with acceptance and social support. Chavela came out officially in her autobiography Y si quieres saber de mi pasado (If You Want to Know About My Past) at the age of eighty-one. This autobiography was her attempt to reconcile the difficulties of coming out at a time when women and especially lesbians held second-class citizenship in Mexico.7 In “Crossing the Border with Chabela Vargas: A Chicana Femme’s Tribute,” Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano pays tribute to the Mexican songstress.8 This critical tribute to Vargas’s music completely shatters the closet door, signaling a time when lesbian writers and academics sought to recuperate queer history. It indicates the power of music to transcend time and space, while Yarbro-Bejarano notes at the same time that “popular music is the site of bodily centered pleasures and cultural identifications.”9 It is fitting to see music, and especially popular music, as an actual place and location— as communal ground on which to intercept the codes of queer identity. In these mythic spaces, Yarbro-Bejarano locates the ways in which Vargas undoes the

gender expectations we might have about música mexicana, in which gender codes are marked strictly in masculine and feminine terms, especially within the Mexicana/o romantic music tradition, where subjects of sexual desire are essentially heterosexual. Because there are no borders to restrict what can be viewed as accessible to the jotería tradition, Chavela Vargas’s music crosses the border and the imagination. She is one of the earliest representations of lesbian desire in music.

My first encounter with a character representing Latinx female masculinity goes back to reading Gloria Anzaldúa’s “La historia de una marimacho” (1989) in The Sexuality of Latinas.10 “La Macha” occupies multiple terms and reference points in the story, but most apparent is the heroic figure who rescues her love interest from a repressive family situation. La Marimacha also occupies the role of renegade or defiant border dweller who refuses the status quo. Writing her text in Spanish in the form of a cuento, Anzaldúa uses the term marimacho in recounting the story. For the sake of consistent grammatical usage, I use the term marimacha and refer to her lover as the querida. One of the few lesbian stories told through the folktale tradition and at the same time following the corrido style common along the south Texas border, “La historia de una marimacho” intends to defy heterosexual norms and celebrates lesbian love.11 The cuento is reminiscent of many border narratives of forbidden love, in this case a tale of forbidden love between two women. It focuses on the couple’s desire and their assertion of independence from their families’ repressive control. Anzaldúa’s story recounts how the “marimacha” seduces and runs away with her beloved, La Chaparrita. We know that she is butch because she wears men’s clothes and has big rough hands “like a man.” She also maintains a resolute love and regard for La Chaparrita. Unlike other stories of misguided love or forbidden love, which function as cautionary tales, “La historia de una marimacho” is a story of social transformation and personal triumph. The renegade butch, rather than capitulate to social expectations, defies those expectations and chooses real love instead. In the end, La Marimacha is able to convince La Chaparrita’s father to accept them for who they are. In this case, La Marimacha and her partner do live happily ever after. While the story was written sometime in the 1980s, Anzaldúa’s aim was to inform and educate others in the Latinx community, and especially the Spanish-speaking audience, about queer love. These examples of butchas, machas, and mariconas approach the subject of their desire and gendered projections and unravel some pertinent questions

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The Marimacha as Decolonizing Subject

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about the nature of female masculinities in Latinx cultura: How are representations of Latinx female masculinity framed and recognized? How is Latinx female masculinity recorded and recognized by Latinx colonial histories? The most obvious issue is the problem of finding representation of Latinx female masculinity when there is erasure, indifference, and invisibility. However, to discover its narrative and representation, we must rely on a methodological blend of archival research, cultural lore, quotidian sightings, and historical tracings. In addressing some ways in which la butcha finds significance and representation across geographies and social contexts, it is critical to note the significance of gender and sexuality as an occasion to decolonize masculinity from its origins. What is needed in the larger framing is more critical attention to the significance that Spanish colonization had in the New World, since many laws and social norms have been influenced by early Spanish colonial declarations.12 As a result, a later portion of this chapter intends to unravel colonial gender ideologies in an effort to excavate Latinx “female masculinity” as a representational form that has been in play for centuries. Tracing Latinx female masculinity across a historical time frame may be fraught with critical slipperiness because so many of the reference points, documents, depictions, and entries in the historical record completely discount its presence; thus it is necessary to locate a more dedicated unpacking and analysis of the historical record to establish a legacy flush with theoretical insights. The presence of Latinx female masculinity cannot be disputed. In fact, representations of Latinx female masculinity can be assessed across a timeline ranging from early Spanish colonial figurations to present-day modern representations in the Americas. What we find is a scant and loosely assembled set of results and exceptional moments. The presence of Latinx female masculinity becomes apparent in late- twentieth-century queer cultures, and it’s at this time that the gender and sexual codes come undone from their colonial sedimentation. Our efforts in this book to decolonize masculinities occasion us to reimagine “la butcha” as part of the two-spirit legacy that one finds in the preconquest Americas. Historian Emma Pérez, in The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, pointed the way to critically challenging our sense of representation in or exclusion from history; the response to this erasure is to reimagine “la butcha” as a credible subject of history.13 It becomes necessary to sketch and work through the terminology in order to locate female masculinity in Latinx cultures, with the goal of recuperating what has been lost and accounting for its representation today as a decolonizing approach. Colonization did not pertain solely to a material and economic set of circumstances: it also extended to social structures, psychological well-being, and the symbolic representational facets of everyday reality. In an effort to

truly decolonize masculinity, we must resist the impulse to define our reality through empire and nation, or through identities or monikers that suggest an exceptional or deviant mode of being— these aspects are part of the organizing features of colonialism that already house masculinity. Finding a stable terminology for the masculine female experience and appearance might be complicated, despite the fact that female masculinity has been expressing itself for centuries, but without a legible and coherent pattern of recognition. Butcha representations and other forms of female masculinity can be traced to other historical periods and across cultural, economic, and social circumstances. Such representations can be found in lesbian communities or LGBTQ communities to which we note a sexual politics. In these circumstances, the Spanish colonial system of gender and sexuality introduced distinctive roles for both men and women, and any deviation from the masculine and feminine identities was cast as deviant and sinful. Latinx female masculinity cannot be fully understood without a broader contextual explanation of conquest and colonization by the Spanish in the Americas. In the next sections, I will explain the historical context that has given Latinx culturas their particular reference point for gender and sexuality.

To decolonize masculinity is to understand its history and its legacy. What is unique about Latinx culture is the way the dialectic of conquest and colonization shapes and informs modern Latinx expressions of gender and sexuality. Many of the current attitudes, ideas, and modern legal codes derive from Spanish conquest and colonialism. I wittingly take a detour here to explain the punitive nature of conquest and colonialism in terms of gender codes and sexual conduct. Any study of Latinx masculinity in the Americas benefits from a better understanding of how this history of colonization worked to generate attitudes about gender and sexuality. Gender reversal or identification with the gender opposite from one’s birth or biological gender was deemed especially dishonorable to the masculine form or identity. Women did not warrant as much attention for gender reversal because women did not cause a symbolic threat to masculinity. Instead, the greater threat to the masculine structure resided in men assuming a female position or taking on the degraded role of women in sexual roles.14 Patriarchal dominance depends entirely on the stability of the masculine form in order to succeed symbolically and politically. Where does this all begin? The reasoning is rather old, but many of the cultural and social codes for anti-queer behavior developed during the reign of Alfonso X of Castile (1252– 84). Las Siete Partidas formed the basis for antihomosexual codes of conduct in the Spanish Iberian tradition. Las Partidas,

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Conquest and Colonialism

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which set forth and established a set of rules that the Spanish kingdom had to obey, dictated specifically that homosexual behavior was a crime against nature.15 These codes later informed and influenced the outlines of what was considered heretical behavior during the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition punished individuals who were suspected of committing acts of sodomy or other homosexual practices. Many of the accused, mostly men, were first tortured and forced to confess their crimes, then eventually convicted as heretics. The Spanish Inquisition gave bishops the power to deal with the offense at the local level, either by the excommunication of the offenders from the church, or by sentencing them to a public death in an auto-da-fé. Taking the form of a daylong festival filled with devout prayers, street vendors, and clowns, the auto-da-fé was a public ritual of punishment or cleansing of the soul through penance that most often ended with the accused and condemned burned at the stake.16 Women, while punished for homosexual acts and gender reversal, did not suffer to the same extent as men in the New World, and Europe had a different set of consequences altogether for women. Louis Crompton writes extensively about how anti-homosexual legalese evolved from a specific decree initiated by Catholic Spain under the rule of Isabella and Ferdinand: “Men suspected of homosexual inclinations were labeled as sodomitas or bujarrones. Especially degrading were the terms for men perceived as playing a feminine role—bardaje, marica, and puto, the ultimate degrading insult.”17 The formation of the Spanish Inquisition coincided with the voyages to the New World and encounters with Indigenous tribes and cultures. The New World presented a different set of issues for the Spanish crown in assessing gender and sexuality according to the established rules. As Louis Crompton describes, “The Spanish [in the New World] had in fact encountered a cultural tradition unknown to Europe but common to many Indian tribes in North and South America: publicly recognized gender-role reversal.”18 Conquest and later Spanish colonialism in the New World reorganized all gender and sexual variations of the inhabitants of the Americas and installed an absolute system of gender and sexuality that was based in procreative determinism and favored heterosexuality.19 Anything outside of the procreative aim of sexuality was considered a sin— more precisely, a pecado nefando, or nefarious sin. Pecados nefandos were considered sins against nature, the natural order, under the Catholic order brought to the New World. Under this order, gender variations or gender reversals were largely considered sinful, but the main brunt of the punishment for pecados nefandos was aimed at men who took on the sexually passive role/position of women as passivos. The brutally punishing attitudes toward nonheterosexual gender identification and sexual practices arise from conquest and colonialism in the

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Americas. Richard C. Trexler argues in Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas that the conquest of the Americas ushered in a particularly violent moment for gender reversal, homosexual conduct, and in particular sodomy in the Americas.20 Central to this violence is the subordination of women and female representation on all levels. Sexual violence and subordination became a pervasive tool of conquest and tactic of war. Gender reversal in the case of the berdache, Trexler argues, was in actuality born out of these gendered forms of conquest. Trexler defines the berdache as “a biological male who dressed, gestured and spoke as an ‘effeminate’ . . . the Berdache served macho males by assuming female divisions of labor, often including the sexual servicing of males.”21 Trexler disparages berdaches as being a consequence of war, mere losers forced into effeminate roles to provide sexual, economic, and political services to the men in power. This argument is problematic because it denies the berdache agency, and it also denies that homosexuality or cross-dressing could be not a punishment of war but an individual choice. For example, among the Zuni Pueblo, a man might take upon himself the dress, jobs, customs, and sexual roles of a woman, fitting the European mold of a berdache. However, this was not because of a punishment or an act of war, but rather might be the result of a sacred vision or selection by the community to fulfill this role. Another reason why Trexler’s argument about homosexual behavior and sodomy in the Americas is problematic is that he is using colonial accounts as his only source of evidence. Narratives and history created by the conquerors on topics such as sodomy and cannibalism have been used as justification for conquest of Indigenous peoples. Central to this proliferation of violence is an attitude about women and the female or feminine aspect. We can only imagine what chaos this caused for the complex social and gender structures that were already in place before colonization throughout the Americas. Lynn Stephen’s “Sexualities and Genders in Zapotec Oaxaca” offers a glimpse of what these gender codes and structures might have been by looking at gender norms that have survived the conquest and colonialism, such as those practiced in Juchitán, Mexico, today.22 Men from Juchitán display a varied form of gender relations and sexualities, and there are some who become muxe. The muxe are defined as “persons who appear predominantly male but display certain female characteristics . . . a third gender role between men and women, taking some characteristics of each.”23 The men who assume the role of muxe are not considered homosexual, because there is no connection between the way they dress and homosexual behavior. Although some muxe do form long-term romantic relationships with men, many also marry women and have children. In the Zapotec community of Juchitán, heterosexuality is not the dominant aspect that constitutes masculinity; therefore, we

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can conclude that gender and not sexuality is the dominant force structuring social and cultural identities.24 The Juchitán community is not by any means a utopian society, but it does show the influence of the Spanish colonial two-gender system forced upon these communities. The two-gender system resulted in a gender hierarchy in which women’s sexuality was subordinated to men’s, not only in Juchitán but also all over the Americas. The fact that the muxe still survive and coexist with these imposed gender structures is a tribute to the importance of Indigenous gender systems that allowed for more flexible approaches to sexual identities; these systems existed before colonization and continue to exist today.25 Since nonbinary gender roles in the New World were not forcefully imposed on individuals, people were capable of having a more complex sexual and gender identity, such as muxe and berdaches. They were able to have more fluid gender identities and sexual roles that did not force them to conform to the ideals of a male/female binary system of gender and sexuality. Through the religious codes of the Spanish Catholic faith, the Spanish practiced a two-gendered heterosexual system of monogamous marriage that made it difficult for them to comprehend and conceptualize the possibility of marriage between two men.26 The Spanish tried to eradicate social systems that did not fit into their religious or war ideologies by implementing tactics they had used since the Inquisition. They primarily labeled homosexual behavior as an act of heresy against the Spanish crown and the church. Their agenda of annihilation had devastating effects on Indigenous communities and their social structures, yet the present-day third-gender roles that still exist in Mexico despite this are indicative of complex gender definitions and relations before the conquest.27 The legacy of the Spanish influence on gender and sexuality in the Americas was devastating, and it instituted gender as a binary system that is distinct, delineated, and many times positioned in antagonistic terms. The prohibition against men acting as women and women acting as men was a given, and flexibility of gender and sexuality was based on the ability to maneuver within gender codes.

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Catalina de Erauso: The Lieutenant Nun

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The case of the Lieutenant Nun stands out as a unique example of gender reversal, lesbian possibility, and transgenderism.28 The story unfolds from an account told by a Spanish soldier sentenced to hang for the murder of another soldier in a tavern brawl in 1620. The soldier confesses to a monk and reveals that he is not only biologically female, but a nun. In a veritable state of disbelief, the monk asks to meet with the bishop and insists that he hear the convicted felon’s story. Knowing this is his last chance for survival, the

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lieutenant nun agrees to an examination by matrons called in to administer a “verification.” Upon the reveal, the bishop halts the execution, deciding that the court cannot execute this person because she is a nun. Catalina de Erauso, also known as the Soldier Nun, became a legend in both the New World and Europe for being a woman who dressed and lived as a man and fought as a soldier in the New World for many years before being found out to be female. Catalina de Erauso’s story has been the subject of various interpretations, and though she lived in and roamed Latin America and Mexico during the seventeenth century, she nevertheless positioned herself as a colonizer. She also became the subject of a play and three autobiographies which may or may not be genuine. Catalina used her virginity to win special status under the law, which ensured her survival in the face of discipline by both secular and religious law. Sherry Velasco, in her book The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso, discusses the case of the lieutenant nun as a transgender spectacle. The most problematic issue happens to be her lesbian desires.29 What ultimately determined her freedom has become the subject of various interpretations. Not only was the lieutenant nun a nun, but she also claimed to be a virgin, in a time when “purity” was the ultimate status for an unmarried woman.30 Her case is important, particularly because it illustrates the social construction of gender and the development of a gender-specific legal system. In Rome, Catalina told her story to a cleric who then wrote her account in a letter dated July 11, 1626. It recorded her description of running away from the convent because of her displeasure with the enclosed life she led and her desire to live as a man. Her account of becoming a soldier in the Indies, of winning a reputation for bravery in battle, and of preserving the secret of her female identity has become the subject of gender and sexuality studies. People of her time tended to believe that sex and gender were the same, and since she dressed and acted as a man, people around her concluded she was male; when she never grew a beard, they assumed she was a eunuch. She assured the cleric that she had assumed male identity not “for an evil purpose,” such as overturning the social order or indulging in sexual license, but only because of her natural inclination for military service. While determining her case, the cleric, still unable to wrap his head around the puzzle of sex and gender, attempted to describe her physical appearance in the letter. He described that she was large in stature, hulking for a woman, although she did not appear to be a man. He commented on her flat chest (which Catalina admitted to binding since youth), described her face as not ugly but not beautiful, and wrote that she was a woman only in the way she moved her hands. The soldier nun used two strategies to save herself from legal punishment. First, she won the protection of religious law by telling the bishop that

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she was a virgin. Virginal women had special status in Catalina’s time; thus, in the eyes of the church, it was Catalina’s virginity that helped to explain her strength and bravery, preserving her respectability even when she chose to be a man. Catalina may have broken every other rule for women, but she preserved the most important one— virginity. Second, even though she had broken the law against murder, she had demonstrated her respect for the legal system. The different accounts of Catalina de Erauso reveal an inclination toward female masculinity irrespective of legal or religious codes.

Conclusion In closing, the framing of Latinx female masculinity developed an aesthetics that we know derives from queer theory and from the LGBTQ movement. In this essay, however, “la butcha” differs from the U.S. construction of butchness because Spanish colonialism left behind in the region of the Southwest called the Spanish borderlands a specific language and a cultural legacy that are unlike those of any other part of the United States. Others will note that the expression of female masculinity in the gender performance of la butcha may even be part of recent genderqueer or transgender expression, and not necessarily a sexual politics, but an assertion of one’s primary gender identity. Certain situations called for an expression of masculinity, such as a call to war, harsh labor on the land, an absence of male figures, or even a desire to hold power. However, as it happens, location and place determine many cultural variations that differ from region to region and from dialect to dialect in the borderlands. Unique to Latinx female masculinity is the history of conquest and colonialism. All of these examples and illustrations suggest the pervasiveness of Latinx female masculinity across time and geographies and its effectiveness in decolonizing social spaces. In this chapter, I have explored female masculinity in Latinx cultures and demonstrated the ways in which conquest and colonization influence and inform gender roles and sexuality. I have also detailed the ways in which Spanish ideologies of gender and sexuality inform and impose on complex gender structures in the New World.

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Notes

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1. 2. 3. 4.

Halberstam, Female Masculinity. Vida, season 1, Starz, May 2018. Wong, “‘Madam Secretary’ Character Comes Out.” John Wayne supposedly used “feo, fuerte y formal” for the epitaph on his grave, but the adage extends far deeper into Mexican culture than John Wayne’s American appropriation.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Cantú, “Entre Hombres.” Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory, 138. Vargas, Y si quieres saber, 49. Yarbro-Bejarano, “Crossing the Border.” Yarbro-Bejarano, 34. Anzaldúa, “La historia.” See Rueda, With Her Machete. See Schiwy, “Decolonization.” In this article, Schiwy discusses the way in which gender complementarity supports a precolonial model for decolonizing gender. Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary. Berco, Sexual Hierarchies. Cristian Berco argues that women were accused of sexual relations with other women, but punishments were not as severe as for men, since it was considered degrading for a man to assume the role of a woman during intercourse with a man. Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, 299. Crompton, 298. Crompton, 293. Crompton, 317. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came. Trexler, Sex and Conquest. Trexler, 64. Stephen, “Sexualities and Genders.” Stephen, 43. Stephen, 44. Stephen, 44. Stephen, 51. Stephen, 55. See Velasco, Lieutenant Nun. Velasco, 9. See Pérez-Villanueva, Life of Catalina de Erauso.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. “La historia de una marimacho.” In The Sexuality of Latinas, edited by Norma Alarcón, Ana Castillo, and Cherríe Moraga. Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1989. Berco, Cristian. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain’s Golden Age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Cantú, Lionel. “Entre Hombres / Between Men: Latino Men and Homosexualities.” In Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Hames-García and Javier Martínez, 147– 67. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011.

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Works Cited

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Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Gutiérrez, Ramón. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pérez-Villanueva, Sonia. The Life of Catalina de Erauso, The Lieutenant Nun: An Early Modern Autobiography. Lanham, Md.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press / Rowan and Littlefield, 2014. Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Dial Press, 2005. Rueda, Catriona. With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Schiwy, Freya. “Decolonization, and the Questions of Subjectivity.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2/3 (March–May 2007): 271–94. Stephen, Lynn. “Sexualities and Genders in Zapotec Oaxaca.” In “Gender, Sexuality, and Same-Sex Desire in Latin America,” special issue, Latin American Perspectives 29, no. 2 (March 2002): 41– 59. Trexler, Richard C. Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order and the European Conquest of the Americas. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995. Vargas, Chavela. Y si quieres saber de mi pasado. Flat Lake Head, Mont.: Aguilar, 2002. Velasco, Sherry. The Lieutenant Nun: Lesbian Desire, Transgenderism, and Catalina de Erauso. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Wong, Curtis M. “Sara Ramirez’s ‘Madam Secretary’ Character Comes Out as Bisexual.” Huffington Post, May 16, 2018. Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Crossing the Border with Chabela Vargas: A Chicana Femme’s Tribute.” In Sex and Sexuality in Latin America: An Interdisciplinary Reader, edited by Daniel Balderston and Donna J. Guy, 33– 42. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

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Chapter 11

CHICANO DRACULA The Passions and Predations of Bela Lugosi, Gomez Addams, and Kid Congo Powers Paloma Martinez-Cruz

There is a sinister dark side to him I find irresistible. — BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1992)

Latinizing the Dark Prince The idea for investigating the matrix of meanings associated with “Chicano Dracula” started with an essay I coauthored with John Cruz titled “Hemisexualizing the Latin Lover: Film and Live Art Interpretations and Provocations,” which appeared in The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture (2018). As we endeavored to define and critique Hollywood’s cinematic stereotype of the Latin lover in our work, two different trajectories emerged for this iconic— and problematic— figure. Screen representations of Latin lovers converged in, on the one hand, colonial anxieties related to Latin American masculinity and, on the other, a hemispheric “queering” in the popular imaginary. In the present analysis, I apply the criteria we used to interrogate the Latin lover’s filmic and live-art iterations to understand how this stereotype is again unleashed in cinematic and musical performances as the ideological and aesthetic undergirding of the legend of Dracula. My analysis begins with a review of the Hollywood Latin lover stereotype canonized by Rudolph Valentino to interpret how notions about Latino and Latintinged masculinities move through the performance of Dracula rendered by Bela Lugosi. Next I examine interpretations of the fictional Gomez Addams played by John Astin and Raúl Juliá. I then conclude by considering queer performativity in the musical practices of Kid Congo Powers through the conceptual lens of disidentification. The cinematic Latin lover stereotype was introduced by Rudolph Valentino in Rex Ingram’s 1921 silent epic war film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. His sensual interpretation of the Argentine playboy Julio Desnoyers helped sediment what Latin lovers represent for U.S. spectatorships and provided us with an enduring rubric for evaluating how these stereotypical 185

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lovers are defined. First, Desnoyers and his filmic successors embody erotic danger, in a plot arc that very rarely culminates in the normalizing contract of matrimony. Secondly, Latin lovers are passionate and emotive, rather than the sturdy, silent types so prized among U.S. cinematic masculinities. Arrogant, refined, and graceful, Latin lovers bear no trace of the humble working-class hero: Valentino dances tango with sophistication and employs his signature irresistible gaze to seduce the white women who fall sway to his thrall. Next, whether a European speaking a Romance language or a hemispheric Latino, the Latin lover represents the mainstream media’s understanding of “Latin looks.” As explained in Arlene Dávila’s seminal Latinos, Inc. (2012), U.S. casting directors represent Latinidad by selecting actors and models with dark, straight hair and olive complexions who resemble peoples of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern heritage rather than the Afro-Latinx or Indigenous tributaries to Latin American populations. Finally, the Latin lover must be geographically ambiguous with regard to ethnicity and nationality. In the silent Four Horsemen, Valentino’s exoticness was achieved not through a thick accent but through exaggerated Argentine gaucho costuming, as well as the intertitle exposition describing the various migrations of Julio’s parents and grandparents (Spain, France, Argentina). The Latin lover is— has to be— nationless and unmoored, with an eye trained on white women from Western Europe or the United States whom he will cross borders and oceans to seduce. But, as Cruz and I also noted in our essay, the Latin lover offers another valence to the world of Latinx masculinities. In defiance of heteronormative sexuality, Latin lovers can also represent a queering presence in film and performance. For example, when the science fiction drama Sense8 (2015) connects eight strangers from different parts of the world, Spanish actor Miguel Ángel Silvestre, as the gay but closeted Mexican telenovela star named Lito Rodriguez, brings the element of nonheteronormative sexuality and emotional acuity to his psychically linked companions. Although he subverts heteronormative prejudice in heroic ways in the series, what the genderqueer Lito character has in common with the Hollywood Latin lovers is an overtly hypersensual nature that crosses national boundaries while venturing into the realm of prohibited sexual drives. With both of these ideas about the Latin lover in mind, here I ask whether the filmic Dracula might be, in fact, a darker and more sinister version of the Hollywood Latin lover, with whom extramarital seduction culminates in the immortal kiss of the cursed. In order to identify the common threads connecting the Latin lover and the count, we need to take stock of the two divergent tendencies that dominate cinematic renderings of Dracula. Irish author Abraham “Bram” Stoker’s Dracula was first published in 1897, and

the first verifiable film adaptation of the story of Count Dracula’s bloodthirsty rampage through the lives of the hapless Jonathan Harker, R. M. Renfield, Lucy, and Mina was a 1921 silent Hungarian film called Dracula’s Death, written and directed by Károly Lajthay. Then came the German expressionist film directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau titled Nosferatu. Featuring Max Schreck as Count Orlock, Murnau’s work is considered to be a masterpiece of German expressionist film. Faithful to Bram Stoker’s literary version, Murnau’s Count Orlock is creepy, ancient, lizard-like, and decidedly repellent. However, the most enduring Dracula styling was to be the Hollywood version released by Universal Pictures under the direction of Tod Browning in 1931. The seductive, aristocratic, and debonair male lead was played by Bela Lugosi, who made an indelible mark with his mesmerizing interpretation of the count. As Valentino was to the Hollywood Latin lover, Lugosi was to the legend of Dracula: the Latin lover’s moving-picture pathway into the horror genre, where he has remained steadfast. In keeping with this genre’s tenor, I offer a Latinx-Van-Helsing-esque reveal to qualify the Dark Master’s adhesion to the Latin lover formula through the following acronym:

When it comes to Dracula, darkness is not just the shroud of night protecting the count from the sun, it also describes the physical coloring of Latin lovers, a depiction that has been constant in nearly all of the major portrayals of Dracula since Lugosi’s performance of the count. Next, the sexually rapacious nature of Dracula’s storied eroticism is such that he sets his sights on not just one but two Western women: Lucy and Mina. If he were to have only one erotic obsession, it could be tamed through its consummation in the pact— whether sacred or sacrilegious— of a lasting, monogamous union. Next, his aristocracy, like the wealth associated with Valentino’s Desnoyers, establishes him as an international playboy: he is adrift but not derelict, his world populated by old things and old ways. At the beginning of Stoker’s novel, Count Dracula informs the solicitor Jonathan Harker, “We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may be amongst the common dead.”1 As for his captivating gaze, if the production techniques of silent film required lingering takes of Valentino’s seductive stare to represent the lure of

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Figure 11.1. Bela Lugosi as Dracula (1931).

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his glance, Lugosi’s eyes, in the role of Dracula, literally hypnotize, constituting his signature move of both aggression and seduction. Next, Dracula also represents the undocumented denizens of Western society. In his early conversations with the newly credentialed young attorney Jonathan Harker, the count is gravely concerned (get it?) that his coffin-sized crates of funky Romanian dirt will not make it through customs, and he contrives to retain the services of several attorneys in various sea ports in order to slip his cargo past local agents, as is done often, in Harker’s words, “by men of business, who do not like the whole of their affairs to be known by any one person.”2 Yes, his travel to London is mired in illicit dealings, misrepresentations at ports of entry, and the deaths of a retinue of shipmates on the Russian vessel that transports his undead person and his special dirt of the damned to England. Moreover, the count is Latin-derived, as a Romance language (Romanian) is spoken in his home of Transylvania, a region located in central Romania. Speaking English with a heavy accent, the actor Bela Lugosi, who was born in the kingdom of Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania), had the Eastern European locution with which the fictive Dracula was associated. Although Harker was thoroughly impressed with the count’s mastery of English vocabulary and grammar, Dracula was aware of the stigma that Londoners would attach to his manner of speech: “Here I am a noble . . . the common people know me and I am a master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not— and to know not is to care not for.”3 Aware that his strangeness of speech would mark him as an outsider, Lugosi found that it was his IRL fate to be steadily typecast as the dark Other throughout his acting career: the intonation that made the Dracula role such a seamless fit for his abilities also marked him as the villain whom audiences were primed by centuries of colonial stereotypes to “care not for.”

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These Dracula aesthetics depart from Stoker’s original characterization to emphasize seduction with Latin flair, and they have become a fixture in the popular imagination thanks to the “will to style” present in production teams that have manufactured generations of gothic Latin lovers in the mold of Lugosi’s count. Developed by Frederick Luis Aldama, the concept of “will to style” describes the notion of the artistic— and ideological— responsibility for depictions of Latinx peoples that, Aldama argues, must take into account “the building blocks of reality that they are constructing as well as the degree of presence of a willful use of skills and technical devices to give shape to the making of new pop-cultural phenomena by and about Latinos.”4 This will to style becomes evident not only on the motion-picture screens intended for adult audiences, but also in the world of children’s entertainment and marketing, as General Mills’ Count Chocula cereal mascot, Sesame Street’s Count von Count, and Eddie and Grandpa Munster are all styled with the dark hair, widow’s peaks, dapper duds, and, in the case of Count von Count, heavily accented English that denote foreign dangerousness anchored in Latinness. By these criteria, Lugosi’s depiction of the monstrous count, like the predatory Latin lover that preceded him, decisively establishes him as the sexual Other, the dark, Latin-tinged, accented, and predatory male who lives to control and corrupt white women in the vein of the Don Juans, Casanovas, and Valentinos of the Western imaginary. But what about when the horror genre’s leading Latin lover is appropriated by the comedic genre, so that the dark prince is comically transformed into a doting father and devoted spouse? This is precisely what happens when Gomez Addams, the Addams Family patriarch, splices Hollywood’s Latin lover and the gothic world inhabited by Dracula to satirize midcentury nuclear families and middle-class pretentions. A tongue-in-cheek inversion of middle-class twentieth-century American family values, the Addamses are a wealthy aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware, or do not care, that other people find them bizarre or frightening. They first appeared in a group of 150 unrelated single-panel cartoons by Charles Addams, about half of which were originally published in The New Yorker between their debut in 1938 and Addams’s death in 1988. In 1964, a live-action television series starring John Astin as Gomez Addams and Carolyn Jones as his wife Morticia premiered on ABC. Initially spanning two seasons, the franchise was again revived in the 1990s in a feature film series consisting of The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), in which Gomez Addams is portrayed by the late Puerto Rican luminary Raúl Juliá. The “Addams Family” cartoons were originally one- panel gags, populated by unnamed and thinly developed characters, until the television series production. Charles Addams had a hand in the naming of the television

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versions of his creations, but vacillated between “Gomez” and “Repelli” for the family patriarch. When he sought Astin’s input on this decision, the actor selected the name “Gomez,” which he acknowledged was a deliberate effort to align the character with “Latin” masculinity. In an interview with Astin from Mark Voger’s volume Monster Mash: The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze in America, 1957– 1972 (2015), the actor recalls:

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Charlie gave us about a paragraph to work with. There wasn’t a heck of a lot, except for suggestions of names for that character. He recommended either Repelli or Gomez, and we chose Gomez. I decided . . . that Gomez would be a character that was romantic and passionately in love with his wife.5

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The name “Gomez” provided for a “Latinness” that, for Astin as well as the series’ creators, conveyed a whole range of romantic passions and emotions that would not have been associated on-screen with other ethnic groups. Across various episodes of this two-season hit show, and in the films as well, Gomez tangos with fervor, lovingly calls his wife Morticia “querida,” and retains a genealogist in season 1 of the television program who traces his family tree back to Amazonian and Egyptian origins. It’s significant to note that the concept behind the Addams family was the staging of a nuclear family that represented the polar opposite of middle-class midcentury values. In Astin’s words, the Addamses were “strange on the outside, very healthy on the inside.”6 The decision to place Latino male sexual excitement at the forefront of Gomez and Morticia’s enduring marriage was a move Astin made to emphasize a conjugal vigor effortlessly associated with Latino male voracity in the eyes of viewing publics. Although Astin’s and Juliá’s portrayals of Gomez Addams are both rife with allusions to the stock Latin lover, this patriarch in a pinstripe suit does not meet the criteria for the Hollywood stereotype in significant ways. He is a family man with no inclination toward predation outside of his marriage to Morticia, and he is steadfast in his duty Figure 11.2. John Astin and Carolyn Jones as to nation and neighborhood: Gomez Gomez and Morticia Addams in The Addams Family (1964). Addams is a citizen who votes, supports

political campaigns, takes an interest in his children’s public-school education, and speaks English with native fluency (albeit, in Juliá’s case, with a Puerto Rican lilt). While the vortex of stereotypical Latin lust, swarthy looks, and man-of-leisure pastimes (he spends the day crashing model trains) are drawn from the Latin lover stereotype, his monogamy and his geographic fixity both distance him from the colonial formula.

So far I’ve discussed the ways in which Bela Lugosi, John Astin, and Raúl Juliá uphold— or subvert— the Latin lover paradigm in film and television. My final section turns to the queering potential of the Latin lover, which finds its punk rock counterpart in the musical practices and aesthetics of the punk rock pioneer Kid Congo Powers. A principal figure of punk’s formative late-’70s and early-’80s stretch, Kid Congo has had a career that has established him as a lasting countercultural icon. If Bela Lugosi’s performance represents the will of Universal Pictures to style Latino maleness with an emphasis on sexual predation, Chicano Dracula’s subaltern, hemisexualizing valences provide a disidentifying turn that rejects the dominant culture’s fixed construals of Latino masculinity and reappropriates, either wholly or partially, mainstream pop-culture tropes. The process of disidentification, as defined by José Esteban Muñoz, explains how massified, dehumanizing depictions of oppressed groups are reconfigured to open new possibilities for queer subjects. “Their emergence,” writes Muñoz of these radical reappropriations, “is predicated on their ability to disidentify with the mass public and instead, through this disidentification, contribute to the function of a counterpublic sphere.”7 Kid Congo (né Brian Tristan) helped found The Gun Club, played in the psychobilly band The Cramps, and played for nearly a decade with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds before launching his current primary musical project Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds. A second-generation Mexican American born in La Puente, California, in March 1959, he was married to Ryan Hill in June of 2013. In an interview with Jhoni Jackson, he discusses how his 2014 essay in the Huffington Post about being gay in punk helped to inspire a process of reflection: “I started being like, ‘I’m going to write about being gay in rock ‘n’ roll.’ I thought on a deeper level what that meant and my experience— about how punk was very gay in the beginning, and gay bars were the places punks went.”8 According to Kid Congo, before “queercore” emerged as its own movement, punk and queer cultures shared spatial and aesthetic families of resemblance. The rubric of disidentification helps to understand how Kid Congo’s current project, with four records between 2009 and 2016, orchestrates the

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Queering Chicano Dracula

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queering not only of the Chicanx garage-rock sound (he cites the seminal L.A. Chicano band Thee Midniters as an early musical influence), but also the queering of the legend of Dracula, as evinced in the gothic titles that constitute the succession of Monkey Birds recordings (all distributed by In the Red Records): Dracula Boots (2009), Gorilla Rose (2011), Haunted Head (2013), and La Araña Es la Vida (2016). Multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Kid Congo makes use of the Dracula motif in his album art and stage performances with the Pink Monkey Birds, reinterpreting the count’s legacy so that its communicative power becomes available to queer Chicanx audiences and listening publics. Many Chicanx particulars populate a Kid Congo Powers set, where harddriving garage-rock dissonance meets Beat generation– style poetics within the acoustic territories of 1960s Eastside party bands. Chicano garage-rock bands such as the(e) aforementioned Thee Midniters, Cannibal and the Headhunters, and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs emphasized the “Wooly Bully” style of jangling Fender guitars, overdriven Farfisa organs, gang vocals, and plaintive, mariachi-esque wails expressing barrio particulars (such as Sam Zamudio’s famous counting off of “Uno, dos, one, two, tres, cuatro” in Spanglish at the beginning of the “Wooly Bully” track). Sonically aligned with these rowdy Rolling-Stones-meet-Ritchie-Valens Eastside dance bands from the ’60s, the Pink Monkey Birds’ visual style further affirms fidelity

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Figure 11.3. Kid Congo Powers. Photograph by Mary Boukouvalas.

to Chicanx heritage. Frequently appearing in matching mechanic’s jackets with personalized name patches, the band members Kiki Solis, Mark Cisneros, and Ron Miller evoke both working-class pride and the prominence of car-club culture in L.A. Chicanx neighborhoods. The sounds and sights of 1960s-style matching band uniforms and frat party acoustics, however, are complicated by Kid Congo, who is known to don a James Dean– style leather biker’s cap and jacket, a Russian fur hat, or a parlor magician’s version of the Dracula aesthetic including a glittering cape and high-collared buttoned shirt. His fluid, nonnormative masculine stage presence comes across in his graceful physical vocabulary and orgasmic vocal style, which contrasts with, but does not contradict, the more retro Eastside swagger of his bandmates. In sum, Kid Congo Powers’s musical and visual practices bring elements together that disidentify with the racially negative massification of Lugosi’s Dracula, while infusing this gothic Latin lover with new conditions of existence in which the queer, the Chicanx, and the punk are free to interlock coterminously.

In a recent internet search I conducted for “Chicano Dracula,” the first image that surfaced was the album cover art for Dracula Boots. The grinning snarl of a youthful Kid Congo with vampire fangs stands out against a field of crimson in his signature, playfully macabre tradition. Observers are, of course, in on the joke. Dracula isn’t Chicano— he’s from Romania! That’s just silly! Well, yes and no. At the time of writing, the White House was taking the country into the third week of Trump’s government shutdown to pressure Congress to sign off on the cool 5.7 billion he claimed was needed to build his border wall. However, the wall, touted as the best way to thwart criminals and “special interest aliens” (alleged terrorists) from entering the United States, owes none of its popularity to any real evidence surrounding national safety or border security. Rather, to quote a recent Vox headline by Dara Lind, “‘Immigrants are coming over the border to kill you’ is the only speech Trump knows how to give.” While his one-note stumping glori- Figure 11.4. Kid Congo and the Pink fies xenophobia in general, his rhetoric clings Monkey Birds, Dracula Boots to particular tropes, particularly the enduring album cover.

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What the “Immigrants Are Coming Across the Border to Kill You” Trope Has to Do with Chicano Dracula

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script of sexual predation, to ignite hatred toward Latin American male border crossers. Throughout his various fearmongering speeches, Trump consistently stokes the racist belief that men of color are a sexual threat to white women. In fact, his astounding political ascent from reality television to the White House was built on his Mexicans-are-rapists-and-bad-hombres-solet’s-build-a-wall brand. My observations about the Latin lover’s vampiric odyssey through the horror genre and remarks about Kid Congo’s reinvention of the Dracula figure are not offered as a formalist romp through Stoker’s Dracula motifs. Instead, my aim has been to expose the seemingly subtle pathways along which popular media streams, from horror movies to celebrated family comedies to the breakfast-table cereal box, circulate and inculcate messages about Latino masculinity to stimulate fears of sexual predation by all Latin-tinged border crossers. On the other hand, creative resistance through the process of disidentification allows for the celebration of Dracula within a queer punk aesthetic. As a countercultural pioneer, and also a pioneer of radical intersectional identities, Kid Congo employs a performativity that refutes nearly two centuries of racist and heteronormative stylings of Dracula to align and elevate Latinx desires that have long been quarantined and repressed. His reverse demonization does not abandon the Lugosi-as-Latin-lover pattern, but reactivates the legend in a way that fends off reductive fantasies of predation.

Notes

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

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Stoker, Dracula, 26. Stoker, 34. Stoker, 22. Aldama, Latinx Superheroes, 4. Voger, Monster Mash, 79. Voger, 80. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 7. Jackson, “Punk Was Always Gay.”

Works Cited Aldama, Frederick Luis. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017. Browning, Tod, dir. Dracula. Universal Pictures, 1931. Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. American Zoetrope / Osiris Films, 1992.

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Dávila, Arlene. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Ingram, Rex, dir. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Metro Pictures, 1921. Jackson, Jhoni. “Punk Was Always Gay: Kid Congo Powers on the Genre’s Queer Beginnings.” Remezcla, June 30, 2016. Accessed January 9, 2019, https://remezcla.com/ features/music/kid-congo-powers-interview/. Lind, Dara. “‘Immigrants Are Coming over the Border to Kill You’ Is the Only Speech Trump Knows How to Give.” Vox, January 9, 2019. Accessed January 9, 2019, https:// www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18174782/trump-speech-immigration-border. Martinez-Cruz, Paloma, and John Cruz. “Hemisexualizing the Latin Lover: Film and Live Art Interpretations and Provocations.” In The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, 206–21. New York: Routledge, 2018. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Murnau, F. W., dir. Nosferatu. Prana Film, 1922. Sonnenfeld, Barry, dir. The Addams Family. Paramount Pictures, 1991. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1992. Voger, Mark. Monster Mash: The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze in America, 1957– 1972. Raleigh, N.C.: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2015. Wachowski, Lana, Lilly Wachowski, and J. Michael Straczynski. Sense8. Netflix, 2015.

