Homecoming queers: desire and difference in Chicana Latina cultural production 9780813545714, 9780813545721, 9780813548371

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Homecoming Queers

LATINIDAD Transnational Cultures in the United States This series publishes books that deepen and expand our knowledge and understanding of the various Latina/o populations in the United States in the context of their transnational relationships with cultures of the broader Americas. The focus is on the history and analysis of Latino cultural systems and practices in national and transnational spheres of influence from the nineteenth century to the present. The series is open to scholarship in political science, economics, anthropology, linguistics, history, cinema and television, literary and cultural

studies, and popular culture and encourages interdisciplinary approaches, methods, and theories. The Series Advisory Board consists of faculty of the Department of Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies and Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University where an interdisciplinary emphasis is being placed on transborder and transnational dynamics.

Marta E. Sanchez, Series Editor, Department of Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies Marivel T. Danielson, Homecoming Queers: Desire and Difference in Chicana Latina Cultural Production Regina M. Marchi, Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon

Homecoming Queers Desire and Difference in Chicana Latina Cultural Production

MARIVEL T. DANIELSON

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Danielson, Marivel T. Homecoming queers : desire and difference in Chicana Latina cultural production/Marivel T. Danielson. p. cm.—(Latinidad: transnational cultures in the United States) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978—-0-—8135—4571—4 (alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8135—4572-I (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. American literature—Hispanic American authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Lesbians’ writings, American—History and criticism. 4. Home in literature. 5. Hispanic Americans in the performing arts. 6. Hispanic American lesbians—Intellectual life. 7. Space in literature. 1. Title. PS153.H56D36 2009 700.86'643—dc22

2008048064 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2009 by Marivel T. Danielson

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

| dedicate this book to the living memory and infinite legacy of Gloria Anzaldta.

...@n mi corazon se incuba Un amor que no es de este mundo.

-Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands |

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix 1 Queering Home: Desire Meets Theory Meets Art 2 Speaking Selves: Language and Identity in Transition 10 3 Moving Violations: Performing the Limits of

Representation in Marga Gomez’s jaywalker Al 4 The Birdy and the Bees: Queer Chicana Girlhood in

Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings 68

5 Complicating Community: Terri de la Pefia, Cristina Serna, Frances Negr6én-Muntaner, Ela Troyano, and

Carmelita Tropicana 92 6 _ Performing the Erotics of Home: Monica Palacios,

Marga Gomez, and Carmelita Tropicana 121 7 Dancing with Devils: Gendered Violence in Novels

by Emma Pérez and Achy Obejas 144

8 Our Art Is Our Weapon: Women of Color

Transforming Academia 168

Notes 191 Bibliography 201 Index 211 vil

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

l am honored to have had the privilege to work with scholarly and literary revolutionaries throughout my journey to this book. Frances Aparicio, Eliana Rivero, Jossianna Arroyo, Maria Cotera and Lawrence M. LaFountain-Stokes, thank you for your early feedback on this project and your belief in the value and promise of my path. I must offer profound thanks to all the students, staff, and faculty in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at the University of California at Santa

Barbara for giving me the support to write, the inspiration to teach, and for reminding me of the joy that truly engaged scholarship can create. I offer special thanks to professors Tara Yosso and Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez for taking time to listen to my voice and to share your own with me. I must also thank the Ford Foundation for providing me with dissertation support and mentorship, as well as the invaluable knowledge of the vast communities and legacies of which I am a part. To my family at Arizona State University, thank you for your support, faith, and friendship. I could not have landed in a better place, and I’m grateful for the

opportunities I’ve discovered in this amazing department. Special thanks to Daniel Bernardi and Lisa Magana, who saw the value in my scholarly voice and challenged me to speak louder and prouder. Chapter 4 first appeared in Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social 7:2 (2008). Thank you to the 2005 MALCS Summer

Institute writing workshop participants—Rosa Furumoto, Magdalena MaizPena, Adriana P. Nieto, and Mariela Nunez-Janes—for your assistance in the development of this work. I need to thank all those sweet souls who blessed me with friendship and love along the way: Vanessa, Genevieve, Taylor, Yovani, Emma, Katy, Silvia, Sage,

Beth, Analinda, Janelle, Heather, Meika, and flida. To my brilliant brother, Miguel, and my mom, Ruth, for their great expectations and even greater love. Iam grateful for so many amazing minds and spirits who bless me each day with their love and support. Seline, gracias por ser mi companera en la lucha. Thank you for fighting with and for me and for sharing this crazy journey with me. Maria eres unica y brillante. Mil gracias por tu amistad. And finally, to Monica, for an unexpected journey of endless inspiration and love, gracias. 1X

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Homecoming Queers

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| Queering Home Desire Meets Theory Meets Art This is her home this thin edge of barbwire. ~—Gloria Anzaldta, Borderlands

In “The Homeland, Aztlan/El otro México,” Gloria Anzaldiia maps the physical

and emotionally treacherous terrain covered by undocumented women in the U.S.~Mexico border region. Vulnerability to violence, discrimination, and harsh environmental conditions marks a precarious state that Anzaldua visualizes as a “thin edge of barbwire.” Caught between sides and defined by the spaces in between, this politically poetic metaphor lends itself well to the experience of queer Chicanas and Latinas who cross the confines of gender, ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality as they move between and among communities and forge new identities living outside the lines. Anzalduia’s embodied borderlands juxtapose the comfort, stability, and security of home with the unsteadiness of edges,

limits, and the razor-sharp points of barbwire, a fencing material usually utilized to control and/or define a territory. The barbs fortify the barrier, intensifying the physical presence of this border with the added threat of sharpened metal piercing vulnerable flesh. Anzaldua’s imagery speaks centuries of political sleight of hand, mass disenfranchisement, and prejudicial policies where the border simultaneously joins and divides Mexico and the United States. The search for home and the fashioning of home spaces within discourses of queer Chicana/Latina community range in scope and context from linguistic to geographical to psychological. As a scholar of queer U.S. Latina/o Studies, I seek spaces of home in university classrooms, publishing houses, conference rooms, and faculty collectives. I aim to carve a home space made of a mindful language used to describe this body of work and the communities who create it. I long for a home space for myself amidst the ideas and images I envision. A key concept within my work, then, is home, whether it be the mythical Chicano homeland 1

2 HOMECOMING QUEERS of Aztlan, an idealized country of origin within a diaspora, or a more localized sense of belonging within a particular geographical or demographic community. A home affords its inhabitants a sense of emotional and geographical groundedness. Something homemade connotes authenticity and loving intention. Home is coalition and commonality. Yet family—the actors and agents of home—do not always live up to these idealized standards, especially when coalitions are challenged by sexual and gender, racial and/or class difference. For many subjects, “queer” pushes at the limits of “home” as defined by blood and birth. Gloria Anzaldta addresses the critical ramifications of an interpretation of homophobia as the fear of going home.' Her portrayal of home is characterized as a site of equal parts power and pain. She describes herself as a turtle, traveling with her own semblance of home, and acknowledges the forces that threaten to keep her separated from the sense of belonging and safety connected with a traditional family and community-based version of home: “And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture” (Borderlands 44). In both references, the most significant tools in homemaking are Anzaldtia’s own agency and desire to build, rebuild, and transport a home space of her own design. Cherrie Moraga also reports that if familia is denied to her through the ignorant and hateful acts of others, she will construct her own home, her own familia “from scratch’—her own queer version of a homemade home space. When subjects are defined as “in excess” of familial, community, or societal norms home becomes a privilege denied, a pawn offered up only as a reward for good nonexcessive behavior. It should be noted, of course, that I invoke the concept of excess simply because of the manner by which sexuality, race, class, gender, and even citizenship are all read in dominant spheres on a linear scale that deems white Anglo (U.S.) heterosexual male America as the zero against which all other numbers are compared. Within this paradigm of subjectivity, double, triple, and other multiply marginalized subjects are perceived as more tragic, more tormented, more fragmented, more hostile, more complicated. This ten-

dency toward a public perception of excess is inextricably linked to queer Latin@ representation and experience of home on all levels cosmic and corporeal. As scholars, students, performers, and audiences, what do we do with this perception of excess? What does our discourse do with the extras? In an article delivered at a women’s history conference in 1978, Audre Lorde used her discourse to confront societal forces relegating women’s erotic power to the marginal and forbidden. Rather than superficial, pornographic, exploitative, or objectified, Lorde’s invocation of desire develops the erotic as a functional instrument and empowering practice. Lorde develops her reclamation of the erotic, explaining, “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge

QUEERING HOME 3 and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (Lorde, Sister Outsider 55). Lorde’s conceptualization of the erotic as power is closely aligned with Ana Castillo’s treatment of concientizacion, as inspired by the work of Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.? Castillo views concientizacion within the con_ text of her study as the process of consciousness raising among Latina activists. In her 1995 Massacre of the Dreamers, Castillo works toward a theory of wholeness

for Chicana subjects, in response to frequent fragmentations and dislocations of gendered, racialized, and sexualized bodies in dominant spheres. Additionally, she cautions of the dangers of ranking oppressions in such a way that relegates sexuality to the lowest priority of a civil rights movement, Failing to accept sexuality as a topic of discussion that affects our personal and professional lives is a reflection of the hierarchical fragmentation of the self in society. All of our conflicts with dominant society, all of the backlashes we suffer when attempting to seek some kind of justice from society, are ultimately traceable to the repression of our sexuality and our

spiritual energies as human beings—which are at no time during our breathing existence on Earth apart from the rest of who we are. (136)

Thus Castillo argues for a practice of concientizacién that will empower Latinas to reconstruct whole selves out of the fragments of gender, race, class, sex, sexuality, and spirituality rendered by mainstream socialization. For both Castillo and Lorde, the investment of spiritual and emotional energy transforms the erotic into a powerful tool for the production of meaning. Both authors, along with other foundational Third World Feminist scholars—posit the erotic as a useful resource with potential political and metaphysical deployments. This emphasis on sexuality and the transformed mode of the erotic will be the focus of the current study, since each of the creative texts I examine lends a unique treatment of “the erotic” as a tool with which to negotiate difference, to subvert

societal norms, to shift or delete boundaries, and to envision new worlds and new possibilities for the queer Latinas in the United States. My analysis will elucidate how queer Chicana Latina writers and performers explore the erotic as

defined by Lorde and Castillo above, lending their work to a centralizing of queer Latina subjectivity within discursive reinscriptions of identity, nation, desire, and home. In this study, I examine the ways in which art, defined as a critical, passionate, and poetic investment in written, filmic, and performative work, enables a critical movement toward a reconceptualization of home in language, commu-

nity, media, and academia. I believe the utilization of scholarship to blur boundaries and facilitate dialogues between theory and practice, art and academia, language and experience, community and self is an invaluable practice. The analyses that follow offer a preliminary venture into the relevance of queer

4 HOMECOMING QUEERS Latina art as a critically engaged tool for the practice of decolonization via Emma Pérez’s model of “un sitio y una lengua.” Pérez’s conceptualization of a space and a language, part essence, part strategic instrument, positions women of color at the center of autochthonous discursive movements that aim to disprove, dismantle, and reconfigure traditional models of sexual, racial, ethnic, cul-

tural, and gendered identities as well as the constructs of home, community, nation, and self that contribute to the experiences of these identities (Pérez, “Sexuality and Discourse” 161). The book’s title, Homecoming Queers, engages the creation of space and language on two distinct levels. First, I intend “queers” as a nominative reference to self-identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) subjects in the

process of coming home through creative expression and critical consciousness. Secondly, however, I argue that “queers” functions, perhaps more importantly, as a present-tense verb whose subject is the act of coming home. In this | alternate reading, the act of coming home initiates a complex web of emotions for queer subjects who must constantly negotiate the distances between community and self, safety and silence, or acceptance and complicity. My analysis throughout this project will explore the ways through which coming home queers both the queer subject and the conceptualization of home for both queer and nonqueer communities. The act of “queering” home reroutes old paths and

forges new ones in the marginal and interstitial spaces between nations, languages, genres, genders, and sexualities.

In chapter 2, I will explore queer Latina artists’ refashioning of the language of identity and community affiliation. Acclaimed and controversial author and critic Richard Rodriguez inspires my discussion of (in)visibility with his inability to “see” the queer Chicanas present in his Mexican American audiences. This invisibility transcends the particular setting in which the utterance

was Offered up and moves into the lives and social realities of queer Latinas struggling to represent and see themselves represented in the world that sur-

rounds them. This chapter emphasizes the unique role of language in the process of self-representation. The trajectory and critical relevance of the terms “queer,” “Chicana,” and “Latina” (my own preferred labels within this current project), as well as other alternatives, including “lesbian,” “gay,” “Hispanic,” “Latin,” etc.—as mapped out in both historical and cultural studies texts alongside poetry by established and lesser-known writers—perform a queer Latina

identity politics resistant to homogenization or definition under a singular monolithic aesthetic. In chapter 3, I explore a live performance by Marga Gomez that offers creativity as a critical interruption of the prescribed silences and invisibilities of queer Latina subjectivity in dominant venues. Gomez’s solo performance, jaywalker, situates her queer and Latina invisibility in the mainstream venue of Hollywood’s entertainment industry. As she struggles to choose between her

- QUEERING HOME 5 desire to “be seen” and her desire to “be herself,” Gomez’s protagonist performs

the limits of Albert Memmi’s impossible colonized revolt (from within the parameters set by the colonizers) and makes home in the interstices of Gloria Anzaldta’s “thin line of barbwire” (Memmi, The Colonizer 29). Unable to present her queer Latina self in a television or film role of her own fashioning, she con-

cedes to dominant caricatures of a criminalized, sexualized, superficial Latina with little or no reference to queer sexuality. The protagonist’s only salvation, her fantasy life, underlines the indispensability of Pérez’s sitio y lengua, since her “visualizations” provide her with the only realm (sitio) in which her selfrepresentations may emerge. Similarly in chapter 4, novelist Carla Trujillo’s protagonist, Marci Cruz, has difficulty locating a linguistic and physical space for her unique subjectivity and experience of difference. Like many of the authors and artists from chapter 2, Marci’s understanding of her own queer Chicana self is enabled by her movement toward a language of queerness—in terms of both her gendered and sexual subjectivities. For Marci, however, locating queer language tends not to be simply a mastery of a particular vocabulary, but the acquisition of skills with which she is able to decipher codes and hidden references to the presence of a queer community that extricates her from her isolation and her own belief in her impossibility as a girl who feels like a boy desiring other girls. Both Gomez and Trujillo offer fleshed out models of Emma Pérez’s theory of “un sitio y una lengua,” where the founding of a new space and language is essential to interrupt discursive invisibilities and impossibilities. Chapter 5 examines the characterization of queer Latina desire within the works of various authors and filmmakers in an effort to map out a multifaceted erotics of representation. Similitude and difference define a web of representational modes utilized within the texts in order to envision organic queer Latina home spaces. In the narrative work of Terri de la Pena and the poetry of Cristina Serna, I map out how longing merges with queer Latina subjectivity to produce a comparative site identified by the practice of coming home via desire between queer Latina subjects. In both authors’ work, similitude offers the foundation for a home space defined in contrast to dominant surroundings. In contrast, I offer analysis of films by queer Latina filmmakers Frances Negrén Muntaner, Carmelita Tropicana, and Monica Enriquez, each of which complicates the act of coming home, resulting in a less idealized negotiation of origin, belonging, and distance in the lives of queer Latinas. In chapter 6, performative works by Monica Palacios, Carmelita Tropicana, and Marga Gomez offer a counterstance to mainstream characterization of queer Latina desire as wholly pathological, criminal, and ultimately unviable. The representational mode of being home rejects dominantly imposed paradigms of marginality, instead mapping queer Latina desire as central to discourse on family and home. In each performance, desire serves as the route by

6 HOMECOMING QUEERS which deviations of self and community are confronted and remapped, enabling an alternative experience of home. Novels by Achy Obejas and Emma Pérez further the mode of “complicating home” in chapter 7, taking aim at gendered stereotypes of violence and abuse. Both novels refuse to limit queer and Latina/o representation to superficially positive, negative, or homogenized entities for ease of representation and group unity. Obejas and Pérez’s protagonists attack norms of gender, sex, and sexuality, factoring violence and power into representations of queer Latina desire and the unstable versions of “home” created as a result. In this project as a whole, I engage the feminist theories of women of color to begin to destabilize the notion that theory, in a hegemonic (white Anglo male heterosexual) context, precedes all other critical inquiries. Here, it does not. My final chapter remaps the primacy of particular forms of theoretical production. Aurora Levins Morales writes about her dissatisfaction with increasingly jargony

theoretical and intellectual production and constructs her own version of Pérez’s “sitio y lengua.” Rejecting a view of theory as an elitist and exclusive realm, she recounts how the Latina Feminist Group of which she is a member “began making theory out of the stuff in our pockets, out of the stories, incidents, dreams, frustrations that were never acceptable anywhere else” (Telling to Live 71). This intimately personal practice of homemade theoretical production is exemplified in the work of queer women of color Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, Emma Pérez, Carla Trujillo, Barbara Christian, Juanita Ramos, and Catridna Rueda Esquibel, among many others. In this context, women of color in general, and queer Latinas specifically, push at the limits of traditionally defined scholarship and theory by interweaving the personal and emotional investment of creativity into critical work in academia. Most of us, in fact, make home on a daily basis, following in the footsteps of the above scholars’ critical calls to action and agency. In academia, espe-

cially, the need for spaces from which to speak prompts revolutionary challenges to the confines of scholarship. From the genre-blending form of Anzaldta and Moraga’s poetry/theory, to the alternative spaces available for publication of revolutionary scholarly work at the intersections of personal testimonio, critical analysis, and poetic intervention, journals like Chicana/ Latina Studies, Frontiers, Aztlan, and Latino Studies perform ongoing transforma-

tions of the academic landscape with a willingness to hear new voices and see new perspectives. Though now confined to the ink on these pages, I envision this current project as equal parts discourse analysis and performative manifestation. As Anzaldua reminds us, “the work has identity,” and as such lives, breathes, and transforms alongside the artistry and artists examined within (Borderlands 89). Thus, throughout, I work toward an examination of the politics of home spaces in literary and cultural production, as I simultaneously strive to create another

QUEERING HOME 7 through my discourse. In this way, I add my narrative to the field I interpret in the hopes of reconfiguring scholarship, not as a linear and hierarchical institution, but as a cycle where my voice fits into, rather than maps onto, the field of lives and works in question. In my particular mapping of intersectional identities, it is paramount to resist rote adherence to the binaries of Spanish or English, normal or italicized text, familiar or foreign language. Readers will note that I do not employ

the standard use of italics to signal the appearance of non-English words. This stands as a deliberate challenge to the binary that claims to equitably divide Spanish and English into neatly stacked piles of letters and syllables. Contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, like other transnational, transborder, and other transdisciplines, burst out from the confines of clearly labeled packaging. My refusal to italicize the inclusion of Spanish words here aims to address Gloria Anzaldua’s claim that “language is a homeland” (Borderlands 77).

And just as Anzaldta establishes herself as “both a creature of darkness and a creature of light” and “a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings,” this book is a narrative of English and Spanish, Chicana/o and Latina/o identified, U.S.-based and globally conscious, and actively challenges the purity or self-evidence of any and all of these categories (Borderlands 103).

The Spanish I include in my own narrative is an inextricable part of my English. Just as a queer Chicana daughter cannot shed her lesbian identity upon entering her Mexicana mother’s home, just as this same woman is unable to erase her brown skin and her perspective as a woman of color when speaking on behalf of LGBTQ civil rights, I cannot speak of this work or these lives without a language, una lengua, expanse enough to allow for the immensities of identity at the intersections of multiple communities. Where Spanish appears in quoted text, I will honor the authors’ and publishers’ choices to italicize or not, however my choice here is to follow the lead of groundbreaking publishers like Arizona State University’s Bilingual Press and offer a narrative that flows free of conventional treatments of linguistic difference. Signaling the inclusion of a Spanish utterance is no more necessary than announcing a shift from academic jargon to conversational speech. Whenever

possible, I include English translations, since my objective is not to exclude monolingual English readers. My perspective is simply that italicizing a nonEnglish word included amidst a primarily English language narrative does not serve to illuminate or elucidate its meaning. It merely signals difference, a dif- — ference that—in fact—both Spanish and English speakers are very likely to iden-

tify without any variation in typeset. Of course the language I speak is not exclusive to the space on these pages. Multilingual transdisciplinary lenguas are a defining characteristic of Chican@ and Latin@ Studies and also frequently inform the fields of gender and queer studies.

8 HOMECOMING QUEERS This current project began as a genre-structured study, centered around chapters on narrative, film, and performance. As I developed my analysis, I discovered the seemingly obvious division by format (shape, size) could not contain the vast differences in terms of authors’ and artists’ critical interests. Instead of attempting to fit many themes, approaches, and ideas into one section simply because they looked alike, I chose to rework the project, privileging content over form. Genre continues to be of key concern, shaping the texts and

defining the limits of their production, but there is much to be gained methodogically by organizing thematically. It can no longer be said that matters of Chicana/Latina gender and sexuality lack scholarly attention. However, in an increasingly economically depressed

nation, literature, art, and creative production take a backseat to corporate America and steady gigs with retirement plans. Artistic production is both salvation and sacrifice for many whose creative work generates respected publica-

tions and professional promotion for scholars, yet fails to pay bills, cover medical care, or secure a comfortable future past retirement. Anzaldua suggests that “nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (Borderlands 109). Literature, film, performance, and testimonio are the “images in our heads,” and contrary to the beliefs of belt-tightening administrators from elementary school to the university, truly engaged education cannot take place without creativity. How we experience the world informs our representation of this world, and how we represent this world conversely transforms how we live in it. Each individual work examined here enacts the specificity and collective agency of Pérez’s sitio y lengua. In the spirit of Emma Pérez’s sitio y lengua, Gloria Anzaldtia’s borderlands, Ana Castillo’s Xicanisma, Carla Trujillo’s living theory, and Catridna Rueda Esquibel’s detective work, I honor a mode of scholarship that doesn’t sacrifice beauty and pleasure for the sake of

jargon and exclusivity.

In her poem “Dreaming of Other Planets,” Cherrie Moraga (The Last

Generation 33) confessed that she was

dreaming of other ways of seeing this life.

It is Moraga’s hope for transformative vision that underlines my analysis of queer Chicana/Latina cultural production. I offer no singular or universal version of queer Latinidad, but rather a handful of the myriad ways to explore these texts via Moraga’s “other ways of seeing.” In subsequent chapters I will explore contemporary queer Latina creative production in the United States. There exists no new genus or species to iden-

tify, nor is the outlining of a particular literary or artistic aesthetic of any

QUEERING HOME 9 relevance to my analysis or critical interest. Such claims presuppose a singular truth for queer Latinidad, a notion that is, in my estimation, naive and imagined at best, delusional and colonizing at worst. Instead, I put my faith in art, not simply as an object of study, but as viewed throughout this current project—in the performance, film, narrative, poetry, and essays of queer Chicanas/Latinas—as a mode of critical and theoretical transformation, as much for artists as for scholars, and for the rest of us, all along the continuum, making home somewhere in between.

2

Speaking Selves Language and Identity in Transition

If men are gay, | want to be precious! —Monica Palacios, Latin Lezbo Comic

| begin with a word, as all books must. A label for him, a title for her. Which X

marks your spot? This book’s title alone contains three labels: queer, Chicana, and Latina. Each word maps a clear path toward gender, sexuality, and/or ethnic identity. Language necessitates order. Yet human experience and subjectivity are inherently disorderly. Consequently, the notion of linguistic representation suggests an oxymoronic state—an organized mess, fixed movement, controlled chaos. Subaltern and feminist critics have also identified language as an instrument utilized by dominant powers to orchestrate past and present subjugation of women and people of color. Trinh T. Minh-ha implores: “How many, already, have been condemned to premature deaths for having borrowed the master’s tools and thereby played into his hands?”! Octavio Paz further extends the ramifications of women’s subjugation to male authority upon declaring: “[The Mexican woman] never expresses her femininity because it always manifests itself in forms men have invented for her.”? Both in terms of the existential and political conflicts between language and expression, how do women of color, and specifically queer Latinas, subvert this representational conundrum? Any attempt to communicate identity through verbal expression inextricably ties us to the limits of labels defined in broad essentializing brushstrokes. While some artists and scholars search for the perfect descriptors, others grapple with, reappropriate, and rewrite existing labels, or fashion entirely new words to speak the multiple worlds they inhabit. While the creation of new descriptors may aid in our self-expression and definition, the act of labeling also poses the potential risk of re-creating traditional paradigms of power and exclusion. Circuitousness defines almost all attempts to discuss one-to-one relationships between identity labels and the communities they claim to rep-

resent, since these relationships will never be unitary or neatly contained. 10

SPEAKING SELVES 11 There are always exceptions and individuals who will be excluded based on the definitions that emerge from a union of language and ideology. Rather than

straining to sharpen blurry edges and control unruly labels, the writers included in the current chapter move to accept the inherent limitations of the language in which we communicate our realities and to utilize their creative work to envision words and worlds fluid enough to fit the slippery subjectivities expressed and experienced within. Through an empowerment of interstices— the middle spaces between words, identities, and communities—I identify the strategic deployment of Gloria Anzaldta’s mestiza consciousness into myriad creative and critical spheres in order to speak of the centrality of queer Latina subjectivity.

Theorizing Identity There is a danger in invoking identity labels, in life and scholarship, because one must situate their meanings within a limited context, knowing full well that

the identities described are not stationary, but fluid and ever evolving. However, the danger of abandoning identity labels in favor of a skewed version

of universality is greater—since the dissolution of identity and community labels threatens to deconstruct the very communities and subjectivities that give structure, unity, and inspiration to movements for political, social, and economic justice. Debates over the validity of the essentialist tendencies of identity labeling have prompted the development of a theoretical model of strategic essentialism that acknowledges the constructedness of essence, yet continues to utilize this construction with particular tactical goals in mind, fully aware of the risks and erasures involved in its deployment. For Tejana historian and novelist Emma Pérez, the movement is inward, toward spaces of increased commonality, rather than outward to encompass larger or more universalized

communities. In one of her contributions to the groundbreaking Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, Pérez advocates a specific con-

ceptualization of strategic essentialism—un sitio y una lengua (a space and a language)—that is particularly relevant to the needs of Chicanas and other lesbians of color: “The space and language is rooted in both the words and silence of Third-World-Identified-Third-World-Women who create a place apart from white men and women and from men of color, if only for a weekend now and again” (Pérez, “Sexuality and Discourse” 161~62). Such an application of essen-

tialism is conscious, enacted with an astute awareness of the need to reach beyond essentialized sites of identity labeling in order to establish and care for connections beyond the limits of one’s perceived communities. Most important, the site Pérez envisions is equal parts material and discursive, defined both by the spatial distancing of women of color from Anglo and male communities, as well as the voices and narratives nurtured within these

12 HOMECOMING QUEERS moments of collective seclusion. Invocation of Pérez’s sitio y lengua gives birth to a hybrid home space where neither language nor identity is a fixed practice. The interdependence of space and language, Mary Pat Brady posits, is unique for Chicanas, since “taking the performativity of space seriously also means understanding that categories such as gender, race, and sexuality are not only discursively constructed but spatially enacted and created as well.” (8). Speaking of the self, naming each part remains a cursory exercise without what Brady deems “the performativity” of spatial occupancy. Pérez’s survivalist separation coupled with her emphasis on self-definition in collective difference yields a symbiotic notion of home that necessarily exceeds the limitations of genetic familial rela-

tions, or nationalistic community ties—lengua engenders sitio, which in turn nurtures lengua. I position my use of the words “queer,” “Chicana,” and “Latina” somewhere between the theorization of Stuart Hall, who posits the label “black” as a “politically and culturally constructed category” (Hall, “New Ethnicities” 254), and Gloria Anzaldtiia, who insists that “naming myself is a survival tactic” (Trujillo, Living Chicana Theory 264). Both theorists work to reveal the inarguable “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em” conundrum of identity labels. For Hall, the process of enacting the label in social settings yields more information about the living and constantly evolving nature of language and identity than any qualities deemed universally illustrative of the particular identity category. And, while Anzaldua also aligns herself with an anti-essentialist view of identity labels, she also emphasizes the performativity essential to community and individual representation. Language stands as an invaluable but inherently flawed tool. Methodologically, what is the significance of producing a critical study ofa collective that is—as Hall indicates—a politically and culturally constructed illusion? Historian and author Emma Pérez would offer that the discussion of such a community helps to create sitios y lenguas, spaces and languages, both physical and discursive, which serve to expose the inner workings of oppression, to

rewrite histories of erasure, and to listen for the stories of the silenced. Hall again provides a framework for the mapping of subjectivity across difference, insisting that “the central issues of race always appear historically in articulation, in a formation, with other categories and divisions and are constantly crossed and recrossed by the categories of class, of gender and ethnicity” (Hall, “New Ethnicities” 255). Individuals do not experience race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class as centralized entities, but rather as fluid processes, as Hall states. All categories equally cross and are recrossed by each other based on location, historical context, personal experience, and authorial agency. The language of identity as elucidated in the creative work of queer Chicana and Latina writers reveals the soaring possibilities and bitter limitations of employing language as a means of speaking selves and making home. Scholars, poets, and per-

formers alike entertain the notion of a fluid subjectivity with labels porous

SPEAKING SELVES 13 enough to encompass and embrace the heterogeneity of queer Chicana Latina experience in the United States. Identity labels of ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, and class identity collide with and grate against one another, providing the dialectic spark Audre Lorde discusses as the power of the erotic (53-59). In this way, the desire to name oneself—as well as to name one’s desires—brings language and home-making into the forefront of queer U.S. Latina representation. To begin a discussion of identity labels and limitations, I introduce the dual objectives of seeing and being seen, a coupling that encompasses both sides of a communicative exchange: the viewer and the viewed. Often, when dealing with the representation of marginalized subjects, language fails to allow for

alternate experiences and identities—a Chicana who speaks no Spanish becomes a “Chicana falsa,”5 a Latina feminist grapples with accusations of disloyalty as she works to untangle the sexism and misogyny from the fabric of her own beloved culture, a lesbian is cast out of her Cuban American family who views her queer sexuality as an Anglo-specific pathology. These lived excesses bubble over the edges of language, altering preconceived notions of homogeneously defined communities. And while these excesses at times read in public as hypervisible—the proverbial sore thumb of identity politics—other times the seemingly excessive identities slip through the cracks of society’s collective consciousness, relegating diversity of experience and expression to the shadowy

corners of the public imaginary. These social slippages occur in both mainstream and minority communities and among all ethnic, racial, gender, sexuality, and class communities. Perhaps the most revealing instances of invisibility occur not between mainstream and minority spheres, but among invisible subjects. The following account evidences the importance of Pérez’s sitio y lengua to resist queer Chicana Latina invisibility in even the most seemingly visible of spaces.

Richard Rodriguez’s Invisible Audience On April 16, 2002, Richard Rodriguez, renowned author, cultural critic, and the subject of many passionate debates, was an invited guest speaker at the University of California, Santa Barbara.* Rodriguez offered an hour-long lecture entitled “Brown: An Erotic History of the Americas.” On this day, Rodriguez shared his memory of a previous speaking engagement on another college campus, which was to be immediately followed by another event featuring someone Rodriguez referred to as a “lesbian speaker.” Rodriguez recounted how, during

his lecture, a young male student from the audience became offended and stormed out the back doors of the theater. As the doors opened, Rodriguez noticed a large group of women waiting just outside the doors for the next lecture. In pondering this moment, Rodriguez, seemingly mystified, wondered aloud to the University of California crowd: “Why can’t I get the lesbians? Why

14 HOMECOMING QUEERS can’t she [the lesbian speaker] get the Mexican Americans?” Rodriguez was Visibly disturbed by the rigid divisions separating his public from the audience the “lesbian speaker” attracted. For him, those divisions ensured that his public was purely Mexican while her audience was purely lesbian.5 In the preface to Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Rodriguez establishes

the multidimensional nature of brown as color, race, and culture: “I write of a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color produced by careless desire, even by accident, by two or several. I write of blood that is blended. I write of brown as complete freedom of substance and narrative. J] extol impurity” (xi). This eulogy to brown lauds its unpredictable, improvisational, imprecise, and fluid nature. He celebrates the multiplicity, hybridity, and impurity of a color and concept derived from many. For Rodriguez, the simultaneity of many in one is underlined by an origin in desire, yet this desire is characterized as largely unintentional, without purpose or premeditation. Brown

here is an unexpected though joyful accident. And while this portrait of desire represents freedom and inclusivity, it still ultimately reveals a profound blind spot in Rodriguez’s queer visibility. Given that the author presented the Santa Barbara lecture in order to promote the text in which the above manifesto of impurity appears, it is useful to examine the dynamics of purity present in the scene he describes, and in his own “reading” of this situation. Rodriguez’s reflection back in the university lecture hall posits important questions regarding the phenomenon of self-segregation,® but even the notion of segregation presupposes the possibility of a pure state of existence that belies

the heterogeneity of all communities. Rather than attempting to answer Rodriguez’s questions about the audience and community, I find it more pro-

ductive to tease out the politics housed within them. How does Rodriguez presume to know that the women outside the door are lesbians? He offers superficial references to “lesbian-looking” hair and clothing. Can an article of clothing really be a universal marker of sexual difference? Surely not, since the same flannel shirt that stereotypically marks the “Midwestern Anglo lesbian” (due in

part to its associations with agricultural work wear, comfort over style, and a particular nontraditional gendered aesthetic) is reinscribed in the barrios of East Los Angeles as a marker of young urban Latino heterosexual masculinity. Yet if we were to take for granted Rodriguez’s ability to accurately identify the lesbians outside the theater, how does he then know that these women are not also Mexican American? And, most important, how does he know that some of the Mexican Americans in his audience are not also lesbians? Why does Rodriguez’s talent for lesbian recognition cease to function at the entrance to this particular theater? Might we attribute this malfunction to the fact that the subjects seated within the theater already presumably carry the label “Mexican American” simply by being present in the speaker’s listening audience? Since there is no infallible method for accurately identifying the ethnic, racial, and

SPEAKING SELVES 15 sexual identities of a particular individual, what are we to do with the questions

of identification and aesthetic? What does lesbian look like?” What does Mexican American look like?

The popular notion of gaydar—one’s supposed ability to identify gay and lesbian subjects in a crowd—relates here.’ Rodriguez has confidence in his skills as a queer-identifier, since he authoritatively locates “the lesbians” outside the theater and the Mexican Americans inside. Yet his ability clearly does not extend to the identification of queer Chicanas. Where his gaydar excels, his “tortillera-dar” fails. In the auditorium Rodriguez analyzes, several groups fly “under the radar,” not just gay but also lesbian, female, and brown. In the model Rodriguez outlines, he fails to imagine how the categories queer, female, and Mexican American overlap in any lived way. How he maps out

the dynamics of these two distinct audiences illustrates the complications of representation, community, and reception for multiply marginalized subjects. Can we locate a space between “the lesbians” outside the door and “the Mexicans” inside? When such divisions provide no space for someone who is a Chicana and a lesbian, how do authors and artists employ Pérez’s sitio y lengua and Anzaldta’s naming as survival to write and theorize themselves into visibility? In other words, with a lobby full of lesbians and a theater full of Mexicans, where will the queer brown girl sit? Rodriguez’s blind spot reiterates the relevance of Emma Pérez’s call for spaces and languages to accommodate multiple community affiliations based on gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Rather than conforming to a space that

views queer Chicana subjectivity at opposing ends of a representational dichotomy of excess or invisibility, Pérez’s sitio y lengua fashions a separate space where the collective of queer and Chicana is a unifying rather than alienating linguistic force and the subjects speak from a central rather than marginal space. When Rodriguez asks why he cannot “get the lesbians,” he presupposes the impossibility of a subject that is both Mexican American and lesbian. Back in the auditorium, reflecting upon his state of “brown-ness,” the author underlines his consequent invisibility: “Nobody seemed to notice me. I was free. I was irrelevant.” Again, Rodriguez views his invisible status as a freeing state. Yet Rodriguez seems blind to the ways in which his own discourse fails to notice and deems irrelevant, invisible, or even impossible the brown bodies of the queer Chicanas who were and are present in his audiences every time he steps onto a stage. When he says “lesbian,” “white” is implied. When he utters “Mexican American,” we must also understand “heterosexual.” Such discourse sets up an imagined mutual exclusivity of ethnic/racial identity and sexuality while limiting subjects to “check one of the following” minority categorizations: If I am Chicana, I cannot also be queer. To be queer, consequently, I must be white. We, the multiply marginalized, perpetually confront the one-minority rule in all its closed-minded glory, much like the predicament in which many multiracial

16 HOMECOMING QUEERS individuals find themselves when asked to “check one” of a group of racial categories, when often two or more actually apply. Rodriguez’s vision problems date back to his first controversial publications. In her analysis of Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Norma Alarc6n suggests the writer’s blind spot pertains not solely to the political and social concerns of Mexican origin and indigenous populations, but to himself as well. She details his twisted logic whereby “difference is aesthetic and private, identity is political and public and must be subordinated to prevailing hegemonic views of the public sphere” (Alarcon, “Tropology of Hunger” 151). A supremely colonized sub-

ject, Rodriguez’s erasure and silencing of his own Mexican, indigenous, and queer subjectivity alienate him from most communities of affinity and impose insurmountable distance between his discourse and the brown audiences he increasingly attempts to address. Rosaura Sanchez sees some willingness on the part of Rodriguez to expand the scope of his identity politics; however, even

in more contemporary publications, Sanchez notes the strict binaries that continue to give structure to the author’s reading of the relationship between the United States and Mexico (Sanchez 160). Such dichotomies factor into Rodriguez’s social myopia, which when layered on top of sexuality and gendered differences yields his erasure and silencing of a queer Chicana community. In this university theater, and in numerous sites beyond, we continue to see how

the limits of vision fail to appropriately match the depth and diversity of our lived realities as racialized, gendered, and sexual subjects. In the same way the census is unable or unwilling to see the possibility of multiply boxed individuals, Richard Rodriguez fails to see that a colored, gendered body might concomitantly be queer. And while this particular comment in its exclusivity ought not be destined to represent Rodriguez’s worldview, it certainly can be said to illus-

trate the silence and invisibility to which queer colored female subjectivity is relegated in dominant spheres. There seems to be no room in the popular/ public imaginary for complications of the one-label limit paradigm. How can queered, colored, female bodies be situated within the confines of

this audience, this scholarship, or Mexican/Chicana/o communities in general? How do queer Chicana/Latina subjectivities slip through spaces like this theater, in academia, in the media, and other areas so often unheard and unseen? What tactics are being utilized to transform this imposed invisibility and silence

into modes of textual and artistic production that reassert individual and collective agency and voice?

So What Is a Latina Lesbian? In an essay entitled “To(o) Queer the Writer,” foundational queer, Chicana/o and Border Studies scholar, poet, and visionary Gloria Anzaldua prompts her readers to consider the critical and creative implications of labeling writers versus

SPEAKING SELVES 17 writings: “What is the power and what is the danger of writing and reading like a ‘lesbian’ or a queer? Can the power and danger be named and can queer writing be named? How does one give queer writing labels while holding the totality of the group and the person in one’s mind?” (266). Anzaldtia’s concern for the community and individual over text transforms my initial interrogative : “What is a Latina lesbian text?” into the perhaps more direct “What or who is a Latina lesbian?” The preceding question is, of course, intended to be as rhetorical as questions get. But the critical process through which scholars attempt to not answer this question reveals important insight into the politics of language and identity as well as illuminates the inspiration and objectives behind the current

project. In the vein of Derrida’s différance,' this question of difference may be tackled most succinctly via deferment, addressing instead what a Latina lesbian is not."

It should be noted, then, that a Latina lesbian is not always Latina. Not all the artists and authors whose work I include in my discussions of queer Latina creativity would claim the categorization of Latina for themselves. For some, this particular descriptor is problematic because of its pan-ethnic nature. The conglomeration of nations, cultures, and racial backgrounds subsumed under the label “Latino/a” is a nod toward the homogenizing melting pot mentality of United States immigration propaganda. In a category so vast, specificity is lost while generalization and stereotype work arduously toward an idealized universal. Specificity also offers many a sense of politically charged identification that may be obscured or erased by using more generalized terms that fail to speak the uniqueness of a particular community’s or individual’s origins and histori-

cal trajectory. |

In the last few decades, scholarly debates over the political and cultural usage of terms such as Hispanic, Latino/a, and Latin have failed to converge on a single definitive descriptor. In Diana Taylor’s introduction to Negotiating Performance, she locates the debate over language in the labels themselves, “thus the terms—Latino/a, Chicano/a, Hispanic—themselves have been the site of struggle and contestation” (6). Much like Gloria Anzaldta maps her theoriza-

tion of borderlands onto her own queer Chicana body, Taylor envisions identity labels as battlegrounds from which individuals wage intimately personal wars to resist or redefine notions of essence, universality, and collectivity. Such struggles can be both productive and paralyzing. Chon A. Noriega and Ana M. Lépez

suggest the potentially liberating as well as ghettoizing repercussions of the use of any one term: “A category, such as ‘Latino’ serves both a contradictory role in both creating space for unique and/or marginalized voices to emerge and be heard, while also relegating them to a category other than the universal dominant” (Noriega and Lopez xii). Repeatedly, the strategic deployment of identity labels acknowledges the indispensability and simultaneous insufficien-

cies of the language surrounding identity. :

18 HOMECOMING QUEERS Suzanne Oboler distinguishes “Latino” from “Hispanic” by tracing each term’s history of political invocation in the United States over the past several decades. In contrast to “Hispanic”—a term known primarily for its popularity amongst state agencies beginning in the 1970s—“Latina/o” emerges most recently as a favorable “grassroots alternative” to what many perceive to be an externally imposed mainstream label (vii). Yet both individual and collective voice must necessarily be filtered through the language in which they are spoken. Does one speak as a Chicana, a Latina, a lesbian, a queer, or a dyke? How does each label chosen, as well as those discarded, track the mobility of a fluid being? Certainly, language can be empowering. As Frantz Fanon notes, “A man who has language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by

that language” (18). However, under the structures of colonial power, Fanon positions the acquisition of language as a complicated transformation for the colonized subject: “The colonized is elevated above his jungle status, in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards” (18). Therefore, the colonized subject who can successfully learn the colonizer’s language and

act out cultural norms in essence “becomes whiter,” at least on the level of social performance. This dynamic of whitening as connected to language may be paralleled with that of U.S. residents of Mexican descent who choose from a vast pool of ethnic labels, from Hispanic to Mexican American to Latino/a, Chicano/a, or Mexicano/a. And while “Hispanic” is an English term, with an almost impossibility of exact translation into the Spanish language, the latter three terms, still embedded in the Spanish language suggest a lived connection to the land of familial history, or at least a very present corporeal memory of such origins, since the words are uniquely uttered by each body, passing through the subject’s lips, accented by the language of origin, or transformed by the English sounds of this new place of residence. When interpreted under Fanon’s dynamic of language and colonization, naming oneself via the dominant, and at times forcibly imposed language, English, posits an alignment with the corresponding dominant culture.” Additionally, Oboler notes that “Hispanic,” as a mainstream designator, becomes the linguistic repository for any and all negative associations with the population indicated by the term. As the most predominant label for mainstream discussion of Latina/o populations, the label as well as the community become riddled with visions of criminality, poverty, and general social threat (Fanon xvi). “Latino/a,” as a term unsanctioned by the state, awkward or unfamiliar in many mainstream venues, escapes many such negative associations that, for Oboler, transform “ethnic labels” into “stigmatizing labels” representative not only of a subject’s community affiliation, but also of each of the negative connotations imposed upon the group’s members.

Due to a desire to resist such stigmatization, or out of concerns for language, agency, specificity, and power dynamics, some Latina lesbians, then, are

SPEAKING SELVES 19 not necessarily Latina. Many are Chicana, Dominicana, Puertorriquefia, Cubana, Salvadorefia, Mexicana, Mexican American, Latin, and even Hispanic. For its particular legacy of grassroots activism, its affiliation with a language other than English (in spite of the admittedly colonial origins of the Spanish language in the United States and Latin America), and its contextualization as a selfproclaimed rather than externally imposed label, I choose to utilize “Latina/o” in the current project for those individuals of Latin American origin with or without any lived connection to the Spanish language that gives “Hispanic” its foundational paradigm at the cost of indigenous and linguistically acculturated U.S. Latino/as. I concur with Oboler that “Latino,” much like “Hispanic,” offers no simple solution to the homogenizing problematics of ethnic labeling.® Ultimately, the labeling debate is largely an issue of agency: Who chooses the term? Who authorizes its use? In what language is it spoken? To whom and with whom does it speak? Who does it include? A similar argument holds true for labels of sexuality, since Latina lesbians are not universally “lesbians.” In this case, though Oboler’s study focuses on ethnic labels, her discussion is equally relevant to designators of sexuality: “It is important to note that ethnic labels, like all names, are by their very nature abstractions of a reality—in many ways, a necessity of speech in a society as large and complex as the United States... The attributes [of a label] are imputed to be common to the group’s members and are used to homogenize the group. Yet this schematic designation does not necessarily correspond to the reality of the group to whom the label is attached” (xv). Many Latina lesbians included here utilize their creative work as a forum from which to reject one or both labels—Latina and lesbian. “Lesbian” in particular is often deemed inappropriate by Latinas specifically and women of color generally because of the term’s perceived origins in and allegiances to white Anglo lesbian and feminist movements. The Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay, Bisexual,

and Transgender History in America defines “lesbian” as “vaguely positive ... linked as it was to the pre-Christian ‘cradle of western culture,’ ancient Greece, and more specifically to the island (Lesbos) where the great female poet Sappho lived.” In this sense, the label “lesbian” fails to fit with Latina same-sex desire and subjectivity on the levels of both linguistics and politics. Jacqueline M. Martinez posits Chicana lesbian subjectivity as the site of a “radical ambiguity” able to break binaries and call into question the tidiness of

borders. In part, Martinez locates this ambiguity in the very invocation of “Chicana lesbian” as a singular entity and identity categorization, since both individual terms denote difference from a larger community, “The adoption of ‘Chicano’ as an identity designator ... signifies a consciously engaged resistance. When ‘lesbian’ is adopted in conjunction with ‘Chicana,’ we have a construction doubly laden with consciously engaged resistance, which is posed against itself from within—a consciousness at war” (Martinez 128). In fact, designators of sexuality often clash with markers of class, race, ethnicity, and

20 HOMECOMING QUEERS sexuality when the privileging of one label threatens to silence the concomitant relevance of additional labels. The use of a single label suggests an unrealistic homogeneity. Multiple labels test the limits of time, space, and patience in an increasingly abbreviation-obsessed U.S. society. The etymology of both labels provides ideological insight into their current usage. “Chicana/o” as a reappropriation of a derogatory slur was transformed into a powerful and politically charged mobilizing site in the 1960s and 1970s for Chicana/o activists, authors, and artists.4 “Lesbian” begins as a geographical referent, for the citizens and language of the Greek island of Lesbos, and later becomes representative of queer female desire and sexuality.® Yet the cultural specificity of Lesbos, like that of the similarly popular lesbian icon Sappho, frequently fails to translate across divides of race, class, language, and ethnicity. “Lesbian” as a language of resistance is not a one-size-fits-all movement. While some advocate a movement of lesbian resistance, others define their struggle with the active resist-

ance of “lesbian” as a universalized construction.

Questioning Language, Sexuality, and Race Gloria Anzaldua cites etymological context as she outlines the critical insufficiencies of the term “lesbian”: “For me ... the term lesbian es problemén ... ‘lesbian’ is a cerebral word, white and middle-class, representing an Englishonly dominant culture, derived from the Greek word lesbos. I think of lesbians as predominantly white and middle-class women and a segment of women of color who acquired the term through osmosis, much the same as Chicanas and Latinas assimilated the word ‘Hispanic’” (“To(o) Queer” 263). “Lesbian,” for Anzaldua, then, parallels “Hispanic” in terms of its mainstream origins and applications. In the same way, “Hispanic” is rejected as externally imposed and insufficiently capable of representing the specificity of each community represented within, so too is “lesbian” refused by many queer women who fail to

relate socially or politically with the movement and imagined community to which it historically refers. Several poets echo this resistance in Carla Trujillo’s groundbreaking I991 collection, Chicana Lesbians; The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About. The work

of reconciling such labels is perhaps most eloquent under the spatial limits presented by poetry. Cathy Arellano embraces the term “lesbian,” but in its Spanish-translated form “lesbiana,” because it can’t be broken. It is basic and whole, it says Woman Latina Lesbian. (Chicana Lesbians 12)

Here the gender specificity of Spanish allows Arellano to denote sex, sexuality,

and cultural subjectivities within the single term ‘“lesbiana.” Yet Arellano

SPEAKING SELVES 21 acknowledges the complications of invoking this label, in terms of her cultural and linguistic distance from the English language origins of the word, Some may say that I have my nerve / no Right for taking / claiming a word from la lengua que I’ve had to study and still need to learn. But as I breathe in my mother’s “mija,” I breathe in Lesbiana. The i, the s, the curves of the vowels, each letter rolls within. (12)

Arellano’s poetic verse gives body to the language with which she speaks her identity: the womanly curves, her own breath giving life to its sounds. The word “lesbiana” becomes a lover (“She holds me in a tender way”) and a destiny fulfilled («she’s more than a word / she is for me / and I am her”) (12). Arellano also

recognizes her need to coexist with other communities that find shelter under the term lesbian, I know she’s also for others. We exist. We live, we love. Somos Lesbianas. (13)

In this context, the notion of “lesbian,” although distinct for each individual, is viewed as a site of unification and commonality across the differences represented by racial, class, language, and ethnic divides. The poet’s repetition of the subject “We” and its Spanish counterpart in the verb conjugation “Somos” (We are) emphasize the experience of lesbian collectivity across the differences and divides of “other” lesbians. Yet like Pérez’s prioritization of local spaces and languages before global coalitions, Arellano locates her sitio at the intimate intersection of language and home. The utterance of her sexuality, in her mother’s tongue, simultaneously speaks the difference and familiarity of her queer and Latina selves. Another of the anthology’s contributors, Gina Montoya, echoes this difficulty of unification under the label “lesbian” by addressing the repercussions such a move creates for “lesbians of color.” Montoya speaks of the required acculturation or assimilation process as she wonders, How many years of oppression must there be to be considered trust

22 HOMECOMING QUEERS worthy in Lesbian culture and lifestyle? More rules to learn. What is politically correct? (Chicana Lesbians 19)

The introduction of trustworthiness is indicative of an insider/outsider or center/

periphery model of power at work within Montoya’s experience of lesbian community. The author’s choice of a line break between “trust” and “worthy” suggests the vast fissure dividing the poetic voice and this lesbian community. She wonders aloud what quantity of suffering and discrimination will warrant inclusion in lesbian community, a concern that implies the presence of gatekeepers or centers of power authorized to accept and reject. Montoya outlines one path to acceptance, following rules and political correctness. Her attempts to perform normative lesbian identity appear less than fully convincing as she describes lesbian community as “another sub-culture for me that / doesn’t let me in” and “another margin to slide / back and forth, in and ‘out’ of” (19). The poetic verse creates a dichotomous portrait of two worlds of identity politics: the exclusivity and impenetrability of lesbian label-policing and the slippery slopes and porous mobility of lived human experience. For Montoya, aligning herself with the label “lesbian” is akin to learning a new language, in addition to the multiple tongues she already possesses: Speaking in Lesbian Speaking in English Speaking in Spanish Speaking in Spanglish (19).

Montoya’s invocation of language here exceeds the simple binary of Spanish or English, suggesting language as a mode of being, equally as applicable to sexuality as to race, ethnicity, or culture. For Alicia Arrizén, this linguistic mode of being suggests a path of “performative agency” whereby queer Latinas

might speak and enact identities that transgress existing norms of culture, ethnicity, or sexuality.” In this way, language leaps off the page, frees itself from the constraints of the written word, and comes to life via engaged deployment. Such an invocation of language resists static definitions and rigid definitions of identity labels and more closely approximates the fluid nature of human experience.

To conclude her poem, Montoya returns full circle with her preferred moniker “baby dyke,” a signifier of generational, gendered, and sexual identity. The term “dyke” is another option utilized in a process of linguistic reappropriation, reinscribing negative connotations to create new alternatives for empowering self-identification.’2 Montoya’s final term comes with a short but definitive list of qualifications: “brown, working-class and/ idealistic” (20). Montoya’s amendments to her chosen label, baby dyke, reveal the term’s lack of signifiers of color, class, and political consciousness. Hence a portrait of language and

SPEAKING SELVES 23 identity labels that is still incomplete, an imperfect fit awaiting all the required adjustments to more accurately align the word with the real world experience it claims to name. However, even given the subversive potential of reappropriation, “dyke” is not without its own unique problematics. In the same volume where the two previous poems appeared, Natashia Lopez offers an attempt to work through the obstacles of speaking multiple marginality in “Trying to Be Dyke and Chicana” (Lépez 84). Throughout the poem, Lépez plays with the title’s two labels, offer-

ing awkward attempts at combination. For this poet, structure is of primary concern, as she attempts to create a label that will not only name her but also offer a hierarchical mapping of her own subjectivity, what do i call myself

people want a name |

a label a product what’s the first ingredient the dominant ingredient can you taste Chicana or smell Dyke. (84)

Lopez’s reference to her “ingredients” underlines her social constructionist reading of sexual and ethnic subjectivity as a mainstream concept, as well as the

pressure to declare a hierarchy of identity (Does one identify primarily as a Latina or a lesbian?). The spatiality of Lopez’s poem mimics the chasm she iden-

tifies between her sexual and ethnic/cultural subjectivities, not as she experiences them, but as they are perceived externally. She indicates each community’s

hostility toward inclusion of her multiply marginalized self. If she chooses “dyke,” she is viewed through a pathologizing lens by heterosexist Chicano nationalist doctrine as a “race destroyer” who “darken[s] the color of my people’s skin” and “pollut[es] the bad recipe” (84).

Anzaldtia addresses this same rhetoric of “sickness” and “infection” ina. poem entitled “Del otro lado,” as she recounts her family’s fear, horror, and shame at learning of her lesbianism: “Don’t bring your queer friends into my house, / my land, the planet. Get away. / Don’t contaminate us, get away” (3). The above stanza bears witness to the poetic voice’s familial abandonment in the name of “safety,” since she is instructed not to “contaminate” her relatives with her identity as a lesbian. Historical contextualization of homosexuality

as disease lends itself to this sort of deployment of homophobia in both Anzaldta’s and Lopez’s texts as the means to an end of containment or quarantine of sexual difference.

The “sides/lados” of which Anzaldtiia speaks are multiple, not simply Mexico and the United States, but safe and dangerous, good and evil, healthy and sick, family and strangers. Lopez also addresses the borders between binaries

24 HOMECOMING QUEERS in her work, utilizing the structure of her lyric to reify this division and her position straddling both sides: feeling pressure to choose between

brown white/women/loving. (L6pez 84) L6pez’s poetic map clearly delineates the supposedly mutually exclusive cate-

gories of race/ethnicity and sexuality, leaving the blank space between the words as the unbridgeable gap the speaker’s own experience represents. Lopez also rejects the notion of identity as the sum of self-contained blocks of experience. Such societal demands—particularly on women of color—to choose one or the other, to be purely this or that, either/or, but never all of the above, prompts both anger and resistance, as epitomized in Donna Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem,” which opens Gloria Anzaldia and Cherrie Moraga’s groundbreaking Third World Feminist collection This Bridge Called My Back.

Instead of accepting these imagined divisions that exclusively align “Chicana” with “heterosexual” and “dyke” with “white,” Lopez offers a linguistic merging of the two terms at the beginning of her poem, “Dyk-ana/Dyk-icana,”

yet both unions maintain a separation of Dyke and Chicana by the infamous hyphen that divides so many ethnic and cultural labels.’9 In both variations above, the term of gender and sexuality—dyke—begins the label, while the gendered ethnic identity label—Chicana—completes the term. In contrast, L6pez’s final lines suggest an additional state of hybridity: “call me Chicana / call me Dyke / Chyk-ana” (Lopez 84). With the new name, Lopez performs what AnaLouise Keating terms “tactical (re)naming,” transformating the first syllable of Chicana, with the alternate spelling from dyke.*° Quite literally, the poetic voice locates sexuality inside of ethnicity and emerges with a combination that speaks both

without separation. Her hybrid linguistic creation employs language as sitio since the connection made between communities is not as tokenized representation or in the interest of educating white lesbians or Chicana/o heterosexuals. Lopez’s “Chyk-ana” forges the path to her own empowerment, speaking as a concomitantly queer brown subject, naming herself. The weight of constantly bridging gaps between communities and individuals causes unbearable pressure on multiply marginalized subjects, since their efforts to mediate focus primarily on the needs of others (translation) at the expense of the nurturing and development of their own voices (creation). When refocused inward, the dissolution of binaries offers the birth of new possibilities, hybrid beings and languages flexible enough to match the fluidity of any identity. The conceptualization of a hybrid subjectivity explodes the epistemological frameworks upon which traditional identity politics are based, since as Gloria Anzaldtia so eloquently states: “Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining” (Borderlands 103). Her emphasis on inclusivity

SPEAKING SELVES 25 resists the spatiality of marginality. Whereas Lopez’s poetic voice is cast out of both Latino and lesbian worlds, Anzaldta’s narrative heals the split, massaging separate ingredients into a unified form. Thus, whether purely one (unified Self) or purely all (hybrid subject), the essentialized notion of purity inherent to each end of this binary opposition is deemed insufficient to appropriately represent the diverse realities of U.S. Latina authors.