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PART III Troubling Storyworlds Unsettling Masculinities

Chapter 12

THE HYPERPATRIARCHAL GAMES Machismo and Its Discontents in Contemporary Young-Adult Latinx Literature Lisa Sánchez González

Recent research on so-called “machismo”— the masculinity ideology popularly associated with the Latinx community— suggests that the hypermasculinity ascribed to Latino men is not a legitimate cultural trait but rather a mid-twentieth-century construct of American English. “Much of machismo’s linguistic purchase,” writes Benjamin Arthur Cowan, or “the reason it has become a global shorthand for hypermasculinity[,] stemmed from mid to late twentieth-century anxieties about hemispheric security, the Cold War, immigration, and overpopulation, particularly vis-à-vis the United States’ near neighbors, Mexico and Puerto Rico.”1 The term machismo (treated here as an English word) tends to pathologize not just Latinos but Latinas as well, who are depicted in scholarship as handmaidens to and victims of a toxic spectrum of extraordinarily patriarchal gender roles. Because it is so pervasive, deconstructing the machismo stereotype becomes an arduous task, especially in the realm of sociological and anthropological discourse, not to mention popular culture. There are literally thousands of articles and hundreds of books in the social sciences dedicated to making this pathology a scientific truism. Film, television, and other media regularly portray Latinx families and youth with a heavy-handed machista gloss. The profit motive of marketing and advertising in the United States likewise promotes the packaging and branding of “Latinidad” for popular consumption, rarely if ever questioning the stereotypical gender roles associated with Latinx communities. This packaging sells a certain image of Latinxs to Latinxs themselves, further entrenching these stereotypes in the minds of Latinxs as well. As Arlene Dávila argues, “Unlike the mainstream consumer— who is targeted in terms of class, generations, or gender— the Latino is continually reduced to an issue of ‘culture.’ ”2 Given the regular misrepresentation of Latinx culture in media and scholarship as revolving around hyperpatriarchal role-playing, common-sense notions of Latinidad become warped even among Latinxs. 199

In this context, Latinx literature— meaning texts written by Latinxs exploring Latinx life and culture— may be the only discursive field in which to counter the pathologizing force of mainstream cultural stereotyping. Arguably, this is especially important in the field of young adult (YA) literature, which forms the only sovereign textual mirror for Latinx young adult readers, and the only sovereign textual window through which non-Latinx young people can glimpse the full humanity of their Latinx peers beyond the usual hackneyed stereotypical view. The phrase sovereign textuality denotes creative writing’s unique autonomy in creating new fictions that more legitimately depict the humanity of subaltern peoples. Unmoored from the profit motives of film, television, and advertising, Latinx literature can and should be a discursive field that represents our humanity in the fullest sense possible. But does it? This essay looks at the representation of gender politics in four recent and socially engaged Latinx YA literary texts written by Chicanx, Boricua, and Cuban American writers: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Sáenz (2012); Juliet Takes a Breath, by Gabby Rivera (2016); The Education of Margot Sanchez, by Lilliam Rivera (2017); and Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, by Meg Medina (2013).3 Running the gamut from queer coming-of-age stories to cisgender teen angst tales, each of these texts explores what it is to grow up Latinx in the center of U.S. imperialism. Across the board, there are striking similarities and some radical differences in these four texts with regard to the underlying gender functions and dysfunctions in Latinx culture. While these literary texts together do not fully deconstruct gender stereotypes, they offer a much wider and more subtle spectrum of insights into Latinx sexuality and our shared humanity.

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Queer Emergence in the YA Novel

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Though set in radically different sexual, social, and geopolitical locations, both Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and Juliet Takes a Breath depict Latinx teen protagonists forming their queer identities. In both stories, the protagonist’s efforts to name and understand their sexual desires drive the novel’s plot and characterization. In the first book, Aristotle Mendoza is a fifteen-year-old Chicano in El Paso who does not yet fully comprehend his attraction to other boys and the discomfort this often causes him. His friendship and budding romance with the novel’s other major character, Dante Quintana, helps him begin to recognize and accept his sexuality by the time he enters his senior year of high school. In the second book, Juliet Milagros Palante, who is a nineteen-year-old Boricua, understands that she’s a woman who loves women but hasn’t quite figured out what that means beyond the confines of her Bronx neighborhood. To make sense of her place

in the world, she embarks on two pilgrimages— first to Portland, Oregon, where she interns for a radical white feminist writer in a rather privileged white community, then to Miami, where she finally finds a community of other queer people of color at a “Clipper Queerz party” her cousin Ava invites her to attend (Juliet, 206). In Sáenz’s Aristotle and Dante, Aristotle’s self-discovery pivots to a great extent around his relationships with his taciturn father and, especially toward the conclusion of the novel, with his absent older brother. While introducing Ari’s relationship with his parents, Sáenz depicts an intelligent and affectionate mother juxtaposed with a distant and uncommunicative father: Once, when I was about six or seven, I was really mad at my father because I wanted him to play with me and he just seemed so far away. It was like I wasn’t even there. I asked my mom with all my boyhood anger, “How could you have married that guy?” She smiled and combed my hair with her fingers. That was always her thing. She looked straight into my eyes and said calmly, “Your father was beautiful.” She didn’t even hesitate. I wanted to ask her what happened to all that beauty. (Aristotle, 11)

Sometimes I think my father has all these scars. On his heart. In his head. All over. It’s not such an easy thing being the son of a man who’s been to war. When I was eight, I overheard my mother talking to my Aunt Ophelia on the phone. “I don’t think that the war will ever be over for him.” Later, I asked my Aunt Ophelia if that was true. “Yes,” she said, “it’s true.” “But why won’t the war leave my dad alone?” “Because your father has a conscience,” she said. “What happened to him in the war?” “No one knows.” “Why won’t he tell?” “Because he can’t.” (Aristotle, 14)

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As the story develops and Ari’s sexuality begins to emerge, with heavy hints that foreshadow his attraction to other boys amid his confusion about it, Sáenz offers a brief backstory for his father, which accounts for his withdrawn personality and his difficulty parenting his youngest son. Ari’s older, absent brother is in prison, and neither of his parents want to talk about why he has been incarcerated. Mr. Mendoza is also a military veteran of the Vietnam War, who Sáenz suggests may suffer from some sort of post-traumatic syndrome:

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Ari’s resentment toward his father hinges around this “sadness” and his father’s apparent incapacity to show him parental affection. Throughout the novel, Ari is also somewhat obsessed with the big secret surrounding his brother Bernardo’s incarceration and his parents’ unwillingness to talk about it. But the core of the story is Ari and Dante’s difficult, sometimes painful, and consistently evolving romance, which is gorgeously and painstakingly depicted as an awakening that literally and figuratively heals both of them. Ari’s mother intuits her son’s deepening affection for Dante and lovingly encourages him to “come out.” Meanwhile Dante, who is self-aware and recognizes his sexuality, has parents who are completely comfortable with having a gay son. The Quintanas also accept Ari. Both mothers, in fact, seem to intuit that Dante and Aristotle’s romance will have a happy ending before their sons do. By the end of the novel, after a dramatic and violent plot climax, Ari is finally able to recognize that he is in love with Dante. But what is odd about the resolution is both the revelation of his brother’s story and the abrupt shift in his father’s character that occurs. Ari’s parents finally reveal to him the truth about Bernardo; when he was fifteen, he hired a prostitute, who turned out to be a transvestite. Enraged, Bernardo murdered the prostitute by beating her to death with his bare hands. Then, while in juvenile detention, Bernardo murdered another inmate, which extended his prison sentence into adulthood (Aristotle, 331– 32). This story is plopped into the concluding chapters in a strange, even perfunctory way; Bernardo, it seems, is just a bad seed, and Ari’s preoccupation with his story is solipsistic— he worries he may be a bad seed too after he attacks another teenager named Julian Enriquez, who, along with three other teens, assaulted Dante in a hate crime. His fears of being like Bernardo are assuaged by Dante and all the adults in his life. No one blames him for beating one of Dante’s attackers, ostensibly because such perps deserve that kind of retaliatory violence:

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“They hurt Dante,” [Ari] whispered. “You can’t even tell what he looks like. You should see his face. They cracked some of his ribs. They left him lying in an alley. Like he was nothing. Like he was a piece of trash. Like he was shit. Like he was nothing. And if he would have died, they wouldn’t have cared.” I started to cry. “You want me to talk? I’ll talk. You want me to tell you? I’ll tell you. He was kissing another boy.” (Aristotle, 318) When his parents hear his explanation of the confrontation, his father leaves to discuss the assault with a witness to Ari’s beating of Julian (Julian’s boss), and his mother finally shares the story of Bernardo with him. During this

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chapter, Ari apologizes for “hurting” his mother that day with his violence against Julian. Her response is: “No . . . I think I understand” (Aristotle, 322). What precisely she understands is not clear, but in a sense this scene absolves Ari of any wrongdoing, again because of the heinousness of the crime Julian and the others committed against Dante. Then, shortly afterward, another perfunctory scene takes place in which his father finally speaks about his time in Vietnam. Essentially, he explains he suffers from survivor’s guilt for having left a wounded comrade behind. Mr. Mendoza’s character undergoes an inexplicably sudden transformation; after telling his story of trauma, he becomes loquacious, loving, and supportive of his youngest child. In fact, his words become the catalyst for Ari’s recognition of his love for Dante. In this pivotal scene, Mr Mendoza says: “Ari, the problem isn’t just that Dante’s in love with you. The real problem— for you, anyway— is that you’re in love with him” (Aristotle, 348). Then Mr. Mendoza launches into an uncharacteristically long and thoughtful discussion with Ari about his son’s love for Dante. What’s missing in both the story of Bernardo and the story of Mr. Mendoza is substance and plausible character development. Bernardo is basically a stock character, a sociopathic killer, the bad seed who stokes Ari’s fears as he navigates his adolescence and developing sexual consciousness. Like Margot Sanchez’s brother Junior (discussed below) and countless stock characters like him in Latinx literature, Bernardo is a flat criminal character introduced for no real purpose other than to create a disturbing plot effect for the Mendoza family. Likewise, though Mr. Mendoza becomes a caring, mindful father in the closing pages of the novel, his abrupt transformation is awkward. It’s as if Sáenz wanted to redeem the flat father figure in the novel’s closing moments to create a tidy happy ending but failed to make his redemption believable. Perhaps the tight tying together of loose ends is predictable in a YA text; we might expect it, given the investment Sáenz’s novel has in a perfectly happy ending with absolute closure for the protagonist. In many ways, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is an idealistic novel, one that has clearly appealed to a wide and appreciative audience. Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath, on the other hand, offers no such simplicity or idealism. Hilariously funny and extraordinarily bold in its depiction of Latina lesbian teen angst, Rivera’s text refuses to pander to the usual YA requirements of “clean” language and simple happy or tragic endings. Instead, the novel complicates each and every issue that the protagonist faces, and Rivera’s depiction of the way in which Juliet ponders these complexities with wit and erudition shows a deep respect for the reader’s intellectual and emotional maturity. Unlike Ari, Juliet confronts homophobia from her family. Her fears revolve around her mother. Yet she is determined to ride it out, come what may:

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I needed air. I wasn’t ashamed of myself. I wasn’t ashamed of being in love with the cutest girl on the planet, but my family was my world and my mom was the gravitational pull that kept me stuck to this Earth. What would happen if she let me go? (Juliet, 12) When she tells her Twix-eating, Animorphs-loving, nerdburger younger brother Melvin about her plans to “come out” at the family dinner table, he is more than understanding: “It has to be tonight, brother. I’ll die if I don’t speak up but they’ll kill me if I tell them.” . . . “I doubt they’ll kill you. It’s not like Mom and Dad are cyborgs that’ll disintegrate you with death rays.” . . . “Duh, brother, but I mean, like, die in my soul.” . . . “Spiritual death is unlikely, Juliet. Your soul would just find another creature to attach itself to and then you’d be a falcon or something. And no one cares if falcons are gay,” he said. (Juliet, 19) Melvin is a kind and caring fourteen-year-old character, a brother whose main flaw is eating too much candy. When Juliet does announce to the family at dinner that night that she has been dating her girlfriend Lainie for the past year and that she is “definitely a lesbian,” her father, aunts, and grandmother seem unperturbed by the news, but her mother indeed flips out as Juliet expected. In the middle of their argument:

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Mom and I stared at each other and I felt like I was falling. “But, Juliet,” she said, “you’ve never had a boyfriend, so how would you know? All you know are these neighborhood boys. You haven’t given any of the boys at your college a chance. You might like Lainie, but it’s not the same thing. I promise you that.” “Love, I love her. You don’t know anything about my feelings.” “I know you better than you think I do and this isn’t you, Juliet.” (Juliet, 26)

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Juliet must leave after dinner to catch a plane to Portland, Oregon, where she has a summer internship with Harlowe Brisbane, the author of a lesbian manifesto titled Raging Flower, which encourages women to “walk in this world with the spirit of a ferocious cunt” (Juliet, 12). Intrigued and inspired by the

radical feminism she discovered in this book, Juliet began a correspondence with Brisbane that resulted in the invitation to the internship. Importantly, as Juliet begins her first voyage of self-discovery in the novel, everyone in her family seems at peace with her lesbian identity. Everyone, that is, except for her mother, whose acceptance she craves the most. Rivera depicts the community Juliet encounters in Portland as nearly homogeneously white, obsessed with a brand of political correctness she is unfamiliar with, and low on personal hygiene skills. On her first bus ride into town, accompanied by a fascinating character named Phen (Brisbane’s housemate), she is shocked by the stench of unwashed bodies:

Then, overcome with guilt for being so judgmental toward the hippies, Juliet decides these unwashed bus riders are simply “earthy” (Juliet, 64). Yet this passage is important in outlining the dimensions of the culture shock she feels in Portland. Unlike the “blanquitos” she knows from the East Coast, the “hippies” she encounters here have a different culture altogether, one that is alien and, at least at first, indecipherable. Though in the end Juliet will discover that the racism she’s used to in New York and Maryland is not absent in Portland’s white culture, at first she has trouble recognizing the cultural codes that mask it. Juliet’s companion on the bus, Phen, is a sanctimoniously queer fellow who grills her on her “preferred gender pronouns,” using nomenclature that she’s never heard of and trying to make her feel inadequately lesbian as a result of her ignorance of these terms. Juliet observes:

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I sat there breathing all crazy and feeling demasiado grossed out. How was I supposed to survive here? These Portlanders were an entirely different breed of white people. . . . I was used to white people that embodied the suburban American dream. White people like Lainie’s parents, who wished their daughters weren’t dating me but tolerated it and engaged me in discussions about affirmative action and how I benefitted from it. White people that informed me that my fellow Latinos were “genetically more violent” than the average white boy all while inviting me to their summer home on the Cape. I was comfortable with white people that only sweat during a friendly game of tennis with their law school buddies. . . . The devils you know and whatnot. These cats over here made me wish I had santos to pray to for guidance. I didn’t know how to navigate hippie white. (Juliet, 62–63)

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I was surrounded by hippies and the only person in the world who knew my name on this bus was sitting across from me speaking in another language. His judgment slid into my heart and carved a space for itself. Trans? Ze? Those words weren’t a part of my vocabulary. No one in the Bronx or even in college asked me if I was a Ze or a trans. Was that even how they fit into sentences? I felt small, constricted, and stupid, very stupid. (Juliet, 65)

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This episode fits into a pattern of behavior that Juliet will later recognize as the crux of her personal crisis in the novel: that she lives in a world in which everyone else wants to define her, leaving no space or energy for her to define herself, and that she is in some ways volunteering to be colonized by not writing her own destiny and taking control of her own story. This realization begins to take form when Harlowe gives a talk at a bookstore in which she defines Juliet more or less as a ghetto rat who has made good against all the odds (drug addict neighbors, unsupportive family, etc.) thanks to an elite white and feminist education (Juliet, 178– 79). Shocked by this misperception of who she really is and where she really comes from, and feeling betrayed by her mentor, who she thinks may only be using her as a token woman of color to impress her white fans, she books a flight to Miami to visit her cousin Ava. The Clipper Queerz party Juliet attends with Ava is the turning point of the novel. Finally Juliet finds a community of queer people of color, a community that feels like home and family to her. Suddenly everything begins to make sense to her, even the bad experience she had in Portland. Something a character named Florencio says to Ava prompts this realization:

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“Well at least to me, masculinity is forever linked to the feminine and to all other forms of gender expression. It’s only damaging and violent because we have elevated it above everything else. Society up and gave masculine people, more specifically cis white men, all of the power and resources and that’s where the trauma comes in. It’s not masculinity in and of itself,” Florencio said. “But, to be perfectly honest I’d rather spend my energy exploring and elevating divine feminine energy.” I stood there with Luz Ángel’s arm still around my shoulder and took in what Florencio said. Instead of feeling blocked and confused like I’d been in Portland, something clicked and I got it. (Juliet, 210–11) After her Miami trip, Juliet returns to Portland. She phones her mother, who has finally come to terms with her daughter’s lesbianism. Her mother then

offers her sage advice about Harlowe Brisbane: “Let go of whatever expectations you had of this woman and her book and write your own. . . . This world is for you to reinvent” (Juliet, 236). Thus the portrait of the Boricua lesbian author as a young woman comes to a close in Juliet Takes a Breath. In daring and brutally honest form, Gabby Rivera deconstructs the coloniality of Juliet’s being and launches her into what looks like a promising life as a creative writer. Crucially, Juliet in the end recognizes that the source of her oppression is systemic and can only be defeated by an epistemic revolution in her own head and her own writing. Supported by her loving working-class Bronx family, her liberation is hardwon and imminent.

Teen Angst in the Cisgender Latina YA Novel

Of the two, Camille is the bitchier one. I’ve never met anyone so hypercritical of everything (except maybe my mom). Sometimes my Bronx accent comes out too strong. Or the color of my lipstick clashes with my outfit. Camille never hesitates in giving her opinion. There are no filters. Serena warned me that Camille was hard-core. I had no idea how hard. Camille . . . lives the most glamorous life. Designer clothes. A personal credit card. Everything I wish I could have. I tolerate her minor jabs at me because I want her life. (Education, 73) Margot’s initial crisis in the novel is trying to figure out a way to get to the Hamptons to join her friends at a classmate’s beach house for a big summer party. Her foil in the novel is Jasmine, a “cashierista” at the supermarket and an aspiring rapper, whom Margot suspects of having an affair with her brother Junior. Jasmine dreams of leaving the Bronx, and while Margot

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The protagonist in The Education of Margot Sanchez, by Lilliam Rivera, is not a particularly likeable character. Margot— a.k.a. “La Princesa”— is the epitome of what kids on the street would call “bougie”; her class aspirations are her only aspirations, at least at the beginning of the novel. Her parents, who have made a comfortable living as supermarket owners in the Bronx, have sent her to an elite private high school called Somerset Prep. In an effort to fit in with the “popular girls,” Margot goes on an unauthorized shopping spree using her father’s credit card. Her punishment is to work at the family store over the summer rather than vacationing in the Hamptons with her friends Serena and Camille, who are equally unsympathetic characters:

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recognizes that they share the same desire to succeed, she thinks Jasmine’s chances are next to nil. Although Margot has a budding romance during the summer with a neighborhood activist named Moises, the explicit object of her desire is a wealthy classmate named Nick, the same one throwing the party. When she manages to get to the Hamptons, she and Nick get inebriated and have sex on the beach. But the scene is kind of ugly, as Margot explains: On paper, my first time could very well be described as romantic. I was with a sweet boy on the beach. I could say, with the waves crashing and a half-moon. The reality is more like a wrestling match played on fast forward with me trying to avoid Nick’s sloppy tongue. I thought being with Nick would banish the thought of Moises. That didn’t happen. What I have to show for my first time is sand up my ass and emptiness. (Education, 211)

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As Margot begins to recognize the “emptiness” of this and many of her other desires, the situation at home becomes dire. Jasmine, it turns out, is pregnant, but Margot soon discovers that the child’s father is not her brother but her father (Education, 238ff.). What’s worse, her mother knows all about her father’s infidelities and doesn’t really care (Education, 254ff.). Her brother is also in trouble; he has stolen cash from the supermarket to buy and sell (and use) crack, blaming the missing cash on an employee, Oscar, who is then fired— Oscar is blamed as well for the missing cases of beer that Margot stole to take to the Hamptons for Nick’s beach party (Education, 232ff.). As the novel comes to a close, Margot has a bout of self-pity and remorse. As she agonizes over her father’s perfidy and her brother’s drug addiction, she realizes the error of her own ways:

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Wait. I’m a liar too. I used Nick that night. Maybe I did him a favor with the beers but the rest of it? That was me. Truth be told, I used Moises too. I tried to play him the night we hung out on the roof. I knew deep down my friends and family would never accept him. And when I got to know him, I wasn’t brave enough to allow myself to get closer. Instead, I turned to Nick. How different am I than my father, than my brother? I’m well on my way to following in their footsteps. (Education, 242) The novel ends with a repentant Margot inviting Moises to lunch and apologizing for treating him badly. Like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of

the Universe, The Education of Margot Sanchez revolves around a protagonist whose brother and father pose as stock characters driving a heavy familial plot. Setting aside the superficiality of the protagonist’s life (along with the tediousness that this superficiality creates for many readers), the novel tends to reinforce stereotypes of Latinx hypermasculinity and criminality. And unlike Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath, Lilliam Rivera’s depiction of the travails of a young Boricua woman from the Bronx is, in a word, lackluster; one wonders what the editors at Simon and Schuster were considering the book’s readership would be. Meg Medina’s Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass is a beautifully wrought novel that explores the anxieties of a young woman who is being bullied by another young woman for no apparent logical reason. The story opens with the protagonist, Piedad “Piddy” Sanchez, hearing about Yaqui Delgado’s intentions to harm her. Piddy is attending a new school and, five weeks in, she discovers that she has a target on her back. Piddy’s mother is Cuban American and her absent father is from the Dominican Republic. And while we might expect that the novel would revolve around the threat posed by Yaqui, the story is primarily about Piddy’s longing for her father, or her desire to find at least some clue to who he is and what the story of her parents’ relationship is. Piddy’s mother and her best friend Lila have destroyed any photographic evidence of her father. As she laments early in the novel, “I could dig to China, and I won’t find any photos of him. It’s like he never existed at all” (Yaqui, 24). Piddy’s preoccupation with her absent father appears to be a lifelong fixation. As she explains, his absence has always haunted her:

All that Piddy knows about her father is that he was a musician: “He played the organ every Sunday at Saint Michael’s Church, the Spanish masses at eleven and two. He left before I was born. They were never married” (Yaqui, 52). Pitying Piddy, Lila finally tells her the truth: that her father was already married when he met her mother, and that he abandoned them to return to his DR family when she became pregnant (Yaqui, 67, 202– 3). The bulk of the novel deals with Piddy’s discovery of the truth about her father’s betrayal. He is a character who has no real presence in the novel

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When I was little I played a private game called Who’s Papi? I could play it anywhere. The supermarket. The bus. Out on the street. I’d spot a man and imagine he was my dad in disguise, following me from a safe distance. I’d pretend he would introduce himself and say, “Piddy! I’m so sorry about everything. I’ve been thinking about you all these years.” (Yaqui, 38)

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except in his absence, therefore absolutely no character development occurs. For Piddy, her father is a source of shame for his mother and for her. She bemoans the fact that he made her mother a “chusma”— a derogatory term for a loose woman (Yaqui, 67). While most of the novel’s plot weaves the story of Piddy’s absent father, very little attention is given to her actually present antagonist, Yaqui Delgado, who is portrayed as a stereotypically violent and inexplicably hardened young woman from the projects. As Piddy describes Yaqui, through her own eyes and the eyes of her mother:

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When I look across the yard, a jolt of fear runs through me. Of all people, it’s Yaqui Delgado, live and in the flesh, like a living nightmare that’s stepped out into the real world. . . . I keep my eyes down, hoping Yaqui is too preoccupied to spot us as we go by. Sometimes I swear Ma’s going to get us killed with her mouth. I’m hurrying, but she won’t let up. Decency is her favorite topic these days— or the lack of it. . . . “Son unas cualquieras,” she mutters. Nobodies. No culture, no family life, illiterates, she means. The kind of people who make her cross to the other side of the street if she meets them in the dark on payday. They’re her worst nightmare of what a Latin girl can become in the United States. . . . Yaqui and me, we should be two hermanas, a sisterhood of Latinas. We eat the same food. We talk the same way. We come from countries that are like rooms in one big house, but, instead, we’re worlds apart. (Yaqui, 56)

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How precisely Yaqui and Piddy might reconcile their differences in the novel is never explored; that potential sisterhood is a nonstarter. Instead, Yaqui remains a one-dimensional character, a violent Latina raging against the world and any person who poses a threat to her clearly pathological understanding of social interaction. Why are Piddy and Yaqui “worlds apart”? The only clue to an answer is that Piddy considers herself the beneficiary of some sort of probationary whiteness. Early in the novel, she describes herself in the following way: “White skinned. No accent. Good in school. I’m not [the] idea of a Latina at all” (Yaqui, 6). At the end of the novel, the solution to Piddy’s victimization is a transfer to another high school, further foreclosing any resolution to the actual conflict at hand in the novel. What’s most intriguing about Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass is precisely this lack of character development in what should be the antagonist. Instead, the absent father figure is the fulcrum around which Piddy’s story

unfolds. Such a curious thing, this hypermasculine presence in absentia that occupies so much of Piddy’s attention. One wonders whether the story might have been more feminist— or simply more interesting— if Yaqui were actually explored as a dynamic character whose relational dialectic with Piddy mattered.

After analyzing the peripheral relationships that the protagonists of these novels have with brothers, fathers, and other masculine types, as well as the women in their spheres, something needs to be said about the delicate work of literary criticism dealing with the sexual and racial performativity of characters in fiction. Every literary critic has her limits; fiction opens windows and doors to experiences that the reader or critic may not share, and therefore its characters may be liable to misreading or overdetermining as exempla of the sexualized/racialized Other. This is particularly relevant when teaching these texts in a college classroom, where students may have lived experiences that are even more radically different from or similar to those of the characters in these texts. A group reading experience can produce a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance, which is difficult to navigate in an environment that is open to multiple and even contradictory interpretations. Likewise, one learns her own limits quickly in a classroom where students find, for the first time, a mirror image of their own gendered, familial, or ethnoracial experiences in the books assigned; finding those mirrors can be liberating and life-affirming in unique ways and vexing in others. So, as we critique the dimensions of the gender and racial roles performed in literary texts, we must be mindful that certain gaps or blank spots may surface in our students’ (and our own) readings of YA works by diverse writers. The beauty, relevance, and literary merit of the works under consideration here is beyond question. The sovereign terrain of fiction is precisely that: sovereign. Latinx authors— all authors in a bona fide democracy, in fact— can and should write their own truths, whether readers enjoy them or not. Yet we can and should critique what we see as problematic patterns in this body of literature. Diversity should never be an alibi for stereotyping or any other aesthetic or ethical flaws in creative writing.

Notes 1. 2.

Cowan, “How Machismo Got Its Spurs,” 606. Dávila, Latino Spin, 87.

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A Closing Caveat

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3.

Textual references to these four novels are cited by page number in the main text, identified as Aristotle, Juliet, Education, or Yaqui. For full bibliographical information, please see Sáenz, Aristotle; G. Rivera, Juliet; L. Rivera, Education; and Medina, Yaqui.

Works Cited

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Cowan, Benjamin Arthur. “How Machismo Got Its Spurs—In English: Social Science, Cold War Imperialism, and the Ethnicization of Hypermasculinity.” Latin American Research Review 52, no. 4 (2017): 606–22. Dávila, Arlene. Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race. New York: NYU Press, 2008. Medina, Meg. Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. Somerville, Mass.: Candlewick Press, 2013. Rivera, Gabby. Juliet Takes a Breath. Riverdale, N.Y.: Riverdale Avenue Books, 2016. Rivera, Lilliam. The Education of Margot Sanchez. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.

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Chapter 13

THE UNCERTAIN HARBOR OF HOME Fragments, Familia, and Failure in Manuel Muñoz’s “Bring Brang Brung” William Orchard

On the evening of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Houston’s Fox affiliate, like many television newsrooms that evening, featured a panel of pundits who responded to the election returns. Among these pundits was Tony Diaz, the writer and activist who started Librotraficante, an organization founded in reaction to Arizona’s ethnic studies ban that dedicated itself to smuggling books by and about Chicanxs back into the state where they had been prohibited. On the Houston Fox affiliate’s election-night roundtable, Diaz loses his composure as he responds to the sight of Florida’s electoral college votes going to the Republican candidate and lays the blame on his Cuban American and Puerto Rican “brothers and sisters” who failed to turn out in needed numbers. He follows this indictment by declaring, “Guess what? It’s Chicano time . . . When you refer to me, I’m Chicano . . . and we’re going to get radical because the system is rigged.”1 Diaz’s blame may be misplaced and hyperbolic— more an impassioned reaction to the shock of the election than a reasoned position— but his passionate response indicates a fissure between terms and identifications like Latino and Chicano. Here his disenchantment with “Latino” as a label that failed to achieve its promise of enhanced coalitional strength and politically progressive futures results in his disavowal of the term in favor of “Chicano,” a category that promises a more “radical” position from which to critique, challenge, and transform the status quo of the United States. Although Diaz’s turn toward Chicano incites laughter from his fellow panelists, I want to take this turn seriously as a position that is not a nostalgic evocation of an activist past but rather vital for the contemporary moment. Indeed, this concern for the future of the category “Chicana/o/x” motivated an essay collection that I co-edited recently with Yolanda Padilla, titled Bridges, Borders, and Breaks. In the introduction to that collection, we discussed the future of Chicana/o/x studies in the face of the transnational turn in American studies and the rise of Latina/o/x studies, asking, “Has Latina/o 213

studies rendered Chicana/o studies obsolete or assigned it the role of a period marker? . . . In what ways does Latina/o studies demand a rearticulation of Chicana/o studies’ political, aesthetic, and cultural aims? How does ‘Chicano’ remain generative as the historical and geographical parameters of the field change?”2 The occasion for this volume was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ramón Saldívar’s Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference, and, in the interview with Saldívar that concluded our collection, we posed these questions to him. His answers both provide a way of reframing Tony Diaz’s election-night response and underscore the need to scrutinize new invocations of “Chicana/o/x” in contemporary activism, art, and literature. In his answer to these questions, Saldívar replies that he “never saw or valued Chicano studies in isolation,” but rather as a field that worked in a comparative context that “had to take into account adjacent conditions” in other fields and disciplines:

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That’s why I thought that “Chicano” was a useful term, and Chicano studies a useful field, but always with the qualifier that you could not think of this as something essentially different, essentially unique, essentially valuable. It wasn’t. It was contextually valuable.3

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He further develops his answer by claiming that the challenge the field faces is “to reassert its centrality to a new set of problematics” or “to be a part of another set of questions and to retain its urgency that way.”4 He sees these new questions emerging from contemporary activism such as that of the DREAM Act generation, who are thinking through issues related to migration, “the traumatic disruption of families, [and] the criminalization of the desire to work” in a context that “is different from the context of the labor migrations of the ’50s and ’60s.”5 If we approach Diaz’s comments after the election from this vantage point, we might see his turn to “Chicano” not as retro-political but as a way of repositioning himself in order to diagnose and get critical distance on not only “the rigged system” of the United States but also the failure of the category “Latino” to fulfill its promise. One way of figuring the critical potential of Chicana/o/x studies in relation to Latina/o/x studies, then, is as a contrapuntal position from which to interrogate the category “Latino,” especially those deployments that place it in the service of the market, neoliberalism, or governmentality broadly. Although not all instantiations of “Latina/o/x” function in this way, scholars such as Arlene Dávila have long alerted us to how the category is vulnerable to this kind of appropriation. In Latinos, Inc., her study of the Latino marketing industry, Dávila notes that, despite many attempts to forge politically pro-

The Un cer t a in Ha rbor of Hom e

gressive pan-Latina/o/x coalitions, these attempts at unity “[remain] tenuous at best.”6 As she explains, “Latinos’ marketing power may be amply discussed in mainstream society, but their political power is yet to parallel the exuberant excitement that they trigger among marketers.”7 In this way, some prominent versions of Latinidad conform with and are incorporated into contemporary dominant economic logics. “Latino” promises visibility and expanding markets ready for exploitation while also distancing the category from some of the activist demands of particular groups like Puerto Ricans or Chicanas, Chicanos, and Chicanxs. If “Latino” risks an estrangement from the radical projects of imagining new socialities and of overcoming situations marked by inequality and discrimination, the return to radical histories of particular groups could both provide positions from which to question the “progress” promised in neoliberal invocations of “Latino” and also open spaces for grassroots thinking from which new pan-Latina/o/x coalitions can be forged. In the realm of narrative, one of the most compelling voices to recognize the radical potential in the legacies of Chicana/o/x life is that of Manuel Muñoz, whose stories set in California’s Central Valley depict Chicana/o/x worlds while also revising what “Chicana/o/x” means by adapting it to new historical, economic, and political contexts. His adjustments to our understanding often occur in his representations of family. In addition to praising his craft as “subtle” and “understated” and remarking on the representation of gay and Latina/o/x life, early reviewers of Muñoz’s fiction focused on his depictions of family. Reviewing his first short story collection Zigzagger (2003) for The American Book Review, Lori O’Dea notes how the stories “made plain . . . how urgent . . . family connections are.”8 In an interview with Muñoz shortly after the publication of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, Daniel Olivas of La Bloga identifies the strained parent-child bond as one of the recurring themes in Muñoz’s fiction.9 For many of these reviewers, Muñoz’s treatment of the fragility of familial attachments is something that renders the work universal, lifting it out of the particulars of Latina/o/x and gay experience. However, I would counter that the family is the location where Muñoz’s work becomes highly particular and most overtly political. Indeed, if we situate Muñoz’s work in a Chicana/o/x tradition, his fiction can be read alongside a large body of criticism by figures like Alma García, Maxine Baca Zinn, and Richard T. Rodríguez (to name but a few), who have examined the family as a key and problematic site for the articulation of Chicana/o/x politics. In Next of Kin, Rodríguez traces the centrality of la familia to Chicano/a/x cultural politics, a formation that is in some sense haunted by its heteropatriarchal origins even as it has been critiqued and reimagined by feminist and queer scholars.10 Rodríguez “illustrate[s] la familia as a genealogical tradition that entails successive shifts contingent upon

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changing kinship discourses and formations.”11 In Muñoz’s fiction, family is not some natural form that is under threat of erasure, but rather a site that is continually being negotiated, reimagined, and extended beyond the bonds of consanguinity. Queer theory offers useful paradigms for conceptualizing kinship relations beyond the bounds of biology and bloodlines. Elizabeth Freeman, for instance, notes how kinship might be thought of less in terms of biological ties and dependencies and more in terms of “techniques of renewal,” which she defines as “the process by which bodies and the potential for physical and emotional attachment are created, transformed, and sustained over time.”12 In this sense, kinship is about forms of belonging that allow a group “to ‘be long,’ to endure in corporeal form over time, beyond procreation.”13 In what follows, I offer a reading of Muñoz’s story “Bring Brang Brung,” the second story in his 2008 collection The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which imagines a way of renewing the Chicana/o/x family, making it relevant to the contemporary moment while also altering the terms by which we understand it. The story accomplishes this by staging a conflict between the Latino and the Chicana/o/x family, reconstituting the Chicana/o/x family from the fragments of both while locating the political force of Chicanidad in its queer aspects, especially in its embrace of failure, rejection of normativity, and decentering of heteropatriarchal masculinity. “Bring Brang Brung” follows Martín Grijalva and his son Adán as they return to Fresno from San Francisco after Martín’s partner, Adrian, swiftly and unexpectedly dies of an aneurysm in an airport hotel in Denver, Colorado. Martín’s initial move to San Francisco was motivated by both sexuality and economics. On the one hand, San Francisco provided Martín a location where he could live openly as a gay man, outside the scrutinizing gaze of his mother, who holds him up as an exemplar of familial excellence but also severs ties with him when he cohabits with a man. On the other hand, San Francisco stands as a symbol of Martín’s class mobility, his ability to propel himself out of what he perceives as a culture of failure in Fresno. For Martín, this culture of failure is most embodied in his sister Perla and her friends, whom he recalls as a “whole brood of mean, belligerent girls whose troublemaking began with skipping school and ended with pregnancies by the tenth grade, the father-boys nowhere to be found” (27).14 His assessment of this group marks their distance from the norm of domestic coupledom and is also underscored with a hint of misogyny, which, as Richard T. Rodríguez notes, can persist in queer communities dominated by men.15 When he returns to Fresno after more than a decade away, Martín is surprised to see one of these mean, belligerent girls, Candi Leal, working as a “grown woman in a respectable job” at the school where he enrolls his son (26). Still, Martín feels himself

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superior. The narrator tells us that he knew “he had the upper hand” (27). As the scene at the school closes, the reader is told, “People had made their mistakes a long time ago, when they were young and hadn’t known better, and he was perfectly willing to remind them if it came to that” (27). Fearing that Candi will inquire about his affairs, particularly the circumstances that contributed to his return to Fresno, Martín has a reaction that is both defensive and rooted in a past that he remains attached to because it grants him power. Another way of viewing his reaction is to see it as premised on a version of normativity that encodes certain sexual practices (in this case, single motherhood, which I will return to in a moment) as aberrant and uses his gender and economic privilege to make claims about respectability. At the beginning of the story, then, Martín exemplifies what Lisa Duggan has termed homonormativity, a way of life that articulates “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising . . . a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.”16 This homonormativity is evinced not only in Martín’s condescension toward Candi and his prior San Francisco domestic life with his partner and son, but also in the story’s very narration, which is coy about Martín’s sexuality, something that Martín’s partner’s ambiguously gendered name, Adrian, allows the story to indulge. Significantly, Adrian is Cuban American, and I suggest that another way in which Martín’s homonormativity is figured is in this Latino union.17 Both homonormativity and Latino coalitions are associated with specious narratives of progress. Indeed, it’s only at the end of the story, after Martín’s worldview has been altered by his renewed encounter with his sister in Fresno, that he is able to acknowledge the “boredom and isolation” of the couple form he craved, as well as his own ambivalent attachment to his son. As he recalls these feelings, the story concludes, “All day it rained. Nothing changed. It rained all day” (46). With this, an image of stasis is presented that contradicts the progressive promise in the couple form and the Latino union. Significantly, this doubt about the comfort and security of his domestic life only surfaces at the end of the story, as though it is something that could not be admitted until he learned new ways of imagining his existence. “Nothing changed” is both false and ironic: Martín has this thought when Adrian departs for Denver, which is the last time Martín will see him. Adrian’s death shatters the homonormative forms— like the family and class status— that Martín is growing bored with, a shattering that dispels the myth of progress by forcing Martín back to his hometown as he attempts to reassemble his life. The story tracks Martín’s education out of this normative mode of thinking and toward understanding the similarities his life shares with those of the “belligerent, mean girls” whom he initially dismissed. His investments

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in normativity are queered through his encounter with these single Chicana mothers. In her classic essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,” political scientist Cathy Cohen argues that figures like single mothers, who inhabit a “nonnormative heterosexuality” that denies them access to heteronormativity’s privileges, could be brought into powerful relation with queer political projects. Cohen argues that by recognizing the shared marginalization of queer persons and nonnormative heterosexuals, “we may begin to envision a new political formation in which one’s relation to dominant power serves as the basis for unity for radical coalition work in the twenty-first century.”18 In his discussions of Muñoz’s earlier fiction collection Zigzagger, Ernesto Javier Martínez notes how Muñoz’s work is alive to the ways in which queerness is intersubjective, produced through the queer subject’s encounter with others who may not share their same-sex desire but who bear witness to and directly and indirectly shape the social worlds queers experience. In narratives that are focalized through nonqueer characters, Martínez observes, Muñoz “shifts the site of queer enunciation” by making that character witness or articulate a “tacit subjectivity,” to use Carlos Decena’s phrase, that the queer Chicano subject himself is unable to speak.19 In this way, Muñoz’s fiction demonstrates time and again how queer worlds demand the participation of queer subjects and others. However, in “Bring Brang Brung,” the story is focalized through a gay subject who learns his queerness by unlearning the forms of economic, gender, and ethnic privilege he seemed so willing to wield in his initial encounter with Candi Leal at the office of his son’s school. In this story, the gay character Martín is put in the position of the witness, and what his witnessing accomplishes is a new identification not only with nonnormative sexualities but also with Chicana/o/x communities that have persisted through a series of setbacks and disruptions. The person who dispenses this counterpedagogy that makes Martín’s learning possible is his sister Perla. Prior to arriving in Fresno, Martín and Perla have a tense relationship that is in part attributable to the favoritism that their mother expressed toward Martín. The mother “pointed to [the] older brother as an example. And, of course, Martín deliberately set an impossible standard, out of sheer distaste for his sister’s belligerence, her selfishness, her disrespect, and her stupidity” (32). Perla’s response to her brother upon his return is interesting for how it invokes and dispels the tensions between the two. When she sees Adán, she exclaims, “Look what your aunt Pearl has for you,” before handing the boy a stuffed purple elephant (29). The Anglicization of her name signals how Perla sees Martín and his son as distant from their Chicana/o origins. If this greeting is generous while at the same time registering difference, the cautious hug “that felt more like letting go” that she offers her brother communicates a willingness to release the

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animosities that marked their earlier lives together (29). More than a sisterly act of generosity, this scene of “letting go” is also a recognition of Martín’s altered circumstances and the assistance that he will need to navigate the new demands of his present life. If we also read this scene of “letting go” as a scene of loss, then this marks one of many moments in Muñoz’s stories where loss is generative and permits characters to rearticulate their attachments. While Martín was interested in exerting his superiority over his sister when he was a younger man, he now understands how his sister’s belligerence can be a desired quality. After Adrian’s death, Martín has to contend with Adrian’s family, who made legal claims on the money that Adrian left for him and Adán. He loses, faces a severe financial downturn, and retreats, unemployed, to Fresno. As he reflects on that period of his life, he expresses a desire for his sister’s presence: “If Perla had been with him, maybe her defensive, angry way of seeing the world would have prepared him for the legalities and the long, fruitless contesting of beneficiary money. Perla would have said he hadn’t fought hard enough, that you get only what you fight for, and whatever he lost to Adrian’s family was the result of his own stupidity” (28). In this remembrance, Martín distances himself from some of the normative privilege he invokes earlier in the narrative. Here, Perla possesses the kind of masculine aggression that might produce a result in the financial wrangling Martín had to engage in with Adrian’s family, but this same aggression is associated with Perla’s failure during adolescence, a comportment that distanced her from social norms and marked her as a “bad” girl in town. In contrast, Martín’s passivity, his willingness to accept and accommodate the demands made on him, may have propelled his social mobility, but it leaves him unequipped to maneuver successfully through moments of crisis. The experience of a downturn in his financial fortunes also forces Martín to revise his understandings of success and failure. He changes his mind about finances: “It was humbling to face what was happening to his finances, and, for once, to admit that circumstances could overwhelm a person. Always, Martín had been a person who believed that choices governed your road” (28). He makes a familiar shift here from seeing financial success as a sign of exceptional individual talents to understanding how it might be determined from without, by “circumstances” (to use the story’s language), or by a series of historical, social, and economic contexts in which one operates. However, instead of seeing himself as the victim of structures, Martín identifies with Perla and her friends: “In the end, he was the same as those girls retreating back to the valley. He would have to make do” (29). Although he has been estranged from his family, he finds community or solidarity with single mothers who understand the importance of persisting when ideal formulations of family collapse.