Performance artist, scholar, and self-proclaimed cyber-vato Guillermo Gomez-Pena problematizes not only the language of the margins, but also that used to describe the dominant or central sphere. Questioning the viability of “dominant” as a descriptor, he instead suggests that, “in order to describe the trans-, inter-, and multicultural processes that are at the core of our contemporary border experience as Latino artists in the United States, we need to find a new terminology, a new iconography, and a new set of categories and definitions. We need to rebaptize the world in our own terms” (GOmez-Pena I8). LO6pez’s poetic verse moves toward this rebaptism of the language and limits of traditional identity politics by forging new linguistic paths adequate to describe

her multiplicity of being. These qualified sites of identity—dyke, lesbian, Chicana, queer—are often perceived as increasingly specific and homogeneous; the more labels added to the front of one’s name, the more that is known about

who and what the subject is. Yet L6pez’s poem resists societal tendencies to treat identity labeling as a warehouse shipping department: identify it, label it, and box it up within preexisting limits. Rather than embracing more and more labels to further clarify her positionalities, Lopez seeks a single word, in a new language—as Montoya suggests—that accounts for her unique combination of subjectivities.

Languages of Self-Definition In the previous two poems, Montoya and Lopez view the word “lesbian” as a problematic, but ultimately as a functional and necessary tool in the process of community building. However, a return to Anzaldua’s discourse on naming calls for an alternative to the European-based terminology of Anglo lesbian movements, since as she explains, “‘Lesbian’ doesn’t name anything in my homeland” (“To(o) Queer” 263). Here origin and sitio are key, as Anzaldua offers a personal solution to the complications of identity labeling: the utilization of a familiar tongue and labels that resonate in the histories and memories of queer Chicanas. Rather than Anglo-derived terms, Anzaldua favors words originating from Spanish or Nahuatl, languages she incorporates into her own identity as a sexual and racialized subject: “Call me loquita, jotita, marimacha, pajuelona, lambiscona, culera—these are words I grew up hearing. I can identify with being ‘una de las otras’ or ‘marimacha,’ or even a jota or a loca porque—these are the terms my

home community uses. I identify most closely with the Nahuatl term patlache.

26 HOMECOMING QUEERS These terms situate me in South Texas Chicano/mexicano culture and in my experiences and recuerdos. These Spanish/Chicano words resonate in my head and evoke gut feelings and meanings” (263). So Anzaldua elects to abandon “les-

bian” in favor of Spanish descriptors like “marimacha,” “una de las otras,” “jota,” or the Nahuatl term “patlache”—a further example of linguistic subver-

sion, since it moves to assert empowerment outside of the very language of Spanish colonization. For the author, these labels foster a sense of home and comfort for a declaration of queer Chicana subjectivity. The concept of sitio is

key here since Anzaldta uses the language of location and origin when she speaks of words that “situate” her in particular geographic regions and cultural communities. Labels of gender and sexuality in Spanish and Nahuatl produce meaning on two levels, definition and performance. Definition speaks to the “resonation,” “feelings,” and “meanings” Anzaldtua mentions above, while “performance” names the experience of the word, created by the act of speaking, writing, or hearing a particular label in a particular language, with a particular accent, all of which indelibly link the word to physical spaces of origin and identification. Anzaldta posits a merging of Pérez’s sitio y lengua in such a way that empowered expressions of identity are only possible as the union of the two. Cherrie Moraga finds both familiarity and predictability in common slurs, as they allow her to delineate between friend and foe: “Call me breed. Call me

trash. Call me spic greaser beaner dyke jota bulldagger. Call me something meant to set me apart from you and I will know who Iam. Do not call me ‘sister.’ 1am not yours” (The Last Generation 126). Unlike Montoya and Lopez, who

resist exclusion from a larger lesbian community, Moraga resists a simplistic

inclusion into the same group. For Moraga, then, the true offense is not the invocation of an identity label that marginalizes or alienates her in difference, but rather the language that glosses over or dismisses the lived realities of distance and dislocation experienced by subjects marked as other. She views the act of inclusion within a purportedly universalized sisterhood as a problematic gesture when the complexities of color, class, and sexuality are subsumed under the blanket of a homogeneously white Anglo feminist or lesbian movement. Moraga’s list of slurs identifies hatred on many levels, from homophobia to racism and misogyny. Of the six terms she lists, three are graphically negative Anglo referents for Latina/o ethnicity, while two other Anglo labels speak of hatred for lesbians. The only term in Spanish on the list, “jota,” suggests a manifestation of hate into a label of cultural, linguistic, gender, and sexual speci-

ficity. The fact that Moraga includes the Spanish slur illustrates multiple discourses of hatred, generated from both Anglo and Spanish-speaking communities. Anzaldtia notes a similar mode of discursive violence with the utilization of “queer” as a label of individual and community identity. The predominance, however, of Anglo terms suggests a hierarchy of power, wherein confrontations

SPEAKING SELVES 27 with homophobia in an English-speaking context outnumber those conflicts taking place within Latina/o and Spanish-speaking communities.

Labels and Language A key label, included within the title of this very project, “queer” acquired pop-

ularity in the 1990s as a broader alternative to more localized terms. As Annamarie Jagose affirms, “its non-specificity guarantees it against recent criticisms made of the exclusionist tendencies of ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ as identity categories” (Jagose 76). And although Gloria Anzaldtia favors “queer” over “lesbian” or “homosexual” for its working-class origins and reappropriated etymology, she, too, underlines the dangers of universalizing sexuality, since queer is used as a false unifying umbrella which all “queers” of all races, ethnicities, and classes are shoved under. At times we need this umbrella to solidify our ranks against outsiders. But even when we seek shelter under it we must not forget that it homogenizes, erases our difference. Yes, we may all love members of the same sex, but we are not the same... I must constantly assert my differentness ... This is one way I avoid getting sucked into the vortex of homogenization, of getting pulled into the shelter of the queer umbrella. (“To(o) Queer” 264)

The language Anzaldua uses to describe her invocation of the term “queer” sug-

gests that such a grouping is strategic and inherently provisional for her. Although she acknowledges the “shelter” it provides, she also professes to being “shoved under,” “pulled,” and “sucked into” this coalition of “queer” in a man-

ner that seems externally imposed and at best only partially consensual—at worst violently oppressive. In the utilization of “queer,” we see the appropriation of the term from its formerly negative context (odd or strange), while “gay” performs the same recla-

mation, but this time of a word with inherently positive connotations (happy or pleasant). The deployment of “butch” and “dyke” more closely resemble the etymological trajectory of “queer,” as do the racial and ethnic corollaries negro,

black, and Chicana/o, all of which at various points in history have been reclaimed from an initially disparaging legacy to one of pride and self-affirmation.

Additionally, within the context of Chicana/o and Latina/o culture, the appropriation of homophobic slurs like “joto/a,” “tortillera,” and Anzaldtia’s preferred label, “patlache,” offer a linguistically subversive approach to the expression of both cultural and sexual subjectivity by addressing the need for a language with simultaneous multiplicity of meanings. Moraga’s and Anzaldta’s dismantling of the ideologies and homogenizing tendencies behind language generally, and sisterhood and queer specifically, creates an entryway into the politics of naming for queer Latinas. These two

28 HOMECOMING QUEERS poet-theorists’ foundational works illustrate the tension created when the desire to be included is preempted by a will to resist subsumption by a larger mainstream collective. In this context, specificity is more significant to a conceptualization of expressive freedom than the role of inclusion into hegemonic centers of power at the cost of heterogeneity and individual agency. However, in another poetic piece from Chicana Lesbians, Lidia Tirado White rejects the same labels Anzaldua and Moraga embrace. Even in Spanish, Tirado

White is unwilling to perform the necessary appropriation of these slurs into her own empowered language. Instead, dryly in list form, she recounts twelve different often derogatory labels in Spanish to refer to a lesbian, including “manflora,” “jota,” “tortillera,” and “marimacha” (Tirado White 22). At the end of the list Tirado White finally moves to directly address her detractor: Intentaraés imponerme todos los adjetivos calificativos que la sociedad sexista te ha ensenado. Y yo, te seguiré repitiendo de una y mil maneras que simplemente soy una MUJER. (22)

The first two words cited from the above excerpt—also the poem’s title—offer insight into Tirado White’s struggle with hostile reception of her sexuality. She certainly perceives a threat, yet she is by no means defeated, indicating with her choice of “intentar” that her offender will “attempt” to impose such negative labels on her, but gives no indication that such attempts are anything but fruitless. Additionally, the poet’s choice of a future verb tense: “intentaras” (you will try) implies that Tirado White expects this battle to be lengthy, but again, her closing verse leaves ample space for the hope of a victorious outcome, “[soy] una MUJER, que desde hace mucho tiempo dejé de ser una MUJER EN SI para convertirse en MUJER PARA Si” (22). The clarification Tirado White makes between “en si” and “para si” affords her poetic voice a sense of agency and selfdetermination, since the former suggests a rigidity of definition as well as fixed boundaries, while the latter offers a declaration of self-sufficiency as a woman “for herself,” implying both a defense and celebration of self.

A different sort of linguistic affiliation is evidenced in Juana Maria Rodriguez’s preferred language of queer subjectivity. For Rodriguez, the descrip-

tors “divas, atrevidas, y entendidas” “resonate with an attitude that steps beyond sexual practice or sexual identity into the realm of a politicized passion for liberation and empowerment. These terms mark a language that is foreign to dominant linguistic norms. They are culturally specific in ways that are not about a discourse of nation or blood but about the language of barrios and bars” (J. M. Rodriguez 24). With this addition to the language of identity politics, Rodriguez enacts a system of meaning that accounts not only for sexuality but also, concomitantly, varying degrees of political engagement and even the class

SPEAKING SELVES 29 distinctions implied by “barrios and bars.” Additionally, the labels disconnect from national and genealogical discourse in order to privilege communities, coalitions, and familias of choice. Yet given Anzaldua’s prior argument about language and familiarity, the

label “lesbian” would not be readily appropriateable for an individual for whom English is a foreign or at least secondary tongue. The introduction of another tongue (Spanish, English) shifts the directional focus of appropriation from negative to positive (i.e., queer, Chicana/o, dyke), and from foreign to familiar. To what degree, then, would the declaration of Spanish as universal Latina mother tongue and signifier of home silence all those subjects for whom Spanish is not a primary language? For Latinas without close and viable connections to the Spanish language, these terms are deemed insufficient as well. In this sense, a discussion of the terminology of sexuality collides with the specificities of ethnicity, race, and culture. Each category and subjectivity is indelibly marked by the others. In any language, one cannot be spoken without the rest, since Diana Taylor cautions, “There is the danger of thinking that Latino/as occupy any one positionality (be it in terms of ideology, class, gender or sexual preference, or race) or that they occupy it in any one way. There may be as many ways of being a Latina lesbian, let us say, as there are of being an Anglo, heterosexual male. ‘Sameness’ cannot be assumed between those who share certain positions of proximity” (Taylor and Villegas 6). Moving beyond dichotomous intersections, identity stands at the center of a vast network of crossed and recrossed positionalities.

tatiana de la tierra and Mariana Romo Carmona Another example of Pérez’s sitio y lengua enacted in language and performativity is present in Esto no tiene nombre, a multigenre creative journal independ-

ently published by tatiana de la tierra, a then Miami-based, Columbian-born writer and artist. The publication, along with the similar but alternately titled Conmocion, spanned 1991-96 and began without a title at all—hence the quite literal label for the first series Esto no tiene nombre (This has no name). In the first issue, published September 23, 1991, de la tierra petitions the journal’s con-

tributors and readers to suggest an appropriate moniker. Yet by the second issue, the editor calls off her search for an “official title,” declaring simply, “Esto no tiene nombre ya es nuestro nombre y con esta identificacién establecida continuamos la tarea de proveer un espacio para lesbianas latinas en Mayami” (Esto no tiene nombre is our name and with this issue resolved, we will continue the work of providing a space for Latina lesbians in Miami). So what begins as a reference to the publication’s lack of name becomes a symbol of the invisibility, silencing, and literal unspeakability of queer Latina women within both Latino

and lesbian communities. The editor, de la tierra, carefully positions the role

30 HOMECOMING QUEERS of her publication, not to “give voice to” Latina lesbians—to quote a phrase often tossed around quite carelessly when discussing academic work on marginalized communities—but rather to provide the space in which Latina lesbians might speak their own voices for themselves. This impossibility of knowing is also an impossibility of speaking as both Anzaldtia and Oboler have noted. The entity “Latina lesbian” cannot be spoken

without severing or at least abbreviating the vast heterogeneity of the label’s affiliated community. When language is utilized without accounting for its homogenizing tendencies, labels become representative of a specific subject— one who symbolizes the “essence” of the label. The risk of an essentialist approach to identity, as interpreted by Diana Fuss, entails the assumption that labels are understood to represent “ontologically stable objects, coherent signs which derive their coherency from their unchangeability and predictability” since “no allowance is made for the historical production of these categories” (Fuss 3). With such an essentialist ideology insisting on constancy and prescribed definitions, many subjects confront alienation and exclusion, when their own heterogeneous experiences deviate from this imagined essence. If it is

to be accepted, as has been posited to this point, that subjectivity is fluid and constantly changing, it is impossible to conceive of living this fluid subjectivity as a fixed and static ideal. This discursive impossibility emerges in much creative work published by queer U.S. Latinas, especially as a critical yet humorous

affront to the prescriptive limits of a mainstream identity politics. tatiana de la tierra’s “100% Latina Lesbian Checklist,” published in a 1996 copy of her self-published zine Conmocion, takes the science of identity to new sarcastic heights with a cleverly devised point system of cultural and sexual subjectivity. Readers are instructed to add or subtract points for a variety of activities, experiences, and cultural knowledge deemed authentic to a true Latina Lesbian identity: “We wanna know ... how pure are you?? Our diligent editorial collective spent hours researching the nature of a 100% Latina Lesbiana over a few cervezas. Let’s see how you measure up, con ganas! Add and subtract points to

get your total score, then check the scale for your results” (de la tierra, Conmocion 15). List items appear in both English and Spanish, most often rewarding displays of the latter (+5 points are awarded for reciting the Ave Maria in Spanish). Items refer to both behavioral choices (“—1o points for making Minute Rice”) and familial traits and traditions (“Are any of your relatives named: Puchi, Pampi, Boobi, Pito, Chata, Nifii, Papo, Flaco or Cuca?”). Checklist items range from material possessions to sexual practices. Quiz-takers gain five points for owning “more than two pairs of earrings by the time you were one,” retaining a culturally, if not sexually, informed notion of gender, since femininity is determined by an individual’s degree of conformity to the common prac-

tice of ear-piercing for young Latinas, rather than one’s positioning on a butch-femme continuum. Another five points are added for having a bedroom

| SPEAKING SELVES 31 that is a “penis-free zone (imaginary, silicone or otherwise),” implying that practices of gender-fucking—via the utilization of dildos or other phallus-like replacements—are exclusively part of an Anglo lesbian domain, detracting from a Latina lesbian’s cultural, ethnic, or racial purity.?! Particular attitudes about

gender and specifically femininity inform the notion of Latina lesbian purity offered here, although many traits are discarded for falling to far too either the Latina or lesbian side. Although many questions in this test of Latina lesbian authenticity address one label or the other, referring directly to either culture/ethnicity or sexuality,

a few items merge both, such as the two points awarded for shouting “jAy Mami!” during sex. According to the test’s experts, the combination of a queer

sexuality with an inherently Latina response (in Spanish) exemplifies the “purest” of Latina lesbians. de la tierra’s union of cultural and sexual markers suggests—with much sarcasm—that “100% Latina Lesbian” is a state achieved by

both individual choice and historical or familial legacy. Such a determination, even in jest, interrupts preexisting discourse on homosexuality as a debate of nature or nurture, of genetic predisposition or socialization. Additionally, the

introduction of cultural, ethnic, and racial identities as entities similarly defined by both sides of the nature/nurture binary destabilizes all identity categories as either natural and essential or a matter of personal preference. The model of her piece, the ever-present and purportedly scientific questionnaires in women’s fashion and beauty magazines (Are you a romantic? Where is your relationship going? etc.), is converted into an instrument of satire with which to critique the limits of identity.

Even with the potentially subversive critique of the marginalization of homosexuality, de la tierra’s tongue-in-cheek satire of this popular form runs the risk of reinforcing essentialist arguments. In fact, the author’s prescriptive list of traits “essential” to Latina lesbian purity strongly resemble mainstream women’s magazines’ socialization of women into particular doctrines of femininity. In order to resist falling into a trap of absolute universalization, de la tierra’s quiz, and especially the scoring key, prompts readers to question their

own notions of static and fixed identity. In the quiz’s concluding explanation, | de la tierra reassures those with less than perfect scores that “purity is overrated,” and “it’s in your biological memory somewhere,” while those with perfect scores are offered the limp congratulatory statement, “Felicidades. You are 100% Latina lesbian, as authentic as café con leche. You’ve managed to lie to yourself and to people you don’t even know para cumplir con la sociedad. Your mother would be proud” (de la tierra 15). Here de la tierra destabilizes an essentialist view of identity as she defines a Latina lesbian subject through an elaborate list of essential qualities and behaviors proven by exhaustive research “over a few cervezas” (mocking the scientific rigor of sociological studies) to explode the “essence” of a Latina lesbian. In light of de la tierra’s

32 HOMECOMING QUEERS offering, her readers are faced with the declaration that lists are for shopping because purity is not possible. Another piece utilizing a unique form with which to express her dissatisfaction with issues of the essentialist limits of language examined above is Chileanborn Mariana Romo-Carmona’s short story entitled “Welcome to America.” This piece, in particular, addresses the rigidity of identity labels and dominant need

for a specific “scripted” mode of minority behavior. Romo-Carmona’s story opens with what appears to be an announcement for employment: “Wanted: The words of a lesbian of color. One of each color. Snap. No experience required but must be proficient at expressing the deep pain of her existence. Snap. Must exemplify the core of her being in poetic English, using syntax we can all understand. Snap. Must be able to make us all feel the weight of the oppression of her people as it relates to her particular culture. Snap” (Romo-Carmona 123). And though the above passage possesses the structure of a help-wanted ad, the first line positions the request as violent, or even criminal, since its form is

also reminiscent of wanted posters featuring the nation’s most dangerous offenders in post offices and police stations across the country. The above excerpt also differs from a typical job announcement in that the request is not for an employee, but rather her “words.” This violent dislocation of subject from voice suggests the appropriation of language and experience by outside parties. The subsequent “qualifications” posited for this position include requirements about the desired lesbian of color, her language skills, and her generally tragic existence. Each of these elements frames a stereotypical depiction of a queer woman of color. Not only is this subject obligated to be a particular way, but she must also conform her creative production to the short list of appropriate topics the “employer” offers. Given the title of Romo-Carmona’s text, “Welcome to America,” it seems likely this professional hierarchy represents an antagonistic relationship with U.S. mainstream culture and media. In this way the author challenges the impossibility of answering the above outlined question, “What does a Latina lesbian look like?” By utilizing the frame of a help-wanted advertisement, Romo-Carmona illustrates the constructedness of such an inquiry, listing off qualities of human experience, much like de la tierra’s quiz, as though they were mere office skills: must be proficient at typing, data entry, filing, and “expressing the deep pain of her existence.” The rhythmic form of the excerpt also lends itself to the falseness of this request, as “snaps” are positioned throughout the piece, interrupting every few words or sentences. Functioning like bullets in an outline, these interjections give emphasis to the advertisement’s list-like composition that names the lesbian of color “essence” the writer desires. The snaps can also be interpreted as representative of the clicks and flashes of a photographer’s lens, capturing and essentially freezing this ideal subjectivity in a specific moment of safe, pre_ dictable fixity (at least from the perspective of dominant subjects). The rapidity

SPEAKING SELVES 33 of the shots suggests a professional photo shoot, such as a fashion layout, where fiction frames every image and message, and as with fashion trends, the fleeting

popularity of a particular item—in this case the lesbian of color herself—is superficially celebrated while the complexity and diversity of such a subject as well as her political and cultural concerns remain largely ignored. This pattern is evidenced by recent talk of “lesbian-Chic” and “the Latino Boom” in Hollywood. Growing representation for marginalized subjects within mainstream spheres seems to be a positive development, although the problematics of power emerge when analyzing who and what will determine the types of representation that will be launched into public view. With the proliferation of stereotypically sexualized, criminalized, and domesticated Latina/o roles, concern appears warranted. But rather than disengaging with mainstream representation altogether, Leo Cabranes-Grant advocates a mapping of the ideological constructs behind all such representations as he inquires, “Do we really

want to discredit a stereotype that makes us ‘hot”?” (Cabranes-Grant 13). In other words, how does his notion of “the hyphen as afrodisiac” [note the “othered” spelling] serve and disserve the minority subjects it promotes? Cabranes-Grant intervenes in the trajectory of the sexualized stereotype by redirecting focus from past to future indicators of self: “Stop asking where’s our accent from. Where is my accent going? Where is my accent taking you?” (13). In this discursive shift the minority subject as fixed entity (defined by her/his foreign origin) is dissolved and a new subject is offered up, one with

inherent mobility (“Where is my accent going?”) and the power to impact her/his surroundings (“Where is my accent taking you?”). The accent becomes symbolic of the complexity and fluidity of queer colored subjectivity in the face of limited and limiting mainstream representation. Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted text explores the politics behind this mainstream desire for minority subjects. Her second paragraph moves from describing the parameters of an ethnic, racial and/or national identity to one of sexual and gender specificity. “Note: She must be a lesbian. Snap. She must identify openly as a lesbian. Snap. She should speak about the triple oppression of being queer, snap—colored, snap—and female, snap—but never vary from her lesbian-

identified perspective. Snap. Commitment to multiculturalism preferable; snap—grassroots organizing experience a must” (123). Again, the text posits the

uncomfortable rigidity of a stereotyped representation. The sought-after lesbian of color—or, more accurately, her words—must not only be queer but also identify openly as such. Additionally, the ad advises that the ideal applicant ought “never vary” from her identification as a lesbian. This mandatory invariability restricts the subjectivity of the lesbian of color in question and implies that although a lesbian of color is desired, the primary issue is that of sexuality since she must always speak of her triple oppression (race, gender, and sexuality) but that she must “never vary from her lesbian-identified perspective,”

34 HOMECOMING QUEERS suggesting perhaps a fear that concerns for racial equality might somehow distract from the main cause: the struggle for lesbian rights. Again snaps mark the text, and when coupled with this insistence on invariability, they transform into the literal fasteners that affix this subject to a particular agenda of white femi-

nist tokenization, each snap marking a further limit being imposed on the token queer woman of color. Romo-Carmona’s piece reveals the ramifications of both superficial interest in a subject or community and of any noncritical invocation of essentialism that fails to be conscious of the gaps and voids left by such a paradigm of identity. Through the work of Suzanne Oboler, Gloria Anzaldta, and others, we come to acknowledge the unique risk posed by deploying strategic essentialism in order to assign static meanings to identity labels such as lesbian or Latina. The danger lies in the limited scope and lack of imagination that is often evidenced

when a group or individual purports to name and authorize the absolute essence of a particular group affiliation or identity categorization. However, as

the previous scholars and artists alike have acknowledged, identity is fluid, shifting, and shape-changing, depending on the location, politics, and emotional status of a given individual at any given moment in life. Any attempt to create a list of inherent qualities and characteristics of a Latina simply underlines the complex reality of human identity, not to mention the colonialist nature of the power dynamics involved in the authoring of such lists. Who will be authorized to police each category and hence the metaphorical gates to a particular community? Given the fluidity of identity, how is it possible to iden-

tify the limits of Latina, the boundaries that contain this identity—or any other—when the map on which the label lies is a constantly evolving entity? Eliana Rivero offers two useful models of identity that attempt to capture the porous nature of subjectivity and the ever-evolving status of the subjects to which identity labels refer. First, Rivero suggests as a counterpoint to discussions of borders the image of margenes that she uses to refer to the ephimerality and fluidity of an ocean shoreline. As waves lap against the sand, the water creates unique and specific yet wholly immeasurable limits much like the elements of location, class, race, language, gender, and sexuality can impact how an individual perceives and describes their own subjectivity. This fluidity is integral when attempting to account for the ways in which identity slips in and out of the limits of language on a daily basis depending on the geographical, emotional, and social positioning of a given subject (Rivero 1999). The second model Rivero develops is the notion of hovering. She uses this model to contrast the action of straddling, as suggested by earlier models from Anzaldua, LOpez, and Rushin, where an individual is split physically and emotionally between the two sites simultaneously united and divided by a border. Rivero points out that the model of hovering again lends itself well to the constantly changing nature of identity, since it is an action carried out just above

SPEAKING SELVES 35 the earth, not grounded in any singular position, and always inherently mobile, “I speak of a ‘hovering state,’ in which consciousness is not anchored consistently to any positionality to the exclusion of another, but potentially includes them all without prejudice to any. This image of spatial hybridity permits not only plurality but simultaneity of states of being” (“Colored Ambiguities” 25). Each of these modes of being stresses the deterritorialization of identity and its corresponding language. Uprooted from the ground, from geographical boundaries and national divisions, hovering and margenes afford a linguistic fluidity

to match the equally fluid nature of gendered, racial, cultural, ethnic, and sexual subjectivities.

Until there is a way to approximate with language, this fluidity of being, there will exist a danger in defining terms like Latina and lesbian, in that by situating them in specific locations, the labeling process will inevitably exclude some subjectivities who fall outside the contextually relevant definition, yet vehemently continue to align themselves with this community. In this way the boundaries of a label are policed by a select few who claim to represent (as well as limit) the whole, as community shifts from a strategy of unification to division. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano explores this phenomenon within the dogma of Chicano nationalism, noting “the fantasy and love of ‘Chicano’ can exclude many who would be part of the collective” (Yarbro-Bejarano, “Sexuality and Chicana/o

Studies” 338). This type of exclusion perpetuates the silence and erasure of voices and subjects who endure marginalization from dominant groups and face additional alienation from the very people and places they claim as their own. But what are the risks of deleting all labels from our linguistic practices?

Identity Ellipsis How might we ensure that our conceptualization of identity categories and the communities they define do not continue a legacy of colonialist discrimination and oppression? In an ideally decolonized world, would all categories be irrelevant?*? This notion is suggested by the politically correct slogan decorating everything from T-shirts to coffee cups and SUV rear ends that reads LOVE SEES NO COLOR. As though the epitome of equality and fair treatment necessitates

that individuals both cease to see and be colored: transparency as the ultimate and universal racial mode. Under this type of rubric lies the warped logic that Jennifer Lopez will have only truly made it in Hollywood when the media and the consuming public cease to refer to her as a Puerto Rican or Latina actress/ singer/performer and begin to simply see her as an actress, singer, or performer. Therefore, the true indicator of success—according to this ideology—is the shedding or amputation of an ethnic or cultural label from one’s identity. Obviously this particular professional hurdle is unique to minority artists, since no one ever maps the professional journey of Brad Pitt or Madonna from

36 HOMECOMING QUEERS white actor or Caucasian singer to simply actor or singer. Keeping this particular double standard in mind (ethnic/racial identity as a professional obstacle to overcome), I wonder for whom this minority hurdle truly exists? Is Jennifer Lopez expected to become less and less Latina as she simultaneously moves toward mainstream success? Certainly some would argue that this is exactly the practice in which Lopez is engaged currently as she seems paler, blonder, and less brown with each public and media appearance. Yet despite this lightening or whitening process, and regardless of how many times Lopez plays the role

of an Italian or otherwise unmarked (ethnically) character, she alone does not possess the power to strip such a label (Latina or Puerto Rican) from mainstream descriptions of her. Ruling mainstream media determines that fate for her, and in order to perform a successful transformation to the glorious state of

default ethnic invisibility the audience must be convinced as well. This unmarked condition seems less a state of mind than a state of reception. To whom is this unmarked status a goal, an accomplishment, and a success? Is it the artist who must constantly evade his or her community affilia-

tions, family, name, and skin? Certainly the social and political privileges afforded to a convincingly unmarked performance of racial, cultural, or sexual

subjectivity are significant, as Linda Schlossberg notes when mapping the politics of passing: to be “unmarked” is to occupy a position of privilege, in which the sub-

ject hides behind an apparent transparency. White individuals, for instance, are in a constant state of passing as having no ethnic or racial identity at all, as having “nothing to say” about race, or as somehow existing outside the volatile world of “racial tensions” . . . similarly, heterosexual

culture continually passes itself off as being merely natural, the undisputed and unmarked norm, rather than as a set of highly visible and frequently commodified practices with its own compulsive behaviors and codes. (5)

The distribution of power within a paradigm of marked and unmarked is closely aligned with a center/periphery model of society, since both map society as a dichotomy of “us” and “them,” with “us” occupying the central position against which everyone else is deemed marginal. With white, Anglo, heterosexual, and often male at the center of social discourse, difference is measured by proximity to this singular imagined center. Since no distance separates the center from itself, discussions of race, culture, language, and sexuality appear to apply only to those outside this central site (hence the notion of foreign languages as every tongue except English). In actuality, the eventual goal for mainstream success

seems not to be the stripping of ethnic identity (with the exception of being , superficially and marketably ethnic as popular demand necessitates), but rather the adoption of a new one, this default invisible categorization of white, Anglo,

SPEAKING SELVES 37 and American (United Statesian). Barbara Christian problematizes such usage of terminology of the margin/center model, asserting, “Constructs like the center and the periphery reveal that tendency to want to make the world less complex by organizing it according to one principle, to fix it through an idea which is really an ideal” (45). But if this language must be eliminated, how then are we to map out differential power relations and inequalities between social groups? Center/periphery models act as descriptive rather than prescriptive models, promoting extant situations where ruling powers are equated with the centrality of the system; instead, Christian suggests the use of the term “Third World Women,” which, like the margin/center framework, also continues to connote hierarchies of power and privilege. In her second publication, How to Be a Chicana Role Model, southern Californian author Michele Serros provides a comical look at mainstream pres-

sures to be a “universal” writer, a label that necessitates a unique ethnic performance from the text’s Chicana narrator. A revealing fan letter from an ironically named Donald McWhite reads: Dear Michele Serros, Hello, Iam an English teacher and bought a copy of your book at a local bookstore here in Calabasas. You have some very nice poems. You need

to, however, concentrate on making your poems more universal. The average kid in Connecticut may not understand your stories and you need to make them accessible to everyone. Instead of using a colloquial term such as chicharrones, why not just pork or ham? A ham sandwich? Everyone knows what that is. Next time you sit down to write, think about the kid in Connecticut. Will he be able to appreciate and grasp what you are trying to say? (207)

The suggestion that Serros “universalize” her writing, in fact, functions as an Instrument of homogenization through which the specificities of discourses by minority or otherwise “othered” artists are faded into the constructed image of a default Anglo, male, and heterosexual “universality.” Note the letter writer’s concern for “the average kid in Connecticut” and his ability to access Serros’s cultural references. As a helpful alternative, he offers the term “ham sandwich”

as a substitute for “chicharrones,” since he assures her that it, unlike the Spanish item, is a marker recognizable by “everyone.” This assumption presupposes the inherent cultural neutrality of white U.S. Anglo culture (from which the sandwich is derived), consequently deeming Chicana/o culture—along with all other nonwhite, non-Anglo, or non-U.S. based cultures—local, limited, and irrelevant. This teleological paradigm, rewarding the cultural nonspecificity of both Jennifer Lopez and Michele Serros with a prized universal stamp, stands as a harsh double standard for Serros, since many Anglo authors are often simply

38 HOMECOMING QUEERS labeled authors or artists because they are granted the status of socially unmarked. These individuals are understood to have nothing to “overcome” as far as their personal perspective and subjectivity and must simply write well. However, this same standard deems any experience outside of Anglo, male, and heterosexual as different, excessive, and therefore distractionary to the goal of great singing, acting, or writing. Of course, these frameworks are racist, sexist, and homophobic and perpetuate a system of superiority for Anglo male heterosexist voices. In “Describe Your Work,” included in Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez and Nancy Saporta Sterbach’s Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology, writer-performer Monica Palacios recounts how homophobic, racist, and sexist comedy clubs limited the scope of her material by requiring her to filter her voice through the supposedly generic heterosexual white male perspective. She remembers being told to “get rid of the queer stuff, get rid of the Latino stuff. Don’t talk about your period” (284). Palacios’s testimony illustrates the limits of universality regulating the mainstream entertainment industry, since, like Serros, she is advised to make her art more “recognizable” by eliminating all those subjectivities that identify her as a queer, brown, female “other.” Once Palacios makes a conscious decision to forge a career outside of these mainstream clubs and their suffocating closedmindedness, she is able to formulate a counterstance to such restrictions that she avoid talking about the specificities of her life as a queer Latina: Excuse me, but I’m not talking— I’m telling. I’m telling you about my life because I have every right to do so. I’m letting you know that my queer Latina vida is not stereotypical like you have ignorantly believed. (284)

Palacios’s manifesto insists on the significance of her unique voice and her right to launch it into the world without editing or censorship. For Palacios, the distinction between “talk” and “tell” reveals the difference between being heard

or silenced. Her deployment of the word “telling” in some ways resembles a dialogue that might be confused with Michel Foucault’s notion of confession wherein “a ritual unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile” (61~62). Palacios’s version of “telling” disrupts Foucault’s paradigm of confession since her model displaces the mainstream subject from a position of discursive superiority over the marginalized subject speaking. As the active speaker, Palacios is the authoritative informant, providing her listener(s) with

truths and the diffusion of stereotypes, inverting the power dynamics of

SPEAKING SELVES 39 Foucault’s confessional paradigm that fixes the confessor in the role of inferior and dependent. Emma Pérez’s “Notes from a Chicana Survivor” offers the alternative para-

digm of a gift, to underline the inherent value of her words, and the words, voices, and experiences of so many other women of color: I give these words to you now. Like a gift. I tell you who and what I am. This is a gift I offer. Do you understand? Ya no me van a robar my sitio y mi lengua. Do you understand? They live inside my soul, with my mother, my sisters, mis hermanas del tercer mundo. (“Sexuality and Discourse” 179)

Both Palacios and Pérez assert their right to tell you who they are, seizing control of the discourse that surrounds them and the knowledge produced about them. Telling implies a dialogic interaction between the speaking subject and a listening audience. Pérez’s notion of her words as a gift also aligns itself with Palacios’s

paradigm of telling since it qualifies the speaker as gift-giver and the listener as recipient. Additionally, the contextualization of her narrative as a gift underscores the precious nature of this discourse and the fact that she, as the speaker, is in control of the process of giving. Thus control is located in the author’s pen and the speaker’s lips alone. Of course there are moments when queer Latinas are not always subjects of un discurso propio. Like any subject, we must, at times, accept our position as objects of other scholars’ studies or an observer’s gaze, as was the case during Richard Rodriguez’s talk with which I began this chapter. After tracing the diverse

_ invocations of language to speak unspoken experiences and identities among queer Latina authors, Rodriguez’s question, “Why can’t I get the lesbians?,” seems to arise not from who is actually present in his audience, but rather from how he sees or fails to see these subjects. Perhaps the author’s point may have been more clearly addressed had he changed a single word in his question, from “Why can’t I get the lesbians?” to “Why can’t I get those lesbians?” Obviously the lesbians he saw outside the theater were the lesbians he reportedly “did not get.” Yet he did not qualify his reference, leaving all those of us sitting in his audience that day to presume that “the lesbians” collectively are either marginal at best or, at worst, invisible or nonexistent in Rodriguez’s vision of his public and community. To him, it would seem, “the lesbians” remain quite literally in the margins, outside the theater and the Mexican/Chicana/o community this space comes to represent in his discourse. To be sure, there were lesbians in his audience that day, and at the previous talk he was recounting for us. Yet his inability to see the lesbians he did get, those seated in front of him, in his Mexican American audience, limits his vision, his understanding of his audience and his community. I recognize that Rodriguez’s account of this incident attempts to offer a critical commentary that had little to do with internalized homophobia, sexism, or

40 HOMECOMING QUEERS misogyny. Instead, he was offering an important analysis of how identity politics can further isolate and segregate minority communities. Yet I retell Rodriguez’s

retelling of this incident in order to show how his own discourse becomes further illustration of his point. As he claims, white lesbians may not listen to Rodriguez, but in a similar manner he fails to see the brown lesbians who are listening. Slippage of the queer brown female body from academic discourse, as well as the mainstream imaginary, impacts far beyond Rodriguez’s vision. In the previous textual analyses, queer Latina authors, artists, and intellectuals utilize diverse modes of creativity, from poetry and short stories to critical essays, in order to intervene in the discourse on the connections and gaps between language, identity, community, and home. The limits of identity labels are exposed by Rodriguez’s inability to see Latina lesbians in his audience. In turn, authors, artists, and critics boldly engage and transform identity labels in the name | of Emma Pérez’s sitios y lenguas, the spaces and languages serving as the points of departure from which infinite discussions on the equally expansive notion of queer Latina identity may begin.

Moving Violations Performing the Limits of Representation in Marga Gomez’s jaywalker What happened? That what you want to know? I'll tell you. It’s simple. She tried to walk in Los Angeles. —Marga Gomez, jaywalker

The sounds of screeching tires and crunching metal open Marga Gomez’s jaywalker,’ where a wide-eyed Gomez rushes out into the spotlight on a stage with only a small pile of automobile tires set to one side. Dressed in a short black lace slip, bright orange traffic safety vest, and precariously high platform sneakers, the title character “Jaywalker” enlightens audience members on the intricacies of Los Angeles pedestrian life. Debuting at-New York City’s P.S, 122 in 1999, Gomez’s onewoman show jaywalker takes the audience on an hour-and-a-half-long journey

detailing the protagonist’s struggle in the margins of multiple communities: a Latina in the Hollywood entertainment scene, one of a handful of pedestrians on the car-packed streets of Los Angeles, and an average queer girl-next-door in a disco sea of identical high-femme “Spice Girl replacement” lesbians. Via this “othered” protagonist—Latina, lesbian, female, pedestrian—Gomez’s performance provides an important commentary on the difficulties of shifting minority representation from the margin to the center of mainstream spheres. Her performance poses a sarcastic challenge to the hierarchies of power residing between the acts of being “marginal” and marginalizing others, as well as the impact of each on the movement and representation of subjects within the varying spaces afforded by a center/periphery model of society. The work addresses the possibilities for minority “invasions” of mainstream Hollywood spaces, and the control and containment of representational spaces through the practice of tokenism. A creative and critical

contestation of the mainstream notion of an unmarked ideal can be found in Jaywalker, who uses the superficiality of Hollywood as the stage from which to confront complicated issues of identity and representation, especially with regard to the limits of identity labels of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and mobility. 41

42 HOMECOMING QUEERS Marginal Bodies In her book on Latina performativity, Alicia Arriz6n comments on the signifi-

cance of the genre of performance for Chicana identity formation: “For Chicanas, the performative consists of the materialization of ‘acts’ which transgress normative epistemologies that affirm and deny cultural and subcultural affiliations of the collective self” (Latina Performance 74). Clearly this statement may be expanded to include the efficacy of performativity as creative weaponry for other Latinas and women of color who view their representations as counterhegemonic. Of key import in Gomez’s work are the notions of materialization and action. Both suggest a moving and fluid body and corresponding discourse.

In the current text, performance is an opportunity for Gomez to publicly acknowledge the voice and body of a previously silenced subjectivity, as actor,

artist, and fictitious character. As an aspiring star in Hollywood, Gomez is unable to emerge from the shadows of ethnic and gender stereotypes. As a per-

former, however, she leaps from others’ margins into the center of her own discourse. The genre of solo performance, as Arriz6n suggests, serves as a space for Gomez’s self-authorized counternarrative to Hollywood’s homogenizing and Anglocentric visions. In effect, Gomez stages her invisibility, enacting both the process and consequences of marginalization and intervening in her own erasure. Gomez’s Jaywalker recognizes her marginality and proudly claims her “bad girl” moniker, allowing a glimpse into the alternative spaces forged in response to the public and popular erasure of queer, Latino, and Latina subjects. The performance’s protagonist introduces her most pivotal marker of individual identity, her name, as colored by a dominant gaze imposed from outside. Instead of naming herself, the protagonist initially seems to concede to a representation grounded in this dominant external gaze, as she defines her identity by others’ perceptions of her, allowing others to name her at various stages of her story. Chronologically, the protagonist is known first as “215,” a rule-follower whose uniqueness is lost to the Hollywood masses: “I wasn’t The Jaywalker back |

then ... They called me ‘215.’ That was the room number at my hotel in Hollywood” (Bonney 369). Reduced to a mere number—not unlike her crushing experiences at mass auditions—Jaywalker is quick to claim her active role in

choosing the sleazy motel and room in which she lives. She simultaneously reminds her public of the ease with which she surrenders her agency to the generic “they” she mentions when introducing herself to the audience. A similar deferral of agency marks her explanation of her designation beyond the hotel sphere. Rather than a number, she is known on the streets of Hollywood by a particular act: “They call me The Jaywalker” (367). The fact that

Jaywalker is labeled for an action suggests an outside acknowledgment of her agency and mobility, yet the label’s criminal connotations and its external imposition (note “They call me ...”) taint any semblance of positive identity

MOVING VIOLATIONS 43 formation for Jaywalker. In fact, the issue of acquiescing to other people’s visions and definitions of her marks an important loss of agency. Naming and self-definition are paramount to the forging of individual autonomy and agency, as Gloria Anzaldta asserts: “My labeling of myself is so that the Chicana and the

lesbian and all the other persons in me don’t get erased, omitted or killed. Naming is how I make my presence known, how I assert who I am and what I want to be known as. Naming myself is a survival tactic” (Trujillo, Living Chicana Theory 264). Ultimately, Jaywalker’s inability to fashion a label of her own design and her passive acceptance of how she is seen by others mark a destructive and imbalanced state of objecthood, where the protagonist accepts her role not as creator but mere character—or more accurately, caricature—in the narrative of her Hollywood journey. Although Jaywalker tends to define her subjectivity through the eyes of others, (“They”) and is intimately linked to her alleged criminal activity (jaywalk-

ing), she appears to perform a successful reappropriation of this externally imposed title, claiming it with devilish vigor. Her role as “The Jaywalker” enables her to break rules, exceed limits, and cross boundaries, especially on the streets of the car-crazy Los Angeles: “It’s all in the timing. How close you gonna let them get before you walk across—not run. Walk. Walk. Walk. Because when you run, ya yield, and I yield to no car” (Tucson).3 Here her claiming of the label and the role of “Jaywalker” allows her to reject her usual position of lowly inferiority in Hollywood, as she daringly asserts her presence on the road, even in the face of oncoming traffic. Jaywalking is this protagonist’s sole means of revolt against a hostile world.

Even on the sidewalks, those designated spaces of purported pedestrian safety, Jaywalker feels the threat of oncoming traffic: “Like the day I was walking

down La Cienaga [Boulevard] ... And this guy with a gym bag cuts me off... And he says, ‘On your left,’ as he passes me like there are lanes on the sidewalk, like he’s a Jaguar and I’m a dented Chevy” (Bonney 368).4 Jaywalker’s automotive metaphors clearly delineate the power hierarchies she sees at work among even Los Angeles’s marginalized pedestrian population—in spite of her decid-

edly utopian perspective that “we’re all equals on the sidewalk” (EE 368). Jaywalker notes that, unlike the streets, the sidewalks lack lane lines. This detail , appears to support the protagonist’s egalitarian vision of pedestrian movement, since there are no lines to dictate or limit movement of those on foot. The sidewalk initially seems to offer Jaywalker the promise of unrestricted movement. Her encounter with the gym bag toting man, however, disrupts her vision of anarchic freedom, imposing boundaries and hierarchies of power wherein she is, once again, relegated to the margins of an already marginal space. Jaywalker’s comparison between the two vehicles serves to illustrate class differentials on several levels. The Jaguar represents economic prestige, being that vehicles of this make routinely retail for tens of thousands of dollars more

44 HOMECOMING QUEERS than the economical Chevy. Also of note is the aesthetic condition of the lesser

Chevy, which is marred and further devalued by body damage. Finally, the comparison reveals an ironic twist in the U.S. reception of the foreign or exotic. As illustrated by Jaywalker’s coupling, the otherness of a foreign sports car is often more highly valued than a domestically produced vehicle. An imported car May even serve as a Status symbol for buyers who wish to flaunt their ability to acquire exotic possessions. However, when Jaywalker struggles to succeed in the entertainment industry, all markers of her ethnic difference—especially as evidenced by physical appearance—are not valued, but largely disparaged (as minority actors struggle to pass as unmarked or Anglo) and/or meticulously controlled (when ethnic and racial minority actors are relegated to peripheral, sexualized, domesticated, or criminalized roles). Despite frequent auditions and meticulous preparations, Jaywalker’s only interactions with important players in the movie and television industries take place at Hollywood parties where she works as a cocktail waitress. Her servile role reifies the hierarchy of power that leaves Jaywalker perpetually condemned to the bottom rung of the social and professional ladder. While working at one of the parties, she speaks with a Hollywood mogul who assures her that she is “very special” and “unique,” both descriptions that Jaywalker quickly notes are “not a compliment in L.A.” (Tucson). Here, the markers of difference— Jaywalker’s Latina features—leave the mogul unimpressed.

After repeated rejections and disappointments, the deviation between dream and reality becomes too painful for Jaywalker to acknowledge. In an effort to restore her faith, she fashions an alternate idealist vision: an interpretation of her world as hospitable, safe, and just. To resist erasure by her surroundings, one of the strategies Gomez’s protagonist utilizes is linguistic reappropriation. Her adoption of the name “Jaywalker” can be interpreted as an attempt at individual agency, and even revolt, inasmuch as it positions her as an active and acting body in Los Angeles, the site of her professional and personal anonymity. Struggling to find hope amidst the brutality of Los Angeles, Jaywalker manufactures it herself, engaging in a series of delusional episodes whereby she constructs a space for individualized self-representation as an active unrestricted subject. She fashions this liberatory representational position by assuming the role of “traffic liberator”: “On every crosswalk there’s that sign with the arrow and the button that makes the light turn green. If it wasn’t for the pedestrian who would push those buttons? How would the traffic flow? That was my job and I pushed that button like this, with pride!” (EE 368). Hence, Jaywalker carves out a unique niche as a traffic-liberating pedestrian and fantasizes about her contribution to an enter-

tainment industry that in reality refuses to acknowledge her presence. Also important is the response she imagines from drivers who shout at her from their vehicles: “[they] would call out their windows to me, ‘Thank you, Lady. Thank you” (EE 368). So great is Jaywalker’s need to be appreciated and accepted within

| MOVING VIOLATIONS 45 the city, that she transforms the drivers’ actual antagonistic sentiments (likely “Fuck you!”) into the grateful expression, “Thank you!”

Jaywalker must exercise constant effort to maintain delusions of her importance and Hollywood’s subsequent gratitude and appreciation. Repeated blows to her ego and utopian Hollywood vision test her psychological fortitude, and when she can no longer shut out the painful reality of an unwelcoming entertainment industry, she eventually resorts to the appropriation of a stereotypically negative role in one of the few spaces allotted for mainstream Latino representation—the criminalized role of a jaywalker. It is vital to note that despite Jaywalker’s passionate desire to rebel against the dominant sphere, her act of resistance is ultimately limited by and manifests itself from within the same preexisting roles available for Latino representation—in this case, that of the criminalized body: Jaywalker. A subtitle appearing on Tucson promotional materials reads “A One Woman Misdemeanor Rampage,” classifying her per-

formance itself as a criminal act—a misdemeanor. Such a categorization emphasizes the subversive nature of her art, which is, by definition, in opposi-

tion to the ruling authorities, be they police, public policy, or simply mainstream representation. Yet this, the degree to which she relishes her role as a public menace, is ini-

tially overshadowed by her desire to participate in the superficially beautiful world that surrounds her. She highlights her history as a rule-following, by-thebook individual: “I used to be a law abiding citizen like the rest of you. I obeyed

every law in the books. I never littered or loitered or spit or brought outside food into the theatre. I never wore white after Labor Day. I rewound my videos. I did everything right. And then. . . I moved to Los Angeles” (Tucson). Jaywalker’s

mention of citizenship is significant in light of William V. Flores’s and Rina Benmayor’s conceptualization of citizenship as a cultural construct. Emphasizing

the creation of individual and communal agency and affirmation, Flores and Benmayor explain, “Empowerment is a process of constructing, establishing and

asserting human, social and cultural rights. These values and rights organize individual and collective identities and practices. These processes and practices are considered ‘cultural citizenship’ ” (12). Jaywalker’s initial insistence on her citizenship is both legal and cultural, as

Benmayor and Flores elucidate. She asserts her “sameness” to the members of her audience as if to reiterate her human rights and to decry the injustices done to her. After all, if she claims to be “just like” her listening public, her suffering should be that much more an outrage. Much like Flores and Benmayor’s version of cultural citizenship, which is not wholly self-determined, Jaywalker understands that she must convince her peers that she is “one of them” in order to be eligible for the rights and privileges that correspond to citizenship. In his recent discussions of ethnicity and identity within Latino and dominant Anglo communities, José Esteban Munoz posits a theory of affect in which access

46 HOMECOMING QUEERS to the privileges of normativity as well as cultural citizenship are restricted to those subjects for whom a convincing performance of “national (white middleclass) affect” is feasible (“Feeling Brown” 68). Thus a successful performance aligns itself with dominant expectations of normativity, akin to the unmarked default mode of white Anglo heterosexuality used to limit claims of universality by minority subjects examined in the previous chapter. Like Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity,> Mufioz’s contextualization of subjectivity as performance is useful in destabilizing the purported universality of any one gender, class, racial, sexual, cultural, or ethnic subjectivity, since it shifts focus from the individual to the act.® Jaywalker’s departure from her role as “law abid-

ing citizen” marks a conscious journey into the margins of society as well as a departure from the mainstream (“rest of you”) that she addresses, and from the lure of cultural citizenship held within this sector. As the protagonist discovers later, the power dynamics that control both legal and cultural citizenship within “the mainstream” are complex and—for her—ultimately elusive. We might regard this initial distancing from centralized discourse—via her criminal status—as an act of agency, since her crime spree represents a chosen marginalization; she willingly chooses to reside in the periphery, in contrast to the imposition of marginality as controlled by societal institutions of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Yet I would also extend Munoz’s model of affect to include rewarding marginalized subjects who perform alterity in such a way that it is within the limits of mainstream expectations and thus nonthreatening to dominant views of minority subjects. In this way, Jaywalker is later “rewarded” with roles in major film and television projects expressly because she concedes to perform dominant stereotypes of Latina/o identity: the maid, the criminal, and the whore. When safely conformist and/or predictably stereotypical, Hollywood powers permit such performances to appear within restrictive mainstream spheres. Similarly, Latino communities reify and reward particular performances of Latino affect in the name of universality. Caridad Svich asserts the presence of multiple mainstreams, “If the U.S. Anglo world had its expectations and perceptions of who/what a Latino is, the U.S. Latino commercial world also created its own set of expectations” (Svich and Marrero xi). In other words, the privileging of certain “affects” is present at all levels and in all communities, subverting a center/periphery model by positing multiple centers. Munoz, Svich, Benmayor, and Flores offer analysis of the mainstream power structures impacting who and what will be seen in society. Those performances of an undesirable affect for which no reward is available will enjoy significantly less visibility than privileged affects. If Jaywalker desires to be seen, she must concede to a predetermined mode of visibility: safely, predictably ethnic and/or nonthreateningly heterosexual. The price of visibility for Jaywalker is her innocence: the good girl must go bad.

“MOVING VIOLATIONS 47 Once she breaks from normalized behavior, Jaywalker’s marginal acts—her

crime spree and bitter rage—are rewarded with public attention and an everelusive visibility within Hollywood. In the midst of her “Misdemeanor Rampage,”

which includes littering, spitting, writing bad checks, helicopter pursuits, and. traffic jams, people finally begin to notice her. Predictably, it is her return to stereotypical behaviors (crime, violence, and threats) that allows her to momentarily escape the limits of her invisibility. In short, there is no room in Hollywood for a rule-following, law-abiding Latina lesbian. Jaywalker herself notes how geography necessitates a shift in her performance of Latinidad: “I did everything right. And then... I moved to Los Angeles” (Tucson). As the site of her descent into criminality, Hollywood stands as a model of approved identity archetypes, both positive and negative. The success of her representation is proportional to her degree of conformity to Hollywood’s limited expectations of her. Through the haze of her breakdown, Jaywalker comes to a painful realization that her one source of power and agency in Los Angeles—the pedestrian button that she believes liberates traffic—is but a delusion. When she moves to play her part in keeping city traffic flowing, she discovers that the button is jammed. In horror, she watches as the lights still change and traffic flows unaided by her action. She immediately connects the disillusion to her professional struggles, calling the button “a placebo placed there by the entertainment industry to make us little people think we mattered” (Tucson). Rather than a break from reality, this realization brings Jaywalker crashing back from her idealized fantasies. Wandering the streets, she now hears the angry drivers’ exclamations as they truly are, not expressions of gratitude but antipathetic expletives. Her pedestrian marginality merges with her Hollywood invisibility and Jaywalker lashes out at the cruel confines of her designation as outsider and other.

Speaking Latinidad Apart from the protagonist’s pedestrian status and ethnic difference, another element key to her portrayal of Latina/o “otherness” is the presence of linguistic difference, a marker by which many ethnic and cultural minorities are tropicalized, eroticized, excluded, and condemned. Yet language, like phenotype, has been incorporated into “universal” self-definitions offered by both majority and

ethnic minority groups. How does Gomez’s performative protagonist avoid reproducing dominant stereotypes of the exotic linguistic other? Particular deployments of language evidence Gomez’s ability to play with her audience’s expectations and subvert, satirize, dismiss, and deconstruct oversimplified perceptions of U.S. Latinos. Frequently in Gomez’s work, her protagonists assume the role of cultural or language educator/translator, offering a sort of narrated tour of her self-authorized

48 HOMECOMING QUEERS expertise in all things Latina/o. In her 2001 run of Cochina: The Twelve Days of Christmas, Gomez assists her audience with what may be unfamiliar vocabulary in her performance: “I am a filthy pig or as my people say, I am a Cochina. Some

of you studying Spanish think I am a kitchen but that is pronounced cocina. Cochina is filthy pig. Cocina is kitchen.” And again later in the same performance: “Every Christmas my Tity came to stay with us for the holidays. For those

of you just learning Spanish, Tity doesn’t mean titties. Those are tetas. Tity means aunt. Teta is a tittie. Unless they are your Tity’s tetas. But why go there?” (http://www.margagomez.com). In her role as language educator, Gomez consistently fuses markers of ethnicity and sexuality, “queering” the curriculum she then offers up to her audiences as authentic knowledge. In this situation the act

of “queering” marks language play that subverts dominant expectations and destabilizes mainstream versions of “truth.” She superficially confirms her audience’s expectation of her Spanish fluency as a Latina and interjects a secondary linguistic stereotype, that of the monolingual Anglo audience member who is ignorant to the intricacies of the Spanish language. Gomez’s protagonist then seizes the power to mediate knowledge within the theater space while simultaneously mocking static notions of language and identity. Similarly, Jaywalker satirizes monolithic views of Latino identity, playing with audience expectations of her character and voice. She begins a line cloaked

in linguistic alterity, the heavy accent of Spanish marking her discourse as stereotypically other. Yet before she arrives at the conclusion of her sentence, she switches back to a familiarly domestic New York inflection. Jaywalker exhibits a deftness of tongue, as she gleefully shifts from the voice of a recent immigrant to an all-American girl within the confines of a single sentence. Ironically, Gomez’s character leaps from the archetype of the recent immigrant to “native” New Yorker, both of which are marked by highly pronounced accents that position them distinctly within a margin/center paradigm of social power. Gomez’s fluid deployment of language is as much a performance of an entirely new tongue as it is a playful joke on her public’s stereotypical thinking. Like Natashia Lopez who previously merged “dyke” and “Chicana” to perform the

_ transition from mutual exclusivity to simultaneity in the previous chapter, Gomez’s Jaywalker invokes a language of becoming. Jaywalker’s discourse on identity clearly prioritizes an ongoing process of Latina/o subjectivity rather than the already fixed state of being.’ Throughout jaywalker, Gomez utilizes the Spanish language to complicate a universal representation of Latinidad and to subvert dominant notions of ethnic minority identity and experience in the United States. In interviews, Gomez

readily acknowledges her limited knowledge of Spanish, stripped from her during her years in an Irish Catholic grade school, yet the performer herself conforms to this notion of bilingualism as inextricably linked to Latinidad. Of her lack of cultural authenticity, she admits, “It’s no secret ... I’m a little bit

MOVING VIOLATIONS 49 assimilated. I was discouraged from speaking Spanish. My mother didn’t want me to get a suntan. So I’m definitely not ‘down.’ I can’t reel off in Spanish, and I can’t dance. So I am always trying to get more creds. I’m like the little lost gringa” (Carr). Gomez’s use of “creds” suggests a partial allegiance to an essentialist system where Spanish fluency is equated with an authenticity and author-

ity of Latina/o identity. Coupled with her light skin and poor rhythm, Gomez’s , lack of Spanish fluency leaves the artist feeling less Latina and more closely aligned with an Anglo identity. In part, Gomez’s connection between identity and language may be attributed to dominant stereotypes that collapse the categories of Latino identity and

bilingualism. Regarding the limits of mainstream Latina/o identity, Caridad Svich posits that “celebrations of ‘Latinidad,’ while certainly valid, begged for a homogenized view of Latinos, reinforcing old world taboos and structures, whether the old world in each individual case was Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico or elsewhere” (Svich and Marrero xi). In Gomez’s case, an eagerness to celebrate the Spanish language heritage of many creates a vision of Latinidad too narrow to embrace the performer’s and many others’ experiences. However, in Gomez’s performance of jaywalker, the protagonist’s inclusion of Spanish seems to represent a distinct rupture of stereotypical or universalized Latina/o representation. As part of dominant discourse, this assumption leads to the use of Spanish as a signifier of the exotic “other.” Might we then view Gomez’s scattered Spanish utterances throughout the play as a parody of stereotype? Jaywalker’s Spanish phrases, sprinkled throughout, do serve to mark her status as a “marginal” voice within stereotypical notions of an “authentic” Latino voice.? These and other audience members coming to watch a Latina/o artist may expect to see a performance of bilingualism. To what degree must Latinos performing in dominant spheres deftly wield the Spanish language in order to fashion believable representations of self? Gomez responds to these questions by mocking the superficial use of language as an essential indicator of authentic Latinidad. During Gomez’s performance, an analysis of audience response to the performer’s utterances in Spanish reveals the link between language and ethnicity.

Since an understanding of the general distribution of audience members is essential to a discussion of power dynamics and representation, I find it necessary to venture an educated conjecture as to the general makeup of spectators at the specific performance of Jaywalker from which I am working. Given the location of the performance (a university theater) and the auspices under which it was produced (a university theater performance art series), a predominantly white, educated, upper middle-class audience is assumed. And though Gomez’s performance appeared to draw many members of the local gay and lesbian communities, few audience members—regardless of sexual orientation—appeared to be men or women of color, despite the theater’s location in Tucson, a short drive from the U.S.-Mexico border, which has a significant Latino presence.?

50 HOMECOMING QUEERS Thus, although representation of gay and lesbian spectators might be slightly higher than for another similarly billed series due to Gomez’s reputation as an openly lesbian performer, the presence of an overwhelmingly Anglo audience helps to postulate a possible understanding for some of their reactions to the Spanish language referents incorporated within the piece.

Three general categories of Spanish utterances are present in the work: profanity; short, easily recognizable terms and expressions; and blatant mistranslations. The recognition associated with the first two categories is easily understood, as familiarity with both commonly heard profane utterances and simple vocabulary are quickly and/or unconsciously acquired through high school Spanish classes, popular media (films, music, television), and adver-

tising. In attendance at a performance series entitled “Voices from the Margins,” audience members seemed to use laughter in reaction to some of these simple utterances as a signifier of cultural and ethnic understanding of the performing subject’s reality. In this case, humor as both a communal activity and subversive strategy might explain the significant amusement produced by a few scattered words in Spanish. In her discussion of feminist performance, Geraldine Harris utilizes Freud’s interpretation of the power and danger of humor in order to map out the reception of female comic performance: “humour is often the return of the repressed in a socially acceptable guise, a defensive reaction that represents both a transgression of the

social order and the containment of that transgression. As such it is not impossible that some of the laughter might be at the expense of the performers and represents an implicit rejection of a woman as author(ity) or speaking subject” (51).

Gomez’s jaywalker interjects into numerous hierarchies of social order, defined not only by gender differences but also sexuality, race, and ethnicity. As the ideologies of patriarchy and xenophobia continue to define much experience of women and people of color living in the United States and beyond, it is clear that the authority of the female speaking subject is at no greater risk of omission than that of an ethnic minority or queer speaking subject. Theater scholar Marvin Carlson similarly posits the danger of a majority audience laughing at a character grounded in ethnic and linguistic difference: “An important

element of humor has always been laughter at the expense of an outsider, whose actions, assumptions, or in this case language, mark him as someone who does not understand or follow the cultural codes of the dramatist and his presumed audience and is therefore offered as a fit subject for laughter” (24). Initially, Gomez’s Jaywalker appears to conform to recognizable “cultural codes”

of Latina/o representation. Flashing her exotic linguistic “cred,” Jaywalker inflects her English with bits of Spanish and speaks (at times) with a heavy accent. She herself speaks with a language of difference. Yet when her audience laughs, is Jaywalker the jokester or the joke?

MOVING VIOLATIONS 31 Both Harris and Carlton provide critiques of humor as a potentially colonizing and/or oppressive force and urge careful consideration of the types of laughter elicited from a live audience. Gomez’s dramatic choices subvert containment of her humor by employing language play to poke fun at her audience—she is

neither mute, nor babbling buffoon, but instead a postmodern performative Medusa figure, stepping out of obscurity to forge her own discourse, to elicit laughter and to laugh in the face of her audience’s gaze. Several distinct paradigms of power and humor are present in Gomez’s audience’s responses to Spanish utterances throughout the performance. There is no punch line to words or phrases like “me gusta” (I like) or “platanos” (plantains), yet audiences

repeatedly respond enthusiastically when the performer includes them in her monologue. Ought this laughter be read, as Harris posits above, as an affront to Gomez’s artistic authority, as a woman, a Latina, or a queer? In contrast, Gomez’s slightly more complicated and less familiar structures, such as “caminando” (walking) elicit little reaction from spectators. This lack of response fur-

ther supports my reading of this othered language as both pleasurable and humorous for dominant audiences who feel they are for a moment closing the gap between minority and majority discourse, regardless of the superficiality of the exchange. The audience’s response to the incorporation of obvious mistranslations for Spanish words or the appropriation and redefinition of English words as Spanish does seem to represent the audience’s willingness to accept Gomez’s subversion of fossilized connections between Spanish fluency and “authentic” Latina/o subjectivity. Such instances allow Gomez’s protagonist to assume the role of language educator/translator, as discussed earlier, informing her audience of potentially confusing translational notes, “They call me The Jaywalker. In Spanish I am known as La Jaywalker!” (EE 367). Again, Jaywalker plays with audience expectations of her ability to translate complex ideas into her “native tongue,” guiding audience members through the exotic and intriguing twists and turns of Latinidad in action. Yet just as she begins to embrace the power of her self-appointed role as guide and authority, Jaywalker begins to reveal the limits of her linguistic expertise. The protagonist’s authority as “cultural educator” is entirely undermined by multiple glaring errors in translation. In her Tucson performance, Gomez pauses dramatically before offering her Spanish translation of “Jaywalker.” Such timing not only builds tension but also shifts the monologue into a dialogic exchange between performance and audience, since the pause suggests a discursive blank to be filled in by knowledgeable Spanish-speaking audience members. When her audience fails to translate the relatively obscure concept, Jaywalker reifies her status as language educator, confidently filling in her own blank with the Spanglish version: La Jaywalker. Here the protagonist adopts a practice common among non-Spanish speakers, the addition of the definite articles “el” or “la” to an English word as a substitute

52 HOMECOMING QUEERS for accurate translation. The confidence with which Jaywalker translates creates a discord with the blatant inaccuracy of her translation. In this paradigm, language represents both an expected marker of “other” imposed from outside and an instrument by which Jaywalker fashions humor

based upon a calculated conformity to stereotypical notions of Latinidad and linguistic alterity. She continues to serve as a flawed authority on Latinidad as she informs her public: “He was a mogul. That’s a Spanish word. It means schmuck,” and later: “La cienaga is Spanish for ‘carpet store’ I think. Because that’s all you see.” (Tucson). Jaywalker’s erroneous Spanish translations elicit robust laughter from her audience, but who or what are they laughing at? Jaywalker’s broken Spanish is the obvious response, but her language skills are certainly not the only thing being mocked here. The ambivalence produced by not knowing who is the true butt of this joke possesses the power to transgress, as Harris concludes, since this ambivalence suggests a “subversion of phallic authority, producing a jouissance and multiplicity of meanings that defies the norms of intelligibility and produce a subversive confusion in terms of the separation of subject and object” (Harris 51). In each instance Gomez plays with dominant stereotypes about her protagonist’s Spanish fluency, granting herself the authority with which to speak and translate. As her audience members listen intently, drawn in by her role as guide and authority on the issue, they are quickly reminded of the inaccuracy—not so much of Jaywalker or her flawed Spanish—but of their own ingrained expectations of this Latina subject. Why is Jaywalker’s bad translation funny? We laugh because the mistranslation is unex-

pected. We expect her to say one thing—perhaps a complicated and exotic-

sounding Spanish phrase. When her reply is far from exotic, but rather ridiculously familiar and erroneous (translating “Jaywalker” in Spanish as “La Jaywalker” or “la ciénaga” as “carpet store”), the performer trips up her audi-

ence as we follow too closely behind her. Throughout the piece, she builds her protagonist’s characterization around the claim of knowledge. She studies Hollywood, reads industry papers, and tries to conform to Los Angeles standards of beauty. By sharing her knowledge with the audience, she establishes a tenuous position as expert, wherein she extends her performative hand and requests that we, her audience, let her lead us. Yet each time Jaywalker missteps with her Spanish/English translations, she walks her trusting audience into a figurative wall. After each preposterous language lesson, Gomez moves closer to a denatu-

ralization of the connection between Latina/o identity and Spanish language proficiency. For both Anglo and Latina/o communities, the artist exposes an important blind spot in her public’s collective imaginary: Why do we expect what we expect of her?

In addition to the words spoken during Gomez’s performance, the performer’s inclusion or exclusion of an accent yields another significant layer of linguistic alterity. Both English and Spanish language utterances are shaped by

MOVING VIOLATIONS 53 the protagonist’s use of an accent that identifies her as a fluent speaker or someone acquiring a second language. The presence of an accent, whether speaking in English or Spanish, represents an additional mode of performing alterity. Accents serve as signifiers of fluency and authenticity. A native speaker possesses the ability to speak a particular language without any markers of out-

side influence or difference from the surrounding majority. A native son is linked to a place of origin by birth; a native land being the site of one’s birth; a native speaker connected to a first tongue through birth. “Native” also holds

the connotation of authenticity and authority. When an employer needs advanced language skills, she posts a request for a native speaker. The connections between nativity, breadth of knowledge, and authenticity provide a tangle of essentialist assumptions with which to contend and from which to extend when using language to perform identity. Accents function as marked modes of difference and, as such, help to define the performer’s positionality and world-

view, both of which underlie and provide structure for all spoken elements within the performance. Throughout her show, Gomez uses a speaking voice marked less by her Spanish language heritage than by her upbringing in New York City. Yet her protagonist puts on and takes off accents within the span of a single sentence. This quick-change linguistic drag show reveals Gomez’s manipulation of both

character and audience. Justifying her inability to drive in the car-obsessed city of Los Angeles—another factor of considerable marginality—Jaywalker explains, “I never learned. (In a lousy Spanish accent) Because where I’m from, in my country... Manhattan, it doesn’t matter!” (EE 368). In her Tucson perform-

ance, Gomez quickly shifts from one heavy accent to another, switching to a thick New Yorker accent as she lays claim to the urban island of Manhattan, not to a faraway tropical homeland. Playing with audience expectations of her as a Latina, Jaywalker challenges the portrayal of all Latinos as first-generation immigrants with a limited mastery of English. Her country is Manhattan and her language is English. Unique to Gomez’s performance is her play with authority, verisimilitude, and comprehensibility on all sides of a heteroglossic script. Marvin Carlson invokes Pierre Bourdieu’s heteroglossia to yield insight into the multilinguistic realms of theatrical performance—both in terms of the performer’s decision to utilize secondary languages, as well as her audience’s response to these utterances.!° When a performer chooses to include multiple languages to “authentically” signify particular modes of cultural and ethnic alterity to an audience, he or she must also grapple with varying levels of audience fluency, should audience members fail to understand multiple languages. Given the brevity of her Spanish utterances, as well as the geographical positioning of the live Tucson performance, Gomez adequately maneuvers the issue of comprehensibility. However, Carlson’s study also notes the role of heteroglossia in communicating

54 HOMECOMING QUEERS authenticity to a theatrical audience, since “surely nothing so immediately marks an outsider as representing another culture than the fact that he speaks an alien language” (Carlson 21). As a commentary on Latinidad and Hollywood

representation, the current performance necessitates a discussion of how language becomes a signifier of authentic Latina identity. When uttering “in my country” midsentence, Gomez’s protagonist offers a heavily accented immigrant narrative that suggests a translation from a primary native language (Spanish) into a secondary subsequently acquired language (English). In this way, although she employs the language of majority and power,

her use is marked by ethnic alterity (the thick Spanish accent), marking her utterance as a failed attempt to shift her positionality from margin to center. Jaywalker’s initial performance of the Spanish accent—that of one who struggles to produce the unique sounds of the English language—signals her expectation

of an audience familiar enough with heteroglossia to recognize variations of ethnic and cultural difference. Certainly, given the location of her performance, in Tucson, I will presume audience awareness of Latina/o presence in the United States as well as the difficulties of language acquisition for many immigrants. Yet the stereotype Gomez develops is short-lived since she darts in and out of a standard North American pronunciation of English with a dexterity that belies her previous portrayal of the thickly accented Latina other. In essence, an utterance that at first poses as a traditional mocking of the difference of an ethnic other quickly shape-shifts to reveal the true object of ridicule as the stereotyping majority, rather than the simplified caricature that the performer quickly discards. Her nimble linguistic play, from code-switching to accent drag, reveals the absurdity of a static notion of U.S. Latina/o identity, and of immigrant identity as a whole. Gomez’s performance posits a new relationship with marginality wherein

the category of “other” collapses as difference is both rejected and rejoiced. Gomez’s fluid performance of ethnic immigrant alterity interrupts the audience’s expectations and assumptions in the name of humor. Further, the performer’s language play shifts the focus of marginality from her body to the collective body

of audience members. Rather than narrate a tragic tale of personal struggle, Gomez’s protagonist challenges her audience by refusing to conform to this particular character type. In dispelling the relevance of this particular archetype for her own experience, Jaywalker seizes a position of power—it is she who controls the discourse in the theater, playing with language and audience alike.

Alterity in the Dominant Sphere Gomez’s protagonist initially indicates an interest in partial conformity and absorption into the entertainment industry mainstream. An aspiring actress, Jaywalker characterizes her “mainstream” dream as she visualizes her ultimate

MOVING VIOLATIONS 55 breakthrough achievement: a role as the first lesbian on the television lifeguard series Baywatch. This particular goal reveals Jaywalker’s keen understanding of mainstream limitations for subaltern subjects. She dreams of infiltrating a dominant space, yet still expresses the desire to remain partly marginal; she doesn’t simply aspire to be on Baywatch, but rather to “be the first lesbian on Baywatch” (Tucson). Thus she communicates her need to preserve this marker of marginality and individuality even as she makes her entrance into a mainstream sphere. When contrasted with the notion of “making it” in Hollywood—a universality marked by the shedding of ethnic and racial markers of difference—two distinct ideological perspectives on the center/periphery model emerge: one from the center outward, the other from the margin inward. To a subject seliidentified as part of a mainstream mass, Jennifer Lopez is marginalized by the descriptor “Puerto Rican” in front of her name and job description. An ethnic label reiterates her alterity, posing an obstacle to reaching the ultimate state

of unmarked Anglo universality: the center. In this standard model, the center is a fixed point equidistant from each of the concentric circles that surround it. Rigid in their divisions, subjects are positioned or position themselves along these circles according to their perceived degree of difference from an imagined center. For a subject to move toward the center on this model, she must discard any markers of difference in order to, as much

as possible, approximate, simulate, and/or mimic the standards of the universal center. Observe the following teleological shift: Jennifer is a working-class Puerto Rican female actor. Jennifer is a working-class Puerto Rican actor. Jennifer is a Puerto Rican actor. Jennifer is an actor. It is not until this final moment— stripped of gender, race, and class (and no doubt a good amount of clothing and color)—that Jennifer is finally deemed “universal.” Of course an amputation of identity labels alone does not a universal subject yield. Per José Esteban Munoz’s analysis, Lopez’s performance of normative affect must be Academy Award— winning in order to be accepted, not as a Puerto Rican, but simply as an actor,

shedding the markers of marginality—especially her Latinidad—in order to approach mainstream centers of power. Underlying this movement is the conversion of the label “Puerto Rican” into Suzanne Oboler’s notion of a “stigmatizing label,” since the descriptor is violently divorced from any historical, cultural, or geographical specificity and is simply interpreted as an obstacle to overcome and a mark to be erased from the superstar’s public identity (Oboler xvi). Here,

rather than stigmatizing by assuming one or more negative characteristics attributed to Puerto Ricans as a whole, the term becomes a largely negative indi-

vidual label whose mere presence alienates its referent from an unmarked mass, restricting her access to mainstream centers and limiting the work these centers allow her to produce.

56 HOMECOMING QUEERS The alternate model of center/periphery is mapped out by Gomez’s Jaywalker, who views her marginal positionality as flexible enough to move toward or even enter into a central mainstream space while concomitantly honoring her marginal subjectivity as queer, brown, and female. In essence, dominant society sees minority subjects like Lopez moving toward center, while Jaywalker envisions the center expanding outward to include her difference. Her version of “making it” complicates her journey, since she wishes to be simultaneously mainstream (visible) and marginal (different). Her desire for mainstream success also complicates notions of racial and gender representation, since she views her primary challenge as that of opening up popular conceptualizations of sexual orientation (“to be the first lesbian on Baywatch”), yet ultimately is limited not by her sexuality but rather by her ethnic and cultural identity. Throughout the performance, Jaywalker is restricted to domesticated and sexualized roles of servitude to affluent white masters, with most doors of professional opportunity appearing to be closed before a discussion of sexuality ever ensues. Still, in her idealized visualizations, Jaywalker views her sexuality as

the primary obstacle to achieving mainstream representation. She imagines Baywatch producers refusing to allow her character to “come out” as a lesbian for fear of a homophobic public backlash comparable to that directed at Ellen DeGeneres for her 1997 television “coming out.”" When her fantasy character is afforded the opportunity to play mainstream roles in spite of her ethnic and cul-

tural identification, she is limited to a heterosexual portrayal of this identity. Jaywalker’s many fantasies reveal her gradual process of self-censorship, since she begins by dreaming of a lesbian role, but quickly diverts the fantasy into a closeted nightmare. Even in her delusional imagination there exists no space for a second marginal positionality such as a sexual or gender nonconformity, and consequently she must don enormous implanted breasts and deny her desire for women in order to fit within producers’ and audiences’ expectations of a universally nonthreatening Anglo heterosexual subject/world. Faced with an excessively multiple subjectivity—at least according to mainstream standards—Jaywalker’s queer sexuality is viewed as the optimal identity to suppress, not because homosexuality is in any way more offensive or limiting

to her professional opportunities than her ethnic identity, but rather because sexuality is viewed as more easily hidden and/or denied. Though she speaks without a Spanish accent and possesses substantial U.S. cultural capital as a lifelong New Yorker, Jaywalker cannot sufficiently alter her physical appearance to

convincingly perform the default unmarked status of whiteness. Jaywalker’s desire to “make it” in Hollywood launches her into a spiral of self-denial and conformity to dominant expectations that can be likened to the social phenomenon of “passing.” Jews in Nazi Germany, light-skinned African Americans, and Mexicans and other Latinos insisting on purely white European ancestry, and even transgendered individuals, have all utilized stereotypes about race,

MOVING VIOLATIONS 57 religion, ethnicity, gender, and culture in order to escape persecution and increase social mobility and access to resources in the face of racist and sexist power structures. Tired of asserting her rights as a Latina lesbian, Jaywalker’s final descent into conformity is a last attempt to be worthy of the privileges of citizenship and humanity only accessible to mainstream (read: white, Anglo, and heterosexual) subjects. Linda Schlossberg examines the enticements of conformity and posits the practice of racial “passing” as not simply a mode of “selling out,” but of survival: “the ability to pass as white was historically the precondition for achieving and maintaining the status, at the most basic level, of being a citizen and human being... For racially marked subjects, passing can mean the difference between life and death, community and isolation, status as property and status as subjects” (Schlossberg and Sanchez 4). Given the slipperiness of sexual subjectivity—at least in terms of a visual aesthetic—“passing” carries much weight in discussions of homosexuality and citizenship. Despite what might seem to be growing tolerance for homosexuals in contemporary U.S. society, policies such as President Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military continue to encourage and reward individuals who remain silent about their sexual alterity.'"2 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick maps out the politics of queer “passing” using the discursive notion of “the closet.” She marks the secrecy of sexuality as distinct from racial or gender passing in the degree of individual discretion involved in the disclosure process (Kosofsky Sedgwick 50). Unlike language or phenotype, queer subjectivity does not deepen the color of one’s skin, does not predictably alter the shape of one’s body or the sounds rolling off one’s tongue. Queer subjects occupy the margins of all communities—racial, ethnic, gender, religious, national, cultural, and class. What does it mean, then, that Gomez’s Jaywalker succumbs to the lures of the Hollywood closet? bell hooks theorizes about the ways gender impacts a color caste system that for centuries has socialized black subjects to devalue dark skin, given the tangible privileges and freedoms afforded to light-skinned individuals. Further analyzing this system, hooks asserts that desire plays an important role in the manner through which these privileges are distributed, since black women confront standards of beauty that are blatantly racialized, from straight hair to skin color, body shape, and facial features. Given these (Caucasian) ideals, black women are excluded from or included in society’s centers of power based on their ability to approximate “whiteness” (in the form of a performance of affect, as Munoz posited earlier) and thus desirability by a white male universal subject (hooks, Outlaw Culture 174-82). For Jaywalker, as a queer Latina subject, her success even in personal fantasies is absolutely con-

tingent upon her ability to transform into the ideally sexualized woman. Her Baywatch producers will not allow her to “come out” as a lesbian on the program, preserving her potential role as the sexual object of male heterosexual desire. To underline this status for the program’s viewing public, Jaywalker

58 HOMECOMING QUEERS imagines the show’s executives requiring her to alter her body in order to conform to mainstream standards of beauty, including oversized breasts and starvation diets meant to reproduce the infantilized body of a young girl. In contrast to this dismal fantasy, Jaywalker’s reality is even less hopeful, since she doesnot ever have the opportunity to be represented in a mainstream venue, assimilated or otherwise. She is limited to predictable representations of minority subjectivity, as either overtly sexualized, criminalized, or domesticated. In this way, the structures of power ruling Hollywood function as a modern-

day colonial system controlling all available representations and modes of being. When minority visibility depends upon mainstream approval, only the representations that lend support to reigning ideologies emerge. The impact of a dominant sector’s ideological paradigms upon a marginalized community’s sense of self manifests as a sense of “objecthood” that marks the colonized subject. Frantz Fanon describes this experience of becoming fixed by the objectification of an external imperial gaze: “Just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self” (Fanon 109). Therefore, the resulting subjectivity is defined as much as restrained by its deferral to dominant perceptions of the subaltern figure. Within Gomez’s performative work on minority representation, she both

grapples with the limitations of such identity politics as well as attempts to problematize the minimal freedoms afforded to minorities for mainstream representation. Her insistence on positive Latina roles and her dream to come out as a lesbian on a television program that presents itself as a bastion of mainstream heterosexuality stand as Jaywalker’s valiant efforts to combat the fixity described earlier by Fanon. She fantasizes of a representation that she will shape in her own likeness a queer Latina with multiple positionalities and a dynamic

sense of self.

Power and the Subversion of Stereotype Throughout the performance, jaywalker’s protagonist shifts along a continuum of reactionary tactics. Though at times Jaywalker appears distraught over her

inability to penetrate dominant cultural domains, in other moments such as her eventual descent into the depths of criminality and despair, she displays a militant desire to distance herself from as well as actively dismantle the

machinery of mainstream society. Citing her cultural and ethnic pride, | Jaywalker adamantly resists stereotypical portrayals of Latinas in mainstream media productions, She explains to her newly hired agents at TBA (The Big Agency): “It’s really important that you never send me out on Latina maid roles.

MOVING VIOLATIONS 59 ‘Cause that’s a stereotype. Or Latina hooker roles. Or that occasional Latina maid hooker role: she’s a maid, she’s a hooker, she’s Latina. No. Pass me by. Because I’m a proud Latina and I always will be” (Tucson). Yet despite her professional resolutions, Jaywalker finds herself conceding to the portrayal of one

such stereotypical Latina maid role in a movie-of-the-week, as her reasoning becomes clouded by her fondness for and desire to work with the film’s starring actress, Kathleen Turner. Jaywalker explains her admiration for the actress citing her obsession with a scene depicting a particular sexual act between Turner

and a male costar. She enthusiastically recounts the star’s inspirational performance in the film Body Heat: “|It] was the first film I ever saw anybody get it from behind! And now that’s all I require from a film” (Tucson). Although this encounter conforms to views of a heterosexist mainstream majority (with one female and one male participant), the position itself, with the male subject penetrating the female from behind suggests, at least for Jaywalker, a passion more animalistic than civilized. Additionally, Jaywalker’s reference restricts itself to a description of the positioning of the two bodies, avoiding any clarification of

either vaginal or anal intercourse. This textual omission leaves the utterance open to interpretation as sodomy, a potentially subversive reading of both the social and sexual politics of Jaywalker’s meeting with Turner.

Once at the audition, Jaywalker finds herself uttering lines for her selfprofessed idol and professional muse in broken and heavily accented English. She is asked to pick up a feather duster and clean Turner’s office so as to lend more impact to her reading of the lines. Turner is so pleased with Jaywalker’s performance that she parades her around the office requesting further readings of the lines accompanied by an assortment of additional domestic tasks such as

vacuuming and laundry. Once all the chores are completed, Turner finally reveals to the protagonist her intention to “go a different way” with the role, and

Jaywalker is launched into a desperate spiral of self-hatred as she simultane| ously beats herself while shrieking, “Bad actress! You suck! You suck!... You’re lousy! God I hate you! I hate me! Me! I hate me! Oh god I’m bad. I’m bad!!!” (Tucson). Convinced that a more helpless and childlike voice might have won her the part, Jaywalker begins to fantasize about Turner’s reaction with a more idealized outcome: “[as Turner] Oh! Fabulous darling! You really nailed it. You really got inside her [bending over suggestively with backside toward audience}. Let’s

try something. Go get the big feather duster over there. I want you to do your lines while you put that big feather duster up in me. Just improvise. Go crazy! I think you can go deeper with your part [fades into a series of passionate moans|”

(Tucson). Tracing the obsession with both Turner and the act of penetration/ sodomy, we see that it emerges first as an act of heterosexuality in the mainstream film Body Heat, yet the act itself is taboo perhaps in part because of its associations with acts of male homosexuality. By introducing this controversial act now, as a trope of lesbian sexuality and eroticism, Gomez completes

60 HOMECOMING QUEERS a trinity of sodomitic sexual pleasure that spans sexual and gender identities alike, perhaps in an attempt to expand notions of sexuality that tend to be limited to and defined by sexual acts. However, further analysis of the interaction between Turner and Jaywalker

reveals a more important interpretation based on dynamics of power and oppression. Flipping the power dynamics from the previous session, Jaywalker

imagines a sexual encounter between herself and Turner, with the latter imploring Jaywalker to penetrate her with a feather duster, the very instrument with which Turner delivers Jaywalker’s humiliation during the original audi-

tion. Though this sexual act comes as a request on Turner’s part, it must be noted that this scenario occurs only as an imagined fantasy of Gomez’s desperate protagonist. Although Jaywalker is clearly smitten with Turner, after being sent reeling by Turner’s exploitation and subsequent rejection, the fantasy exchange seems more a reversal of an oppressive situation than an act of desire or seduction. The fact that Jaywalker’s fantasy manifests itself in such a graphically sexual manner is not surprising since her need to be chosen for the role in Turner’s film seems reversed by this sex act. In the audition Turner rejects Jaywalker for the role, yet in this fantasy Turner’s desire for her is palpable and immediately acted upon. Of key significance to the exchange is the object with which Jaywalker imagines

penetrating Turner, the same feather duster, a symbol of domesticity and subservience, with which she was placed into a position of inferiority.

Disregarding her personal and professional standards to audition for this Latina maid role, the protagonist falls prey to the very stereotyping she had hoped to avoid for her characters. Given the underlying politics of Octavio Paz’s

chingo6n/chingada paradigm, this penetrator/penetrated situation suggests itself as a mapping of the power dynamics and oppression at play within Hollywood. As Paz views it, the ching6n is epitomized by the violent macho, ripping open the world around him with devilish glee. The feminine figure in this heterosexist paradigm is the object to be torn into by the macho, an act of wide-reaching signification represented by the male’s penetration of his partner. Passivity and openness in the female subject are (im)balanced by connotations of a closed and active male (Paz 77-79). The repercussions of this dynamic map onto male subjectivity a sense of the Spanish colonizer’s violence, power,

and action, while the status of traitor and enemy are attached to the female “Malinchista” subjectivity. This affiliation with La Malinche has grave consequences, as seen in Paz’s subsequent understanding of Mexican female identity, “The Chingada’s passivity causes her to lose her identity. . . She loses her name; she is no one; she disappears into nothingness; she is nothingness. And yet she is the cruel incarnation of the feminine condition (85-86).” Paz further extends his portrayal of an inevitable female nothingness and questions the possibility of escape from

MOVING VIOLATIONS 61 this system, noting “women are imprisoned in the image masculinist society has imposed on them; therefore, if they attempt a free choice it must be a kind of jail break... If she dares love, if she dares be herself, she has to destroy the image in which the world has imprisoned her (198).” In Jaywalker’s hysterical reactionary fantasy, she inverts these positions of power represented not by male and female, but purely chingada and chingon, extracting the heterosexist element of gender subordination from Paz’s original paradigm. In response to the stereotypical (or nonexistent) representations in which she finds herself imprisoned, Jaywalker revolts by locating herself in a position of dominance over Turner and the restrictive power she holds as a guard to the gates of mainstream representation. Yet this scene moves beyond Paz’s politics of penetration, focusing on the dynamics of female interaction, and this maid’s revenge is unquestionably queer.

Voices from the Margins I witnessed a live staging of Gomez’s jaywalker on March 24, 2000, as part of a

performance art series organized by the University of Arizona that promised “fresh and daring perspectives from the boundaries of our culture” (University of Arizona press release). The event proudly and unquestioningly called itself “Voices from the Margins: A Singular Festival of Uncommon Artists.” The series’ - roster comprised two white men, a white lesbian, and Gomez. In a panel preceding the week of performances, Gomez was the sole artist of the four to address the significance of the event’s title with some sarcasm. Two evenings later, dur-

ing the first of her two performances, Gomez said to the audience, “I bet some of you, in your heart of hearts, wish that it was Jennifer Lopez here tonight instead of me. But she’s not in the margins!” Gomez clearly grasps the unspoken contract between Latina/o artists and mainstream popularity, acknowledging the problematic nature of both dominant society’s embracing of Jennifer Lopez as a “mainstream” artist and her own presence amongst a series of “marginal voices.” With both extremes idealized, artists like Gomez find ample reason to reflect upon society’s manipulation and categorization of Latina/o and other “ethnic” artists and their voices. The title of Gomez’s performance references a subject jaywalker, walking outside the lines, challenging rules, and creating general traffic mayhem. The border that delineates the end of “mainstream” and the beginning of “marginal” is the line Gomez’s protagonist straddles as she valiantly strives to penetrate Hollywood’s tightly policed boundaries. Foundational border scholar Gloria Anzaldtia describes a border as set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A bor-

derland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional

62 HOMECOMING QUEERS residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live

here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who

cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.” (Borderlands 25)

Jaywalker’s desire to move out of the margins represents a challenge to the “us and them” mentality that Anzaldua cites as giving life and shape to the border as a geographical and political phenomenon. In effect, Anzaldta depicts border inhabitants as cultural jaywalkers: “los atravesados” and “those who cross over.”

Gomez’s Jaywalker is then, by definition, a border inhabitant, not simply because she attempts to cross the limits of one space or another, but because she symbolizes a subjectivity neither space can contain. Her subjectivity is in excess of those frames offered up by traditional identity politics and main-

stream representation. And just as the authors and artists in last chapter pushed at the limits of language in order to speak these excesses of being, Jaywalker must envision a new sitio y lengua in order to perform her jaywalking, border-crossing subjectivity.

Born to Play Jennifer Lopez Jaywalker underlines the importance of space for a successful breakthrough into Hollywood as she despairs, “If only [they] knew what kind of career I would have if it wasn’t for Jennifer Lopez. I couldn’t get any work. Jennifer Lopez was getting all my parts. You don’t know what it’s like. It’s always ‘Jennifer, Jennifer,

Jennifer!’ Like she’s the only Latino in the universe. Oh, no. We got the chihuahua, too” (Tucson). With this, the performance repositions mainstream tokenism of Latina representation as a satirical “catfight” between Jaywalker and J-Lo, perhaps the most visible ambassador of the recent Latino cultural breakthrough. Mainstream tokenizing of Latino subjects limits representation to a specifically controlled set of characteristics—most often sexualized for women, criminalized for men, superficially or conservatively political, and always acceptably, colorfully, commercially ethnic. Gomez’s Hollywood focus in jaywalker is especially revealing given the role that Lopez has come to play as of late within mainstream popular culture as the ultimate Latina representative. Jaywalker laments

the wealth of opportunity that Jennifer Lopez has enjoyed at her expense. Gomez’s own experiences attempting to penetrate the limits of mainstream representation illustrate the salience of her protagonist’s claims about the paucity of roles for Latinas in mainstream spheres such as television, film, and music industries.

MOVING VIOLATIONS 63 Loosely based on her actual accounts as an aspiring actor in Hollywood, jaywalker materializes from Gomez’s previous searches for work in mainstream venues of the entertainment industry. In 1998 she laments the lack of opportunities, explaining, “There aren’t many parts for Latinas. That’s the first thing people notice [about mel]. It’s not like I have lesbian written on my forehead, but Latina—there’s not that many parts for us, and they’re all going to Chihuahuas. All I have to say is ‘Yo quiero sitcom.’ ”'5 Again, Gomez maps the spatiality of her multiple marginalizations. Based on pure aesthetics, her Latina identity poses more of a challenge to universality than does her passable queer status. Gomez’s

mainstream breakthrough film came in 1995 with a supporting role in Barry Levinison’s $85 million sci-fi thriller Sphere. In the film Gomez plays one of a small group of scientists and technicians hired to investigate a strange object deep beneath the ocean’s surface. Her character, the ethnically ambiguous Jane Edmunds, specializes in computer technology, providing vital data for the crew’s research missions. Gomez recounts an additional responsibility her character happily fulfills: “she serves muffins to the scientists. She says not a word,

gently laying the plate down in front of Dustin Hoffman as he expounds on physics.” Although her character is passively accepting of her domestic role, on her Web site the actress offers an outraged challenge, “Why? Why would a computer expert be serving muffins? The military can afford to hire a cook. So can Warner Brothers. What happened to the cook? Maybe Jane Edmunds has more than muffins up her sleeve” (http://www.margagomez.com). In the film, Gomez and her fellow submarine technician, played by Queen Latifah, each die brutal deaths in the first half of the film, while costars Sharon Stone and Dustin Hoffman, along with the only African American male character in the film, played by Samuel L. Jackson, survive to the concluding scene. Like the servant role she was denied in the Kathleen Turner film earlier, Gomez’s portrayal of Edmunds, the muffin-serving technofile, illustrates the limits of mainstream Latina representation, confined to superficial, domestic, peripheral, and victimized roles. Gomez’s portrayal of “The Jennifer Conundrum” of Latina representation possesses subversive potential because of Jaywalker’s ability—whether due to a slight mental instability or perhaps an even shrewder sense of reality than most around her—to decode the prefabricated role that Lopez occupies in Hollywood and to apply this same theory of fabrication to her own performance and life experience. Jaywalker questions both Lopez’s authenticity and dominant audiences’ crazed fanaticism for her by positioning herself as the victim of Lopez’s deceit: “Let me tell you something about Miss Lopez. You know how she got where she is? She stole my look .. . I had the big ass first” (EE 369). Jaywalker’s treatment of stereotypes, and the assimilationist mentality that drives a subject to conform to such representational limitations, continues with a discussion of Jennifer Lopez and dominant characterizations of a homogenized

64 HOMECOMING QUEERS Latino identity. Jaywalker’s claim that “Jennifer stole my look” problematizes the notion of a universalized Latina subject by positioning Lopez’s image as performance rather than essence. All the characteristics perceived as representa-

tive of Jennifer Lopez’s identity (a checklist of attributes that mainstream audiences have come to situate as authentic symbols of Latinidad: salsa rhythms, sex appeal, feminine voluptuousness) Jaywalker deems stolen prop-

erty. These traits are portrayed as imitable traits not representative of any essence of being. Admittedly, Gomez structures the declaration of thievery with enormous comic hyperbole, yet the underlying assertion is clear. Gomez’s performance of this dispute stages a literal embodiment of the figurative battle between essentialist and constructionist modes of identity formation. Where Jennifer Lopez represents the essence of Latina subjectivity, Jaywalker’s description of identity as stolen property, much like an article of clothing to be put on or taken off, underlies her constructionist view of essence as historically and socially informed. Jaywalker furthers this disavowal of the list of widely embraced

stereotypical traits that comprise a dominant understanding of Latina/o essence as she professes her desire to open an alternative to Lopez’s Los Angeles

nightclub, the Conga Room. In contrast, Gomez’s proposed club, the Cono Room, will feature none of the Conga Room’s predictable Latino music and dancing and will instead showcase “Latino cursing and a full bar” (EE 370). Deftly moving from one mainstream representation to another, Jaywalker takes aim at the instabilities of such stereotypical portrayals as well as the public’s general eagerness to consume such images. This homogenizing tendency is evident not only in the static and generalized representations of Latinidad, but also in Latina/o subjects’ willingness to conform to such limits in exchange for increased visibility. Such rewards for conformity serve to both increase and limit Latina/o representation. In particular, Gomez’s use of corporeality performs a challenge to the limits

of stereotype. In addition to Jaywalker’s look, she also claims to have been robbed of her physicality—her unique movements and manera de ser: “She stole

my moves too. When you watch Selena you’re watching me” (369). Here Jaywalker refers to Chicana singer and cultural icon Selena Quintanilla, whom Lopez played in Gregory Nava’s 1997 biopic. The three lives, Lopez, Quintanilla, and Jaywalker, intersect at what Jaywalker views as the single available space for Latina representation. She posits herself as the original and authentic Latina, then layers Lopez’s unauthorized imitation and Lopez’s portrayal of Selena. A Texas-born Chicana and New York—born Puerto Rican represent mere performances for Jaywalker, who claims both as her original intellectual/identity property. Such a merging subsumes Latina diversity into a framework of difference as sameness. Ultimately, an Anglo dominant heteronormative Hollywood reduces all Latina difference—from national origin, linguistic, class, sexual, or racial distinctions to a singular performance of marketable alterity.

MOVING VIOLATIONS 65 Eventually Jaywalker observes a shift in Hollywood focus during the touted “Week of the Latino,” when the Big Agency affords her the opportunity to star in a mainstream sitcom called Amigos (a Latino spin-off of the popular program Friends). Yet despite this professional opportunity, the protagonist continues to

struggle with the limited space allotted to her for character development as a Latina. During what should seemingly be her opportunity to enjoy a wealth of professional roles and characters (at least for seven days), her breakthrough role on Amigos continues to illustrate a limited range of Latino roles since the only outlet opened by this “Week of the Latino” is a Latino version of an already

existing framework. Even Jaywalker’s role on Amigos, “the Latina Jennifer Aniston part—Rrrraquel” is a Latinized version of the Friends character Rachel (EE 370). Rachel’s girl-next-door role takes on an exotic flare with the exaggeratedly trilled Spanish pronunciation of her Amigos counterpart’s name, signifying an acceptable and limited performance of Latina difference within the familiar sameness of the Friends template. Although her role as Raquel affords representation to Latinas in a mainstream venue, Jaywalker’s contribution to Hollywood is destined to emerge devoid of depth or originality. This dominant celebration of Latinidad—much like Jennifer Lopez’s massive success in mainstream music ,

and films—suggests what Graham Huggan calls “boutique multiculturalism,”

where “the emphasis on spectacle and a commodified appreciation for the cultural other occlude the underlying political mechanisms through which more ‘traditional’ racial/ethnic hierarchies are preserved” (Huggan 153). Just like Jaywalker’s previous close encounters with dominant spheres, “The Week of the Latino” affords visible Latina/o representation only as preexisting models of nonthreatening, safely othered, colorfully entertaining Latina/o exotics.

As the performance closes, a tragic accident snatches Lopez from the heights of success, consequently opening a single space for one more Latina to breakthrough to mainstream crossover success. Just as Hollywood abandons Amigos and quickly switches its focus of the week from Latinos to Lithuanians, Jaywalker receives the call of her dreams and is asked to take Lopez’s place in the mainstream spotlight. Still, the opportunity comes at significant cost to her individuality and artistic freedom: She will not play herself. She must become

Jennifer Lopez. Jaywalker, then, is not merely the token Hollywood Latina replacement, but specifically the token Jennifer Lopez replacement. With mounting rejection and perpetual unemployment looming, the desperate actress reconsiders her earlier animosity toward Lopez. The protagonist’s clos-

ing lines illustrate the ease with which she succumbs to this trap of popular representation: “Yes of course I’m available. Of course I can do it. Iwas born to play Jennifer Lopez!” (Tucson). Later, as she directs paramedics to Jennifer’s accident

scene, she reveals, “Don’t worry. You’ll find her [Lopez]. She’s not going anywhere. But I am!” (Tucson). Despite her mental instability, Gomez’s protagonist recognizes the limits of her ascent as she stands over Lopez’s injured body and

66 HOMECOMING QUEERS proudly assures her agent that she was “born to play Jennifer Lopez.” With this acknowledgement, Jaywalker accepts the repercussions of token Latina representation, agreeing to play a role as a Jennifer Lopez replacement, conceding that there is no alternative space available for her to represent herself.

Jennifer Lopez occupies a particularly essential space in mainstream Latina/o representation. A brief glance at contemporary television offerings confirms the singularity of Lopez’s image in the United States’ popular imaginary. On May 5, 2000—the same year Gomez’s jaywalker was featured at the University of Arizona—daytime talk show host Ricki Lake offered a tribute to all things Latino in honor of Cinco de Mayo. In addition to salsa competitions and

topless male runway performances, the show featured a competition they dubbed “Jennifer Lopez Wannabes.” Female contestants emerged with their faces obscured by life-sized cutouts of Lopez’s face from a variety of film roles and competed to determine who most closely approximated Lopez’s quintessential Latina aesthetic. Both this performance and Gomez’s jaywalker reveal how space for the launching of Latina voices is restricted to the single slot that Jennifer Lopez occupies. In the case of the talk show contestants advanced by mimicking the idealized Jennifer Lopez. In jaywalker, Hollywood allows Jaywalker to advance only after Lopez is incapacitated, and even then the only available role continues to be for a portrayal of “Jennifer Lopez-ness.” Gomez’s performance does not stop at a depiction of stereotypified essence or a confirmation of a homogeneous Latina subject. Rather, it offers a protagonist who actively questions the

confines of mainstream representation, staging the very subjectivity that is deemed impossible or invisible in her experience of Hollywood. With her performance, Gomez moves toward un sitio y una lengua to make the invisible visible and the impossible possible, staging queer Latina subjectivity as both active and central to a self-authorized representation. The performance ends with Jennifer Lopez lying stricken in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard while the gleefully deranged Jaywalker skips off to replace the star at a record store signing event. While brutal, Gomez’s performance

epitomizes the art of space-making as a deconstructive weapon—since the heartbreaking story exposes the dynamics of Hollywood’s attempts to control difference. Her work also provides audience members with the tools to take apart superficial images of Latinos offered in dominant spheres and urges them to question the politics of a minority visibility that requires the invisibility of a majority of the community’s members. Gomez’s art is the weapon with which she, and then her audience, both disprove and dismantle existing images and the structures and systems that produce them. Despite this dark close to the show, Gomez’s point is clear. In the struggle to represent and see oneself represented among dominant spheres, opportunities are few, and the dynamics of the mainstream seem to ensure that available

MOVING VIOLATIONS 67 images will conform to a dominant recipe for “authentic” minority reception. As an openly lesbian artist, Gomez’s artistic self-reflection must necessarily confront dominant institutions of homophobia and heteronormativity, as well as racism and sexism, whereby her subjectivity and work are deemed concomitantly marginal. Her performances of social, cultural, ethnic, and sexual alterity further stage and complicate notions of this marginalized categorization while

continuing to produce meaning under this very framework of difference. jaywalker is not unique, however, in creating a space for the performance of such marginalized voices. Instead, the significance of this performance piece and of Gomez as an artist lies in her willingness to confront these paradigms of difference and positionality in order to challenge their relevance within her work and experience.

4 The Birdy and the Bees Queer Chicana Girlhood in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings

| have to tell you what | need from God. | have to change into a boy. This

is what | want and it’s not an easy thing to ask for... This wish [is] what | want for myself. —Carla Trujillo, What Night Brings

Marci is a girl who wants to be a boy so she can be in love with a girl. She introduces her plight with the above declaration while nightly imploring to God, Baby Jesus, and the Virgin Mary to grant her wish of bodily conversion. At different points along the narrative road that Carla Trujillo paves in her 2003 debut novel, What Night Brings, the book’s eleven-year-old Chicana protagonist Marci Cruz constructs a positionality that enables her to shift from an initial identification as transgendered to a full acceptance of both her female body and

her unnamed homoerotic attractions. Despite this layered representation of subjectivity, Marci’s ultimate struggle is to reconcile the relationships between her physical body, her gendered behavior, and her sexual desires. She dreams of acquiring a penis with which she may authorize her physical attraction to other girls. The primary motivation behind this transformation lies in Marci’s wish to express heteronormative desire for female partners. Marci dreams and prays for a male body replete with power, agency, and freedom to act upon her desires. Yet in spite of Marci’s desperate pleas for a penis, she fails to exhibit other key components of a transgendered or transsexual incompatibility with her own female body. Given the primary impetus of sexual desire rather than corporeal incongruity, when does this young protagonist’s vision of transgendered identity shift toward an acceptance of queer or lesbian identity? How does Marci’s

ethnic identity intersect with her self-definition as a sexual and gendered subject? How is Marci’s experience as a queer Chicana subject impeded by her lack of knowledge and access to communities of affinity who share her sense 68

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 69 of difference from social norms? How does Trujillo’s novel put flesh to historian and novelist Emma Pérez’s theory of un sitio y una lengua?

Throughout her career Carla Trujillo has repeatedly repositioned herself on the theorized/theorizing continuum as a novelist, administrator, student, editor, and scholar. Her contribution to the body of theory on queer Chicana subjectivity is both prolific and profound. The editor and scholar behind two of the most groundbreaking publications on Chicana lesbian identity, Trujillo has inspired over a decade of critical engagement with her anthologized collections Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About and Living Chicana

Theory. Her collective and individual publications have helped to initiate important critical conversations about the role of gender, sexuality, patriarchy,

and homophobia in Chicana and Chicano culture and community. Her first novel, What Night Brings, was released to significant critical acclaim and appreClative reception from popular and academic audiences alike.! Growing up in an industrial town in northern California in the 1960s, the novel’s protagonist, Marci Cruz, copes with daily emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her father. When she is not protecting herself from her father’s rage and flying fists, Marci wages a heart-wrenching battle against her own physical body, struggling to understand her gendered and sexual self. Her family includes a violent but emotionally vulnerable father, a passive and enabling mother, and their two young daughters: the determined, witty, resourceful, and wise-for-herage Marci and her younger sister, Corin, a shell of a girl who has become numb and emotionally distant due to abuse and neglect. As the novel’s central charac-

ter, Marci narrates the sisters’ struggles for immediate survival and ultimate freedom from their father’s rage and mother’s blind love for her husband. In addition to the physical and emotional abuse inflicted by her parents, the novel details Marci’s attempts to understand the complexities of her own developing gender and sexual identities. As an adolescent, Marci begins to experience feelings of romantic desire, yet the objects of her attraction are girls and women, leading her to grapple with the limits of her understanding of female desire and sexuality alongside her actively engaged sense of spirituality. What Night Brings traces a young queer girl’s path to possibility as she fights to challenge the violence, silences, and secrecy surrounding sexuality and difference. Trujillo’s text engages in the subversion of norms of sex, gender, and sexuality through the lens of a queer Chicana girlhood. In this context, the invocation of queer subjectivity is not meant as a static reference to any particular sexual practice or classification or to the sex or gender of the subjects. Instead,

as Annamarie Jagose affirms, the broad nonspecificity of the term presents an inclusive shelter for subjects seeking a space of possibilities rather than restrictive definitions Jagose 76).? Since Marci struggles with multiple intersec-

tions of gender and sexuality, I believe the broadness of queer speaks more clearly to her experience.

70 HOMECOMING QUEERS | Theorizing Queer Chicana Space and Language The novel details Marci’s survival strategies as the child constructs both a space and a language in which to speak her uniquely queer Chicana self. Pérez’s model of un sitio y una lengua—a space and language—lays the critical groundwork for

women of color and lesbians of color to gather and engender communities of support and safety from which to mobilize and speak their own unique gendered, racialized, classed, and sexual subjectivities independent from tokenized inclusion in dominantly male, heterosexual, Euro-American, and middle-class spheres. Pérez’s vision of space and language grounds itself in a rejection of colonialist oppressions and in the valuing of the words and worlds of women of color. While Pérez acknowledges the potential for a separatist reading of her model, she offers the contrastingly nuanced interpretation of her paradigm’s positive, selfaffirming, and survivalist slant. She states in explication of her framework “call

me a separatist, but to me this is not about separatism. It is about survival. I think of myself as one who must separate to my space and language of women to revitalize, to nurture and be nurtured” (“Sexuality and Discourse” 178). I will not argue that Marci employs Pérez’s sitio y lengua in order to “find herself” or to reassemble her fragmented identities. As Deena Gonzalez reminds us, “It is not true that [Chicanas] do not know who we are. If anything, we should suffer

the accusation that we know too much who we are, have too much identity” (“Chicana Identity Matters” 43). Trujillo’s protagonist is not searching for herself as much as she is searching for the language and community that will speak her experience of sexual, gendered, and racialized difference.3 An invocation of Chela Sandoval’s coalitional politics enables Marci to form a sense of community through her “connections-by-affinity” and “proximitiesof-being” that link her to other queer subjects in spite of their unique and often dramatically distinct versions of queer identity (“Dissident Globalizations” 20).

Because the notion of affinity and proximity amongst queer subjects has the potential to cover a wide range of gendered, sexual, cultural, class, and racial differences from a heterosexual and patriarchal norm, the concept of familiar alterity, or unity in difference, builds upon Sandoval’s coalitional frameworks. Yet rather than focus on the power of sameness to draw together groups of people, familiar alterity emphasizes the role of shared (although perhaps quite unique) experiences of difference from a default norm in the development and bonding of queer communities. Throughout the majority of the novel, Marci fails to locate subjects who share a similar sense of difference as she experiences it. Marci knows no other girls who pray to be transformed into boys. Her expo-

sure to media imagery appears wholly heteronormative. Even with extended family members who deviate from a clear heterosexual norm or experience a bodily transformation from male to female, Marci expresses a lack of affinity with these individuals. However, her experience of alienation defines Marci’s

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 71 sitio in difference from a gendered and sexual norm, aligning her with other alienated subjects. Such connections eventually begin to afford her character a safe and supportive space from which to continue to explore issues of gender, sexuality, culture, and self. One of the key concepts I emphasize in Trujillo’s narrative strategy of sub-

version is the notion of the productive potential of interstitial social spaces.4 In an effort to negotiate her difference, Marci must confront her alienation from existing norms of gender and sexuality. Gloria Anzaldta’s brilliantly poetic elucidation of mestiza consciousness calls for a “massive uprooting of dualistic thinking” and emerges from a space of multiple intersections that present the

possibility of new modes of being. Though the knowledge of this possibility eludes Marci for the majority of the novel, her journey toward self-definition parallels Anzalduia’s mestiza consciousness: “This assembly is not one where severed or separated pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness—and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from the continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm” (Anzaldua, Borderlands 79-80). In much of the novel Marci tries to conform to rigid paradigms of sexuality and gender. She accepts a unitary version of sexuality wherein her desires for girls may only be

normalized within a male body. Eventually she reconciles these desires within her female body and invokes the in-between state of Anzaldtia’s mestiza consciousness. Ultimately, Marci’s journey necessitates that she establish a “third element” of self wherein a queer or lesbian identity may be possible.® For Anzaldua, intersectionalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality do not simply inspire another rigidly defined category of being, but rather a new way of thinking about the insufficiencies of all previous categorizations. Anzaldtia’s

duality-rejecting mestiza consciousness alongside Pérez’s theorization of autochthonous spaces and languages envisioned and enacted by queer women of color connects directly to individual subjectivity and especially the fashion-

ing of alternative modes of gendered, sexual, cultural, and racial identity outside the confines and prescribed norms of heterosexist patriarchal and racist societies. In this case, then, the critical dialogue between Anzaldtia and Pérez swirls around the birth of a new consciousness that insists on moving beyond the hybridity of a few components and into the simultaneity of myriad multiplicities. In addition to moving beyond binary visions of being, scholarship on queer Chicana subjectivity insists on the recognition, respect, and naming of these in-between spaces of creative and political productivity. Natashia L6pez’s poetic contribution, “Trying to Be Dyke and Chicana,” is included in an earlier publication by Carla Trujillo, the anthology Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers

72 HOMECOMING QUEERS Warned Us About (Lopez 84). Lopez uses the first half of the piece to develop the

notion both of physical and emotional distance between her sexual and cultural/ethnic selves. This division comes not as a result of her own fragmented subjectivity, but rather from society’s inability to imagine the simultaneity of her experience as a queer Chicana. Tired of these rigid separations, L6pez’s poem performs a union of “dyke” and “Chicana” into “Chyk-ana,” transforming

two into one, lending wholeness, permanence, and specific language to her experience and existence as a queer Chicana. Similarly, Marci attempts to negotiate her sense of psychological chaos caused by her inability to unite her many

different subjectivities—gendered, sexual, racialized—into one positive and coherent conceptualization of self. Marci’s identities are shaped by excess and insufficiency: too dark to be beautiful, too tough for a girl, the wrong body for a boy, and the wrong desires for a girl. She also studies the usefulness and inade-

quacies of the language employed by adults in her family and community to describe differences of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. From labels like “queer” to the intricacies of racial and ethnic identity, Marci tirelessly investigates the power and possibilities of the language that surrounds her. Church, school, and the library become sites of discovery as her detective work reveals traces of linguistic meaning in adult dialogues. Despite the nuns’, priests’ and her parents’

unwillingness to provide answers to Marci’s questions, she takes charge of her own learning and reclaims these places as sites of intellectual discovery. In these ways, the novel provides the flesh atop the skeletal frame of Pérez’s paradigm of un sitio y una lengua. The novel’s protagonist and narrator reveals the vital connection between space and language, as Marci’s hostile environments at school, home, and church threaten to silence her voice as an emerging queer Chicana subject. Pérez’s sitio is marked by a “rejection of colonial ideology” and “capitalist patriarchy,” much the same way Marci’s experience of sex-

ual and gendered difference resists the norms of heterosexism and male domination (“Sexuality and Discourse’ 161). Trujillo’s novel offers a map of one child’s journey to self-discovery, beginning first with the need for a safe space in the face of threatening male sociosexual and colonial powers, then a grappling with the language of ethnic, gender, and sexual alterity, and finally ending with Marci’s inclusion into various communities or sitios defined by shared experiences of difference and oppression.