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Part of “making do” here is also being receptive to scenes of learning that he may have discounted in the past. He submits to his sister’s tutelage, and “he regretted how he might have misread her [Candi] before” (41). In the case of his new understandings of both his earlier financial success and his misjudgment of Candi, Martín comes to realize that what he thought he knew previously wasn’t true, but was rather a product of the circumstances he was embedded in. As he begins to move beyond the privileges of middleclass coupledom, he also begins to unlearn old ways of processing failure. Perla is once again a guide. In his initial encounters with failure, Martín is overwhelmed with shame. For instance, when he wants to inquire about how Perla is able to assist him with food and childcare while she is working as a house cleaner and raising a teenager, Martín “felt too ashamed to pry when he himself was in need” (33). Later, when he recognizes Perla’s attempts to “bring their slow reconciliation out into the open, [he] felt ashamed of how little he was trying to meet her halfway” (38). For Martín, shame obstructs both knowledge about his sister and self-understanding. This is in marked contrast to Perla, who confronts her failures and learns from them. She offers her brother her expertise, declaring, “I’ve learned a lot trying to raise [her son] Matthew. . . . I made a lot of stupid mistakes. So did some of my friends, the ones who had their own kids. It’s hard, Martín. It’s harder than you think” (38). Unlike Martín, Perla is not ashamed of her failings but rather operates in a mode of forgiveness. Martín first notices this when he sees two modest rings on her rough hands, interpreting these not as signs of acquisitiveness but rather as “a contentment and a self-knowledge, a forgiveness for her own part in her unhappiness, a releasing” (40). He retrospectively also detects a similar “spark of forgiveness” in Candi Leal’s encounter with him at the school, a gesture “of new possibilities, of growing and maturing” (41). One way of thinking about failure in these instances is as an inability to fulfill some kind of normative expectation, whether figured around race, sexuality, class, or gender. Perhaps because of failure’s connection to normativity, Jack Halberstam has examined the ways in which failure is a “queer art.” In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam posits failure as a queer art that “allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhood to predictable adulthoods.”20 They detect in failure a utopian urge to “continue to search for different ways of being in the world and being in relation to one another than those already prescribed for the liberal and consumer subject.”21 Perla and Candi experience their failure queerly: no longer needing to conform to the norms that they failed to fulfill, each seems capable of connecting with others not by fulfilling normative expectations of mothers (each has a less-than-ideal relationship with her son) but rather through a forgiving relationship with herself and through solidarities forged with others in similar circumstances.

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As Martín grows more sympathetic to his sister’s worldview, he begins to follow her advice and becomes more involved in Adán’s life. His first step in this direction involves going to his son’s school to receive an apology from a student who bullied Adán and took the thirteen dollars he had brought to school for portraits. The school becomes a setting for a lesson, as Martín has an epiphany when he listens to the young bully deliver his apology. As the bully reads his apology from a written text, Martín cringes at the grammatical mistakes the boy makes, particularly a line in which he declares, “I brang the money to my house” (42). “Bring Brang Brung” is, of course, the title of the story, which underscores the significance of the moment that follows the reading of the note. Martín begins to reflect on the pedagogical task that lies before the boy’s teachers, who, at some point, will initiate “the smallest of a whole string of corrections,” which will include, presumably, teaching him to use “brought” instead of “brang” (44). That reflection leads him to think about how not only he and Perla have failed (and therefore require correction), but also their mother. In the central portion of the paragraph in which Martín recalls the bully, his apology, and the lessons he failed to learn, Martín remembers a moment from his adolescence when he understood his mother as a failure: “He had opened the envelope from the adult-training center, the application that his mother had put in, the handwriting scratchy and uncertain, the information inaccurate or missing because his mother had not understood the question. Her application for job training had been denied. He had thrown it away before she even saw it” (44). When he disposes of the note in order to not crush his mother’s feelings, he inadvertently robs her of the possibility of experiencing her failure and therefore of learning the lesson that could propel her further. Although the memory of his mother’s failure aligns Martín with her as well as Perla, the story also uses failure as a way of reimagining and extending family. While Martín, Perla, and their mother are blood relations, the terms of their belonging to each other are not based on blood or even on shared affection, but rather on similar experiences of failing to meet normative expectations. The bully plays a significant role in remaking the terms of belonging and expanding the sense of kinship beyond bloodline to a set of shared experiences, as it is his mistake that triggers Martín’s memories of Perla and his mother. The young man who writes the mangled apology note to Martín is named Jesse Leal. As the principal takes Martín to her office where Jesse is waiting to formally apologize, Martín inquires whether or not Jesse is the son of Candi Leal, the office secretary and his sister’s friend. The principal replies, “Oh no. Maybe a cousin of some kind, but not her kid. She had her own problems long ago” (43). Although Candi cannot claim the boy as her “own,” the principal’s remark reveals a more expansive field of relation, one that finds its parallel in the way Jesse connects to the Grijalvas. What

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connects him to these figures is a resemblance. Jesse’s failure mirrors Candi’s “own problems” with her son and connects to the mother’s failure to master the English language in her training center application. In this way, the bonds of kinship extend beyond the Grijalvas to Perla’s high-school friends. Significantly, this family is remade without a patriarchal center. Martín’s mother raised her children by herself, and although Martín momentarily thinks about his father, he does not imagine him being part of his newly formed connection with his mother and sister. Indeed, the memory of the father surfaces in the story’s last section, when Martín recalls the boredom he felt in his domestic life with Adán and Adrian: “Martín found himself longing for something to change in his life. He thought, for the first time in years, of his father, and in the quiet of the apartment, Martín let himself inch toward understanding him” (46). Embedded in a passage rife with misunderstandings which the rest of the narrative educates Martín out of, the reference to the father as a resource that might help him change is positioned to be negated in favor of the wisdom of the women he encounters when he returns home. Beyond Martín and Perla’s father, other fathers are also denied a place in the kinship structure Martín constructs from the ruins of his relationship. The father of Perla’s child is not a part of this kinship structure. Even Adán’s biological father, Adrian, is excluded from the vision of family at the end of the story. However, as Halberstam notes, “alternative ways of knowing and being . . . are not unduly optimistic.”22 Martín continually wonders about how the fathers of Perla’s son and of Adán will return in their offspring’s physical looks and whether the sons will repeat the errors of their ancestors. Following the recollection of his mother’s rejection, the narrator, through free indirect discourse, gives us access to a strange and remarkable string of phrases that reverberate in Martín’s mind as he contemplates the boy’s note and his mother’s failure:

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Diction, syntax, grammar, basic math, conceptual thinking. Symmetries, the logic of sympathy, the order of gratitude, empathy, concern, the rigor of understanding, the faulty equation of grief and anger. (44)

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Lacking any subject or verb, these lines can equally apply to Martín, his mother, Perla, or the bully. Indeed, the lines compel us to bring these figures together. In the first sentence, we read a series of rules that suggest how enunciation should occur and how to make an opaque system clear, which is to say we read a list of certain disciplined ways of ordering the world. But the second sentence, with its mentions of sympathy, empathy, gratitude, and emotion, suggests a different kind of understanding, one that is premised

As much as I see a potential alliance with gay men in our shared experience of homophobia, the majority of gay men still cling to what privileges they can. . . . On some level, our brothers—gay and straight—have to give up being “men.” . . . Chicano gay men have been reluctant to recognize and acknowledge that their freedom is intricately connected to the freedom of women.26 “Bring Brang Brung” acknowledges this criticism in Martín’s unflinching disdain for the “mean, belligerent girls” Perla socialized with, and in the ways in which it decenters father figures and incorporates Martín into a commu-

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not on rules, laws, and norms but rather on situations, visceral feelings, and reciprocity. The second sentence offers an escape from the traps of the first. Halberstam notes how embracing failure is a de-disciplinary exercise, one that requires an “unlearning,” as new ways of being in the world are imagined and enacted. “Bring Brang Brung” reveals ways of unlearning the family. Here unlearning the family does not mean forgetting it but rather re-membering it: rearticulating attachments around negative affects, like failure, that the dominant culture may want to suppress. “Bring Brang Brung” presents a different way of “queering Aztlán,” to allude to the title of Cherríe Moraga’s well-known essay. It’s hard not to read Muñoz’s story as a response to Moraga’s “Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe,” which, significantly, appears in Moraga’s 1993 collection The Last Generation. As Sandra K. Soto explains, “Moraga means ‘the last generation’ to signify the cultural and biological loss not just in her own nuclear family (as evidenced by her nieces’ and nephews’ ‘pale blue [eyes] in a flurry of light lashes’) but in the broader Chican@ community, ‘a disappearing tribe.’ ”23 Moraga attributes this disappearance to machismo and homophobia, which distorted the promise of the movement, and the “hispanicization” of the 1980s, which siphoned away and depoliticized the movement’s political energies.24 The project of Muñoz’s story maps onto some of Moraga’s critiques. Like Moraga, a story like “Bring Brang Brung” sees a Chicana/o/x community in need of “techniques of renewal” that will prevent its erasure in the face of a neoliberal Latinidad that can be seen as a later iteration of the “hispanicization” that Moraga found problematic thirty years earlier. Insofar as the story aligns this with homonormativity, which leverages forms of heteropatriarchy, Muñoz’s story shares with Moraga’s critique an attempt to imagine a form of Chicanidad “that decolonizes the brown and female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth.”25 Moraga, of course, was well aware of how gay men were prone to retaining heteropatriarchy’s privileges:

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nity of single mothers. What’s key in this new instantiation of kinship is not pride or consanguinity but a shared relationship to failure and moving on. In this sense, phallic masculinity’s fixation on mastery is forsaken in favor of a new relationality based on knowledges rooted in the lived experiences of those who were, for a time, excluded or denied full membership in these communities. But if Muñoz’s story seems to respond to some of the critiques in Moraga’s earlier essay, it also modifies some of Moraga’s stances. Many have noted how Moraga remains committed to ethnonationalism, largely rooted in an understanding of race, even as she advocates for a reformation of our understandings of kinship and belonging. As Richard T. Rodríguez explains, “Moraga’s alternative rendering of la familia strives toward a utopian space that is able to critique yet sustain Chicano/a community formation.”27 Part of the difference between Moraga and Muñoz may relate to how they position sexuality in relation to Chicana/o/x identity. Moraga tells us, “My real politicization began, not through the Chicano Movement, but through my recognition of my lesbianism,” a recognition that pulled her away momentarily, providing her the critical distance from which to critique.28 In “Bring Brang Brung,” Martín’s sexuality pulls him away, but it doesn’t result in a critical examination of the community he left behind. Rather, it allows a host of misjudgments and misunderstandings to linger. It is not until he returns and is forced to “make familia from scratch” that he begins to understand his situation more clearly, because this forces him to reckon with the knowledge rooted in working-class Chicana/o/x life.29 Yet, “Chicana/o/x” is a word that’s never explicitly spoken in the story. It remains tacit, understood, yet at the same time porous in ways that Moraga’s “re-formation of the tribe” is not. In Muñoz’s short story, the particular, local experiences of Mexican Americans provide an important counterpoint to homonormativity and neoliberal instances of “Latino,” but the understandings discovered in this particularity do not foreclose the possibility of these categories coming into productive, dialectical contact with each other. This potential is seen in Perla and Martín’s uncertainty about their children, and in the focus on economic survival rather than ethnic identity. In this version, the work of decolonizing gender, race, and ethnicity is ongoing and open to assuming shapes that we cannot yet imagine.

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Notes 1. 2. 3.

“Tony Diaz Says.” Orchard and Padilla, “Introduction,” 3. Orchard and Padilla, “You Find Your Place,” 190.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

Orchard and Padilla, “You Find Your Place,” 190. Orchard and Padilla, “You Find Your Place,” 191. Dávila, Latinos, Inc., 13. Dávila, 13. O’Dea, “Los enlaces,” 11. Olivas, “Interview with Manuel Muñoz.” Rodríguez borrows the term heteropatriarchy from the work of Roderick Ferguson, who uses it to refer to an entwinement of heteronormative and patriarchal discourses that is powerfully present in conventional representations of the family and kinship. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 2. Richard T. Rodríguez, Next of Kin, 3. Freeman, “Queer Belongings,” 298. Freeman, 299. Textual references to Muñoz’s story “Bring Brang Brung” are cited by page number in the text. For bibliographical information, see Muñoz, Faith Healer. Richard T. Rodríguez, Next of Kin, 18. Duggan, Twilight, 50. This is not to suggest that all gay Latinx families are homonormative. In the chapter “Who’s Your Daddy?: Queer Kinship and Perverse Domesticity,” in her book Sexual Outlaws, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings, Juana María Rodríguez notes that not all queer Latinx families are “part of a larger crusade to uphold the moral integrity of heteronormative domesticity”; some instead “herald those political and personal intentions to reduce harm, ameliorate violence, heal trauma, and change the social conditions that create hierarchies of human value.” Rodríguez notes how the latter form of families might challenge normative kinship configurations and become subject to society’s heightened scrutiny: “For queers who are not white, middle-class, able-bodied, coupled, or normatively gendered, choosing to parent can actually make us appear more, rather than less, perverse.” Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Outlaws, 47– 48, 53. In “Bring Brang Brung,” Martín and Adrian’s upward economic mobility, San Francisco home, monogamous coupling, and white-collar careers, among other things, place them squarely within the realm of homonormativity. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” 452. Martínez, On Making Sense, 113. Drawing on the Spanish-language concept of the sujeto tácito, in which a subject can be omitted from an utterance while still implied in the verb’s conjugation, Decena tracks the ways in which queerness can also be unspoken and still present in Latina/o/x communities. Examining the “unspoken bases of connectivity for the making and sustenance of socialities,” Decena argues that “what binds people to one another and what makes networks, solidarities, and resource sharing possible and sustainable are forms of connection that cannot be fully articulated but can be shared, intuited, and known.” Decena, Tacit Subjects, 1. Halberstam, Queer Art, 3.

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Halberstam, 2. Halberstam, Queer Art, 24. Soto, Reading Chican@, 22. Moraga, Last Generation, 156. Moraga, Last Generation, 162. Moraga, Last Generation, 161–62. Richard T. Rodríguez, Next of Kin, 4. Moraga, Last Generation, 146. This often-cited phrase comes from Moraga’s play Giving Up the Ghost. Moraga, Giving Up the Ghost, 35.

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Works Cited

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Cohen, Cathy. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Critique.” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997): 437– 65. Dávila, Arlene. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Decena, Carlos. Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire Among Dominican Immigrant Men. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Freeman, Elizabeth. “Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory.” In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 295–314. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007. Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. Martínez, Ernesto Javier. On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012. Moraga, Cherríe. Giving Up the Ghost: Teatro in Two Acts. Los Angeles: West End Press, 1986. Moraga, Cherríe. The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry. Boston: South End Press, 1993. Muñoz, Manuel. The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2007. O’Dea, Lori. “Los enlaces peligrosos.” American Book Review, May– June 2004, 11. Olivas, Daniel. “Interview with Manual Muñoz.” LaBloga.com, May  28, 2007. https:// labloga.blogspot.com/2007/05/interview-with-manuel-muoz.html. Orchard, William, and Yolanda Padilla. “Introduction: Chicana/o Narratives: Then and Now.” In Bridges, Borders, and Breaks: History, Narrative, and Nation in Twenty-FirstCentury Chicana/o Literary Criticism, edited by William Orchard and Yolanda Padilla, 1– 24. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.

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Orchard, William, and Yolanda Padilla. “‘You Find Your Place and You Fight There’: An Interview with Ramón Saldívar.” In Bridges, Borders, and Breaks: History, Narrative, and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Chicana/o Literary Criticism, edited by William Orchard and Yolanda Padilla, 177–200. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Rodríguez, Juana María. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Rodríguez, Richard T. Next of Kin: The Family in Chicana/o Cultural Politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. Soto, Sandra K. Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-mastery of Desire. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. “Tony Diaz Says Only Chicano, No Longer Latino.” Fox26 Houston.com, November 9, 2016. Accessed January 2019, http://www.fox26houston.com/news/216371081-video.

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Chapter 14

UNSETTLING MONUMENTS OF CHICANX MASCULINITY IN ESTELA PORTILLO TRAMBLEY’S “RAIN OF SCORPIONS” Francisco E. Robles

In this essay, I take up one of Chicanx literature’s most important—but often forgotten— creators and champions in the 1970s: Estela Portillo Trambley, of El Paso, Texas. Her work was widely read, her plays and other theater works were widely performed, and her literary contributions were much discussed in the late 1970s, especially since she was often held up as a representative voice for Chicana writers and artists. She actively resisted this double-edged sword of recognition, however: she saw her work not as speaking for all Chicanas, but instead as being one specific Chicana’s contribution to an emergent Chicanx humanism, based in Chicana feminism, that saw the possibility of empathetic universality in all people and was not solely filtered through the Anglo-American world.1 Portillo Trambley’s novella “Rain of Scorpions,” first published in the 1975 collection Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings, elaborates an important set of decolonial tactics for the representation of Chicanx masculinity within narrative; the author does this by means of her creation of male characters who, through failure and responsiveness, come to embody differential forms of community, resistance, and revolution. In defining decolonial tactics as a matrix of aesthetic methods, I rely on Emma Pérez, Sylvia Wynter, and Rey Chow.2 For Pérez, “where women are conceptualized as merely a backdrop to men’s social and political activities, they are in . . . fact intervening interstitially while sexing the colonial imaginary. . . . Women’s voices and actions intervene to do what I call sexing the colonial imaginary, historically tracking women’s agency on the colonial landscape.”3 Wynter unsettles the definition of the human by turning to the coinage “the genre of man,” offering a critique of Western reason by illustrating precisely how “we must set out to open a path . . . directed at the winning of the autonomy of our cognition with respect to the social reality of which we are always already socialized subject-observers, [just] as that first poetics had made possible that of our 228

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cognitive autonomy with respect to physical reality.”4 For Chow, building on the distinction that Michel de Certeau makes between strategies (which are spatially oriented) and tactics (which are temporally oriented), tactics offer a means of subverting “essentialist notions of culture and history; conservative notions of territorial and linguistic propriety, and the ‘otherness’ ensuing from them. . . . These new solidarities are often informed by a strategic attitude which repeats what they seek to overthrow. The weight of old ideologies being reinforced over and over again is immense.”5 Taken together, these thinkers show the necessity of developing a series of methods that refuse to reinscribe received historical categories of meaning and power (Pérez), overarching genres of man that determine meaning and subjectivity (Wynter), and dominant ideologies of power and access to that power (Chow). Portillo Trambley offers an important case study for understanding how one particular author undoes received ideas of power, agency, humanness, and solidarity, thus imagining a differential system for understanding oneself historically and communally. Key to these decolonial tactics is what I call “unsettling monuments,” in which “unsettling” operates simultaneously as a verb and an adjective. That is, Portillo Trambley unsettles monuments of Chicanx masculinity— specifically, expectations of unquestioned male leadership, a generalized anti-imperialist impulse that purveyed a certain notion of gender relations based on mistaken assumptions about Indigenous cultures, and the embrace of Aztlán as a militant ideal of land and aspiration— and shows how these monuments are unsettling, in the sense that they disarray thoughtful action by representing insistent and ossified notions of identity that command attention, fealty, and obeisance. Furthermore, Portillo Trambley’s “Rain of Scorpions” offers a very specific unsettling of the idea that Chicanxs, in their search for dignity and sovereignty against a colonialist framework, must base their idealism on the taking back of land. While not rejecting Aztlán as a mythohistorical concept, and without denying the importance of the Aztlán land claim as an anticolonialist revolutionary idea, Portillo Trambley still cautions against actions and philosophies that might replicate U.S. settler colonialism. While the search for the “green valley” in “Rain of Scorpions” is based on a noble impulse, Portillo Trambley shows it to be a displacement of consequential action and true revolution. Instead, her novella shows that communal action should be internally directed and based on dignity, freedom, and fulfillment rather than externally directed and based on lack, loss, and displacement. “Unsettling,” in this essay, operates as both a descriptor applied to “the monuments of Chicanx masculinity” and as a representation of Portillo Trambley’s work to critique and undo those very monuments. I have used the term in order to take advantage of its multiple possible meanings, such

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as disturbing, as well as the process of actively undoing settler colonial processes. “Monuments,” here, means a number of things. First, “monuments” indicates specific texts that make up the Chicano literary canon, especially prior to the 1980s: José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho, Tomás Rivera’s . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra, Corky Gonzales’s “I Am Joaquín,” Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Miguel Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán, Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Rolando Hinojosa’s Estampas del valle y otras obras, and Aristeo Brito’s El diablo en Tejas. While Portillo Trambley admired in particular Rivera, Arias, Hinojosa, and Anaya, she also crafted an oeuvre quite distinct from these works, and this is part of what renders her work invisible in relation to the established and purveyed canon of Chicanx letters. By attending to Portillo Trambley’s decolonial tactics in “Rain of Scorpions,” we can understand how monumentality— as canonicity— threatens to become an ossified genealogical method for the crafting of literary history and the shaping of critical and pedagogical attention. In using “monuments,” I also mean Chicanismo’s important yet quite machista iconoclasm with regard to Western imperialism and colonialism, in which, rather than undoing historical structures of power, many writers and thinkers set about erecting new monuments or icons of fealty in place of the old.6 That is not to say that I am unsympathetic to specifically Chicano critiques of Western institutions of belief, but rather that the way these critiques took shape was through an extraordinarily macho rebellion against, in particular, innocent and duped mothers. (An honest overview of all the mothers in texts such as Pocho, . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra, Peregrinos de Aztlán, and to a much lesser extent Bless Me, Ultima reveals generally stock characters whose naïve belief in God gets ridiculed by young sons as part of the bildungsroman journey toward discovery— these sons lecture their mothers, mock their mothers, openly and publicly repudiate their mothers’ belief systems, and so on.) Portillo Trambley is interested in reconfiguring knowledge and belief, and she does not mock belief for the sake of marking a box on the checklist of “writing a bildungsroman.” Instead, she takes up belief as an earnestly held and existential survival tool that can be used to develop one’s sense of self in the world or can create boundaries and separations. For example, one of the stories in Rain of Scorpions, “The Burning,” tells of a group of Mexican American women who, furious with an Indigenous woman who worked as a doctor and healer for decades and, in a final perceived “insult” to their beliefs, carved household gods for everyone in the town as a sign of her respect and gratitude, decide they’re going to burn her to death while she sleeps. Importantly, though, her dying wish (she is already dying as the fire gets started) is to be cremated in the traditional way of her tribe. In their religious big-

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otry, the women of the town unknowingly perform the Indigenous woman’s proper funeral rites. In emphasizing a separate belief system and treating it as authentic and earnest in the sense that it enables the elaboration of dignity rather than its suppression, Portillo Trambley aligns herself with Anaya’s syncretic vision in Bless Me, Ultima. Originally published in 1975 as Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings and reissued in 1993 as Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories, Portillo Trambley’s book contains a series of captivating texts whose focuses, while varied, deal with a Chicanx world that spans nations— Mexico, the United States, and, in one story, France. For the purposes of this essay, I focus on the 1975 edition, against Portillo Trambley’s advice.7 Given the context in which she originally published Rain of Scorpions, I track the aesthetics and tactics at play in her unsettling of Chicanx monuments in the collection’s title novella, which is particularly important given her artistic and activist milieu in the 1970s. The most widely discussed story that appears in both editions is “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle,” while another story, “The Trees,” which only appears in the 1975 edition, is also frequently discussed, especially alongside Portillo Trambley’s drama The Day of the Swallows. Not only did Rain of Scorpions serve as a keystone publication for Tonatiuh Press after the dissolution of Quinto Sol, but Portillo Trambley also won the 1972 “honorary” Premio Quinto Sol, which she received along with Luis Javier Rodriguez (that year’s first prize was won by Rolando Hinojosa).8 While John Alba Cutler notes that the historical record of her relationship to the award is hazy at best, what seems certain, given that it was printed in Quinto Sol’s own distributed materials, is that she won the honorable mention award in 1972, yet there remains an air of mystery around whether she won a second award.9 Importantly, though, in editing anthologies of Chicana writing, discussing the work of other writers within and beyond the emergent Chicanx literary canon, and insisting on writing truthfully and courageously about topics her contemporaries preferred to shy away from and oversimplify (a central example is her complex portrayal of lesbians in her much-lauded surrealist play The Day of the Swallows), Portillo Trambley crafted a literary oeuvre whose impact on her contemporaries and Chicana feminists of the 1980s was enormous, but which has remained curiously unexamined, with a few notable exceptions. As a whole, the criticism in the 1970s of Portillo Trambley’s work is exemplified by Vernon and Patricia Lattin, who in 1977 summarized Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings by arguing, “These heroic women express a value system that honors freedom, instinct, wholeness, feeling, and primitiveness against slavery, barbarized reason, tradition, civilized order, and inequality. In the image of the wild, untamed garden Trambley sees the symbol of women’s freedom, while in the ordered, symmetrical garden she sees the

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patriarchal traditions that have limited and tortured women.”10 In responding to early analyses of Portillo Trambley’s work, Roberta Fernández says, “Generally, though, Chicano critics have not been kind to Portillo. In his Chicano Authors . . . Juan Bruce-Novoa holds her up to ridicule. . . . Francisco Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley’s Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 82, dedicated to Chicano writers, has entries on fifty-one writers; of these, nine are women writers. Estela Portillo is not among them though, at least for historical reasons, one could expect to find her in such a compilation of writers.”11 Fernández’s 1994 article seeks to recuperate Portillo Trambley’s radical work, and Lattin and Lattin’s introduction to the 1993 edition of Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories attends to the editorial changes Portillo Trambley instituted, including the insertion of entirely new work, while Naomi Quiñonez’s 1997 contribution to Living Chicana Theory points out Portillo Trambley’s complicated feminist rhetoric: “Portillo’s analysis [in her introduction to the 1973 El Grito anthology of Chicana writing, which she edited] clearly shows that before Chicanas embraced and re-inscribed a feminist analysis, women proved to be susceptible to qualifying themselves in traditional terms, even if they were doing something quite revolutionary.”12 Twenty-first-century criticism that discusses Rain of Scorpions (either the 1975 or the 1993 edition) by Cordelia Candelaria, John Alba Cutler, and Maythee Rojas has diverged quite a bit from previous decades of scholarship, focusing on Portillo Trambley from a theoretical perspective that sees her work as embedded within a longer feminist conversation (Candelaria and Rojas) and a historicist view of Chicanx literature’s status in academia (Cutler).13 In contrast to the binary insisted upon by Lattin and Lattin in 1977, Rojas argues, “Trambley challenges the gendering of this [nature-culture] dualism and the physical and emotional violence inherent in maintaining its boundaries. If woman is nature, argues Trambley, it is a nature that has been exploited and commodified by men and male culture, and one that ultimately has the power to overwhelm, poison, and subsume its (male) human aggressors and their attempt to impose a false and one-sided sense of order.”14 One of the reasons the collection’s final section—the “Rain of Scorpions” novella— has been less focused on, as argued by Portillo Trambley herself in her interview with Juan Bruce-Novoa, as well as by Vernon E. and Patricia Hopkins Lattin, is that the novella deals mostly with men rather than with women, and therefore does not fit neatly into the prevailing argument that Portillo Trambley’s work asserts a Chicana feminist worldview. Though it is true that the novella focuses principally on men, when we consider the power of works such as Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon or Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, among many others, the argument does not quite hold up— indeed, a feminist framework for the de-

piction of male characters seems not only obviously plausible but deeply important in the context of decolonial and intersectional thought. Additionally, in turning fully to the novella, we can see how the 1975 edition in particular takes a definitively feminist and decolonial approach to challenging the premises, representations, and consequences of Chicanx activism, especially when led by men. As Cordelia Candelaria notes,

This description of Portillo Trambley’s writing as containing “a pointed and unflinching concern” that understands the oppressions of interlocking power that produce patriarchy can be further extended to the critique of coloniality found in “Rain of Scorpions,” in which Portillo Trambley considers patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and ecocide as combining to abase and destroy the Chicanx people of the barrio of Smeltertown in El Paso, Texas. “Rain of Scorpions,” as the titular and final text of Rain of Scorpions, works across a number of genres, skirting the narrative form of the bildungsroman and the boys’ adventure story, while also weaving an invented Indigenous folk story through the text, offering multiple narrative and metanarrative levels through which it constructs meaning.16 While the novella as a whole can be read allegorically— indeed, Bruce-Novoa argues that the novella “allegorically challenges the central Chicano concept of Aztlán, the return to the mythical garden of paradise”— Portillo Trambley’s use of multiple narrative levels challenges the formal layering of allegory as a narrative signifying device.17 The novella’s setting in El Paso’s Smeltertown barrio blends the fictional and the actual, and the text’s movement between registers of reality and unreality heightens the complexity. Smeltertown is an entirely Mexican American barrio run by an enormous company (which is revealed to be ASARCO in the 1993 revision, though it is left unnamed in the original novella; Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s 2005 novel Desert Blood features the ASARCO plant prominently). Smeltertown is overwhelmingly gray and often floods with out-of-control rain runoff due to the company’s devastation of the environment. A number of characters populate the text: Papa At, an elderly and beneficent store

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Trambley inscribed her point of view in unflinching and memorable tracings of one woman’s Chicana imaginary. Characterized by a hybrid consciousness of Mexican-Texan biculturality, Spanish-English bilingualism, and resistance to the entrenched vestiges of conquest and colonialism, Trambley expresses the mestizaje of her imaginary through a pointed and unflinching concern with gender relations in the full compound meaning of the term, i.e., sex roles, sexuality, orientation, and identity; patriarchy, personhood, and power, etc.15

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owner; Fito, a disabled Vietnam War veteran who wants to lead the town’s collective activism; Miguel, an industrious young Chicano, along with his five friends; Champurrado, the town drunk, who has a deep sense of history and connection to the land; and Lupe, a young Chicana who is a heartsick bookworm pining for Fito, and who takes a heroic turn when she saves her grandmother from a mudslide full of dead scorpions, which was caused by a catastrophic flood; the story also includes mythical characters like Gotallama, the Red Wind, and El Indio Tolo.18 The crisis that motivates the story is the community’s anger at the company at the heart of Smeltertown (again, unnamed in the 1975 edition), due to the environmental destruction it has created. Children have been tested, and a dangerous “amount of suphur dioxide in the blood” has been found (1975, 115).19 Disheartened, the community struggles to find a solution, and Fito calls a meeting where he unveils his plan to threaten the company with a mass exodus. The people, incredulous, ask him where they could possibly go— and he has no answer, but enlivening dialogue ensues. The scene of the meeting begins with Lupe and Papa At walking into a union hall, and then we read a breathless description of the crowd:

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Now, they both sat and absorbed a relished thing: husbands . . . wives . . . children . . . friends . . . a good blending. The best part of the meeting! The small talk between people, the smile, the handshake, the embrace . . . all good blending, a tapestry of little things . . . I saved twenty-seven dollars to buy it . . . for colic aceitito calientito . . . ¿Qué trae el loco de Fito? . . . Se casaron con el justice of the peace . . . le están saliendo los dientes . . . It’s going to be a hard rain . . . a flood, do you think? . . . I haven’t seen you since Rosie’s fast . . . The boy is smart . . . así es la vida . . . Dame un cigarro . . . tapestry of little things, words that tell of life. Lupe and Papa At enjoyed in silence. (1975, 129; ellipses original)

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Although, as noted earlier, Portillo Trambley claimed the 1993 edition was superior, the passage above contains a raw sense of experimentation and aesthetic daring, one that speaks with, but also offers a counterpoise to, the prevailing Chicano literary milieu of the 1970s. Though Portillo Trambley felt that passages such as this “told” rather than “showed,” the “tapestry of little things” is of a piece with the experimental and communal writing found in “Cuando lleguemos” and “Debajo de la casa,” the final stories in Tomás Rivera’s important . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra. In both Portillo Trambley’s “Rain of Scorpions” and Rivera’s “Debajo de la casa,” we find a decentered, celebratory

writing that revels in multiplicity rather than emphasizing narrative progress and certainty. Indeed, the attention paid to the meetings is quite different: to turn briefly to the 1993 edition, the people’s consternation with Fito’s plan is due to the overwhelming power of ASARCO: “Murmurs rose, mostly negative. It wouldn’t work; the ASARCO people could take the bad publicity. Such a thing had never been done before, a whole town refusing to be scattered to the winds of change. Fito had thought the plan majestic, grand, but, now, seeing the reaction of his neighbors, it seemed impractical, all in disarray. One more meeting had come to the end” (1993, 128). In the 1975 edition, in which Smeltertown’s residents are faced with environmental terror rather than forced migration, the people erect a diversity of arguments: “‘We can’t do anything about it. We do what we can to survive. Principle will not feed the family or put a roof over our heads. We have a life here!” (1975, 131). And, “Miguel’s father was angry. ‘This is our home. It is not a death-trap to me or my family. There’s meaning here. We’re poor . . . yes, but we manage for ourselves and our children. Fito, you’re crazy!’” (1975, 131). Finally, the community disperses after a confusion of argument and disputation:

The argument, taking place in a union hall rather than the school cafeteria of the 1993 version, embodies a strong sense of direct democracy and community, even within— or, more likely, due to— the context of a fierce debate: “Papa At looked at Lupe and said gently, ‘Everyone shall win and lose. We are all two . . . the winner and the loser . . . the lost and found. To be here together with sparks giving life, even if we hate each other for a while, that is the good of these meetings’” (1975, 132; ellipses original). In both cases, Fito is dismissed; in the 1975 edition, though, it is because the people refuse to cede Smeltertown on any principle or gesture. After having attended the meeting, the young boys depart with a sense of purpose: they decide they should bring Fito’s activist vision to life by finding a new place to settle. Miguel in particular fixates on a green valley he’s heard

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Papa At listened to the arguments going back and forth . . . You’re a radical, Fito . . . You’re satisfied with nothing . . . Chingado, we want more . . . We do what we can . . . You want us to starve out in the desert . . . We can use our wits to survive . . . Wits! That’s a funny one . . . Real funny, Fito . . . You say the company bosses lie . . . The city fathers lie . . . And what do you do, Fito? You dream . . . what is the difference between dream and lie . . . both are words . . . words . . . you don’t know what you are talking about, Fito . . . back and forth. (1975, 132; ellipses original)

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about in Papa At’s many stories of El Indio Tolo, a legendary Apache hero: “All of them had been excited by Fito’s plan. It would be like in the movies when wagon trains went west. Miguel and his friends visualized the whole town going through similar trials to find new homes. They liked the idea” (1975, 132). The boys link their sense of adventure directly to the romanticized settler colonialism of Hollywood films; they grow excited by the sense of conquest through individualized adventure. Their fantasy— “Miguel and his friends visualized the whole town going through similar trials to find new homes”— signifies a unity based in heroic determination, in which the entire town will possess a green valley: a paradise for all. A vision of “wagon trains,” symbolic here of a valorized pioneer mentality, motivates the boys. Importantly, the vision is shared only because of the stable patriotic discourse of Anglo colonialism. The vision is not derived from their communal experiences as Chicanxs, but instead predicated on idealized U.S. conquest through genocide. Indeed, the very structure of this popularized colonial discourse means that the boys are not communally or dialogically determining a shared vision of the future, but instead individually participating in the consumption and then purveying of an external fantasy. Their reliance on U.S. colonial fantasies means, then, that they are not thinking with or through decolonial tactics. Thus, in creating Smeltertown, Portillo Trambley links the need for a revolution to the need for an ecocritical, decolonial consciousness. Through the character of Fito, a war veteran whose leg has been amputated, Portillo Trambley also links the Vietnam War to the economic and environmental devastation wrought by industrialized colonialism and extractive capitalism. Fito’s insistence that something must be done— even if his plan, a gesture of leaving, is ill-conceived— provides the force that motivates the group of boys to search for the green valley. His desire for a better world, even in the face of disappointment and personal tragedy, also attracts Lupe. This is the part of the novella that most confounds the unsettling of Chicanx monuments: the narrative arc seems to insist that Lupe must become the instrument of Fito’s healing, thus reinforcing gender normativity vis-à-vis feeling and care.20 Although the story might seem to reinscribe the literary marriage plot, the novella does not conclude with the resolution of this particular narrative arc— the young boys and their return home take narrative center stage. Making the Lupe-Fito romance a major plot arc but one that is not structurally definitive in terms of the story’s ultimate conclusion shows an unsettling of narrative and metanarrative expectations around heterosexual coupling and its normative implications within and upon plot. Importantly, the Lupe-Fito romantic arc contains a mixture of minuteness and enormity that attends to the quotidian experience of love while gesturing toward the potentially

world-making expansiveness of relational love. Indeed, the focalization in the moment of this narrative strand’s conclusion is Lupe’s, as the perspective narrows down to a world of two:

In thinking of “these small stillnesses” as “the architects of purpose,” Lupe sees herself and Fito as inhabiting a complicated and relational dynamic in which mutuality and cooperation rather than dependence become the foundational vision of a purposive, common world. Indeed, Lupe’s love for Fito is grounding for both of them: Lupe does not feel she needs to “spin candy” in her dreams any more, or imagine that she is Cleopatra, in order to feel secure about her brown, big body and her enormous capacity for love. In this realization, Lupe anticipates the turn the boys make from their dependence on Hollywood-reliant tropes of settler colonialist fantasy toward a communally derived and nuanced idea of what it might mean to decolonize the world around them. Indeed, Lupe’s refusal to rely on external and determinative narratives of being, becoming, and belonging showcases the relational root of decolonial tactics. Portillo Trambley herself, in conversation with Faye Nell Vowell, takes up a nuanced position regarding dreamwork, fantasy, and desire: “Well, look at all the women in my stories. They’re very independent; they create their own universes; they are very unorthodox. They are not held down by rules and regulations. Of course most of them are involved in, shall we say, very strong conflicts, which in essence will lead some to violence or whatever. But even so, they’re not passive. They’re not passive, they’re alive, they have a mind of their own, and they’re not afraid.”21 Though Lupe did initially create a fantasy that removed her from “reality,” she subsequently makes the universe one in which she can be and love “the way she knew how.” Courageously living

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His face was stubby and his eyes were sad. She reached out and took his head and lay it on her bosom. She was a mother of the earth. There was no spinning candy. She felt his need for her faith. She stroked his head and knew that theirs would never be a great love story. It didn’t have to be a great love story. Little “nows” were enough. Between the struggle, the disappointment, the confusions, these small stillnesses would be the architects of purpose. It was all a making of ordinary things that had nothing to do with books and mind, with words of heroines. She felt very alive. She didn’t want to be Cleopatra anymore. She wanted to be Lupe loving Fito the way she knew how. After a while Fito looked up and asked, “You’ll stay, won’t you?” “Yes, I’ll stay.” (1975, 165)

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in the given world, Lupe feels “very alive,” especially since she can be and feel in ways “that had nothing to do with books and mind, with words of heroines.” Here, mind stands not for intellection but for the consciousness when it is separated from material reality: Lupe rejects a mind-body split, asserting their unity rather than their separation. Though Maythee Rojas’s analysis of Portillo Trambley’s work takes up “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle” rather than “Rain of Scorpions,” her argument holds for the novella as well: “Love is for Trambley a crucial force and energy in developing a Chicana feminist discourse. However, her stories resist the notion that the pursuit of love results only in marriage, children, and ‘happiness ever after,’ and that women will sacrifice themselves in exchange for these promises. Instead, Trambley argues for a reexamination of the concept of love by questioning our accustomed understandings.”22 Lupe’s insistence on “nows” will not construct a fantastical “great love story”— instead, similar to what Rojas describes, Lupe creates her own language of acceptance and agreement rather than falling into a marriage plot arc that might be condensed into the phrase “happiness ever after.” As Aída Hurtado argues, “The gender liberation of Chicana women is intertwined with the gender liberation of Chicano men. Therefore, it would require the restructuring of deeply held values about sexuality, family, and community.”23 Hurtado’s point is not that men’s liberation takes the place of, or is the same as, the liberation of Chicanas; instead, she points out that Chicana liberation is predicated on “the restructuring of deeply held values” that determine possibilities of action and identity. Hurtado’s decolonial call for the deconstruction and restructuring of received categories of knowledge, being, and community suggests a means of locating “Rain of Scorpions” within a context of renewal and sustenance, especially on a systemic level. For Lupe, companionship with Fito is sustaining, especially because it is not part of an enormous and externally determined narrative or plot. If the deconstruction of the Lupe-Fito romance undoes heteropatriarchy’s monumental force in writing the arc of love, the novel also decolonizes the idea of paradise as a space that can be settled. This moves against the ideological construct of “when wagon trains went west,” which the boys imagine in their fantasy of the green valley. In fact, even though the young boys envision finding the hidden green paradise and the people of Smeltertown settling it, Portillo Trambley decisively unsettles this fantasy. The solution is not a Chicanx rearticulation of settler colonialism; instead, it is a more pragmatic and politically useful thing: the people themselves, not a messianically inhabited space, are revealed to be paradise. This argument is levied against reconquista and the logic of Aztlán-centric Chicanx nationalism of any iteration; yet, without outright dismissing the territorial rationale behind these claims to hegemony, which are rooted in empowerment in the face of

dispossession, Portillo Trambley’s novella moves in another direction. When the boys return from the cave and approach Papa At with a stone they have discovered— with the word KEAR cut into the surface— they ask him what the letters mean. In both editions, Papa At knowingly smiles, before telling the boys, as well as the rest of the children in his store at the time, that the word means “you” (1975, 177; 1993, 168). Papa At goes on explaining:

The narration considers the contradictory but unifying concept of “kear,” which Papa At notes means a number of things. The passage’s tone of speculative description establishes the story’s complicated message: “Light . . . water . . . stone . . . fire . . . people. There was more bewilderment than understanding, but there was a feel, a strange feel as if a door had opened unto something to be realized” (1975, 177– 78; ellipses original). Portillo Trambley’s use of “unto” rather than the expected “onto” produces an unmooring textual strangeness. In particular, “unto” carries a sacred resonance, and it also inserts a temporal quality into the language, which might otherwise— given that “there was a feel, a strange feel as if a door had opened”— be read as purely spatial. This unsettling feeling emphasizes the decolonial process of unsettlement. The novella contains a lengthy, though perhaps heavy-handed, narrative arc related to the discovery of the “kear” stone. Much earlier in the text, the children hear Papa At’s description of the genocidal ideologies of colonization and conquest: “The white man says he tamed the West; the Indian sees it another way. The white man has brought forth a new order of steel and concrete; it is called progress. Sometimes it is like the twister of the desert; this new order destroys in its path, like the killing current of a river or the hail that ruins crops. There is a word . . . caos . . . caos” (1975, 117; ellipses original). The children listening to Papa At ask for definitions of chaos: “Miguel volunteered, ‘I learned that word in Reading. Chaos . . . is chaos . . . Ke . . . us.