Invisibilities of Victimization Marci’s day-to-day existence is burdened by the unrealistic expectations and painful consequences of both family and community. She struggles to be seen and acknowledged by the world around her as she works to alter her impossible body to match the desires she is unwilling to relinquish. As an abused child, Marci offers heartbreaking accounts of her victimization by her out-of-control

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 73 father. The novel details the horrors of the girls’ torture at the hands of their father. Marci describes a constant threat of physical violence: “nothing is as scary as my dad getting mad. I can’t remember the first time he hit me, only the sound of mad feet” (Trujillo, What Night Brings 11). Many of the happiest of

moments in Marci’s life—Christmas vacation, Easter, a spaghetti feed at the , church, and payday—are marred by her father’s explosive temper. Marci’s victimization brings focus to her bodily condition, in terms of both her physical pain and her narration of the abuse—less through words than sensory experi-

ences like the sound of angry footsteps or the force of a leather belt yanked angrily from her father’s pants. The physical and emotional violence she endures creates a spatial void, as home and family are characterized as hostile and unpredictable places for her to exist. The abuse transforms Marci’s childhood home into a space of constant threat. She expresses a clear understanding of the myriad ways abuse shapes her daily existence and personality: “I’d be so scared I didn’t know who I was. It was like I was across the room watching him come after me, chase me, then catch me” (11). Marci describes a psychic split where her victimized self receives her father’s blows while another stunned version of herself witnesses from across the room. When her father leaves the home for a brief time, Marci immediately

notes the positive impact of this momentary respite, “I didn’t know it, but I guess I must of spent a lot of time being mad or afraid. It was nice being something else” (102). Freed momentarily from a mode of constant fear, Marci

acknowledges the degree to which she is controlled not just physically but psychologically by her father’s rage. In an effort to counter this erasure and displacement of her basic rights and

needs, Marci continually attempts to assert her presence, her humanity, in the face of an attacker who objectifies her to the point of an almost complete invisibility: “I looked at his face; trying to make his eyes see mine. ‘Look at me! Look!’ My eyes begged him. But it was like he’d turned into a monster, a werewolf with eyes that couldn’t see” (12). In this moment of violence, her father’s abuse erases her. He cannot see her body, the body he brutalizes. Marci struggles to impose

her subjectivity upon him, to insist on her presence—that he see her—but he

refuses to acknowledge her as a subject. Her battle can be understood as an insistence on her possibility—she is possible—in spite of her father’s inability or refusal to see her. Marci experiences this erasure as a sense of both invisibility and silence: “If my dad didn’t have eyes, he sure didn’t have ears. It was like he saw, heard, and felt nothing” (12). This passage evidences the ability of

violence to dehumanize both the attacker and the attacked, since the abuse strips Marci of her voice and consequently her humanity, and it simultaneously reduces her father to a violent force devoid of all human senses. Marci’s repeated attempts to be seen and heard can be placed on a continuum of subversive acts that range from wholly creative to exclusively reactive.

74 HOMECOMING QUEERS Within this framework I define subversion as any movement toward the destabilization of existing societal norms (i.e., heterosexuality, patriarchy, Eurocentrism—to name a few) that purport to represent a majority group. I also distinguish between a reactive subversion that draws on preexisting language and conceptualizations to define its challenge (in reaction to existing frameworks), and a creative subversion that moves toward ideological shifts that may or may not be inspired by existing frameworks but define their struggles in new spaces and language. In other words, much like Anzaldua’s mestiza consciousness, creative subversion produces meaning by posing new questions, rather than simply finding new answers to preexisting questions. Additionally, Marci’s silence and invisibility suggests that her lack of sitio _ thwarts her ability to produce lengua. Her experience of home comes alongside a doctrine of silence that strips Marci of her voice and her opinions.® Marci and her sister find themselves at the mercy of multiple oppressions that layer upon one another, limiting their avenues for resistance. The girls lack both the psychological space of a home as a safe haven, as well as the emotionally supportive space of the family unit. The girls’ only potential ally in the home, their mother, wholly fails to interject in the system of abuse perpetrated by her husband. While Marci characterizes her father through his angry attacks, it is the

lack of physical contact from her mother that wounds her daughter most: “I remember the exact day [Mom] stopped letting me touch her” (44). When Marci rests her head against her mother’s arm during a Christmas ceremony at church, her mother uses her body language to set a clear tone of distance and disconnection. “She didn’t look at me, or say anything. Instead, she shook her shoulder and used her elbow to push me away. Hard ... It made me feel bad, like I was shriveling up inside” (45). The devastation of this physical rejection from her mother appears to be equal to the horrendous physical assaults by her

father. Extending far beyond the oppressive proverb that suggests children ought to be “seen and not heard,” Marci and Corin’s violent father and complic-

itly silent mother ascribe to the parenting philosophy that children should be both unseen and unheard—a virtually unachievable state of nonexistence. Marci’s battle to be seen by her abusive father aligns itself with reactive

subversion since she continues to appeal to patriarchy, imploring that he acknowledge her, without destabilizing the male center of power within the family that imposes this sentence of invisibility on its female members. While it appears that Marci and Corin’s father directs most of his rage at his daughters with little or no objection from his wife, Marci still views her mother as a simi-

larly tortured victim: “I felt sorry for Mom because she was always trying to make Dad happy. She’d look at him like a scared pup” (11). In the early stages of the novel, neither Marci nor her mother dares to interrupt the discourse of male power in the home. But soon Marci’s tactical approach shifts toward creative subversion when, after a severe beating, Marci and her sister decide to disown

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 75 their father. When the girls inform their father—whom they now call by his first name, Eddie—of their intentions, he erupts in anger. “You can’t disown me. I’m the father and that means only I do the disowning!” Yet Marci and Corin resist his attempt to resume control of the situation, emphasizing their determination to challenge his authority: “we’re disowning you ... we don’t want you for our dad anymore... So from now on you’re not our dad. And we’re not calling you that anymore” (115). When he responds with physical violence, the girls further illustrate their resolve to defy his power even under the threat of his wrath: “you can hit us all you want but it ain’t gonna make us take you back” (116). This final statement is significant because it suggests that Marci and Corin have moved

toward a new organizational understanding of the power distribution within their family. Rather than accept victimization as female children, they not only declare a semblance of familial power (disowning Eddie) but also reposition the

father as a subordinate figure in the position to be taken back (or not) by his daughters. Yet Marci and her sister do not seek to dominate their father, physically or psychologically. They simply assert their intention to stop performing a passive enabling of patriarchal rule in the home. Marci announces the girls’ resistant stance and in doing so lends a sense of authority and importance to their desires, and the act of disowning the father positions the girls as agents of linguistic determination (115). Disowning also displays a discursive act of creative subversion in the context of the language of power, yet because the shift in linguistic referencing fails to change the violent dynamics of the family, an actual safe space, or sitio, remains elusive.

Feigning Femininity Initially what appears to be a search for the appropriate gendered space—Marcl is a girl, but often feels more like a boy in terms of her interests and abilities— ultimately moves beyond the binaries of masculine and feminine and into the unique desires that define Marci’s sexual subjectivity. For the majority of the novel, Marci appears comfortable in her own body and with her own performance of femininity, yet she perceives her gendered behaviors as resistant to societal norms or expectations. Marci’s minimal exposure to mainstream media includes a keen understanding of how femininity becomes a racialized construct. She notes the limited visibility of any female characters in her favorite television programs and observes that even the beautiful Rita Hayworth could not “make it in Hollywood” unless she changed her name because “they can’t sound real, and for sure not Mexican” (6). Earlier in the novel Marci approaches her mother and aunt to declare her intent to dye her hair blonde and adopt the name Linda Ledoux. Her announcement prompts uncontrollable laughter from both women, as her mother explains the logical incongruencies of the child’s desired transformation. “Ay, no. You look too much like one of the Indians from

76 HOMECOMING QUEERS the Texas Rangers. Y también, being named Linda means you have to be pretty.” Her aunt exclaims that Marci is “too goddamn dark to be running around with blonde hair” (6). Here Marci’s attempt to align herself with the beautiful female Hollywood mainstream prompts ridicule and skepticism from her family, who fail to disentangle themselves from an ideology of beauty that excludes women with Mexican-sounding names as well as dark or indigenous-looking women of any origin. Therefore, Marci’s attempt at self-translation (she desires to be beautiful, so she will rewrite herself as an Anglo woman) fails to communicate

this new meaning of self to her own family members. This translation of self accommodates itself to existing categories of racialized beauty and fails to produce any new meaning with regard to Hollywood’s or even her family’s colonizing aesthetic ideals. In addition to her family’s and community’s resistance to her attempts at femininity, Marci, herself, frequently admits to a discomfort with the traditional

trappings of girlhood. She expresses this disconnect from prescribed gender models through her choice of toys, activities, and behaviors. When Marci’s mother instructs her daughters to pack their Barbie suitcases for an attempted escape from their home and violent family life, Marci’s quiet defiance emerges in her response: “The day I use that Barbie doll suitcase is the day they’ll have to take me to the State Hospital ... Mom and [her father] Eddie must have gone to the Mother Superior for ideas on getting me a present, because they sure didn’t pay attention to what I really wanted: a gun and holster, cowboy boots, and a hat. I think both of them thought if they got me a Barbie doll suitcase Pd act more like a girl” (184). Marci grasps the degree to which societal expectations factor into individ-

ual gender identity. She hypothesizes about several layers of social influence, from the church (Mother Superior) to her parents, who work together in their attempts to shape Marci’s behavior and being. Her theory of how the gift was chosen positions her parents and the church as collaborators in a process of gender socialization that is decidedly materialistic—the Barbie doll suitcase seemingly imbued with the power to transform Marci from tomboy to princess. Additionally, the reference positions the iconic Barbie—with her hyperbolic body measurements, makeup, long flowing hair, and bright pink signature color scheme—serve as the unattainable ideal of womanhood to which Marci refuses to aspire. In fact, she scoffs at the thought of the suitcase as a catalyst for any gendered conversion, indicating that her use of the suitcase would demonstrate her conformity to a prescribed system of gendered behaviors so antithetical to her own being that she would sooner accept the label of insanity than abide by the restrictions symbolized by the bag. Yet in her resistance to carry the bag or “act like a girl,” Marci moves toward a conceptualization of gender that provides for a fluidity of being as suggested by

Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance: “When the constructed status of

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 77 gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-

floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one” (Gender Trouble 6). The notion of performance here is key, since Marci recognizes societal pressures to act like a girl, yet displays no

innate interest in the behaviors that she understands to be natural for female subjects. In Marci’s previous statement regarding preferred playthings, Marci rejects traditional symbols of childhood femininity, instead opting for the more stereotypically masculine gun and holster.” Certainly the weapon, phallic in nature, suggests Marci’s longing for power and control of her vulnerable position at home. Additionally, her desire for a gun requires Marci to subvert the gender norms that threaten to restrict her being. In terms of gender and sexual subjectivity, Marci’s performance of gendered behavior appears confident, yet she fails to translate this gendered fluidity into a more inclusive paradigm of desire and sexual attraction. While she may feel authorized to express her interest in stereo-

typically masculine activities and toys without a male body, she remains unable , to express her desires for girls from within her female body. For Marci, the disaccord between her desires and her body prompt her to formulate an impassioned plea to God, and in this case to the Mother of God, Mary, to transform her into a boy. “Mother Mary, please help me be a boy. I love girls so much and I need you and Baby Jesus to help God change me” (31). However, Marci continues to main-

tain that her objective in wanting to be changed into a boy is not to realign her corporeal and psychic selves, but rather to right the incongruity between her desires and the body from which she experiences them. Even as Marci’s insistence on her presence and possibility as a subject fails with her abusive father, she utilizes the same techniques in her relationship with God. When her persistent prayers remain unanswered, the protagonist calls out to God, rejecting the sort of invisibility and silence that marks her daily family life, “Look at me, God. Are you listening?” (30). She refuses to accept that

her wishes will remain unheard and her reality unseen by the eyes of God, demanding that her presence and voice be acknowledged. Her tactical approach to resisting erasure serves her well throughout the rest of the novel as forces in her environment continually call into question the possibility of her gendered and sexual subjectivities. Marci’s curiosity, her research skills, her resistant spirit, and her strong will enable her to launch a grassroots girlhood revolution against her incendiary home life.

Pleasure, Power, and Privilege Her repeated requests in the form of prayers detail her specific needs, a “birdy sin huevos,” since according to Marci they would probably just “get in the way.” In Trujillo’s text, Marci’s thinking about the purpose of the penis and its

78 HOMECOMING QUEERS associations with masculinity and male privilege can be divided into several distinct categories. The issue of physical pleasure is initially addressed when, after falling asleep so many nights with the whispered prayers of this desired conversion on her lips, Marci awakes to find a phallus, a “birdy,” as she terms it, where her female genitalia used to be: “after a few minutes, I decided it was okay to touch it. I slowly reached down. My fingers inched closer and closer till the very tip of my finger slid over the skin. It felt good! Like a Vienna sausage fresh

out of the can. Each time my finger touched it, it moved a little, like a teeny lizard getting petted” (80). Although Marci remains ignorant about the details of sexual reproduction, she is able to translate physical pleasure through this newly sprouted male organ. No mention of masturbation or sexual self-exploration is referenced in the novel, with the exception of this one instance in which the pleasure is experienced via a male phallus, suggesting the limits of Marci’s interpretation of female sexuality. As a female, Marci does not explore the physical pleasures afforded to her by her female body, yet within the fantasy of transsexual transformation, her male body immediately presents to her the opportunity for selfexploration, stimulation, and pleasure.® It is likely that this association with pleasure and male sexuality comes as a result of a familial and societal discourse of repressed female sexuality whereby women and girls are expected “to experi-

ence pleasure only in the context of institutional approval: through Churchsanctified marriage” (Zavella 228).9 Such a belief system relegates women to roles as asexual beings until an official union with a man deems them other- wise. In contrast to such a paradigm, Marci seeks a sitio where she can safely explore her physical and sexual being. A creative subversion of this sexist double-standard would envision a world where her girl body has the capacity for pleasure and exploration equal to a boy’s. However, Marci cannot untangle sexual freedom from the masculine body and male privilege, and thus her pleasurable dream/fantasy relies heavily on the patriarchal norm of the male body as the center of sexual desire and pleasure. Just as Marci begins to explore her new body, she is awakened from this dream by the angry derisions of her mother: “Marrana! Keep your hands out of there” (80). Violently returned to her girlhood reality, she is reminded of her restricted sexual status as a girl, and of the humiliating stigma of finding sexual pleasure in her own female body.

In Defense of Self Largely, however, these physical sensations, though exciting and enjoyable, are not offered as primary motivation for Marci’s desired transformation into a boy. Instead Marci views masculinity and the male body as a site of gendered power that might help her to shed her role as helpless victim and vulnerable child. As a victimized child, abused by both her father’s rage and her mother’s passivity,

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 79 Marci experiences a sense of vulnerability that is, in her view, enhanced by the limits of her gendered self. Pervasive throughout the novel are Marci’s attempts to reject her helplessness by transforming herself from passive to active agent in her Supergirl rescue missions: “Every night I dreamed I saved beautiful girls. Usually, a mean man was hurting the girl. I’d beat up the man, then carry her away” (6). Here, rather than “being rescued,” Marci rescues another victim and inverts the power dynamics of her own home by avenging the crimes of a violent man. In her daily life, however, Marci struggles with the physical limits of her girl body, wanting to be bigger and stronger but unable to convince her family that weight-lifting and martial arts are appropriate pastimes for a young girl. In fact, when Marci attempts to incorporate some of the qualities of her Supergirl role into her daily encounters with her violent father, she once again confronts the limits of her gendered subjectivity—as interpreted by her father.

Standing up to “Eddie’—a name which announces his failures as a paternal figure, Marci inspires a telling response from her father: “Hijo, Marci, what a big little man you are now... Qué hombre! I didn’t know I had me un hombrecito. Here I was thinking you was my little girl” (108). Marci’s bravery, her outrage at mistreatment, her pride, and her refusal to submit are interpreted by her father as signifiers of masculinity. Yet rather than praise such qualities, as would seem to be the natural response within a patriarchal system, Marci’s father belittles her performance of masculinity by labeling her “un hombrecito” (a little man) and implies that such displays from a female will only result in unconvincing and even laughable imitation. Not only does this reaction privilege the male sex as the sole proprietor of brave and honorable acts, but it concomitantly limits and debases the worth of his daughter’s femininity. A few days later, when, in a dream, Marci again attempts to challenge her father’s domination of her, and her mother and sister, she imagines her father

again resorting to gender-based humiliation: “We should have called you Mauricio... You, girl... ain’t got shit down there except a little piece of tail. And that, little hombre . .. is all you’ll ever have” (144). Unaware of his daughter’s secret requests to be transformed into a boy, Marci’s father unconsciously

alludes to her internal struggle as he displays an anxious desire to position her as both an unconvincing “little hombre” and an inferior mujer. His argument extends, this time, to Marci’s physical body, as he defines her through her lack of a penis, suggesting one primary origin of Marci’s constant obsession

with acquiring such an organ. Her father invokes the phallus to authorize his power and male privilege, “‘you’re going to have to figure out sooner or later that you ain’t never gonna be man enough to take on your father. Not as long as I’m still standing. Hell no! Your daddy here’s the one with the balls.’ He pointed to his birdy. ‘And he ain’t scared of nothing. Nothing! You hear me? And I’m gonna telling you something else, he’s got this big peter here to back up these huevos, too’” (144).

80 HOMECOMING QUEERS The fact that this exchange occurs in Marci’s dream suggests an internaliza-

tion of her father’s correlation between power and the male sexual organs. Given this belief system, Marci’s desire to emerge from her victimized state is

necessarily envisioned through her transformation from a weak, vulnerable female into a strong, controlling male. For this young girl, access to a penis clearly equates access to the centers of male power. Marci’s own privileging of phallocentric power illustrates an internalization of Audre Lorde’s discourse on the master’s tools, which in this case Marci is using.'° Her wish to change her body to match her desire exists as a counterstance to patriarchal power only in as much as it suggests a belief in the possibility of a female subject acquiring agency and empowerment—though it comes at the cost of this subject’s female body and subjectivity. However, the efficacy of such subversion is minimal since, as Albert Memmi cautions, of the two feasible options for colonized subjects, assimilation and revolt each are defined by implications of inevitable impossibility and failure. Of revolt, Memmi notes, “The colonized fights in the name of the very values

of the colonizer, uses his techniques of thought and his methods of combat. It must be added that this is the only action that the colonizer understands” (Memmi 29). Thus to stage a revolt against the colonizer’s values is to necessarily conform that battle to and be translated by the standards of this very same imperialist power if it is to be heard and acknowledged." For Marci, at least initially, her struggle and revolt against female powerlessness and invisibility is limited by her conformity to existing patriarchal and phallocentric ideologies. Rather than establishing a new center, or destroying the primacy of the previous center, Marci simply wishes for the proper (male) body with which to acquire access to this traditional center of power. Her tool of choice, wishing for a penis, does not dismantle the structures of power that keep her silent and invisible as a queer Chicana. Marci’s dreams for power and control over her own body, life, and destiny are defined by her limited understanding of gender fluidity. She has not yet arrived at the possibility that the desires she has for power and pleasure might be divorced from the male sex and body for which she prays.

The Privilege of Desire In addition to providing access to pleasure and power, Marci also believes a “birdy” will afford her access to particular privileged desires, these being the principal motivating factor behind her frequent requests to be changed into

a boy. Initially, when Marci reveals the impetus behind her request for a boy’s body, she suggests a distinctly fluid paradigm of gender, sex, and sexuality: “It’s not because I think I’m a boy, though sometimes it sure seems like I am. It’s

because I like girls ... Maybe I was born this way” (9). Marci recognizes the impossibility of her desire for girls when housed within her own girl body: “Now

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 81 I know you can’t be with a girl if you are a girl. So that’s why I have to change into a boy” (9). When the young protagonist discovers her first major crush, a

teenage neighbor girl named Raquel, her impulse to transform grows still stronger as she implores of God: “I like this girl named Raquel who lives next door. ..I don’t usually ask very much from you, but I have to change into a boy. Otherwise, how else can I be with Raquel?” (30). Yet those afforded the luxury of verbally and/or physically expressing their desire for Raquel are exclusively men and boys, including Raquel’s boyfriend and Marci’s own father. Marci observes both watching and objectifying Raquel in a way that she openly criticizes. Her father comments on Raquel’s body and seems to look right through her clothes

with “x-ray vision,” whereas Raquel’s boyfriend offers an even more invasive gaze, according to Marci’s interpretation, as he looks at her face as though “he was going to drill her head to the garage door” (39). In both instances, Marci

observes the male gaze to be both penetrative and invasive, entering into Raquel’s body, infiltrating her space in a violent manner. Marci does not consider her own desiring gaze in such negative way, likening the experience of being with Raquel to an encounter with “the holy spirit” or eating large quantities of candy (26-27). Yet when Raquel looks at Marci she does so “with eyes that went straight into mine, and down in my stomach. It felt like I was the one now

being drilled into a wall” (42). Here the invasive gaze is subverted as Raquel returns it, not as an object of desire, but as an active subject with a gaze and perspective of her own. Although Marci understands that her desire for girls makes her different, she never interprets this difference as a problem of desire, but rather of the body from which the desire emerges. She is confident of her need for a male body and often contextualizes her request as a desire to fit within what she perceives to be Raquel’s heteronormative framework of desire: “I like this girl named Raquel who

lives next door... I want to marry her, but I think she’ll want to marry a boy” (30). Marci believes that a male body will serve to normalize her desires and give her access to Raquel, who she notes “won’t give me the time of day unless I turn into a boy” (31). Although she repeatedly requests a change in her female body, Marci never asks God to change her desire for girls into a heteronormative attraction to boys. She never questions the validity of her desires, viewing them as the

central subjectivity around which all other identities may be adjusted accordingly. In other words, her desires are essential to the subject she is, whereas she interprets her gender and sex as the malleable entities to be transformed. Under threats of violence, fears of invisibility, and impossibility, Marci refuses to propose a solution to God in which her desires shift to match her body. Instead, Marci conceives only of a body that will conform to match her desires. Due to her collaboration with heteronormative and patriarchal models of desire, Marci is unable to see how her desires are possible within her female body. Yet when cloaked in the anonymity of a confessional, Marci decides to

82 HOMECOMING QUEERS reveal her feelings to her priest. When she is finished confessing, the priest responds, with a chuckle, that her feelings are not bad, but perhaps simply a little precocious, and suggests that in addition to saying several Our Fathers and

Hail Marys, she should consider waiting to act upon her attraction to girls. Marci is elated at the response. “He said it was okay to squeeze chiches. I was happy. But then, wait a minute, I forgot we were in the confessional. He can’t tell who I am. He thinks I’m a boy!” (72). Yet even this realization does not dampen Marci’s happiness. “I told the truth to that priest and didn’t have to lie. He acted like everything I said was normal. It didn’t even seem like my sins were that bad. I don’t know what he would have done if he knew I was a girl. But I didn’t care

because the worst was over” (73). Marci’s interpretation of the priest’s comments reify her belief that her body is the site which must be transformed, rather than her desires, which, via the priest’s reassurances, are in effect sanctioned by the Catholic church as valid and acceptable. For Marci, speaking her desires represents a major step in making her sexual and gendered subjectivities possible. The anonymity of the confessional provides Marci with a temporary space from which to normalize her desires and speak her truth. Once she locates this site and a free access to language, she is able to give voice to these desires, shattering the silence that has surrounded so much of her existence. Yet again, the subversion is only partial, since the imbalances of power and privilege between male/masculine and female/feminine remain intact—even in the darkness of the confessional. Adrienne Rich’s conceptualization of compulsory heterosexuality suggests that “lesbian desire comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women” (52). Societal fears of such affronts to male power are quickly disarmed by setting female conformity to heterosexuality as the default mode of being. Such a paradigm marginalizes and/or erases the possibility of alternative subjectivities. Marci believes that the priest assumes she is a boy, matching the subject’s body to the desire voiced and thereby upholding a heterosexist view of desire. Yet in spite of such a heteronormative interpretation of her confessions, she is heartened by having spoken her desire as well as having confirmed the normalization of this desire, since by her interpretation, and what she believes to be the priest’s as well, her attraction to women is acceptable when offered up from a male body. The sooner she can invoke the transformation of her body, the sooner her desires will be made possible.

Coalitional Politics and Familiar Alterity Throughout the novel Marci is able to discover new possibilities. Even as her sex-

ual, gendered, cultural, and spiritual subjectivities differ greatly from those around her, she manages to identify community within her limited network

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 83 of family and friends. Hope is afforded to the protagonist via a shift from the impossible to the possible in her community, family, and self as she learns to flesh

out her own sitio y lengua. The discovery of coalitional bonds between other “queer” or “queered” subjects—so as to create semblances of family and community—comes in the form of a recognition of similar or shared difference, a concept I term “familiar alterity.” Familiar alterity expresses recognition of difference that is shared. As it brings together alienated subjects, it shatters the isolation of mar-

ginalization. Additionally, a notion of familiar alterity suggests the productive tension between difference and sameness—being unified with others through a commonality of difference. We are the same because we are different. This conceptualization also consciously alludes to familial connections and the queering of heteronormative family structures. In contrast, these families are brought together, defined, and strengthened by a shared sense of exclusion and exile from a heteronormative mainstream as well as a mindful commitment to coalitional politics. Chela Sandoval defines coalitional politics as “to interpellate connection-

by-affinity: to call up the proximities-of-being that can ally individual citizensubjects in the great global exchange of capital” (“Dissident Globalizations” 20). A focus on critical closeness or similarity broadens agency and experience from individual to collective. Such collectives are especially useful in studying the experiences of marginalized people who are routinely denied the privileges of cultural

citizenship based on their differences from a perceived norm: a queer couple denied the rights and privileges of marriage, a person of color refused full consid-

eration in an Anglo-run company, a woman earning a fraction of the salary of performing the same job as a man. In each of these situations, failure to perform the norm (heterosexual, Anglo, or male) results in a lessening or removal of rights

for the individual who differs from the majority or perceived default category. In Sandoval’s vision of affinity, however, citizenship is rewarded on the basis of this very difference rather than a conformity to an imagined norm.” The practice of a coalitional politics is especially significant for Marci, as an isolated and othered subject. Such circumstances of social solitude are critical because they initiate a trajectory of nonexistence: Marci does not see anyone like herself, therefore there must not be anyone else like her. She perceives herself as not only invisible but impossible, hence her multiple pleas to God for a corporeal transformation to make her desires possible. The establishment of coalitional structures, of family and community, underlines the presence and possibility of marginalized subjects. Coalitions, family structures, and community combat silence and solitude: we are not alone. When Marci sees others, such as a famous transsexual woman, a young cousin who transitions from male to female, and an effeminate neighbor boy who resemble her in their difference, she sees that what and who she is are possible. As the novel moves from beginning to the end, Marci witnesses several modes

of queer subjectivity that deviate from the norms of gender, sex, and sexuality

84 HOMECOMING QUEERS as established by the authorities in her world: her parents, her school, her religion, and her limited community of relatives and friends. In her reaction to such encounters of difference—whether it be physical appearance, bodily transformations, or gendered behaviors—in the public figure of Christine Jorgensen, in her cousin Raylene, and in her childhood friend Randy, we are able to trace Marci’s path of reconciliation with her own queer subjectivity, as well as the

alliances and coalitions available to her as such a subject: othered but not alone. Early in the novel, as Marci explains her need to “become a boy,” she grapples with the perceived impossibilities of such a conversion. She anticipates her listener’s disbelief, offering as proof, “Anything can happen. It happened to my cousin, right here in my own back yard. Raylene is a girl. But when

she was born, she was a boy” (25). Marci’s own disbelief in the situation prompts her to further interrogate her mother for details on Raylene’s transformation. Largely, Marci is troubled by the way Raylene’s situation disrupts the bodily binary of male and female sex. When her mother attributes the occurrence to a doctor’s error, Marci is quick to question this explanation, “How do you make that kind of mistake? You’re either a boy, or a girl. Couldn’t they tell it was a boy? Didn’t she have a birdy?” (25). Here Marci’s comprehension of Raylene’s situation suffers from an inability to transcend the boundaries of a

binary system of gender and sex. She possesses no language with which to describe the concept of a fluid gender identity. Much like her perception of her own mismatched body, Marci identifies corporeality as the primary determinant upon which all other identity categorizations depend. Since she began life as “Ray,” Raylene’s body must have been

male. What additional factors could have been present to alter the doctors’ diagnosis of her sex months later? Marci’s young mind questions both the “mistake” of classifying Raylene a boy, and especially the physical process through which such a mistake is rectified. “Mom, if they named her Ray, then she must

have had a birdy. So what happened to it?” (25). The privileging of visibility emerges again here in Marci’s strong resolve to see Raylene as a girl. Since her mother reveals Raylene’s secret only after the young child has moved with her family to another state, Marci expresses a need not only to understand this change but also to witness it for herself. “I wanted to see what [Raylene] looked like, and if she still acted like a boy. I wondered if she was going to like girls like me” (26). Her desire to see Raylene seems an attempt to confirm or disprove her growing suspicion of gender, sex, and sexuality as unruly and unpredictable categories. Marci struggles to reconnect the socially severed links between these categories. Will a shift in Raylene’s body prompt additional changes in her gen-

der (how she acts) or in her sexuality (who she desires)? Sexual identity, for Marci, seems to be a confusing jumble of excess and lack. She lacks the male genitalia to authorize her desire for girls. For Raylene, following her conversion

into a girl, Marci can only conceive of the excess represented by the penis.

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 85 Although she has been socialized to accept a binary mapping of gender and sex, this cousin’s experience clouds the clear distinctions between male and female and suggests that bodies can be every bit as blurry as the genders they contain. Marci’s disconnect between body and mind are echoed in the mystery of

Raylene’s transformation, and though Marci is unable to elicit anything but vague traces of the story from her clearly embarrassed mother, she knows enough to draw parallels between this and her own experience. Defiantly, in the face of her listener’s doubt, the young protagonist reassures us that anything is possible, even Marci herself: “Just like Raylene, it could happen to me” (26).

Still, the possibility she entertains for herself continues to be limited by her compliance with heterosexist norms. She is possible, but only after her transformation into a boy. Yet even as she assures herself and the readers of the continued possibility of a bodily transformation, Marci grows increasingly concerned

about her own unanswered prayers, “Where are you God? If you can read my mind, do it and show me you're real. Talk to me!” (222). She stresses the prac-

ticality of a bodily transformation later in adolescence, “I had a funny feeling it wasn’t going to happen. You kinda think if it was gonna happen he would have changed me by now so that everyone, including me, could’ve gotten used to it” (222). In contrast to the proximity of her cousin Raylene (“in my own backyard”),

Marci encounters another queer subject whose familiar alterity reaches across social divides of race, class, gender, sex, and sexuality. Marci’s detective-like

curiosity often brings her to the local public library where under the cloak of science she is able to ask questions about “a girl changing into a boy” (28). Her hope quickly deflates as the librarian responds, “I’ve been a librarian for seventeen years and I’ve never heard of that happening. Nor have I come across it in any books” (28). Here the theme of impossibility is reiterated as the librarian, an authorized proprietor of knowledge, rejects the possibility of such a transformation. Without a written history, without the traces of queer subjectivity in any locatable site, Marci has little evidence with which to prove its existence in general, or her own existence specifically. A few moments later, however, the librarian approaches Marci to show her a book from the adult section of the library, a biography entitled The Christine Jorgensen Story.’3 Marci is initially unimpressed, feeling disconnected from the book’s author and her experience. The librarian explains, “this [is the] story of a man who decided he was living in the wrong body and got an operation to become a woman” (29). Marci quickly differentiates her own experience from Jorgensen’s, explaining, “it wasn’t me. I didn’t even really want a birdy. I just wanted Raquel” (29). Although she clearly recognizes a sense of familiar alterity, in terms of the shifting between female and male, Marci underlines the division between transsexual/transgendered and her own queer sexuality. Ultimately, in spite of her repeated requests to “be a boy” and have a “birdy,” it is not the

86 HOMECOMING QUEERS corporeal transformation that she dreams of, but rather the privileges that such a body will afford her: the authority to express and act upon her desires for her friend Raquel.

A much more localized manifestation of familiar alterity presents itself as an intimate connection to a neighbor friend, a boy named Randy, whose discomfort in his own body at first elicits feelings not of empathy but of hostility from the novel’s narrator. “I felt really mad when I looked at Randy Torres. He was a big sissy kid who lived down the street. He didn’t like football, even though he would have been good as a tackle” (31). Marci’s anger seems to stem from her envy of Randy’s boy body and the opportunities it affords him. This antagonism wanes by her later comments, wherein she attempts to sympathize with his situation and connect it to her own. “Randy looked sad, and I felt sorry for him for about a second. How did Randy end up a boy and me a girl? I knew I could throw a ball so hard it would’ve made his dad’s hand sting. But if Randy ever wanted to be with Raquel, he’d have a better chance than me” (32). So even in spite of Marci’s ability to perform masculinity—in terms of strength, athleticism—better than Randy, his desires for girls will be authorized by society in a way that Marci’s will never be. Exasperated by the lack of logic through which Randy is made a boy and she a girl, she begins to focus her attention on authority and agency. Marci wonders, “who got to make the choice of what you were when you were born. I memorized this question to ask Ms. Buck [the librarian] later” (32). Her question reveals a view of gender and sex as imposed or externally relegated assignments rather than identities one has the agency to choose for oneself. Additionally, she shifts authority to outside sources to answer the question, like the priest in the confessional or the librarian who had previously informed her of Christine Jorgensen’s story. At this point in the novel, Marci is unable to envision a sense of self that she defines and controls from within. Instead, she defers to external authori-

ties such as her teachers, librarian, clergy, and parents. For Marci, her only | recourse and means to impact her existence is prayer and confession. In this way, Catholicism, though often an oppressive force for queer subjects, is transformed into an empowering medium, as prayer enables Marci to speak her dreams, wishes, and desires in contrast to the silence that surrounds most of her daily life. At numerous points in the novel, the church attempts to regulate Marci’s voice by requiring her to promise not to ask her teacher questions “of any kind, ever” (21). The Mother Superior further belittles Marci when she assures her that “[her] questions do no one any good” (21). This imposed silence is largely ineffective at containing her active curiosity, but her teacher’s great efforts to quiet and control her lend themselves to the greater social process of silencing dissenting voices and unruly subjects, especially when Marci is informed that it is not just her teachers, but God, who wants to strip her of her voice and discourse.

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 87 Religion does, however; present Marci with several of her most compelling

introductions into the possibilities of queer subjectivity, and ironically both occur in a Catholic confessional. First, her confession to the priest about desiring girls represents a fleeting moment of anonymity and linguistic freedom.

Throughout the novel there are only two people to whom Marci is able to confess her desires for girls. The first is the priest, Father Chac6n, to whom she confesses before her first communion. This instance is a blind confession, since Father Chacon is unable to see Marci’s face or confirm her identity as a girl. This experience of anonymity converts the confessional into a safe space for Marci to declare her very first expression of queer desire."4 Ironically, the anonymity of the confessional reveals another queer connec-

tion, between the priest, Father Chacon, and her father’s brother, known to , her as Uncle Tommy. At a church fund-raising dinner, Marci witnesses Uncle Tommy and Father Chacén emerging from a confessional booth together, flus-

tered, nervous, and laughing. Although at this moment Marci is unable to unravel the mystery surrounding this incident, she immediately reacts to the oddity of the situation: two men in a small sacred space as well as the secrecy underlying their encounter. Breathless and confused, she returns to join her family, wondering silently, “What were they doing inside that confessional? I wanted to know bad, but I was too scared to ask” (Trujillo, What Night Brings 78).

On the brink of understanding this queer connection, Marci must carefully weigh her desire to know Uncle Tommy and Father Chacon’s secret against the fear of revealing her own queer confessional secret.

Each of her encounters with queer experience in her surroundings, a stranger found in a library book, an effeminate male neighbor, and a close relative and a Catholic priest, provide Marci with a sense of the possibilities for

community defined in difference and enable her to question what she has believed to be the limits of her girl body. With a sense of her priest’s now familiar alterity, Marci reinterprets their earlier confessional exchange: “Remember when I was in confession with Father Chacén and I told him I liked girls and he

didn’t even care? And remember I thought it was because he thought I was a boy? Well, maybe he knew I wasn’t. If he knew I was a girl and I said I liked girls,

then can you see why he didn’t care?” (136). Here her knowledge of Father Chacon’s desires leads Marci to contemplate the possibility of her own desires, not as the inherent product of the boy she should be, but as experienced from the body of the girl she is. The introduction of this new possibility enables the protagonist to move closer to Ana Castillo’s conceptualization of an “erotic whole self.” For Castillo the separation of sexuality and self for Chicanas and Latinas yields a potential for destruction far beyond the scope of the local and individual: “All of our conflicts with dominant society, all of the backlashes we suffer when attempting to seek some kind of justice from society, are ultimately traceable to the repression of our sexuality and our spiritual energies as human

88 HOMECOMING QUEERS beings—which are at no time during our breathing existence on Earth apart from the rest of who we are” (Castillo 136).

Not only does Castillo assert the destructive potential of alienating sexual subjectivity, she further suggests that resolution of the fragmentation of sexuality results in the empowered “erotic whole self” that brings together mind, body, and soul into a unified vision of self (143). Given Castillo’s framework, one might argue that Marci never veers from the path of erotic whole selfhood, since she is

unwavering in her determination to undergo the transformation she deems necessary in order to express and ultimately act upon her desires for another female subject. Yet once she is able to reconcile her experience of these desires from within her gendered female body, Marci actively begins to reject the frag-

mentation and incompletion that motivated her earlier wish for corporeal transformation.

Speaking Silences and Decoding Difference In terms of Marci’s “lengua,” though she does not arrive at a comfortable term of self-definition by the close of the novel, she actively engages with the available linguistic descriptors and takes on the role of detective as she deciphers the meanings of adult references like “queer,” “jotito,” and “homosexual,” especially as they pertain to her family, her community, and herself. Self-definition is initially filtered through a dominant view of the limits of female sexuality and

desire, and Marci must forge her own interpretive model for understanding and articulating her desiring self. The issue of Marci’s space is intertwined with her search for an authentic and unaffected voice. She comes to a preliminary understanding of the language

that surrounds gender, sexuality, religion, and difference through her own investigations and observations. She begins with an analysis of the language spoken by those around her, namely her father who frequently directs the term “queer” at anyone who displeases or confounds him. Coupled with dictionary research, Marci begins to formulate a bank of meanings from which to understand the concept of queerness—both from her father’s perspective and beyond. Initially, Eddie uses the term to describe frequent churchgoers, or as he terms them “holy rollers.” Subsequently, he spits the word as a form of insult during a heated argument with his brother, Marci’s Uncle Tommy. During this research

session, Marci first encounters the descriptor “homosexual” and begins to unravel its connection to Uncle Tommy’s earlier encounter with the priest in the confessional and her own desires for girls. Still, Marci’s view of her own sex-

ual difference is limited by her lack of exposure to the related terminology. Language is paramount in Marci’s inability to understand her queer sexuality, both because she does not understand the lexicon, and because she does not have access to a community that is defined by such descriptors. As she pieces

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 89 together the connections between religion, sexuality, and difference, she attempts to place herself within a queer continuum: “So if being in the church makes you a homosexual queer, or a man loving a man, or lady loving a lady makes you a homosexual queer, then this must be what I am. I’m a girl. I like Raquel. That makes me a girl liking a girl, which is a homosexual queer. And since I like God, Baby Jesus, and Mary, and they’re the church, then I must be a double homosexual queer... But then what happens if I want to be a boy. Does that make me a triple?” (137). However, even as Marci approaches a linguistic mapping of her different desires, she still lacks a more immediate experience of familiar alterity, since each of the members of her queer community are male or transsexual, and none of them are able to speak to Marci’s exact situation as a young girl attracted to other girls. Audre Lorde argues that the master’s tools

are unable to deconstruct the master’s house and proposes that rather than defining oneself and one’s struggles in terms of prior revolutionary acts, women of color might increase the efficacy of their movements by working with home-

grown tools (100). Indeed, one of Marci’s obstacles in her search for lengua requires her to move beyond the discursive tools of patriarchy and heterosexism

and into a new consciousness and an acceptance of her unique voice and language. At the close of the novel Marci and her sister engage in one final horrifying

struggle with their abusive father. As he beats Marci, Corin grabs her father’s rifle and shoots him in the back. The girls seize the chaotic opportunity, amidst policemen and sirens, to escape to a bus headed toward their grandmother’s home in New Mexico. They are received with open arms, and although their parents never acknowledge the truth about the shooting, they do not make any attempt to bring the girls home again. In the movement from their father’s misogynist dictatorship to their grandmother’s loving matriarchy, the girls are finally able to enjoy a structural sense of sitio and the freedom to speak and think freely as they develop their own lenguas. Marci’s struggle with gender and sexuality continues even as she elects to stop attending church services. She now expresses distrust of both the institution of Catholicism and the powers held within it. Her rejection of the physical structure of the church and doctrine offered by the priests and nuns stands as a moment of agency and autonomy. Largely, Marci’s prayers are supplications for the changes she believed would correct the deviance of her mismatched body and desire. At the close of the novel, Marci arrives at a semblance of acceptance, “All of a sudden it hits me. I’m never gonna be a boy. No matter how hard I pray, or how good I try to be, I’ll always be a girl... If I’m gonna stay a girl I’d better figure out what to do” (223). It is in her acceptance that Marci begins to enact a mode of creative subversion. Rather than seek out a solution that allows her to

conform to societal expectations, she begins to assess her body and desires as immutable components of her being, rather than anomalies to be remedied

90 HOMECOMING QUEERS through divine or medical intervention. When she transforms her spirituality from a faith in God to a belief in her own self-worth and possibility, Marci moves toward a self-designed “alternative spirituality” (24). This spirituality rejects the

male-centered and Eurocentric structures of power that discouraged her from speaking, questioning, or desiring in a way that which was intuitive for her. Rather than a simplistic reversal of male dominance and whiteness, Marci and Corin are able to locate a sitio outside male dominance and abuse, and in spite of Marci’s persistent desire to become a strong and powerful boy, she ultimately discovers the power to free herself and her sister within her own female body. Perhaps this initial encounter with a female-centered community enables Marci to also make a final movement toward self-acceptance and the related language needed to express her queer self.

Chicana Girlhoods/Lesbian Possibilities In With Her Machete in Her Hands: Reading Chicana Lesbians, Catridna Rueda

Esquibel offers a mapping of literary representations of Chicana girlhood as potential spaces of sexual exploration, self-definition, and agency. Although she terms many of these spaces “restrictive,” she also posits that “young Chicanas

are encouraged to form lifelong female friendships, and it is the intimacy of these relationships that often provides the context for lesbian desire” (91). This understanding of comadrazgo—as system of support for women’s relationships with each other—is largely absent from Trujillo’s text. In part, this is due to the familial violence that shatters any sense of collectivity, spreading victimization equally among the female family members, pitting father against mother, mother against daughters, and daughters against both their hostile father and passive mother. Certainly Marci’s struggle to understand her own desires is complicated by the absence of a community or familial tradition of comadrazgo; however, at the close of the narrative she encounters a coalitional connection with another young girl, Robbie, who confesses to a similar desire for girls. This brief moment bears witness to the possibilities of Rueda Esquibel’s theory of Chicana girlhoods. When asked by her new friend if she believes their desire is a sin, Marci quickly replies, “No, I don’t” (241). The immediacy with which she responds illustrates how her new spirituality makes a space for her desire and

allows for her to speak this desire without shame. When the pair shares their first kiss, Marci is left speechless but narrates her final thoughts to the reader: “I didn’t know what to do or think. But for once I could say I felt so good it didn’t matter” (242).

For Marci Cruz, a sense of self is disrupted and disjointed through her repeated requests for a male body. At the close of the novel, however, Marci’s fragmentation diminishes as her body is made whole by rejecting the impossibility of her desires while asserting her unique gendered identity and her active

THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 91 subjecthood. Her final statement, reveling in the pleasure of her connection to Robbie, rather than its social implications, completes Marci’s circle of selfdefinition. In the passage that began this article, Marci expressed her desire to have a boy’s body, although she ultimately finds this wish impossible and perhaps unnecessary. Despite her unfulfilled wish, Marci manages to find resolution to her seeming corporeal unrest. She initially states that her wish to be a boy is “what I want for myself,” and in her prioritization of pleasure (“I felt so good it didn’t matter”) she is able to transgress the limitations of heteronormativity and fashion a new wish, the shared kiss between Robbie and Marci, that begins to claim her own definition and expression of self. Trujillo’s novel and its strong young protagonist serve to address the issue of multiple marginalization and the consequent societal perception of a fragmented subjectivity. Marci is forced to confront worlds that refuse to see her unique and multiple layers of subjectivity. Daily she attempts to reconcile a world incapable of seeing the queer Chicana she is becoming. Rather than rebel against the limited options afforded to her by dominant society, Marci initially internalizes the sexist and heterosexist attitudes from her surroundings, believing that her queer female subjectivity is in fact impossible. Trujillo’s narrative offers a glimpse into self-recovery, as Marci is able to contextualize her own desires for girls within a queer community, thereby enabling her to grasp her ultimate possibility. Trujillo’s narrative evidences the practice of storytelling to illustrate how the lack of visible queer Latina representation has less to do with actual impossibilities of being than failures of seeing. For Trujillo’s protagonist, her place to begin~—a wholly unique sitio y lengua—emerges at the close of the

novel as a newly discovered alternative to either/or dichotomies and comes from the knowledge that her identification as girl does not preclude her desire for other girls. Her desires, her body, her experience, and her subjectivity move into the realm of productive and passionate possibility.

Complicating Community Terri de la Pefia, Cristina Serna, Frances Negron-Muntaner, Ela Troyano, and Carmelita Tropicana Even when nostalgia looks like a two-minute commercial to attract tourism, there must be a way | can regain this unspeakable part of myself.

Even when there’s no return, even when | will remain a partial stranger. Anywhere and everywhere. How can | go back? —Frances Negrén-Muntaner, Brincando el charco

Each of the narrative works in this chapter map out the insufficiencies of dominant spaces while simultaneously envisioning organic home spaces where queer Latina bodies, voices, and discourses are not marginal but central. When considered together, these characterizations of queer Latina desire posit a politics of home constituted of three distinct but interlocking modes of representation, which I classify as “coming home,” “being home,” and “complicating home.” I have found no need for or value in imposing a chronological or hierarchical

order to this list, since none appears to exist within the texts. Instead, each mode offers a set of practices that frame the creative representation of home spaces. I ground the mode of being home in a politics of similitude—referred to earlier as familiar alterity. These representations may be viewed as separatist or radical—but in reality focus less on exclusivity than embracing shared differences from a dominant norm. The mode of coming home is especially useful to engage the comparatively drawn home spaces in de la Pena’s narrative work. In this author’s representations, queer Chicana desire is delineated against the foil of Anglo lesbian desire and creates a counterstance of safety and familiarity

- when measured against non-Chicana partners. In order to engage the filmic work in this chapter, the mode of complicating home allows filmmakers to pose creative challenges to wholly positive and inclusive portraits of home. Given the foundational influence of queer Chicana theorists Gloria Anzaldtia and Cherrie Moraga in the establishing of scholarly and poetic discourse on

92 ,

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 93 queer Latina home spaces, it will be useful to look toward a key discursive trope in Chicana/o literary and political work, the mythical Chicana/o homeland of Aztlan. In a 1989 collection of critical essays on Aztlan, only one of twelve con_ tributors is female, this sole representative being. Anzaldua. Luis Leal elucidates the principal signifying branches of Aztlan: “It represents the geographic region known as the Southwestern part of the United States, composed of the territory that Mexico ceded in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; second, and more important, Aztlan symbolized the spiritual union of the Chicanos, something that is carried within the heart, no matter where they may live or where they may find themselves” (Anaya and Lomeli 8). This concept of homecoming

posits both a physical and psychic space of origin and unity for Chicana/os. Released from a particular geographical site, Leal’s critical mapping of Aztlan elucidates the power of myth as discursive homecoming when a physical return is not possible. For Anzaldiia, though, a discussion of Aztlan is far from idyllic. Her discourse from the same collection stresses the unique pressures and dangers for female subjects along the U.S./Mexico border. The journey home—to Aztlan,

across the border, into the lures of opportunity as well as the dissolutioned reality—is inherently problematic (Anaya and Lomeli 203). Critics seem to draw a similar interpretation from Cherrie Moraga’s work with the concept of Aztlan. Mary Pat Brady concludes, “Linking Aztlan to erotic desire and wounding also indicates how differently Moraga figures the imagined homeland of the Mexica

than do many of her contemporaries or, indeed, her predecessors” (140-41). In the following sections I will examine alternatives to traditional notions of an idealized homeland, such as that expressed by the Chicana/o conceptualization of Aztlan. These works bear witness to the scope of queer Chicana creativity as well as the distinct ways through which these discursive texts/tools serve to loosen and dismantle static notions of family, community, identity, and home, as well as to reassemble and reconceptualize these ideas as necessarily queer, brown, and female.

Cristina Serna’s “tierras sagradas” At an on-campus lecture sponsored by a University of California Chicana/o student group in 2001, a well-known and respected Chicano muralist attempted to

articulate the role of “la Chicana” in the Chicano movement for an inquiring student seated among his audience. The silver-haired gentleman immediately became emotional and, while choking back tears, managed to utter, “La mujer is so important ... because she gives us our babies, our new Raza.” Despite his marriage to an equally influential fellow artist and activist and what would seem

to be an ample knowledge of the artistic and political contributions of Chicanas—including his own wife—the speaker cited a woman’s role only as

94 HOMECOMING QUEERS bearer and mother of his children, a role that must be interpreted in part as passive, since “the new raza” is characterized as clearly distinct from women who simply provide the “Chicanitos” who will actually continue a political, social, and artistic movement in the Chicano community. The mothers themselves are never indicated as active participants in this vision of the movement, except inasmuch as they supply the subjects who will participate.

The comments of this artist, no doubt politically and socially aware of the struggles of both marginalized subject and community, bear witness to the patriarchal and sexist norms that, as much as racism, profoundly impact his Chicano community and the Chicana/o movement of which he is a part. Certainly generational differences account for the tone of the artist’s commen-

tary. But while clearly intended as a gesture of honor and respect for la Chicana, the earlier statement illustrates how a woman’s ability to reproduce can, at times,

become collapsed into a representation of her single most valuable asset to an artistic and/or social justice movement, leaving all her other work—creative, political, cultural, professional, scholarly, etc.—obscured by this one ability to reproduce and “give babies” to the ruling men of the movement.' The critical

danger in this paradigm is the amputation of the many other contributions of women, as well as the total erasure of any female subject who chooses not to or is unable to bear children. Such a heteronormative worldview positions queer Chicana subjectivity in the realm of both invisible and impossible, since any woman choosing not to participate in the creation of new Raza as part of a heterosexual union risks classification as a traitor or subversive to her own community, as attested to in the poetic works of Gloria Anzaldtiia and Natashia L6pez. Given these tendencies to reduce women’s worth to her reproductive potential—in essence the functionality of her body alone—the reification of Latina sexuality and, specifically for

this project, queer Latina desire is of utmost discursive and political importance. In the multidisciplinary work of Terri de la Pena, Cristina Serna, Frances Negron-Muntaner, Ela Troyano, Alina Troyano, and Monica Enriquez, emphasis on queer Latina bodies and desire enables a transcendence of motherhood as an essential and universal characteristic of femininity. José Esteban Munoz’s

notion of disidentification is key here, since each text bears witness to the _ resistance to objectification and confinement by the lenses or language of dominant media and identity politics. By “disidentifying” with these powerful repre-

sentational institutions, authors and artists forge new paths to what José Esteban Munoz terms “counterpublic spheres” (Disidentifications 7). While similar arguments for the interruption of patriarchy can be located among heterosexual authors and artists, these representations of queer Chicana

and Latina sexuality uniquely center women’s bodies within a framework of female community and collective desire. Diverting authorial and directorial focus from women only as mothers of future generations, these authors and

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 95 artists offer an alternative but equally influential form of new Raza in their creative remapping of restrictive words and worlds. In Tongues Magazine, a journal of creativity produced by queer women of color in the Los Angeles area that debuted in the winter of 2001, Cristina Serna’s “tierras sagradas” represents a poetic profession of love as much to a place as to a person, the woman she addresses in the text. Serna’s verses develop a vital connection between the brown female body and a sense of origin and home. Serna’s creative work constructs a specifically queer Latina sitio from which to enact both nation and home as wholly positive and productive constructions. Serna’s desiring equation “woman = home” performs the second mode of homemaking described earlier, being home. This mode is defined by a dismissal of the comparative models invoked in the practice of coming home. Since the focus is on a state of being, rather than coming, the resulting home space Is less transitional in nature, though this lack of movement ought not suggest lack of vitality nor a fixity of definition. Coming home contextualizes home as a state

of movement, while being home defines home as a fluid state of being. Both models rely on water imagery, but simply coming home is the swim toward home. Being home is that island home, with porous boundaries, las margenes | mapped out by Eliana Rivero.

The poet begins in Spanish with an immediate reference to the parallel between her muse and a particular home space, “Eres la memoria de estas tierras sagradas” (Serna 13). The invocation of the woman as memory situates the subject in both the ancient past and the remembering present. Also the choice of “estas tierras” indicates a space in close proximity to the poetic voice. These lands she speaks of are here, where she and her partner are located, and this home is within arm’s reach. In this way, through the creative text the poet is able to reduce or erase the distances imposed by the ruptures of exile, migration, conquest, or displacement. The object of desire in Serna’s poem, the queer Chicana, is characterized as a goddess of Teotihuacan, a morena mexicana, even indigena, with her obsidian eyes and belleza de tiempos antiguos. At the close of the first verse, Serna uses traditional models of Mexican feminine power in order to reinscribe the act of desiring as a specifically queer Chicana practice. The poetic voice proclaims to the object of her desire, “Eres la bruja y curandera that bewitches and heals/ the ancient stirrings of my heart” (9-10, 13). Lesbian desire as represented in this poem, then, is situated in a specifically racialized and cultural context, is inherently Mexican in origin, and lends itself to a reading of the queer Latina body as representative of history, tradition, as well as the physical and emotional notions of home for the Latina subject who desires her. Both la curandera and la bruja hold a degree of feminine social and/or spiritual power within traditional Chicana/o community. As Tey Diana Rebolledo notes, the figure of the woman healer is invested with wisdom, knowledge, and spiritual power, while

96 HOMECOMING QUEERS the witch stands as a slightly more enigmatic and potentially threatening influence yet occupies an equally powerful position of female authority grounded in indigenous spiritualities (Rebolledo 83). This contextualization of specifically feminine forms of power within Serna’s narrative of queer Chicana desire turn a one-to-one expression of desire into a communitywide celebration of la mujer in her empowered state. There is little doubt as one moves through Serna’s verses, that for this poetic voice, the land, like her queer Chicana muse, is beautiful, brown, and female: I can feel the breath of this dark earth it’s in your scent, your body wears it as perfume. In the curve of your breasts I feel the dark mountain earth. Ican get so lost in your jungles, would love to be drowned by your rivers. I want to taste the wet earth between your thighs a place of beauty—the gateway of life. (13)

The topographical metaphors perform a literary “mapping out” of ethnic and cultural identity onto the body of the queer Chicana, as the contours of the female form become the shapes of a beloved homeland. Simultaneously, the verse weaves lesbian and female sexuality into the most basic of components of a national identity, the very earth that is Mexico. Furthermore, Serna also develops the queer brown female body, specifically her sexual organs, as a “gateway of life.” The reference to the female body as the embodiment of life suggests a variety of textual interpretations. This “gateway

of life”? seems to refer most directly to female reproductive organs and her capacity to create and nurture life within her body. The mention of motherhood here, in a homoerotic love poem about two Latinas, enacts an interesting critical interruption since typically family and maternal roles tend to be thought

of as primarily a practice within the domain of heterosexuality. Thus this connection and the insistence on the life-creating and affirming potential of the female body across categories of sexuality displace the compulsory hetero-

sexism of a reproductive definition of family and intimate union (family = man + woman + offspring), since according to the model set up in Serna’s poem, a lesbian coupling does not limit the power and possibility of this union to create life. By the same token, the poet’s final verse reveals a further extension of the imagery of this queer Latina body as exemplifying the promise and richness of life beyond reproduction. You

are what survives

the tragedy, the sadness,

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 97 the beauty, magic and holiness of life you are what survives, the memory of a sacred landscape that remains alive you are what survives, the spirit of a people that cannot be erased

by conquest, poverty, or lies .

you are what survives— a gift of life. (13)

From these lines it becomes evident that the “gateway of life” represented by the body of the Chicana muse has value far beyond its literal reproductive implications, since the “gift of life” in the closing lines of the poem is “you,” the queer Chicana herself, rather than the child she has the potential to produce. The lesbiana is “what survives,” making the queer Chicana body itself a living legacy through which history, culture, community, and tradition are preserved. In naming the queer Chicana body “the spirit of a people” and “an ancient beauty that remains alive,” she becomes the continuation of a physical and emotional space of home, as well as an extension of cultural and community pride. Since the queer Chicana body, then, is so closely aligned with Chicano/ Mexicano communities, the love and desire of that body—specifically its female form—connotes a queer, racialized, and gendered expression of love of culture, nation, and Self.

The Politics of Home in the Narrative of Terri de la Pena The silences and invisibilities—both scholarly and popular—which surround much of the work of Latina lesbian writing in the United States do not elude Terri de la Pena’s body of work. Despite her role as one of the most prolific Latina lesbian (or simply Latina) authors of the last two decades, many Latino scholars (along with the greater part of academia) remain ignorant of de la Pena’s texts and oddly unwilling to engage in discussions of these and other literary works that exceed the limits of preestablished literary canons.? Very recently, scholars have begun to include de la Pena’s vast body of work in scholarly discussions of Chicana/o, Latina/o, and queer studies, including book chapters by MaryPat Brady, Catridna Rueda Esquibel, and Salvador C. Fernandez. For the most part, however, her work remains largely untreated both in scholarship and the classroom. Published in 1989, de la Pena’s short story “La Maya” exemplifies the dias- _ poric notion of displaced identity and the longing and desire for reconnection

with the homeland. The story traces the protagonist’s physical journey to México, the land of her people, yet its impact far exceeds the confines of de la Pena’s fictional world as the narrative creation of an indigenous lover comes to

98 HOMECOMING QUEERS represent the cultivation and preservation of home, community, and identity. William Saffran posits a detailed listing of traits characteristic of all diaspora, including a history of imposed dispersal, an experience of alienation in the new host country, the desire to return to the home country, a continued sense of support for this homeland, a sense of collective identity grounded in the experience of displacement from the land of origin, and finally the preservation of memories and/or myths concerning the homeland (Clifford 304). Of these six features, the sense of longing for and often mythical (re)construction of the place of perceived origin most directly dialogues with de la Pena’s narrative.4

The act of commemorating defines a counterhegemonic reading of diaspora for Paul Gilroy: “As an alternative to the metaphysics of ‘race,’ nation, and bounded culture coded into the body, Diaspora is a concept that problematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging. It disrupts the fundamental

power of territory to determine identity by breaking the simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location and consciousness. It destroys the naive invocation of common memory as the basis of particularity by drawing attention to the dynamics of commemoration” (Gilroy 328). While the practice of commemoration underlines each of the three modes of homemaking, coming home begins with a clear delineation of mainstream spheres and inhabitants in contrast to marginal ones. This comparative element defines this mode, since it represents the most significant distinction from the second mode, being home.

While both modes utilize tropes of commonality and mirrored experiences/ appearances/phenotype/history/positionality, the tendency to characterize home

spaces by mapping out distinctions between center and periphery is unique to the first mode. In the context of diaspora subjectivity, center equates geographical positionality in a host country, while periphery refers to a subject’s link with a distant homeland or perceived nation of origin regardless of actual birthplace. It is this compare/contrast method of representation and meaning production that constructs a home space always in progress, rather than fixed or preexisting. Thus, the emphasis throughout this current mode is on the movement toward home—rather than a static definition of home. For queer theorists, the closet provides a paradigm from which to discuss issues of gender, sex, and sexuality, especially with regard to public performance. The slippery nature of queer subjectivity extends beyond the limits of traditional identity politics. A popular construct like gaydar provides only a provisional means for public identification of subjects falling outside heterosexual hegemony. Is she? Isn’t she? If Richard Rodriguez can’t tell, who can? Certainly racial, ethnic, and cultural identity should not be read as any more predictable or fixed than sexual subjectivity, since passing can be seen as an active strategy for all marginalized communities.5 The imagery of the closet saturates the experience of sexual alterity for queer subjects in the United States and internationally. To be in the closet is to pass as heterosexual in spite of one’s private lived

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 99 experience as a queer subject. Coming out of this queer closet is the mode through which queer subjects discard tactical silences and shrouds of secrecy to enter into openly public lives as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, or queer (only a few of the extensive list of labels embraced by individuals upon

their emergence). ,

For many dominant subjects, this coming out is a symbol of both personal and community empowerment. Yet for many queers of color, coming out may likely serve to disempower from the standpoint of racial, ethnic, and cultural community. The existing model of coming out is similar to my proposed mode of coming home in that both focus on a subject’s movement from one space into another, from silence to speaking, from restriction to (limited) freedom.

Yet, as has been observed throughout previous chapters of this book, the coming out process for many queers of color also involves an exile from racial, ethnic, and cultural communities (whether imposed or self-proclaimed) that often fails to emerge in hegemonic discussions of queer coming out narratives. Natashia L6pez’s and Gloria Anzaldtia’s poetry bears witness to this dislocation, as each woman is made to choose between Latina/o and queer communities. While Lopez felt pressure to choose between her identities as either a Latina

or a lesbian, Anzaldua positioned the debate as a border conflict, with her queer Chicana subjectivity always “del otro lado.” Ellen Gil-Gémez interprets the limits of subjectivity for lesbians of color who find themselves forced to choose whether to “live as a lesbian (generally seen as a white-identified label) or to pass as a ‘straight’ person of color” (Gil-Gémez 122). This binary of race/ ethnicity and sexuality has the potential to produce a sort of metaphysical diaspora, wherein subjects are displaced from racial, ethnic, and cultural communities due to publicly professed allegiances to queer subjectivity and community.

Rather than a nation of origin, there is a racialized subjectivity of origin: Chicana/o, Latina/o, Asian American, African American, etc. Rather than political or social disaccord, a public acknowledgment of sexual alterity precipitates a sentence of community exile as described by Gil-Gémez.®

Indigeneity and Authenticity in “La Maya” My proposed mode of coming home, along the same lines of diasporic longing for a distant homeland, positions queer subjects as perpetually almost but not quite home when racial, ethnic, and cultural communities reject the possibility of concomitantly queer subjects among their ranks. This return home is facilitated much as it is for the traditional geographic-based diaspora subjects: as a discursive practice grounded in the creative reinscription of home as idyllic, supportive and, above all, welcoming. Terri de la Pena’s narrative epitomizes this process of discursive homemaking as she depicts queer Chicana and Latina

desire as the means through which home spaces may be envisioned in spite

100 HOMECOMING QUEERS of both physical distance and the political and social antipathy her Mexican and Chicana/o communities exhibit toward queer subjectivity. Through carefully scripted exchanges of queer Chicana desire, de la Pena reconciles the divides her characters experience as multiply marginalized subjects. “La Maya” opens with Adriana Carranza, de la Pena’s protagonist, on the beaches of Isla Mujeres, where her sensual fantasies are propelled by soft ocean waves. As she swims through calm waters, Adriana notes that “the tropical climate heightened her sexuality” and reveals recurring erotic dreams—not about her Anglo girlfriend back in the United States, but rather about “brown-skinned Mexicanas with glossy hair and compelling eyes.” She confesses to wondering “if being among her own people had made her more open to these fantasies” (1). From the beginning, then, Adriana views Mexico as her home and creates a system of community in which she identifies almost exclusively with her new foreign surroundings. However, the text’s automatic linking of the tropicalized Mexico and a sense of eroticism must be problematized. To what degree might

these images represent a self-exoticization and also tropicalization of the indigenous women whom she sexualizes throughout the story? In Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, coeditors Frances Aparicio and Susan Chavez-Silverman define the practice of “tropicalization” as “to trope, to imbue a particular space, geography, group, or nation with a set of traits, images, and values,” and with respect to Latina/o representation they define their focus as “a mythic idea of latinidad based on Anglo (or dominant) projections of fear” (8). An understanding of the concept of tropicalization hinges upon an analysis of power dynamics and authorial positionality, since a First World tropicalization might be inherently hegemonic, as Aparicio

and Chavez-Silverman assert, while a tropicalized representation produced from a Third World perspective possesses the potential for both subversive and assimilative agendas. Integral to reading essentialism and understanding the nature of representations of alterity is an analytical framework that incorporates an awareness of how tropicalized images are utilized by different communities as tools for both the propagation of hegemony and counterhegemonic self-representation “that foregrounds the transformative cultural agency of the subaltern subject” (2). Although de la Pena’s short stories are clearly fictional, the concept of selfrepresentation maintains relevance here, since the author admittedly writes of subjectivities and communities with which she identifies as a woman, Chicana, feminist, and lesbian.’ In this case, de la Pena’s representations of Chicana lesbian community prove relatively “symmetric” in terms of the power dynamics. However, “La Maya” tests the limits of self-representation as de la Pena offers characterization of both a Chicana and native lesbian. The Chicana character stands as a member of the First World superpower of the United States, at least geographically if not psychologically or politically. La Maya represents the Third

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 101 World entity of Mexico and is still further politically marginalized as an indigenous woman. Given this extreme power differential, does de la Pefia’s characterization of the native woman, La Maya, conform to an assimilative end? Of key concern, given Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman’s paradigm of tropicalization, is the notion of hegemony and whether a particular representation perpetuates or interrupts a ruling discourse. An accurate response to the issue of hegemony in de la Pena’s work is difficult to arrive at, given that we must first determine which hegemony matters as far as the power dynamics of de la Pena’s tropicalized representations. Queer Latina and specifically Chicana communities have, even recently, been relegated to the realm of the invisible, as I have

discussed through the current project. It is, therefore, difficult to establish a reigning vision of hegemony for such a marginalized population. Yet one could argue that the representation of queer Chicana characters, by a queer Chicana herself, equates a degree of counterhegemonic self-representation, since de la Pena’s texts defy the principal characteristic attributed to queer Latina subjec-

tivity in mainstream U.S. society: nonexistence. Her characters are active, speaking, desiring subjects who are not marginal but central to discourses of their own design. De la Pena portrays women in an empowered independent manner that counters patriarchal hegemony, and Chicanas in a manner contrary to both misogynist and racist worldviews. Additionally, her privileging of women’s discourse, women’s communities, and women’s history, as well as feminist ideologies, lends itself to this counterhegemonic purpose. Along the same lines, de la Pena’s unwaveringly positive focus on lesbian sexuality counters ruling institutions of heterosexism that limit female sexuality and pleasure to its coupling with a male partner. Each of these qualities of de la Pena’s text lend themselves to what Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman term the “transformative cultural agency” signifying a subversive mode of tropicalization (Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman 2).

“La Maya” does reveal the “asymmetries of power” that Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman cite as indicative of a hegemonic tropicalization. In Adriana’s visualizations, the nameless Mayan woman appears nude and is characterized

by what appear to be attempts at a distinctly native characterization. Her “sturdy and powerful” frame, “skillful fingers,” and “wide hips” are all described

in detail as they pertain to the acts of pleasuring Adriana. The protagonist’s dream scene, the flow seems strangely unidirectional—alive only on the side that La Maya holds, while Adriana simply receives this flow of energy without

contributing to the exchange. This imbalanced flow of energy might be explained by the nature of the narrative, an erotic dream/fantasy that would justify the lack of reciprocity within the sexual encounter. However, the Mayan woman’s role as giver rather than recipient of erotic pleasure is significant also as a reading of diasporic longing and desire for a distant homeland. In her analysis of transcultural Cuban-American poetry, Silvia Spitta elucidates two distinct

102 HOMECOMING QUEERS positions on the concept of home, “the longing for ‘home’ and the realization that there is no going home” (Aparicio and Chavez Silverman 172). Both realiza-

tions similarly frame de la Pena’s protagonist’s relationship with Mexico, though the author attempts to circumvent the notion of an impossible homecoming by rewriting a narrative of Mexico as a welcoming and wholly familiar

site of perceived origin. In this way, homemaking becomes the discursive practice through which nation is broadened to include relationships both geographical and textual. This mode, then, presents itself as a critical weapon of survival for diasporic subjects for whom return to a distant homeland is difficult or impossible. Adriana feels alienated from her Anglo surroundings in the United States and the Mayan woman and Mexico represent agents that lend substance to her construction of identity as a Mexicana in spite of ties to the United States. The conjuring of an indigenous woman nourishing and attending to Adriana represents an undisputed and unproblematized affiliation with this land of origin as epitomized by Mexico’s (La Maya’s) unhesitating embrace of Chicana and Chicano offspring (Adriana). The significance of Mexico’s embrace is exemplified in the protagonist’s fantastical encounter with La Maya, revealing that “Adriana wanted to blend with esta mujer extrana, and she grabbed the thick ends of la Maya’s flowing hair. Her cabello de india felt like a lifeline” (2). The pro-

tagonist’s fantasy is defined by the human link between the two—a link that upon further examination can be interpreted as a passage of life energy from the Mexican woman to the Chicana. De la Pena’s “La Maya” works toward a subversion of both the politics of location and identity within a diaspora situation and of the animosity that often characterizes Chicano/Mexicano relations, as is illustrated by Octavio Paz’s depiction of the Mexican American pachuco figure as “a pariah, a man who belongs nowhere” and an individual whose “hybrid language and behavior reflect a psychic oscillation between two irreducible worlds—the North American and the Mexican—which he vainly hopes to reconcile and conquer” (Paz 17-18). Paz’s conceptualization of the pachuco exhibits the prevalence of an essential-

ized national identity, and without question his argument supports an inherent link between location or residence and individual and collective identity. Paz’s description of the pachuco posits this figure as defined by the same lack of sitio and lengua elucidated by Emma Pérez. For Paz, then, diasporic identity (as exemplified by his description of the not-quite-Mexican, not-quite-American pachuco) is at best unstable, at worst impossible. A sane man within this paradigm of identity might be expected to undergo the assimilation necessary to acculturate into a new environment, in this case that of the United States of (Anglo) America. Yet, as Spitta noted, Paz fails to imagine the possibility that his two irreducible categories, Mexican and Yankee, do not in fact represent mutually exclusive domains, and that in the same way notions of mexicanidad have

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 103 come to include an amalgamation of both Anglo European and indigenous ties, Chicanismo might also have the potential to subsume both national identities and together create something not one or the other, but both. Yet for many diasporic subjects, this unwavering embrace does not automatically radiate from the land of displacement, and in fact, many are forced to come to terms with

their homeland’s default rejection of them and of their consequently hybrid subjectivities. In the excerpt from “La Maya,” de la Penia’s cycle of energy from la indigena

to la Chicana represents what Stuart Hall describes as a return home “by another route.” Within the paradigm of diaspora subjectivity, Hall discusses the significance of the physical and emotional journey back to one’s homeland but explains the primacy of a psychological return for subjects of African diasporas: “These symbolic journeys are necessary for us all—and necessarily circular. This is the Africa we must return to—but ‘by another route’: what Africa has become in the New World, what we have made of ‘Africa’: ‘Africa’—as we re-tell it through

politics, memory and desire” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 232). When the physical journey is not feasible, as is frequently the case for diaspora subjects, the journey home is constructed as a retelling of the past as the preservation and cultivation of memory and myth that ties the diasporic subject to this land

of origin. Gloria Anzaldia envisions a similar alternative homecoming for Mexican origin communities, which she terms “El otro México.” Inspired by a popular Los Tigres del Norte song, Anzaldua suggests a layering of Mexico and

the mythical Aztlan, since she laments being “mexicana de este lado” (Borderlands 23-25). Here she speaks not of nations but of sides—this or that one—the divide between the two seemingly porous but ultimately impenetrable. Hall and Anzaldtia address the elusiveness of these distant lands of origin, re-creating home as a mythical entity that replaces a physical homecoming with a discursive one. Adriana’s journey home is both physical—via her travels to Mexico—and psychological—via her romantic connection with La Maya. Yet the process is contextualized in this moment as uniquely corporeal, since La Maya’s

own hair becomes the conduit through which Adriana commemorates Mexico and is consequently accepted by the native woman as the nation’s discursive representative. Ironically then, the very desire to connect and be defined by the land of origin incites the sense of hybridity in displaced individuals who then endure the rejection and alienation from both home and host countries. The idealized fictional worlds created in de la Pena’s texts represent exactly this: a fantasy. The images are extreme, melodramatic, and essentialist, yet the resulting text constructs a hybrid home space that stands in diametric opposition to that of a racist, sexist, and homophobic reality in both Anglo and Mexican communities. Thus La Maya’s “adoring tongue” and eager embrace represent a utopian world in which hybridity does not preclude a sense of community and belonging.

104 HOMECOMING QUEERS In the story, the figure through which this utopia is constructed, La Maya, soon emerges as an actual woman—the fantasy of Adriana’s dreams brought to life. Her entrance as the Mexican hotel’s local tour guide is marked with characteristic drama and exotic flare: From the corner of her eye, Adriana noticed her. La mujer glided into the lobby with the grace of a prowling jaguar. She was lithe and brown, of

average height—but there was nothing average about her. Her waistlength hair was fastened with a golden clasp at the nape of her neck. Her penetrating eyes spoke of ageless mysteries. With a Mayan profile, she seems to have stepped from the pages of a Mexican art book. She had the prominent nose, the sensual lips, the large eyes with the slight upward tilt so characteristic of the Mayans. She even wore an embroidered huipil, a short version which revealed her strong legs. Adriana stared. La Maya had come to life. (3)

In this passage Adriana observes how the Anglo tourists surrounding her in the hotel are charmed by the woman, Pilar, and her colorful dress and accented English. Yet what Adriana fails to notice is her own charmed state as she eagerly devours the exoticized image of the native woman. The characterization of Pilar is unquestionably caricatured, quintessentially indigenous, as if she had stepped from an art book, a painting, an artist’s rendering of exotic Mexicanismo. Although several of the characteristics are anthropological in feel, the narrator’s referencing of the Mexican art book is particularly revealing of the politics behind Adriana’s gaze. First, the book itself suggests some distance from the figure of La Maya, who obviously represents an image of which the Chicana has

only textual familiarity. This distance implies that Adriana’s connection to Mexico is primarily external, from the outside (United States) inward. Secondly,

the choice of an art book, rather than the art itself, contextualizes Adriana’s gaze as that of an art historian or museum visitor, studying the indigenous woman rather than interacting with her as an active human subject. Thirdly, the book itself is stationary and characterizes La Maya—even as she “steps from the pages”—as fixed and rigidly defined. Her likeness to the textual artifact fossilizes her as essence brought to life. The portrayal may be further problema-

tized upon an analysis of the native woman’s limited voice and superficial character development throughout the story. This superficiality extends to the nature of Adriana’s interaction with the woman: “Adriana hardly listened to Pilar’s narrative. She was too intrigued with watching her, anticipating how to approach her.” It further characterizes Pilar as “a fitting distraction” to her worries about a current romantic relationship with an Anglo woman at home in the United States. In this way, a disturbing parallel emerges between the desiring gaze of dominant interest in the exoticized, sexualized, and often superficially characterized native figure.

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 105 This relationship with an Anglo woman and the narrator’s strong desire to contrast it with that of Adriana and her Mayan fantasy woman also illustrates the sense of alienation and discontinuity with her surroundings in an Anglo-

dominated U.S. society. While traveling on sightseeing excursions through Mexico with other Anglo tourists, Adriana is as quick to notice her sense of isolation from the others as they are, and she fields numerous questions from tourists curious about her ethnic-looking appearance and cultural background. This same superficiality also defines Adriana’s Anglo girlfriend, Liz, who is char-

acterized in opposition to the Chicana protagonist. Though both Liz and Adriana hold positions as bilingual educators, the narrator is quick to distinguish between the Anglo woman’s lack of profound interest in the language or culture of those she teaches and Adriana’s loyalty to both her community and cultural traditions. Liz as a subject is drawn with broad and generalized strokes that emphasize many of the points at which her personality and cultural awareness diverge from that of Adriana, yet little attention is dedicated to the ways in which Adriana’s identity converges with that of the Anglo lesbian, or U.S. communities in general. This collapsing of difference within Mexican and Chicano communities exists in dramatic contrast to the way in which Adriana’s identity as a Chicana is constructed almost completely outside the United States and its dominant culture. Whether this—like the unwavering embrace of La Maya—is also an idealized version of reality is yet another issue essential to the interrogation of _ this text. It appears, though, that Adriana’s sense of alienation with the host country 1s precipitated by her desire to connect with a community and of belonging that is firmly embedded in Mexican culture and identity. In a physical, emotional, and aesthetic sense, de la Pena’s protagonist positions herself firmly on the Mexican side of a U.S./Mexico dichotomy. This binary of identity lends itself to a reading of Adriana actively engaging in the representational mode of “coming home,” where comparative frameworks give structure to her allegiance to a land of perceived origin and alienation from a site of residence. In contrast to Cristina Serna’s representation of home as an affirmatively Chicana/Mexicana and female, de la Pena’s protagonist formulates a vision of home that joins affirmation for Mexico with a negation of the antihome in the Anglo-dominant United States.

Mexican and Chicana Merging in “Mariposa” The pattern of coming home in “La Maya” that observes the collapsing of Chicana identity into that of “lo Mexicano” is inverted in another of de la Pena’s

short stories, “Mariposa.” In “La Maya,” de la Pena’s protagonist travels to Mexico and, with the help of the indigenous and somewhat spectral figure of La Maya (Pilar), becomes integrated into the Mexican community. She creates

106 HOMECOMING QUEERS a textual resolution to the disconnect of diaspora subjectivity. De la Pena’s creative texts transform an impossible return of the diasporic subject into a productive and wholly positive reunion with an idealized homeland. This second story, “Mariposa,” introduces another Chicana lesbian protagonist, Jen Avila, a musician who travels to a women’s music festival in order to perform and also to seek out female bonding and community. At the beginning of the story, Jen sits upon a rock practicing her flute while in the process of “transporting herself to the Mexican past” with her music (7). Again, we see de la Pena’s characters in a nearly perpetual state of movement, situated within one reality while continually attempting to transcend their actual surroundings in order to reconnect with a world more ethnically and culturally specific and idealistically supportive of both a Chicana and lesbian identified subject. In this case, the diasporic subject, in her distancing from cultural and national centers of Mexican community, is afforded the opportunity to transgress the limits of geography and tradition through a retelling of this land of origin, similar to Hall’s and Anzaldua’s reconstruction of Africa and Mexico through memory and myth. De la Pena offers her fiction as memory and myth, the discursive fabric from which a uniquely queer Chicana diaspora is woven.®

In his admittedly brief discussion of gender, James Clifford also asserts the

potential impact of diasporic experience on the disruption or perpetuation of sexism among dispersed communities. Clifford ponders the impact such displacement might have upon the loosening of gender subordination and posits the possible risk that continued connections with the homeland and its familial, cultural, and religious traditions pose to a perpetuation or renewal of patriarchal structures (314). The positing of this possible reproduction or resurgence of the homeland’s patriarchal traditions is problematic, however, in its

underlying presumption that the new host country does not also support an equally or—in fact—more oppressive patriarchal framework. A conversion or

liberation from a previous value system does not inherently imply an improvement of gender equity or a lessening of sexist and/or patriarchal rule. Paul Gilroy, in contrast, argues that diasporic discourse might be viewed as a viable alternative to patriarchal notions as defined through a traditional nation-state model and its tendency to centralize masculinity and hierarchies of gender and family in the struggle for national and global identity (332~35). Given Gilroy and Clifford’s assertions, how might a reading of de la Pena’s

fluidly hybrid fictional worlds be seen to further challenge or conform to notions of traditional identity politics and of essentialized genealogical and national identification? De la Pena avoids the potential dangers outlined by Clifford as she transforms the mythical imagined homeland into a domain of specifically lesbian exchanges and interaction. Although lesbian ought not be thought to equate fair and equal power relations, de la Pena’s underlying feminist perspective, as well as her alignment with a politics of sameness and

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 107 shared difference, ground her fiction in equality and woman-centered family and community structures. De la Pena’s textual worlds exist as utopian representations of a Mexican homeland where identification with native culture is epitomized by the inviting and alluring Mexican woman, whose body is marked by idealized notions of both indigenous beauty and unabashedly open lesbian desire and sexuality. Finding middle ground somewhere between both Gilroy

and Clifford’s statements, de la Pena’s fiction constructs mythical worlds of

acceptance and support, both subverting patriarchal norms of traditional Mexican society while also conforming to typically exoticized and superficially

constructed portraits of indigenous subjects. : In the 1990 publication “Mariposa,” action takes place within the United States, and the momentum of the protagonist’s positionality is simply inverted as a collective Chicana identity gradually moves to subsume that of Mexican identity. “Mariposa” again introduces the Mexican figure as the object of the Chicana protagonist’s desiring gaze. Jen, the protagonist, views the Mexican woman, Mariposa, for the first time as she stands nude, bathing in a nearby stream. As is typical in de la Pena’s narrative, a physical description precedes a more profound characterization, and Mariposa—with her brown skin, long black hair, ebony “ojos de india,” and supple figure—closely resembles the native woman Pilar in “La Maya.” Seemingly unaware, Jen’s impression of

Mariposa is strikingly similar to that of the gawking Anglo tourists in the “La Maya,” noting how “Lesbians from América Latina intrigued Jen” (8). Jen quickly reassesses the situation, attempting to convince herself that Mariposa’s

“ethnic beauty” was not a contributing factor in her growing interest in and attraction to her. Upon engaging in a conversation with Mariposa, Jen’s shame at her

Anglicized name and her mother’s assimilationist tendencies emerges. Mariposa—referred to in the narrative as “The Latina” (not in contrast to Jen, but rather to the rest of the women’s music festival community)—responds “Pero, somos Americanas tambien, verdad? Unless they heard you and me speak, los gringos wouldn’t even know we’re from different sides of the border. They’d see us only as brown women—foreigners” (9). Here Stuart Hall’s notion of subjectivity crossed and recrossed suggests that for Jen and Mariposa sexuality operates as the unifying positionality at the festival (a women’s and lesbian focused event), upon which their national and ethnic difference (based on phenotypic variation from the surrounding Anglos) crosses and recrosses in order to map the heterogeneity of this lesbian community. However, the very pronounced distinctions between Mariposa’s Mexican national identity and Jen’s U.S.-based Chicana identity fail to register on the map of crossings and recross-

ings, though their narrative impact remain evident. , Mariposa’s statement marks yet another fictional world of collapsed boundaries and subsumed differences, although in this instance, the Chicana

108 HOMECOMING QUEERS protagonist’s identity is kept stationary while the Mexican woman is gradually contained within the label “Chicana.” In fact, though Mariposa identifies herself as a Mexicana from Aguascalientes, her journey to the United States as an ado-

lescent shifts her identity toward Gloria Anzaldtia’s notion of a “Mexicana de este lado.” Her speech evidences this other side, as she offers only a handful of words in Spanish, sprinkled throughout with what the protagonist “guessed was a Mexican accent” (8). While Mariposa clearly distinguishes between her Mexican and Jen’s U.S. origins, she cites the Anglo homogenizing gaze and the

women’s shared experience of alienation or familiar alterity as the impetus for their collective identity. In an effort to emphasize the similarities between Chicana and Mexicana identity, de la Pena creates Chicana-identified Mexicanas and Mexicana-identified Chicanas—the performance of hybridity equally marking both ends of this queer Chicana diaspora. In her book Performing la Mestiza: Textual Representations of Lesbians of Color

and the Negotiation of Identities, Ellen Gil-G6mez suggests that queer women of color at times utilize what José Esteban Munoz would term “White Anglo lesbian affect” as a survival tactic, when the homophobia and misogyny present in their racial, ethnic, and cultural communities make it difficult or impossible to live openly as queer subjects (Gil-Go6mez 119~22). Perhaps because of this tendency

to register homosexuality as a sign of assimilation into Anglo culture and values, the form of the desired body becomes paramount to discussions of the Latina lesbian desiring subject. What—in terms of physical features or material attributes—and, more important, who—defined by the declared racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, and class positionalities of the individual)—a Latina lesbian subject chooses to desire, love, and commit to each significantly factor into matters of individual identity as well as community and family dynamics. Through discussions of the personal and political ramifications of various paths of queer Latina desire in her work, Terri de la Pena constructs the primacy of the desired subject in discussions of Latina and lesbian subjectivity. Thus the acceptance of a Mexican woman as partner comes to represent an embracing of community, family, and ethnic and cultural identity. Nearly all of de la Pena’s narrative production employs a narrative style I term inclusive erotics. This approach to queer Chicana representation attempts to harness Audre Lorde’s “uses of the erotic” in order to strengthen a fragile relationship with a perceived homeland. This emphasis on inclusion reconciles tenuously defined national and ethnic categorizations by collapsing particular dichotomies (i.e., Mexican and Chicana/o) while reifying others (Anglo United States and indigenous Latin America). As such, de la Pena offers narratives that work toward a resolution of Chicana/Mexican animosity through the representation of an intimate queer union. However, authorial emphasis on frameworks of affinity at times elides the historical and political specificity of the Mexican indigenous female subject.

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 109 The Chicana protagonist in de la Pefia’s first novel, Margins (1992), exempli-

fies such a characterization as she distinguishes hey interaction with an Anglo lover from her current involvement with another Chicana lesbian, “The bond forming between them was more than sexual; it involved common roots, common perceptions” (219). And again, we find a characterization of the Chicana/ Mexicana lover as representative of home, origin, and identity, as the narrator describes the protagonist’s encounter with her brown lover’s body, “her firm arms... long legs, a fine down attesting to a long-ago conquistador. It swirled at the nape of her neck, meeting her thick black hair, glossy and straight as that of any Azteca” (267). Later the parallel characterization so important to the protagonist’s claiming of home and identity is revealed by the narrator’s comments, “Veronica [the protagonist] smiled. She knew René {her Chicana lover] wanted

her; their desire was identical. She’s like me, she thought—so brown, so Chicana” (267-68). Thus the protagonist’s sense of alienation from her surroundings as well as her desire to belong is echoed in her longing for a partner of similar phenotype and cultural background, and this mirroring is often carried to such an extent in the narrative that a reading of love and acceptance of Self in addition to that of another woman and Chicana cannot be denied. Often the dynamics of Anglo/Chicana unions in de la Pena’s narrative establish the protagonist as an isolated Chicana who seeks intimacy with Anglo partners because of their availability, yet the introduction of a single Chicana/ Mexicana into the fictional world functions as a prioritizing agent, enabling the protagonist to see how interracial or intercultural relationships are ultimately unfulfilling and restrictive to an affirmation of Chicana identity. Jen first spots Mariposa standing in a stream where, prompted by her own recent depression, she wonders if the beautiful woman is attempting to drown herself. Racing to her rescue, Jen quickly learns that the woman is merely bathing and requires no assistance. Ironically, the Mexican woman’s introduction in the story presents the catalyst for de la Pena’s narrative of inclusive erotics wherein Mariposa ultimately rescues Jen. In similar fashion to Pilar in “La Maya,” de la Pena characterizes Mariposa as a sensual Mexican goddess with emphasis on her appealing aesthetic: “She was a couple of inches shorter than Jen, with naturally burnished skin, a supple body. Releasing her hair, she let it cascade to her waist. Her ebony eyes gazed at

Jen disarmingly” (8). Phenotypically, the Chicana or Mexicana woman who enables an inclusive homecoming for de la Pefia’s protagonists is generally dark and often indigenous, as illustrated earlier. Here the narrator is careful to note

the “natural” state of Mariposa’s copper skin, presenting her as an authentic (rather than unnaturally tanned) morena. Jen’s gaze eagerly devours the markers of this brown woman’s naked body, noticing first Mariposa’s “black hair” and “ebony eyes,” and finally takes note of the woman’s exposed genitals as she

“(catches] a fleeting glimpse of a purple butterfly tattoo near the dark tangle

110 HOMECOMING QUEERS of the Latina’s mound” (8). De la Pena’s desiring aesthetic stresses the importance of the corporeality of the mujer morena, every part of her body marked by darkness and difference. The iconic morena beauty in de la Pena’s narratives regularly stands in stark contrast to a previous Anglo lover who functions as the antithesis of the Chicana/Mexicana lover on several levels. The binaries of bronzed versus pale skin, black versus red or blonde hair, Spanglish versus English, and open versus closeted lesbian give structure to de la Pena’s comparative coming home narrative. Yet while the categories appear clearly drawn in “Mariposa,” protagonist Jen reveals her worries about being rejected from a Chicana/Mexicana collective. When Mariposa, a talented artist, offers to paint a colibri on Jen’s body, Jen must inquire about the word’s meaning. “Embarrassed by her lack of Spanish fluency,” (12) Jen anticipates judgment from Mariposa: “The artist lifted a dark brow, no doubt classifying Jen in the ‘hopeless pocha’ category” (13). Consistent with the coming home narrative, Mariposa repeatedly offers reassurance and an extended hand to welcome Jen into a sense of Latina collectivity, glossing over any differences to focus on their shared difference from the non-Latina lesbians

at the festival. The hummingbird—uttered initially in Spanish—illustrates one significant welcoming moment, since Mariposa explains to Jen that the bird is “a Mexican symbol of love... un colibri with tiny wings will cause your heart to flutter again” (13). A Spanish word, a Mexican symbol, and a call to resurrect Jen’s desiring heart, the colibri, like Mariposa herself, is meant to inject life and desire into the protagonist’s previously wounded and unfulfilled heart. An open expression of lesbian sexuality also marks de la Pena’s inclusive erotics. Mariposa proudly exhibits her desire for women in a way that exceeds what is possible or comfortable for the protagonist herself. In one scene, while painting a design on Jen’s friend Michi, Mariposa unexpectedly lowers her mouth to lick her client’s exposed breast. Embarrassed, Michi exits while Jen observes from a distance, “grateful for the pine tree’s support. Otherwise, in her surprise at Mariposa’s impulsiveness, she would have toppled over” (12). From the first scene, the nude Mariposa is presented as open, comfortable, and available. Where Mariposa’s desire floats along the surface of her skin, drifts from her lips in bold and unapologetic confessions, Jen’s desire is cerebral, offered not in dialogue but silent narration. Like Mariposa’s clear Mexican features and bilingualism, her open expression of lesbian sexuality is essential in de la Pena’s formulation of an inclusive erotics—since Jen’s desired homecoming is equally lesbian and Mexican in nature. For Mariposa, an adolescent romance with an Anglo lover—the daughter of her family’s employer—ends in trauma when the daughter’s father catches the two together and fires Mariposa’s entire family. Both the Anglo father and Mariposa’s Mexican family respond with outrage, prompting her to run away and eventually seek out “la comunidad lesbiana” (14).

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 11 Although Mariposa flees not a hostile nation but her disgraced family and

community, the result is the same: a disjointed subject who seeks out the acceptance of lesbian community when her ethnic community rejects her. For queer Puerto Ricans who face a hostile homeland, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes elucidates three common options: fight, flight, and/or the closet (“De Sexilio(s)” 143-44). “Mariposa” addresses the first two paths as a singular hybrid choice—in a Chicana/Mexicana rather than Puerto Rican context. Mariposa and Jen both reference difficulties negotiating their lesbian identities within a heteronormative world, and both flee either physically or emotionally from particular communities in order to live comfortably. Whereas Mariposa leaves her Mexican family for a lesbian community, she also actively disengages with an Anglo lesbian community in favor of a utopic Chicana lesbian union with the protag-

onist. Jen also flees her Anglo-dominant world for a Latina partner and Mexican-specific desire that will reconcile her feelings of isolation and alienation. In contrast to the “sexilio”—or (s)exile—state that La Fountain-Stokes theorizes, Jen’s homecoming to a Latina lesbian lover positions her in what could be called a “Mexilio”—a Chicana exiled from a cultural legacy to which she desperately longs to return. Unlike other works by de la Peha where an Anglo lover serves as awkward

foil for the perfectly matched Chicana/Mexicana lover, Jen’s betrayal comes from a previous Chicana lover who leaves her for a mutual friend. And though the previous Anglo lover is distant or absent here, the comparative focus shifts to a generalized sense of dissatisfaction that may only be remedied by the current union of the story’s two characters. In the final scene, the two women’s passions converge, and both quantify their feelings in relative terms. Mariposa remembers the pain associated with her childhood Anglo lover and then admits to Jen, “eres Chicana. It means more, sabes?” (17). Though Jen does not verbally respond, she silently affirms the statement, “recalling the pride she had felt in loving ... a Chicana lesbian like herself” (17). For each woman, the heightened intensity of their Chicana/Mexicana union is directly measured against lesser desires and relationships with non-Latinas. As the women make love, the narra-

tive lifts them into flight: “las Chicanas soared and flew together into that Yosemite night” (17). This final image brings the women full circle, their desire aloft like the Mexican colibri and Mariposa’s own butterfly tattoo, and also consummates the couple’s conversion into wholeness, with Mariposa’s Mexicana subsumed into Jen’s Chicana subjectivity. While “La Maya” and “Mariposa” present exciting alternative homecomings in discourse for their queer Chicana protagonists, they concurrently gloss over

important distinctions in the legacies of colonization shaping queer Chicana, Mexicana, and indigenous women’s lives. Where Frances Aparicio and Susana Chavez-Silverman discuss tropicalizations from above (hegemonic) or below (subversive), de la Pena’s tropicalizations further complicate the dichotomy

112 HOMECOMING QUEERS of above and below. To what degree do Adriana and Jen, as Chicanas residing

in the United States, represent the privilege and colonial legacies of this nation? At what point, if any, do we distinguish between their likely U.S. citizenship and their positionalities as ethnic, gendered, and sexual minorities in an Anglocentric, patriarchal, and homophobic society? Though Cherrie Moraga cautions against the division consequence of “ranking of oppressions,”

historical specificity shapes the texture of particular forms of oppression (Loving in the War Years 52). In addition to an analysis of power structures subverted or reified, I believe it is equally helpful to study the nature of the style and genre in which both stories are written. “La Maya” and “Mariposa” appear within a year of each other in the lesbian erotica collections Intricate Passions and Lesbian Bedtime Stories 2, respectively. The titles and types of publication

suggest a popular form intended for leisure reading by lesbian audiences. In particular, the specific niche of erotica imposes certain restrictions on de la Pena’s narrative production. In the interest of universal seduction, de la Pena’s

short stories forgo many of the detailed discussions of political and social issues facing Chicana/o and specifically queer Chicana communities that mark her novelistic publications.

Frances Negr6én-Muntaner’s Brincando el charco | Negr6n-Muntaner begins her 1994 film with both resistance and conformity. The film’s narrator poses familiar “who are we?” and “where are we going?” questions of identity and community, then defiantly declares to her viewing audience, “I’m the maker of these questions, even as I contest them. Yet on certain occasions I am seduced into seeing us, failing to see anything else. That is when I must point my lens elsewhere to look for what escapes the ‘us’ in nosotros.”? Her resistance takes the form of a rejection of homogenizing identity politics as she questions the very questions that move to define or confine her. Conformity emerges in as much as she admits to being seduced by the lures of a romantically essentialized Puerto Rican community that the film’s protagonist,

a filmmaker named Claudia, interprets as accepting “a plate at the table of la grand familia puertorriquena.” For Claudia (played by the film’s writer, producer,

| and director, Negro6n-Muntaner), and many other Puerto Ricans living away from the island, there is no border in the dirt to signify the moment of crossing from one nation into another. Yet while citizenship may or may not be a legal matter that is fairly easy to map upon the bodies it marks, the etchings of identity come with greater psychological and linguistic complications. The interviewees in Negrén-Muntaner’s film explain the disconnect Puerto Ricans feel, both with their island of origin as well as their current mainland home. During one scene, Claudia interviews her girlfriend, Ana, who evidences the shifting of ethnic identity confines across her own flesh: “When I’m with

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 113 gringos I say I’m Puerto Rican. When I’m with real Puerto Ricans, I say ’m from

New York” (Brincando). Ana understands that her ethnic identity is largely informed by insufficiency, whether she is too dark to be “New Yorker” among Anglos and too assimilated into Anglo culture to be Puerto Rican among “real” Puerto Ricans. Ana’s choice of “real” to designate a type of Puerto Rican suggests her conformity to a system of ethnic authenticity. Much like Michele Serros labels herself a “Chicana falsa,”’?° Ana accepts—albeit angrily—that she is a “boricua falsa” and chooses to engage in a self-limiting version of border play. Like a ping-pong ball she propels herself back and forth across borders of Puerto Rican and New Yorker identities, always defined by her insufficiency in relation to a normalized authentic other. As the filmmaker, Claudia’s narrative propels the film forward, self-reflective as though she were simultaneously creator, audience, and critic of her creative

production. This technique of metanarrative gives structure to the film and enables Claudia to voice her own experience as the final and overarching testimonio in her cinematic study of Puerto Rican diaspora experience. Like Ana, Claudia experiences a sense of dissonance with her New York City surroundings: “I had trouble finding my reflection in others, or so my memory fails me. On this side the cobblestones don’t speak to me. My blue sky doesn’t in a second turn grey and rain upon me. Along these streets my skin melts away in the privilege of whiteness. As long as I hold my tongue. So I’m making myself native, in other ways” (Brincando). As a light-skinned Latina, Claudia finds that her skin speaks equally as loud as her own voice when she is swallowed up into a mass of white privilege. Because she looks familiar to many presumably Anglo New Yorkers

on the city’s streets, Claudia gains access to worlds she might otherwise be denied—yet these privileges come at the cost of her voice, since she must “hold her tongue” in order to pass through. In this way, Claudia’s appearance and ability to pass as Anglo are presented not as a positive aspect of her diasporic experience, but rather as a violent one in which she perceives herself as melting into—losing all sense of distinction, uniqueness, or difference from—a collective Anglo dominant whole, or what she might term an equally problematic seat at the table of the great American (read: United Statesian) family. How then might we interpret Claudia’s final determination in the previous excerpt—that she is “making herself native, in other ways”? I would argue that this appeal to nativeness suggests the representational mode of complicating home, since the familiarity, ease, and stability of Claudia’s homecoming is clearly undermined by her tenuous relationship with her heteronormative family in Puerto Rico and her Anglo-dominant surroundings in New York. The notion of native here once again recalls Anzaldtia’s “Mexicana de este lado,” since

Claudia cannot count on her physical or linguistic presence to proclaim her Puerto Rican and lesbian positionalities. She identifies herself as “a familiar stranger,” not just in New York but also in Puerto Rico. When her friend reminds

114 HOMECOMING QUEERS her that eventually all Puerto Ricans feel the desire to return to the island, to their home, Claudia resists with her own redefinition of a home repositioned: FRIEND: jAy Claudia! Es que llega el momento en que uno quiere estar entre los suyos, en el pais de uno, aunque no sea de uno na. CLAUDIA: 2Qué mas entre los nuestros que en Nueva York? Somos mas aqui que en San Juan. FRIEND: Tu sabes que no es lo mismo (Brincando).

As the two women discuss mainland Puerto Ricans’ connection and disconnection from the island, Claudia’s friend argues that nostalgia defines a sense of home and ultimate belonging rooted in an individual’s land of origin. Claudia challenges this unitary approach to home suggesting that Puerto Ricans in New York experience perhaps a greater sense of community—both in terms of num-

bers and psychological connection—than those who remain on the island, While Claudia’s narration ought not be read as a trivialization of nostalgia or a displaced subjects’ psychological connection to lands of origin, she does provide a point of departure for the complication of nostalgia as more than an obligatory and unproblematic desire for a distant homeland. Instead, Claudia underlines the complexity of such a desire for an impossible return. As Stuart

Hall notes of diaspora identity, the return to a land of origin is always via “another route,” one that often takes the form of memory, storytelling, and cultural traditions—a mode of commemoration rather than an actual physical journey to the land of origin. For Claudia, there is “no return,” yet she identifies an unquantifiable “part of myself” that she must recover in order to “go back” via an alternate route (Contemporary Postcolonial Theory 232).

Another variant of complicating home comes during a later scene in Negr6n-Muntaner’s Brincando el charco when the filmmaker, Claudia, interviews a young Puerto Rican woman who discusses her sense of connection and discon-

nection from her island of origin. The woman details her emotional shift from negative to positive and object to subject as she explains how she is able to reinterpret “la 6ptica del desarraigo y la mirada de la orfandad como un aspecto

positivo” (the view of uprootedness and orphanage as positive aspects) (Brincando). In shifting her perspective on her relationship to ethnic and geographic borders from negative to positive, the woman elucidates how she is able to “redefinir turismo” as an intensely personal mode of movement. She explains that her recent and future returns to Puerto Rico, as an adult now living in the mainland, are a type of “very personal tourism,” wherein she must readapt the notion of tourist travel to accommodate immigrant and diasporic experience. The notion of tourism suggests deliberate movement away from home for pleasure, adventure, and exploration. For this Puerto Rican subject, however, the journey back to her island cannot be contained solely in the realm of leisure.

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY H5 A young Latino model dances and smiles while posing for a camera lens. The scene that follows the photography shoot positions the same model in a chair being interviewed in front of a video camera. Each of these exchanges illustrate Anzaldua’s conceptualization of “the breakdown of the subject-object duality” as part of a mestiza consciousness (Borderlands 102). In NegrdénMuntaner’s two scenes described earlier, the model remains the “object” of the camera’s gaze, yet the second scene allows the model to shape his representation linguistically as he tells his own story to a video rather than a still camera. Anzaldua cautions against the violence of such a static representation: “The eye pins down the object of its gaze, scrutinizes it, judges it. A glance can freeze us

in place; it can ‘possess’ us. It can erect a barrier against the world” (64). Whereas the model strikes a solitary pose in the photographer’s chosen shot, the filmic version allows him to strike multiple poses and represent himself as a moving and fluid object—so as to transition across the dualistic border that separates subject from object. Moments later, the Latina photographer, Claudia, speaks on camera with another model, who seems to be refusing to allow her to photograph him. Later,

Claudia crosses paths with the same model—an aspiring photographer himself—and as they greet each other, he raises a still camera to his eye and photographs her from his position across the street. We see the still frames he captures, Claudia smiling, waving, covering her face with her palm. It is ironic that this scene now inverts the previous power dynamic, with the photographer being pursued and captured by the model’s camera. As Claudia holds her hand in front of her face—hiding herself from his and his lens’s gaze—she becomes an object similarly frozen in a single moment of exposure. In both inversions of subject and object, the resulting discourse creates a vibrant middle space bursting with motion and voice. By playing with the acts around seeing and being seen, Negron-Muntaner redraws the hierarchies of power in the protagonist’s genres of artistic production. The juxtaposition of still photography against video offers an alternative continuum for Claudia’s models, affording them a space in the interstices of the two formats to bridge a subject/object divide with their presence and discourse. In identifying and interrogating the underlying structures of power in her art, Claudia enacts a narrative of complicating her creative home. The filmmaker interrupts her own externally imposed gaze, enabling an account of the seeing transformed into the seen, and posing questions about power and agency that extend beyond filmmaking and into a wide range of academic scholarship and public policy. In another scene, the filmmaker’s commentary on gaze continues and is focused specifically on shifting representation of queer Latina desire from spectacle to participatory act. Negrén-Muntaner combines black-and-white images of female couples engaged in kissing, touching, and other sensual play. The

viewer sees both fragmented portions of the female form, as well as facial

116 HOMECOMING QUEERS expressions and wider body shots. Interspersed throughout the erotic images are direct addresses to the film’s viewing public. One commentary, “What a lack of imagination,” suggests the inability of mainstream subjects to envision a paradigm of sexuality that diverges from default heterosexuality. While the images of the women’s bodies are—at times—fragmented by the camera’s lens, their constant movement, the inclusion of faces and expressions, bears witness to the

pleasure and desire experienced by these bodies. The potential of reducing them to sexualized objects is lessened by the fact that they are represented as active, desiring agents. At the close of the scene, the text prompts action from the viewer her- or himself. “Don’t watch. Do it” situates the viewer as passive voyeur, shifting power and agency inward (Brincando). Simultaneously, the film-

maker’s directed commentary inverts the power dynamics of the situation, framing the viewer’s gaze in superficiality (seeing versus doing), and circumvents rejection of the images by positioning the viewer as outsider looking in, rather than superior looking down.

Carmelita Tropicana, Ela Troyano, and Monica Enriquez Sisters Alina and Ela Troyano offer another subversion of traditionally sexist and homophobic modes of representation for women’s desire in their 1994 filmic collaboration Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen. In the opening scene, the film’s protagonist, Carmelita Tropicana—Alina Troyano’s performative alter-ego—proclaims her devotion to her New York-—specific backdrop Loisaida (a Latino reinterpretation of the Lower East Side): “It’s multicultural, multinational, multigenerational, mucho multi” (137). The theme of multiplicity saturates the film’s various scenes throughout New York. While Carmelita and her colleagues confront angry protesters in front of a women’s clinic, her sister Sophia makes a quick purchase at a nearby market. Shocked at the high

price on her item, Sophia offers her own protest, to which the Latina clerk exclaims, “jCono, qué tacana!” (What a tightwad!) (147). Perfectly fluent in Spanish, Sophia does not understand and demands an explanation. In her defense, the clerk admits, “I’m not color blind. I thought you were black, okay?” (148). Such a reading conflates Sophia’s appearance with being unable to speak

Spanish. Defining a sitio based on aesthetic alone, the clerk presumes that Sophia’s appearance will preclude her access to the Spanish utterances, in essence allowing her a private space of language. Instead, this private lengua becomes a public performance of Latina diversity when Sophia retorts, “Well open your eyes, honey, Latinas come in all different colors!” (148). Here passing comes into play as Sophia’s skin color allows her to pass as black, a racial aesthetic that this particular Latina interprets as non-Latina. In an interview, Alina Troyano elucidates how gaze informs subjectivity:

“Identity really depends on where you are at, it’s so much about geography.

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 117 In New York, Iam a woman of color. In Cuba, I was labeled white. All these shifts

of identity depend on who is doing the seeing” (“Carmelita Tropicana Unplugged” 90). Like Troyano and Negrén-Muntaner’s light-skinned Claudia, Sophia’s Latina identity slips off the surface of others’ readings of her skin, and she must consequently “make herself native” in ways that negotiate the silences between racial, ethnic, and national communities. The staging of the scene in the film also lends itself to a shifting of a subject/object duality, since the clerk fails to see Sophia’s Latina positionality based on visual analysis. The clerk defends her racial classification on the basis of sight. By her understanding, see-

ing is believing. However, the clerk’s position is echoed in her gaze, which immediately diverts from the customer about whom she speaks. She does not look and consequently fails to see. Sophia, in contrast, directly addresses her offender, demanding that she “open up [her] eyes” and see the way multiple categories of ethnicity, race, and culture overlap on Sophia’s own body.

Another complication of home takes place during the musical number “Prisioneras del amor,” in which Carmelita, her friend, her sister, and her former mugger stage the choreographed production from a jail cell where they have been sent following a scuffle at a protest and demonstration outside a women’s clinic earlier in the day. The physical location of the scene, a prison cell, is significant for a several reasons. First, the stereotypical cult genre of lesbian prison films is rewritten in this production as more than just explicitly sexual, as norms of desire and femininity are mocked throughout. The positioning of the characters in the prison cell mocks society’s relentless persecution of both queers and people of color, and allows the women to break from their enclosure and speak or sing of their own conscientizaciédn. The scene additionally serves to reclaim the space of the prison, not as a violent, desperate, and isolating site, but rather as a productive space with the potential to establish and nourish communities and families of women. “Prisioneras del amor” tells the tale of women’s victimization and erasure at the hands ofa love, which, as they illustrate, both keeps them warm and creates great pain and suffering. The lyrics suggest multilayered meanings. First, clearly referencing a feminist desire to depart from rigidly defined gender roles, the women proclaim, “cambiaremos estas lagrimas y este llanto, Por fuerza musculo y sudor” (We'll exchange our tears and sobs, for strength, muscle and sweat) and then musing about their revolutionary possibilities, “Rompiéndonos los habitos de monjas enclaustradas. Haciendo que la liberacidén sea nuestra nueva religién”

(Tearing away at our habits of cloistered nuns, making liberation our new religion) (Troyano, I, Carmelita Tropicana 166)."

The lyrics also lend themselves to an alternative reading of the catchy tune as a campy queer anthem. Each of the verses I have already mentioned, pertaining to a dissatisfaction with gender roles, redefinition of religious doctrine, love

18 HOMECOMING QUEERS or desire as a nourishing yet also dangerous agent, and finally—but not least of all—the reference to “prisoners of love” can be reinterpreted in a queer context. “Prisioneras” performs an effective subversion of the controlling and criminalizing queer and specifically lesbian sexuality. Contextualized as bodily transfor-

mation, from one gendered extreme to another, strength, muscle, and sweat replace tears and weakness. The women’s auto-liberation forcefully breaks from the stereotype of the chaste nun, crystallized not only by her role in the church but also her clothing and geographical restrictions as a cloistered nun. With the same spiritual zeal, the women sing of the conversion to a faith of revolution and autonomy.” Finally, Monica Enriquez’s short film, A Journey Home maps a return that is

arduous for some and impossible for others. Using the taped testimonios of three women, Enriquez’s film offers a glimpse into the intimate negotiations of identity, community, and home for queer Chicana Latina subjects. The filmmaker’s choice of interview format for a large portion of the work emphasizes a multiplicity of experience while also acknowledging that her interviewees’ testimonios represent an admittedly partial view of how queer Latinas specifi-

cally, and more broadly queer Latinos and other immigrants, reconcile how distance, difference, and desire. The film begins with the image of cracks in sepia tones that mimic earth and flesh tones layered over the inanimate man-made concrete panels of ruptured sidewalk. These fissures suggest the faulty design of the pavement, since the movement of the earth and the plant life that pushes through reign over the concrete’s rigid composition and successfully resist the imposition of a flat and even surface. The film then transitions from life pushed from within these crevices to borders and splits painted directly onto life—in the form of a nude Latina subject. Initially we see only portions of her body, first a shot of her hands from wrist to fingertip, adorned with feathery lines that resemble both the previous pavement cracks as well as the graduated roots and branches of a sturdy tree. Enriquez’s

juxtaposition of life and lines bears witness to the constant negotiations of home, community, and self for many queer Latina/o individuals. The lines of origin and the roots of history mimic in shape, if not in tone, the breaks, tears, and

ruptures in tradition and expectation when some sons and daughters take an alternate route home. The same power of movement and life evidenced by the weeds pushing through pavement cracks is echoed in the visualization of a tree’s root system pushing through hard earth with the strength to displace even massive structures, or the broad branches of an enormous tree stretching out across

the sky. Roots can certainly hold a person down, keep them stable and connected, but as Enriquez illustrates with this scene, roots can also threaten, damage, and destroy what appear to be permanent routes of travel. The movement toward a reconceptualization of borders emerges in the verses that accompany Enriquez’s corporeal imagery. She shifts from the live

COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 119 body of her model to a plaster sculpture, marked over its head, shoulders, and torso with deep fractures to the plaster caked upon the wire mesh dress form. Additionally, the artist has placed a strip of wire mesh upright lengthwise from the figure’s forehead to her chest, which strongly echoes the chain link fences that lie along many stretches of the U.S./Mexico border. Gloria Anzaldua’s timeless refrain narrates the undeniable corporeality of the border: 1,950 mile-long open wound dividing a pueblo, a culture, running down the length of my body, staking fence rods in my flesh,

splitsme splits me meraja_ meraja. (Borderlands 24)

In Anzaldua’s poetic narrative, the space between nations, languages, and even words is simultaneously an insurmountable expanse and an arm’s length. The art piece in Enriquez’s film parallels this characterization of the border as violent and inherently corporeal construction. In the film’s subsequent testimonios, three Latina lesbian subjects reveal how movement, displacement, and definition across and along borders impact their lives. For the three subjects interviewed in Enriquez’s film, an understanding of home necessitates a personal mapping of cultural and national borders that move fluidly from Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Mexico into the United States and more specifically San Francisco, where they all lived. Geopolitical borders and

historical context shape the experiences of movement and home of each subject. For Maria from Argentina, financial hardship precipitates her family’s movement to the United States. Her more European features enable her to pass as Anglo and access worlds and opportunities that may be unreachable for

others Latinos in her local community. For Zulma, the lure of educational opportunities in addition to her frustration with the limited venues for political and social action and the expression of her voice prompted her to search out a future in the mainland. And although Zulma is unable to pass as racially and © ethnically unmarked, as Maria sometimes could, she was aided by her claims to U.S. citizenship as a Puerto Rican, unlike many individuals whose lives move much more fluidly along the U.S./Mexico border than the laws that govern citizenship and legality of movement across these borders. The third interviewee,

Clarissa, represents this fluidity of border life, as she grew up crossing and recrossing the U.S./Mexico border with family ties in Mexicali and Calexico. While each of the women interviewed consider San Francisco their home,

several, including the filmmaker herself in subtitled references through the film, acknowledge the power of external force to intervene in their homemaking process. In the first few scenes, Enriquez addresses her viewers, declaring that “El gobierno de los Estados Unidos tiene el poder de decir qué significa

120 HOMECOMING QUEERS hogar” (The United States government has the power to say what home means) and then “La oficina de inmigracién malpronuncia mi identidad” (The Office of Immigration mispronounces my identity). In both instances, the intensely personal and individual constructs of home and identity are juxtaposed against the administrative formality of national governments and key regulatory departments. The uneven nature of the pairings, however, leaves both statements to posit the absurdity of a system that allows offices and agents to define individual lives. Enriquez’s reference to mispronunciation characterizes a vast divide

separating the identity the subject claims and the identity the immigration officials assign her. Anyone with a first or last name outside the Anglo norms in the last century surely have tales of mispronounced names and identities. Whether due to an issue of unfamiliarity with other languages and cultures or simply an irreverence for the unknown, when a name is deemed unspeakable, the related identity and subject become amorphous entities within a society that relegates them to the role of other. Mapping the politics of Chicana Latina lesbian desire offers important insight into the impact of queer sexuality expression on individual and collective identities. Poetry by Cristina Serna, narrative production by Terri de la

Pena, and films by Frances Negron-Muntaner, Ela Troyano, and Monica Enriquez detail the creation of home spaces defined by desire and love between queer Latina subjects, and their negotiation of the concepts of community, origin, and home. A study of the politics of sameness and shared difference reveals a contextualization of desire and home as concomitantly racialized, gendered, and queered. Each of the films examined here, along with the narrative production of Terri de la Pena and Cristina Serna, map the journey from mispronunciation to self-creation as they employ representations of queer Chicana Latina desire to resist erasure, distortion, and silence while their stories and theories push up through the smooth sidewalks and clear roads to make meaning in the ruptures. Life conquers concrete every time.