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Papa At smiled reassuringly. “It’s a piece of wisdom beyond years.” Miguel became excited, “It’s a symbol, a secret code?” Papa At shook his head. Papa At had placed all the things they had brought back from the cave on a small table for people to see. The orange jars, the beautiful stones, and the slab. They were not worth money. But people would wonder when they came into the store. The water of the cave had made another world, another kind of light in the stones and rocks. People would feel an old mystery inside themselves. Papa At felt it and he wanted the people to feel it too. It was like centuries discovered inside the heart and in a silent mind. (1975, 177)

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I think you pronounce it like that.’ Miguel had not known, when he learned to spell the word in class, that it had the secrets of the universe . . . mixed up with suffering. What a word! Chaos . . . caos. . . .” (1975, 118; ellipses original). The novella creates a direct semiotic and visual connection between “KEAR” and “Ke . . . us,” and this is confirmed in the particular attention given to the idea of chaos. Tomás Vallejos in particular notes the importance of motion, a throughline in the Aztec philosophy of Ometeotl, in Portillo Trambley’s work. He argues:

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Through the all-important element of chaos, Portillo Trambley’s fiction discloses the passage to her visionary paradise. It is reached through an individual’s inner acceptance of all aspects of life and awareness of being part of this “all.” The search for paradise in Rain of Scorpions, sometimes successful and sometimes not, is a return to the primordial past, to the moment of creation. By holding the primordial wholeness of creation up as a model, Portillo Trambley makes her criticisms of social orders that are dead harmonies and not vital balances.24

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I agree with Vallejos’s sense of the importance of chaos to the text, especially as a version of “vital balances” rather than “dead harmonies” and the genocidal “progress” Papa At names; however, his insistence on “the primordial past” as “the moment of creation,” rather than understanding the “now” as this moment of creation, causes him to focus on isolation and individual discovery at the expense of the communal process of dialogue and discovery that the novella privileges throughout. Though Vallejos finds energetic dialectical tension between “an individual’s inner acceptance of all aspects of life and awareness of being part of this ‘all,’ ” his vision of Portillo Trambley’s work looks backward toward an underlying communal essence, rather than transhistorically at the creative energies within each person. Portillo Trambley’s decolonizing vision is rooted within the active and activating creation of a world for the living, and this is a point that has been elaborated at length in recent criticism, such as Cutler’s and Candelaria’s. Cutler argues, “What Papa At suggests, and Lupe intuitively gets, is that the flight from the town would represent a further alienation, a flight from history. In this sense, Rain of Scorpions presents a strong counternarrative to the romantic idealism of Bless Me, Ultima. Rather than an attempt at an idealist transcendence, the surrealism of Rain of Scorpions always circles back to the grounds of present history: economic inequality, the war in Viet Nam, and the flooding of El Paso after Hurricane Cecilia in 1970.”25 Candelaria finds:

By not avoiding machismo and sexuality [Portillo Trambley] strode onto the stage of raza creative literature and found it to be a temporal and spatial precipice of the Chicano Movement with its own anxieties—or, at least, its own distinctive intracultural, transnational perturbations—of politics and identity. She wrote her unique expressive zone, or border discourse, as a means of suggesting another zone of potential human connectedness, una frontera de Yo-soy-porque-Somos.26 Candelaria’s “Yo-soy-porque-Somos” brilliantly suggests a way to think with the “Ke . . . us”-to-“kear” transition. Indeed, for Portillo Trambley, community does not come from a recognition of self reflected within an existing social structure (that is, she does not seek mere representation as a political means or a political end); instead, as Candelaria notes, we arrive at a zone in which “I am because we are,” in which somos becomes the nomos. Justification lies in relationality. “Rain of Scorpions” continues the countergenealogy that Mary Pat Brady has in mind in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies. Brady asserts:

Portillo Trambley’s decolonial vision, rooted in relationality and the unsettling of monuments of Chicanx masculinity, specifically argues against the settler colonial implications of the desire for the green valley in the novella; to grab the land would be, quite simply, a displaced “use of space to naturalize violent racial, gender, sexual, and class ideologies” of the type that Brady notes. Rather than desiring to colonize a space as a liberatory strategy, Portillo Trambley asserts the need for a transhistorical and decolonial tactic that works within and through the difficulty of one’s community. Thus “Rain of Scorpions” falls within Norma Alarcón’s lineage of Chicana writings in which “the point is not so much to recover a lost ‘utopia’ nor the ‘true’ essence of our being; although, of course, there are those who long for the ‘lost origins,’ as well as those who feel a profound kinship with the ‘lost’— a spirituality whose resistant political

Unset t li ng Mo nu ment s of Chic a n x Ma s c ul i n it y

Chicana literature has, from its inception, contested the terms of capitalist spatial formation, including the attempts to regulate the meanings and uses of spaces, especially the use of space to naturalize violent racial, gender, sexual, and class ideologies. Chicana literature has consistently offered alternative methods of conceptualizing space not only by noting how social change must be spatialized but also by seeing and feeling space as performative and participatory, that is, by refusing a too-rigid binary between the material and the discursive.27

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implications must not be underestimated, but refocused for feminist change.”28 Ramón Saldívar, noting the importance of Chicana feminism in Chicano Narrative, argues that “the literature produced by Chicana authors is counterhegemonic to the second power, serving as a critique of critiques of oppression that fail to take into account the full range of domination. This metacritical function of Chicana narrative makes this new body of texts doubly differential and dialectical and of great significance to anyone interested in the literatures of the Americas and in the theories that respond to them.”29 By employing an understanding of Chicana feminism within a hemispheric and transhistorical tradition of decoloniality, Portillo Trambley’s variegated tactics of unsettling the monuments of Chicanx masculinity form an energetic alternative. To consider Portillo Trambley’s “Rain of Scorpions” an attentive act of unsettling Chicanx masculinity, especially as it intersects with nationalism, is to situate the text in opposition to the monumentalizing logic of canonical literary genealogies, thus offering a new path of inquiry and literary movement. In its very presence as a text, the novella forms an action— and within it are set forth a variety of Chicanx masculinities, while we are prompted to consider them and envision how they might be transformed or instantiated in empowering, feminist ways. In so doing, “Rain of Scorpions” further elaborates an ecologically oriented critique of what Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel have recently named the Capitalocene and its unethical framework of power in which objects and subjects are transformed into consumable units;30 Portillo Trambley’s text achieves this by specifically attending to how brown bodies are subjected to the environmental violence of capitalism’s expansion. Finally, and most urgently, the novella is a critique of settler colonialism, asking us to question the desire of the boys from Smeltertown to settle the green valley. Taken together, these unsettled monuments, as part of a matrix of decolonial aesthetic tactics, establish what Sylvia Wynter calls “a horizon from which to spearhead the speech of a new frontier of knowledge able to move us toward a new, correlated human species, and eco-systemic, ethic.”31 To see the reality of the green valley, the people of Smeltertown do not need to possess it or settle it; instead, they realize that the green valley is the communal, loving, and autonomous impulse that makes them Chicanx in the first place.

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Notes

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Thank you to Fede Aldama and Arturo Aldama for asking me to contribute to this volume, and to Matt Gleeson for astute suggestions and edits. I am also extremely grateful to the University of Notre Dame’s Gender Studies Program, particularly for hosting me at the Gender Studies Faculty Workshop. The feedback I received from the participants has been extremely helpful throughout the writing and development of this chapter. I would also like to specifically thank Carla O. Alvarez and Alexandria

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

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1.

Suarez at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, whose help was invaluable in the completion of this project. In this essay, I use Chicana, Chicano, and Chicanx, although not interchangeably. I mean Chicana to indicate specifically feminist or womanist philosophical interventions, and I use Chicano to signal a specific intersection of masculinity, politics, and philosophy. In using Chicanx, I mean an inclusive Chicanidad that contains within it Chicano, Chicana, and opposition to the putative binary between the two. It must be noted that although I am marshaling a very specific definition, I am not the inventor of the phrase “decolonial tactics”— that credit goes to a number of critics. “Decolonial tactics” has a presence in scholarly articles and presentations, which can be ascertained through search engine results. For the most part, the usage appears in the context of Indigenous studies, including in work by Jason Black (“A Clash of Native Space and Institutional Place in a Local Choctaw-Upper Creek Memory Site: Decolonizing Critiques and Scholar-Activist Interventions”), Liliana Conlisk-Gallegos (“Somos la dignidad rebelde: On Mexican Indigenous Praxis of Resistance Pedagogy, No Longer Misappropriated Under US ‘Innovative’ Methods”), Rachel Constance Jackson (“‘Touching the Pen’: Kiowa Rhetorical Sovereignty, Transrhetorical Analysis, and Decolonial Archives”), and Sara Alicia Ramírez (“Subjects of Trauma: The Decolonial Tactics of Self-Making and Self-Healing by Queer Xicana Feminist Teatristas”). Importantly, Ramírez does not elaborate a narrow definition of “decolonial tactics” as such. Instead she traces a variety of tactics present in performance and theater. Following Chela Sandoval, she argues that decolonial tactics are “tactics or movidas [which] are short-term maneuvers that are part of a long-term strategy for structural change” (Ramírez, “Subjects of Trauma,” 12), examining these in the work of Cherríe Moraga, Adelina Anthony, and Virginia Grise. The theoretical framework Ramírez establishes has enormous implications for current and future research in Chicanx studies and could shed important light on Portillo Trambley’s dramas, including Blacklight, Sor Juana, The Day of the Swallows, and others. For example, Ramírez argues that “like shamanistic strategists, [these playwrights] offer decolonial feminist tactics to uncover our open wounds, to let them breathe, and to let them finally scar, for this is one component for imagining a holistic decolonial project” (Ramírez, “Subjects of Trauma,” 3). Using Ramírez’s framework, one can see how Portillo Trambley’s dramas— and one could argue her fiction as well— might be used to expose and then heal the historical wounding of Chicanas at the hands of racism and heteropatriarchy. Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary, 5. Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 49. Chow, Writing Diaspora, 17. This is a point elaborated by Chicana and Chicanx literary theory, philosophy, and history, as well as in Black studies and Indigenous studies. From Emma Pérez to Aída Hurtado, from Teresa Córdova to Teresa McKenna, from This Bridge Called My Back to Living Chicana Theory, from Sojourner Truth to Saidiya Hartman, from Zitkála-Šá to Paula Gunn Allen, from Ida B. Wells and Pauline Hopkins to Toni Morrison and

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7.

8.

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9.

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10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

Christina Sharpe, and across many lineages and critical permutations, the need to undo received and oppressive norms through a revolutionary decolonial praxis has been asserted and imagined in words and works of astonishing, vivifying power. In an interview with Karin Ikas, published in Ikas’s Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers, Portillo Trambley states, “By the way, don’t refer to the first Rain of Scorpions! Use the second. It is so much better,” and, “The second Rain of Scorpions is more accepting of people and situations. It does not pontificate like the first Rain. I hope I’ve improved as a writer, not to communicate a message, but to speak ‘life’!” Ikas, Chicana Ways, 208, 209. Vernon and Patricia Lattin do a truly exceptional job of comparing the 1975 and 1993 editions in their introduction to the 1993 edition, and they craft an inspiring invitation to further take up Portillo Trambley’s work in the context of developments in literary theory and cultural studies. Lattin and Lattin, “Introduction.” “Winners: Third Annual Premio Quinto Sol for Literature,” box 6, folder 5, Estela Portillo Trambley Papers, 1969– 1978, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin. In a news article by Betty Ligon, “Mother of Five Is Poet, Playwright, Novelist,” El Paso Herald-Post, Saturday, June 5, 1976, Portillo Trambley states that she won the 1972 Premio Quinto Sol (and does not qualify it with “honorary” or “honorable mention”) for her work editing Chicanas in Literature and Art, but another source (“Original Play Set In Barrio,” by Ed Kimble, in the El Paso Times of Wednesday, May 25, 1977) claims she won the prize for “Days of the Swallows” [sic]. Cutler, Ends of Assimilation. The following sources mention a 1976 award: “E.P. Teacher Wins Quinto Sol Award,” El Paso Herald-Post, Saturday, June 5, 1976; and Galal J. Kernahan, “Una Isla de Pobreza,” Hispano Americano Tiempo / Time Magazine, March 5, 1979. However, “3 Plays Conclude UTEP Series,” published in the El Paso Herald-Post, claims Portillo Trambley was the “winner of the Quinto Sol award for literature in 1974.” This is a pretty anomalous observation, and I have not yet seen it repeated anywhere else. “Chicana Playwright Struggles with 2 Cultures,” by Richard A. Abrams (Austin American-Statesman, December 6, 1981), also mentions that Portillo Trambley’s acting was noteworthy, as she was “twice-winner of El Paso’s coveted Harlequin Award.” All the above sources are found in box 6, folder 5, of the Estella Portillo Trambley Papers in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Lattin and Lattin, “Eve’s Garden,” 3. Fernández, “Abriendo Caminos,” 39. Quiñonez, “Re(Riting),” 137. In her interview with Juan Bruce-Novoa, Portillo Trambley states, “People who review Rain of Scorpions say I am a woman’s liberationist, which I didn’t see, but when I look through the whole thing, well what do you know, I am.” Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors, 167. Candelaria, Engendering; Rojas, “Violent Acts”; Cutler, Ends of Assimilation. Rojas, “Violent Acts,” 72.

Works Cited Alarcón, Norma. “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman.” In Living Chicana Theory, edited by Carla Trujillo, 371–82. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1997.

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15. Candelaria, “Engendering,” 196. 16. Textual references to Portillo Trambley’s “Rain of Scorpions” are cited in the text of this chapter by page number preceded by year of the edition (either 1975 or 1993). For full bibliographical information, see Trambley, Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings; Trambley, Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories. I use “Portillo Trambley” throughout the essay, although the Library of Congress refers to her last name only as “Trambley.” 17. Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors, 164. 18. In the 1993 edition, Lupe is a college-educated tutor whose aspirations to serve her community align with her love for Fito. Her sexual openness and certainty are foregrounded in that edition, and Portillo Trambley moves away from the “female Quixote” implications of a young heroine living out a fantasy. However, Lupe’s overcoming of that fantasy narrative structure lends power to the original text, even if, to second Portillo Trambley’s sense of the text, it was a bit heavy-handed. 19. In the 1993 edition, a meeting is called in response to ASARCO’s punishment of the community, due to the civic and political action it faces. ASARCO plans to dismantle the barrio and move everyone who lives there to new factory housing outside of town, separating them into several small groups rather than leaving them as one big community. 20. Indeed, in the 1993 edition, Portillo Trambley writes, “Lupe wanted to make him feel whole. He was whole and beautiful, but there was no more Belén [Fito’s ex, who left him when he came back from the war]. Love me, Fito, she commanded fiercely in her mind. I know about the love that counts because I have passed through the fire of loneliness. That has made me whole. Now, let me make you whole” (1993, 155). That said, the 1993 text far more openly celebrates Lupe’s sexuality and sensuality. 21. Vowell, “MELUS Interview,” 64. 22. Rojas, “Violent Acts,” 82. 23. Hurtado, “Politics of Sexuality,” 406. 24. Vallejos, “Fictive Search,” 276. 25. Cutler, Ends of Assimilation, 82. 26. Candelaria, “Engendering,” 204. 27. Brady, Extinct Lands, 6. 28. Alarcón, “Chicana Feminism,” 375. 29. Saldívar, Chicano Narrative, 173. 30. Moore and Patel, “Unearthing the Capitalocene.” 31. Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 69.

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Brady, Mary Pat. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Candelaria, Cordelia. “Engendering Re/Solutions: The (Feminist) Legacy of Estela Portillo Trambley.” In Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century, edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez, 196– 208. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Cutler, John Alba. Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2015. Fernández, Roberta. “Abriendo Caminos in the Brotherland: Chicana Writers Respond to the Ideology of Literary Nationalism.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 14, no. 2 (1994): 23– 50. Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2005. Hurtado, Aída. “The Politics of Sexuality in the Gender Subordination of Chicanas.” In Living Chicana Theory, edited by Carla Trujillo, 383– 428. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1997. Ikas, Karin Rosa. Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2001. Lattin, Patricia, and Vernon Lattin. “Eve’s Garden: Power and Freedom in Estela Portillo Trambley’s Stories.” Typescript, 1977. Box 6, folder 7, Estela Portillo Trambley Papers, 1969– 1978. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. Lattin, Patricia, and Vernon Lattin. “Introduction.” In Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories, by Estela Portillo Trambley, 1–14. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press, 1993. Moore, Jason W., and Raj Patel. “Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology.” ROAR Magazine, no. 7, Autumn 2017, 16–27. Accessed December 19, 2018, https://roarmag.org/issues. Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Quiñonez, Naomi H. “Re(Riting) the Chicana Postcolonial: From Traitor to 21st Century Interpreter.” In Living Chicana Theory, edited by Carla Trujillo, 129– 151. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1997. Ramírez, Sara Alicia. “Subjects of Trauma: The Decolonial Tactics of Self-Making and Self-Healing by Queer Xicana Feminist Teatristas.” PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2016. eScholarship, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wc1k0s9. Rojas, Maythee. “Violent Acts of a Feminist Nature: Estela Portillo Trambley’s Striking Short Fiction.” MELUS 33, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 71– 90.

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Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: Dialectics of Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Trambley, Estela Portillo. Papers, 1969– 1978. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. Trambley, Estela Portillo. Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press, 1993. Trambley, Estela Portillo. Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings. Berkeley, Calif.: Tonatiuh International Inc., 1975. Vallejos, Tomás. “Estela Portillo Trambley’s Fictive Search for Paradise.” In Contemporary Chicano Fiction, edited by Vernon E. Lattin, 269–77. Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press / Editorial Bilingüe, 1986. Vowell, Faye Nell. “A MELUS Interview: Estela Portillo Trambley.” MELUS 9, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 59– 66. Wynter, Sylvia. “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 42– 73.

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PART IV Why the Latin-X Matters From Performance to Activism

Chapter 15

TRANS*LATING THE GENDERQUEER - X THROUGH CAXCAN, NAHUA, AND XICANX INDÍGENA KNOWLEDGE Jennie Luna and Gabriel S. Estrada

As Native people our community is based on memory. — MOCTEZUMA MEZA SOLANO, DANCE KEEPER AND CAXCAN ELDER

Teaching on the Chumash and Tongva coasts of California, we (the authors) draw upon Caxcan knowledge, Nahuatl language, Xicana/o/x studies, and Indigenous methodologies to frame our analysis of gender.1 The topic of Indigenous genders as expressed in ceremonial and cultural practice is a central theme in both of our work. For example, while Luna is a doula who draws upon her Xicana feminist community experiences to write about Nahua birthing texts, Estrada writes about film history within zir two-spirit/queer Indigenous circles.2 Thus, gender easily became a common point of interest in this research on Caxcan, Nahua, and Xicanx Indígena knowledge. Here, we relate our own conversations, observations, and ethnographic experiences with the emergent and historical studies of Caxcan language and Indigenous epistemologies. Inspired by our grandfathers’ Caxcan oral traditions, this chapter emphasizes the 1924 Caxcan feminist work of Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, the 2019 dissertation by Caxcan activist-scholar Daisy Ocampo, and other Caxcan, Nahua, and Xicanx Indígena written histories. Affirming both Walter’s emphasis on the healing importance of place for male, female, and transgender two-spirit people and Cajete’s assertion that land provides a “map of the soul” and “ensoulment,” we also returned to our grandfathers’ pueblos to do the research, not only for ourselves, but for the U.S. diaspora of Caxcanes, Zacatecanxs, Jaliscienses, Nahuas, and Xicanxs.3 We feel compelled to write this work given that Caxcan, Spanish, and Nahuatl documents are often held in obscure Mexican archives and that, until recently, the majority of English-language scholarship about the Caxcanes derived from Mexican and white U.S. anthropologists who failed to integrate genderqueer, feminist, and Indigenous methodologies into their work. We urgently document ongoing Caxcan critiques of the modern cis-heterocolonial master narrative that renders Caxcanes extinct. In addition, our assertion 251

of a Caxcan philosophical base counters the Mexica-centric narrative that persists in Chicano and Mexican nationalist ideologies. We begin the body of our work by reviewing the return to our grandfathers’ pueblos to learn more about Caxcan language and wisdom. We further this linguistic, gendered, and cultural analysis by examining the Caxcan place-names of our pueblos. Next, we contrast the gender contruction within Nahuatl language with the use of the -x to render Spanish and English more genderqueer within Xicanx discourse. Here we find the contemporary Xicanx Indígena use of the genderqueer -x to be both benefit and limitation. After reviewing myths of cisheterosexist mestizaje, we return to Caxcan, Nahua, and Chichimeca-Mexica dance and ceremony to offer gendered insights into decolonizing the extant literature on Caxcanes and Nahuas. We hope that this essay can inspire other Indigenous and Xicanx Indígena researchers to revisit and redress previously held ideas and provide new sites of knowledge.

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This article has its beginnings in the summer of 2009, when we met in Zacateco territory at the University of Zacatecas as participants in an intensive Nahuatl language class and realized that we both identified with and were in the process of reclaiming our Caxcan identity, knowledge, and culture. Learning Nahuatl on Chichimeca land was of particular significance to us both because southern Zacatecas, Mexico, is our ancestral homeland and the Caxcan variant of Nahuatl is the language of our ancestors. Studying the Nahuatl language and Caxcan documents ignited a sense that it was urgent to gain some level of fluency in order to better understand the nuances of culture and the local vernacular of our respective pueblos. Anthropologists conflate the last fluent generation of Caxcan language speakers of the 1890s with the end of the Caxcan people themselves.4 Yet we were two people of the mezquite learning Nahuatl and Caxcan language by circulating through our ancestral lands and participating in the ongoing revitalization of Caxcan language, scholarship, and culture. At the conclusion of the Nahuatl language course, we followed the stories of our grandfathers by setting out on a trip to our pueblos of Juchipila and Tepechitlán to seek new knowledge based in Caxcan land and community. For Luna, this meant retracing the migration of her mother’s father José Manuel Luna to Arroyo Hondo, Tepechitlán. It was he who explained to her, “Somos la gente del mezquite” (We are the people of the mesquite tree). For Estrada, this included going to Juchipila and Tlachialoyantepec (Cerro de las Ventanas) to reconnect the Santiago Estrada Rodríguez line of patrilineal Caxcan stories of the coyote, eagle, and other desert animals back to their

Caxcan landscape of origin. In doing this work, we began to deepen a feeling of connection to our land, our language, our nation, our history of resistance, and our kinship. This trip led to experiences of Caxcan ceremonies, visits to Caxcan sacred sites, and conversations with local cronistas (site-specific chroniclers who document local histories) and caretakers of local sacred sites. This journey set in motion an ongoing kinship and friendship with the long-term goal of building upon our research and knowledge, of which this chapter is the first product. The culmination of our decade-long collaboration occurred during the May 2019 Caxcan Symposium, which we organized at California State University, Channel Islands. The symposium’s speakers brought new insights, evolving our conversation with contemporary transnational Caxcan movements. For example, one of our keynote speakers, Daisy Ocampo of the Inglewood chapter of La Hermandad del Xuchitl, presented her research on contemporary Caxcanes actively fighting for ceremonial access to their Creation Mountain. This access has been blocked by Mexican state archaeological projects of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), who are commodifying access to the teocali (pyramid) and cliff house on the peñol.5 Seeing the Caxcan-, Spanish-, and English-language scholarship renewed through contemporary Caxcan voices was a milestone we wish to share in this work.

Caxcan language is most often documented as an ancient variant of Nahuatl.6 It is one of several Nahuatl variants indigenous to the western and northern regions of Mexico now known as Zacatecas, southern Durango, Jalisco, Colima, Aguascalientes, Nayarit, and Michoacán. Sometimes these variants are defined by the prevalence of either -t, -l, or -tl endings on certain words, such as the noun Nahuatl. The Nahuat and Nahual variants overlap in Jalisco, with the Nahuat variant extending northward into Zacatecas and the Nahual variant extending south to Michoacán, especially along the coast. Caxcan is a -t Nahuat variant.7 Although Caxcanes favor the -t in unpossessed noun endings, Caxcan documents and spellings also incorporate the -tl suffix in some cases and even the -l in others. The Eastern Nahuatl -tl variants appear to have evolved as the Nahual or Nahuat speakers circulated from the northwestern areas of Mexico through central, eastern, and southern Mexico and as far south as Costa Rica.8 Beginning in the sixth century and ending no later than the ninth century CE, these migrants are evidenced at the multiethnic metropolis of Teotihuacan. By the tenth century, these peoples, sometimes called the Tolteca-Chichimeca, pushed farther south and east to other cities,

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Caxcan Language and Gendered Place-Names

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but some likely retraced their earlier migration, introducing some -tl endings back into Western Nahua populations. Starting around 1200 CE, Western Nahuas again moved east in waves into central Mexico, the most famous group being the Mexica, who would build a large confederation and trade network based upon Mesoamerican infrastructure in the area. While some Caxcanes may have helped found the urban centers of Chalchihuites (Alta Vista) and Chicomoztoc (La Quemada) in Zacatecas, along with other regional urban centers across the first millennium CE and into the second, many remained in or returned to the seminomadic life of the semiarid altiplano, maintaining a different set of practices and political alliances with other Chichimecas that were not possible in the more urbanized areas of central Mexico or the more tropical areas farther east, west, or south. Today, Nahuatl is one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in North America, with over 2.5 million speakers, not including the many other Indigenous languages that also belong to the Uto-Nahuatl language family. Overall, in the country of Mexico, Indigenous languages are interspersed in a checkerboard pattern and there are even several language families in many regions. In the literature, various Caxcan pueblos are sometimes referred to as Mexicaneros, Caxcanes, Teules, Mexicanos Rústicos, Tochos, Chichimecas, or Chichimeca-Toltecas, as well as other pueblo-specific identities such as Xochipilteca. Historically, the three pueblos of Teul, Juchipila, and Nochistlan comprised the center of the seminomadic Caxcan nations that run along the canyons and rivers of Tlaltenango, Xochipilli, and Nochistlan. These pueblos represented spiritual/ceremonial, agricultural/commercial, and political/military centers that were most often seasonal stops for Caxcanes before Spanish colonial practices enforced more settled pueblo/altepet practices in the 1500s to 1700s amid various Chichimeca wars, Spanish enslavement, and the Catholic hegemony that arose in Zacatecas.9 Despite the loss of fluently spoken Caxcan language in modern times, ceremonial, cultural, political, and social connections persist along with place-names. Many Caxcan pueblos retain place-names that describe the sacred landscape and the eventual formation of the altepet (at [water] + tepet [mountain]) or pueblo. The term Caxcan may have origins in the following: molcaxit (molcajete / mortar bowl) or caxti (cup/vessel) + can (locative, meaning “place”). Together this translates to “Place of the Mortar Bowl / Vessel.” The significance of the vessel is that it is seen as the container of life or water; it represents the womb, related to what García-Zambrano identifies as the Nahua conception of the paisaje sagrado (sacred landscape).10 He posits that the geomorphological features of the earth and water most often had to mirror the sacred passages of life in order for a people to form and name their pueblo/altepetl. In the same vein, the early Caxcanes of the canyons of Zacatecas, which geomor-

phologically represented a bowl of water, are the people who come from the place of emergence from earth, the womb of Mother Earth. For example, the name Tepechitlán can be translated as tepet (mountain) + icxit (foot) + tlan (locative) = “Place at the Foot of the Mountain,” as well as tepechtli, meaning “base.”11 The fact that this town’s name reflects a geographical feature and identifies it as located at the “foot of the mountain” (a valley/bowl), reflects García-Zambrano’s explanation of sacred landscapes in Mesoamerica. Another example is presented in the work of Daisy Ocampo, who recounts the emergence of Caxcanes from the Creation Mountain, Tlachialoyantepec (El Cerro de las Ventanas / Windows on the Mountain), a mountain that stood amid the primordial sea or lake called Cax, a word for which the authors could find no exact etymology:

Another example from Juchipila, or Xochipilan (Flower Child Place), is the name of Xochipili, a teot (spirit) who is also linked to Caxcan sacred creation narratives. In Ocampo’s work, Xochipili is the youngest child or tepechi of Mother Crow and Father Snake, who is eaten by a jaguar. When the Caxcanes placed cacalotxuchil petals on the cave floor where they were hiding and Mother Crow was resting, “the tepechi emerged from the flower bed located inside the cave.”13 Caxcanes named the tepechi Xochipili, or “flower prince/princess,” and eventually honored zir resurrection through the dance of the xuchitl.14 Given Garibi’s notes that the -chi in tepechi is a diminutive suffix like -tzin in Central Nahuatl or -ito/a in Spanish,15 tepechi could also mean a little tepet (hill) or even little lord, lady, or noble one.16 Hence, Tepechitlán could alternately derive from tepechi and refer to the resurrection of Xochipili. In the colonial Lienzo de Tlaxcala, Xochipili is first represented in Latin script and with the logogram of a child holding a cempohualxochitl flower, a reference to Tlachialoyantepec, the sacred birthplace of Xochipili.17 This naming practice and its links to the primordial birthing of the Caxcanes continued into Jalisco in places such as Ameca (atl [water] + mecatl [rope/ cord] = Water Cord / Umbilical Cord / Lineage), which represents great respect for Mother Earth’s ongoing power to birth through water.

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The Caxcan community of Contitlan, for example, refers to the body of water as a lake in their narration, while Caxcans of el Remolino insist an ocean covered the Caxcan homelands including the Juchipila Canyons. Since Tlachialoyantepec and Sierra de Morones came from water, Caxcans view water as a sacred element that held these twins like a mother carries her children in her womb. Caxcans describe this time as Tlachiwalisti, or creation.12

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(Me)Ch/Xicana/o/@/x

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Nahuatl and Caxcan have a bounded linguistic interface with the genderqueer -x recently adopted by Latinx and Xicanx writers. In the 1990s, an offshoot of the Chicano Movement produced a renewed spelling of the term Chicano beginning with an X: Xicano.18 The X arguably stems from the x in México, which was fought for as a national reminder of Nahuatl linguistic roots. Whereas older spellings of México used the Spanish j instead of an x (Méjico), the new Mexican state reclaimed the X in MeXico and MeXica. However, this state reclamation of Indigenismo was a racialized logic that favored modern mestizo identity rather than supporting living Nahua and Indigenous pueblos. As one elder said of twentieth-century Mexican politics in the Chichimeca territories of Jerez, Zacatecas, “El gobierno nomás mata la gente” (The government just kills people). Bolaños notes that Gutiérrez de Mendoza continued her journalistic activism before, during, and after the Mexican Revolution, writing with the Council of the Caxcanes in 1924, “We do not recognize the right of any race to impose its civilization upon us.”19 She was dedicated to feminist projects and the rejection of assimilationist models of education in Indigenous communities. While the term Xicano derives from the Nahuatl term Mexica, it is important to note that the Nahuatl language existed before the Mexica migrated south into what is now Mexico City. The contemporary notion that Xicano is only related to the Mexica (versus other Indigenous peoples within Mexico) came about because of Chicano nationalist movements that at times inferred this limited meaning. Today, the word Xicano is taking on new meanings that reject Mexica-centrism, and instead can be viewed from a broader perspective, one that more widely embraces the Uto-Nahuatl, Mayan, and other Indigenous language families spoken throughout the Americas. For example, Acosta references both a Nahuatl and a Maya pronunciation of a final x, stating: “Others have suggested pronouncing ‘x’ in accord with its phonetic value in Mayan languages: /ʃ/ or ‘sh’, as in Xicanx (pronounced Shi-kan-sh).”20 To some extent, the X challenged Spanish constructions of language and pronunciation. It represented a symbolic return to the Nahuatl and Maya usage and pronunciation and thus retains potential for Indigenous reclamation. Xicanas, Xicanos, and Xicanxs adopted the X not only as a respelling of the word, but also as a conscious resistance to further Hispanicization/ colonization. The X is also symbolic of a shift within the movement. The 1960s Chicano Movement focused on mestizo politics, whereas later evolutions of the movement began to recognize the need for spiritual guidance and Indigenous perspectives. The X phenomenon stems from the resurgence of

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“Indigenismo/Indigeneity/Indianismo,” or revivals of and reconnection with Indigenous roots, ceremony, and ways of life. As such, the X in the spelling is symbolic of the recognition of a more profound political and spiritual grounding that moves beyond definitions that were once held to be true in the 1960s Chicano Movement. The use of the X helped people begin to rethink and refocus the meanings of Chicano as a nationalist, geopolitical, boundaryencapsulated, and inherently Eurocentric identity, and brought about the evolution of a “non-border,” philosophical, and spiritual term. Rodríguez states, “X is the spirit that has allowed us to persevere and seek justice. It is also the spirit that rejects oppression, conquest, exploitation and domination. X is hope and the fire that can never be extinguished and the spirit that refuses to die.”21 Moraga adds that X in the Xicano movement also hearkens to Malcolm X’s use of the letter to resist further enslavement or to reject imposed slave identities, a sentiment that Rodríguez echoes, as both African and Latinx Indigenous populations faced a process of racialization that included resistance to enslavement.22 Xicanas/os/xs were in a process not of “relearning” but of re-membering; they were recalling memories, reconnecting, and building their communities back up. In order to “re-member,” one had to start by going home: going back to Indigenous languages, asking families for their stories, and going back to places of family origin. Essentially, the X in Xicana/o/x represents a spirit or a movement. Whether or not one calls oneself Xicanx, this word still can identify the way in which one lives and walks. It is a spirit that ultimately cannot be quantified or reduced to language or words. Furthermore, the word Xicanx has evolved to include a flexibility that embraces simultaneous identification with specific Indigenous nations, whether local Indigenous peoples or beyond. Xicana/o/x neither identifies a merely Mexican geographical origin, nor is it limited to imposed political, mental, and psychological borders. It reflects a political belief and a strategy to build inter-Indigenous connections and relations hemispherically. Xicanx is an “intertribal” transborder term that may or may not coincide with multiracial identities. Here we affirm that Indigenous peoplehood is community-ascribed and self-affirmed in a multiplicity of ways in different communites and nations. What the early use of Xicano often lacked was an integration of an evolving Xicana feminist consciousness. Chicanas in the 1960s through 1980s challenged the heteropatriarchal nature of the Chicano Movement and also began to assert mujerista, womanist, feminist, and lesbiana perspectives. Rejecting the predominantly white feminist movement that often marginalized and disenfranchised women of color, they began to configure their own concepts and ideas in relation to feminism.23 The term Xicana, like Xicano, would be attached to a politic, an Indigenous identity and spirituality, but

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it would assert and affirm the central role of women in the movement. Ana Castillo popularized the term Xicanisma to define a unique Xicana feminism which was shaped by Indigenous ideology and spirituality. Xicana, Xicanindia, Xicanista, and Xicana Indígena are all radical reconfigurations of the same ideology: one that values a self-identified Xicana who embraces her Indigenous/Native identity, placing women back at the center of life. Xicanas challenged their own broader community by proposing that decolonization needed to occur on multiple levels, including a critique of phallocentric language and by means of the intentional inclusion of Xicanas. Similar to the need to assert Indigeneity as a measure to protect that part of ourselves from being discarded or crushed, Xicanas also wanted to assert their mujerisma/ womanism within the community so as not to be rendered invisible. Xicana feminist ideology advocates for “Xicana” as a symbol of the vindication of the feminine held sacred in the matriarchal, bilateral, and matrilineal societies of Indigenous communities. In the last decade, this same argument has emerged, but for the representation of non-binary, trans*, or gender-nonconforming folks. In this chapter, the use of the asterisk in trans* is intended to open up transgender or trans to “a greater range of meanings that include genderqueer, neutrios, intersex, agender, two-spirit, cross-dresser, and genderfluid.”24 And trans*lation in our title refers to a genderqueer act of translating. In light of the trans* “x” movement, we confirm that the -x represents a nonbinary language evolution that could provide a means to help decolonize cis-heteropatriarchal leanings in Caxcan, Mexica, and Xicanx historical and contemporary literature. On the other hand, the -x can potentially suppress zihuat (mujer/woman) visibility, the need to balance different genders, and the use of Caxcan and Nahuatl language, which are relatively gender-neutral. Inclusivity would move beyond the Eurocentric/Western gender binary of a/o, and the -x would once again be a marker of resistance. While the -x, in this usage, is not an intentional marker of Indigeneity, one could argue that, in effect, the reinscription of the letter remains a marker that resists Eurocentric constructions of language and therefore is potentially an Indigenous form of resistance.25 At the same time, other Indigenous beliefs, such as contemporary Zapatista philosophy, believe that gender is not binary but rather complementary, and they prefer the @ rather than the -x, to keep both rather than delete them altogether. We insert our own postulation that perhaps the @ symbol can be viewed as a caracol (in Spanish, a snail or conch shell) that represents the universe, which is in constant spiral motion. With regard to gender, this caracol symbol supposes that, rather than a linear spectrum, gender is more like the spiral of the caracol, in constant fluidity and motion. The @ also honors the dual duality that exists in everything. This dual

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duality is the understanding that not only does duality exist in the form of two complementary entities (earth and sky, sun and moon, water and fire), but it also exists within each single entity. For example, within one human body there is duality (masculine and feminine energy). The same can be said for the earth, sky, and every element and/or entity that exists; each of these, in and of itself, is also dual in nature. At the same time, the ultimate meaning of “duality” is not so much the idea that there are only two ways of being; rather, duality as a concept attempts to acknowledge the importance of balance and change. From an Indigenous perspective, to walk in balance is to walk in beauty. By accepting and embracing all parts of ourselves, we achieve balance and beauty. While part of what an Indigenized genderqueer -x represents is an interruption of colonization and male/female sexual hierarchies, the -x reconfigurations are still operating according to a partially European construction of language. For example, actual Nahuatl unpossessed noun endings rarely end in an -x suffix, but instead tend to end in -tl, -li, and -tli, and more often -t, -li, and -ti in Caxcan language. As related in the 1765 Nahuat and Caxcan vocabulary and confessional by Cortés y Zedeño, the Caxcan -t noun endings of both zihuatacat (mujer/woman person) and oquixtacat (hombre/man person) are exactly the same, in contrast with the masculine -o and feminine -a gender class endings in Spanish that mark the feminine word macha as “butch woman” and the masculine word macho as “butch man.”26 Tacat by itself merely means “person” and is not gendered in the same way that all Caxcan nouns are not gendered, unless the heart or root of the noun is combined with other modifying words like oquixti for man or zihuat for woman, as we just observed. A queer example of zihuat and oquixti desire occurs in Cortés y Zedeño’s confessional with Spanish and Nahuat translation: “Quizá has penetrado alguna muger, ó algun varon en la parte poƒterior? Azo oticuilonti ten zihuat, nozo ten oquichti ipan icuilchil?” which Estrada trans*lates from Nahuat to English here as, “Perhaps you were a penetrator of a woman or of a man upon zir posterior?”27 Even the singular third-person possessor i- in icuilchil (zir behind) does not translate directly as “his” or “hers” but is always nonbinary, though in this case it refers to the second erotic object of the sentence, oquichti (hombre/man). In this quote, the context of the cis-heteropatriarchal Catholic condemnation of queer erotics and heterosexual sex outside of marriage is emphasized by the structure of the Spanish language itself, with the feminine -a suffix in “alguna” (some) that marks la muger (woman) as feminine contrasted with the masculine -o in “alguno” (some) that marks el varon as masculine. Over time, and with these Catholic colonial interventions, Caxcan and Nahua language and gender roles began to conform unevenly to

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Spanish expectations. For example, in contemporary Chicontepec Huastecan Nahuatl, the plural term tlacameh still means “people,” but its singular form tlacatl now means “man.” This contemporary masculinization of tlacatl came about through the influence of the patriarchal impositions of Spanish language and Catholicism that mark the universal as masculine and absent the feminine and trans* from representation. Lockhart explains that in Nahuatl, gender is not a grammatical category and all “nouns are not masculine, feminine or neuter, as they are in many Indo-European languages.”28 While English and Spanish speakers struggle to imagine nonbinary constructions such as an -x ending or the pronouns they and ze, in Nahuatl “neither the prefixes nor the independent pronouns distinguish gender,” Lockhart affirms, adding that “Nahuatl has absolutely no way to say ‘he’ or ‘she,’ only third person singular subject, no ‘his’ or ‘her,’ only third person singular possessive.”29 In fact, the gendered-ending struggles of the Indo-European Spanish and English would not find resonance in the Americas, as most Indigenous languages do not have gender as a grammatical class.30 In this sense, Nahuatl, like most American Indigenous languages, goes far beyond the implementation of the Indigenized genderqueer -x into English and Spanish to completely avoid the possibility of having gendered pronouns and gendered suffixes. In this light, we would argue for Indigenous authors to return to the use of their own Indigenous pronouns, such as the Nahuat nonbinary third-person singular yehuat, to make this point more poignantly.