Performing the Erotics of Home Monica Palacios, Marga Gomez, and Carmelita Tropicana

It was turning into a kinky ritual.

What lured me was the way she used her sexy mouth, and god— she loved to CHEW!

Yes, | watched her eat carne asada tacos from afar. —Monica Palacios, Greetings from a Queer Sefiorita

Performative forms of expression not only allow for an additional element of corporeality so important to marginalized subjects combating silence and erasure, but also emphasize the performative nature of the representational process. By breaking free from the constraints of the page and the written word,

artists “become”/embody their texts, circumventing—at least in part—the limitations of language. In the world of performance we no longer read words. We read the performer, her expression, her gestures, her orality, and her silence. Language is a tool for the communication of ideas, but it ceases to be the sole or principle communicative instrument. The dethroning of language is essential to understanding the freedom that performativity affords artists and its boundless

potential for transforming identity politics for those subjects whose voices have | been silenced or deferred within dominant historical and cultural domains. The centrality of corporeality is an undeniable force in performative manifestations of dissent, for as David Roman states, “In solo performance the body of the performer emerges as the primary site of representation, interpretation, and, consequentially, possible intervention.” (Acts of Intervention, 117). Alicia

Arrizon also notes that Latina performativity “literally embod[ies] cultural resistance,” and when these staged bodies are marked by sexual as well as ethnic or racial alterity and accompanied by a voice in overt opposition to the institutions of heteronormative patriarchy, the performance’s transgressive potential is amplified (Latina Performance 163). José Esteban Munoz expands this possibility with a conceptualization of “queer worldmaking” where performers move beyond the staging of a single subject and instead transport spectator and artist 121

122 HOMECOMING QUEERS alike to transgressive worlds that defy hegemonic institutions of power: “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. These alternative vistas are more than simply views or perspectives; they are the oppositional ideologies that function as critiques of oppressive regimes of ‘truth’ that subjugate minoritarian people. Oppositional counterpublics are enabled by visions, ‘worldviews,’ that reshape as they deconstruct reality” (Disidentifications 196—97). Through their staging of both body and voice,

Gomez’s, Tropicana’s, and Palacios’s performances challenge homogenizing stereotypes and create spaces for a multiplicity of experiences and perspectives within minority and majority groups. On the importance of visibility, Gomez notes, “We need to be telling our own stories. If we never see anyone who looks like us, then we never include ourselves in our fantasies and dreams” (Durnell 31).

Gomez keenly delineates the connection between discourse and corporeality, since she posits “seeing” as a prime impetus for self-affirming discursive production. Performance holds the potential to flip the proverbial script here since the stage becomes Gomez’s means to interrupt her own public erasure as a queer Latina. In the performances of Tropicana, Gomez, and Palacios, audiences and critics alike witness that the convergence of multiple identity categories within a single subject further complicates and refutes the claims of purity or unmarked status purported by any dominant or minority community. Yet as performance critic Kate Davy posits, “An understanding of how the lesbian performer represents herself on-stage is useful not to separate and valorize her forms of expression as unique from those of everyone else, but to understand how some lesbian performance has begun to push at the boundaries of representation itself” (43). The three artists included in this chapter utilize elements of performance and performativity to stage the complications of a singularly defined “minority subjectivity,” to embody their textual creations, and to complicate the politics of identity formation and representation afforded to subjects defined through alterity by dominant spheres.

Monica Palacios’s Erotics of Symmetry In a traditional model of desire, typically only the subject speaks while the desired object is merely spoken to or of. This paradigm is largely one-sided since

it is constituted not of two subjects, but rather of one subject and one object. Such a representation of desire largely silences one subject, because this individual’s participation is irrelevant to the act of desiring. In this way, the transition from subject to object is performed as the object of desire is consumed by the act of being desired. In this category I locate mainstream sexualization and objectification of the female body—like the use of fragmented images of the

PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME 123 female body in fashion magazines or music videos—or the eroticization of the racial or ethnic “other’—as illustrated in the fiery passions of César Romero

or Carmen Miranda. Emma Pérez theorizes a decolonized version of history wherein third space feminism “allows a look to the past through the present,

always already marked by the coming of that which is still left unsaid, unthought. Moreover, it is in the maneuvering through time to retool and remake subjectivities neglected and ignored” (Decolonial Imaginary 127). In much

the same way Pérez reclaims Chicana presence in historical discourses, performer Monica Palacios reclaims her past and present from the institutions of patriarchy and homophobia. And while historian Pérez seeks to tell the stories and distinguish the voices of Chicanas in history, healing a wound of silence and exclusion, Palacios mends the ruptured Chicana lesbian subject, reclaiming full-subjecthood, including absolute agency over her sexual and erotic feelings and practices. The countermodel relevant in discussing Palacios’s work is the discursive mode of being home. In this category I situate texts in which desire is framed by

an erotics of similitude, which I define as a sense of sameness due to shared practices, life experiences, values, history, cultural referents, language, phenotype, etc. Within these texts, to varying degrees, desire is represented and devel-

oped as positively countertextualized within a framework of commonality as shared by two queer Chicana subjects engaging romantic intimacy. Within this model, desire is defined not in contrast to any default majority but rather as a wholly separate entity not dependent upon comparisons with mainstream subjects for its definition or representation. In extremely basic terms, the question is not “Why is brown better than white?” but simply “Why is brown good?” Given earlier discussions of the problematic intersections of language and identity, ask the preceding questions fully aware of the complications of white and brown as categories of universalized racial or ethnic significance. Despite the

instability of the terms, they factor significantly in Palacios’s, Gomez’s, and Tropicana’s portrayals of queer Chicanas/Latinas, lending a fluidity that informs their staging of desire and home. Palacios’s 1994 performance piece, “I Don’t Have to Explain,” takes as its setting the private space of a bedroom, where two women lie together in bed.! Palacios’s performance of the text re-creates this scene as the speaker’s memory

of the previous encounter. In unpublished correspondence with the artist, Palacios has said she hopes to offer a version of this particular text “written on the body,” utilizing a white silk slip upon which to project the text of her performance in black against her body’s frame. Of this corporeal merging of text

and performance, Palacios comments, “I’ve always liked projected images, words on skin. I like looking at words. I like looking at words in art pieces, paintings. Words and pictures: that’s what I see in my brain.”? For Palacios, performa-

tivity possesses an inherently textual aspect, and she views the words of her

124 HOMECOMING QUEERS performance as both written (on the body) and spoken (through the body) simultaneously.

During a 2002 performance at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California, Palacios performed “I Don’t Have to Explain” while standing atop a two-foot-high pedestal in a black fitted suit. With warm purple and blue

light surrounding her, the airy images of clouds and a crescent moon illuminated space above her head. The raised position of the performer suggests a mode of declamation, while the soft lighting and projected natural elements and direct addressing of the audience create an intimate environment from which she provides her “anti-explanation.” The performer begins by listing three reasons why she loves Chicanas: I love Chicanas because they’re beautiful I love Chicanas because they say things like: Look que cute! I love Chicanas because I don’t have to explain.3

The speaker’s first lines reference the internal and/or external beauty of Chicanas. Next she mentions language, specifically the usage of Spanglish as a

positive and desirable personality trait. As the performance progresses, the speaker reveals her own merging of Spanish and English, which provides yet another element of commonality between the two women. In terms of Palacios’s

work, we see an important coupling of language and the representation of a desire that is specifically marked as queer and Latina. Alicia Arrizon has noted,

“Palacios exposes the erotics of same-sex desire in order to mark a militant sense of difference, in opposition to heterosexism and homophobia. Palacios centers her sexuality in a fashion that performs the grammars of the erotically marginal” (Latina Performance 163). In my analysis of Palacios’s work, it seems

| reasonable to extend Arriz6n’s statement to include not only a marginality of sexuality and eroticism but also ethnicity and culture. Further, Palacios’s grammar of erotics does not emerge as the center of a marginalized discourse, but instead constructs Chicana lesbian desire as an entity that problematizes the

applicability of margin/center discourses. Palacios’s performance positions itself not as marginal but as central within a framework that refuses to be defined in comparison to or in difference from additional structural models.

The third and most significant of the speaker’s three reasons she loves Chicanas is “I love Chicanas because I don’t have to explain.” Embedded within this last line is a particular politics of desire grounded in a sense of sameness. Throughout Palacios’s performance of this piece, the line from which the title is extracted reiterates the importance of this erotics of similitude in the character-

ization of an intimate bond between the two Chicana lesbian subjects. The speaker does not have to explain because her partner, another queer Chicana, possesses enough shared cultural information to understand her companion’s narratives, her experiences, habits, and perspective without explanation.

PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME 125 When the speaker shares a childhood memory captured in an old photograph of herself at three years old as a “young tomboy mariachi,” we, the audience, encounter the first context in which a lack of need for explanation begins to shape the dynamics of this particular desire. Both women nostalgically recount childhood memories of listening to Mexican love songs and being moved to tears: TRAGEDY.

Mexicanos invented the word. Pues, if you can’t sing me a tragic love song, don’t bother to sing me a cancion at all!

Clearly the two characters share an understanding of the emotive power of music to stir the heart of even the youngest of listeners, and this passionate way of relating to music that inspires feelings of childhood, family, home, and love continues to influence their adult emotional sensibilities. Immediately prior to delivering the previous lines, Palacios interjects a brief music cue by the legendary “Reina de la Ranchera” Lola Beltran. Listening intently, the performer places a fist over her heart, closes her eyes, and lifts her head, lost in the gut-wrenching emotion of Beltran’s delivery. Palacios’s invoking of the melodramatic ranchera-style performances of Beltran queer the performance of Mexican love songs and create a space for their application outside hetero-

normative tradition. As Olga Najera-Ramirez explains, “rancheras may be considered culturally sanctioned sites in which the ideas and values of a community are not merely displayed but, more important, are transmitted, produced, reproduced, and contested” (Najera-Ramirez 189). By positing the passionate love songs as a point of queer Chicana intersectionality, Palacios not only transmits, produces, and reproduces the cultural tradition, but, more important, contests a reading of the music as an exclusively heteronormative narrative. In this performative space, Beltran speaks for and to the desire shared in Palacios’s performance. As the speaker recounts past musical memories, one such passionate love song, “La gloria eres tu,”4 begins to play softly behind the performance. The song’s significance, “you are heaven,” lends itself to Palacios’s unique staging of “woman = home” since her partner stands as the earthly incarnation of the

epitome of sacred home spaces, la gloria. The inclusion of the song gives weight to the importance of music in both re-creations of love and home and represents a cycle of music creating memories, which in turn inspire more music. Javier Solis, Lola Beltran, and Pedro Infante constitute the cultural soundtrack to this performance, as their strong, proud, emotional voices leaves a similar mark on both women’s subjectivities, and in particular on the way in

which they both experience desire, intimacy, and passion, as evidenced throughout the piece.

126 HOMECOMING QUEERS This connection, an understanding that transcends physicality, is marked again midway through the piece with the repetition of the title phrase: I don’t have to explain. She shakes her head as if she has heard all of my Sunday morning, Mexican music and pan dulce inner most thoughts.

The performative and poetic characterization of what could be thought of as a specifically Mexican mind-meld also contributes to the construction of a politics of desire grounded in this erotics of similitude, since again we witness the importance of a connection that extends beyond the physical into cultural, racial, and political realms available to subjects of the same or similar communities and/or ethnic backgrounds.

It is also important to trace how the text utilizes setting to provide a uniquely subversive depiction of queer Latina desire. Though the performance is delivered atop a raised step with only Palacios onstage, the text she performs is situated within the emotionally and psychologically intimate space of a bedroom, and in the very bed where the women are lying together. Yet despite all of these circumstances—or even perhaps because of them—the scene manages to create a sexual scene outside of any suggestion of sexual contact during the performance. Though clearly sexually intimate in nature, the connection between the two women at the moment of the performance is developed almost exclusively through an emotional intimacy that never manifests itself in any graphic manner during the piece: the seemingly radical notion (at least to mainstream audiences) of a representation of queer Latina sexuality without explicit sex. The first physical exchange, a kiss, is represented as warm, intimate, and uniquely Mexican: She lands her delicious canela mouth on my lips. We melt. Her kisses are just like the label says, Pico Pica, real Mexican style taco sauce.

Not only is this moment queer in nature, with the two women kissing, but it is also specifically racialized, their kiss being laced with the heat of Mexican chiles. In the next physical connection, the two women further extend a model of similitude as the speaker notes how her partner’s “warm brown hand fits nicely into my palm.” The two Chicanas “fit” together: We share a giggle and she rolls on top of me, brown skin on brown skin brown eyes looking into brown eyes.

This structure of brown mapped onto brown reiterates the sameness the two subjects share, which shapes a unique dynamics of desire. The model of similitude

PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME 127 lends to a foundation of equality to this intimate connection, since, for example, the brown skin the speaker desires in her partner is “the same” or at least similar to her own brown skin. Two sets of brown eyes suggest a mirrorlike exchange and emphasize their similar perspectives and positionalities. However, despite the numerous references to commonalities shared by the two queer Chicana characters, Palacios’s performance carefully avoids the textual threat of collapsing the two women into a singular, homogeneous, or stereotypified subject. Although this particular performance piece conforms to the structure of the one-woman show, which Palacios most often utilizes for public performance, she nonetheless displays a unique ability to bring to live conversations between distinct subjects, becoming the vessel for multiple subjectivities. In this piece, the speaker not only voices her own first-person perspective but also shifts throughout the performance in order to directly offer the voice of her partner. So regardless of the fact that the piece is produced with only one performer on stage, the performance is inherently dialogic, as it “performs” both queer Latina subjects and ultimately an entire community through Palacios’s singular body. To be considered as part of a paradigm of desire grounded in a politics of similitude, as I have outlined previously, the work must focus on the desires and desiring of queer Chicana subjects without shifting into a comparative analysis where these acts of desire are measured against dominant referents to create meaning in difference. This textual disinterest in a relational or hierarchical mapping of desire is evident in Palacios’s performance of “I Don’t Have to Explain.” At the close of the piece the speaker inquires, “Have you ever been with a white woman before?” “Yeah,” I say poquito hesitant because Latinas can give you shit for this. “Me too.” She says letting me off the hook. “But I always feel like the Lesbian Mexican Mafia is going to come after me.”

In this exchange, despite the introduction of the topic of interethnic relationships, the objective of the discussion is to emphasize the way in which the two subjects converge in their experience of such unions. Rather than performing a side-by-side comparison of loving a Latina versus loving a white woman, the dialogue simply uses the situation to underline how the two women’s experiences dating white women impact their sense of community and support from other Latinas. In other words, instead of ranking the level of intimacy with each partner, the passage reveals how the experience of desire that extends outside Chicana/o community impacts the subject on this very local level, in terms of the judgments, tension, and hostility of other queer Latinas. And again the

incident further emphasizes a political, cultural, and experiential bank of

128 HOMECOMING QUEERS knowledge that the two Latinas share, and the way this commonality creates a foundation for their intimate relationship. Finally, Palacios’s piece invokes a connection with the past, history, and familiarity. As the two women lie together drifting off to sleep, the speaker encapsulates the tone of the entire performance in the final brief verse, look{ing| forward to the huevos rancheros morning with mom’s salsa. A breakfast that will enhance this love hangover. Something simple,

un sabor from the past. passion.

Mexican food, a family recipe, beloved traditions, and a seamless blend of Spanish and English all serve to strengthen the desire the two women share for each other. The past, the many memories shared amidst the intimacy of this bedroom scene, inspires and informs their present passion. Through memory and an erotics of similitude, this past is revived as it is remembered and carried into the future. In the work’s last line, the word “passion” stands alone, suggest-

ing the emotive Mexican love songs as well as the multiple ways in which the two queer Latina subjects now direct this passion into their love of self and one another. Together, these markers of love and familiarity establish a home space that is uniquely queer and Chicana. This space is defined not in relation to a preexisting Anglo model, but as an entity unto itself.

Gender, Desire, and Patriarchy in “Tomboy” In a segment from Greetings from a Queer Senorita entitled “Tomboy,” Palacios

also tackles issues of patriarchy and sexism as she narrates her struggle with gender identity: “The land of little boys was Adventure—Danger—Buddies! And

really cool toys. Don’t get me wrong, I never wanted to physically be a boy. Although I did try peeing standing up a couple of times—and I did pretend to shave with dad. I liked my girl body. I just wanted what they had—Power!” (Svich and Marrero 386). A few years later in adolescence, this affinity for stereotypically masculine attributes transforms into fear of the threatening force of “male sexual power”: Who told them it was okay to invade my space— my body— my soul—

on their terms? (Svich and Marrero 387)

PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME 129 The speaker, referred to in the performance as “Monica,” also rejects the blindly devotional relationship many of her female friends maintained with boyfriends, mocking one girl’s selfless love, “Monica, you know my boyfriend who I love very much and I would stick a fork in my eye to prove I love?” (387). Expressing an adamant disgust for such “blind” dedication to men, Palacios proceeds to illustrate a portrayal of heterosexuality as impractical, illogical, or undesirable, in effect “othering” or marginalizing the traditional center—that of heterosexual normativity, Their tongues down my throat. Hands up my shirt. Dicks inside—get that hose away from me! There were moments when I thought I was enjoying myself— but no, not really. (387)

Palacios follows this passage with an important disclaimer, “And folks, please note, I don’t hate men. I don’t want to read somewhere: ‘Funny, but hates men.’ I have close male friends. I do shows with men. It’s just that Male Sexual Power— I allowed it because I was taught to accept it” (387). The above statement is significant in two distinct ways, since it acknowledges oppressive structures in both Latino and dominant Anglo communities. The risk of critiquing any problematic of a particular community from within that community is great, as Aida

Hurtado notes. Explaining her reasoning for labeling the three chapters in her 1996 book on experiences of gender and oppression in women of color and Anglo women, Hurtado states, “[I consider them] blasphemy in the sense of questioning what in many ways we [women of color] have been required not to question—our loyalty and silence to those who may oppress us because they have also been our companeras/companeros in struggle ... To question these alliances [to both the predominantly white feminist movement and activist movements of people of color] is to potentially serve the role of saboteur when the progress we have made in remedying racism and sexism is yet in its infancy” (xi). Hence any challenge of existing structures of oppression is perceived as a threat to group advancement and displacement of attention away from issues in which community members function as victims rather than perpetrators of oppressive acts. On August 8, 2004, at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California, Palacios performed “Tomboy” as part of “Hombres Talking About Life, Sex, and Sangre,” a collaborative show that featured new work by four male

solo performers. The artist begins the performance standing center stage, dressed in a men’s white collared shirt with loose denim jeans. Her hair falls around her shoulders as she faces and addresses the audience directly. Several body images mark the strong physical presence of “male sexual power” in her childhood and adolescence. She uses two hands to fire a powerful toy machine

130 HOMECOMING QUEERS gun and uses the same two hands to illustrate her prized cowboy outfit, complete with holster and pistols. A final two-handed gesture has Palacios beating her fists against her chest in stereotypical king-of-the-jungle style. Each of these body positions uses Palacios’s female body to stage the primacy of male power in a patriarchal world. As a young girl, Monica identifies the institutionalized connection between male gender performance and action, and she longs for the thrilling pleasures of boyhood masculinity: “ADVENTURE—DANGER—BUDDIES.

And really cool toys” (“Tomboy” 307). In fact, when the performer tells the story

of a tragic trip to the toy store with her father and brother Greg, her choice of plaything crystallizes her contentious negotiation with socialized norms of gender and behavior: “Greg got this totally cool machine gun and I—I don’t know what possessed me, perhaps societal pressure—I got this doll. During our drive home I knew I made the wrong choice. By the time I got inside, I was bawling my head off because I wanted a machine gun too. I cried so much, my dad went back to the toy store and returned home with a brand new machine gun. I was really happy then” (306). This scene illustrates the conflicted desires that define Monica’s childhood years. At such an early age, the speaker’s desire connects more strongly with gendered behaviors than sexuality. Her induction into gendered expectations is already evident, as the performer cites “societal pressures” as the impetus for her choosing the doll over the gun. Yet in spite of socialized norms, Monica is immediately aware of her true predilections: the feminine toy is “wrong” and makes her cry, while the gun her father ultimately brings home prompts definitive joy. Gloria Anzaldtia identifies a similar discord between who she is and

who her family and community expect her to be: “Nothing in my culture approved of me. Habia agarrado malos pasos. Something was ‘wrong’ with me. Estaba mds alld de la tradicién” (Borderlands 38). Anzaldua attributes these feelings of being “wrong” to the “cultural tyranny” that socializes women and girls to follow prescribed roles of femininity and sexual innocence. She describes her critical rebellion as a “Shadow-Beast” who “refuses to take orders from outside

authorities ... At the least hint of limitations on my time or space by others, it kicks out with both feet. Bolts” (38). The speaker in Palacios’s “Tomboy” possesses such a Shadow-Beast who resists the gendered script of maternal playthings for young girls. While she does not flee in a physical sense, her emotional flight is notable. Upon returning home, Monica is inconsolable. Dissolving into

a tearful mess allows Monica to disconnect herself from the aftermath of her “wrong” choice and to perform a Shadow-Beast resistance in the only manner available to her as a young child.

Throughout “Tomboy,” Palacios intertwines conversations about gender and sexuality in an attempt to trace Monica’s journey from anxiety and confusion to understanding and self-acceptance as an adult. In a statement that merges corporeal and existential self-discovery, Monica explains how she

PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME 131 “reached DEEP IN THE CROTCH OF MY QUEER LATINA PSYCHE?” (309). The cou-

pling of “crotch” and “psyche” establishes an uneasy tension between sex and soul. In her performance of this line, Palacios glides her palms from her shoulders, to her chest, to her torso, and finally between her spread legs as she stands, facing the audience. Then, as is a frequent strategy in Palacios’s performative work, the corporeal and explicitly sexual “crotch” is tempered with the cerebral and abstract “psyche” as her hands move seductively from between her legs

to her forehead. Palacios reassures her audience that her acceptance of a queer identity is not simply physical but also emotional and intellectual—an allencompassing transformation. At the close of the piece, the performer states her willingness to explore her lesbian identity on each of these multiple levels: “I was ready to embrace myself.

I was ready to embrace other women. And feel a sense of equality. And feel myself gripping her sensual waist” (309). The reference to equality mirrors my earlier discussion of Palacios’s “I Don’t Have to Explain,” since the performer identifies a state of balance and symmetry shared with a Latina partner and lover. The speaker in “Tomboy” does not explicitly discuss ethnicity; however, her portrait of her lover is decidedly feminine, emphasizing her “sensual waist”

and “inviting curves,” and her “chocolate nipples” suggest a connection between desire and phenotype not unlike the earlier narrative representations of Terri de la Pena. The piece concludes with the speaker’s declaration of sexual certainty and proud passion: ... Sliding my face down Lick

Down Lick Down Lick

Wanting all of her inside of my mouth And knowing I was never going back Because honey is too sweet

_ To give up. (309)

Palacios’s poetic choices reveal two possible interpretations of the final three lines, Read without pause, the statement indicates that honey, the sweetness representative of her first kisses with women, is so pleasurable that she must continue to identify as a lesbian and seek out such sweetness. Yet the capitalization of “To” in the final line indicates a slight separation, suggesting the “giving up” of which she speaks is not simply the “honey” and her desire for women, but also the struggle and emotional journey to self-acceptance. Neither will she give up her desire or the battle she wages for agency and choice.

132 HOMECOMING QUEERS In this final scene, Palacios performs the dialogue as an exchange between bodily release and psychological stimulation. Starting on her feet, with legs in a wide, confident stance, she performs the journey from sweet to sultry, moving to kneel on one knee, then both knees with each mention of the word “Down.” The lighting concentrates in a single spot around her face and upper body as she holds her palms in front of her face and looks upward into the light, licking her palms slowly as the spot fades into darkness. The visual imagery Palacios creates with her body intimates a religious confessional, with the performer on her knees, vulnerable, and open to a spiritual experience. Such a reading is appropriate here, since this moment suggests equal parts confession, awakening, and sacred ritual. She declares her sexual identity without shame, seizes the opportunity to savor pleasure and desire, and describes making love with a woman as a transcendental phenomenon.

While Palacios’s performance embraces lesbian desire, there is a clear intention on the part of the performer to enact an affirmative version of femalecentered desire rather than a rejection of men or heterosexuality. Thus Palacios’s disclaimer about not wanting to be perceived as a man-hater is also important in as much as it illustrates the way in which her discourse on sexuality manages to subvert rather than simply invert existing paradigms of patriarchy, heterosexism, and domination. In her attempt to diffuse misandrist interpretations of her work as a simple reversal of the male and female hierarchies of superiority

and inferiority while leaving extant institutional frameworks of oppression untouched, Palacios offers a portrayal of lesbian sexuality that is defined by an embracing of similitude as opposed to a rejection of alterity or difference, and in choosing a female partner she expresses not a hatred for men, but rather an assertion of her individual agency, as well as an affirmation of her love of women and self.

The Desiring Triad in “Taqueria Tease” A third performance by Palacios complicates the act of desiring by adding the

elements of layered agency and attraction as the performer plays with the notion of consuming the desired object. In much of Palacios’s work, we see an important coupling of language and the representation of a desire that is specifically marked as Chicana and lesbian. In one of the only critical articles to focus exclusively on Palacios’s performative work, Barbara Simerka employs

a paradigm of liminality with which to discuss Palacios’s third one-woman show, Latin Lezbo Comic: “Palacios offers a unique perspective on the construc-

tion of liminal identity, because the theatrical representation of an autobio-

graphical narrative permits the performance of identity, in which the professional performance itself constitutes an element of the ‘production of that self’” (Simerka 89).®

PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME 133 Yet the limen as a social and anthropological construct stems from analysis of the practice of rites of passage, especially with regard to coming of age ceremonies where a child attains the status of man or woman via a series of performative acts.’ Thus the liminal subject differs significantly from Fernando Ortiz’s transcultural subject® or Anzaldtvia’s mestiza,? since the latter two are characterized by a simultaneity of characteristics from both sides of the divide/union, whereas liminality largely implies an abandonment of the general characteristics of each phase prior to or preceding the threshold of the limen. Despite this

important distinction, both liminality and border spatiality presuppose an inherent power and divinity to subjects occupying this middle space. Arnold Van Gennep describes the societal privileges afforded to ceremonial subjects, “Ithey] are outside society, and society has no power over them, especially since they are actually sacred and holy, and therefore untouchable and dangerous, just as gods would be” (Van Gennep 114). Liminality, then, is a confined space, a threshold with precise limits, a beginning and an end. While Palacios’s performative figure enjoys the freedom of being sole purveyor of a desiring discourse that exceeds a mainstream imaginary, much like the untouchable liminal subject, Anzaldua’s and Ortiz’s models offer lasting paradigms of productive rather than provisional “in-between-ness.” In most of Palacios’s performative works, audiences witness a pattern of erotic representation marked by signifiers of ethnic and cultural familiarity— specifically those of food, language, and phenotype. In her erotic pieces, a seamless combination of the three will usually be present. “Taqueria Tease,” a poem from Greetings from a Queer Senorita, merges the sensuality of Mexican food with the Chicana enjoying it, as the narrator looks on from “behind the salsa”: She was a Chicana—

brown woman dark eyes dark thick Mexican girl hair about 5/2” athletic build and she was hungry! (Svich and Marrero 380)

This illustration of a specifically Chicana eroticism is complicated, since it con-

structs a Chicana as an object of desire and flirts with what Jeannie Forte describes as a literal and figurative “consumption of the female body as sexualized object” (Forte 257). Yet by locating Chicanas at both the subject and object positions within the erotic paradigm, Palacios subverts a heterosexist portrayal. Her desiring Chicana subject transgresses the universalized consumptive mas-

culine gaze and positions the two (subject and object) within a paradigm of equality and similitude. The unique paradigm of consumption and observation

134 HOMECOMING QUEERS presents potential for transcultural subversion. Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach note, “Palacios’ voyeurism displaces the male gaze and refocuses the audience’s attention and the sexual object into ethnicity” (115). Yet because this culinary tease still positions a woman of color in the role of object rather than subject, it is important to question, as Jeanie Forte does, How might it be possible for a feminist performer to express “female” pleasure, especially in terms of the female body, without resorting to essentialist categories? I believe that at least a partial answer resides ina concept of erotic agency; that women artists, manipulating imagery in order to inscribe themselves in discourse as erotic agents or to create an erotic sensibility, may transgress the limits of representation and construct a different viewing space wherein both the spectator and performer become differentiated subjects. This transgressive erotic agency may come in a variety of representations that on the surface might not appear “sexual,” in the common understanding of that term. (256) With regard to issues of “essentialism,” Palacios seems to fully comprehend the delicate line between an exoticization of a desired object marked by an ethnic or cultural “otherness” in relation to dominant culture. Yet it is precisely her

incorporation of such essentialist tropes of cultural and aesthetic difference and the melodrama with which they are performed that ultimately explodes them as viable and realistic markers of definition. Of the desired woman, “Miss Sabrosita,” the narrator describes “full Chicana lips,” “thick Mexican girl hair,” and a fondness for jalapenos that elicits an animated: “Ay, pura Mexicana!”

(Svich and Marrero 380). Though it is important that this representation of desire is framed by a Chicana lesbian subjectivity, the scene is characteristic of a sort of representation in excess that models what Arriz6n earlier referred to as a “grammar of erotics.” When the speaker notices a drop of grease from the carne asada dripping from the woman’s lips, her reaction thoroughly blurs the lines between hunger and desire, Watching the carne asada grease trickle from her mouth down her chin down her neck almost down her cleavage, her cleavage— Almost. Ay! (381)

The speaker’s queer gaze transforms the carne asada into an agent for her covert desires. Where her own agency and action fails, the single drop of grease incites

PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME 135 the speaker’s fierce passion, sensuously caressing the curves of the woman’s body in ways she can only imagine. Typical of Palacios’s performative work, the coupling of food and sex characterizes the performer’s uniquely Chicana representations of desire. Her use of humor and exaggeration (i.e., beef grease as an agent of seduction for a vegetarian speaker) circumvent a static or essentialized image of Mexican or lesbian identity. Just as a vegetarian lesbian is powerless against the lures of the taco, the intensely universal appeal of the carne asada cannot be contained within a heterosexual space. Since throughout the poem the speaker remains “in the shadows,” expressing her “need to watch her eat carne asada tacos from afar,” the gaze does not in fact complete a “consumption” of the object. Additionally, the object is rep-

resented as the subject of her own desiring equation—that of gastronomic pleasure—with the carne asada tacos as the ultimate object of her desire (381). Viewing Palacios’s performance of “Taqueria Tease” offers yet another subject/ object pairing to add to the complex map of desire as she is seated, dressed in a short sexy black lace slip with her hands seemingly tied behind her. Obviously the image of a clearly sexualized Latina, bound in a position of powerlessness, is not only provocative but even dangerous. The accompanying soundtrack consists of a sultry song with only a sporadic female “ay” as its only lyrics, as if to suggest the sexual climax of a woman. The power dynamics of this scene are somewhat balanced by the context

of the performance: in that Palacios portrays not a helpless victim but an empowered, speaking, desiring subject. Furthermore, the performer’s bound state allows her audience to further complicate the triangle of desire, since it adds the additional pairing of the performer as the object of some external subject’s desire—the lover who has tied her up. So lest this speaker become an all-powerful desiring subject devouring the image of the other Chicana figure, the staging of the performance allows us to see how each individual experiences both subject and objecthood. The performer desires the eater. The eater desires her tacos. The performer desires the tacos as well, as a symbol of her beloved Mexican culture. Given the performer’s physical state, she is also undeniably the object of another subject’s desire. Everyone is acting. Everyone | is acted upon. Palacios performs a structure of desire that neither consumes nor destroys the object and enables two unique Chicana desiring subjects. _ All participants are both desiring and being desired and the only thing that gets consumed is the taco.

Marga Gomez and Carmelita Tropicana’s Single Wet Female In another performative work, the question of a subject/object power struggle merges within a single individual, as writer/performers Marga Gomez and Carmelita Tropicana (née Alina Troyano) tackle matters of assimilation and

136 HOMECOMING QUEERS self-negation in the collaborative performance of Single Wet Female. This work confronts societal pressures directed at queer Latina subjects to assimilate into

a mainstream mass of Anglo heterosexuality. Since their portrayal of desire extends far beyond “lo fisico,” Gomez and Tropicana’s unique use of queer Latina desire illustrates the wide range of deployments suggested by Audre Lorde’s the-

orization on the uses of the erotic (Lorde 341). Reaching beyond superficial treatments of sex or sexuality, Gomez and Tropicana’s performance launches queer Latina desire into the realm of Emma Pérez’s decolonial imaginary as their presence in a California queer arts festival contributes to both the legacy and future of creative production by and about queer Latina subjects. My analysis of this performance maps the distinct ways the performance of desire in and of excess serves to loosen and dismantle static notions of family, community, identity, and home, as well as to reassemble and reconceptualize these ideas in contexts that are specifically and necessarily queer, brown, and female. Gomez and Tropicana’s version of Single Wet Female boasts numerous cre-

ative inspirations, both mainstream and marginal in nature. The idea for the collaboration emerged from a meeting at a queer U.S. Latina/o performance conference in Austin, Texas, and established itself in name and content as a queer Latina homage to the 1992 mainstream stalker film Single White Female.'° Starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh, the mainstream thriller tells the story of an awkward, disturbed young woman who attempts to steal the life and identity of her prettier, happier new roommate. In 2002, at the annual National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco, performers Marga Gomez and Carmelita Tropicana presented their collaborative twist on this Hollywood blockbuster (I will refer to the June 8 and 9 performances for my analysis of this piece). Later that year the show was further developed with director David Schweizer for a full run at New York City’s P.S. 122 and a return to Austin in 2005 for Rude Mechanicals’ “Throws Like a Girl” festival at Off Center Arts. The debut performance in San Francisco differed significantly from subsequent versions, especially in terms of the development of the characters’ gendered and sexualized subjectivities. However, a reading of these initial productions provides insight into the creative trajectory of the work. The two artists described this, their first collaboration as “a theatrical performance that

drips with suspense while peeking into the intimate living arrangement of an average white chick and the desperate voyeur with back acne who answers her ad for a roommate. This first-hand account of female passion includes bath scenes, death scenes, and simulated nudity that run through it like a river.” The theme of a “roommate-gone-bad” marks both the filmic inspiration and theatrical productions, yet beyond this trope’s potential to inspire psychological trauma—along with audience thrills and suspense—the archetype is further developed in Single Wet Female in order to explore the desires and dangers of denial, self-hatred, and assimilation.

PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME 137 In the 2002 performance in San Francisco, Gomez and Tropicana’s characters embody the performance of excess in racial, cultural, and sexual and gendered contexts. Gomez plays the cheery blonde Margaret, who is loudly and proudly in love with and engaged to be married to Murray Bertram, a role played solely in film clips by New York drag king Murray Hill.” A classic case of identity deferred can be located in Margaret, who struggles to keep all of her unruly identities under control. Dressed throughout the performance in an innocuous beige suit, Margaret admits to being a Banana Republic junkie eager to fit in with a style-conscious, classy crowd. Racially, she veers anxiously toward a white, Anglo,

mainstream, middle-class heterosexual identity. She professes to loathe loud music, the Spanish language, and spicy foods. Additionally, she denies any recognition of the frequent phone calls and messages left by an assortment of Latino

family members, mami, papi, and abuelita, each laying claim to Margaret and lamenting her lengthy unexplained absence. In each case, Margaret classifies the cultural referents of Latinidads exaggerated and excessive when compared to her love of a quiet, calm, bland, and off-white world. Latino food is too spicy, Latino music is too loud, Spanish-speakers are too animated—and as a consequence, Margaret internalizes a reading of her own Latina excess, moving to eradicate all evidence of these nonnormative extras from her behavior, appearance, and relationships. Yet her nervous repetition and insistence on a white, Anglo, mainstream, middle-class, heterosexual identity exposes her precarious positioning within this assumed identity. When Margaret ventures out to buy a gift for her fiancé, she encounters Tropicana’s character, Cahmy, a scattered and socially inept store employee who is immediately smitten with Margaret. Yet another identity deferred, Cahmy and her character’s history are painted in vague generalized strokes, from the spontaneously invented name she gives Margaret—after the cameras she sells—to her denial of family and ethnic background. With a faraway look in her eyes she explains: “I’m from Minnesota. That’s why I’m so pale.”® This denial of her past is prompted in large part by Margaret’s judgmental comments—particularly her

unabashed antipathy toward Latinos. Wanting to attract rather than frighten or offend, Cahmy constructs an impromptu alter ego divorced from all markers of her Latina past: her family, her name, and her origins in order to engage with Margaret’s Anglo affect. Affect as the performance of cultural, gender, or sexual excess emerges as a key strategy for social engagement and expression of desire within Single Wet Female. For Troyano’s portrayal of Cahmy, her performative affect is not only racial and cultural, but also sexual—she performs heterosexual affect in order to engage with Margaret. The irony of this transformation is, of

course, that she is motivated to adopt heterosexual affect by her homoerotic desire for Margaret. Gomez and Tropicana’s performances, especially Gomez’s “average white chick” Margaret, throughout Single Wet Female exhibit the asymmetries of power

138 HOMECOMING QUEERS that mark the impact of colonization. In this performance, however, Gomez and

Tropicana reverse the direction of their stereotype, as women, queers, and Latinas performing something akin to “white-face”—where Anglo, middle-class, and heterosexual are lampooned to the extreme.“ Mel Watkins traces a history of blackface minstrelsy that has its origins in clowning. Gomez and Tropicana’s inversion of this racial mimesis begins with Gomez’s background in stand-up

comedy and physical humor. Watkins notes that in spite of its connotation of levity, clowning and its extension in blackface “offered a way to play with collec-

tive fears of a degraded and threatening—and male—Other while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them” (Watkins 13). In Single Wet Female, control is reversed, as the marginal mock the mainstream from a standpoint of lack rather than the excess that characterizes hegemonic tropicalizations of Latina/os. Instead of loud music, wild colors, and spicy flavors, Gomez and Tropicana offer the antitropical white Anglo subject: colorless, tasteless, quiet, conformist, and, above all, entitled. Gomez’s portrayal of Margaret’s whiteness is farcical at best, and in performing these excesses of a hegemonic subjectivity, she posits the irrationality of excess as a social marker. Her efforts to deny her Latina self range from obsessively intentional to almost completely subconscious but are always contextualized as a matter of physical and emotional preservation. She must be white, because she believes anything else will not be merely a failure but tantamount to death. Margaret refuses to recognize the voices of her own family on the answering machine, she insists that her aversion to salsa music is not a preference but a medical condition, and she exhibits an allergic repulsion of all things Latino in a hysteria that reads as a quintessential narrative of internalized colonization. Not only is Margaret’s perception of Latinidad defined in excess, but her resistance to this subjectivity is equally excessive. In their work, Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon stress the efficacious nature

of the colonialist system whose invocation of an internalized colonialist ideology in colonized subjects resulted in a complex pattern of self-hatred and desperate assimilationist desire. In his 1965 publication The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi poses the question: “What is left of the colonized at the end of this stubborn effort to dehumanize him? He is surely no longer an alter ego of the colonizer. He is hardly a human being. He tends rapidly toward becoming an object. As an end, in the colonizer’s supreme ambition, he should exist only as a function of the needs of the colonizer, i.e., be transformed into a pure colonized” (86). According to Fanon’s accounts, this negation of the colonized subject is not limited to racial distinctions, but is rather an all-encompassing sense of inferiority epitomized by his assertion that, “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white” (10). Cherrie Moraga elucidates the impact of colonization in her own experience as a daughter of a Mexican mother and Anglo father. Though her own

PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME 139 Chicana identity emerged later in life, her childhood was marked by a similar socialization process of self-denial and internalized inferiority: “No one ever quite told me this (that light was right), but I knew that being light was something valued in my family... In fact everything in my upbringing... attempted to bleach me of what color I did have. Although my mother was fluent in it, I was

never taught much Spanish at home ... It was through my mother’s desire to protect her children from poverty and illiteracy that we became ‘anglocized’; the more effectively we could pass in the white world, the better our future” (Moraga, Loving in the War Years 51). Moraga’s experience also illustrates the way

internalization enables the colonial machine by ensuring that the doctrine of Latina/o inferiority is perpetuated not only by an Anglo majority but also by Latina/o communities themselves. Moraga’s own mother strips her child of the value of her culture, language, and features in an attempt to shelter her from hate or discrimination. Of course, Moraga ultimately interrupts the trajectory of internalized colonization with her critical voice and Chicana feminist consciousness, yet her past helps trace the journey, Margaret, undertakes in Single Wet Female.

Margaret firmly believes her destiny is white. She has become, as Moraga and Memmi described, “bleached” and “a pure colonized.” She assumes the dominant neocolonialist hatred for the colonized, marginalized, minority subject, which in this case is her former Latina self. Margaret exists in a web of inferiority and self-hatred culminating with what Fanon speculates to be the final inevitable concession to an assimilationist path, to “bring [one]self as quickly as possible into step with the white world” (98). This self-hatred is painfully pres-

ent for Margaret as she works feverishly to silence and deny her queer and Latina identities in order to stay within the boundaries of dominant society. As “pure colonized,” Margaret assumes the responsibilities of her own colonizer, of which one of the primary responsibilities is the promulgation and perpetuation of the colonialist stereotype. Homi Bhabha constructs a theory of colonialist discourse that includes a discussion of the stereotype as contingent upon a notion of colonialist ambivalence rooted in the “anxious repetition” of multiple and contradictory characterizations of the colonized subject as both

utter “other” and inherently essential force in the colonialist system. This ambivalence is posited by Bhabha as a potentially subversive site for the subaltern and/or colonized figure to produce creative and cultural works of resist-

ance: “Mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus a sign of a double articulation; a complex

strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference of recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses and immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” (Bhabha 86). This form

140 HOMECOMING QUEERS of subaltern parodic performance of “authorized versions of otherness” situates itself within a colonialist discourse yet enables the expression of marginalized

voice through the rejection and reappropriation of extant systemic and discursive modes of expression and limitation. For Gomez and Tropicana, Single Wet Female fulfills exactly this subversive role as they mimic a dominant stereotype of the minority subject as ever-striving to become majority. The result of staging the marginalized idolization of the colonizer—in Margaret’s case, Anglo

heterosexuality—is a destabilization of mainstream primacy. To reenact or perform the stereotype is to understand and consequently disentangle it from the webs of individual and community identity. For Margaret and Cahmy, mimicry of a dominant ideal appears less calcu-

lated and thus far more psychologically traumatic. For both Margaret and Cahmy, the deferral of racial, ethnic, cultural, and sexual subjectivities represents a critical crisis of Self. Particularly for Margaret, her acculturation into a white Anglo mainstream represents the counterstance to a recognition and revitalization of herself as a Latina subject. Fernando Ortiz defines acculturation as “the process of transition from one culture to another, and its manifold social repercussions” (Ortiz 98), a concept Ortiz contrasts with that of transculturation that he employs to describe “the different phases of the process of transi-

tion from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture ... but the process necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation” (102-3). Whereas the former practice suggests the abandonment of one culture for another in a one-to-one exchange (usually with a minority subject adopting majority culture), Ortiz’s notion of transculturation enables multifaceted versions of cultural transformation that move in all directions of the colonizer/colonized and center/periphery paradigms. Although both processes map out cultural transformation due to shifts caused by colonization and exile or other forms of geographical displacement, Ortiz’s transculturation offers a mode of cultural subversion, since it refuses to privilege any one component of which it is made. Because Gomez’s portrayal of Margaret reveals her to be initially unable to find a psychically safe or productive middle ground, she performs a dominant white Anglo heterosexual subjectivity at the cost of her queer and Latina identities. Frozen in the second stage of Ortiz’s adaptive framework, Margaret experiences the simultaneity of both deculturation (stripping of her Latina identity) and neoculturation (adoption of Anglo affect and cultural norms). Yet Gomez’s performance further complicates Margaret’s journey toward transculturation, since her identity contains no apparent trajectory from one nation, culture, or community to another. Both inputs, Anglo and Latino, exist concomitantly, transforming the notions of origin and home into suspicious and slippery entities.

PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME 141 When Margaret’s relationship begins to crumble, Cahmy joins her in the apartment as roommate and friend. Cahmy quickly becomes obsessed with Margaret, installing cameras throughout the apartment to observe her roommate’s every move throughout the day. Unfortunately for her fragile psyche, these hidden cameras often capture graphic images of Margaret’s performance of heterosexual affect with her fiancé, to which Cahmy reacts in dramatic fashion. In terms of Margaret’s sexuality, her denial of a queer identity takes a

slightly different manifestation than her distancing from a racial or ethnic subjectivity. The distinction lies in the fact that unlike her free-flowing racial prejudices, she never explicitly expresses homophobic judgments but instead performs what Homi Bhabha would term “anxious repetition” of a dominant heterosexual norm. She is vocal early on about her engagement to a man— ironically played by a well-known male impersonator—and performs exaggerated displays of her self-conscious heterosexuality for her new roommate on numerous occasions. This heterosexuality comes complete with submission, helplessness, and a grave sense of selflessness that emerge as Margaret professes her love for the mainstream feature film Sleepless in Seattle and its female lead played by actress Meg Ryan.'5 Margaret closely aligns her philosophy of life with Ryan’s character, admitting breathlessly, “I’ve always thought there was some-

one out there to complete me.” With this declaration, Margaret embraces a dominant version of heterosexuality and female inadequacy, where a woman remains fragmented or incomplete in the absence of a male romantic partner. As Margaret’s roommate and secret stalker, Cahmy performs an equally anxious disavowal of Margaret’s heterosexual performance. Her horror at Margaret’s

on-camera sexual exploits prompts Cahmy’s antisocial behavior and violent tendencies to come to a disturbing head as several men to whom Margaret professes an attraction turn up brutally murdered. Cahmy seems to vent her hostility toward Margaret’s compulsory performance of heterosexuality through what appear to be violent killings of the innocent men who serve as reminders of Margaret’s refusal to be queer. Immediately after Margaret deems her cable guy “a hottie,” Cahmy exits in a rage, returning moments later dragging a large body-sized garbage sack onto the stage, leaving it in full view at the foot of the bed downstage for the remainder of the performance. As she struggles to position the heavy sack, Cahmy angrily kicks at it, muttering about a “hottie” and a “hookup,” confirming audience suspicions that the cable guy is Cahmy’s latest victim.

In the few instances where Cahmy’s homoerotic desire is presented to Margaret, the dynamics and depth of her self-negation are exposed. When Cahmy attempts to instruct Margaret on the art of merengue, her student is initially resistant to the Hispanic music yet is lulled into dancing with Cahmy. After a few moments of vigorous hip movement, the two women fall into an embrace and passionate kiss. Seconds later, Margaret pulls away and Cahmy reassures

142 HOMECOMING QUEERS her: “this is the way you dance the merengue.” Margaret accepts this explana-

, tion quickly and resumes their kiss. In this case, Cahmy’s response (“this is how you dance the merengue”) subsumes lesbian desire (represented by the kiss) within Latina/o culture (signified by the merengue music and dance). Although both queer and Latino identities have previously terrified Margaret, this current coupling of a concomitantly ethnic and sexual subjectivity seems to alleviate her fears as she submits to Cahmy’s advances, momentarily embracing both Cahmy and their shared queer desire. Margaret’s Openness to a queer sexuality, though fleeting, allows her to begin an emotional return home to rediscover the queer Latina identity she has come to deny. Through a series of plot twists, Cahmy’s murderous rage is linked to Margaret’s denial and auto-erasure, when her own queer Latina self, not the pizza guy or the cable man, is seen to be the true murder victim. The body bag at the end of the stage—believed to hold the lifeless remains of the cable guy—is torn open toward the end of the show, revealing not the body of Cahmy’s murder victim but instead a huge quantity of platanos: plantains sent by the family she has forgotten, to remind her to remember.” The rediscovery of the platanos provides the final link from Margaret’s current assimilated self to her future queer Latina identity. The body bag holds the culture she must reclaim in order to reify her own silenced body. Margaret’s culture is the casualty of her assimilationist drive away from home and toward a dominant neocolonial ideology. Frantz Fanon underlines the psychological costs of colonization, describing his voyage from hope for an autonomous self-representation to the crushing realization that his subaltern subjectivity has become fixed by the objectification of the external imperial gaze: “Just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self” (109). Like Fanon, Margaret must recon-

struct her subjectivity from the shattered remains of a failed assimilation attempt. At the close of the performance, Cahmy forces Margaret to look into a mirror and face the silenced subject staring back at her. With Cahmy hovering behind and above her, the two construct the image of a composite being, representative of the multiplicity of queer Latina subjectivity. The San Francisco run of Single Wet Female underwent significant visual and textual transformation before its New York debut several months later at P.S. 122. In the California performances, Tropicana described her earlier portrayals of Cahmy as “undevel- :

oped.” Later, under the direction of David Schweizer, Tropicana revamped Cahmy’s dowdy costume of ill-fitting, brightly colored spandex into a decidedly more authoritative set of bright orange coveralls. Additionally, Cahmy’s gender

identity was refined from a manic depressive androgyny into a more aggressively butch role. This shift lends itself to a reading of Margaret and Cahmy

PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME 143 as interlocking parts of a whole queer Latina subject. In the San Francisco run, as the two subjects begin their final process of reunification, Margaret’s blonde wig is removed to reveal her dark hair and morena self. The stripping of the fake hair stands as a consciously silly but significant symbol of Margaret’s return to her queer Latina self, and the home space found within. In effect Gomez and Tropicana’s performance is a coming out story, not simply as a lesbian, but a Latina lesbian. Gomez and Tropicana’s performative mirror reflects distinct parts of a single subject made whole by an acceptance of ethnic, gender, and sexual difference. Unlike the characters in mainstream romance films, Margaret is not completed by Murray, Cahmy, or anyone else. Margaret is Cahmy. For Margaret, being colonized meant being invaded, land, body, and mind, being taught to hate herself, to love her “other,” the one she could never be. Her internalized sense of colonization led Margaret to homelessness and self-hatred. The homecoming developed in the conclusion of Single Wet Female suggests a reversal of these colonized mentalities. Decolonization, as practiced in Gomez and Tropicana’s work, is the recovery of home through self-love and the cultivation of communities of affinity. The union Margaret and Cahmy form allows both to return to a home that is made, as Cherrie Moraga reminds us, “from scratch,” through the words and worlds of queer Latina artists and performers. The erotic, as developed in Palacios, Gomez, and Tropicana’s performative work,

confirms Audre Lorde’s assertion that the erotic has been misconstrued by patriarchal society as “the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation ... confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic” (Lorde 340). In fact, all of the performances examined here illustrate treatments of the erotic that extend far beyond the realm of physical pleasure as they delve into the depths of colonization, conformity, and identity. The erotic pull between Margaret and Cahmy, as well as that between Palacios’s Chicana subjects, represents the greater union of subject and self, with desire as the discur-

sive and performative tool that prompts this homecoming. Cindy Cruz has suggested that the revolutionary nature of narrative is especially relevant for Chicanas, since “writing is not only a means of crafting the self. For Chicana writers, it is narrative that makes the word flesh” (667). With the added dimension of performance, Palacios, Gomez, and Tropicana move a step further, from word to flesh to the staging of their own speaking, thinking, desiring bodies. Both Gomez and Tropicana’s Single Wet Female and Monica Palacios’s “I Don’t Have to Explain” offer valuable examples of this transformation of words into flesh as queer Latina bodies are represented not as fragmented and marginal

but as whole and central to discourse on desire, identity, and the erotics of home for all individuals. Monica Palacios, Carmelita Tropicana, and Marga Gomez’s performances of being home move away from comparative views of home, shifting queer Chicana/Latina home spaces out of the margins of minority subjectivity and into the center of performative discourse.

/ Dancing with Devils Gendered Violence in Novels by Emma Pérez and Achy Obejas To recognize truth is not easy when one is so close to home. To speak truth is even harder. —Emma Pérez, Gulf Dreams

T transitioning away from the model of sameness elucidated in the previous chapters, the narrative works of Emma Pérez and Achy Obejas violently push past the familiarity of similitude and into a dynamics of difference wherein desire is used to destabilize binaries and call into question rigid divisions of gender, sex, and sexuality. These destabilizations of seemingly fixed categories of being and seeing define the third representational mode of homemaking that I label “complicating home.” In this category I identify home spaces of similar fluidity as the previous two modes, coming home and being home; however, an erotics of similitude is only invoked as a mythic entity, a truth to be disproved by the complication of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and political heterogeneity as well as social inequities between and among these categories. This mode shatters the utopian notion of commonality with important interrogations of the marginalizing forces directed at queer Latinas, not only from dominant spheres but also from within their own queer and Latina/o communities. Achy Obejas’s and Emma Pérez’s first published novels both portray the intensity of an intimate relationship between two Latinas, one who is openly lesbian and another who refuses to publicly—and at times even privately— acknowledge her desire for women. The politics of similitude enter into discussions of queer Latina desire, as does the correlation between sex and nation, since both can be seen to reconfigure the queer Latina body as an individual and community construct. Sensuality and the act of desiring manifest as a cultivation of racial, cultural, and ethnic home. Yet in both novels, the significance of these acts of love, lust, and attraction as liberatory and empowering practices is complicated by the silence, frustration, and shame that swirls around expressions 144

DANCING WITH DEVILS 145 of these desires. Such complications of the idyllic notion of home and homecoming produce a space marked by instability and a network of layered meanings and individual specificity. The unnamed protagonist in Chicana Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams uses her narrative voice to quickly establish a link between herself and her romantic interest. This connection is defined by its primal and organic nature as though the two Chicana subjects are born through their union: “We both knew this, that we came from the same place, that we were joined in a place so uncommon that this world, which bound and confined us, could not understand the bond that flesh frustrated” (27). This narrator characterizes herself and the young woman as two equal parts of a greater whole and later cites this intimate connection for prompting her to return home to confront a difficult and painful past: “Dreams of her continue. They remind me of her back, her mouth, her touch. They brought me back home, but not to find her, to recover something I had witnessed that summer” (37). In this declaration, the narrator not only recognizes the power of her love for the young woman, but also the opportuni-

ties made possible by her return home, to matters that extend beyond the sexual relationship between the two women. Queer Chicana desire serves as the catalyst for yet another discursive homecoming.

Obejas’s narrative similarly characterizes an intimate bond between Latinas as a site of origin and home. As Memory Mambo’s Cuban American protagonist declares of her Puerto Rican ex-lover, “To me, she was the like the purest, blackest earth—that rich, sweet soil in which sugarcane grows. I always imagined her as hills in which I would roll around, happy and dirty, as if I were back in Cuba, or perhaps in Puerto Rico” (119). Here the Latina object of the nar-

rator’s desire is not merely suggestive of a home space, but through the narrative she actually becomes the earth itself, the most primal element of which her home is constituted, much like Cristina Serna’s trope of woman as earth. Within these passages one can see how the authors transform the representation of the act of loving another woman, specifically as a queer Latina, into a transcendental experience with ramifications far beyond the limits of the individuals immediately involved or the intimacy shared. For these narrative voices, the love of a Latina by another Latina implies a love and acceptance of self, an active demonstration of commitment and loyalty to one’s family and community, as well as a refashioning and reenvisioning of home. However, in contrast to previous analyses of similitude, I engage Obejas and Pérez’s texts to map the ways in which paradigms of sameness—exemplified by the coupling of two queer Latina subjects—are seen to produce an equally powerful commentary on difference, as the mirror held up to reflect sameness, in actuality, exposes profound diversity among queer Chicanas and Latinas. Also unique to the texts examined in these two sections is the archetype of the violent grotesque Latino male antagonist. In each novel this figure provides

146 HOMECOMING QUEERS an important catalyst for the Latina lesbian protagonist’s characterization. Pérez and Obejas’s novels develop a dynamics of difference in contrast to the erotics of similitude present in previous texts. The representations developed in both Memory Mambo and Gulf Dreams provide significant challenges to the superficiality, stereotype, and homogeneity of hegemonic notions of female sexuality and gender identities.

Misogyny across Gender Lines in Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams Emma Pérez’s 1996 novel takes readers on a journey through memory, fantasy, and nightmare with a narrative fragmentation that resembles a disturbing night of troubled sleep. This, Pérez’s first novel, introduces us to an unnamed female narrator who reveals her world of violence and frustrated desire. The focus of the text comes primarily from the narrator’s lifelong obsession with yet another nameless woman whose haunting presence and absence accompanies the narrator from fascinated youth to disturbed and tormented adulthood.

The concept of symmetry indelibly marks the novel’s presentation of desire: “I gaze into a mirror at an aging face pronouncing her name clearly, succinctly. She is me, fused, even when we’re apart. I couldn’t look into my own eyes without her mirrored back” (Pérez, Gulf Dreams 49). In fact, the two women

share a profound relationship that, at times, pushes beyond similitude and into a more hybrid state of being. While the object of the narrator’s desire is generally resistant to the affair—at least within public spheres—the narrator’s confessions paint an image of inherent and indelible connection between the

two characters, a bond that supercedes that of husband and wife, and that links the pair forever as though two halves of one whole being: “How can I explain she was the core of me? I repeat this over and over, to you, to myself. We merged before birth, entwined in each other’s souls, wrapped together like

a bubble of mist, floating free, reflecting rainbows. This was before flesh, before bones crushed each other foolishly trying to join mortal bodies, before

the outline of skin shielded us from one another” (27). The act of desiring prompts a sense of merged subjecthood. From the narrator’s point of view, the two women are not merely similar but essentially the same.! The subject/object paradigm collapses in upon itself as the object of desire is subsumed within the desiring subject. It is useful to read this protagonist’s internalized struggle through the lens of Gloria Anzaldtia’s mapping of mestiza subjectivity, a site of myriad intersections, confrontations, and reconciliations. While Anzaldua’s critical concept of mestiza consciousness pushes forward from the conflict and turmoil of culture clashing and into mode of revolutionary and spiritual transcendence, Pérez’s narrator stands at the beginning of the journey, struggling to encompass the

multiple intersections of gender, culture, and sexuality that constitute her

DANCING WITH DEVILS 147 being. Anzaldta explains this painful state of multiplicity as “a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war... The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision” (Borderlands 100). Anzaldta’s language of incompatibility and collision

establishes a tone of psychic violence that darkens and defines Pérez’s Gulf Dreams protagonist. While the narrator grounds her love for the unnamed woman in a politics

of similitude, her eroticization of sameness quickly gives way to a dynamics of difference as the two women are characterized as vastly distinct—though intimately connected—women. On a physical level the two are indeed distant. Because of the presence of the young woman’s lovers, husband, and her own underlying homophobia, the intimate relationship between the two women is stunted—not allowed to develop beyond immature displays of possession, aggression, and jealousy. At times, the sameness seems to blur the two subjects into a single entity, almost wholly eliminating the specificity of history or culture: “I couldn’t compete with her past, nor could she with mine. There was no competition, only commonality. Our souls touched before in a life where my love for her was not forbidden” (27). The narrator tempers this dissolving of differences with an emphasis on the corporeal limitations of such a union. Just as Anzaldua’s theory embodies the border as “una herida abierta” (Borderlands 25), Pérez creates a living, breathing border out of her narrator’s own flesh, which

she interprets as limiting her ability to merge completely with the young unnamed woman with whom she is obsessed. Like Anzaldiia’s mestiza, the narrator experiences a “struggle of the flesh” and a merging of “incompatible frames of reference” represented by the two women who share a desire frustrated by fear and social expectations (Borderlands 100). Throughout Pérez’s text, the narrator struggles to overcome the forces that threaten to marginalize and silence her as a queer brown female subject. At the beginning of the narration, she recounts a grade school incident where several

Anglo classmates question the hygiene of the Chicano students. The narrator responds flatly, “I wasn’t defiant” (Gulf Dreams 23). Yet later her capacity to resist the negativity that surrounds her increases, as she proclaims, “Daily, ’m reminded, I have no right to love as I love. I live in a place that ruptures and negates this practice. Don’t misunderstand me, even when I’m told to hide from public, to meet only in unlit rooms where you can’t see us, I’m defiant” (73). The narrator’s sexuality, here, marks her shift from passivity (“I wasn’t

defiant”) to action (“I’m defiant”), yet the speaker’s actions reveal a still tortured subject. The narrator’s desire for the young woman is distinctly linguistic in nature, “without a touch. ..I wanted to brush her cheek lightly with my hand, but I, too frightened, spoke in riddles, euphemistic yearnings” (11). Words bridge the phys-

ical space separating the two women, bringing them together in an intimacy

148 HOMECOMING QUEERS that exceeds any physical connection. Early in their adolescent friendship, the young woman giddily confesses her sexual involvement with a male lover. The narrator’s immediate response also translates her betrayal through language, “For an instant, I forgot her name. She was foreign, a stranger” (14). The narrator’s pain robs her of the language to name the very women she desires. A defin-

ing element of the narrator’s desire, language serves as the primary bond between the two women, linking them in discourse when physical union is not

an option. As adolescents, the young woman joins the narrator in her bed, where the two share a linguistic, if not sexual connection: “Intimacies of the flesh achieved through words. That was our affair... We did not repress the language of this fixation. Our boyfriends, confused and angry, left us to each other. Finally, only each other, seduced by tempting words” (52—53). The shift from physical to verbal enables the women to surpass the limitations of heteronor-

mativity and carve out a safe space apart from patriarchal rule by fathers, husbands, and lovers outside the room. Although their relationship is characterized by desire for each other, the consummation of this desire is impossible, much like the return to a distant homeland for an exiled or otherwise displaced subject. In both cases, the return is performed, as cultural studies scholar Stuart

Hall theorizes, “by another route,” via the language of longing and loss (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 232).

Language as an alternate route for desire proves highly successful as the two women cultivate a passionate intensity, “We became enraptured, entrapped, addicted to each other’s eroticism. A kiss on the cheek inflamed me for hours. I witnessed her greed. Teasing reached new heights. Could I let go of my addiction to her, to her words? Would I let go? The desire to desire her—my weakness” (Pérez, Gulf Dreams 28). It soon becomes evident that the absence of consummation, in fact, fuels the intensity of the women’s desire for each other. And while physical limitations confine their expressions of affection, the strength of their linguistic connection begins to pose a threat to the young woman’s boyfriend,

and later husband, Pelén. For the narrator, the alternate route is paved with an emphasis on language, which affords her a unique mode of desire that both confounds the men in their lives and replaces the physical connection she is denied with the young woman.

, The young woman’s affiliation with Chicano patriarchy positions her in close proximity to the violently aggressive male figure, Pel6n. Defined by her attraction to violence and victimization, the young woman finds herself trapped in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship with her activist husband. The narrator develops a stark contrast between the vibrant voluptuous young woman in adolescence and the thin frail being into which she deteriorates after her pairing with Pelén. The narrator not only recognizes the destructiveness of the marriage, but also lays blame on Peldn for inciting the breakdown of his young wife’s body and spirit: “He liked her to be skinny, he said. He didn’t

DANCING WITH DEVILS 149 suspect that her frailty had only developed since they’d married. Before marriage, she had been sturdy with a young woman’s full, hoop like hips. He assumed she purposely didn’t gain weight, but for her, a skinny body encouraged slow death” (48). Several dueling aesthetics are at play in the narrator’s assessment of the young woman’s marriage. The connection between thinness and feminine beauty satisfies Pelon’s desire for a conventionally attractive bride. The narrator, however, reads past the superficial codes and interprets the young woman’s appearance not as a presence of beauty but lack of vibrancy and life. Her once womanly hips are now gaunt, and her frame, once strong, is now fragile and slight. So while Pelén sees her shrinking figure as a purposeful effort to please him, the narrator reinterprets the loss as a deliberate plodding toward the end of her life and ultimate escape from an oppressive marriage. Frustration and jealousy frequently manifest into physical and verbal violence directed at the young woman. Given the abuse the young woman endures at the hands of her partners, several scholars have noted a contrast with the symbiotic relationship she shares with the novel’s narrator. Catriona Rueda Esquibel conjures up images of comadrazgo: “the narrator is the conventional

comadre, in that she provides support for the young woman in the latter’s heterosexual relationship; in addition, she acts as a sort of lesbian supplement to heterosexuality, providing a love and level of eroticism that balances the inadequacies (for the young woman) of the heterosexual relationship and helps maintain it” (“Memories of Girlhood” 675). Yet while she is the target of both partners’ rage, the narrative also implicates the young woman herself, in the cycle of violence. The narrator observes: “I learned how boys had damaged her. I judged her damage. She punished me when I refused to continue the pattern with which she was so familiar. When I denied her the fight she sought, she would finally look elsewhere. So accustomed to brutality, she chose the victim’s role” (28). Both Pelon and the narrator are characterized as players in a torturous game propelled by the young woman at the center of the desiring triad. Rather than resist the paradigm of abuse and victimization, the young woman— driven by the familiar coupling of passion and pain—attempts to mimic the victimizer/victimized power relationship of her heterosexual relationship in her homoerotic connection to the narrator. Thus, I would agree with Rueda Esquibel that the same-sex relationship serves to support and maintain the heterosexual union, lending a verbal element of desire and passion that is lacking in her interaction with Pel6n. However, the narrative suggests a haunting symmetry between Pelén and the narrator, such that their compliance—whether eager or begrudging—with their roles as abusers belies the love and support of a conventional comadrazgo relationship.

The narrator observes an inherent negativity within the heterosexual coupling, yet her own exchanges with the woman are far from healthy or stable.

The narrator herself seems aware but ambivalent about her role as comadre,

150 HOMECOMING QUEERS and through her narrative she clearly prioritizes desire over friendship or female bonding: Not one knew why I had come. To see my new friend, they thought. To link families with four sisters who would be friends longer than their life-

times through children who would bond them at baptismal rites. Comadres. We would become intimate friends sharing coffee, gossip and heartaches. We would endure the female life-cycle—adolescence, marriage, menopause, death, and even divorce, before or after menopause, before or after death. I had not come for that. I had come for her kiss. (13)

Queer Chicana desire in this sense is not depicted as a universally stable or healthy mode of interaction. It is equally marred by hate, aggression, and dangerous imbalances of power. Violence, domination, and deception mark most of the young woman’s encounters with intimate partners. And despite the narrator’s seeming outrage at Pel6n’s abusive acts, she repeatedly falls into the same patterns of violence that plague the young woman’s marital relationship. She admits, “I compound her [the young woman’s] purple marks. She is satisfied to hate me. I couldn’t stop. Nor could she” (63). The repetitious violence distorts

even the precious language that differentiates the narrator’s bond with the young woman. “And so we played this deceitful game, angry because we didn’t now how to quit. I would spit fierce words at her. Sometimes, without uttering a sound, I hurt her” (29). Whether through hurtful words or silence, language ultimately fails to pull the two women from the agony of cyclical domestic violence. Where shared desire in works by Terri de la Pena, Monica Palacios, Cristina Serna, Marga Gomez, and Carmelita Tropicana suggested a positive and joyful homecoming, Pérez’s portrait of desire interrupts any semblance of an idealized home space. Instead, queer Chicana desire prompts the destruction of safety, belonging, and home—as the narrator beats the body of the young woman she is unable to love. In stark contrast to a politics of similitude, Pérez’s fictional work focuses specifically on the distinctions and specificities among Latina lesbian subjects. In my work with queer Chicana Latina narrative, I have identified a prominent archetype, that of the grotesque hypermasculine heterosexual Chicano/Latino male figure, which serves as a frequent foil to queer Chicana and Latina protagonists. When addressing the dynamics of difference in a Chicana/Latina literary production, I find it equally important to examine the ways in which masculinity and male subjectivity shape and are shaped by the characterization of queer Chicana and Latina community. To this end, I employ a brief analysis of Terri de la Pena’s 1999 novel, Faults, which establishes the definitive characterization of this archetype. Subsequent analysis of Pérez’s Gulf Dreams and Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo emphasizes the subversive variations in narrative treatment of this extreme gendered archetype.

DANCING WITH DEVILS 15] In de la Pena’s 1999 novel, Faults, the author introduces an abusive heterosexual male figure, Zalo, the brother-in-law of the novel’s lesbian protagonist, Toni. Very few escape the wrath of this character’s rage, and de la Pena’s narrative is valuable for its interruption of silences traditionally surrounding situations of domestic abuse and the complicated web of victims produced by such violence. I employ the term “grotesque” cautiously, aware of the potential for

objectification and dehumanization of male subjectivity. It is expressly this dehumanized or, rather, desensitized state that characterizes this archetypal figure, particularly in queer Chicana/Latina narrative. Beyond simply a carniva-

lesque spectacle of excess, Geoffrey Galt Harpham designates the grotesque as “a condition of being just out of focus, just beyond the reach of language. It accommodates the things left over when the categories of language are exhausted; it is a defense against silence when other words have failed” (3). As another space of marginalization, the grotesque offers a language and a label

for an unspeakable and unknowable entity. Difference—whether physical, behavioral, or psychological—manifests to such an excessive degree that words cannot contain the otherness. The three defining elements of spectacle, excess, and language converge in my configuring of the violent masculine grotesque. De la Pena’s grotesque, Zalo, regularly transforms himself into a raging monster, inflicting physical and verbal assaults on his wife, Sylvia. Though my interpretation of the grotesque does not rely on specific physical characteristics, a shared aesthetics of abuse can be identified in each of the characters studied here. Bestial characterizations, desensitization, and the performance of visual spectacle all shape this male grotesque archetype. For Zalo, a defiant night away from home and his wife’s subsequent discontent inspires an epic fit of rage narrated from his wife’s perspective, “He has me cornered in the bathroom, pressed to the cold yellow tile. His sweaty face is unshaven, his breath rancid. I smell the female stink on him, but I won’t say that out loud... Zalo is like a furious boar” (88-89). De la Pefia’s animalistic presence and his performance of excess—facial hair, sweat, and the smell of another woman’s sex—saturate Zalo’s body in

hypermasculine referents. His pungent scent, unkempt appearance, and the allusion to his uncontrolled libido frame the masculine grotesque, yet Zalo’s hypermasculinity provides a foil against which the Chicana lesbian characters are drawn. De la Pena does imbue other minor male characters with nonviolent and compassionate qualities who—along with a butch Chicana lesbian—offer a nuanced counternarrative to Zalo’s static rage. Largely a factor of heterosexuality rather than ethnicity, the heterosexual male grotesque is always Chicano/ Latino in the literary examples offered here, however the violent performance essentializes gender and sexuality, while ethnicity only occasionally factors into

the characterizations. My interpretation of the neutrality of ethnicity in this grotesque figure resists popular conflation of machismo or male bravado with Latino masculinities.

152 HOMECOMING QUEERS Overall, though, Faults tends to reduce the portrayal of violence to a gendered and specifically masculine practice, especially while contrastingly representing the lesbian protagonist and her relationship as wholly positive and unproblematic, despite evidence of a separation, infidelity, and dishonesty between the two Chicana lesbian subjects. Thus de la Pena’s narrative, in this case, tends to set up a dualistic paradigm, wherein the male heterosexual figure is positioned and characterized in absolute opposition to the lesbian protagonist’s innocence and righteousness. The exception to this rule manifests itself as a factor of ethnicity, since Anglo lesbian characters—such as Toni’s ex-lover Amanda—at times lean toward negative representations, though never marked by physical violence as defines the monstrous male archetype. Any desire marred by violence is used in de la Pena’s narrative to develop a moral distancing of the lesbian subject from the heterosexual male’s abusive behaviors. Emma Pérez and Achy Obejas’s narrative patterns depart dramatically from de la Pena’s portrayal of violence and abuse as exclusive constructs of masculinity. Similarly grotesque heterosexual male abusive figures are present in both Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, yet the authors further extend an exploration of violence and desire by destabilizing traditional

paradigms that collapse gendered, sexual, racial, ethnic, and class experiences into unified yet wholly oversimplified categories. Throughout Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, a disturbing parallel emerges between the Chicana lesbian protagonist/narrator and another abusive male character, the husband of a young woman with whom the narrator is obsessed. In Pérez’s text the connection is characterized as a competition or game that is not wholly rejected by the lesbian subject who confesses to her reader: “I enjoyed how I threatened him [Pelon]” (64). The narrator recognizes a destructive dynamic within the marriage between Pelén and the young woman, declaring to her

reader, “Her husband owned her, sapping her, wanting every piece of her, expecting what he’d had as a child. He held her frantically. His possession. Always within sight of him, she mirrored him back to him. He was her purpose” (46). Yet despite her disdain for Pelon, the narrator identifies a similar dynamic in her own exchanges with the young woman when soon after making the above statement she reveals: “In college, we began a savage game. I hit her, tightening

my grip around her arm, bruising the skin, leaving purple blotches. I wanted to clutch her, to own her. I could only reach her with cruelty” (63). She struggles to distinguish her love from that of Pelén: “His was a violent passion. Mine was an unnamed urgency.” Yet both modes of desire culminate in physical violence against the young woman’s body. Increasingly, throughout the novel, the narrator’s relationship with the young woman mirrors the rage and aggression that characterizes Pel6n’s heterosexual masculinity: “I understood their union, how she wrapped herself up in him. His every syllable over-shadowed her conversations. I had been with her in the same way when we were young, like that day

DANCING WITH DEVILS 153 under the tree, she stated resolutely that she couldn’t distinguish where she began and where I ended” (50). The characterizations of the narrator’s and Pelon’s relationships with the young woman are strikingly similar, the only dramatic difference being the societal norms sanctioning the heterosexual union. What does indeed distinguish the homoerotic relations from the normative heterosexual coupling is the manner in which intimacy is developed via the narration. Not only is the lack of physicality in the women’s relationship a concern for

the narrator, but she also continues to seek something further—a connection and a bond implying a deeper and more intensely shared intimacy—one that will set her apart from Pelon.

This particular frustration with the limitations of corporeality is present within the narrator’s voice as she admits a preoccupation with the linguistic manifestations of desire. She expresses her love for the young woman solely in terms of its discursive repercussions, confessing: “The way I love you remains an act of language. Words, narrative, myth—all my dreams convey the way I would have loved you” (137). Again a sense of diasporic longing emerges as the

narrator idealizes their unattainable union as a mythic construction, a story, in dreams, that defines her being through its impossibility. Texts and words satiate her in a way that her frustrated desire for the young woman cannot: “Years later I discovered my compulsion to consummate intimacy through dialogue— to make love with a tongue that spewed desire, that pleaded for more words, acid droplets on my skin. With her, I learned to make love to women without a touch. I craved intimate, erotic dialogue. I was addicted to words and she had spawned the addiction” (52). This linguistic fetish may be attributed, in part, to the notion of language as a traditionally male discourse. Trinh T. Minh-ha expresses the pleasure of language—“Words, fragments, and lines that I love for no sound reason; blanks lapses, and silences that settle in like gaps of fresh air as soon as the inked space smells stuffy’—but she also notes the powerful threat

posed by the reclamation of language from historically male dominance: “Learned women have often been described in terms one might use in describing a thief. Being able to read and write, a learned woman robs man of his creativity, his activity, his culture, his language. Learning ‘unfeminizes’” (Minh-ha 19). By appropriating language to satiate female homoerotic desire, the narrator of Pérez’s Gulf Dreams subverts yet another traditional institution of male domination. As a local defense attorney, Pelén also uses language to control and influ-

ence both his community and his wife. Yet despite the adulation his voice inspires among his (exclusively male) audiences, the narrator questions his authenticity, explaining, “He had no personal style, no gift to create from the root of himself. He threw up other’s words, not his own” (64). Therefore, it is of

great significance that the narrator then uses this same language transformed in order to express desire and passion for women, and—more specifically—for Pelon’s prized “possession,” his wife.

154 HOMECOMING QUEERS While the narrator criticizes Pelon for using the words of “others,” she prides herself on her ability to fabricate elaborate deceptions for the women she desires. In this way, the narrator appears to adopt many of the patterns of male dominance within intimate relationships that she decries in Pel6én’s behavior. Both Pelén and the narrator beat the young woman. Pelon’s extramarital affairs wound her, and in a disturbing passage the narrator proudly relates the false nature of her relations with other women: “I’m deceptive. I lie to you. I’m a liar proud of her lies. I admit my deception. I lied to my mother. I’ve lied to every woman I thought I loved and to every woman I know | loved,

I lied even more. And men were never worth making up lies for, so I spoke unkind truths to them. But lies, always sweet, special deceit for women” (88). This is a brutal confession emerging from any voice, lesbian or otherwise; however, the fact that such a statement emerges as part of a discourse of a Chicana lesbian subject is important, specifically because of its ability to interject in the

fossilized narrative of harmonious and homogenized view of female-centric spaces. In Pérez’s novel, deception is a game played equally skillfully by men and

women, heterosexual and queer. The narrative’s apparent objective is not to develop a fixed and lasting trope of queer Chicana identity, but rather to destabilize the fixity of truth itself. The presence of such challenges to stereotypical representations of women and lesbians is essential to the opening up of space for marginal subjects to operate within dominant spheres. The narrator herself admits, “I became someone to hate. I hated myself” (126). Not only is the reader forced to see the abusive male (as exemplified by Pelén) in Pérez’s text, but also the abusive female subject, the queer Chicana narrator, in order to compare and perhaps deconstruct readers’ unquestioned perceptions of violence and gender.

The second half of the novel follows the trial of several young Chicanos accused of the rape of a local woman named Ermila. The young woman’s now husband, Pelon, serves as the men’s defense lawyer, and the case, along with the small town’s reaction to it, perform a retelling of the Cortez/Malinche legacy (Hernandez 166).? Ermila’s betrayal takes the form of her willingness to bear witness to the crimes the men had committed against her, for valuing her body more than these men did, and for speaking out and refusing to participate in a system that accepts rape and abuse as the price of womanhood. Upon coming forward to confront her rapists in court, Ermila discovers the risk of complicating home. Though Ermila views herself as a victimized subject, her case’s trajectory through the small Texas town’s judicial system drifts away from the violation of a woman’s body and mind and instead toward the violated

facade of the sleepy rural community. Several states away in California, the narrator reads about the crime and court case in a newspaper: “A town whose name was not muttered outside the Gulf coast stirred chaotically when a woman

didn’t hide her rage, screaming for someone or something to help recapture her future; but those who said they sought truth distorted her words” (Pérez,

DANCING WITH DEVILS 155 Gulf Dreams 77). The narrator identifies the focus of the article; it is not Ermila’s

brutally beaten and violated body that stirs the town, but rather her audacity to speak out against her own victimization, particularly when this entails a persecution of three of the town’s “own” Chicano youth. Pérez’s portrayal clearly delineates a double standard regarding the limits of gendered behavior, the horror of the men’s crimes quickly forgotten, Ermila’s crimes against her community endure in the townspeople’s minds. And though the expectations fall along gender lines, both men and women in her community demand a discourse of silence from Ermila.

Aida Hurtado labels such internally directed affronts to both ethnic and gendered communities as blasphemy: “{I consider them] blasphemy in the sense of questioning what in many ways we [women of color] have been required not to question—our loyalty and silence to those who may oppress us because they have

also been our companeras/companeros in struggle ... To question these alliances [to both the predominantly white feminist movement and activist movements of people of color] is to potentially serve the role of saboteur when the progress we have made in remedying racism and sexism is yet in its infancy” (Hurtado xi). Hence any problematizing of existing structures of oppression, especially related to gender, sex, and sexuality is perceived as a threat to group advancement by displacing attention from issues in which community members function as victims rather than perpetrators of oppressive acts against fellow community members. For Ermila, her very existence as a victim poses a threat to a system of Chicano patriarchy, where men see themselves merely as victims of dominant oppression rather than perpetrators of oppression or crime against others—and specifically against the women in their own communities.

Indeed, Pel6n sees the trial as a microcosm of his community’s greater struggle in an Anglo-dominant neocolonialist society: “[he] defended the rapists, accusing a white media of framing innocent young men, making them a gang of barrio punks. He was so sure of himself that when he spoke about gringo enemies, he forgot who Ermila was and where she came from” (89). The notion

of the male grotesque reverberates in this, Pel6n’s desensitized state, as he builds the defense for his clients around the erasure of their victim. Though Pelén does not touch Ermila, his violent discourse compounds her physical wounds. The feminine force of comadrazgo—a Mexicana/Chicana network of feminine support and collectivity—fails Ermila as well: “They tried to censor her

anger. The compassion some offered was not compassion at all, but instead

words meant to stifle her, to say, ‘Don’t do this, Ermila, don’t talk to the strangers. Why do you say these things? You make your life harder.’ These words came from women, tias y vecinas, only her giielita listened and repaired her broken flesh” (90). As Hurtado asserts, by challenging the sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy in her Chicano community, the town deems Ermila’s discourse blasphemous and consequently forces her into an emotional exile.

156 HOMECOMING QUEERS During the emotional trial, the narrator maintains a profound connection with Pelon. In spite of her hatred of his violence and selfishness, the narrator seems to share a closer intimacy with Pelén than even with his wife, the actual object of her desire. In the novel’s final section, this intimate bond is illustrated as the narrator penetrates Pelon’s dream state, witnessing, if not controlling, the terrifying visions he endures nightly. The narrator assures her reader, “He [Pel6n] wouldn’t admit to her [the young woman] how I haunted his nights” (118-19), yet the impact

of the narrator’s presence as well as her unwavering and palpable desire for his wife succeed in shaking the security of his masculinity as he dreams that “he holds a sharp six inch blade in his right hand, the wooden handle indented. He clutches the shining knife. In a swift gesture he slashes his penis, holding it in his left hand. I refuse it, gazing blankly at him as he grips a bleeding, puny genital. Pel6n awoke with a moan, shaking. The bed sheets were soaked throughout. Urgently, he looked for his wife” (118). In the ultimate betrayal of patriarchal rule, Pel6n’s subconscious toys with the horror of self-castration and the additional emasculation of offering up the severed male member to the lesbian narrator. Upon waking, his wife is the sole comfort that may soothe his wounded ego, confirming the gendered positions of male dominance and female submission within their heterosexual union. The threat of the narrator’s desire, and his wife’s potential for lesbian desire as well, continue to destabilize Pelén’s patriarchal platform:

Cherrie Moraga points out that “homosexuality does not, in and of itself, pose a great threat to society ... But lesbianism, in any form, and male homosexuality which openly avows both the sexual and emotional elements of the bond, challenges the very foundation of la familia” (Loving in the War Years i111).

Aida Hurtado adds that, “lesbianism is subversive because it undermines the unconquerable biological divide of patriarchal inheritance laws through biological ties” (Hurtado 22). Homoerotic unions between women—as well as socially

conscious unions of men—dismantle traditional notions of the heterosexual nuclear family, as well as the privileging of reproductivity as woman’s greatest value, the deconstruction of which has been illustrated in Cristina Serna’s earlier work. Both the narrator’s queer positionality and her desire for Peldn’s wife represent a displacement of Pelon’s masculine superiority, shaking the foundations of his orderly world and threatening to emasculate him on both physical and psychological levels. The novel closes with a troubling incident of vengeance, as the narrator plans the execution of one of Ermila’s rapists. Yet again, as is the norm in Pérez’s text, reality is clouded by the dream state, leaving her narrative disoriented and confused. She explains the motivation behind her violent plans as “purg[ing] him from my nightmares, the ones that kept me tied to the woman from El Pueblo.” She later wonders, “Was a recurring nightmare premeditation?” (Gulf Dreams 133).

Again the trial is linked to the narrator’s obsession with the young woman, or rather her final desire to eradicate their (dis)connection from her life. The

DANCING WITH DEVILS 157 protagonist repeatedly uses a sort of self-reflective metanarration, exploring and questioning her narrative voice as she produces it. The rapist’s murder represents yet another puzzling site for both narrator and reader. It is a detail she narrates from beneath a blanket of silence, explaining, “I can’t tell you when it happened. The murder. You'll have to trace the clues I leave behind in this text. I can’t reveal too much. Not because I won’t, but because I’m not sure I remember’ (142). This self-reflection provides the reader with yet another border, that which separates truth and fiction—a border that seems to be blurred within the narrator’s own mind as she confesses, “I sometimes lack the ability to discern what is real, or unreal, what I imagine to be true... What is invisible is as alive and true to me as the visible” (142). Pérez’s narrative adeptly destabilizes her own narrator’s authority within the text, transforming the reader into an active participant in the final outcome of the novel. This call to the reader affords a dialogic nature to creativity, enabling sites of entrance for queer Latina and other engaged audiences.3 Ellie Hernandez’s study of Gulf Dreams elucidates a twofold interpretation of Pérez’s representation of desire: Both a narrative of lesbian love and decolonial historical recovery. She links both readings through the centralizing of desire as an agency for locating space and language for Chicana subjects: “It is crucial, then, to understand that this same desire, or rather, the ‘lack’ of historical legitimacy, is a choice of articulation that allows the Chicana lesbian protagonist to

remain outside of the rules that govern reality and intelligibility while maintaining a sense of agency and voice” (161). Pérez’s narrator breaks the rules of chronological storytelling and authorial verisimilitude, which, according to Hernandez, enables the narrator to forge a space and language with which to speak out and impose her discourse in a way that the novel’s Ermila and the young woman from El Pueblo are unable to achieve. In this novel, Emma Pérez shares with her readers a narrative voice full of contradictions. She condemns abuse yet is herself a perpetrator of violent acts. She masterfully paints the landscape of her desire, then single handedly shreds

her narrative and credibility by fully and proudly acknowledging her own manipulation of reality in order to create her textual presence in the novel. This narrator demonstrates an ability to occupy a multiplicity of spaces—some contradictory, others perfectly hybrid in nature. A challenging text for its fragmentation and anonymous characters, Gulf Dreams offers a unique insight into the

fearless practice of complicating home through the interrogation of gender, ethnicity, memory, and the politics of queer Chicana desire.

Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo Emma Pérez’s protagonist in Gulf Dreams fabricates worlds of queer Chicana inti-

macy in a dream state. When she is forced to separate from the object of her desires, she constructs alternative spaces for the satiation of this desire: “I dreamt

158 HOMECOMING QUEERS of her fingers brushing my skin ... so unsure of the certainties her body felt” (12). And while the two women’s physical attraction is almost wholly frustrated,

the dream world provides the narrator with a remedy for the anguishing distance and an outlet for her unrequited passions. “Weeks passed before I saw her again. During those nights, I dreamt but did not sleep” (12). While Pérez’s narrator clings to dreams as her only constant link to desire, Cuban-born Achy Obejas creates a protagonist who is unable to retreat to the comfort of fantasy. Following the breakup of her relationship, her own frustrated desire robs her of her ability to dream. “I could never remember my dreams; it was as if suddenly I didn’t have dreams, or could only recall snatches of them, tiny scenes that would torment me all day long” (Obejas 120). Exiled from her dreamworld,

the protagonist’s faulty memory affords her only temporary relief from her troubled past. For Juani Casas, the young protagonist in Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo, a

turbulent romantic relationship with another Latina serves as a catalyst for a reexamination of her own political and national identity as a Cuban living in the United States. For her partner, Gina, a passionate Puerto Rican independentista activist, social and political involvement profoundly inform her perspective and define her identity. In contrast, Juani finds herself longing for such commitment

to a cause. Yet, ultimately her jealousy stems not from any specific political issue, but rather from her desire for the sense of self such activities offer to Gina

and her activist community. Even her surname, Casas, stands as a mocking reminder of the sense of home and belonging that eludes her throughout the text. Following an aggressive interrogation by one of Gina’s Puerto Rican friends, Juani confesses to her reader: I was jealous that she and her friends knew so much about my country, and I knew so little, really, not just about Cuba, but about Puerto Rico and everywhere else. I was pissed that, while they had been to Cuba, I had spent all my time working in a laundromat folding other people’s clothes and emptying quarters from the pinball machines in the back. I hated their independence not for political reasons but because it seemed to give them direction. And hope. Suddenly, I hated that I was just sitting there like a big black hole, like the mouth of one of those big industrial washers into which everybody just throws all their dirty clothes. (133)

For Juani, then, her lack of political motivation is both cause and consequence of her fading past, her family’s confusion, and her ambivalence toward her national and cultural identities. In contrast to the erotics of similitude outlined in earlier, Juani and Gina’s relationship impacts on a level of profound difference. The women’s union proves to be less of a mirrored or identical desire than a dialectic informed by the refraction and dispersion of alterity. When Gina comes to her girlfriend’s aid in the conversation, shifting it away from politics,

DANCING WITH DEVILS 159 Juani is quick to recognize the rapidly growing divide between the pair. “On the surface it seemed she’d taken my side, but I knew better. The gulf between us was wider than the ninety miles from Havana to Miami and the air was just as thick with doubt and suspicion” (132). The narrator’s choice of metaphors used

to describe the “gulf” in her relationship is telling here, since the eventual dissolution of this relationship, along with equally traumatic events within her own family, prompt her to reconcile the divide between her U.S. home and her Cuban birthplace, and to make plans to revisit and reconstruct the truth of her past on the island. Another issue of seeming commonality across which the relationships in both Obejas’s and Pérez’s novels evidence an imbalance is that of sexuality. Although the intimate relationship between Gina and Juani in Memory Mambo is unequivocally sexual in nature, the two characters hold radically different views on the importance and expression of this sexuality as a marker of public identity. Perhaps because of Gina’s visible role as a community activist, she chooses to remain silent with regard to her sexuality and her relationships with female partners. As an “out” lesbian, Juani opts to express her feelings and display her partnerships openly within her community. The discrepancies between the two women’s approaches to sexual subjectivity and expression provide for disturbing ideological clashes. In one instance, Gina reproaches Juani’s concern for gay and lesbian representation in social and political spheres: “‘Look, ’m not interested in being a lesbian, in separating politically from my people,’ she’d say to me, her face hard and dark. ‘What are we talking about? Issues of sexual identity? While Puerto Rico is a colony? While Puerto Rican apologists are trying

to ram statehood down our throats with legislative tricks and sleights of hand? You think I’m going to sit around and discuss sexual identity? Nah, Juani, you can have that—you can have that navel-gazing discussion’” (77).

Through Gina’s exasperated comments, one can see the manner in which issues of sexuality are concomitantly shaped by class and national identity. For Gina, Juani’s interest in gay and lesbian rights is afforded to her as a direct result of her class status as a Cuban American, while her own positionality as a Puerto Rican fighting for the independence of her homeland eliminates any space for the expression of or concern for the specificities of sexuality within her political discourse. In fact, her disparaging attitude is indicative of an ideological hierarchy in which national and cultural identities are privileged over sexuality or gender. The presence of an implicit connection between female heterosexuality and community loyalty is frequently challenged by Chicana and Latina theorists. Cherrie Moraga notes the high price many Chicanas pay as they attempt to prove themselves loyal to the Chicano movement: “As obedient sister/daughter/ lover she is the committed heterosexual, the socially acceptable Chicana. Even if she’s politically radical, sex remains the bottom line on which she proves her

160 HOMECOMING QUEERS commitment to her race” (Loving in the War Years 105). For Gina, a public acknowledgment of her sexuality and the pursuit of equal rights on such a platform signifies a betrayal of the independentista movement for which she fights so passionately. Her declaration grounds itself in a mutual exclusivity of sexuality and national/ethnic identity. Pressure to conform to this mode of compulsory heterosexuality emerges from both community and family,* as Gloria Anzaldua illustrates in her poem “Del otro lado,” which opens Juanita Ramos’s pivotal collection Companeras: Latina Lesbians (Ramos 2-3). In this poem, Anzaldta elucidates the dichotomies of border living, as queer and mestiza, never belonging wholly to one side, one group, one family. A profound sense of alienation is born of constant rejection, and Anzaldtia’s poetic voice finds herself repeatedly attempting to justify her multifaceted existence: You should be ashamed of yourself. People are starving in Ethiopia, dying in Guatemala and Nicaragua while you talk about gay rights and orgasms (3).

Anzaldta’s channeling of such ignorant and homophobic perspectives illustrates an emphasis on the superficiality of queer subjectivity and sexual politics, as well as the seemingly undeniable argument that certainly death ought to be a greater concern than sex or sexuality. Yet queer subjects, like the poetic voice in Anzaldva’s poem or Juani and Gina from Obejas’s Memory Mambo, daily confront acts of genocidal violence and oppression as they permeate national and international borders. Both Anzaldtia and Obejas’s works attest to the harsh conditions caused by homophobia and heterosexism. Whether the war is fought on foreign soil or ina hostile homeland, whether the opponent is hunger, greed,

or another faceless enemy, or simply the familiar faces of family members distorted in ignorance and fear, the battles are every bit as bloody. The dismissive voices emerging through Anzaldua’s verses echo in Gina’s chastising diatribe directed at Juani. The antagonistic voices in “De las otras” invoke the same dismissal of the “navel-gazing” issues of sex and sexuality that Gina expresses. Matters of sexual identity and agency pale in comparison to issues of ethnic, racial, and cultural equality, and autonomy, that are deemed inherently more worthy of concern and attention. Yet Gina’s refusal to acknowledge her lesbianism does not suggest a neutral or desexualized movement, it simply conforms to a heterosexist vision of Puerto Rican nationalism. Cherrie Moraga

notes the consequences of constructing hierarchies of oppression: “In [the United States], lesbianism is a poverty—as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor. The danger lies in ranking the oppressions. The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression” (Loving in the War

Years 52). Thus the quantifying of oppressions contributes to a homogenization

DANCING WITH DEVILS 161 of all injustices. For queer Latina subjects, as well as others, oppressions are experienced simultaneously. Privileging one oppression over another necessitates the belief that each is self-contained and unaffected by other oppressions experienced concomitantly. Yet human experience is messy. The ease with which human beings—uniquely in the United States—construct borders to mark what is ours, what is theirs, does not translate so smoothly to the containment of identity. For Gina issues of class consequently fade into issues of ethnicity and sexuality, when she later declares to Juani, ““That’s so white, this whole business of sexual identity,’ she’d say while practically undoing my pants. ‘But you Cubans, you think you’re white’” (78). Gina’s statement bears witness to the intercon-

nectedness her character posits between racial, cultural, and socioeconomic privilege and the corresponding social freedoms allowing for open expressions of sexuality. Juani interprets her partner’s priorities as a sort of nationalist single-mindedness, noting, “for Gina, being a public lesbian somehow distracted from her puertorriquenismo” (78). Yet Gina’s own identity belies her assertions, since she can no more cease to be a woman or a lesbian than a Puerto Rican or independentista.> Her failure to observe the undeniable role of gender and sexual oppression as tools for the control and dominance of all colonized people and lands leaves her own struggle for social and political equality partial at best and fatally flawed at worst.® By tracing the patterns of desire and violence, Obejas’s narrative develops a

profound parallel between its lesbian protagonist, Juani, and a heterosexual male character, Jimmy, in a similar way to Pérez’s parallel in Gulf Dreams between her queer Chicana protagonist and the violent male figure, Pelén. In this way Obejas’s text offers a complication of simplified representations of gendered, racialized, or sexual subjectivities. Jimmy, the husband of Juani’s cousin Caridad, plays a role nearly identical to that of Pérez’s Pelon. Physically and mentally abusive, Jimmy’s flying fists and incendiary accusations lend a hostile tone to the home he shares with Caridad. This same home space frequently hosts tense exchanges between Juani and Jimmy and their competing

bravado. Following a bitter confrontation between the two, Jimmy himself posits the connection between the two characters, admitting, “Juani’s just like me, we’re two of a kind. . . She’d do anything” (20). Juani reacts with what seems

to be outraged disbelief upon hearing this declaration, and perhaps similar incredulity can be expected from the reader since the narrative’s reverse chronological order enables Juani to wait until well beyond the midpoint in the

text to confess her own violently abusive encounter with her partner, Gina. Thus the reader is permitted throughout the novel to react indignantly to Jimmy’s rage-filled outbursts and violent beatings of his wife, Caridad, while the narrative—Juani’s narrative—slowly leaks evidence of Juani’s guilty conscience and subsequent bond with the abusive Jimmy.

162 HOMECOMING QUEERS Undoubtedly, Jimmy’s arrogance emerges from his performance of masculine grotesque, as most of his misogynist and homophobic remarks are accompanied by his clutching of his groin. When during their first moments alone

together Jimmy asks Juani if she has ever wanted to have a penis, Juani is privately disturbed by what she deems the inappropriateness of her response, explaining, “I really should have been ticked off, or maybe scared ... Yet, when he talked to me like that, instead of telling him what a dumb question that was, or how homophobic and insecure he sounded, I just laughed and told him no, that I didn’t need one of those” (20). Instead, Juani responds to Jimmy’s interrogation as if to a challenge of dueling virility in which the protagonist is a willing participant. “It was like a stand-off: dangerous, yes, but also just plain exhilarating. I went home that night and got off a dozen times or so just playing that scene over and over in my head” (20). In this exchange, the narrative expanse

between lesbian female subjectivity and the grotesque portrayal of macho heterosexism, exemplified by Terri de la Pena’s narrative production, shrinks, as Juani’s desire and her public performance of hypermasculinity collide in a flood of sexual tension and pleasure. Juani’s initial instinct toward moral distancing from Jimmy’s behavior is weakened by the above exchange, as Juani admits later in the novel: “I’m as fascinated as ever with [Jimmy’s] brazenness ...

and I’m disgusted with myself for being so hypnotized” (55). The tension between Juani’s disgust and desire positions Jimmy in the archetypal role of the grotesque, illustrating the delicate relationship between attraction and repulsion (Harpham 11). The appeal of excess and difference lures Juani into engaging with Jimmy’s discourse and accompanying bodily performance of hypermasculinity. While Juani acknowledges the inappropriate nature of her interaction with Jimmy, the very forbidden nature of her participation in the heterosexist patriarchal space propels her forward and intensifies her trans-

gressive pleasure. While Juani is unable to re-create the corporeal version of masculinity that Jimmy flaunts, she revels in the creation of an alternate form of lesbian hypermasculinity.” The absence of the phallus becomes a defining factor in Juani’s queer performance of masculinity, yet the sociocultural significance of the penis remains

etched in her intoxicating connection to masculine pleasure and power. Ilan Stavans says of the “Latin phallus”: “it remains an all-consuming image for Hispanic society, whether as the absent, animating presence in the repressive culture of machismo or the furtive purpose of the repressed in culture of homosexuality. It is the representation of masculine desire, a fantastic projection of guilt, shame, and power. Hyperactive bravura and suppressed longing are its twin modalities” (Stavans 238). Obejas’s account of the interaction between Juani and Jimmy exhibits both forms of repression suggested by Stavans’ comments. Certainly, there is bravura in Jimmy’s brazen sexual positioning, since his explicit gestures characterize a man performing an excess of masculinity,

DANCING WITH DEVILS 163 as well as the anxiety of the masculinity in question. Although Stavans’s discourse appears directed at the repression of the phallus in male homosexuality,

Juani’s lesbianism, poses a unique threat to Jimmy’s masculine drag, since he | vacillates between a reading of Juani as either envious or ambivalent toward his phallus and consequent male sexual power. The idea of Juani’s desire for women posits the ultimate uselessness of this sex organ, Jimmy’s primary justification for patriarchal domination.? Upon considering all of the exchanges between these two characters, the rivalry can be seen as much more than a simple matter of sex or desire. Instead, it represents a struggle for control over the memories, lies, and manipulations swirling around them. Far greater than the lures of physical or sexual control, Juani and Jimmy strive to master the discursive realm.

The connection between Juani and Jimmy is most clearly defined in two graphically violent instances. The first is narrated by Juani as a gathering of Gina’s friends that leads to feelings of discomfort and hurt for Juani, whose lack

of political passion prompts jeering retorts from the other—primarily active Puerto Rican independentista—guests. Once the couple’s guests have departed, Juani’s narration does little to connect her emotional state to the sudden burst of violence she commits against her girlfriend. She recalls, “my fist had somehow rolled into a wrecking ball, the knuckles all pointy and aimed at her face. I don’t know why or how but I smashed it into her—she was just sitting next to me” (134). While Juani is detached and disoriented, Gina is transformed by her partner’s bestial portrayal. Juani’s narration describes her wounded partner “shriek[ing] like some kind of animal,” “sink{ing] her spiky nails into my wrists,” and biting Juani’s breast “like a rabid dog. .. chewing and drooling and not letting go” (134-35). Juani’s rage not only prompts her to attack her lover but also

to manipulate Gina’s discursive presence into that of a monstrous beast with claws and fangs. In her final description of their struggle, Juani’s narrative shifts to an inset

italicized passage that provides omniscient accompaniment to the violent exchange between the two lovers. The savage acts described within the passage create an awkward discord when combined with the beautifully poetic language used to describe them: “I go this way then that, push you away, hit you, bring you to me in a vice-like embrace... my blood like a fountain from my nipples,

like a geyser, like rain—and I kiss you” (135). And in the final lines of the chapter, an admission of her own responsibility, tempered by her feelings for Gina: “I love you, monstrously and uselessly, but I still love—I will always love you” (135). This isolated passage also provides more than 120 words of description without a sentence break, masterfully translating the relentlessness of the attack into the text’s narrative. Immediately prior to this final paragraph, Juani

admits to leaving her body, “when I just walked out of it and watched from across the room like a ghost or a spirit,” and in its separation from the previous

164 HOMECOMING QUEERS description of the struggle, through both indentation and italicization, the final narration of the fight removes the narrator and also the reader from the events, providing a vantage point that seems positioned apart from the previous narrative and just above the violent struggle below (135). Juani’s detachment from her and her partner’s violent rage reveals her shock at her own transgressions, and the way in which they frighteningly mirror Jimmy’s abusive treatment of Juani’s cousin, Caridad. Much like Pérez’s Gulf Dreams narrator, Juani must confront the possibility that she is becoming the very thing she detests, a grotesquely violent abuser of women.

As the only witness to the fight’s aftermath, Jimmy further extends the secret game of competing masculinities and manipulations he shares with Juani. Rather than reveal the humiliating truth of the altercation, Juani remains silent as Jimmy provides a false version of the evening’s events, portraying the women as innocent victims of a random hate crime. This shared secret requires Juani’s compliance with Jimmy’s fabricated version of the women’s fight. Yet Obejas’s narrative, in fact, tells the story of the protagonist’s ultimate inability to remain within the realm of Jimmy’s violence and domination. Once Juani narrates the violent exchange between Gina and herself, she also reveals the secret thread tying Juani and Jimmy from the beginning of the novel. As an employee at the hospital where Juani and Gina are treated following their fight, Jimmy assumes the role of protector, not for Juani but rather for the truth surrounding the events of that evening. By inventing a mysterious intruder who perpetrates a random “attack” on the two women, Jimmy advances the “game”

between himself and Juani to another level, since Juani must now decide whether to dissolve her connection with Jimmy and reveal a shameful truth to her family or to perpetuate the alternate truth and accept an allegiance with the grotesque Jimmy, whom she notes “looked monstrous, like a real Frankenstein, made of pale dead skin and fleshy satin scars” (139). Jimmy, like Gina before, is transformed into a form less than human by the author’s narrative, and Juani is left to face the complicity in her own mirrored image reflecting back from each of the bestial and monstrous depictions around her. Ultimately, in spite of her horror at Jimmy’s deceptive words and behavior,

Juani chooses not to challenge his explanation, imagining that “any other version was more disturbing—perhaps too disturbing” (140). Juani longs for her

family to know the truth, and when her mother stops her from confessing the truth, Juani is silently pleased, believing that they might finally share an unspoken understanding of the burden of her horrible truth. Yet the protagonist is quickly disillusioned upon realizing her mother’s desire is to silence not the truth of her daughter’s role in the violent attack, but rather the nature of her daughter’s relationship and Gina’s radical independentista politics, both of which she cites as contributing factors in their supposed victimization. Better that her daughter be a random victim than a lesbian or political activist. When

DANCING WITH DEVILS 165 Juani finally becomes outraged enough to break her silence, she can only manage to cry out to her mother, “It’s not what you think!” (142). Her truth remains unspoken and her collision course with Jimmy’s evil plods forward. Given her secret pact with Jimmy, Juani relies exclusively on her own memory of the evening’s events in order to maintain her private connection with the truth. Soon, however, she finds this truth to be more elusive than the lies she fabricates and perpetuates with ease. Prior to having narrated the fight between Gina and herself, Juani hints at her precarious grasp on the past, “Right now I hold on to myself, sometimes literally. I hold on to my sides, my arms, my stub-

born ankles, because in this house of nostalgia and fear, of time warps and trivia, I’m the only one I know for sure. I keep my own space, a journal with the right dates, photographs with names and places written on the back” (79). The journal, for Juani, reflects her need to control her past by establishing a pri-

vate sitio y lengua in order to discursively contain her memories and truths about her connection and disconnection with Gina and Jimmy. Yet this same journal Juani clings to for its ability to organize and preserve truths about her past soon betrays her as well. Near the end of the novel she confesses, “In the last month my journal had become a nightmare. Not writing about ‘the incident’ right away had been a terrible mistake. Now, every time I began to jot down my story, it got confused with Jimmy’s mess ... But I knew that wasn’t what happened! Or was it?” (173). Juani’s loss of control over her journal entries,

and consequently her “lengua,” further substantiates her fears about the instability of both her own memories and the written word. These fears find their beginning with her father’s fantastical story about losing the recipe for duct tape to a covert CIA operation during their journey to the United States from Cuba and conclude with a disturbing final stand-off between Juani and Jimmy. No story or memory is stable or secure, as both her and her father’s memories veer toward mythical invention. Juani’s only opportunity to completely reject her role in Jimmy’s plot is through her own confession of the truth to her family and friends. However, the truth needed to remove Juani from the trap of Jimmy’s control remains elusive and unreliable, like most narratives surrounding her and her family’s histories. By shattering her silence and paralysis as she cries out to denounce Jimmy’s rape of an infant relative, Juani finally breaks free from her compliance with his manipulation. Thus it is through the revelation of Jimmy’s crime, not her own, that Juani is able to relinquish her role in their psychological game. And, in fact, the manner through which Juani shatters her silence is not by speaking the

truth about Jimmy’s crime but rather by refusing to speak the lie Jimmy prompts her to fabricate in his defense. At this point, Jimmy’s character performs a final spiral into the depths of evil, as Juani’s narrative describes him in monstrous detail with “huge hands,” “dog-teeth,” and a “demonic” face as he crawls toward her on hands and knees,

166 HOMECOMING QUEERS pleading for her support after having violated yet another member of his family.

In this animalistic representation, Jimmy emerges as an ultimate grotesque, flailing and enraged, with few human traits left to his character. The tragic event, marking Jimmy’s final descent into unthinkable evil, represents a pivotal point for Juani as well. When faced with both villain and victim, she is unable and unwilling to continue to engage in the game of deception and fabrication with Jimmy. As he inches toward her, severely beaten by another witness to his crime, he pleads with Juani to corroborate his false version of the events: “Tell them what happened,” and then in response to Juani’s refusal, “I helped you, you stupid bitch, I helped you!” (225). Throughout Jimmy’s pleading, Juani

is both physically and psychologically distanced from this man she seemed previously so uncontrollably drawn to: I don’t know why but I look over at Jimmy again. And what I see now is so different. There, through his blood-spattered face, his swollen mouth and engorged eyes, there’s a smirk emerging ...I don’t realize at first that Pm

crawling backwards, inching away from Jimmy, totally terrified ... He lunges toward me, his face demonic ... I push myself off—I fee! my legs extend like a hurdler, my hips leading, my head back—and I’m out of there, out of that furnace of all their passions and tempers, out of that sucking spiral to hell, out of their circle of darkness and fire. As Irun, run out to Milwaukee Avenue, I feel fresh, clean snow on my face. (225-26)

In this passage, Juani begins to see Jimmy as the violent and abusive monster he has always been. Her former connection and attraction to his excessive displays

of masculinity now seem inexplicable. In fact, her repeated use of “their” to describe the conflicts and turmoil suggest an “us/them” paradigm where she positions herself entirely outside the circle of violence. The fact that she makes this realization while experiencing a dislocation from her own body is significant, since from this out-of-body perspective—much like her view of her struggle with Gina earlier—Juani is able to observe Jimmy and herself. In this moment,

she bears witness to the horrors, not simply of Jimmy and his crime but also

of her disturbing pairing with him as violent, desperate, and monstrous. Indeed, Juani admits to loving Gina “monstrously and uselessly,” much like the Frankenstein-esque Jimmy simultaneously loves and wounds his victims. Ultimately, Juani returns to face the harsh realities offered up that night,

and her search for the truth is both facilitated and complicated by her final encounter with Jimmy. Perhaps as a result of Jimmy’s callousness toward his crime, Juani begins to accept responsibility for the truths she interprets from the world around her. Returning to the fight with Gina, Juani acknowledges, “I hurt Gina, she hurt me. I don’t know who hurt whom first—I know I hit her first—but I don’t know when we first hurt each other, or whether that particular detail matters. It is possible—it is entirely possible—that I need to see it in this

DANCING WITH DEVILS 167 way and that need dictates what I remember” (234). Her ability to perform selfreflexive analysis of her memory or lack thereof suggests an acceptance of the slipperiness of truth similar to that suggested by Emma Pérez’s narrator at the close of her novel Gulf Dreams: “You may not believe me, the hysteric who

invokes myth, reinvents truth. My hysteria tells you this part of the story. I sometimes lack the ability to discern what is real, or unreal, what I imagine to be true, or what ’ve made up to entertain myself, to pass away dreary hours and days. What is invisible is as alive and true to me as the visible” (142). Each protagonist’s collision course with violence and a patriarchal notion of hypermasculinity prompt a broader understanding of the role of memory in truth, and of the impossibility of a static or fixed notion of either memory or truth. Desire, in these cases, offers a discursive challenge to blindly accepted norms of gender and sexuality and lends itself to the deconstruction of any authentic truth used to support such norms. Both Obejas’s and Pérez’s narrators position memory as an integral— though subjective—part of truth as a discursive home space. For both novels’ protagonists, the desire and ultimate inability to remember forms the slippery foundation for a home space within the narrative text. Each narrator, presented to readers as a purveyor of facts, undergoes an eventual distancing from this position of authority, thereby performing a destabilization of discourses of

truth. Truth also plays an integral role in the definition of national and racial/ethnic identities that are posited as equally problematic. The characterization of home spaces within both Pérez’s and Obejas’s novels provides characters and readers alike with the mapping out of community within and among differences. Where the previous two representational modes—coming home and being home—worked to create meaning in similitude, Gulf Dreams and Memory Mambo enact homecomings that refuse to idealize subjects or subject relations, even at the cost of a unified portrait of community. Emma Pérez and Achy Obejas offer an alternative view of home that is less concerned with collectivity or unity and instead centers itself around the profound heterogeneity contained within community, as well as within individual subjectivities of gender, race, ethnicity, culture, class, and sexuality.

Our Art Is Our Weapon Women of Color Transforming Academia | look at my fingers, see plumes growing there. From the fingers, my feathers, black and red ink drips across the page. Escribo con la tinta de mi sangre. —Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: The New Mestiza

Fia Troyano’s 1994 short film Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen stars

Troyano’s sister Alina as her performative alter-ego, Carmelita Tropicana, a radical Cuban-born, New York City, Lower East Side—dwelling, lesbian performance artist with a penchant for colorful sequined costumes, platform sneakers, and fruit as a fashion accessory. In the film’s opening scene, Carmelita prides herself on being “good with the tongue.” The film’s title, Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (Your Art Is Your Weapon), is a mixture of German and English that illustrates her lin-

guistic talents and artistic ideology while simultaneously (and certainly not inadvertently) sounding a little sexy and scandalous to non—German speaking viewers who might only guess at the meanings of “kunst” and “waffen.” Another of Troyano’s performances, Memorias de la revolucion/Memories of the Revolution, tells of Carmelita Tropicana’s origins and also develops the critical metaphor of art as a weapon. The drama begins in 1955 Havana as Carmelita and her friends and family attempt to overthrow the evil dictator Maldito. When the assassination plot fails, Carmelita is forced to flee her home in a small row-

boat, which quickly becomes lost at sea. As she is tossed about the choppy waters, the Virgin Mary appears to Carmelita and informs her she has been selected to be “the next hottest Latin Superstar” (A. Troyano 37). The Virgin— played by the cast’s only male actor—also instructs: “Oh, the revolution. Let it be your art. Your art is your weapon. To give dignity to Latin and Third World women: this is your struggle” (38). Before this drag queen Virgin exits, she warns Carmelita that along with its rewards (of superstardom and eternal youth), her artistic mission will have a price. The Virgin cautions, “listen Carmelita, there is more. You must never, 168

OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 169 ever, ever... let a man touch you. You must remain pure, like me,” to which Carmelita quickly retorts, “Believe me, to Carmelita Tropicana Guzman Jiménez Marquesa de Aguas Claras, that is never to be a problem” (38). So we come to understand Carmelita’s revolution as an artistic one, specifically grounded in the interests of Latina and Third World Women, and necessarily queer in nature (since Carmelita reinterprets the Virgin’s allusion to celibacy as a call for radical lesbianism). In this way, Memorias de la revoluci6n and Your Kunst Is Your Waffen provide readers and audiences with specifically queer and Latina frameworks

for cultural revolution. :

This metaphor of art as weapon suggests a framework with which to understand the creative, political, and—certainly not least of all—theoretical possibilities offered to readers and viewers of artistic expression in general, and of queer U.S. Latina creativity specifically. Tropicana’s translation of art into weapon is most powerfully understood not as destructive but rather deconstructive in as

much as politically and socially conscious art is able to break down cultural stereotypes and institutions of oppression. In Tropicana’s performance, as well as the context of this project as a whole, a weapon is also a tool that not only takes apart but also rebuilds. The artistic production of Latina lesbians is equally reconstructive through its practices of building and rebuilding spaces for the launching of theory, history, and identity from the perspectives, the mouths, and the bodies of queer Latinas in the United States. Queer Latina art as a weapon can be understood as destructive in as much as it is able to break down cultural stereotypes and institutions of oppression. Works such as Carmelita Tropicana’s “excess-as-norm” performance of Latinidad in Your Kunst Is Your Waffen and Memorias de la revoluciOn reinscribe outrageous cultural stereotypes as purported by dominant discourse and have the potential to dislodge stereotypical images from their fossilized foundations. So we see the power of queer Latina art to dismantle and deconstruct existing structures of oppression, but how can this same art be recontextualized as equally reconstructive?