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Decolonizing Mexican Indigenous Data

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While it is important to reclaim voices through the arts and language, there are multiple science and policy areas beyond the scope of this article that also need reform and revolution. The next section offers a brief glimpse at evolving Indigenous social science data before delving back into dance and ceremony. Even a basic question such as “Who counts as Indigenous?” sparks new debates as science changes. Writing in the postmillennial context of the mass marketing of genetic tests, Tallbear notes that Indigenous DNA does not equate to sovereign forms of Indigenous identity, especially when the DNA data is used to politically disempower Indigenous peoples’ own practices in accounting for their membership.31 New census data on Indigenous populations is not predicted solely by the presence of Indigenous DNA. While postmillennial DNA studies offer little support for actual Indigenous rights movements, genetic scholarship, like any field of knowledge, has a potential decolonizing impact on the totalizing and hypermasculine narratives of Spanish colonization and mestizo national formation. Postrevolutionary mestizaje authors José Vasconcelos and Octavio Paz featured the Spanish col-

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onizer father and Aztec colonized mother as the archetypal biological parents of a Mexican mestizo identity.32 This dominant Eurocentric metanarrative positions the “Aztec Empire” as the norm and marker of all Indigeneity of Mexico. This is further reenforced by the myth of mestizaje, referring to the predominant Spanish-Indigenous racial mixture, a residue of the colonial caste system.33 As Paz’s writings might have foreshadowed, preliminary DNA tests show that, on average, mixed Mexican populations are indeed roughly half American Indigenous and half European / “Old World” according to DNA composition. For example, a 2008 study showed an estimated genetic makeup of 55 percent Indigenous, 42 percent European, 3.5 percent African, and 1.8 percent East Asian for mixed Mexican DNA, with a general increase in Indigenous DNA as one goes from north to south in Mexico.34 DNA also shows that mixed people are largely descended from the local Indigenous populations rather than being “Aztec” or of Central Nahua descent. Paz also might not have been able to account for the diversity of Y-DNA patrilineages, with 30.8 percent Indigenous, 14.7 percent Eurasian (which includes North African, Middle Eastern, and European Mediterranean), 4.2 percent African, and 0.3 percent East Asian patrilineages complementing the 49.9 percent European (mostly Spanish) ones on average.35 Culturally speaking, this means that Indigenous men did significantly pass on their culture, language, family ties, gender roles, and eventual adaptations to colonial-era changes, despite Paz’s archetypal masking of Indigenous fatherhood with colonial Spanish lines of patrilineage. Given Paz’s foregrounding of Mexican Indigenous matrilineages, the 95.1 percent Indigenous mitochondrial mtDNA of mixed Mexicans, indicating matrilineage, is no surprise, and is certainly a strong gendered source of Indigeneity in mixed populations.36 This means that in the cases when Indigeneity is passed on by Indigenous patrilineage, it is almost assuredly accompanied by Indigenous matrilineage as well. The Indigenization of mixed populations can occur in community, through ceremony, through language, or through the corn farming practices that are central to many Indigenous peoples of Mexico. Even those from non-Indigenous patrilineages could learn the all-important Indigenous practices of seasonal hunting celebrations or corn ceremonies thanks to the remaining patrilineal and matrilineal knowledge in their community and family. This leads to what Bonfil Batalla calls “México profundo,” a continued living presence of Mesoamerican lifeways that are politically and culturally deployed in cyclical resistive ways against Eurocentric and globalized oppressions.37 Postmillennial censuses of the United States of America and the United States of Mexico add important markers of Indigeneity that highlight greater numbers of Mexican Indians, which in turn has historical gendered and political implications. In the USA, Mexican American Indians were, surprisingly,

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the fourth largest grouping of American Indians in the 2010 census, which shows transnational movement of Mexican Indigenous peoples.38 The 2015 Mexican census, for the first time, allowed people to self-identify as Indigenous independent of language use; this was in addition to the standard use of Indigenous language in the home as the sole marker of being Indigenous.39 This new question allowed for a tripling of Indigenous people in the Mexican national population in 2015: the proportion of people in an Indigenousspeaking household was 8.7 percent, and those who self-identify as Indigenous regardless of language use came to 25.1 percent.40 In Zacatecas, Jalisco, and Aguascalientes, the contiguous states that form the traditional lands of Caxcanes, this acceptance of identification as Indigenous even if outside of an Indigenous-speaking household allowed for an increase of Indigenous identification by a factor of 15, 16, and 10, respectively. In this 2015 census, ten Caxcan areas of southern Zacatecas averaged about 10 percent Indigenous. An example of a gendered instance of México profundo is the 2005 Zapatista meeting hosted by the Coca of Mezcala on the shores of Lake Chapala in Jalisco. Caxcan, Coca, Zacateco, and Chichimeca-Huachichil delegates participated, despite being labeled “extinct” by the dominant society as a result of language loss. The second principle that the Mezcala Zapatista group affirmed was respect for “la madre tierra” (the Mother Earth) in opposition to the neoliberal spoiling of Indigenous lands for elitist globalized profits.41 This gendered inflection of the earth as mother in Indigenous communities is a foundation of Indigenous continuity and gender. While it does not necessarily mean that genders are balanced within these communities after centuries of colonial gendered oppressive forces, it nonetheless provides a source of women’s power and men’s respect for women, a power and a respect that cannot be easily understood outside of Indigenous contexts.

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Gendering Caxcan Dance History and Nahuatl

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While Indigenous data is important for its policy and political implications, it is not the only concern within Indigenous methodologies of knowing. Dance also has a central place within Caxcan identity, which has survived through the decades even after official censuses stopped counting Caxcanes. Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza was a decolonial Caxcan feminist, revolutionary, journalist, and author who convened the Council of the Caxcanes in Juchipila (Xochipilan) in the 1920s. In her 1924 book ¡Por la tierra y por la raza!, she expanded upon her opposition to the sexism of Mexican Catholicism by professing her belief in Caxcan sacred creation narratives. These narratives include the eventual splitting off of the Tenochtitlan-bound Mexica Nahuas from the original Caxcan people, who once lived by a large lake. Although

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subtle, her exhortation about “la dualidad creadora” (the creative duality) includes Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent) and Xochiquetzal (Flowery Feather) as father and mother, respectively, of Xochipili (Flower Child). At another point, she mentions this duality as being that of the primordial water and sun. Gutiérrez de Mendoza also describes the truly ancient “Danza del Xúchil” (Dance of the Flower), reenacted in Xochipillan during the summer rains, as a direct reflection of the dual creation of Quetzalcoatl and Xochiquetzal. After being devoured by a monster, Xochipilli is brought back to life and the parents celebrate this resurrection. Gutiérrez de Mendoza writes, “Nos recordaban también la maravillosa reaparición de nuestro hermano y para que no se olvidara que la ternura de Xochiquétzal y la fuerza de Quetzalcóatl daban la vida, al celebrarse la Danza del Xúchil se unían los que amaban como amaron ellos” (We were reminded as well of the marvelous reappearance of our brother [Xochipili] and so as not to forget that the affection of Xochiquetzal and the force of Quetzalcoatl gave life, upon celebrating the Dance of the Flower, those who loved united, as they [Quetzalcoatl and Xochiquetzal] did).42 Formerly the loving dance may have been symbolic, as it is today— the passing of a red cloth, or tlapaleoliztle, between different genders— or it could have been differently enacted in terms of gender and erotics before the Catholic Church intervened. One reading of this ceremony is that it honors the internal and external dual duality in all beings, all children of Quetzalcoatl and Xochiquetzal, who include both Xochipili and the Caxcanes. The cacalotxuchil (crow flower or plumeria) that naturally grows in the region is still brought as an offering for Xochipili to this day during the dance. Although ¡Por la tierra y por la raza! often gives more narration of Quetzalcoatl and Caxcan men’s actions, the narrative of Xochipili presents both parents as essential to Xochipili’s existence. Gutiérrez de Mendoza’s own biography mentions that she is Caxcan through her matrilineal line, supporting the idea that Caxcan lineage can descend through women. What of transgender and genderqueer Caxcanes and Nahuas in history? This is a complicated question because the norms of gender common in popular culture today do not apply to most Indigenous people, including Caxcanes. For example, Gutiérrez de Mendoza could be thought of as a genderqueer person for having transcended women’s gendered limitations in her roles as a revolutionary journalist and Indigenous intellectual.43 However, historical fragments on Caxcanes indicate that women were not restricted from thinking, fighting, and governing within earlier Caxcan culture. For example, Yáñez Rosales lists the Caxcan altepet (pueblo) of Mezquituta in the Moyahua municipality of southern Zacatecas as being politically headed by a woman, in addition to the Tecuexe and Caxcan pueblo of Tonalá, which is still known for its Indigenous pottery, dances, and arts in the Guadalajara

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area.44 The Caxcanes and the neighboring Tecuexe, who probably spoke a related Uto-Nahuatl language as well as Nahuatl, likely intermarried throughout the underdocumented histories of ancient migration patterns, wars, and colonial mixing as Caxcanes again expanded farther south into what is now Jalisco.45 Certainly, some neighboring Tepecanos, Wixárikas, Zacatecos, Huachichiles, and Tecuexes mixed with Caxcanes in Zacatecas centuries before and after the Mixton War, the major Chichimeca alliance war that took place along the Xochipilli River in the early 1540s. Intermarriage in bordering or interethnic areas also implies a sharing or complicating of multigendered systems across various Indigenous peoples. Many questions remain unanswered about this history. Although Zacatecos are reported to have spoken a variant of Nahuatl,46 the lack of language documentation and current use makes it hard to differentiate their language and culture from those of the Caxcanes. We must also consider even deeper connections that contest the colonial record of war as the defining quality of all Chichimeca cultures.47 According to the Caxcan spiritual leader Pichilingue, a caretaker of Tlachialoyantepec at Juchipila, the various local Indigenous peoples were once united, but they split apart after the flood that followed their joint creation. Quoted in Ocampo’s thesis, he states, “These are all my relatives. We are cousins, once, a long time ago, we were all the same.”48 Perhaps this regional mixing and shifting Chichimeca alliances are the reasons why Caxcanes are not automatically lumped in with Nahua people today, despite being identified in the colonial literature as speaking an early variant of Nahuatl for centuries.49 A minority of sources do count Caxcan as a separate language from Nahuatl. Given the Ventura and Los Angeles County border communities of intermarried Tongva and Chumash, two peoples whose languages are from entirely different language families, it is also possible that the non-Nahuatl designation of Caxcan derived from multilingual and intermarried communities that included Nahuat-speaking Caxcanes. This multilingual community could relate to Ocampo’s use of the alternate Caxcan identity of Caz’ Ahmo, literally meaning “no lake,” a term referring to the disappearance of the Caxcan primordial water after the great flood.50 While ahmo is undoubtedly “no” in all Western Nahuatl languages, cax or caz does not have a clear etymology, with its lack of the usual Nahuatl ending to make it caxti, caxli, or caxtli, which means “cup” or “vessel.” Caxti does not literally mean “lake.” However, the Tepecanos located to the west and north of the Caxcanes spoke a variant of O’odham, and the more northern Tohono O’odham language does have a similar word for lake, cahchk.51 Could cax be from the original cahchk, a loan word from O’odham? In contrast to the Nahuatl-adjacent -x ending of Xicanx, here is an example in which an unpossessed noun that ends in -x could be proof that a word is actually not Nahuat. More linguistic analysis is

Briefly, Caxcans utilize these masks in a tastoan dance that performs the clash of the Spanish and Caxcans. This re-enactment

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needed of Caxcan language to better understand how closely it relates to its neighboring languages. In contrast to the zihuatastoani (woman speaker/ruler) of Mezquituta, a 1570 letter written in Nahuatl by five Xochipila tastoani speakers appears to demonstrate all-male leadership. They introduce themselves saying, “Titlatoque ynipan xochipilla” (We govern over Xochipila), and sign their names as “Don Domingo de García; Don Pablo de Guzman; Don Pedro governador; Francisco Ximénez, alcalde; Francisco Lucas, alcalde.”52 One wonders to what extent women could maintain tastoani posts in colonial times when dealing with the extreme sexism of Spanish colonial structures and with an influx of differing Indigenous, mixed, African, Asian, and Spanish populations. The literature does not provide a full picture. What is clear is that as Spanish colonial gender norms began to filter into Caxcan communities, public letters and writings in Nahuatl or Caxcan would change before actual community understandings did, since the latter were farther from Spanish scrutiny, especially in more remote Indigenous areas. Ceremonies demonstrate Indigenous understandings of gender and culture that writings will sometimes not allow. In a more recent evolution of a few of the regional Caxcan celebrations featuring masked tastoan dancers, women tastoanes don masks with masculine beards and mustaches. This kind of gender fluidity does not happen within the less-Indigenized Catholic masses. In Moyahua, there is movement from male to female attire within this same dance. One Euro-American ethnographer writing for National Geographic repeats colonial narratives as she writes, “Here, two tastuanes dress as chinanas— male dancers, representing indigenous elders, who wear women’s clothing— and cavort through the streets, kissing each crowd member and fighting each other. But the other tastuanes— the chinanas’ symbolic children— chase and beat the ‘elders,’ stripping them of their feminine clothing to recall the humiliation suffered by the vanquished Caxcanes.”53 Transphobic and colonial, this analysis confronts only a few paradoxes of this Indigenous dance honoring Santo Santiago, the military spiritual leader for Catholic conversion of Moors and Indigenous people, in Moyahua, where people have varying relationships to being Caxcan. Firstly, National Geographic incorrectly establishes all Caxcanes as having disappeared in the 1500s. Neither does it account for La Danza del Xúchil, which has been practiced for millennia, nor does it explore the aspects of the tastoanes that show survival and more coded resistance. In contrast to this colonial perspective, Ocampo notes:

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through performance involves tesguino, or fermented corn drink, as a practice of forgetting yet reconnecting to Caxcans roots, Creation, and landscape. Caxcans believe the tree is sacrificing a piece of itself for the healing of the People through the many layers of historical trauma experienced.54

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While all parties agree that the dances are ways of dealing with historical trauma, Ocampo’s analysis provides a key narrative of Caxcan reconnection across the temporal upheavals of wars and ongoing cultural disruptions. Rather than only focusing on Spanish-Caxcan relationships, this narrative recenters Caxcan relationships to sacred lands and plants. She remembers to honor the mesquite tree for its sacrifice in the ceremony, and she highlights the presence of the tesguino. Here we remember José Manuel Luna’s words that Caxcanes are people of the mezquite. Ocampo completes the circle by saying that the tastoan dances are about both forgetting and remembering Caxcan roots. She affirms that the healing and decolonial understandings of Caxcan dances persist into contemporary times, even when popular culture continues to replicate colonial descriptions of Caxcan disappearance. Moreover, her larger work affirms the strength of Caxcan elders, both women and men. The written literature surrounding nonnormative Nahua genders is subject to both suppression and misunderstanding in colonial documents. Here we call for a decolonization of the Caxcan and Nahua teot Xochipili (Flower Child) in the queered Mesoamerican literature. Although “Xochipilli” is identified as a deity of “homosexuality” and “male prostitution” in post-1980s Western gay historical surveys,55 a decolonial reading would counter that claim by citing the partial influence of the Spanish Inquisition and the condemnation of “homosexuality” in colonial Nahua literature.56 While Xochipili can represent happiness and erotic pleasure, it is not clear that these qualities are restricted to queer people. It is interesting to contrast the literature from the 1800s on two-spirit people of North America, in which genderqueer roles are recorded as having greater honor and integration within Indigenous societies, with the colonial literature from the 1500s on Nahua “sodomites” that is colored by Catholic damnation and extreme cis-heteropatriarchy. Clearly, for the colonial Spanish to find cannibalism and sodomy in Mexico was to their advantage, providing a justification for their presence in order to presumptively bring a patriarchal “order” to the Americas— a presence that resulted in mass genocides.57 The irony of colonial Nahuatl documents is that they do contain words or coded references related to queer Indigeneity that are worth repositioning. Sigal’s work is often critical of both Spanish and English translations of Nahuatl teotl names, and

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he relates a series of Nahuatl words found in colonial literature that have transgender and queer connotations, such as the apparently male-to-female xochihua (flower possessor), the apparently female-to-male or lesbian patlache, which comes from patlachuia (to use a wide thing), and the presumably receptive male-bodied cuiloni (taken one).58 However, while Sigal is in conversation with Foucault in trying to keep modern Western presumptions about homosexuality from tainting perceptions of gender in other times and places,59 he fails to take into account Indigenous methodologies that call for Indigenous research to tie itself more closely to current Indigenous “selfdetermination” and “world views,” as Linda Tuhiwai Smith outlines in Decolonizing Methodologies.60 While Sigal criticizes the “ethnopornography” of his colonial sources as the erotic study of the Other, it does not occur to him that his reliance upon non-Indigenous theory and research methods often reinscribes the Othering of Nahuas today.61 For example, Nahuas and Nahua descendants can suffer the alienation of being negatively compared to the static standards of authenticity represented by ancient Nahua writings and codex images. As Jakaltek Maya scholar Montejo notes, the exaltation of grand Mesoamerican civilizations in the literature can lead to the impoverishment and oppression of the contemporary Maya.62 We would offer the opinion that the entire field of “classic Nahuatl” studies needs to decolonize its projects by linking the historical work to contemporary Nahuas so as not to replicate the Mexican national myth of disappeared Indians. McDonough’s work on modern Huastecan Nahua intellectuals is an important step in making this link between ancient and contemporary Nahua codices as well as having a concern for Indigenous methodologies that include Nahua community activism.63 Obviously, the publication of contemporary Nahua intellectuals should be a core concern in future Nahua production and anthologies. For example, the final contemporary section of translated Indigenous literature in In the Language of Kings, edited by Miguel León-Portilla and Earl Shorris, is a critical inclusion.64 Often Nahua-authored Nahuatl writings are locally produced in the rural Nahua altepetl, in urban barrios, and online. The online magazine Yolitia: Revista en lengua náhuatl, edited by macehualli (Huastecan Nahua) Victoriano de la Cruz Cruz, demonstrates articles written about the author’s community in the Huasteca and about Mexico City, which is a place of quizaliztli (migration) from the Huasteca. A former teacher of modern Nahuatl in Zacatecas, de la Cruz Cruz also published an article about the Western Nahuatl of the adjacent state of Jalisco.65 Historical gender research that incorporates contemporary Caxcan, Nahua, and Xicanx practices can provide better clues, or at least findings with

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more cultural integrity, than research that uncritically relies on sixteenthcentury colonial literature. There is a need for this modern work. As yet, no study examines through interviews the perspectives of contemporary two-spirit, trans, or queer Caxcanes in Zacatecas. However, according to contemporary Indigenous ceremonial traditions in Chicontepec, Veracruz, in the Huasteca region, there is a Nahuatl term that identifies LGBTQ or two-spirit people. This term, maxochitl, can be translated literally as “hand flower.” The term derives from the name of their sacred creator / spiritual manifestation, known as Chicomexochitl, or Seven Flowers, who is the caretaker of all, but especially associated with corn. Within ceremony, Chicomexochitl appears as a sacred, single paper cut-out form that represents a sacred family of various ages and genders. The term maxochitl and its understanding are an extension of this cosmogony, acknowledging that those who are two-spirit or dual, or who carry multigendered conceptualizations, are connected to the sacred. They carry the flower in their hand, or rather, they are the flowered hand. They are connected to the divine.66 Currently, there are too few open or “out” spaces for queer and trans* danzantes within Danza Tolteca-Chichimeca-Mexica circles, despite the fact that there are many LGBTQ danzantes. These circles, like Xicanx communities, are often intertribal in nature, sometimes leaning toward Rarámuri, Zapotec, Nahua, Apache, Tongva, or other local Indigenous families in composition. The fostering of a safe, inclusive space for LGBTQ danzantes and the incorporation or embracing of a more overt, special role for two-spirit/ maxochitl danzantes has yet to be consistently realized.67 Within Danza Tolteca-Chichimeca-Mexica circles, women, and in some spaces two-spirit/ queer Xicanx/Indigenous and trans*feminine danzantes, hold the position of caring for the fire or smoke in the center of the circle. It is an honored position that connects women and the feminine or nonbinary with the sun and earth, as central forces and givers of life. More recently, two-spirit gatherings have become places of renewal for queer danzantes. An example would be the two-spirit gatherings which feature Danza Tolteca-ChichimecaMexica. Although all Danza circles may not have created obvious spaces for the discussion of gender/sexuality issues or removed limitations based on gender, there is future potential within Danza for these transformations to occur, even though change can often be met with resistance. While Caxcan tastoanes in Los Angeles and in western Mexico may also offer genderqueer spaces in different ways, the notion of a dual duality of gender would complicate the idea that all ceremony is simply divided between purely male and female participants, or that human gender is even necessarily a main category of being for Caxcanes.

What can we learn from Caxcan, Nahua, and Xicanx Indígena wisdomknowledge that can help us move forward our conversations about gender, masculinity, and Indigeneity? Ultimately, if we are truly examining ways to decolonize masculinity and gender, we must begin by acknowledging that the notion of an oppositional “gender binary” is Eurocentric at its roots; yet that Eurocentric binary is the place most conversations begin. Rather than beginning from this Eurocentric premise, we argue that there are multiple ways of knowing gender, and one of these ways is through an Indigenous epistemology. But to infuse our conversation with Indigenous wisdom requires each of us to do the work of reconnecting to our own Indigenous philosophies, which in our case begins with Caxcan philosophy. Our work must begin with a radical reconnection, both relearning and re-membering our Indigenous philosophical roots in order to have a deeper understanding of gender analysis. Often our political histories of naming have limited our possibilities rather than expanded them. Therefore, we are exploring the -x and its usage, re-membering and reconnecting it to its origins rooted in Nahuatl language. Simultaneously, we argue that decolonizing masculinity and gender goes beyond the limited gesture of a single letter -x. If we are examining gender from a Nahua or Indigenous perspective, we must first examine the purpose. Is our ultimate goal related to current politics or is it about transformation? Is our goal to be “woke” or is it to restore our Indigenous relationships? At their core, Indigenous perspectives honor our relationships with humans, the Earth, and the natural world and are ultimately about unconditional love and connection. The Indigenous concept of the circle supposes that more inclusivity makes the circle more complete; therefore, it is critical to continue working toward being more whole as individuals and as a community. Rather than focusing solely on “naming,” we must further consider what we each contribute to the circle, or rather to our pueblo, in order for it to be more whole. It is the history of colonialism and migration that has rendered us invisible and, simultaneously, it is our desire and need to “be seen” that pushes us to claim the names and relationships that give meaning to Caxcan, Nahua, and Xicanx Indígena lives and continued existence.

Notes 1.

Most Nahuatl words used in this piece, including many place-names, intentionally do not adhere to Spanish-language conventions of accent usage. In contemporary written Nahuatl there is a linguistic trend to not write the accents, because in Nahuatl the

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

accents are always on the second-to-last syllable, therefore assumed and not written. In addition, throughout this chapter, the authors use Nahua to refer to the people and Nahuatl to refer to the language, mindful of variations of usage in the record. Luna and Galeana, “Remembering Coyolxauhqui,” 1; Estrada, “Ojibwe Lesbian Visual AIDS,” 403. Walters et al., “Dis-Placement and Dis-ease,” 187; Cajete, quoted in Walters et al., “Dis-Placement and Dis-ease,” 165. Gonzalez, “Caxcan Identity,” x. Ocampo, “Spiritual Geographies,” 2. Yáñez Rosales, “Nahuatl L2 Texts.” Dakin, “Western and Central Nahua Dialects,” 294. Dakin, 270. Ocampo, “Spiritual Geographies,” 200. García-Zambrano, “Ancestral Rituals,” 202. Godoy Robles, “Monograf ía”; Bierhorst, Nahuatl-English Dictionary, 311. Ocampo, “Spiritual Geographies,” 76–77. Ocampo, 83. Ocampo, 84. Dávila Garibi, Cazcanos y Tochos, 23. Bierhorst, Nahuatl-English Dictionary, 313. León-Portilla, La flecha, 82, 183. Rodríguez, The X; Maiz, Xicano. Bolaños, “Chicana/x Critical Place,” 7. Acosta Matos, “Grammatical Gender,” 42. Rodríguez, The X, 135. Moraga, Xicana Codex; Rodríguez, The X, 133. Castillo, Massacre. Tompkins, “Asterisk,” 27. Acosta Matos, “Grammatical Gender,” 42. Cortés y Zedeño, Arte, Vocabulario y Confessionario, 35. Cortés y Zedeño, 160. Lockhart, Nahuatl as Written, 1. Lockhart, 1. Corbett, “Number of Genders,” 127. Tallbear, Native American DNA, 10. Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race; Paz, Labyrinth, 86. Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race; Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo. Silva-Ziletti et al., “Genomic Diversity,” 2. Martínez-Cortés et al., “Admixture and Population Structure,” 4. González-Sobrino et al., “Genetic Diversity,” 60. Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo, 29– 48. Norris, Vines, and Hoeffel, American Indian and Alaska Native Population, 18.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Coordinación General de Planeación y Evaluación, Población indígena, 4– 5. Coordinación General de Planeación y Evaluación, 7. Congreso Nacional Indígena, “Declaración de Mezcala.” Gutiérrez de Mendoza, ¡Por la tierra!, 14. Translation by Gabriel S. Estrada. Lau Jaiven, “La participación de las mujeres,” 5. Yáñez Rosales, Rostro, palabra y memoria, 53. Weigand, “Archaeology and Ethnohistory,” 171. Dakin, “Western and Central Nahua Dialects,” 276. Weigand, “Archaeology and Ethnohistory,” 171. Ocampo, “Spiritual Geographies,” 95. Dávila Garibi, Cazcanos y Tochos. Ocampo, “Spiritual Geographies,” 98. Saxton, Saxton, and Enos, Dictionary: Tohono O’odham, 90. De García et al., “Ma tlazohcamacho,” 73. Brown, “Complex Mexican Dance.” Brown, 117. Greenberg, Construction of Homosexuality, 165. Estrada, “Two-Spirit History,” 174. Estrada, 184. Sigal, Flower and the Scorpion, 99–100, 111, 199. Sigal, 3. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. Sigal, Flower and the Scorpion, 69. Montejo, Maya Intellectual Renaissance, 39. McDonough, Learned Ones, 142– 43. León-Portilla and Shorris, Language of Kings. De la Cruz Cruz, “El náhuatl.” Luna, “Danza Mexica.” For the past four years, Bay Area danzante Xico Garza has founded and organized a two-spirit gathering in the Central Valley of California which has created a safe space for ceremony. See www.wildplaces.net for more information.

Acosta Matos, Mariel M. “Graphic Representations of Grammatical Gender in Spanish Language.” Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, no. 1 (2018): 29–48. Bierhorst, John. A Nahuatl-English Dictionary and Concordance to the Cantares Mexicanos. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1985. Bolaños, Karina. “Chicana/x Critical Place: Re/configuration of Indigeneity, Identity, and Spirituality.” Master’s thesis, San Francisco State University, 2019. Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization. Translated by Philip A. Dennis. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

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Brown, Rachel. “Go Inside a Complex Mexican Dance.” National Geographic, August 7, 2018. Castillo, Ana. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. New York: Plume Books, 1994. Congreso Nacional Indígena. “Declaración de Mezcala.” Regeneración Radio, December 3, 2006. https://www.regeneracionradio.org/index.php/autonomia/pueblos-indios/ item/794-cni-declaración-de-mezcala. Coordinación General de Planeación y Evaluación. Fichas de información básica de la población indígena, 2015. Mexico City: Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas, 2016. Corbett, Greville G. “Number of Genders.” In The World Atlas of Language Structures, edited by Matthew S. Dryer and Martin Haspelmath, 126–29. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2013. Cortés y Zedeño, Gerónimo Thomas de Aquino. Arte, Vocabulario y Confessionario en el Idioma Mexicano. Puebla de Los Angeles: Imprenta del Colegio Real de San Ignacio, 1765. Dakin, Karen. “Western and Central Nahua Dialects: Possible Influences from Contact with Cora and Huichol.” In Language Contact and Change in Mesoamerica and Beyond, edited by Karen Dakin, Claudia Parodi, and Natalie Operstein, 263– 300. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017. Dávila Garibi, José Ignacio Paulino. Cazcanos y Tochos: Algunas observaciones acerca de estas tribus y su idioma. Guadalajara: Instituto Jalisciense de Antropología e Historia, Universidad de Guadalajara, 1991. de García, Domingo, Pablo de Guzman, Don Pedro, Francisco Ximénez, and Francisco Lucas. “Ma tlazohcamacho yn totecuiyo dios.” In Fray Miguel de Bolonia: El guardián de los indios, compiled by José de Jesús Martín Flores, 72–73. Mexico City: Entre Amigos, 2006. de la Cruz Cruz, Victoriano. “El náhuatl en el estado de Jalisco: La pérdida de la identidad.” Yolitia: Revista náhuatl, no. 5 (August 2017): 23– 30. https://issuu.com/victoriano delacruzcruz/docs/yolitia_5. Estrada, Gabriel S. “Ojibwe Lesbian Visual AIDS: On the Red Road with Carol laFavor, Her Giveaway (1988) and Native LGBTQ2 Film History.” In “Native American MenWomen, Lesbians, Two-Spirits: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives,” special issue of Journal of Lesbian Studies 20, no. 3–4 (June 2016): 388–407. Estrada, Gabriel S. “Two-Spirit History in Southwestern and Mesoamerican Literatures.” In Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400–1850, edited by Sandra Slater and Fay Yarbrough, 165– 84. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011. García-Zambrano, Ángel Julián. “Ancestral Rituals of Landscape Exploration and Appropriation Among Indigenous Communities in Early Colonial México.” In Sacred Gardens and Landscapes: Ritual and Agency, edited by Michel Conan, 193–220. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2007.

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Godoy Robles, Salvador. “Monograf ía de Tepechitlán, Zacatecas.” Unpublished monograph, Tepechitlán, Zacatecas, n.d. Gonzalez, Rubio Ramiro. “The Caxcan Identity: An Ethnohistorical Account of the Caxcan People from Zacatecas and Jalisco, Mexico.” Master’s thesis, California State University, Fullerton, 2003. González-Sobrino, Blanca Z., et al. “Genetic Diversity and Differentiation in Urban and Indigenous Populations of Mexico: Patterns of Mitochondrial DNA and Y-Chromosome Lineages.” Biodemography and Social Biology 62, no. 1 (January 2016): 53–72. Greenberg, David F. The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Juana Belén. ¡Por la tierra y por la raza! Mexico City: Imprenta de F. Pérez Negrete, 1924. Lau Jaiven, Ana. “La participación de las mujeres en la Revolución Mexicana: Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza (1875–1942).” Diálogos: Revista Electrónica de Historia 5, no. 1– 2 (April– August 2005): 1– 32. León-Portilla, Miguel. La flecha en el blanco: Francisco Tenamaztle y Bartolomé de las Casas en lucha por los derechos de los indígenas, 1541– 1556. Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 1995. León-Portilla, Miguel, and Earl Shorris, eds. In the Language of Kings: An Anthology of Mesoamerican Literature, Pre-Columbian to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Lockhart, James. Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl with Copious Examples and Texts. Nahuatl Studies Series no. 6. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Luna, Jennie. “Danza Mexica: Indigenous Identity, Spirituality, Activism, and Performance.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Davis, March 2011. Luna, Jennie, and Martha Galeana. “Remembering Coyolxauhqui as a Birthing Text.” Regeneración Tlacuilolli: UCLA Raza Studies Journal 2, no. 1 (2016): 7– 32. Maiz, Apaxu. Xicano: An Autobiography. East Lansing, Mich.: Sun Dog Press, 1995. Martínez-Cortés, Gabriela, et  al. “Admixture and Population Structure in MexicanMestizos Based on Paternal Lineages.” Journal of Human Genetics (July 2012): 1–7. McDonough, Kelly S. The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Montejo, Victor. Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Identity, Representation, and Leadership. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Moraga, Cherríe. A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings 2000– 2010. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. Norris, Tina, Paula Vines, and Elizabeth M. Hoeffel. The American Indian and Alaska Native Population: 2010. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012. Ocampo, Daisy. “Spiritual Geographies of Indigenous Sovereignty: Connections of Caxcan with Tlachialoyantepec and Chemehuevi with Mamapukaib.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Riverside, December 2019.

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Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings. Translated by Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Philips Belash. New York: Grove Press, 1985. Rodríguez, Roberto. The X in La Raza. Albuquerque: self-published, 1996. Saxton, Dean, Lucille Saxton, and Susie Enos. Dictionary: Tohono O’odham / Pima to English, English to Tohono O’odham / Pima. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1983. Sigal, Pete. The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Silva-Ziletti, Irma, et al. “Analysis of Genomic Diversity in Mexican Mestizo Populations to Develop Genomic Medicine in Mexico.” In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1–6. Cambridge: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2009. www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2009/05/11/0903045106.full.pdf. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies. New York: Zed Books, 2002. Tallbear, Kim. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Tompkins, Avery. “Asterisk.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1– 2 (May 2014): 26–27. Vasconcelos, José. The Cosmic Race / La raza cósmica. Translated by Didier T. Jaén. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979. Walters, Karina, Ramona Beltran, David Huh, and Teresa Evans-Campbell. “Dis-Placement and Dis-Ease: Land, Place, and Health Among American Indians and Alaska Natives.” In Communities, Neighborhoods, and Health: Expanding the Boundaries of Place, edited by Linda M. Burton, Stephan A. Matthews, ManChui Leung, Susan P. Kemp, and David T. Takeuchi, 163– 99. New York: Springer Science & Business Media B.V., 2011. Weigand, Phil C. “Considerations on the Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Mexicaneros, Tequales, Coras, Huicholes, and Caxcanes of Nayarit, Jalisco, and Zacatecas.” In Contributions to the Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Greater Mesoamerica: Western Mexico, edited by W. J. Folan, 126– 87. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Yáñez Rosales, Rosa H. “Nahuatl L2 Texts from Northern Nueva Galicia.” In Language Contact and Change in Mesoamerica and Beyond, edited by Karen Dakin, Claudia Parodi, and Natalie Operstein, 237– 61. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017. Yáñez Rosales, Rosa H. Rostro, palabra y memoria indígenas: El  occidente de México, 1524–1816. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 2001.

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Chapter 16

“¿ERES CUIR, OR WHAT?” Latinx Disidentificatory Practices of Becoming Laura Malaver

Es una cuestión de tiempo Tan breve este momento En que eres y en que soy Tú mañana ya te fuiste Y antes me dijiste El futuro es hoy. —CAFÉ TACVBA, “FUTURO”

On May 4, 2018, NPR Music’s program Alt.Latino invited Latinx queer musicians Jenn Alva and Niña Dioz and music podcaster Miriam Zoila Pérez to speak on an episode titled “Queer, Punk and Latin: A Discussion About Sexual Identity.”1 Felix Contreras, the show’s host, alongside journalist Jessica Diaz-Hurtado, engaged in a twenty-eight-minute-and-fifty-nine-second conversation about what it means to be queer and Latinx in the music industry. After Alva, Dioz, and Pérez shared their coming-out stories with the hosts and listeners, Diaz-Hurtado asked about how their LGBT and queer experience differs from that of women who do not identify as such, particularly as Jenn Alva and Niña Dioz navigate the music world as queer performers. In her response, Alva shared how supportive the crowds she has encountered have been, especially when lesbians come to see Fea, one of her bands, perform on stage. Contreras immediately asked, “Does it sometimes feel like you are marginalized, that only your crowd is going to come and it’s not accepted by the larger punk audience in general?” Alva poignantly answered, “No, I don’t feel that way . . . I mean, it honestly feels like a bunch of misfits coming together, which I think is punk rock anyway . . . it’s all about coming together for music and having a good time.”2 In contrast, Niña Dioz, as a rapper who performs in the hip hop scene in Monterrey, Mexico, relates how the crowd was quite machista when she started performing ten years ago, not to mention verbally abusive, since Dioz was performing as the only closeted woman in the macho-dominated hip hop scene at that time.3 Right 275

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after Dioz’s response, the hosts play Fea’s song “Mujer Moderna,” an incredible “fuck ’em all” anthem that can be read as a response to the toxic pressures that masculinity and all its derivates place on other sexualities and genders, as well as a parody of the meanings of “modernity” and capital. These pressures can be called toxic because the damages caused by hegemonic masculinity/ ies seem to permeate into quotidian livelihoods and cultures deeply enough to imprint behaviors and enactments through capital, nation, class, race, and, clearly, gender and sexuality. Returning to the song, in the verse just before the chorus, band member Letty Martinez sings, “Abre más las piernas / Abre, abre, abre, abre / Abre más las piernas, eres sucia y eres perra” (Open your legs more / Open, open, open, open / Open your legs more, you are dirty and a bitch; my translation).4 To Contreras’s amazement, the possibility of a nonexplicit version of this song existing is laughable; as Alva contends and as I would like to reaffirm, there is no such thing, and that is ultimately the point. In an attempt to locate the band’s sexuality and explicit use of language at the forefront of conversation, Contreras becomes complicit in subjugating the very bodies that partake in queer(ing) modalities through music, film, art, narrative, or other forms of artistry.5 These modalities collectively gesture toward less-toxic spatial scales and logics, which in turn trouble approaches that universalize identities such as lesbian, gay, queer, and trans in relation to space and work toward the possibility of a more liberating, edgy culture that conspires with social heterogeneity and antagonizes exclusionary normative investments in homogeneity.6 Not all misfits, as Alva calls them, will engage in the queer Latinx punk rock scene, but most likely all can find refuge and desire through affinities within such a space. As performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz states, “Queers are not always ‘properly’ interpellated by the dominant public sphere’s heterosexist mandates because desire for a bad object offsets that process of reactionary ideological indoctrination.” 7 Unpacking this interview with Jenn Alva and Niña Dioz with a critical mind-set and body/sense-informed positionality invites us to condemn presumptions that falsely accuse nonnormative subjects and nonnormative behaviors of offsetting the process of “reactionary ideological indoctrination.”8 We might ask: At what point can nonnormative, subaltern, queer subjects be considered potential sites from which to critique heteronormativity, heterosexuality, and (toxic) masculinization without situating those subjects as points of depature from which to create divisions and separations, further producing liberal antagonisms? A relational approach will show how racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities implicate the ideological matrices of colonial power that “impede and enable the flows of meaning, cultural expression, desire, and pain as they make their way into the body and then find their way out in aesthetic, political, social, and gestural expressions.”9

It is also worth mentioning that the Alt.Latino show begins with the song “Macorina,” recorded in 1956 by iconic ranchera singer Chavela Vargas, playing in the background. One of Chavela Vargas’s most famous songs, “Macorina” tells the tragic life story of María Calvo Nodarse, an elegant and famous high-class prostitute of La Habana, Cuba, who was also the first woman to receive a driver’s license.10 The commentary that starts off the Alt.Latino show revolves around asking the invitees about their relationship to or knowledge of this song, specifically because, as Contreras comments, “[Chavela] deliberately did not change the pronoun in this song, so she is singing these suggestive lyrics to a woman.”11 Speaking humbly yet directly, I would say that these kinds of questions suggestive of the desire to know and inquire about sexuality and gender remind us of attempts to fixate on and fetishize particular identities and embodiments thereof. Not only does this fixation orientate the subjects in question into political material objectivities that intend to identify sexuality and gender as categorically framing the cultural artistry produced,12 but it also perpetuates the traumas of racism and colonization in subtle yet calculated ways.13 In her essay “Geographies of Selves— Reimagining Identity: Nos/Otras (Us/Other), Las Nepantleras, and the New Tribalism,” in Light in the Dark / Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, Gloria Anzaldúa writes:

The iteration of “can’t” in Anzaldúa’s piece assumes (1) the continuation of endless oppressions brought about by colonialism and their saturation in our psyche and our cuerpos (bodies), and (2) an internal desire to embrace alternative modes of being and becoming through collective alterations of “cultural beliefs, behaviors, attitudes about their meanings.”15 Chavela was singing a song about and to Macorina, a mujer, yes. And the lyrics are suggestive, full of longing and desire, yes: “Ponme la mano aquí, Macorina / Ponme la mano aquí” (Put your hand on me, Macorina / Put your hand on me; my translation). Nonetheless, the deliberate act of singing mujer-to-mujer defies the assumed binarism in which Chavela is the desiring subject and Macorina is the

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My body is sexed; I can’t avoid that reality, although I could change it through transgendering or transsexing. My body is raced; I can’t escape that reality, can’t control how other people perceive me, can’t de-race, e-race my body, or the reality of its raced-ness. U.S. society . . . expects certain behavior from women, certain bearings from men, certain comportments from queer mujeres, certain demeanor from queer hombres, certain conduct from disabled [people], and so on.14

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longed-for and desired recipient. It is important, then, to understand Contreras’s comment in the Alt.Latino show through a women of color feminist lens that understands, negotiates, and identifies with the hybridity Anzaldúa notes as mestiza consciousness and nepantla, and which also makes Contreras’s heterosexual and hegemonic positionality complicit in the aforementioned matrix of power.16 Hence, Chavela in performing her song “Macorina,” Jenn Alva and Niña Dioz as witnesses of Contreras’s “lesbic” interpretation of the song, and even Macorina herself find affinity with and refuge in the liminal dwellings some of us undertake, known to Anzaldúa as mestizaje: “Mestizas live in between different worlds, in nepantla. We are forced (or choose) to live in categories that defy binaries of gender, race, class, and sexuality. . . . Depending on the degree of cultural hybridization, we are caught between cultures and can simultaneously be insiders, outsiders, and other-siders.”17 Lastly, borrowing from Sara Ahmed, the concept of orientation and the use of orientate as a verb recapitulate the process of queering our relationship to objects and things through orientations themselves— implying movement toward or around objects; (mixed) genealogies of inheritance; perceptions of likeness; and inhabitation through dwelling among others.18 Ahmed writes that “by showing how phenomenology faces a certain direction, which depends on the relegation of other ‘things’ to the background, I consider how phenomenology may be gendered as a form of occupation.”19 I argue that Contreras’s comment and similar masculinized, sexist, and homophobic situations occupy a gendered phenomenology that depends on the existence of the “things” and “objects” around, in, or outside of such heterogeneity.20 That is, “Macorina” felt like an important and perfect song to play in the background at the beginning of a show interested in going “beyond music appreciation to talk about subjects that are music related, but speak to much larger social issues . . . [F]or no other reason than we wanted to talk about it, the subject is queer and LGBT women in the Latin music industry.”21 Is the question we should ask, then, about agency? How can we as queer people of color weave in and out of set standards that demand that our relation to objects and/or things be based on categories of self, of identity? How can we embrace being “other-siders” and misfits? I take the time to introduce the “Queer, Punk and Latin: A Discussion About Sexual Identity” episode of Alt.Latino in order to frame the Latinx practices of disidentification stemming from representational hierarchies that seek to maintain social and racial order through numerous paradigms in which the modality or practice of becoming becomes genealogically fixed and orientated. In other words, taken as performance, becoming (with) rests on the process of disidentifying from the dominant ideology, “one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it.”22 “Disidentification

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is the hermeneutical performance of decoding mass, high, or any other cultural field from the perspective of a minority subject who is disempowered” in such a social structure and such spatial logics.23 It is this disempowerment I am interested in analyzing: How are disidentificatory practices of becoming enabling minoritized subjects to feel, or be, empowered? Ellie Hernández’s chapter in this book, titled “Fea, Firme y Formal,” critically conceptualizes the ways in which Latinx female masculinity defies colonial heteronormative and heterosexual expectations and norms, as is apparent in various cultural productions through the triad “butchas,” “machas,” and “mariconas.” I seek to further expose and disrupt the fixed normativities and orientations of gender and sexuality through lenses of performativity and relationality by observing how the becoming of queer of color subjects must flow in spatial logics that are designed, recycled, and repurposed by these very subjects. Referencing Andean Indigenous thinkers in their book On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh describe relationality as vincularidad, “the awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms (in which humans are only a part) with territory or land and the cosmos. It is a relation and interdependence in search of balance and harmony of life in the planet.”24 Vincularidad, then, elucidates the practice of becoming that I am foregrounding. Through the performances deployed by Latinx (queer) subjects, in which their integral relation to music, futurity, gender, sexuality, and masculinities hopes to (re)produce harmony, balance, and empowerment, becoming through this integral relation “can enter into conversations and build understandings that both cross geopolitical locations and colonial differences, and contest the totalizing claims and political-epistemic violence of modernity.”25 In lieu of making toxic Latinx masculinity/ies central to the context of decolonization, I borrow from Jack Halberstam’s argument about trans* feminism, and queer of color critique as proposed by Roderick Ferguson, to position masculine/ized comportment within the insular characterization of what Latinx masculinity entails in the genealogies of colonial control and power.26 That is, I trouble the associations of masculinity with toxicity in Latinx culture by (re)envisioning the fixity of colonial masculinity and transforming or transporting such fixity into flexible performativities of decolonial capacities. These capacities take into consideration the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the formulation of social practices by orientating ourselves toward the past in order to live in the present and imagine possible futures. These articulations are supported by queer of color critique; this lens invites us to question boundaries of identity in order to (re)imagine identities within spaces of contestation that simultaneously address “social

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contradictions that nationalism strives to conceal.”27 Cultural phenomena such as film, television series, and music that depict enactments of masculinities that are liberated from the toxic, rigid forms described empower (trans) feminist-led epistemologies to debunk the harmful interpellation that queer of color subjects undergo in neoliberal realities that highlight processes of becoming as malleable, unfixed, and full of potential.28 In what follows, I draw on material from the aforementioned episode of NPR’s Alt.Latino program, the letra/lyrics and music video of “Mujer Moderna” by the band Fea, and the psychic future-reading abilities of a female protagonist in a Mexican telenovela. I propose that these cultural phenomena are dialectical or contradictory examples that play with and create distance from (toxic) masculinities (1) in the unfixed and reorientated queer of color performativities of the Latinx band, and (2) in the performance of the female protagonist’s subtle debunking of the masculinization deeply rooted in Latinx culture. Though this is not an ethnomusicological analysis, I view, hear, sense, and examine these case studies through a relational modality and disidentificatory analytic, borrowing from transgender studies and decolonial theory to explicate the toxicity manipulated into heterosexual masculinization and demonstrate the queer(ed) responses to such genealogies. Here decolonial theory is closely attached to queer borderlands theory in that “it seeks to engage and disengage same-sex-desiring [and/or trans desire] representations within marginal and mainstream culture.”29 I will introduce each section with verses from songs by Latin American musicians, intertwine anecdotal accounts within the cultural productions I analyze, and ultimately provide final thoughts on world-making and disidentificatory practices as these construct, recycle, rebuild, and transform colonial praxes of identity formation.

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No te dejes confundir Busca el fondo y su razón Recuerda se ven las caras Pero nunca el corazón. — RUBÉN BLADES, “PLÁSTICO”

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Putting performance studies in conversation with borderlands queer theory is important in order to show how the Latinx identity and concept ungenders Latino/a expectations and damaging stereotypes. To become Latinx necessarily entails reorientating ourselves by queering (read: disrupting) the gendered and sexualized motions we are to enact and gesture toward. For example, as a Latina, I found that gendered practices dictated my very under-

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standings of toxic Latino masculinities. On one hand, my gender expression within the dichotomous world of heteronormativity fulfilled the expectations of womanhood and femininity. The response— a back-and-forth of femalemale interactions— incapacitated my desires toward the same sex, the same gender, toward sameness of any kind. As a matter of fact, Jack Halberstam’s assertion that “the feeling of the body as experienced from the inside can sometimes be at odds with appearances or external features” resonates with me.30 A number of years later, through my identification with the marker Latin@, my sexuality began to enter an intersectional project of queerness. Because the “at” symbol in Latin@ can be pronounced as the diphthong “ao,” I felt an urge to differentiate myself from the Latina identity marker and from the formulation Latina/o, pronounced as two separate words. At the time, I cared more about identification with queerness than understanding the harm in identity separatism and exceptionalism. Processes of formation seem necessary from time to time as we mark our relation to the complex world(s) we navigate. As I began to disidentify from particular epistemologies of colonial domination and even queer and feminist theoretical frameworks, I learned to redirect my attention to other subjectivities articulating decolonial and relational praxes. That said, I understood the marker Latin@ the way Sandra K. Soto understood Chican@ in her work Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-mastery of Desire: “I like the way the nonalphabetic symbol for ‘at’ disrupts our desire for intelligibility, our desire for a quick and certain visual register of a gendered body the split second we see or hear the term.”31 Now, becoming Latinx has given me possibilities of positioning myself in contested liminal spaces of masculinities that seek to reimagine the struggles and desires that trans, queer, and nonbinary Latinxs experience. I believe that to understand the social realities of Latinx as a label of identity, we can turn to varying meaning-making practices by Latinx queer subjects who become through performance and navigate masculinities in complex ways. Though I am not engaging with specificities of the intervention of the x in Latinx as a new genealogy of identity, I do consider the expansion of such a move to divert us from contentious binarisms into more fluid possibilities of being and becoming. I thus refer to queer of color subjects in this work, specifically Latinx-identified individuals and communities, including Chicanx identities. Certain performances of masculine comportment and expression within the framework of queer of color critique allow us to comprehend the tensions that appear in productions where queer Latinxs embrace masculinity as a gender expression without attending to the social expectation that masculinity equates to toxic behaviors informed by processes of racialization and capitalism. During the Alt.Latino episode “Queer, Punk and Latin: A Discussion About Sexual Identity,” there is a brief discussion about the band Fea’s name

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Figure 16.1. The band Fea, 2019. Courtesy of Fea. Photograph by Jaime Monzon.

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and its inception, which Jenn Alva describes: “We chose Fea because the drummer and myself . . . were experiencing all the things we are talking about, you know, sexism . . . whether you’re just playing a show at a venue and they’re like already thinking you don’t know what you are doing and . . . judging you already even before you even play . . . We wanted a name that basically says, ‘f-you,’ and we will be called ugly and we will make it into a positive thing.”32 Part of Alva’s comment revolves around the music industry’s unfitting requirement to have “better-looking” people on stage, especially when it comes to an all-Latinx-women band. In between some chuckling, Alva insists that all of the band members are “good-looking gals,” and hence using the identifier Fea for the band produces a set of contradictions. Not wanting to fall victim to yet another binary of good versus bad or pretty versus ugly, Fea’s members produced a three-minute-and-twenty-five-second music video in Spanglish which is absolutely worth describing and examining. “Mujer Moderna” starts off with a title screen reading, “FEA /FAE-AH/ Adj. 1. UGLY (GIRL) 2. F**K EM ALL,” after which all of the writing slowly fades except for the band’s name, FEA, and the name of the song written in red. After the fade, the video opens with a shot of a neon-lit virgen/virgin positioned in a box inside a dark underground room; when this disappears, we are introduced to several mujeres as the camera pans right: La Sabrosa, La Chola, La Lesbiana, La Sucia, and La Transbetty. What looks like an underground concert venue, faithful to the punk rock scene, appears on-screen

“¿E re s Cu ir, or What ?”

with the band playing on a stage. The camera, tilted upward from below, frames all members of the band— Letty Fea, Phanie Fea, Aaron Feo, and Jenn Fea (Jenn Alva)— with Letty Fea, the singer, closest to the camera. Four hombres stand against a wall inside the venue and are introduced as “Los Necios” (played by members of the band Piñata Protest). Through a series of camera shots that document what is happening in the venue as the band plays, we see the following: (1) One of the mujeres— La Transbetty— slaps one of the Necios after he approaches her sitting on a bench, referencing rape culture as part of the toxic masculinity representative of the bar scene that reproduces gender-binary standards. (2) Letty Fea sings, “No soy culpa, ni ramera / no soy puta, mujerzuela / No soy zorra, no soy perra, solo soy mujer moderna,” standing next to the neon-lit virgen, now enlarged to fit half of the camera shot. (3) One of the Necios puts what looks like a date-rape drug in La Transbetty’s drink. Immediately, La Sabrosa silently mouths to La Transbetty, “Te lo metió ahí,” pointing to the glass. La Transbetty then proceeds to exchange the glasses so the Necio will drink the drugged cocktail. (4) One of the Necios approaches La Lesbiana, who is standing in the front row of the crowd, and attempts to dance with her. La Lesbiana pushes his arm away and with her eyes tells him to leave. (5) The Necio appears at the end of the music video passed out on the floor, while the band members, of whom we see only their legs and feet, pick up the instruments, step over him, and leave the venue.33 Not surprisingly within frameworks of disruption and critique, “Mujer Moderna” is a “fuck ’em all” anthem responding to what can be read as rape culture, heterosexuality, and masculinity. Yet, this “fuck ’em all” anthem also (re)produces subaltern subjectivities for the duration of the music video, and beyond, whose character(istic)s disassemble and dissolve a material, objective, and heteronormative narrative. That is, with its mostly queer cast, Fea’s punk rock song enacts disidentificatory aspects: the all-Latinx crew participates in the underground concert as audience members but also as “actors” or “performers” of the song itself. The mise-en-scène of the video constructs what Juana María Rodríguez refers to as “discursive spaces,” sites of knowledge production.34 In such spaces, identity—as embodiment and spatiality— transports and transforms established relationships with normativity and phenomenologies of normativity into subversive encounters. That is, “the discursive space does not establish which identity practices are available, but it does provide a frame through which these practices are received in that context. The subject’s ability to subvert dominant readings is both unlimited and partial.”35 This is not to conclude that subversion and disruption erase or dissipate the messaging of masculinity as heteronormative, but rather that subversive practices position subjects as what Norma Alarcón terms “subjects-in-process,” whereby identity is performed as an act of constant

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becoming; Rodríguez contends that the subject-in-process “does not insinuate a progressional, unidirectional development,” but is rather a process that is “often spastic and unpredictable, continually unfolding without origin or end.”36 This transient or even unstable process is indicative of what becoming insists on within disidentificatory articulations. As the song progresses, Fea’s performance dances or converses with the crowd, inciting empowerment, resiliency, and ultimately sexy, sensual fun. There is a sense of becoming with the song, with the messaging it instills, and with the sense of camaraderie that the mujeres in particular develop and enact. While identity within markers of race, class, gender, and sexuality reflects the sociopolitical and historical context we find ourselves in, such identity is “not merely a response to culturally defined differences, but is continually engaged in unpacking the steam of ‘paradoxes and contradictions’ that inform the subject’s relationship to other subjects and the discourses that surround them.”37 Moreover, the discursive space in “Mujer Moderna” resembles what Roderick Ferguson identifies as capital formation: “Capitalist political economies have been scenes for the universalization and, hence, the normalization of sexuality. But those economies have also been the arenas for the disruption of normativity.”38 I suggest we explore the following inquiry: How do we locate “Mujer Moderna,” both the production itself and the producers (the band members as well as the listeners and audience participants in the production), within or at the edges of a national culture that on the one hand “disavows the configuration of our [and their] own racial, gender, class, and sexual particularity,” and on the other hand also serves as “a mode of production that fosters [their/our] own formation”?39 Lastly, referring to the making of trans* bodies in particular, though arguably applicable to all subaltern, nonnormative subjects, Jack Halberstam invites us “to place transgenderism firmly within new biopolitical regimes where bodies are not simply the effect of performativity or social constructions or gender ideologies but also repositories for new chemical scripts in which bodies can be energized or quieted, made fertile or infertile, awakened or numbed, made to feel more or to feel less.”40 I find the image of the body as repository inevitable in “Mujer Moderna” (and in the clairvoyant female protagonist in the telenovela described below). The bodies in “Mujer Moderna” produce alternative geographies of self, as Anzaldúa calls them, all attending to their role as musicians but also to the performance of undoing or decolonizing the toxic masculinity that rape culture and heteronormativity assumes to be true. If decoloniality as vincularidad exposes our relation and interdependence (as subjects) with other (un)natural objects, things, and subjects, “Mujer Moderna,” as a musical and cultural production, invites us to understand and critique the epistemologies of modernity and of gender

and sexuality beyond social constructions and repositories for “new chemical scripts.” As I have already pointed out, vincularidad elucidates the practice of becoming, and hence of relation and interdependence, through the performances deployed by Latinx (queer) subjects, in which their integral relation to music, futurity, gender, sexuality, and masculinities (re)produces harmony, balance, and empowerment.

Cultivaste ceros en tu imaginación Que obnubilaron tu corazón Y volviste tóxica nuestra relación Despilfarraste todo el amor

A practice inevitable for certain Latinx households and localities is that of telenovela watching. Back in 2002, when my family of four traveled from Bogotá, Colombia, to Golden, Colorado, the production Las vías del amor (The Tracks of Love) played night after night on the only Spanish-speaking channel, Televisa. Not previously a family tradition or a routine we engaged in, in the United States telenovela watching became a bonding practice for us four Latinx people, three Spanish-speaking and one bilingual. What felt like a far-fetched narrative in the novela would compartmentalize the behaviors, expectations, and embodiments assumed of my own cultura and my own familia. As in many of these narratives, the portrayal of the men is hypermasculinized in terms of expression and behavior, and that of their female counterparts is feminized and docile. And yet, with these depictions and the sufrida plotline in mind, the protagonist of Las vías del amor, Perla, embodies an unapologetically important quality: she is the only clairvoyant character. Perla, the viewers’ intuitive accomplice, has visiones, made apparent in extreme close-ups that tightly frame first her face and then her bright green eyes, serving as a sort of trancelike invitation into her supernatural visions of future events. Leaving aside the intricate plotline of the telenovela, it is intriguing to assign such a capacious quality to this female character, who over the course of a year of telenovela production would play the female role according to marianismo, alternating with futuristic visiones, products of

“¿E re s Cu ir, or What ?”

Vamo’ a relajar el pony Ay ombe, ay ombe Deja ’e maltratar tu mami Ay ombe, ay ombe. — ATERCIOPELADOS, “AY OMBE (VAMO’ A RELAJAR EL PONY)”

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her psychic world. My status as a young Latina coming to the United States, watching a telenovela in the English-speaking world I had just entered, orientated me toward understanding Perla as a kind of contradiction: she undergoes a series of relationships with very distinct men— the “poor” boy from the town, the “rich” hacendado, this same patrón’s son, and the educated man from the city— and simultaneously maintains peace and harmony, ironically, in her community because of her capacity to foretell events. Though Perla is not a queer character in terms of sexuality or gender— she is depicted as the heteronormative, desirable, child-bearing, and marriageable good girl— her ability to foresee potential harm incited by the malicious characters in the telenovela disturbs the temporal and spatial dynamics executed over the course of the plotline. To demonstrate this dichotomy, I will describe instances from the first episode in which the chronological setting is disrupted by the main character’s experience of her first visión. After the credits start off the episode, we find Perla and Paco playfully enjoying their love in the plaza of Tlacotalpan, Mexico. All of a sudden, Perla begins to question her life, her work, and other quotidian aspects of the lives of others in town. Paco holds Perla down with his arms and tells her, “No pienses en eso ahora, piensa en tus sueños” (Don’t think about that now, think about your dreams).41 Their loving exchange is interrupted by the sound of the clapper against one of the bells of the town’s church. Enrique, the son of don Gerónimo, who is Perla’s boss and the richest man in town, stands at the very top of the left-hand bell tower yelling blasphemous exclamations, including his desire to commit suicide. We see numerous low-angle shots of Enrique from the point of view of the passersby, who start speculating about his wealth and use of drugs en la capital (the capital, México D.F.)

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Figure 16.2. Image capture from Fea’s music video “Mujer Moderna” showing La Transbetty, La Chola, La Lesbiana. Image from YouTube video directed by Jenn Alva. Blackheart Records, 2016.

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as the cause of his suicide attempt. As any good Latinx telenovela narrative entails, Enrique gets saved by a priest, whose embrace of Enrique reminds us viewers of the power that Dios and Man hold. In the same episode, we also learn that don Gerónimo, unbeknownst to Perla, decides to get rid of Paco and that his son Enrique wants to have Perla all to himself. All in all, masculinization is awakened in both father and son through the toxic gaze inundated with wealth and power. Three-quarters of the way into the episode, we experience Perla’s first vision. After a set of cuts between closeups of Perla and Paco, an unexpected flash-forward depicts the trope of the devil seen standing on a boat in the dark above water and covered in black, and a series of skulls tattooed on someone’s arm. Immediately after this, we discover that the tattooed arm belongs to don Gerónimo’s personal security guard. Perla leaves Paco in extreme distress, believing that her vision which juxtaposes death with Paco will come true. With only a few minutes left in the episode, Perla is seen walking with her dad and mom, worried about the fact that Paco has missed a date at her house. Walking alongside the dock, Perla sees three police cars with their sirens on and hears people on the other side of the dock chattering. When Perla comes down to the scene of the crime, nobody wants to tell her what has happened; she discovers Paco is dead, lying on the ground. The deployment of these visiones of the future in a “mass” cultural production— the telenovela— produces new sets of social logics and realities, including realities positioned in the future. In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz writes that “the queer futurity that I am describing is not an end by an opening or horizon. Queer utopia is a modality of critique that speaks to quotidian gestures as laden with potentiality.”42 I wonder if Perla’s visions might be gestures laden with potentiality, especially as these phenomena try to make sense of her and others’ everyday live(s). Queerness as a site of contestation feels congruent with the situation of this protagonist. On the one hand, Perla falls prey to numerous instances of sexual harassment, abuse, forced marriage, and unwanted compliments conveyed through touch, sight, and voice. The masculinization of all the male figures anticipates a series of toxic comportments that not only Perla will witness and experience, but other females in the show too. On the other hand, Perla is also the most important character, not only because she holds the role of protagonist, but because her clairvoyant ability is powerful and absolutely necessary for the continuation— temporal and spatial— of the narrative. Arguably, Perla is becoming with her visions of future events as she lives her everyday life. A simple reading of her visions would assume that they are necessary for her survival of quotidian happenings, external and internal. However, I see these visiones as queer gestures relative to the framework of a telenovela, which

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is a mass production purveying an exaggerated representation of masculine, heteronormative Latinx culture. These queer gestures push against the boundaries of the heteronormativity, heterosexuality, and toxic masculinity that feed into morality and objectivity, in order to reimagine identity and create vínculos with the surroundings in ways that defy temporal structure and representational hierarchies. I position the clairvoyant Perla as a character on the peripheries of the social and cultural boundaries imposed in the telenovela by racialized, gendered, and sexualized paradigms. Though her visiones provide potential warnings of future events, these are merely attempting to “save” people, including Perla herself. These liminal visiones are oppositional in action and production, and therefore queer in their disruption of the temporal and spatial orientations in the narrative. This telenovela produces and builds “a present in the future and, dialectically, a future in the present. This temporality helps counter ‘the burden of liveness’ mandate that stalks the minoritarian subject insofar as time and space transport is made available and the disidentifying player and spectator are freed from the holding cell that is strictly live, local, and present world.”43 In speaking about identity, Gloria Anzaldúa states that “we discover, uncover, create our identities as we interrelate with others and our alrededores/surroundings. Identity grows out of our interactions, and we strategically reinvent ourselves to accommodate our exchanges.”44 Perla, as a contradictorily nonnormative subaltern subject, evokes meaning, and therefore a modality, that disrupts her engagement with the “modern” world she lives in: working/laboring, taking care of familia, marrying and divorcing, and eventually bearing children. Perla is a subjectin-process who reorientates us so that we experience different temporalities in the midst of telenovela watching— not in the sense of helping us predict future events, but rather in the sense of permitting us and Perla to (re)imagine future nontoxic and nonhegemonic possibilities of livability.

Perla, ¿eres cuir, or what?

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Jenn, ¿eres cuir, or what?

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_____, ¿eres cuir, or what?

— ANONYMOUS

Back in the studio of NPR’s Alt.Latino episode “Queer, Punk and Latin: A Discussion About Sexual Identity,” Niña Dioz shares that she is now the first openly queer rapper in Mexico. Ten years before, the sexist and homophobic

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situations she experienced provided insight into the need for the musical genre to expand its representation of various genders and sexualities. Nonetheless, Dioz’s story reminds us of the power of heterosexuality as a compulsory orientation. This concept of compulsory orientation is “imagined as the future of the child insofar as heterosexuality is idealized as a social gift and even as the gift of life itself. The gift becomes an inheritance.”45 While Jenn Alva portrays her band Fea as “a bunch of misfits” queering the punk rock genre, rapper Niña Dioz is forced into accepting the gift of colonial and heterogeneous genealogies. While this acceptance speaks to sexuality and gender, race and class are also integral. In terms of spatial logics and discursive spaces, how we take up social space is dependent upon the racialization of the body; under the hostile white colonial gaze we must redirect and reorientate our body toward other histories. Such orientation is contingent upon spaces, and the racialization processes that inhabit them, following a specific line of desire.46 The orientation of our phenomenology is thus disrupted, slanted by the queering of the historicity that has placed race, class, gender, and nation within a particular genealogy. The construction and reproduction of knowledge orientates us in particular directions according to which it is demanded that bodies labor within a capitalist and “straight” orientation. To queer this phenomenology is an act of power and a (re)imagining of identity in our everyday life. I set out to answer the following question: How are disidentificatory practices of becoming enabling minoritized subjects to feel, or be, empowered? In this chapter, I have exposed the fixed normativities and orientations of gender and sexuality through lenses of performativity in the music of punk rock band Fea and in the portrayal of the psychic world of the character Perla in a telenovela. I have observed how becoming as queer of color subjects and nonnormative subjects in a heteronormative world must flow in spatial logics designed, recycled, and repurposed by varying kinds of cultural phenomena. I aim to respond to an inquiry that understands these nonnormative subjects as gendered and sexualized, but that also shifts the focus from the subjects’ gender identity and sexuality; hence, how do we understand (or make sense of ) the construction of trans, genderqueer, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary bodies of color in relation to their visibility and precarity as sites of distortion of the temporal and spatial performances these subcultures (are bound to) negotiate? The struggles for social and racial justice accentuated by musical production and other cultural phenomena are reminders of the collective efforts against state-sponsored and colonial violence that intentionally overshadow nonnormative subjects and paradoxically evidence the liberal, material, and objectivist agenda of modernity. That is, these struggles, and therefore the bodies within them, are mobilized from invisible subcultures

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and subaltern subjects into a (forced) transformation of hypervisibility and surveillance that discards nonnormative performance(s) as sites of possible personhood. Mignolo and Walsh invite us to “enter into conversations and build understandings that both cross geopolitical locations and colonial differences.”47 These conversations, alluded to as performances, are also invitations to take to task larger historical narratives of colonial control and domination, from which crucial practices of becoming arise and seek to undo these colonial narratives. As a point of departure, disidentification as praxis and modality “takes place in the future and in the present, which is to say that disidentificatory performance offers a utopian blueprint for a possible future while, at the same time, staging a new political formation in the present.”48 Not all misfits will participate in queer Latinx punk rock or other subaltern spaces, nor will they all have psychic abilities, but all can probably find refuge and desire through the present affinities within and at the edges of such logics. Si eres cuir, ponme la mano aquí. Tus senos carne de anón Tu boca una bendición De guanábana madura Y era tu fina cintura La misma de aquel danzón.

— CHAVELA VARGAS, “MACORINA”

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

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5.

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6.

Contreras, “Queer, Punk and Latin.” Contreras, “Queer, Punk and Latin,” interviewing Jenn Alva. Contreras, “Queer, Punk and Latin,” interviewing Niña Dioz. Fea, “Mujer Moderna.” The lyrics to the song are available online at https://genius .com/Fea-mujermoderna-lyrics. I use the term queer here according to the way Juana María Rodríguez describes it: “‘Queer’ is not simply an umbrella term that encompasses lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, two-spirited people, and transsexuals; it is a challenge to constructions of heteronormativity. It need not subsume the particularities of these other definitions of identity; instead it creates an opportunity to call into question the systems of categorization that have served to define sexuality.” Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad, 24. According to Ferguson, a number of canonical texts and fields, such as sociology, have arched “toward universality” and as such “only obscure the ways that nonheteronormative racial formations point to the contradictions between the promise of equality and the practice of exclusions based on a racialized gender and sexual

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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7. 8.

eccentricity, and eccentricity produced through discourse and articulated in practice.” Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 21. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 15. In this chapter, I use nonnormative and nonnormativity in three ways: (1) as part of the phrase perceived as nonnormative, to signal the dominant categories of sexuality and gender that marginalize practices and identities outside of this dominant structure; (2) in critiquing the political sexualized and gendered structures that uphold heteronormativity and homonormativity (see Duggan, Twilight); and (3) encouraging a reimagining of these “outsider” and marginalized identities as sites of empowerment and resiliency that defy state-sponsored projects of violence and citizenship. Halberstam, Trans*, 30. Bono, “Chavela Vargas.” Contreras, “Queer, Punk and Latin.” Speaking to the limitations of historical materialism, Ferguson notes how historical materialism and liberal ideology alike “took normative heterosexuality as the emblem of order, nature, and universality, making that which deviated from heteropatriarchal ideals the sign of disorder.” Material objectivities indicate historical materialism’s order. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 6. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 65. Anzaldúa, 65. Anzaldúa, 66. Anzaldúa, 71. Anzaldúa, 71. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 27. Ahmed, 27. Aldama, Brown on Brown, 24. My thinking related to “things” and “objects” is in dialogue with Frederick Luis Aldama’s book and work on Chicanx studies within a queer borderlands framework. In understanding “objects” as relegated to the background in relation to subjects, I agree with Aldama’s critique of contemporary queer theorists “who uncritically reproduce a Western-gazing subjectivity that turns Third World subjects into objects.” Therefore, I use “objects” here not as making objects of subjects, but rather as making sense of how we as subjects relate to objects, and how the reproduction of certain things and objects works against efforts of social heterogeneity where subjectivity prevails and objectification fails. Contreras, “Queer, Punk and Latin.” Muñoz, Disidentifications, 11. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 25. Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 1. Mignolo and Walsh, 1. Halberstam, Trans*, 126. As Halberstam points out, “the opportunity that faces contemporary trans* theory is to reset the terms of these debates: rather than

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27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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remaining invested in an identitarian set of conflicts that turn on small differences and individual hurts, let us rather wage battle against the violent imposition of economic disparity and forcefully oppose a renewed and open investment in white supremacy and American imperial ambition transacted through the channels of globalization.” Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 126. According to Duggan, “neoliberalism was constructed in and through cultural and identity politics and cannot be undone by a movement without constituencies and analyses that respond directly to that fact. Nor will it be possible to build a new social movement that might be strong, creative, and diverse enough to engage the work of reinventing global politics for the new millennium as long as cultural and identity issues are separated, analytically and organizationally, from the political economy in which they are embedded.” Duggan, Twilight, 3. Aldama, Brown on Brown, 24. Halberstam, Trans*, 31. Soto, Reading Chican@, 2. Contreras, “Queer, Punk and Latin.” Jenn Alva, dir., “Mujer Moderna,” YouTube video, 3:25, posted by “blackheartrec,” May 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv4yHCASirU. Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad, 5. Rodríguez, 5. Alarcón, “Conjugating Subjects,” 137; Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad, 7. Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad, 6. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 11. Ferguson, 11. Halberstam, Trans*, 29. Las vías del amor, episode 1, directed by Salvador Garcini, aired August 5, 2002, Televisa, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVVNFwgpMNo&t=2294s. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 91. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 199. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 75. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 86. Ahmed, 120. Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 1. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 200.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.

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Alarcón, Norma. “Conjugating Subjects in the Age of Multiculturalism.” In Mapping Multiculturalism, edited by Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, 127–48. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Aldama, Frederick Luis. Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Light in the Dark / Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015. Bono, Ferran. “Chavela Vargas y la deslumbrante belleza de Macorina.” El País (Valencia, Spain), October 8, 2013. Contreras, Felix. “Queer, Punk and Latin: A Discussion About Sexual Identity.” Produced by NPR. Alt.Latino, May 3, 2018. Podcast audio, 29:59. Accessed May 4, 2018, https:// www.npr.org/sections/altlatino/2018/05/04/607945228/queer-punk-and-latin-a -discussion-about-sexual-identity. Duggan, Lisa. Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon, 2004. Fea. “Mujer Moderna.” Track 1 on Fea. Blackheart Records, recorded July 2016, compact disc. Ferguson, Roderick. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Halberstam, Jack. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Mignolo, Walter, and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Rodríguez, Juana María. Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Soto, Sandra K. Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-mastery of Desire. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.

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Chapter 17

DECOLONIZING HETERONORMATIVITIES AND PATRIARCHY WITHIN DOMINANT IMMIGRANT RIGHTS DISCOURSE Alejandra Benita Portillos

In February 2017, the stay of removal expired for Jeanette Vizguerra, a wellknown labor and immigrant rights activist and mother of four children in Denver, Colorado. To avoid deportation by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), Vizguerra sought refuge and sanctuary in the First Unitarian church in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Leftist and mainstream media attention and nonprofit organizations immediately focused on Vizguerra’s identity as a mother of four children, three of whom were born in the United States. The attention placed on Vizguerra’s family highlights dominant immigrant rights claims made to the state to seek relief from deportation. Arguments for relief also relied upon Vizguerra’s longtime residence in the United States and the fact that she was a productive member of society.1 Similarly, undocumented Latinx families in the United States, supported by nonprofit campaigns, organized to defend against potential deportations using the argument that immigration policies should not separate families. Activists, journalists, and immigration scholars alike have contributed to reifying the dominant argument of #keepfamiliestogether by considering the consequences that deportation has on the family. For instance, scholars argue that families with mixed U.S. legal status suffer from increased stress, especially in the case of people who already experience poverty and discrimination and who have little formal education.2 Immigration scholarship has also found that family separation increases the percentage of single-parent homes and the likelihood of young people being placed in the foster care system.3 Activist and academic work has contributed to critiques of racist U.S. legislation— for instance, by analyzing how anti-immigrant legislation has made undocumented people susceptible to surveillance, increasing the likelihood of ICE detainment.4 Further, immigration scholarship has documented the negative impacts of immigration detention on undocumented Latinx individuals and families.5 294

Although activism by communities and academic research are imperative and critical kinds of work, they sometimes emphasize the heteronormative family structure. These narratives are problematic because they limit and continue to silence the experiences of queer and trans Latinx immigrants who encounter systemic, structural, and societal violence in the United States. Thus, this chapter seeks to theorize how and why queer and trans persons are unrepresented in the dominant immigrant rights discourses and scholarship. I first analyze the role of settler colonialism in Abya Yala (renamed the Americas through colonial conquest) and the way it has resulted in the imposition and violent administration of racial, gendered, and sexualized norms. I highlight how colonial norms instill dominant patriarchal ideologies that inform gender roles, gender expressions, and sexualities within masculinity and femininity. I assert the ways in which conformity to heteronormative family standards has become a key tool in making claims for deportation relief. Using a queer theory framework, I draw from Deborah Vargas’s “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic” (2014) to understand the ways in which queer and trans Latinx undocumented immigrants embody “lo sucio” and practice “suciedad” by defying white cis-heteropatriarchal claims about personhood, which consequently makes them targets for elimination by the state and society.

Within society, people are trained to accept patriarchal ideologies and systems and to withhold queer desires. These ideologies and behaviors are inherited within the community, so that individuals even police themselves and others to enforce conformity.6 But where do these beliefs originate within the context of what is today considered “the Americas”? In this section, I first employ concepts from Scott Morgensen’s argument in “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities” (2010), where he demonstrates that colonization produces the rise of colonial biopolitics, which determines sexual modernities and settler sexuality. In addition, I employ ideas elaborated in Aníbal Quijano’s text “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America” (2000), which describes the process of establishing categories of racial hierarchy to justify domination over and colonial violence toward African and Indigenous peoples. In addition I point to scholars such as Martha Escobar, Qwo-Li Driskill, and Kelly Lytle Hernández who provide gender and sexuality analytics for understanding Quijano’s coloniality of power. At the start of the Spanish colonizers’ terror, violence was inflicted upon Indigenous communities in efforts to extract resources from the land. The

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Settler Colonialism

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Spanish justified their greedy violence through religion. As described by Arturo J. Aldama in Disrupting Savagism: Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant, and Native American Struggles for Self-Representation (2001), the debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda about fierce versus noble savages classified Indigenous peoples and determined their fate in Abya Yala. On the one hand, Sepúlveda believed that Indigenous people were primitive animals who had no souls and “needed to be violently enslaved and then exterminated.”7 De las Casas, on the other hand, argued that Indigenous peoples held innocent characteristics and had the potential, through Christian conversion, to become human.8 Moreover, noble savages were viewed, in Aldama’s description, as “representing all that was not culture, civilization, and European . . . the ‘abject’ of the civilizing subject.”9 The construction of Indigenous peoples as abject subjected them to inhumane treatment. In Devastation of the Indies, Bartolomé de las Casas recounts the horrific treatment of Indigenous peoples in “America” by the Spanish conquistadors.10 They were killed in ways that ranged from burnings, hangings, and the mutilation of hands, legs, or bodies to being fed to Spaniards’ dogs and death by sword or pike.11 Gendered violence was enacted by raping the wives of Indigenous leaders and killing pregnant women and their babies. Thus, demarcations of fierce and noble savages justified the capitalist-driven and violent treatment of Indigenous people. As outlined by Kelly Lytle Hernández in City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (2017), European settlers violently attacked Indigenous peoples in order to take control of land and resources, and to eliminate old norms and establish theirs as the ideal. Settler colonialism is an ongoing project of elimination of nonnormative people through cultural erasure, disappearance, removal, displacement, genocidal methods, and incarceration.12 Hernández expands Quijano’s analysis of colonization by focusing not only on the way racialized outsiders were subjected to violence, but on how nonnormative sexualities were as well. Qwo-Li Driskill, in their article “Stolen from Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/ Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic,” argues that “as native people, our erotic lives and identities have been colonized along with our homelands.”13 This means that the conquest has imposed oppressive and violent gender and sexuality ideologies and practices on women, men, and two-spirit individuals and communities. Driskill sees sexuality as a tool to gain power over others and to control women’s bodies. . . . A colonized sexuality is one in which we have internalized the sexual values of dominant culture. The invaders continue to enforce the idea that sexuality and non-dichotomous genders

Through colonial biopolitics, Indigenous people’s practices concerning gender and sexuality were destroyed and patriarchy was imposed. Condemnation was directed toward nonheteronormative roles that defied machismo and marianismo. European colonizers imposed ideologies about women’s inferiority and the “abomination” of two-spirit individuals and same-sex relationships.15 In the eyes of colonizers, these people deserved subordination and oppression.16 Conquerors consumed by what Jack Forbes has identified as wétiko psychosis would sexually mutilate and rape women and men.17 In an example of contradictory logic, it was okay for Spanish colonizers to rape Indigenous men to assert dominance, but it was forbidden for Indigenous people to have two-spirit and homosexual identities. European conquerors couldn’t understand the beauty in the multiple genders and sexual fluidity that Indigenous peoples had experienced in Abya Yala, and they persecuted two-spirit people and homosexuality, thus establishing that masculinity held power in European culture. While individuals have been marked for death, colonial logic has been indoctrinated through ideas and practices of patriarchy and heteronormativity. In terms of colonial biopolitics, Indigenous peoples have been indoctrinated in dominant rules, procedures, and laws of behavior through the church, school, and the military. Eurocentrism stripped away colonized people’s cultural discoveries and knowledges while replacing their beliefs with European epistemologies and economic systems of production rooted in capitalism.18 For instance, boys were forced to cut off their hair, symbolizing the disavowal of Indigenous spiritual beliefs and their forced assimilation into Christianity.19 Crow boys, who viewed themselves as being of neither gender, were placed within the male category and forced to wear dresses as a method of humiliation. Indigenous women were not allowed to leave boarding schools until they were married.20 School rules enforced the division and separation of genders.21 Within the Christian religious curriculum, the Judeo-Christian idea of “God” as the Holy Father reinforced and normalized patriarchal authority and dominance over women. Prior to colonization, understandings of “divine” spiritual forces are thought to have been gender-fluid, as were social roles.22 This violent education disciplined Indigenous peoples and forced them to disassociate from their communities and cultural nonbinary gender practices while learning the way of the Western colonizer. Dominant gender ideologies became understood in contemporary terms as machismo and marianismo. Machismo is an ideological belief in which

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are a sin, recreating sexuality as illicit, shocking, shameful, and removed from any positive spiritual context. Queer sexualities and genders are degraded, ignored, condemned and destroyed.14

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men in Latinx culture assume traits of hypermasculinity. Machismo especially represents men’s domination and superiority over women and twospirit individuals in society. Because of machismo, men attempt to assert their manhood through displays of dominance that often cause violence toward anything symbolizing feminine energies. For women, machismo’s heteronormative counterpart is marianismo. Settler colonists imposed ideas of the normative woman that include characteristics such as being submissive to men, showing humility, and having children— indeed, having many children provided status and privilege.23 Scholars have pointed to a common trope within marianismo identified as the “virgin-whore dichotomy,” in which the whore is the betrayer (the one who embraces sexuality for her own pleasure), the promiscuous, the bad one, the abject, while in contrast, the virgin is selfless, saves herself for marriage with a man, and doesn’t expect erotic pleasure.24 Marianismo is an ideology that contributes to making women into docile bodies. Thus, as a consequence, women police “bad women” who do not conform to its norms. As manifestations of colonial biopolitics, marianismo and machismo complement each other and enforce restrictive gender and sexual binaries within communities. In the Latinx context, sexuality was molded through colonial biopolitics, by disciplining and administering the ideologies of marianismo and machismo through church, school, family, and community. I highlight the use of colonial biopolitics to demonstrate how European culture and epistemology have become correlated with ideologies of modernity. A component of modernity includes benevolent stories depicting Europeans as saviors of the socially constructed primitive Indian savages.25 The European episteme favors stories in which the disappearances of Indigenous peoples in Abya Yala are attributed solely to disease, silencing the very racialized, gendered, and sexist genocide committed by European explorers. Having briefly discussed how patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies were imposed on Indigenous communities during the colonization process, and how we must understand current forms of oppression and injustice by linking them to settler colonialism, I will now turn to the ways in which colonial biopolitics impacts the nation-state’s determination of who is eligible for personhood and rights.

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BIOPOLITICS AND CLAIMS TO PERSONHOOD / ELIGIBILITY FOR RIGHTS

Scholars like Morgensen have called for connecting colonial biopolitics to our contemporary moment. I answer this call by making the connection between violence through the indoctrination of normative sexuality, gender, and race and the way in which these factors have shaped demarcations of who qualifies for personhood and eligibility for rights in the context of

PROBLEMATIZING DOMINANT IMMIGRANT RIGHTS DISCOURSES

After having briefly analyzed how claims to personhood and eligibility for rights have always been racialized, sexualized, and gendered, I will now theorize how and why dominant immigrant rights discourses overwhelmingly focus on the heteronormative narrative of #keepfamiliestogether and living out the “American dream.” Because of this focus, dominant immigrant rights discourses limit the discussion around queer and trans Latinx immigrants. In “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic” (2014), Deborah Vargas proposes “lo sucio” as an analytic to highlight how “suciedad” and “sucias” are displaced and eliminated through the process of neoliberalism. For Vargas, sucias are queer and trans people who “perform disobediently within hetero-homonormative racial projects of citizenship formations.”29

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immigration. These qualifications and barriers disproportionately impact queer and trans Latinxs.26 It is imperative to understand concepts such as social death, social value, and personhood in the context of the neoliberal regime.27 Certain populations are subjected to social death, meaning that persons are considered nonpersons, denied any ascription of social value, and determined to be ineligible for rights. Specifically, Lisa Cacho, in Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (2012), unpacks how social value has historically been ascribed through a racialized, gendered, and sexist process. Ascribing value to normative bodies demarcates whites, heteronormative subjects, and males as eligible for having value and personhood, whereas nonwhites and sexual and gender outsiders are devalued, expected to not contribute to society, and made ineligible for personhood. Undocumented Latinx immigrants are denied eligibility for personhood because of white supremacist ideologies and constructions around citizenship that have denied individuals the right to have rights.28 Furthermore, queer, trans, and gender-variant persons are also denied the right to have rights. For undocumented Latinx individuals, the construction of their illegality and inherent criminality forms the foundation of the law. Criminalization justifies their ineligibility for personhood and rights. In addition, gender and sexual outsiders experience another layer of discrimination and violence because of their perceived nonnormative social value. Normative ideologies of the family, sexuality, etc. become a means to make claims for value and personhood. However, they continue to leave certain people labeled as undeserving. Thus, scholars and activists within the immigration field need to identify in their analysis the fact that colonial biopolitics is an ongoing project that demarcates barriers to personhood and eligibility for rights based on normalized hierarchies of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

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Sucias refuse hetero- and homonormative ideological promises of love, reproduction of the family, and safety. José Muñoz argues in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) that the future in normative standards is always focused on the reproduction of the white heterosexual child and requires the elimination of the nonwhite queer.30 Thus the heteronormative order of the family is reproduced. Because of this standpoint, the neoliberal and neocolonial state views queer and trans nonwhites as being a “waste of time.”31 In the racialized sense, their bodies are constructed as illegal and criminal. In the gendered and sexualized sense, queer and trans people do not abide by capitalistic standards in reproducing the normative child.32 Thus, sucias are determined to be “unprofitable bodies.”33 I suggest that, in the same ways in which the queer community has taken on movements for marriage equality that replicate heteronormative standards of the family,34 immigrant rights movements and discourses center the family to make claims for personhood that are measured by normative standards. Conforming to heteronormative ideologies of the family helps to demonstrate the good moral character of the undocumented Latinx family unit and its capability to be deserving of rights. Whether the highly racialized, sexed, and gendered state accepts these claims is another question, but in making this argument, immigrant rights movements attempt to abide by Western ideologies in order to be recognized as deserving of rights. In the process, they leave out trans and queer communities because of their inability to conform or resistance to conforming. Another reading of the distancing of queer and trans narratives within immigrant rights discourses could be perhaps explained by Jack Forbes’s theorizations of wétiko psychosis.35 Forbes argues that during colonization Indigenous peoples conformed to colonizer norms to survive, and in some instances they achieved material gains for reinforcing colonial strictures, norms, and policies. In Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother / Nin Tonantzin Non Centeotl: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas (2014), Roberto Cintli Rodríguez expands our understandings of colonization by describing how people from the United States, Mexico, and Central and South America have become de-Indigenized from their maíz-based culture and values. Colonial violence, forced Christianity, and attempts at cultural genocide (disavowal of maíz beliefs and achievements of the society) have distanced people from Indigenous ways of living. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla adds to the discussion in his book México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization, saying that the government in Mexico, driven by the Western imaginary, defines being a Mexican citizen as being one who denounces illegitimate Indigenous culture. Because of the resulting “total marginalization, an exclusion of one’s way of living, many Mexicans thus have a choice: they can live on the margin of national

life . . . or they can live a double life, also schizophrenic, changing between worlds and cultures according to circumstances and necessities; or . . . they can renounce their identity from birth and try to be fully accepted in the imaginary Mexico of the minority.”36 Bonfil Batalla highlights the constant struggle involved in denouncing Indigenous identities, cultures, systems of knowledge, and lands to conform to the imaginary Mexico that denies the validity of Mesoamerican civilization and adopts a Western model of modernity. According to him, the rejection of Indigeneity “makes it impossible to understand different and alternative ways of life.”37 Ultimately the “Indian” and Indigeneity are relegated to the past. Referencing Frantz Fanon, Forbes argues that oppressed people abide by colonizers’ rules and ideologies, motivated by hopes of being recognized by colonizers, considered worthy of relations with them, and, as I have argued, gifted citizenship and social value.38 Thus, relating to the current moment, dominant immigrant rights discourses replicate the same exclusionary and violent structures that they are hoping to survive within. Wanting equality would mean wanting the right to be an exploiter, a wétiko.

In Captivity Beyond Prisons: Criminalization Experiences of Latina (Im)migrants (2016), Martha Escobar argues that colonialism is a continued project that reinforces subordination and exploitation based on race, gender, and sexuality. Using Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics and Mbembé’s ideas on necropolitics, Escobar asserts the nation-state’s motivation is “not to kill, but rather, to deny resources that make life livable.”39 Under the framework of necropolitics, the “work of death” is performed because “their bodies cannot be disciplined and normalized, and thus remain permanent potential threats.”40 The constant threat of nonnormative individuals produces “deathworlds . . . [spaces] where the political objective is the maximum destruction of nonnormative life.”41 In the context of Latinx immigration, Escobar identifies the ways in which the state remains determined to reproduce death by militarizing the border, which creates dangerous unauthorized crossing conditions.42 Despite individual activists like Vizguerra publicly displaying solidarity with trans and queer undocumented communities, media attention and immigrant rights rhetoric are still centered on arguments of deportation relief for the heteronormative family. In the case of trans and queer folk who are excluded from the recognition of the state, mainstream media, and immigrant rights discourses, their experiences with immigration are often rarely discussed. Only within certain communities are there concentrated discussions on abolishing the prison-industrial complex and institutions that reinforce white supremacy,

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Consequences of the Silencing of Queer and Trans Narratives

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transphobia, and homophobia. Activist groups focus on the inhumane treatment of queer and trans individuals within ICE detention. The most recent attention has focused on the lack of medical care provided for trans persons within ICE facilities. Activist groups also call attention to the physical abuse that is committed by ICE officials toward trans migrants. For instance, Roxana Hernández, a transgender migrant from Honduras who was seeking asylum in the United States, died in ICE custody because of medical neglect and physical abuse.43 Additionally, queer and trans organizations continue to circulate information about the homophobia and transphobia experienced by the most recent migrant caravan from Central America, calling attention to the lack of willing sponsors for queer and trans immigrants. In addition, intense homophobia and transphobia on the part of other Central American migrants forced queer and trans individuals to separate from the dominant migrant group. Disturbingly, Roxana’s story and others similar to theirs have not been widely circulated across mainstream media networks. Nor have the narratives of queer and trans individuals from the most recent migrant caravan. The stories of trans and queer immigrants’ experiences with the U.S. immigration system demonstrate the power of the nation-state to mark certain bodies for death. In the immigration context, being marked for death has been exemplified by what happens to those who choose to stay in the

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Figure 17.1. Justice for Roxana.

country and petition for asylum; ICE facilities make conditions extremely unbearable for gender and sexual outsiders by denying medical resources and subjecting them to transphobic or homophobic violence. In addition, the state refuses to invest in political interventions, thus contributing to the bureaucratic delay in which populations become marked for death. There is an extreme need to focus not only on families separated by immigration policies but also on people who are often silenced and overlooked because the nation-state’s ability to determine who is marked for death remains a tool of colonial biopolitics and necropolitics, resulting in “the management of Latinx im(migrant life).”44 Whether we attribute the fact that certain people are not widely included within dominant immigrant rights discourses and media attention to patriarchal colonial biopolitics or to wétiko psychosis, it exemplifies the continued silencing and the attempts of the settler colonialist project to eliminate outsiders to Western ideologies.

Throughout this chapter, it has been my intention to place emphasis on the harmful and violent legacy of colonial biopolitics and how the nation-state determines who should be eligible for personhood. Although immigrant rights discourses critique state-sanctioned violence impacting undocumented Latinx communities, they oftentimes ignore the rights of immigrant people and communities of nonnormative sexuality or gender. Through critiquing dominant immigrant rights discourses based on the movement #keepfamiliestogether, with the families in question always assumed to be heteronormative, I seek to bring attention to and problematize the way in which these narratives reinforce norms of gender and sexuality. In particular, this chapter has emphasized the ways in which white cis-heteropatriarchal norms infiltrate immigrant rights discourses, determining one’s social value according to normative standards of the heterosexual family. Immigrant families demonstrating characteristics of marianismo and machismo thus become the dominant forms of articulating and appealing for legibility to the state, thus reinforcing the notion of ideal immigrants who conform to traditional claims for personhood that reinforce white cis-heteropatriarchal ideologies. I have also looked at the continuous conversation and activist work offered by certain nonprofit organizations to demonstrate acts of resistance by sucias and suciedad communities. Sucias continue to challenge colonialist binary thinking. With my critiques of the nation-state and immigrant rights discourses, it is my intent to recognize the violent mechanisms that continue to oppress queer and trans undocumented immigrants in hopes of moving toward healing, collectivity, and the enactment of social change.

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Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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31. 32. 33.

Please see the April 20, 2017, Denver Post article that examines how Jeanette Vizguerra was named by Time Magazine as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world: Paul, “Mom Living in Denver Church.” Hanna and Ortega, “Salir Adelante”; Quevedo, “Troubling Case(s) of Noncitizens.” Quevedo, “Troubling Case(s) of Noncitizens.” Portillos, “Breaking the I.C.E.” Portillos, “Breaking the I.C.E.” Foucault, Discipline and Punish. Aldama, Disrupting Savagism, 13. Aldama, Disrupting Savagism. Aldama, 14. Casas, Devastation. Casas, Devastation. Hernández, City of Inmates; Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism.” Driskill, “Stolen from Our Bodies,” 53. Driskill, 53–54. Hardin, “Altering Masculinities.” Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals; Hardin, “Altering Masculinities.” Quijano, “Coloniality of Power.” Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism.” Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism.” Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism.” Hardin, “Altering Masculinities.” Jezzini, Guzmán, and Grayshield, “Gender Role Concept of Marianismo”; Stevens, “Prospects.” Fox, “Obedience and Rebellion.” Aldama, Disrupting Savagism. Estrada, “Two-Spirit Mexica Youth.” Cacho, Social Death. Cacho, Social Death. Vargas, “Ruminations on Lo Sucio,” 718. Please see Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. Munoz critiques and expands on Lee Edelman’s article “The Future Is Kid Stuff ” (1998). Edelman has a normative focus on white queer children, and Munoz adds a racialized analytic to interrogate normativity further. Vargas, “Ruminations on Lo Sucio,” 721. Vargas, “Ruminations on Lo Sucio.” Vargas, 721.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals. Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo, 66. Bonfil Batalla, 19. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals. Escobar, Captivity Beyond Prisons, 99. Escobar, 101. Mbembé, “Necropolitics.” Escobar, Captivity Beyond Prisons. For an overview of Roxana Hernández and her death in ICE custody in May 2018, see Chavez, “Transgender Woman in Migrant Caravan.” 44. Escobar, Captivity Beyond Prisons.

Aldama, Arturo J. Disrupting Savagism: Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant, and Native American Struggles for Self-Representation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization. Translated by Philip Dennis. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Cacho, Lisa Marie. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Casas, Bartolomé de las. The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account. Translated by Herma Briffault. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. Chavez, Nicole. “Transgender Woman in Migrant Caravan Dies in ICE Custody.” CNN, May 31, 2018. Accessed February 18, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/31/health /transgender-migrant-dies-ice-custody/index.html. Driskill, Qwo-Li. “Stolen from Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 16, no. 2 (2004): 50–64. Edelman, Lee. “The Future Is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive.” Narrative 6, no. 1 (1998): 18–30. Escobar, Martha D. Captivity Beyond Prisons: Criminalization Experiences of Latina (Im) migrants. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Estrada, Gabriel S. “Two-Spirit Mexica Youth and Transgender Mixtec/Muxe Media: La Mission (2009), Two Spirit: Injunuity (2013), and Libertad (2015).” Journal of Religion and Film 21, no. 1 (2017). Forbes, Jack D. Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism and Terrorism. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1992. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

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Works Cited

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Fox, Linda C. “Obedience and Rebellion: Ref-Vision of Chicana Myths of Motherhood.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1983): 20–22. Hanna, Ashley-Marie Vollmer, and Debora Marie Ortega. “Salir Adelante (Perseverance): Lessons from the Mexican Immigrant Experience.” Journal of Social Work 16, no. 1 (2016): 47– 65. Hardin, Michael. “Altering Masculinities: The Spanish Conquest and the Evolution of the Latin American Machismo.” International Journal of Sexuality & Gender Studies 7, no. 1 (2002): 1–22. Hernández, Kelly Lytle. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Jezzini, Andreana T., Cynthia E. Guzmán, and Lisa Grayshield. “Examining the Gender Role Concept of Marianismo and Its Relation to Acculturation in Mexican-American College Women.” Presentation given at the ACA Annual Conference and Exhibition, Honolulu, Hawai‘i, March 2008. Accessed June 27, 2008, https://www.counseling.org /docs/default-source/vistas/vistas_2008_jezzini.pdf?sfvrsn=da750f22_11. Mbembé, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11– 40. Project MUSE. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism Within Queer Modernities.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1 (2010): 105–31. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Paul, Jesse. “Mom Living in Denver Church for Sanctuary Among TIME’s 100 Most Influential People.” Denver Post, April 20, 2017. Accessed February 18, 2019, https://www .denverpost.com/2017/04/20/jeanette-vizguerra-sanctuary-time-magazine/. Portillos, Alejandra Benita. “Breaking the I.C.E.: Understanding Latinx Experiences with Immigration Detention and Deportation.” Presentation given at the American Society of Criminology Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, November 2018. Quevedo, Juan C. “The Troubling Case(s) of Noncitizens: Immigration Enforcement Through the Criminal Justice System and the Effect on Families.” Tennessee Journal of Law & Policy 10, no. 2 (2015): 386–421. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (2000): 215– 32. Rodríguez, Roberto Cintli. Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Stevens, Evelyn P. “The Prospects for a Women’s Liberation Movement in Latin America.” Journal of Marriage and Family 35, no. 2 (1973): 313– 21. Vargas, Deborah R. “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic.” American Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2014): 715– 26. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387– 409.

Chapter 18

A RODEO TO CALL THEIR OWN LGBTQ Vaqueros and the Gay Rodeo of the American West Nicholas Villanueva Jr.

In Southwest Texas [in the 1870s] . . . cowboys were—and still are—generally referred to as “vaqueros” (often pronounced bakeros), “hands,” or “cow hands.” The word “cowboy” was sometimes used, but not nearly so commonly as now. Vaquero—from vaca (cow)—was originally applied only to Spanish or Mexican cowboys. But from an early day, Texans, especially those near the border, have used the word without reference to race. Thus in one corrida, or outfit, may be found “Mexican vaqueros,” “white vaqueros,” and “nigger vaqueros.” —J. FRANK DOBIE, A VAQUERO OF THE BRUSH COUNTRY, 1946

In the past forty years, U.S. society has changed notably by becoming increasingly diversified. However, a celebration of the acceptance of diversity does not always follow. Quite the opposite can occur when the dominant, nativeborn members of society see diversity as an attack or a threat to their cultural capital. This capital, acquired during hundreds of years of colonialism and domination, includes cultural characteristics such as English being the dominant spoken language, Christianity being the dominant practiced religion, and heterosexual lifestyles being the most authentic coupling accepted in society. The changes that occurred during the previous four decades have disrupted this, as a growing number of people living in the United States identify with the LGBTQ community, as well as with gender nonconformance. During this time, same-sex marriages disrupted the social order that evangelical Christians attempted to impose through a rise in conservatism in politics. At the same time, the remarkable increase in the number of Spanish-speaking Latinx people in the United States has resulted in the rise of white nationalism and nativism in this country. This chapter examines the LGBTQ Latinx community through the vaqueros of the gay rodeo.1 I argue that Latinx LGBTQ rodeo participants are reclaiming the figure of the vaquero as the authentic cowboy, and that, by doing so, they have made the vaquero identity a more inclusive and gender-nonconforming one in the hegemonic masculine sport of rodeo. The LGBTQ Latinx community’s increased visibility during the previous decades occurred during a time when it experienced greater acceptance. Pop307

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ular social norms of masculinity and femininity were challenged, and icons such as the American cowboy were reimagined. On Valentine’s Day 2006, country music hall of fame artist Willie Nelson released the song “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other.” Nelson timed this release to express his support for the LGBTQ community and for gay marriage. The song debuted on Howard Stern’s radio broadcast and was available on iTunes shortly thereafter.2 The lyrics, by Ned Sublette, were originally written in 1981.3 The song remained “in the closet” for twenty-five years until several factors led Nelson to record and release it. The most significant was the greater acceptance of gay couples in popular culture. The critical acclaim for the 2005 movie Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s epic romantic drama about two gay cowboys, demonstrated that twenty-first-century American popular culture was ready to accept and understand gay intimacy as love. Us Weekly and Vanity Fair both ranked the film among the top twenty-five romantic movies of all time. Time Out ranked the film as high as sixth; it beat out fan favorites like When Harry Met Sally and the blockbuster hit Titanic, surpassed only by classics like Annie Hall and Casablanca.4 Even though many conservative communities banned Brokeback Mountain from their theaters, limiting it to a 60 percent nationwide release, as opposed to hits like Titanic, Pearl Harbor, and the 2017 blockbuster hit Beauty and the Beast, starring Emma Watson, it currently ranks sixteenth in all-time theater ticket sales among romantic dramas.5 An inverted story of changes occurred for Latinx people over a parallel timeline in the United States. Categorized as “Hispanic” in U.S. census records, the Latinx community grew from 14.8 million in 1980 to 56.5 million in 2015— or nearly 18 percent of the U.S. population. According to the Pew Research Center, the Latinx population could reach 107 million by 2065.6 While the LGBTQ community during this period witnessed continued efforts to improve members’ quality of life in the United States, with public institutions enacting nondiscrimination policies that protected sexual orientation and gender identity and the United States Supreme Court protecting same-sex marriages, the opposite occurred within the Latinx community. Nativist rhetoric that demonized immigrants, especially those of the Islamic faith or Latin American origin, increased during this period. Nativist views gained increased traction during the 2015– 16 Republican primary race, with plans to exclude Muslim refugees, repatriate non– U.S. citizens, and construct a wall that would prevent Mexican “killers and rapists” from entering the United States.7 Three years into the Trump administration, the construction of a border wall remains a topic of contestation. At the dawn of 2019, the U.S. federal government was in a partial shutdown. In fact, this shutdown, the longest in U.S. history, was the result of a fight over the funding of a border wall. Not helping matters, the president’s

The Anglo Cowboy When Anglo society imagines a cowboy, many might see an image of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. To an NFL football fan, the word cowboy evokes a different image, possibly Tony Romo or Jason Witten, former players for the Dallas Cowboys NFL team. Cowboy images may differ in relation to their

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son, Donald Trump Jr., compared immigrants to zoo animals in an Instagram post: “You know why you can enjoy a day at the zoo? . . . Because walls work.” 8 It was this dehumanization that led to animosity and violence against people of color historically, and it is a problem that has reemerged today. Yet the Latinx community continues to fight this injustice so they can reclaim their rightful place in the United States. This chapter examines the cultural changes in broader U.S. society for LGBTQ people and the Latinx community, the appropriation of cowboy identity by Anglo-Americans, the early years of the gay rodeo, and the LGBTQ Latinx vaqueros who have reimagined what rodeo can be in the American West. In Colorado, the LGBTQ Latinx community helped organize the Rocky Mountain Gay Rodeo and Denver’s Latino Gay Pride. Through their efforts, Latinx Coloradoans are reclaiming the term vaquero as the name of the “authentic” cowboy, an identity usurped by Anglo-Americans in the late nineteenth century. The dominant group associated with rodeo (white, male, Christian, and heterosexual) might regard this as an attack or a threat, but, as mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, the question is one of Latinx people reclaiming what belongs to their culture, which has been under attack or appropriated for over a century. By the mid-twentieth century, Hollywood films replaced the Mexican vaquero with the likes of buckaroos such as John Wayne. Yet even the nickname “buckaroo” evolved from the Spanish word vaquero.9 In U.S. popular culture, Latinx people, primarily of Mexican descent, have long been marginalized as comical sidekicks in westerns and caricatured as thieves in cartoon images like the Frito Bandito. Today we can see the cultural appropriation of Latinx history by venturing out on Cinco de Mayo (May 5). Ask any of a dozen people celebrating the day with tacos, margaritas, and Mexican beers what they are celebrating, and few if any will answer that it commemorates the Battle of Puebla during the second French invasion of Mexico. Most will either answer that they do not know or that they believe it is Mexico’s Independence Day, similar to July 4 in the USA. This chapter demonstrates that as the Latinx population surges in the United States and members of the dominant white group fear and stigmatize Latinx people, the Colorado vaqueros are reclaiming a stolen identity for the Latinx community through the gay rodeo.

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meaning, but one thing remains constant— the word cowboy exemplifies masculinity. Phil Ragsdale, the founder of the Reno Gay Rodeo in 1976, knew that the phrase “gay cowboy” seemed to be a contradiction in greater society due to stereotypes and heteronormativity.10 This contradiction is similar to the one described in Eric Anderson’s study of gay athletes and the hegemonic conception of masculinity— the gay athlete, or gay cowboy, is a paradox because “gay athletes comply with the gendered script of being male,” yet they “violate another masculine script through the existence of their same-sex desires.”11 The same rationale is true for gay cowboys: their script is a narrative of hard work and strife on the frontier, and they dress the part with their Stetson hats and Wrangler jeans, but, as Willie Nelson so poetically sang, “they are secretly, frequently fond of each other.”12 Willie Nelson and Ned Sublette were on to something with the lyrics of this song. The history of cowmen in the American West reveals a relationship between men that is not always associated with this romanticized, rugged figure of frontier history: In the 1800s, a fall roundup or an eight-hundred-mile trail drive meant being away from civilization for weeks or months. For heterosexual cowboys, female companionship was scarce. Ranches didn’t want the boys fighting over women, so most had no women employees. You had to wait ’til Saturday night, or the end of the season, to visit the whorehouse in town. But town sex could also give you syphilis and gonorrhea—not curable in those dark days before penicillin. Like men in the army or on ships at sea, even the hetero hands may have turned to each other for sexual relief when the boss wasn’t looking.13

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More than a physical relationship, the partnership between these men was real and at times emotional. Cowboy songs have long revealed closeness when their message is of grief over a loss due to an accident or a shooting. In the traditional cowboy song “Utah Carroll,” a cowboy grieves for his deceased partner:

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In the land of Mexico in the place from whence I came, In silence sleeps my partner in a grave without a name. We rode the trail together and worked cows side by side, Oh, I loved him like a brother, and I wept when Utah died.14 As long as these men of the West did their jobs, ranchers understood gay cowboy love “as an unavoidable result of the circumstances . . . it made the loneliness and hardship bearable.”15

When Ned Sublette wrote his cowboy ballad for Willie Nelson in 1981, the gay liberation movement had already made great strides in bringing homosexuals out of the closet and into the mainstream public, following the pivotal 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. In Reno, Nevada, a group of cowboys led by Phil Ragsdale organized an annual event known as the Reno Gay Rodeo starting in 1976. Many Reno business owners eventually welcomed these new visitors from around the country because the local economy benefited from the event in the form of sold-out hotels and reservation-only restaurants. The Reno Gay Rodeo attempted to bridge the gap between homosexuals and heterosexuals in the greater Reno community with philanthropic efforts to give back to the community and thus bridge the divide created by the homophobic milieu of the West. Early in 1976, Ragsdale began his mission to host the first gay rodeo. The money raised would benefit the local branch of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The Washoe County Fairgrounds manager agreed to host the event and scheduled October 2, 1976, as the first available day.16 On his part, Ragsdale faced many challenges locating ranchers willing to rent out livestock. As soon as Ragsdale disclosed that the interested civic group was the Reno gay community, ranchers quickly refused any involvement with these men. Thirty-six ranchers repudiated Ragsdale. On Friday, October 1, 1976, the night before the inaugural event, Ragsdale traveled sixty miles east of Reno to purchase the livestock at auction. By 10 p.m., Ragsdale had purchased the animals and secured transportation for ten “wild” range calves, five “wild” range cows, one pig, and a Shetland pony.17 At the end of the one-day event, a donation of $214 was made to the Muscular Dystrophy Association in the name of “gay people.”18 Even among cowboys, there is a debate about true cowboy identity that leads ranchmen to dismiss rodeo men as not being “real” cowboys, even though they are at a far greater risk of injury than in any other sport (see figure 18.1). The potential for injury is 89 percent, based on a study of collegiate rodeo athletes.19 This high percentage, coupled with the “mystique” of toughness that often encourages rodeo cowboys to deny that an injury occurred, is seen as an “occupational hazard endemic to the sport.”20 For West Texas historian Alex Hunt, the image of bronco rider Robert Etbauer searching the dirt floor of the arena for his severed thumb following his ride at the 1995 Denver Stock Show and Rodeo will forever represent cowboys’ toughness.21 The gay rodeo originated in 1976 and has become an international competition. The International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA) is the governing

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The Origin of the Gay Rodeo

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Figure 18.1. Unknown bull rider, 2019 Rodeo in the Rock, Diamond State Rodeo Association. Photo by Ryan Villanueva.

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body. In Colorado, Latinx people participate in the Rocky Mountain Gay Rodeo, and many of the vaqueros consider this their Gay Pride Festival, as opposed to the largely white and middle-class event that occurs every June. Through gay rodeo fundraising and promotional events, the vaquero identity is being reclaimed. The dilemma of the Anglo-American cowboy consciousness is that it has mostly been forgotten that rodeos began on Spanish haciendas among Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Mexico and the western United States. Spanish missionaries settled north of what is the current U.S.Mexico border. By 1833, twenty-one Spanish missions thrived in California, along El Camino Real from San Diego to north of San Francisco. These missions— Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and San José, for example— became the cities of California today. Anglo cowboys in the American West were hired to do the dirty work for the cattle barons; they were often army deserters and “criminals on the run from the law in another state. . . . [W]ell into the twentieth century, [a cowboy’s] wage was $40 a month and board— less if he was black or Mexican.”22 Today Latinx rodeo participants are foreigners in their own sport, often pigeonholed under the name “Mexican rodeo,” just as they became foreigners in their own land with Anglo North Americans’ arrival in former New Spain and later northern Mexico. The history of Latinx participants in rodeo and the history of Latinx people in the United States share a parallel story of colonialism, encounters with Anglo North

Americans, displacement, and the contemporary fight to reclaim Latinx participants’ rights as central to rodeo culture. Rodeo is a competitive sport that attracts riders from around the world. Competitive athletes represent nations including New Zealand and Australia, hardly the locations one imagines for this sporting phenomenon. It’s the cultural identity of the sport that has spread its popularity abroad. But what is that cultural identity? To some, it is part of the rural milieu of ranch life in small towns across a nation-state— the same ideology that embraces conservative values, hegemonic masculinity, and country music. In these social worlds, it is not uncommon for the Confederate battle flag to cover the tailgate of a pickup truck in places like rural northern Wisconsin— once again, a dilemma of consciousness. To others, the cultural identity of rodeo is rooted in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century principles of a “strenuous life” that follows Theodore Rooseveltian ideals of hard work and “manly strife.” Historian Gary Gerstle explains that Roosevelt revered the men of his First Volunteer Cavalry, the so-called Rough Riders, in San Juan, Cuba, because they were “America’s citizen soldiers” and not the product of a bureaucratic institution (the army).23 Roosevelt chose men who had “taken part in the killing of the great buffalo herds, and had fought Indians when the tribes were still on the warpath. The younger ones, too, had led rough lives; and the lines in their faces told of many a hardship endured, and many a danger silently faced with grim, unconscious philosophy.”24 These are the men of the Anglo-American cowboy consciousness. However, the dilemma is that this identity is false for rodeo and rodeo cowboys. Just like Native American lands and Spanish haciendas, Anglo North Americans stole the rodeo cowboys’ identity.

In mainstream rodeo, Latinx people are emerging as the dominant force in competition. In 2014, Silvano Alves became the Professional Bull Riders association (PBR) world champion for the third time in a five-year span (2011, 2012, and 2014). The same year that Alves won his third world title, the 2014 Wrangler National Finals Rodeo attracted 177,565 ticket holders to its tenday series of events at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. This was an attendance record for the thirty-year history of the event.25 Alves, a twenty-six-year-old from Pilar do Sul, Brazil, who lives in Decatur, Texas, became only the second bull rider to win three world titles. The first, Adriano Moraes of Quintana, São Paulo, Brazil, won his titles in 1994, 2001, and 2006. Professional bull riding and the rodeo continue to grow in fan enthusiasm, televised viewers, and profits. In 2016, bull rider Jorge Valdiviezo

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became the first Mexican on the Built Ford Tough Series, involving the Professional Bull Riders’ top thirty-five riders. Valdiviezo moved his family to San Antonio to chase his dream to compete in the PBR and earn money for his wife Natalie and daughter Mia, after winning at every level in Mexico: “I feel very honored to be at this level, and it’s a great thing and big responsibility. . . . I feel proud to represent Mexico. . . . I hope to do this for many years and show youngsters around the world you can do this regardless where you’re from.”26 Rodeo attracts many to the ranks, and the former mayor of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is part of this rodeo cohort as well. Javier Gonzales served as mayor of Santa Fe from 2014 to 2018. As the first openly gay mayor of the city, Gonzales is a trailblazer. When the rodeo came to town, Gonzales expressed his interest in participating. And as the rodeo parade lined the streets of Santa Fe, Gonzales didn’t take the traditional ride in an open convertible like most politicians, instead stating, “I’ll be on my horse.”27 Popularity remains steady for rodeo. Historian Joel Bernstein claimed that professional rodeo was the seventh-ranked professional sport in the United States by 2001 and stated that “more than twenty-four million people go to Professional Cowboy Association rodeos in the United States and Canada, and to the surprise of many sports fans, that puts rodeo attendance ahead of such well-known professional sports as golf or tennis. . . . People, whether they are Americans or not, don’t seem to be able to erase the picture of the North American cowboy from their consciousness.”28 But that consciousness has a dilemma. The LGBTQ Latinx community is challenging this Anglo-constructed identity. Outside of the mainstream rodeo circuit there are rodeos that celebrate the sport within communities like the LGBTQ community. In the United States, “Native Americans, Black, Hispanic and Hawaiian groups all host rodeos.”29 The gay rodeo, however, might be the most inclusive sport in the United States. The rodeo welcomes all members of the LGBTQ community, does not adhere to a gender binary, and welcomes heterosexual-identifying athletes:

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In a sport traditionally dominated by rugged Marlboro men, the gay rodeo not only doesn’t discriminate against women, but it doesn’t discriminate against men who are women or want to dress like women, or women who love women, or men who love men, or men who love women. All of them are eligible to vie for prize money and a championship buckle in any event.30 Moreover, women are often restricted from competing in bull riding, bareback riding, and wrestling steers in the mainstream rodeo and relegated to a few “non-contact” events.31

was a phobia about homosexuals. . . . It was a fear of homosexuals which seemed to be associated with a fear of contagion, a fear of reducing the things one fought for—home and family. It was a religious fear and it had led to great brutality as fear always does.35 Out of such fear came anti-gay violence that became known as “gay bashing.” Anti-gay violence often went unpunished throughout the 1970s and 1980s,

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First-time filmmaker Matt Livadary, a longtime fan of the rodeo, produced Queens and Cowboys: A Straight Year on the Gay Rodeo. Over the course of more than eight hundred hours of film, in which he interviewed dozens of participants, Livadary stated that the only pushback he experienced was not for being a heterosexual male filming the gay rodeo; rather, it was the following question from the president of the International Gay Rodeo Association, Doug Graff: “Are you in PETA?” “I said, ‘no,’ and that was my only test.”32 The gay rodeo allows for full participation by all athletes. Unlike its mainstream U.S. counterpart, the gay rodeo has thirteen events open to all participants. In most arenas, all participants identifying with any gender compete against one another. Lesbian bull rider Char Duran has competed against gay men in rodeo for nearly twenty years. Duran rode her first horse after moving to Colorado from California in 1995. The elusive championship buckle has escaped her throughout her nearly-twenty-year career, yet she prefers the gay rodeo over competing in a women’s rodeo association because of the widespread homophobia that has long existed in the sport. Gender ideology has a long history in sports throughout the twentieth century and reinforces, in the social world of sport, the ideas that humans are either male or female, that men are physically stronger and more rational than women, and that heterosexuality is nature’s foundation, while other expressions are abnormal, deviant, or immoral.33 This ideology in sports led to the exclusion of women for much of the twentieth century, and almost complete exclusion of the LGBTQ community. When lesbians and gay men attempted to participate in mainstream rodeo, homophobia often led to intimidation or physical violence. Duran explains, “Every one of us has a sad or scary tale of being treated differently— and sometimes downright shitty— from being part of rodeo . . . if not because of being gay, then because of being a woman. Neither one is particularly welcomed with open arms on the straight circuit, that’s for sure.”34 Ragsdale and organizers of the first gay rodeo in Reno had major concerns about safety because of homophobia, a term that was never spoken prior to 1965. Psychologist George Weinberg coined the phrase as he began to examine homosexuals in a nonclinical setting. According to Gregory M. Herek, Weinberg argued that homophobia

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not only because law enforcement failed to protect gay and lesbian victims, but also because the victims themselves often fled the scene when assailants were arrested. Closeted victims rarely faced their perpetrators in criminal and civil courts because they feared family, friends, or employers would learn about their homosexuality. Law professor Teresa Eileen Kibelstis explains, “While victims may want to prosecute their assailants, they are too vulnerable as homosexuals in American society to be exposed in this manner.”36 For the Reno Gay Rodeo men, this was a serious concern. After the 1976 rodeo made national news, the press paid more attention to the planning of the August 1977 event. Gay cowboys felt a sense of security within the confines of their fairground, and the event pulled gay cowboys out of the closet and into the competition arena. Many of these men would have remained in secrecy without the gay rodeo. Bull rider Patrick Kelly stated that he could not come out at the mainstream rodeo (the “straight circuit”) out of fear for his safety. He stated that he did not feel safe competing until the Reno Gay Rodeo. A Texas woman at the Reno rodeo noted, “In rodeo, we not only run the risk of serious injury just by participating, but we’re also exposed to deliberate injury. I don’t think there is anything worse than a redneck cowboy.”37 Ragsdale was concerned about “redneck action” that might occur outside of the fairgrounds and hired security for the festivities. While he believed that the greater Reno population was becoming more open-minded toward homosexuals, and that many have a “live and let live” philosophy, his concern with “gay bashing” was warranted, and he believed the potential for anti-gay violence increased when “redneck cowboys” got “a few drinks under their belts.”38 Ragsdale reiterated to the Associated Press that the event was intended to represent the opposite of gay stereotypes, and, more importantly, “gays do not want to create a problem. We do not want protesters spurred by the Anita Bryant thing.”39 Country music artist Anita Bryant’s actions epitomized a homophobic belief that homosexuals were a threat to “home and family,” which became a major political talking point in the late 1970s. Her campaign named Save Our Children was an effort to overturn a 1977 ordinance in Dade County, Florida, that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Bryant’s campaign was successful, and on June 7, 1977, Dade County repealed the antidiscrimination ordinance. After hearing the news, Bryant and her husband Bob Green danced with glee. In response to her efforts, supporters of the legislation fought back. Bryant was a spokesperson for the Florida citrus industry, and a boycott of oranges and orange juice went into effect. Gay and gay-friendly bars took screwdrivers, the vodka-and-orange-juice beverage, off the menu and replaced them with the “Anita Bryant,” a mixture of vodka and apple juice.40 This history of discrimination resulted in the growth of the gay rodeo, and Latinas like Duran found a safe and inclusive space in the West— though

not always with the animals. Duran sustained injuries during events that included a broken ankle, a broken left arm, a broken right forearm, three separate broken collarbones, fractured teeth, a bruised heart and lung, and concussions, and she had numerous surgeries as a result. The 2015 Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo was no different:

Duran is proud of her participation in the gay rodeo and believes it’s an important contribution toward generating social acceptance in society today and reclaiming an important part of history: “There are still a lot of people who don’t know our history and why we’re an important part of rodeo.”42 Bull rider Deanna Trujillo-James experienced discrimination and homophobia within her own family. Raised in Southern California, TrujilloJames grew up with a large extended family while being raised by a single mother. She became estranged from her mother after the family learned of her romantic interest in women. She married Judy James, a gay rodeo promoter, who grew up watching rodeos with her father in Wyoming. James “ran away from home at 17, after her parents found her love letters to another woman.”43 A failed intervention by her family ended with her father pointing a gun at her. On her last visit with her father years later, at a rodeo they once attended when she was a child, James stated, “The greatest joy in my life is that father got to meet Dee [Deanna Trujillo-James], and accepted her.”44 Trujillo-James’s mother had long hoped her daughter’s interest in women was a phase, but today she is more interested in introducing her daughter as “a gay cowgirl,” and she “loves educating people,” Trujillo-James explains.45 Moreover, the gay rodeo has become a source of enjoyment and profit wherever it occurs, and in small mountain towns like La Honda, in San Mateo County, California, Trujillo-James and LGBTQ Latinx vaqueros are welcomed: “When we show up, people shout, ‘Gay cowboys are here!’ We bring in a lot of business to these small communities.”46

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When the chute opens, all 1,700 pounds of brindle bull bursts out. The animal spins, rears and kicks violently, as though his hindquarters are spring-loaded. . . . [T]he rider is flying to the ground, helmet-clad head hitting hard against the dirt, brownand-white leather chaps slightly askew. Quickly surrounding the prone body, the bullfighters and other rodeo staff tasked with providing protection against the still-kicking bull offer a human screen against anxious spectators too. After several tense moments, the rider pops up and fist- pumps the air as the crowd roars. Then the helmet comes off, and it’s easy to see that this toughie is no cowboy: It’s Char Duran, [Latina] lady bull rider.41

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Figure 18.2. Delyria Paul Twilight Starr (Maria Martinez) is a member of the New Mexico Gay Rodeo Association and a member of International Gay Rodeo Association Royalty. This Latina is the 2019 Ms. IGRA second runner-up and one of the twelve-member Royalty team. Photo by Ryan Villanueva.

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One of the most expressive and entertaining parts of the gay rodeo is its pageantry. All of the gay rodeo events have a drag royalty competition. A winner is crowned, and that person has the responsibility of raising money throughout the year for local or national charities as part of representing their title. At the IGRA finals, “the royalty consists of a Miss IGRA (a gay man dressed as a woman), a Ms. IGRA (a gay woman dressed as a woman), a Mr. IGRA (a gay man dressed like a man), and a MsTer IGRA (a gay woman dressed as a man).”47 One of the first rodeo drag queen winners, Chili Pepper, was also a rodeo man. A vaquero with lipstick, Miss Pepper competed in the rodeo as Tony Valdez: “When he’s not dodging steer horns or dusting dirt from his cowboy duds, you’ll find him in a more chic Western outfit, riding in the back of a vintage convertible as Chili Pepper, Miss International Gay Rodeo Association [1992].”48 Latinx LGBTQ rodeo participants are reclaiming the figure of the vaquero as the authentic cowboy, and, in doing so, have made vaquero identity a more inclusive and gender-nonconforming term in the hegemonic masculine sport of rodeo. LGBTQ Latinx vaqueros have reimagined what rodeo can be in the American West. In Oakland, California, Latinx men created their own pageant: Mr. Gay Vaquero. The gay vaquero contest is a month-long beauty and talent competition. One competitor described in a 2007 article, Antonio Rios, was a closeted

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twenty-one-year-old gay man from Michoacán, Mexico, who assumed a fake name when competing and visiting gay clubs in the San Francisco Bay Area. Rios arrived as an immigrant when he was seventeen. He struggled with his gay identity, even contemplating suicide when he was a teenager. Rios and many of the other Mr. Gay Vaquero contestants are not shy about their “quest for the title.”49 Orlando Cabera was a muscular man and a foot taller than Rios. At the time, “the 29-year-old had been working out at the gym since January for this.”50 The November event final was a championship spectacle: “Out front on the dance floor of the large warehouse-like club, a vaquero croons a love ballad to the crowd, which is expected to swell to more [than] 452 people, the club’s capacity on Monday when the 2007 Mr. Gay Vaquero steps up for his crown.”51 These men have reclaimed the rodeo and vaquero history through their month-long competition and other cultural events and reimagined what rodeo can be in the American West today: “The pageant aims to continue the rodeo spirit through cultural traditions such as ballet folklorico and cow-roping that originated from the rural Mexican states of Jalisco and Michoacan, said Munoz. It is unique, however, because Mr. Gay Vaquero contestants are free to serenade their boyfriends and have drag queens do backup as well.”52 Richard Valdez, the president of the Colorado Gay Rodeo Association, explains that gay vaqueros and gay cowboys were once ostracized by the general public and mainstream rodeo participants, fans, and organizers. Now, greater acceptance of the LGBTQ community is positive, but has resulted in a decline in interest on the part of spectators. Valdez explains, “At one time, gay rodeo was such a novelty that people had to come out and watch it, but I think that younger people are just so much more accepting these days and have so many other things competing for their attention that they’re like, ‘Meh, rodeo.’ ”53 Other than a lack of interest, the only powerful opposition to the gay rodeo is from PETA and its opposition to all rodeos. PETA members find that rodeo violates animal rights and that the events are cruel to animals. In San Francisco, a group of protesters from LGBT Compassion staged an event outside a gay rodeo fundraiser at Powerhouse Bar on Folsom Street. Organizer Andrew Zollman and several other protesters handed out fliers detailing the harsh conditions these animals are forced to endure in this sport. Protester Julie Dunn stated that she loses sleep over the thought of their treatment. Another protester stated, “Rodeos are a nightmare for animals and to get entertainment at the expense of creatures that are sensitive is unfathomable to me.”54 Zollman equated the experience of these helpless animals to that of people from marginalized groups in the United States: “We want to inform the community of the cruelty involved in rodeo, and illustrate the parallels between the bullying, abuse and oppression of minorities such as LGBTs, and

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animals (who cannot speak for themselves).”55 But for now, the vaqueros of the gay rodeo have reclaimed an identity in a sport that originated with their heritage and reimagined what a rodeo can be in the American West. The gay rodeo and Latinx Pride festivals are important to this community. For nearly a century, Latinxs’ identity as vaqueros of the rodeo was appropriated by Anglo cowboys, and the marginalization of LGBTQ Latinx people within the larger Pride festivals continues to exist. Pride festivals across the United States originated to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots. These festivals have become an inclusive event that heterosexual families attend as well. While this is important for the larger LGBTQ mission of inclusion, it is now dominated by the white middle class and, as a result, LGBTQ people of color continue to be marginalized within this subculture of society. Similarly, in 2015, as Donald Trump jockeyed for position among a field of over a dozen Republican primary candidates, he criticized Jeb Bush’s family for being bilingual, speaking both Spanish and English: “Who cares if he speaks Mexican, this is America, English!”56 Trump’s hate speech against the Latinx community brought tremendous criticism as well: As stated in The Wrap, “The National Hispanic Media Coalition praised NBC Universal for severing ties with Donald Trump.” NBC Universal ended the ten- year run of his hit show The Apprentice and stated they would no longer air the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants that he produced.57 As the Latinx community grows, so will the discontent with hate speech by conservative political leaders. From the mid-1980s to the twenty-first century, the LGBTQ community made tremendous strides by becoming a political voice of opposition to conservative hate speech and now has new leaders in powerful government positions, such as Colorado governor Jared Polis, who in 2018 became the first openly gay candidate for governor to win an election. The Latinx community increased their political presence in 2018 with the election of a highly outspoken and charismatic activist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to the U.S. House of Representatives. In her first floor speech as a member of Congress, Ocasio-Cortez condemned President Trump and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky for the government shutdown. She argued:

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It is actually not about a wall, it is not about the border, and it is certainly not about the well-being of everyday Americans. . . . The truth is, this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms.58 Ocasio-Cortez shared a similar discontent with McConnell a day after seeking out the U.S. Senate leader for a discussion and finding him absent: “It is not normal to shut down the government when we don’t get what we want. It is not normal for public servants to run away and hide from the public

that they serve.”59 As political leaders fight to make the United States a more welcoming place for the Latinx community in the era of Trump, 2020 is approaching. Possibly someone like former San Antonio mayor Julián Castro can successfully earn the nomination of the Democratic Party for president and reclaim the office of the presidency from the Republican Party. One thing is certain: reclaiming a space, a history, and an identity in the United States is a challenge that Latinx people have taken on in the twenty-first century. Maybe the Latinx LGBTQ vaqueros are an example of the tenacity and perseverance necessary to reclaim identity. The study of Latinx LGBTQ vaqueros is not only about challenging LGBTQ stereotypes and reclaiming a space and identity in the U.S. American West; it is also one more example of voices that need to be heard in order to inspire others to reclaim the respect that the Latinx community deserves.

1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

The term gay rodeo will be used in this chapter to represent LGBTQ-centered rodeo. “Gay rodeo” is trademarked through the international organization known as IGRA— the International Gay Rodeo Association. All of the organizers, participants, and fans know it as the gay rodeo, and the term will be used throughout this chapter. This is not to disregard the complexity of LGBTQ community identities. Ian David, “Dallas Dudes Who Inspired Willie Nelson’s Salute to Gay Cowboys Usher in Star-Studded Aetheria Bash,” GLBT discussion forum, DemocraticUnderground .com, February 11, 2007, accessed February 28, 2014, http://www.democraticunder ground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=221x48205. Sanneh, “Singing Loudly.” Jacobs, “Cinema Aphrodiso”; Us Weekly Staff, “30 Most Romantic Movies.” The ranking information provided came from Us Weekly, Vanity Fair, and boxofficemojo.com, accessed March 22, 2014. Data for romantic dramas has changed since the publication of this chapter. Statistics according to boxofficemojo.com, as of January 17, 2019. Flores, “Facts on U.S. Latinos.” Phillips, “12 Other Times.” Durando, “Donald Trump Jr.” Warren, Lavender Locker Room, 262. Rogers, “Pride in the Saddle.” Anderson, In the Game, 45. Anderson is drawing on the work of sociologist Brian Pronger in The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). These are the lyrics to Willie Nelson’s song “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other,” released in 2006. Warren, Lavender Locker Room, 268–69.

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Notes

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14. Warren, Lavender Locker Room, 270– 71. 15. Warren, Lavender Locker Room, 271. 16. “The Reno Gay Rodeo: Known Internationally as ‘The National Reno Gay Rodeo,’ ” Comstock Gay Rodeo Association National Reno Gay Rodeo Program, 1983, Reno, Nevada, August 1983, 20. Archived at GayRodeoHistory.org, a project of the Gay & Lesbian Rodeo Heritage Foundation: http://gayrodeohistory.org. 17. “Reno Gay Rodeo,” 20 (see note 16 above). 18. “Mr., Ms., Miss. National Reno Gay Rodeo Contest,” Comstock Gay Rodeo Association National Reno Gay Rodeo Program, 1984, 9. Archived at GayRodeoHistory.org, a project of the Gay & Lesbian Rodeo Heritage Foundation: http://gayrodeohistory.org. 19. Pearson and Haney, “Rodeo Cowboy,” 17– 18. 20. Pearson and Haney, “Rodeo Cowboy,” 17–18. 21. Hunt, “West of the Closet,” 137– 38. 22. Warren, “Rodeo.” 23. Gerstle, American Crucible, 27. 24. Roosevelt, Rough Riders, 22–23. 25. Las Vegas Sun, “National Finals Rodeo.” 26. Manzano, “Mexican Bull Rider.” 27. Charon, “Mayor to Appear.” 28. Quoted in Patton and Schedlock, “Let’s Go,” 504. 29. Hansen, “Rodeo to Call Their Own.” 30. Wagner, “Women Can Compete.” 31. Hansen, “Rodeo to Call Their Own.” 32. Brooks, “‘Queens & Cowboys’ Director.” 33. Coakley, Sports in Society, 14– 15. 34. Wagner, “Women Can Compete.” 35. Herek, “Beyond ‘Homophobia,’ ” 7. 36. Kibelstis, “Preventing Violence,” 316. See also Altschiller, Hate Crimes, 27. 37. Levitt, “Different Buckaroo,” 22. 38. Steinauer, “Not for Everyone.” 39. Steinauer, “Not for Everyone.” 40. See “Anita Sucks [Oranges],” Documented: Digital Collections of the History Project, accessed February 13, 2020, http://historyproject.omeka.net/items/show/67. See also Marcus, Making Gay History, 258–59. 41. Wagner, “Women Can Compete.” 42. Wagner, “Women Can Compete.” 43. Hansen, “Rodeo to Call Their Own.” 44. Hansen, “Rodeo to Call Their Own.” 45. Hansen, “Rodeo to Call Their Own.” 46. Hansen, “Rodeo to Call Their Own.” 47. Saul, “Breaking Steers.”

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

LoLordo, “Bucking Tradition.” Satake and Love, “Pageant of Their Own.” Satake and Love, “Pageant of Their Own.” Satake and Love, “Pageant of Their Own.” Satake and Love, “Pageant of Their Own.” Names and Spanish words were printed without accent marks in the published article. Wagner, “Women Can Compete.” Duran, “Group Protests.” Duran, “Group Protests.” Moreno, “9 Outrageous Things.” Zerbib, “Donald Trump Slammed.” Johnson, “Ocasio-Cortez Condemns.” Johnson, “Ocasio-Cortez Condemns.”

Altschiller, Donald. Hate Crimes: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005. Anderson, Eric. In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Boag, Peter G. Re-dressing America’s Frontier Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Brooks, Brian. “‘Queens & Cowboys’ Director on LGBT Rodeos, the Old West, and Some Bull.” Film at Lincoln Center Daily, November 2, 2014. Accessed January 11, 2019, https://www.filmlinc.org/daily/queens-cowboys-gay-rodeo-matt-livadary-interview -lgbt-mountainfilm/. Charon, Daniel J. “Mayor to Appear in Rodeo de Santa Fe’s Kickoff Team-Roping Exhibition.” Santa Fe New Mexican, June 6, 2014. Coakley, Jay. Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies. 12th ed. New York: McGraw Hill Education, 2017. Dobie, J. Frank. A Vaquero of the Brush Country. Boston: Little Brown, 1946. Duran, David. “Group Protests Outside Gay Rodeo Fundraiser.” Bay Area Reporter, September 30, 2016. Durando, Jessica. “Donald Trump Jr. Compares Wall to Zoo Fences that Hold Animals in Instagram Post.” USA Today, January 9, 2019. Flores, Antonio. “Facts on U.S. Latinos, 2015: Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States.” Hispanic Trends, Pew Research Center, September 18, 2017. https://www .pewresearch.org/hispanic/2017/09/18/facts-on-u-s-latinos-previous-years-data/. Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Hansen, Matthew. “For Gay Competitors, a Rodeo to Call Their Own.” Peninsula Press, KQED News, March 25, 2014. https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/03/25/a-gay-rodeo/.

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Herek, Gregory M. “Beyond ‘Homophobia’: Thinking About Sexual Prejudice and Stigma in the Twenty-First Century.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 1, no. 2 (April 2004): 6– 24. Hunt, Alan. “West of the Closet, Fear on the Range.” In The Brokeback Book: From Story to Cultural Phenomenon, edited by William R. Handley, 137– 50. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Jacobs, Laura. “Cinema Aphrodiso.” Vanity Fair, August 9, 2013. Accessed March 18, 2014, http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/09/25-best-love-story-movies. Johnson, Jake. “In First Floor Speech, Ocasio-Cortez Condemns Trump Shutdown as ‘Erosion of American Democracy.’ ” Common Dreams, January 17, 2019. https://www .commondreams.org/news/2019/01/17/first-floor-speech-ocasio-cortez-condemns -trump-shutdown-erosion-american-democracy. Katz, Jonathan Ned. Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Kibelstis, Teresa Eileen. “Preventing Violence Against Gay Men and Lesbians: Should Enhanced Penalties at Sentencing Extend to Bias Crimes Based on Victims’ Sexual Orientation?” Notre Dame Journal of Law, Politics and Public Policy 9, no. 1 (1995): 309–43. Las Vegas Sun. “National Finals Rodeo Breaks 30-Year Attendance Record,” Las Vegas Sun, December 15, 2014. Levitt, Lisa. “He Stands Out as a Different Buckaroo.” Kokomo Tribune, May 21, 1981. LoLordo, Ann. “Bucking Tradition Gay Rodeo: Wrestling Steers, Stereotypes.” Baltimore Sun, October  1, 1993. https://www.baltimore sun.com/news/bs -xpm-1993-10-01 -1993274200-story.html. Manzano, Gilbert. “Mexican Bull Rider Jorge Valdiviezo Quickly Rises to PBR Fan Favorite.” Las Vegas Review-Journal, May 15, 2016. Marcus, Eric. Making Gay History: The Half Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2002. Moreno, Carolina. “9 Outrageous Things Donald Trump Has Said About Latinos.” Huffington Post, August 31, 2015. Packard, C. Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Patton, Tracy Owens, and Sally M. Schedlock. “Let’s Go, Let’s Show, Let’s Rodeo: African Americans and the History of Rodeo.” The Journal of African American History 96, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 503– 21. Pearson, Demetrius W., and C. Allen Haney. “The Rodeo Cowboy as an American Icon: The Perceived Social and Cultural Significance.” The Journal of American Culture 22, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 17–21. Phillips, Amber. “Here Are 12 Other Times Donald Trump Vilified Illegal Immigrants.” Washington Post, July 1, 2015.

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Rogers, Brian. “Pride in the Saddle Starts in Nevada.” Presentation at IGRA awards ceremony, Las Vegas, Nevada, November 11, 2012. Accessed February 14, 2020, http:// www.gayrodeohistory.org/2012/PrideInTheSaddle/001.htm. Roosevelt, Theodore. The Rough Riders. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902. Sanneh, Kelefa. “Singing Loudly and Carrying a Big Flag.” New York Times, February 16, 2006, E1. Satake, Alison, and William Love. “A Pageant of Their Own Gay Mexican Cowboy Contest Winner to Be Crowned Monday.” East Bay Times, November 17, 2007. Saul, Isaac. “EXCLUSIVE: Breaking Steers and Breaking Stereotypes— Meet the Cowboys and Cowgirls of the Gay Rodeo (And Yes, There Is a Drag Race).” Daily Mail, October 14, 2015. Steinauer, Bill. “Rodeo at Washoe County Fairgrounds This Weekend Is Not for Everyone.” Reno Evening Gazette, August 19, 1977, 15. Us Weekly Staff. “30 Most Romantic Movies of All Time.” Us Weekly, February 14, 2012. Accessed March  18, 2014, http://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/pictures/30 -most-romantic-movies-of-all-time-2012102/20669. Wagner, Kyle. “In Gay Rodeo, Women Can Compete with the Big Boys— and Big Bulls.” Westword, January 6, 2016. Warren, Patricia Nell. The Lavender Locker Room: 3000 Years of Great Athletes Whose Sexual Orientation Was Different. Valencia, Calif.: Wildcat Press, 2006. Warren, Patricia Nell. “Rodeo: Real Gay Cowboys and Brokeback Mountain.” Still Blue Project: Writing with Working-Class Queers in Mind. Accessed February 10, 2020, https://stillblueproject.wordpress.com/essays-life-writing/warren/. Zerbib, Kathy. “Donald Trump Slammed as ‘Bigoted, Racist, Anti-Latino’ by National Hispanic Media Coalition.” The Wrap, June 29, 2015.

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CONTRIBUTORS ARTURO J. ALDAMA serves as an associate professor and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at CU Boulder. He received a PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley. He is the author of Disrupting Savagism: Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant, and Native American Struggles for Representation (2001). He is the editor of Violence and the Body: Race, Gender and the State (2003); lead editor of Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century (2003), Enduring Legacies: Colorado Ethnic Histories and Cultures (2010), and Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands (2012); and co-editor of Comparative Indigeneities: Towards a Hemispheric Perspective (2012). He served as editor of the Encyclopedia of Latina and Latino Popular Culture (2004), a 400,000-word, multivolume project that is the first of its kind. He currently serves as co-editor of the Latinx Pop Culture book series from the University of Arizona Press, together with his brother Frederick. FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA is Distinguished University Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and Alumni Distinguished Teacher at the Ohio State University. He is the 2019 recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award. He is the award-winning author, co-author, and editor of over forty books. In 2018, his Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics won the International Latino Book Award and the Eisner Award for Best Scholarly Work. He is editor and co-editor of nine academic-press book series as well as editor of Latinographix, a trade-press series that publishes Latinx graphic fiction and nonfiction. He is the creator of the first documentary on the history of Latinx superheroes in comics (Amazon Prime) and cofounder and director of SÕL-CON: Brown & Black Comix Expo. He is founder and director of the Obama White House award– winning LASER: Latinx Space for Enrichment and Research, as well as founder and co-director of the Humanities and Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute. He has a joint appointment in Spanish and Portuguese as well as faculty affiliation in film studies and with the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. T. JACKIE CUEVAS teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research focuses on questions of gender and sexuality in Latinx literature. She is the author of Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Literature and Gender Variant Critique (2018) and co-editor of El Mundo Zurdo 4: Selected Works from the 327

2013 Meeting of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa (2015). PostBorderlandia received honorable mention for the 2018 Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). GABRIEL S. ESTRADA is professor of religious studies at California State University Long Beach and co-chair of the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Caxcan, Rarámuri, and Apache via Chican@ parents, Dr. Estrada is the author of several works on hemispheric two-spirit film history, including “Two-Spirit Mexica Youth and Transgender Mixtec/ Muxe Media: La Mission (2009), Two-Spirit: Injunuity (2013), and Libertad (2015),” in Journal of Religion and Film, and “Ojibwe Lesbian Visual AIDS: On the Red Road with Carol laFavor, Her Giveaway (1988) and Native LGBTQ2 Film History,” in Journal of Lesbian Studies. WAYNE FREEMAN is a PhD student in ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and holds a BA in anthropology and an MA in communication. He has a background and interest in various topical and methodological areas, including ethnography, popular culture studies, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, praxis-based approaches to ethnic studies, youth development and education, critical sports studies, and contemporary and historical social change. He is originally from Chino, California.

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JONATHAN D. GOMEZ is an assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at San José State University. He is a scholar and a poet, born and raised in the barrio of City Terrace in East L.A. He earned his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the Department of Sociology with an emphasis in Black studies, by way of East Los Angeles College and UC Santa Cruz. Gomez examines the racial, spatial, and gender dimensions of social space in the postindustrial city. His scholarship and teaching evidence the ways in which people who have been dispossessed and displaced envision and enact cultural practices to take possession of concrete spaces across the city as strategies for refusing the unlivable destinies to which they have been relegated.

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ELLIE D. HERNÁNDEZ is an associate professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches and writes extensively on Chicanx literature and culture, citizenship, transnational Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural production, and Latinx LGBTQ studies. Her book Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture (2009) is a study of the subject of nationalism and gender and sexuality studies. In 2014, she published a co-edited collection of essays titled The UnMaking of

Latina/o Citizenship: Culture, Politics, and Aesthetics, from Palgrave Press. She is also working on a co-edited collection of essays titled Transmovimientos, which deals with the subject of the LGBTQ immigrant experience. ALBERTO LEDESMA, PhD, serves as assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of California, Berkeley. Ledesma grew up in East Oakland and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from UC Berkeley. He earned a PhD in ethnic studies in 1996 and is a former faculty member at California State University, Monterey Bay, and a lecturer in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. He is a creative writer, artist, and lecturer on living sin papeles / without papers. He is the author of the award-winning Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer (2017). JENNIE LUNA (Quiahuicoatl Meztli) is an assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at Cal State University, Channel Islands. Dr. Luna’s research focuses on the contemporary history of the Danza Mexica/Azteca tradition and its impact on Xicana Indígena identity formation. Her essay “La Tradición Conchera: The Historical Process of Danza and Catholicism” was recently awarded the 2014 Antonia I. Castañeda Prize of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies.

LAURA MALAVER is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Lau’s research interests include cultural studies, queer theory / queer of color critique, performance, critical race theory, affect, relationality, decolonial theory, women of color feminism, and (trans)gender studies. They are currently at work on a project that foregrounds a praxis-oriented theory called recovecos that analyzes the lived experiences of racialized, gendered, and sexualized nonwhite subjects from a critical race and feminist theory framework, and which seeks radical alternatives to healing and political practices. Lau does this by centering various queer(ed) cultural productions that consider encounters and gestures between bodies in works of fiction and visual art. PALOMA MARTINEZ- CRUZ, PhD, associate professor of Latinx and Latin American cultural studies at the Ohio State University, is the author of Food Fight!

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SERGIO A. MACÍAS is an associate teaching professor at the University of Denver. He teaches a variety of language, culture, and literature courses focusing on Latin America and the Latinx presence in the United States. His teaching and research interests are aesthetics and politics, gender and sexuality, and “deviant” art and popular culture.

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Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace and Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica: From East L.A. to Anahuac, and the editor of a new performance pedagogy book with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Saúl García-López titled A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society (Routledge, forthcoming). She directs and hosts Onda Latina Ohio, a Latina arts initiative showcasing local Latinx arts practices, and prioritizes radical safety through performance pedagogies and artist interventions. L. PANCHO MCFARLAND, PhD, is a father, son, food grower, seed saver, and professor of sociology at Chicago State University. His research has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. His latest works include Toward a Chican@ Hip Hop Anticolonialism (2017) and the award-winning co-edited volume Mexican-Origin Food, Foodways and Social Movements (2017). He also published The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation (2013) and Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio (2008). Since 2008 he has served in the decolonial food movement as executive director of the Green Lots Project. He is writing an autoethnography based on his participation in the movement. WILLIAM ORCHARD is associate professor of English at Queens College / City University of New York. With Yolanda Padilla, he has co-edited Bridges, Borders, and Breaks: History, Narrative, and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Chicana/o Literary Criticism (2016) and The Plays of Josefina Niggli (2007). He is currently completing a book about the alternative pedagogies of Latinx comic art, titled Drawn Together: Politics, Pedagogy, and the Latinx Graphic Novel.

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ALEJANDRA BENITA PORTILLOS is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research areas include carcerality, LGBTQ Latinx immigration, citizenship, social movements, and decolonial studies.

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JOHN-MICHAEL RIVERA is an associate professor of English and the director of the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Rivera works on Latinx literature and culture, creative nonfiction, archival theory, rhetoric and composition, and cross-genre studies. He is the author of The Emergence of Mexican America: Recovering Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in U.S. Culture (2006), winner of the 2006 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary Studies. His new book UNDOCUMENTS is a mixed-genre semio-text that explores the colonialist and racist vagaries of

living sin papeles (without documents), forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press. FRANCISCO E. ROBLES is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a faculty affiliate in the Institute for Latino Studies and a concurrent faculty member in the Gender Studies Program. He would like to thank his mother, Yolanda Gómez Robles, for conversations during the writing of his chapter, as well as his grandmother, María Luisa Gómez, for being so supportive. He teaches and researches in American literatures, focusing on African American literature, Chicanx literature, Indigenous literatures, literature and ethics, and LGBTQ* literature. His writing appears in MELUS: Multiethnic Literatures of the United States, Killing the Buddha, and Post45. LISA SÁNCHEZ GONZÁLEZ is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her essays have appeared in many scholarly journals and anthologies, including American Literary History, Cultural Studies, Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies, and African Roots / American Cultures. She has over a decade of production credits in news and public affairs for a wide range of community-based radio stations in the United States, as well as documentary films. In 2000 she was honored with an international appointment as a Fulbright Scholar in American Studies. Sánchez is the author of Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (2001). Her second book, The Stories I Read to the Children (2013), recovers and explores the life and writing of Pura Belpré, an early-twentieth-century American folklorist, children’s author, librarian, and public intellectual. Her first collection of short stories, Puerto Rican Folktales / Cuentos folclóricos puertorriqueños, is a bilingual book (2014), and she has completed a fantasy novel, The Voyage of the Kunjari. Her current scholarly project, Tribal Futurism: The Post-Apocalypse, explores re-creating the future.

NICHOLAS VILLANUEVA JR. is director of the Critical Sports Studies Program and assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has affiliate status with the Center for the American West and Latin

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KRISTIE SOARES is an assistant professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and an active performance artist. Both her performance work and her research explore issues of queerness in Caribbean and Latinx communities. She has published in Frontiers, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Letras Femeninas, Remezcla, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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American Studies. He is the author of the award-winning Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands (2017), which examines the increase in Mexican lynching during the first ten years of the Mexican Revolution, 1910– 1920. He is also the author of the forthcoming Critical Sports Studies: Social Problems and Practical Solutions. His fellowships and awards include the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the West Texas History Association award, and the Walter Prescott Webb publishing award. Disability Services honored Dr. Villanueva with the 2018 Faculty of the Year Award for his commitment to inclusion.

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INDEX @ (concept), 258–59, 281 activism, 6–8, 213–15, 233, 234–35, 294–95, 301–3. See also specific activist names and community organizations Ahmed, Sara, 131–32, 139, 140, 143, 147, 278 Alt.Latino (NPR program), 275, 277 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 6, 175, 277–78, 288 Anzoategui, Ser, 169 Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, 200–203, 208–9 Astin, John, 189–91 Aztlán, 118–19, 223, 229 berdache, 179–80 Billy the Kid and Other Plays, 35–36 biopolitics, 284, 296–99, 301, 303 Black studies, 106, 110 Bless Me, Ultima (novel), 230–31, 240 Brokeback Mountain (film), 308 Bruising for Besos, 131, 143–48 Bryant, Anita, 316 butch, 145–47, 175, 182, 259 butcha, 168–70, 175–77, 182 California, 312; Mr. Gay Vaquero in, 318–19; politics, 51–57, 59 Cantú, Lionel, Jr., 8, 133, 171 car culture, 58, 117, 123–26 Chavez, Martin, 29 Chicana/o/x (concept), 33, 213–15; and Chicana/o/x studies, 213–14; and Xicana/o/x, 256–58. See also @ (concept); -x (concept) Chicano Movement, 6, 95, 99–100, 103, 241, 256–58 children, 3–5, 77, 81, 83, 90, 99–100, 105–6, 189, 255; and familial relationships, 84–86, 179, 215, 294, 298, 300; representations of, 137–44, 145, 148, 218, 221–22, 234, 239. See also family; teenagers Christianity, 296, 297, 307, 309; Catholicism, 5, 10, 178–79, 180, 259–60, 262–63, 265, 266 clairvoyance, 285–86, 287–88 Connell, R. W., 132–33 consumerism, 47, 81, 83, 199 Cortés, Jason, 9 “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other” (song), 308, 310, 311

Dávila, Arlene, 186, 199, 214–15 Diaz, Tony, 213–14 disability, 136, 234, 236 domestic violence, 135, 137–38, 141–43, 144–46 Domino Rudolph, Jennifer, 9 Dracula (novel), 186–87, 189, 194 Duran, Char, 315, 317 ecocriticism, 234–36 The Education of Margo Sanchez, 207–9 Erauso, Catalina de, 180–82 Estrada Courts Mural Program, 94, 99–104, 107–8 family, 4–6, 8, 84–85, 104, 124, 285, 317; and heteronormativity, 225n17, 299–300; and immigration, 74, 76, 294–95, 303; and lineage, 260–61; representations of, 131, 134–35, 137, 138–40, 147–48, 175, 189–90, 203–7, 215–24. See also children; heteropatriarchy Fea (band), 275, 281–84, 289; “Mujer Moderna,” 282–84 feminism, 135, 231–33; Chicana feminism, 15, 165n12, 242; ecofeminism, 85, 87; transfeminsm, 15–16, 279–80; Xicana feminism, 257–58 garage rock (music), 191–93 Garrett, Pat, 23–24, 32 Garza, Valentina, 160–61, 162 gays, 84, 90–91, 133, 215, 223, 266; and music, 191, 308, 310; representations of, 134–37, 186, 201–3, 216–18; in rodeos, 307–21 gender: and the legal system, 180–82; and performance, 53–54, 81–82, 118, 126, 132–34, 169, 182, 278–82; roles, 6, 83–85, 92, 171– 75, 177–80, 182, 199, 261, 295, 297 Gilligan, Vince, 117, 119, 120, 122–23 Gonzales, Javier, 314 González, Ray, 9 Green Lots Project, 80, 86, 89–90 Guerrero, Aurora, 117, 123 Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Juana Belén, 256, 262–63 Halberstam, Jack, 168, 220, 222–23, 279, 281, 284

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Hamilton (musical), 61 hate: crime, 4, 128, 130n16, 202–3; speech, 3–4, 320–21 Hernández, Roxana, 302 heteropatriarchy, 4, 12, 14–15, 81, 84, 86, 90–91, 117, 131–32, 215–16, 223, 225n10, 257–58, 259–60, 266, 295, 303; and violence, 12, 16, 128, 133–35, 140, 146–47. See also wétiko Hollywood: the CW Network, 161–63; and Latinx creators, 152, 160–63, 164, 165nn14–18; and Latinx stereotypes, 43–44, 137, 151–52, 153–60, 185–90. See also specific film titles homonormativity, 217, 223–24, 225n17 homophobia, 4, 6, 84, 90–91, 127–28, 134–39, 177–78, 203–4, 223, 288–89, 301–3, 315– 17. See also hate Hough, Emerson, 30 Hurtado, Aída, 9, 238 immigration: and deportation, 56, 69–70, 294– 95, 301; documentation, 65–79; and Donald Trump, 39–43, 45, 56–57; and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 4, 16–17, 101, 127, 294, 302–3; migrant caravan, 17, 45, 302; and Proposition 187, 51–55; rights, 8, 16–17, 294–95, 299–301, 303. See also under family indigeneity, 82, 83, 84–92, 122–23, 251–69; and census data, 260–62; and colonialism, 26– 27, 128, 177–80, 266–67, 295–98, 300–301; and dance, 262–68; and language, 128n1, 256–60; representations of, 118–19, 230–31 indigenous peoples: Caxcan, 251–56, 258–59, 262–69; Chichimeca, 252–54, 256, 262, 264, 268; Maya, 88, 256, 267; Nahua, 251–56, 258–69; Nishnaabeg, 86; Zacateco, 262, 264; Zuni, 179 Islas, Arturo, 9 Juliá, Raúl, 189–91 Juliet Takes a Breath, 200–201, 203–7, 209

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Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds, 191–93

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La Mission (film), 131, 134–37, 147–48 Las vías del amor (TV show), 285–88 Latina/o/x (concept), 33, 92, 199, 213–15; 224; and Latina/o/x studies, 213–14. See also @ (concept); -x (concept) lesbians, 176–77, 180–81, 224, 315–16; and music, 173–75, 275–76; representations of, 143–47, 168, 203–7 Lima, Lázaro, 7

macha, 168–70, 175–76, 259 machismo, 8–10, 14, 77, 133, 199–200, 223, 241, 297–98, 303 Madam Secretary (TV show), 170 Manifest Destiny, 27 marianismo, 297–98, 303 maricona, 168–70, 173, 175–76 Martínez, Ernesto J., 7, 218 maxochitl, 268 Mendez, Anthony, 151, 154 mestizaje, 28, 256, 260–61, 278 Mexico, 252–56, 261, 300–301; and the bracero program, 43; gender roles in, 173–74, 179– 80; and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 26–27, 43 Mirandé, Alfredo, 9 Moraga, Cherríe, 123, 144, 147, 223–24, 257 Mora, Richard, 8 Muñoz, José Esteban, 126, 133–34, 141, 191, 276, 287, 300 Muñoz-Laboy, Miguel, 7–8 muxe, 179–80 narratology: focalization, 15, 218, 237; Gerard Genette, 153; metanarrative, 159, 233, 236, 242; narration, 13, 151–64, 217, 222–23 necropolitics, 119, 301 New Mexico, 117–19; politics, 31–32; 314; territory, 27–28; 30 Niña Dioz, 275–76, 278, 288–89 Ocampo, Daisy, 253, 255, 264–66 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 320–21 Otero, Miguel Antonio, 26–31, 34 pageants: Mr. Gay Vaquero, 318–19; Ms. IGRA, 318; MsTer IGRA, 318 Paz, Octavio, 260–61 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), 315, 319–20 police, 4, 55, 98, 100, 127 Pride (festival), 309, 312, 320 punk culture, 97–99, 191, 194 punk rock (music), 191, 275–76, 288–90. See also Fea (band) Queens and Cowboys: A Straight Year on the Gay Rodeo, 315 queer: 6–8, 91, 127, 147–48, 177–78, 182, 185–86, 200–211, 215–18, 220, 223, 266– 58, 278–81, 289–90, 295–97; characters, 134–48, 168–70, 175, 186, 200–201, 205–6, 287–88; immigrants, 295, 298–303; language, 251–52, 256–60, 263; music,

Ragsdale, Phil, 310, 311, 315–16 Ramirez, Hernan, 8 rap (music), 51–62; “CIT4DT,” 51, 57; “Donald Trump’s Nightmare: The Cypher,” 51, 57, 59, 61; “Everything They Owe,” 55; “FDT,” 51, 57–59, 60–61; “FDT (Part 2),” 61; and gender roles, 53, 84; “Noizy Minorityz,” 51, 53–55, 57; “To Live and Die in L.A.,” 51, 55. See also Niña Dioz rape: and colonialism, 297; culture, 5, 127, 283– 84; and stereotypes, 44–45 Reno Gay Rodeo, 315–16 Richardson, Bill, 31–32 Rivera, Carolina, 160–61, 162 Rodríguez, Juana María, 125, 225n17, 283–84, 290n5 Rodriguez, Richard, 172 Rodríguez, Richard T., 7, 215–16 Roosevelt, Theodore, 26, 313 Saldívar, Ramón, 214, 242 Sandoval, Kat, 170 Sense8 (TV show), 186 Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Ben, 7 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 86–87, 91–92 Snyder Urman, Jennie, 153, 163–64, 165n16 social media, 6, 90, 294, 299, 303 solidarity, 51–53, 55, 58–62, 105, 106, 219, 301–2 Soto, Sandra K., 7, 281 Spanish Inquisition, 177–78, 180 stereotypes, 30, 40–41, 45, 54, 80, 127, 133, 199–200, 210–11, 310. See also under Hollywood suicide, 138, 149n18; 286–87; 319

teenagers, 65–79, 117; representations of, 123– 26, 200–211. See also children Torres, Lourdes, 7 transgender: characters, 145–47; people, 91, 177–82, 258, 263–68, 279–80, 284, 295, 298–303; and transphobia, 265, 301–3 translation, 258, 259–60, 266–67 Trujillo-James, Deanna, 317 Trump, Donald: 2016 election, 56–57, 59, 213–14, 320; hip hop response to, 56–61; and Mexico-U.S. border wall, 193–94, 308–9, 320–21; and rhetoric, 10–11, 38–47, 51, 56–59, 127, 193–94, 308, 320. See also under immigration Turner, Frederick Jackson, 26–27, 29, 30 two-spirit, 91, 130n16, 168, 176, 251, 258, 266– 68, 296–97 “Utah Carroll” (song), 310 Valentino, Rudolph, 185–87, 189 Vargas, Chavela, 172–75, 277–78, 279 Vida (TV show), 168–70 Vizguerra, Jeanette, 294 We the Animals (film), 131, 140–43, 147–48 We the Animals (novel), 137–40, 141–43, 147–48 wétiko, 90, 91, 92n13, 128, 130n16, 297, 300– 301, 303 white supremacy, 60, 82, 127, 299, 301 Wilson, Pete, 51–60 -x (concept), 128n1, 252, 256–60, 269 Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, 209–11 Zapatista, 85, 87, 258, 262

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173–75, 191–94, 277–78, 275–76, 281–85, 288–89; worldmaking, 131, 133–34, 147, 280, 288–89

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