In this concluding section I map out the ongoing revolution occurring among some women of color and queer women of color scholars, intellectuals,

artists, and authors in the United States. This revolution, within a system several centuries old, has begun to expand the applicability of a university education and subsequent scholarly production among communities that academia has traditionally and primarily served to alienate. As intellectuals begin to broaden their and our understanding of theory as both a discursive entity and active process, they enable the creation of spaces within academia for the simultaneous practices of theoretical production, critical analyses, activist organization, and artistic expression—all of which greatly enrich a university environment and its student and faculty populations. As Aida Hurtado reminds us, for people and specifically women of color, public institutions of racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. are concomitantly personal, political, and

170 HOMECOMING QUEERS consequently—necessarily—for communities of color, intellectual practices are equally personally and politically relevant ventures (Hurtado 18). The critical work I explore in this chapter spans several decades and traverses a wide range of genres and stylistic approaches to theoretical production. My analysis traces the way creativity—defined here as the personal, emotional,

and poetic investment of an author into her critical work—is used by queer women of color as a tool to both penetrate the mainstream space of hegemonic academia and to create new spaces within academia for the production of and respect for alternative modes of scholarship. In this way, as both an invasion of mainstream space and the creation of strategic home spaces within, a movement toward a revolution of academia led by queer women of color can be seen to encompass the frameworks of space-making and homecoming as examined/ observed throughout this project.

Living Language and Scholarship In a similar metanarrative to that offered by Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, Juana Maria Rodriguez cautions readers in the preface to her 2003 publication Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces: “Do not believe everything I say. I am learning to feel at ease with ambiguity. Most of [this] text is not imagina-

tive fiction, but it is a product of my critical imagination” (2). Rodriguez’s suggestion of a “critical imagination” signifies a move toward creativity as a scholarly tool. Stepping outside scientific paradigms of fact and unbiased invisibility of the researcher, Rodriguez imagines a criticism that not only holds itself

accountable for ideological influences but also defines itself through such distinctions and specificities. For Rodriguez, then, theory is more story than science, more dream than diagnosis. In fact, Rodriguez reiterates her role not as a critic, but a narrator, emphasizing a facilitation process whereby her authorial role and ideological interest in the text are openly acknowledged. This self-proclaimed title enables her to align her text more closely with art and literature than anthropology or medical science. Creativity, in this context, impacts both scholar and subject, since telling a story is wholly distinct from defining a subject, as Rodriguez explains: “This text is not about representing communities or a set of subjects. 1am more concerned with ways of looking than constructing credible objects of analysis” (3). Rodriguez’s investment in “ways of looking” echoes Moraga’s earlier poetic petition for “other ways of seeing” (3). Such a shift in scholarly focus, from the literal and figurative “nailing down” of subjects of inquiry to the process and practices through which we as scholars attempt to “see” such subjects and the work they create, offers hope for a more inclusive, viable, and consequently sustainable notion of academia. As a professor, author, and activist, bell hooks is careful to differentiate

between intellectual life and academic careerism. In doing so, she locates a

OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 171 space from which to think critically, engage with theory, and produce scholarly texts from outside the historically hallowed halls and ivory towers of mainstream academia. She underlines the lack of support for nontraditional theory-

making within traditional academia, particularly for practices that utilize creativity as critical weaponry: “It is precisely because common structures of evaluation and advancement in various academic jobs require homogeneous thought and action, judged usually from a conservative standpoint, that academia is often less a site for open-minded creative study and engagement with ideas and more a space of repression that dissenting voices are so easily censored and/or silenced” (Remembered Rapture 140).

Further, hooks indicates that a revolution of scholarship working toward the survival of the voices and ideas of marginalized communities not only embraces creativity and artistry as theoretical practices, but also seeks out alternative sites for the production and exploration of meaning. She deems “dangerous” the limitation of revolution to solely “academic” institutions. Like Tropicana’s art as weapon, hooks sees creativity as offering a vital framework for contextualizing subversive movements and discourse. Increasingly, anyone willing to look is able to locate these spaces of creative theoretical production in the novels, poetry, film, political and social organizing, performance and visual art

of individuals who have felt alienated by the goals and structure of traditional academia. These hegemonic institutions provide little inspiration or support for artistic endeavors that engage with theoretical and critical issues yet fail to conform to established (white Anglo male) standards of critical production. What happens when the presumed boundaries separating literature and scholarship become blurred? What does it mean to read creative and literary texts as theoretical works? To ask such a question reveals an already fossilized ideology regarding the imagined divisions between these two “categories.”

theory creativity

true > fictional unbiased > biased

impersonal > emotional

critical > political analytical > poetic

The preceding paradigm privileges theory as an exclusive category. It is also

constructed upon inherently racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies, since the positionalities of the subjects responsible for creating the ideal models are rarely seen to contribute to the value systems embedded within these ideals.

Inherent discrimination can also be attributed to the fact that hegemonic theory necessitates an unbiased discourse that eludes all subjects outside the

172 HOMECOMING QUEERS default universal white male heterosexual whose work benefits from a suspended mode of gender, racial, and sexual invisibility. As soon as a scholar emerges from this fantastic realm of invisibility, as woman, queer, person of color, or all three, her discourse stands a much greater risk of being dismissed as emotional, personal, biased, and political in as much as it engages with the impact of race, gender, and sexuality. Though these issues impact the universal subject (white, male, heterosexual) as much as they do the marginalized sub-

ject, the latter has constructed an academic institution that allows his work to slip from the marked positionalities it actually occupies and that are used to limit the impact, dissemination, and reception of works by individuals of marginalized communities. This study of alternative theory-making begins with the notion of the body. Issues of corporeality are certainly relevant to the study of creative work by

women of color, specifically within discussions of texts, authors and artists grappling with racial and ethnic identity, queer brown desire, and the literal staging of queer Latina bodies in performative and cinematic works. Yet as I approach a theoretical discussion of the body as it pertains to queer women of color, 1am prompted to confront the question of whether it is appropriate to discuss this aforementioned body without the critical work of Michele Foucault. Can I offer analyses of the politics of gender for women of color without Judith Butler’s interpretation of drag and performance?! Can I have these critical conversations and complete these projects without grounding my arguments in the ideas and language of white European precursors whose purportedly universal and groundbreaking work on gender and the body has absorbed the majority of academic attention over the past century. Yet why should a discussion of queer and colored bodies and their voices and work necessarily be translated or filtered through the theoretical scope and language of Foucault or Butler? Simply

because these voices were (published) first, should it follow that they should occupy a more privileged space on university shelves. The fact is, for most academics, it does and they do. What I propose for my own work—as a direct corollary to my previous work with queer Latina creative texts as critical weaponry—is a reading of and thinking about textual production of women and lesbians of color from within the rich legacy of critical thought by women and lesbians of color themselves. I do not dispute that mainstream theoretical voices can dialogue in productive ways with texts by women of color and other marginalized authors and artists. To the contrary, I cite both Foucault and Butler briefly here, and I have engaged the work of Anglo lesbian and male postcolonial

theorists throughout this work. I simply posit that the aforementioned texts may be read in equally insightful ways via other critical traditions and methodologies, and that hegemonic resistance to such scholarly inclusions stems not from any lack of relevance or applicability, but rather from an investment in the exclusive and elitist nature of this hegemony known as academia.

OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 173 It will probably be thought naive or even ignorant to approach discussions of queer subjectivity, body politics, and female desire without first grounding myself in foundational foremothers and fathers of European descent who have previously overwhelmed discourse on these topics of the academic mainstream. However, I am willing to risk such accusations and criticisms of my work in order to offer the perhaps gravely offensive possibility that we as women and lesbians of color may in fact be capable of explaining, understanding, and theorizing ourselves, our bodies, our experiences, and our voices entirely outside previously hailed discourse on women, gays and lesbians, sexuality, subjectivity, and power emerging from mainstream academic sources. As Audre Lorde so powerfully stated over two decades ago, “The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house,” and, similarly, while a mastery of increasingly dense and technical theory may earn me tenure at a well-respected research institution, my wielding of those hegemonic tools will not dismantle the increasingly elitist house of academia (Lorde 112). As long as theory requires a translation for users and use outside university walls, it will continue to produce limited revolutions for a privileged few. Appropriation, as Lorde views it, can be insufficient. If we cannot forge a new and more expansive definition of theory and the language that surrounds it, we as scholars will be perpetuating a colonialist system that relegates certain texts (most frequently those of women, queers, and people of color) to the patronizing realm of descriptive production rather than the revolutionary discourse these texts often represent. Scholarly exclusivity has a price, and entirely too often it is the silencing of the voices and contributions of queer women of color. Trinh T. Minh-ha notes this, the

flaw of appropriated discourse: “Stolen language will always remain that other’s language... Words thoroughly invested with realities that turn out to be not-quite-yet-mines are radically deceptive” (20). The hollowness of dominant diction—a critical language forged apart from the minority critic who may invoke it—yields a discursive incompletion closely aligned with Albert Memmi’s characterization of assimilation as an impossible prospect for colonized subjects. In this state of failed appropriation, Cindy Cruz posits the performance of hegemonic theory by women of color as “bodiless entity” when such discourse requires that minority scholars shed all designations of difference (gender, sexuality, racial, class, etc.) in order to assume the unmarked status of universality (read: white Anglo male heterosexual). Cruz explains that this denial of brown, female, and often queer bodies produces a theory divorced from material issues of community and self. Yet she also affirms the subversive possibilities afforded to a scholar when appropriation of dominant discourse is discarded in favor of

writing and producing theory from within the aforementioned categories of difference (Cruz 659).

The scholar in possession of a brown and lesbian body, or in this case the body inscribed as messy text, is not only disruptive to the canon, but is also

174 HOMECOMING QUEERS excessive in its disorderly movements and conduct. Nothing provokes the custodians of normality and objectivity more than the excessiveness of a body (Cruz 659). Given the potential threat posed to traditional academia by the excesses of queer Latina difference, Emma Pérez’s envisioning of un sitio y una

lengua underlines the need for and works toward a space and a language expressly for this unwelcomed messy text.

To defend the primacy or inherent superiority of a primarily white European foundation of philosophy and women’s studies is to concomitantly defend the oppressive systems of power that enabled those voices to develop, emerge first, and define that foundation. To declare that a scholar must establish an understanding and fluency in these foundational theories before engaging subsequent discussions of more specialized work on women and lesbians of color is to declare allegiance to the very systems that relegate those voices to the position of the margins. As minority groups of all sorts fully understand, this paradigm of intellectual development does not exist in reverse. Knowledge of the voices and theories of women and lesbians of color is almost always considered to be in excess, extra, rarely essential to the discourse of a well-trained scholarly mind. In her first book, a collection of poetry and short fiction, Chicana Falsa, Michele Serros notes a double standard regarding the learning of Spanish as an Anglo or a Chicana: My skin is brown just like theirs, but now I’m unworthy of the color ‘cause I don’t speak Spanish the way I should

A white person gets encouragement, praise, for weak attempts at a second language. “Maybe he wants to be brown like us.”

and that is good.

My earnest attempts make me look bad, dumb. (Serros 31)

The dynamic this poetic testimonio illustrates is one of essential knowledge. The speaker’s authenticity and authority as a Chicana is perceived as damaged by her inability to wield the language inextricably tied to this identity by the Latinos who criticize her. In her efforts to “be Chicana,” the poetic voice discovers that this label comes with a prescribed set of characteristics and required

OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 175 knowledge—her essentialized Chicano space demands Spanish fluency upon admission, the antithesis of Pérez’s sitio y lengua. In academia, hegemonic theory of primarily white Europeans is the currency with which scholarly authority is earned/purchased. And while Serros’s bilingualism is overlooked because of her partial fluency in Spanish, an Anglo man is praised for his efforts to speak even a few words. Serros must know both languages fluently, while the Anglo is hailed for the minimalist of attempts at a second language. In the same way Serros’s bilingualism is a requisite, we as women of color in academia are expected to be fluent in the languages of both traditional theory and those that emerge from and speak to our own communlties and specifically focus on our bodies, voices, and experiences as racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. A foundation comprised of the latter voices alone is insufficient to claim intellectual entitlement in most traditional academic settings, not enough to warrant tenure or publication. Yet survival in a university setting is scarcely possible without such voices. Hence, for many women of color

scholars, existence in academia necessitates a theoretical bilingualism not often recognized or rewarded. As scholars and women of color, we are informed that we must first establish our critical voices in this accepted language before moving on to include alternative voices and modes of theoretical discourse. Barbara Christian maps out this unequal paradigm, noting, “I was supposed to know them, while they were not at all interested in knowing me” (72). Yet a theory/theorist is criticized very little for not adequately addressing issues of queers, women, and people

of color, aside from the critiques produced by these excluded communities themselves. This double standard results from an academy constructed upon racist and exclusionary principles, where the values of scholarship reflect the colonialist aims of its creators. Hegemonic critical theory is no more essential, no more primary, no more universal than that of women and queers of color. This universality—like most notions of universality—is equal parts delusion and colonial instrument. For those of us who are indeed advocating a world free from delineation and distribution of privilege along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality, it would behoove us to begin to dismantle those divisions within the discourse of this very academy first. As a young scholar, over just the past few years I have heard and read the stories of countless women of color with established university careers openly and adamantly distancing themselves from the academy. “Academic” is becoming an increasingly negative label, especially—and perhaps most critically—

among communities of color who are already largely disenfranchised from systems of education in the United States. I have also noticed as of late several

calls for papers that engage with the challenge of translating theory into practice so as to bridge the gaps between academic and activist. And, indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines theory as abstract knowledge that is

176 HOMECOMING QUEERS “distinguished from or opposed to practice.” Yet a tangled web of dichotomies reveals this interpretation of theory to be incomplete. In her book The Color of Privilege, Aida Hurtado traces the shifting frameworks underlying both mainstream and Third World feminist movements. Hurtado discusses how mainstream (largely white and Anglo) feminist endeavors employed the model that private is political, implying that issues of personal relevance (distribution of household labor, child development, gendered beauty ideals, etc.) impacted the political lives of women as much as issues outside of home, family, and intimate relationships. In contrast, Hurtado explains the shift in paradigm for feminists of color who invoke the equation that public is personal in order to extend the

focus of a women’s and human rights movement to public institutions of oppression (racism, affirmative action, disenfranchisement) with personally relevant impact on the lives of women of color (18). This paradigmatic shift is important in providing a model of the opening up of critical spaces for the unique and diverse perspectives of women of color scholars and activists. When slightly adjusted to address the practice of theoretical or scholarly production versus the practice of activism or artistry, Hurtado opens up the space for the

reformulated equation that theory is practice, rather than theory preceding practice. Certainly theory-making is every bit as personal and emotionally invested as are the practices of creativity or political action. Numerous critics have pointed out that for communities of color, theory and practice have been unnaturally fractured into separate fields since, as they ‘observe, in the most revolutionary sense theory is practice. And since practice for women of color and other communities includes literature, art, activism, performance, organization, and—most important—survival, theory is necessarily all of these things. Privileging theory over practice and ignoring their inher-

ent connectedness will condemn academia to inevitable obsolescence. Beginning from such an understanding of scholarly production allows many more options for the production of theory, the practices of activist scholars, and academic sanity/survival. This study has taken as its methodology the declaration that all forms of critical production—regardless of their format—may be considered for their theoretical implications for communities of color and beyond. In the pages that follow, I will map out a framework for theoretical discourse that respects the fluidity of discursive production for women—and specifically lesbians—of color. It is my hope that projects such as this one will lend themselves to an expansion of our

definitions of theory, its shapes, functions, purposes, and possibilities so that ultimately the academy might abandon its elitist tendencies and facilitate a sort of discursive multilingualism for all participants that is simultaneously theory and practice such that the translation between the two becomes obsolete. It was a conscious decision to make a chapter on theory last in this book, since it seems to me so often that a discussion of theory—defined in the form

OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 177 of the critical essay—begins all work around an issue. This traditional model sets up a research project by first establishing an overview of theoretical discourse in a field, while literary and testimonial texts follow. I suggest, however, that works by women of color can be viewed productively not as a division of primary (creative) and secondary (critical or theoretical) works, but rather as an active dialogue between these two discursive modes, which can—in fact—be seen to blur into each other within the very works examined in this project. In this way, through the conscious and celebratory incorporation of personal and emotional expression within their theoretical production, women and specifically lesbians of color begin to disrupt traditional academic practices. I find a discussion of ongoing radical transformations of hegemonic academia here useful and appropriate for several reasons. I believe that women of color and specifically queer women of color, as multiply-marginalized subjects, tend to experience and understand most intimately the inadequacies of contemporary structures of higher education. Historically, these hallowed halls and ivory towers were not created for us as women, people of color, queers, and working-class, though perhaps the structures themselves may have been constructed by us, our hands, shoulders, and backs. Those who designed this space of critical scholarship known as academia did so according to their own unique needs, desires, and interests—to form their own sitio y lengua, one might argue (not so much for survival but advancement). As subsequent communities begin to gain limited and rigidly policed access to university spaces, these subjects are most often the first to recognize the insufficiencies of the existing system. To use Audre Lorde’s image of the master’s house, many scholars of color, specifically women and queers among them, find the house of academia unacceptable, a roof that hangs too low, walls too close, a door frame much too narrow to afford entrance to the diverse specificities represented across intersecting communities. Lorde notes, then, “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house,” so for those of us who find the current structure both cramped and uninhabitable, her paradigm suggests several viable options. First, one might undertake a massive remodeling project in which this master’s tools are appropriated and transformed through the imposition of new positionalities and ideologies. As a restructuring of the original, this option offers limited change but represents perhaps the most realistic possibility for mutual understanding, since it necessitates literal and figurative cohabitation within difference. Contrastingly, some scholars find that these tools cannot ever be adequately stripped of their previous ideological content and that entirely new tools must be fashioned. Both approaches are evident in my earlier discussion of identity labels and the politics of representation, since some accepted or reappropriated existing terms while others created entirely new linguistic manifestations. Although a reappropriation of the master’s instruments may

178 HOMECOMING QUEERS succeed at taking apart the offending structures, some will argue that our time, breath, sweat, and energy might be better spent building entirely new structures of our own original design. Given that these institutions of higher education were founded and developed with particular ideologies and intentions, minority academics—ones per-

haps not envisioned in the founders’ original vision because of their racial, cultural, sexual, and/or gender identities—have learned to survive as well as build entire careers from their critical and creative responses to this system’s vast insufficiencies. For marginalized scholars who succeed at penetrating this

dominant center of power, academia becomes an exercise in professional, financial, social, and psychological survival. Certainly, though, many respected and established underrepresented scholars have found support, success, and a home in hegemonic academia, in its language and traditions. I do not intend the preceding narrative as dismissive or disrespectful toward any theorist or theory. My methodological approach here is wholly productive, rather than destructive. I seek not to tear down but to build additional alternatives, to trace the possible paths, and understand the revolutions waged daily by groundbreaking scholars emerging from all directions of intellectual production—from within the university and beyond.

Notes on Invisibility Iam aman of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

As the semester went on, my self began to slowly vanish. I would soon become invisible. Although I knew I was physically there, attentively listening, taking in as much as I possibly could, I also knew that I was the only one aware of my presence. Completely ignored in a silence, I was growing numb. —Caridad Souza, Telling to Live

In his 1947 novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison offers an eloquent and insight-

ful theoretical reflection on the dynamics of invisibility through the voice of an anonymous young male African American narrator. Despite vast political, social, and psychological implications, Ellison’s narrator concedes that this condition is “sometimes advantageous” and admits, “after existing some twenty years, [I] did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility” (7). How might his described state of invisibility enable this African American man, or for that matter a Latina, or a queer woman of color to become alive rather than remaining silenced, erased, and obliterated? Just as Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams exposed

OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 179 the potential repercussions of speaking out against violation, Ellison’s narrator points out that rejecting one’s invisibility prompts violent resistance: “You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful” (4). Again we bear witness to Memmi’s theory of impossible revolution for the colonized subject and Minh-ha’s state of “almost-not-quite” linguistic incompletion. It is in the reactive nature of this struggle that one finds insight into the futility of a revolutionary movement grounded in the disproving of dominant ideology as ideological construction or fantasy. Homi Bhabha argues against such an approach to colonialist stereotypes where qualifications of good/bad or true/false overshadow the epistemological dismantling of the discursive tools of oppression. “To judge the stereotype image on the basis of a prior political normativity is to dismiss it, not to displace it, which is only possible by engaging with its effectivity” (Bhabha 67). According to Bhabha’s theory, Ellison’s protagonist fails in his resistance when he aims to prove his existence as truth in opposition to dominant perception of his invisibility. This attempt could be likened to the treatment of stereotype as positive/negative and right/wrong. Bhabha’s theory suggests such evaluations yield little in the way of social change, while a grappling with the functionality of stereotype—how it works and why it is effective or ineffective within a system of meaning—offers greater transformative impact. Mitsuye Yamada’s contribution to This Bridge Called My Back parallels that of

Ellison’s protagonist: “I had become invisible to white Americans, and it clung to me like a bad habit. Like most bad habits, this one crept up on me because

I took it in minute doses like Mithradates’ poison and my mind and body adapted so well to it I hardly noticed it was there” (Yamada 37). For Yamada, the

stereotypical subservience and silence surrounding popular Asian and Asian American representations left her struggling to convince herself and others of her active role in the political and social movements with which she was asso-

ciated. Yet Yamada’s invisibility extended beyond the boundaries of mainstream white America and into her own family, where her political convictions and activist involvement were deemed inconsequential, not because of her race but because of her gender. Silence and invisibility have been ingrained into the purported essence of

an Asian American female subject, a trait authorized as truth unless proven otherwise. However Yamada’s text works toward an unraveling of such chains of knowledge, identifying the weakest points where these generalizations fail to correspond to any heterogeneous lived reality of Asian American identity. In fact, the author insists, “Invisibility is not a natural state for anyone,” and thus not a valid characteristic of any individual’s essential self (40). Yamada’s interpretation of invisibility is characterized by both its positive and negative repercussions, as she views it as concomitantly oppressive and utilitarian in nature.

180 HOMECOMING QUEERS Notions of invisibility and its dichotomous partner of hypervisibility frame many of the contributions to the 2001 publication Telling to Live: Latina Feminist

Testimonios. Discussions of the inhospitable environment of academia for women of color are common but covert, and Telling to Live offers numerous testimonios from a wide range of Latina feminist authors, academics, and artists. In a collectively written introduction to the section “Alchemies of Erasure,” the Latina Feminist Group’s members recognize the complexity of their perceived presence: “Somos tan invisibles que somos visibles. Parece contradiccion pero no lo es”

(del Alba Acevedo et al., 167). In fact, the collective notes, there is a distinct power associated with invisibility, in that one’s perceived absence allows for increased observation, exploration, and interrogation, “the better to see, to hear, to notice, to learn” (167) Yet of the four thematic sections that make up the collection—empowerment, the body, desire, and erasure in academia—this last section contains by far the greatest percentage of anonymous entries. Surely the presence of this literary and professional “witness protection program” evidences the continued hostil-

ity toward those ungrateful subjects who dare speak out against the current content and character of traditional academia. A quick glance at other selections’ titles maps a disquieting journey through higher education for U.S. Latinas: “Snapshots from My Daze at School,” “Between Perfection and Invisibility,” “Diary of a Llorona with a Ph.D.,” “Welcome to the Ivory Tower,” “Lessons Learned from an Assistant Professor,” “Don’t You Like Being in the University,” “Temporary Latina,” “La Tra(d)icién,” and “I Still Don’t Know Why.”

Half of the above have anonymous authors. The collective assures readers, “When a woman has to be made invisible, it is because she is powerful, and her presence reverberates, touching everything in its path” (167). Unfortunately, to speak of such invisibilities is threatening, an assertion of self-worth as well as a critical attack on the institutions of power that perpetuate such silences. The above titles and their nameless authors illustrate that to speak as an invisible woman, to finally declare one’s voice and insist upon being heard, one must continue to be veiled under the cloak of anonymity, a top-secret sitio. She who is unseen often may only speak from within the position of the unnamed. In order to trace some of the ways in which women of color use creativity to push at the boundaries of critical and theoretical production, it is useful to map out some of the reasons why authors feel inclined to break silences and write as well as some of the goals and intentions of their writing according to the writers themselves. Many scholars, across racial, ethnic, class, sexual, and gender lines, have dedicated their time to learning the game that is traditional academia so as to either deconstruct it from within or knowingly or unknowingly reinforce it. To be sure, this chapter, as well as this project as a whole, does not concern itself

with such approaches—though I do not deny the merits of these practices. Instead, I take as a common thread an authorial resistance to both the rules

OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 181 and implications of the game of hegemonic academia. In the works resulting from this sense of resistance I find inspiration and hope for the promise of an academic revolution grounded in the words, work, and voices of women of color, queer women of color, and others who work toward a respect of difference and a dismantling of oppressive and colonialist rule. In “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers,” Gloria Anzaldta’s contribution to her and Cherrie Moraga’s foundational collection, This Bridge Called My Back, Anzaldta addresses issues of intention and audience in her theoretical production. She maps this process by tracing her selection of literary genre and the evolution of her contribution: “It began as a poem, a long poem. | tried to turn it into an essay but the result was wooden, cold. I have not

yet unlearned the esoteric bullshit and pseudo-intellectualizing that school brainwashed into my writing ... How to begin again. How to approximate the intimacy and immediacy I want. What form? A letter, of course” (Anzaldua, “Speaking in Tongues” 165). In this simple but invaluable choice lies the radical conceptualization of theory as both intimately personal and inherently dialogic. Anzaldua’s epistolary format positions her as both theorist and subject situated within the very community to whom she speaks. Anzaldua’s theoretical production speaks to specific subjects, for specific purposes, and from specified posi-

tionalities in such a way that overtly rejects the default universality and authorial invisibility purported by hegemonic theorists. In doing so, Anzaldta is able to provide theories of writing that are not only about Third World women but expressly to and in collaboration with Third World women. This intellectual

process is an inherently collective pursuit with a theorist who involves and embraces her intended audience as readers, participants, and active contributors. Anzaldua’s willingness to directly proclaim a specific positionality and ideology consequently places under suspicion all those works and writers who fail to acknowledge the equally specific ideological agendas behind their theories. In her letter, Anzaldua provides support and encouragement for her audience, Third World women writers, as she outlines some of the vital reasons why

writing can be an invaluable tool for the diverse communities represented under this category. First, she suggests that the writing of Third World women affords individuals the opportunity to imagine alternate worlds that counteract the brutal realities of daily life for marginalized subjects.? This practice of queer world-making has underlined previous chapters’ analyses, as authors and artists like Terri de la Pena, Marga Gomez, and Carmelita Tropicana/Alina Troyano use their creative voices to construct alternate worlds by transforming the dynamics of existing spaces (i.e., México, Hollywood, prison) and ideological constructs (gender, identity, home). Anzaldua asserts that writing offers important challenges to existing structures of oppression: “Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me” (169). In this sense, writing becomes the means through which alternatives to the master’s

182 HOMECOMING QUEERS house are constructed according to the specific and multiply diverse positionalities of women and queer women of color writers. Finally, Anzaldta reveals, “I write because I’m scared of writing but I’m more scared of not writing” (169). Writing is necessary because the threat of being criticized is far less dangerous than the threat of being silenced and erased altogether. There is no pretense

of authorial omnipotence, only an insistence on the irrefutable presence of Anzaldua’s voice, and that of the communities to which she speaks, and of the dialectic contained within. Anzaldta notes that writing may also be used as a tool for community and coalition building for and between letter writers and letter readers. She illustrates the unique power of writing to touch the lives of readers as she assures us of our collective condition. “As I grope for words and a voice to speak of writing, I stare at my brown hand clenching the pen and think of you thousands of miles away clutching your pen. You are not alone” (169). The new house being created here is the notion of writing as a practice specifically by and for women of color. We are not alone because, although our marginalization from traditional centers of academic practice continues to be palpable, this theory and this theorist speak to us. By fashioning a mode of theorizing from within a personal letter that directly and specifically speaks to communities of women of color, Anzaldtia establishes her audience as a vital factor in her intellectual production. We are able to observe how the shape or format of theory can impact both how and by whom intellectual work is received. Another important element determining the scope and reception of theory is the language in which it is written. In an article that shall set the tone for this chapter, Barbara Christian calls on her readers to consider the question “For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?” (77). Barbara Christian also expresses her concern for the increasingly exclusionary nature of scholarly language by offering a sound reproach of traditional philosophical writing: “I am appalled by the sheer ugliness of the language, its lack of clarity, its unnecessarily complicated sentence constructions, its lack of pleasurableness, its alienating quality. It is the kind of writing for which composition teachers would give a first-year student a resounding F (72).” The article in which Christian makes this assertion, “The Race for Theory,” criticizes the type of impenetrable language upon which justifications of a necessarily elitist and exclusionary academia are built. Her title offers a twofold meaning for readers.

First, Christian uses the phrase to describe the competitive process through which traditional academics launch theories into their fields of study with the increasingly abstract and monolithic approaches to scholarship exemplified by their dense language and entangled syntax, as described earlier. Christian also invokes the phrase to reiterate the ways in which theorizing has always been a part of the creative and intellectual practices of communities of color, although often in ways rarely recognized by mainstream academics and institutions.

OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 183 Christian assures both this traditional academia and other readers: “My folk, have always been a race for theory—though more in the forms of the hieroglyph,

a written figure that is both sensual and abstract, both beautiful and communicative” (68). In this article, Christian expresses distaste for the lack of pleas-

ure in traditional scholarly language and notes the valuable potential of an approach to writing that is both abstract and sensual. Her insistence on the sensuality of writing and intellectual expression marks one of the many alternative paths being forged in academia by women and queer women of color scholars and artists. Audre Lorde also discusses the power of developing such sensuality in women’s writing in her 1978 paper “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In her discussion Lorde develops a conceptualization of the erotic as an empowering creative energy and a celebration of the life force of women. The erotic as

a force is simultaneously joyful and collective in nature. Contrasted from the

nonemotional practice of sexuality devoid of feeling (as in pornography), Lorde’s model envisions the erotic as a revolutionary tool for the empowerment of women through writing and other practices where sensuality and potential

pleasure define the work being produced. Under this framework, Lorde explains, “The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed that I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered” (340). Embracing the power of the erotic within one’s writing, then, allows this work to transform a chore or burden into a nourishing and pleasurable practice. Given the hostile environment present in so many universities for women of color, the shifting of scholarship from a tedious game into a spiritually and emotionally fulfilling act of joy and celebration enables many minority scholars to not only survive but also thrive (psychically if not always professionally or financially) in traditional academic settings. So what does Lorde’s elucidation of the erotic look like and how does it translate into the theoretical practices of other women and queer women of color? In the work of all the artists and authors examined in this study—not only those within this chapter—the deployment of creativity in order to theorize, produce meaning, and create alternative worlds represents one primary way in which the power of the erotic is utilized by queer women of color. Creative energy and personal positionality charge theoretical language with new dialectics and incendiary passions. Even small shifts in wording of a text impact both how and by whom that work will be received, as Aurora Levins Morales declares, “The language people use reveals important information about who they identify with, what their intentions are, for whom they are writing or speaking ... Unnecessarily specialized language is used to humiliate those who are not supposed to feel entitled. It sells the illusion that only those who can wield it can think (70).”

184 HOMECOMING QUEERS If we can think of academia, in its traditional sense, as one example of a master’s house, then according to Levins Morales’s theory of language and audience overly dense and complicated language could be thought of as the awk-

wardly shaped doorway through which only those individuals of a particular shape and size may pass. This traditionally accepted language is useless to some scholars, both because of its inherently exclusive nature and its distance from community-based activist and human rights movements. Given these responses to traditional theoretical language as defined and rewarded by hegemonic aca-

demia, to what degree can we interpret this language as and example of the master’s tools from Lorde’s previously discussed model? To what extent can : these linguistic tools be utilized in the act of dismantling preexisting systems of oppression within the university system and beyond? And, finally, if there is to be a mode of linguistic expression that we deem both oppressive and consequently ineffective at promoting change—at least for women of color—what alternatives exist and are being incorporated into the critical work of women of color and queer women of color scholars? Trinh T. Minh-ha utilizes her poetic theory coupled with photographic images in order to incite women of color to action as she dares us to transform language into the tools of our own fashioning: “So where do you go from here? where do | go? and where does a committed woman writer go? Finding a voice, searching for words and sentences: say some thing, one thing, or no thing; tie/untie, read/unread, discard their forms; scrutinize the grammatical habits of your writing and decide for yourself whether they free or repress. Again, order(s). Shake syntax, smash the myths, and if you lose, slide on, unearth some new linguistic paths. Do you surprise? Do you shock? Do you have a choice?” (Minh-ha 20). Here Minh-ha’s position on language aligns itself with Homi Bhabha’s treatment of stereotype. Both scholars avoid simplistic classifications of good or bad, instead opting to engage with the mechanics of use and effectiveness. In spite of Minh-ha’s previous accounting of the insufficiencies of dominant language for minority authors, ultimately she drops the decision at the feet of the writer herself, whom she instructs to “decide for yourself.” In this act, her recognition of individual agency, Minh-ha interrupts the existing discourses of power that laud one language (white, Anglo, male, heterosexual) while condemning another (brown, immigrant, female, queer).

Coloring Women’s Studies It is easy and/or expected to say that heterosexual women (not to be understood as “white women” simply because I have not specified a particular race) possess more institutional privilege than lesbians (again of all and no particular race, class, or gendered population).? Heterosexual privilege, as examined by Aida

Hurtado rewards conformist (heteronormative) women with access to more central positions in dominant structures of power primarily ruled by their white

OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 185 male partners. Yet for women of color—and to a further degree queer women of color—the racial privilege enjoyed (whether openly or ignorantly/obliviously) by

white women (feminists and lesbians included) simultaneously perpetuates the oppression of communities of color, and specifically other women of color (21-22). It is, of course, no surprise that willingness of many white women to accept their contributing role as oppressors in any paradigm of power is limited if not absent in far too many academic departments, feminist organizations, support groups, and social interactions. Hurtado’s analysis of privilege extends

to include lesbian subjects for whom access to the centers of power and the “rewards of seduction” are denied. Lesbians, Hurtado notes, “in having distance from white patriarchy, are more likely to have the psychological, social and physical space to invent themselves outside the confines of gender seduction” (23).

Additionally she posits lesbianism as an inherently subversive tool, in that it “undermines the unconquerable biological divide of patriarchal inheritance laws through biological ties” (22). This rewriting and reappropriation of family via queer and nonbiological connections provides a framework for the texts examined in the previous chapter. For some, then, sexual alterity provides the ultimate vehicle from which to challenge the politics of exclusion and marginalization based on all forms of difference. Female undergraduate and graduate students of color, despite their relative

newness within institutions of higher education, walk the same threatening halls and confront similar issues of silence, invisibility, and hostility as full-time faculty. As grade-earning students, scholars-in-training, and future job-seekers, they experience many of the same professional pressures to conform as do fac-

ulty pursuing tenure in the university system. What they write, how and for whom they write it, where they publish, whose help they seek, are all questions that serve to direct their futures as respected academics or resented outsiders. Yet despite the supposed lures of conformity, many young scholars choose not to be forced into a singular model of intellectual and academic activity. Often this requires dissatisfied students to insist upon the inherent interconnectedness of politics and scholarship and how each scholar’s sexuality, race, class, and gender positionality inform her or his work. One group of students engaged in such a critical, political, and creative revolution of hegemonic academia emerged from the Women’s Studies Department at Portland State University under the self-proclaimed title “Raging Exotics: Women of Color Caucus.” In the fall of 2000 at the University of Arizona, founding members of Raging Exotics alongside Women’s Studies students from the Tucson campus offered a workshop at this conference proudly entitled “The Future of Women’s Studies Conference.” The panel detailed the student organization’s history, goals, and personal experiences and traumas lived by women

of color students within Women’s Studies academic departments as well as the field in general. Although the group offered copies of their work in print,

186 HOMECOMING QUEERS the most vibrant form of theorizing occurred as the panel and audience performed the lived experience of collaboration and confrontation in this “live” venue.

As a graduate student deeply invested in the experiences and voices of women authors and artists, I always viewed Women’s Studies as an integral part of my research. I was excited to attend the University of Arizona conference, despite my own semitraumatic experiences with race and politics in Women’s

Studies departments and classrooms at both my graduate and undergraduate institutions. I had hope—as I have had in the past—that in this conference on the “future of Women’s Studies” I might finally locate a space from which to speak and to situate my own research that I still believe is unquestionably relevant to this field that purports to study women’s lives, voices, and work. That morning my companion and I arrived early, but no sooner had we reached the registration table when anticipation turned to cool alienation and frustration when the women in charge could not locate my folder. Though my friend and I registered together, only her name and folder could be found. The individual helping me wondered aloud, Had I paid? Had I sent in my registration materials? Had I completed the forms properly? In the end, there was nothing she could do, and she was quick to reiterate this several times in the face of my disbelief. Seeing how upset I was at being quite literally cast out of this particular Women’s Studies world, my friend quickly offered me her registration materials so I might participate in her place. Looking back, I am willing to concede, due to lack of proof, not conviction, that this confusion about the registration was not related to my brown and my friend’s white skin. However, the politics of race and ensuing social and academic tensions failed to dissolve away, remain-

ing an overt reminder of just how unsteady this future was. Just around the corner at the workshop sign-up table, I was quickly informed that there was no room left in the panel entitled “Raging Exotics: Women of Color Transforming Silence into Action.” Knowing this panel would deal with the stories and struggles of female students of color within the field of Women’s Studies, I knew I would probably never again find a session that so perfectly fit my needs, desires, and interests as a woman of color, scholar, and student working, though never seemingly welcomed, in this field. It was particularly upsetting that such a unique and impor-

tant session would be restricted to only a limited audience of preregistered members. Conference planners clearly did not anticipate the sizable crowd this workshop would draw, perhaps due to an underestimation of the relevance of queer women of color discourse to the future of Women’s Studies. Conference organizers might cite safety precautions, but I would also point to the underlying or even blatant fear of communities of color coming together, organizing, and constructing political, social, academic, and cultural revolutions. Perhaps incendiary ideas rather than fire codes were the underlying concern. A return to

OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 187 Cindy Cruz’s assurance that “nothing provokes the custodians of normality and objectivity more than the excessiveness of a body” reminds us that difference and mobilization among marginalized groups can, indeed, spark the fear and hostility of any ruling party (659). In my mind, the threat of such possibilities

loomed large in the situating of this “Raging Exotics” workshop in a small remote classroom rather than in one of the area’s other larger venues, an auditorium or conference room, which were used for other events and speakers that were no doubt deemed both more popular and less dangerous. Over the course of their panel, “Raging Exotics” members Monica Steen, Lamya Chidiac, and Emi Koyama, joined by two local University of Arizona Women’s Studies students, would present their own experiences, each reading

a prepared statement about the unique forms of racism and ignorance with which she grapples on a daily basis as a student in the Portland State University’s

Women’s Studies Department. In addition to their panel presentations, the students offered copies of their independently published zine. In this publication, the “Raging Exotics” established their goals as well as demands of audiences and readers alike: “The issues we are talking about are still very traumatic for us, SO we may get emotional in the course of the presentation. Do not freak out or use our emotions as an excuse to devalue our words. And if you are white, take responsibility for your discomfort upon hearing our very difficult stories.

We are not talking about skinheads or KKK; we are talking about perfectly well-intentioned feminists who end up hurting us due to their ignorance and prejudice” (Raging Exotics Zine).

However, before they could begin their presentation, the validity of their experiences and theories would be performed as a profoundly troublesome introduction. That afternoon I entered the tiny, almost empty classroom with an Anglo female friend who insisted on sitting silently in the back row. When I suggested we move closer to the front of the room, she shook her head and pointed to a sign written in large letters on a blackboard at the side of the room: “This is a space for Women of Color to speak and express ourselves. If you are not a Woman of Color please keep your comments brief. If you do not respect this request we will tell you to stop. This workshop is not about you.” I sat and watched as women entered, filling the room, reading the sign, and reacting with varying degrees of melodrama, outrage, indignation, fear, righteousness, humor, and fierce accord. One older woman appeared disturbed and seemed to scoff at the sign’s request. She strolled calmly into the classroom, claiming a seat in the front row directly across from the panelists, as if initiating a duel. Before the speakers began, the woman rose from her seat and walked to the center of the table where they had placed a stack of their self-created zines. She first read a sign indicating that the publication was free to women of color and five dollars for allies. In a loftily sarcastic voice, the women challenged, “What

if you’re 1/16 Cherokee. Does that count?” Clearly upset, one of the panelists

188 HOMECOMING QUEERS managed to state firmly, “I find your statement offensive. I think you should leave.” The woman offered that she was just joking and, if given the benefit of the doubt, could have been lightly directing an anti-essentialist nudge at the workshop organizers’ establishing statement. When she was met with only stunned silence, she turned to face the now nearly full and shocked audience and implored, “Do you think I should leave?” No doubt expecting a warm and supportive match to her own indignation at the situation, she received, instead, only our own awkward silence and stares. Another panelist quietly argued that perhaps she should be allowed to stay, but the stand-off would not so easily be diffused. Finally, incredulous, the woman turned, gathered her things, and exited the room as the rest of us watched speechless. Perhaps none of us had ever observed a scene where an older Anglo professor, with clear institutional knowledge and authority, had been shut down by a young woman of color student. Perhaps we had never seen or experienced a space in which insensitive quips, derogatory joking, and carelessly tossed racist statements were neither tolerated, nor reciprocated. Perhaps we had only dreamed of such spaces where women of color took precedence even in the company of other dominant groups. And we sat speechless now, not realizing these spaces could actually exist, that we would ever be fortunate enough to locate them, to situate ourselves, our bodies, voices, and experiences within such a site. In this pivotal moment, graduate students, young and largely queer women of color, assembled a space of their own along the lines of similarity as well as shared difference from larger dominant spheres. They defined this sitio with specific boundaries to indicate whose participation was relevant and permissible. The attention to voice, la lengua, was also imperative, as they were clear in their desire to allow the words and experiences of women of color to not only emerge but also to dominate or at least saturate the discursive focus of the workshop. In addition to invoking such voices, the members of “Raging Exotics” attempted to remove any dominant voices deemed distractionary, demeaning, or dismis-

sive. Even seemingly supportive gestures were deconstructed into their most basic dominant parts, as when one white French woman began to cry as she expressed how upset she was that someone would think her oppressive when all she intended to do was help. After continuing to speak between tearful gasps for roughly a five-minute uninterrupted stretch, one panelist responded dryly that this workshop “was not about her [the French woman].” Whether intentional or not, the woman’s emotions shifted the panel’s intended focus from the unique experiences and needs of women of color in academia to the guilt and indignation of Caucasian female scholars. Rather than rush to the side of this woman, the students simply recognized the attempt to shift attention and refocused on their own critical agenda. The attempt, of course, was to cease what Gloria Anzaldia calls reactive communication, where a struggle takes the form of action/reaction where all critical thought is focused on combating

OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 189 the ideas of others, rather than offering up new and original ideas of one’s own. For the “Raging Exotics,” the goal was to act and speak, rather than respond to the issues and inquiries of another. Yet Pérez deems such a sitio strategic, since

even the original thoughts and speech presented in the room that afternoon were responses to actions and words of the now silenced Anglo women. Painful exclusions, bitter dismissals, and tokenized treatment marked most of the experiences shared that day. Though the imposed Anglo silence rule removed these women’s discourse from the hour or so of discussion—following the conflict and indignant ejection of one woman—the sitio was provisional, not permanent or lasting in its ability to silence or remove the structures of power present among feminist scholars. Subsequent to the temporary refuge of such sitios, Anzaldua urges further interaction across differences to locate allies and productive coalitions in spite of continued inequalities: “it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank,

shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions ... it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it’s not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite

bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes” (Borderlands 100-101). As we all stepped into the classroom for this particular workshop, we were fortunate to bear witness to the realm of the “Raging Exotics” sitio, where theories—like those of the scholars and artists discussed throughout this book—made space for us to speak, think, and believe in the possibility of a home in academia. Women of color scholars have forged new paths for performing critical analysis and shaping scholarly work in and out of academia. As evidenced above, nowhere, not even in a space that is consciously designed to meet the decolonizing principles of Emma Pérez’s sitio y lengua, is entirely free from the impact of hierarchies of power and privilege. The scene also illustrates the painful ramifications of creating such home

spaces where universal inclusivity is rejected. It must be noted that all parties in : the conflictive exchange that took place in the Raging Exotics workshop pay distinct prices for their words and/or silences in academia. The Raging Exotics incident brings to life Aida Hurtado’s theorization of Chicana and Latina feminism as a blasphemic challenge to nationalist and patriarchal structures. In a conference space of intended unification of allies via the collective experiences of gen-

der oppression, feminists of different races, ethnicities, spiritualities, classes, and national affiliations found unity elusive at best. While the students of color seized their opportunity to make home in the university, and to limit the participation and consequent lenguas of Anglo women attendees, many other women of color in academia are unable to locate or inhabit such home spaces. The lures of tenure, job security, departmental harmony, and financial stability all factor into the shape of any scholar’s public voice. The stereotype of the angry person

190 HOMECOMING QUEERS of color—an archetype Chicano performance troupe Culture Clash deems “confused and full of rage’—permeates across gender lines, merging with another stereotype, that of the angry feminist, yielding a landscape of professional landmines and potential hazards to career advancement. When scholarly work is both personal and political, and, in the case of all the critical work examined here, poetic as well, academic fields of study and the lives made _ possible within are transformed. This final chapter builds upon the previous chapters’ discussion of the revolutionary reinscription of language and identity labels, the merging of binary modes of thinking and being, and the invocation of desire—~sexual and spiritual—

as a tool with which to construct new identities, heal old wounds of separation and alienation, and, where the return home may not be physically or psychologically possible, to perform soulful homecomings “by another route,” through words, images, stories, and song. Queer Chicana Latina creative expression offers not one but myriad home spaces, like those forged in academic settings, as well as those situated in political arenas, the media, government, and within and beyond the walls of our houses, bodies, and minds.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1 QUEERING HOME I. Gloria Anzaldta’s theorization is inspired by a student’s comment that she believed homophobia was a fear of returning after a period of residency away from home. From a misguided definition, Anzaldua performs the critical work to identify the relevance of “home” in homophobia (Borderlands 41-42). 2. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, with an introduction by Donald Macedo (New York: Continuum, 2000).

CHAPTER 2 SPEAKING SELVES 1. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 79-80. 2. Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 197.

3. Michele Serros, Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard (New York: Riverhead Books, 1993).

4. Certainly my analysis of this particular speaking engagement does not represent the first instance where a Chicana/o has rejected the homogenizing and colonial tendencies within Rodriguez’s work. In her 1996 The Color of Privilege, Aida Hurtado criticizes

Rodriguez and others for “their ideological positions [that] are not influenced by everyday interactions or by close scholarly contact with individuals whose work is to defend and promote the advancement of ethnic/racial groups” (30). While Rodriguez represents a pariah for some Chicanos and Latinos who view his stance on bilingual education and ethnic identity as counter to the revolutionary aims of social justice struggles, other scholars, like Alberto Ledesma and Frederick Luis Aldama, choose to engage his scholarly and creative work as representative of a complicated transcultural subject at the center of myriad intersectionalities in need of interrogation. See Ledesma’s “Narratives of Undocumented Mexican Immigration as Chicana/o Acts of Intellectual and Political Responsibility,” in Decolonial Voices, ed. Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quinones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 330-54, and Frederick Luis Aldama’s Brown on Brown (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 5. For more on purity and Latina lesbian identity, see Maria Lugones, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation,” Signs (Winter 1994): 458-79. 6. See Beverly Daniel Tatum, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations about Race (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

7. For a fascinating interrogation of this same question from a social science perspective, see Eithne Luibhéid “Looking Like a Lesbian: The Organization of Sexual 191

192 NOTES TO PAGES 15-18 Monitoring at the United States-Mexican Border,” in Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, ed. Denise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 106-33. 8. Donald Reuter defines “gaydar” in a popular—and explicitly male—context as “a word (derived from radar, of course) used to name the telepathic sixth sense which only gay men—and the occasional ultra savvy straight person—seem to possess. Its main func-

tion is to help gay men recognize one another in situations involving the general straight population.” Donald F. Reuter, Gaydar: The Ultimate Insider Guide to the Gay Sixth Sense (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002).

9. All quotations taken from my own lecture notes from this presentation by Richard Rodriguez at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 10. See Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), in which Derrida offers the term “différance” to encompass both the traditional sense of “difference” as distinction, as well as the continuous patterns of deferral (différer), whereby referents acquire meaning based not on what they are, but rather what they are not, as well as what they have the power to become. i. Juan Flores points out the danger of such a Derridian approach to definition by deferral in his “The Latino Imaginary: Dimensions of Community and Identity,” where he posits self-definition for Latina/os as an affirmative practice with close ties to personal and community agency: “Latinos listen to their own kind of music, eat their own kind of food, dream their dreams, and snap their photos not just to express their difference from, or opposition to, the way the ‘gringos’ do it. These choices and preferences, though arrived at under circumstances of dependency and imposition, also attest to a deep sense of autonomy and self-referentiality. Latino identity is imagined not as the negation of the non-Latino, but as the affirmation of cultural and social

realities and possibilities inscribed in their own human trajectory” (Flores and Benmayor 190). My attempt at definition in deferral is not intended to strip the sub-

jects in question of agency, but simply to disrupt what might be commonplace assumptions about Latinas, lesbians, and Latina lesbians that may or may not be true for any given subject and also to expose the tenuousness of any universal definition of group identity. 12. In the United States, Fanon’s notion of “becoming whiter” has been transformed into

symbols representative of a predictably American obsession: food. Each major minority group in the United States—Latino, Asian, and African American—can be paired up with an object that purports to capture the condition of a nonnormative minority subject. These pairings illustrate society’s, communities’, and sometimes even an individual’s own perplexed reaction to subjectivity that defies stereotype. A Latina who speaks no Spanish or dyes her dark hair blonde, an Asian American with no knowledge of his family’s cultural traditions, an African American woman born and at home in her own white suburban neighborhood, attending predominantly white schools, surrounded by a network of primarily white friends, mentors, and associates. Each of these subjectivities is mapped onto an exemplary object to clarify the disaccord between color and comportment: a coconut, banana, and chocolate/vanilla sandwich cookie, to re-create the notion of brown, yellow, or black on the outside, while purely white, inherently white, on the inside. Certainly there is no coincidence in the fact that each of these terms referencing particularly hybrid subjects are food items meant to be bought, sold, and ultimately consumed. In various conversations, I have heard these labels proudly raised by individuals as proclamations of self-defined difference. I have also heard the sting of rejection as these

NOTES TO PAGES 19-35 193 labels were hurled at me by another who felt her own ethnic identity secure enough to police mine. Although these references, at first glance, seem pulled directly from children’s playground banter, the body politics behind these images offer important commentary on the way race, ethnicity, and culture are seen, heard, and experienced in our society. 13. For another extensive interrogation of language and Chicana Latina lesbian identity, see Alicia ArrizOn’s chapter “Epistemologies of ‘Brownness’” in her book Queering Mestizaje (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 14. See Ignacio M. Garcia, Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 35. 15. The American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985).

16. Juanita Ramos subsequently edited and published the equally foundational Companeras: Latina Lesbians (New York: Routledge, 1994), which provided a broader context for U.S. Latina lesbian experience and creative expression, since it included a variety of genres including a greater emphasis on oral history and testimonial narratives in both English and Spanish. 17. See Arriz6n’s discussion of Montoya’s poem and other literary discussions of identity labels in “Epistemologies of ‘Brownness’: Deployments of the Queer-Mestiza Body,” in her book Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

18. The term’s possible derivation from “dite” in “hermaphrodite.” The verto root in inversion, perversion, invert, and pervert means “turning,” which conveyed the sense of turning away from sexual and gender norms, may account for some of its inability to “speak” to or for all queer female subjects. See also Linda Garber, “Putting the Word Dyke on the Map: Judy Grahn,” in Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2001), 31-62. 19. For an engaging theorization of hyphen spaces, see Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Life on the

Hyphen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), and Jennifer DeVere Brody’s “Hyphen-Nations,” in Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality and Sexuality, ed. Sue-Ellen Case, Phillip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 149-62.

20. See AnaLouise Keating, “(De)Centering the Margins? Identity Politics and Tactical (Re)Naming,” in Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color, ed. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 23-43. 21. This now commonly invoked notion of “gender-fucking” eludes most scholarly studies of gender and sexuality; however, its usage by a general queer population can be

intuited via online information. One site sponsored by a “transsexual psychologist” defines “gender fuck” as “to purposely present with strong visible elements of both sexes (e.g., to have a beard and wear a dress). The intent of gender-fucking is typically to provoke people to think about gender roles.” The entire glossary may be located at http://www. genderpsychology.org/transsexual/glossary. html.

22. In The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), historian and author Emma Pérez describes her vision of a “decolonial imaginary,” which “in Chicana/o history is a theoretical tool for uncovering the hidden voices of Chicanas that have been relegated to silences, to passivity, to that third space where agency is enacted through third space feminism” (xvi). I use the notion of a decolonized world in the spirit of Pérez’s theorization, since it implies both the dismantling of colonialist structures of domination as well as a recovery of women’s history and experience.

194 NOTES TO PAGES 41-60 CHAPTER 3 MOVING VIOLATIONS I. Marga Gomez, jaywalker, as performed March 23, 2000, in Tucson, Arizona. All subsequent quotations from my own transcription. 2. For clarification, references to Gomez’s performance piece shall be denoted by a lowercase and italicized spelling of the work’s title, as is utilized in promotional materi-

als. Gomez’s protagonist of the same name will always be distinguished through capitalization. 3. All subsequent citations from Gomez’s live performance of jaywalker in Tucson, Arizona, on March 24, 2000, will be designated by the word “Tucson.” 4. To distinguish references to Gomez’s live performance and the excerpted print version in Jo Bonney’s Extreme Exposure, I will henceforth designate the print citations with the abbreviation EE. 5. See Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 6. For a similar denaturalization of identity categorizations via a critical model of identity as drag, see Karen Christian, Show and Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S. Latina/o Fiction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). 7. Stuart Hall describes diasporic identity as a merging of “being and becoming,” refuting the possibility that identity might ever exist as a fixed and completed entity in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Edward Arnold, 1996), 110-21. 8. For another beautifully written and painful account of language and Chicana identity, see also Michele Serros, “Mi problema,” in her collection Chicana Falsa, 31-32.

9. I make these generalizations cautiously, in light of the critical erasures illustrated earlier by my discussion of Richard Rodriguez’s lecture in chapter 2. 10. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Action, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). i. For more on public reaction to Ellen Degeneres’s historic coming out, see Bonnie J. Dow, “Ellen, Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility,” in Critical Studies in Media Communication 18.2 (2001), 123-40.

12, Gary Lehring interprets Clinton’s policy as institutionalized erasure, since “in the name of privacy homosexual behavior, or any declarations of speech that acknowledge one’s gay or lesbian identity, still result in one’s dismissal from the military, transforming privacy into an enforced silence in which gays and lesbians do the work of self-policing, closeting themselves willingly if they wish to continue to serve ... Under this understanding of sexual identity and the right of privacy, lesbians and gays are made invisible” (181). Lehring’s analysis of “self-policing” parallels the internalization and “epidermalization” of imperial ideologies among colonized peoples. For further analysis of this phenomenon, see Fanon, Memmi, Bhabha. 13. An empowered alternative to Paz’s passive vulnerable female state of la chingada is offered in la chingona, the feminine counterpart to el chingén. Largely used as an adjective to designate a feminine subject or object as extremely favorable, Chicanas have utilized the term to distinguish women who literally and figuratively “fuck” with existing structures of power and challenge stereotypes and oppressive forces negatively

impacting other Chicanas. See Susana L. Gallardo’s Chicana feminist Web site at http://www.chicanas.com/huh.html, and especially her list of distinguished “Chicanas Chingonas” at http://www.chicanas.com/chingonas.html. 14. Malintzin Tenepal, better known as La Malinche, served Hernan Cortés as both lover and translator beginning in 1519. Currently, Tenepal occupies the infamous role of

NOTES TO PAGES 63-77 195 traitor to her race, as the assistance and child she provided to Cortés—even when acknowledged as a requirement of her enslavément—are cited as pivotal factors in the

successful conquest of Mexico by Spain. Norma Alarcén, “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-vision through Malintzin/ or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie

Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981), 182-90. For an important recontextualization of “La Malinche” for women scholars of contemporary Chicana/o Studies, see also Naomi Quinones, “Re(Riting) the Chicana Postcolonial: From Traitor to 21st Century Interpreter,” in Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century, ed. Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quinones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 129-51. 15. Surina Khan, “Future Baywatch Bimbo? Marga Gomez, A Veteran of the Comedy Circuit, Sets Her Sights on Hollywood,” Boston Phoenix, May 1998. Also available at http://www. bostonphoenix.com/archive/1into/98/05/GOMEZ. html.

CHAPTER 4 THE BIRDY AND THE BEES 1. Trujillo was awarded the Marmol Prize in 2003 for What Night Brings. The novel was

also a runner-up in the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award and received an Honorable Mention for the Writers at Work competition. Esteemed authors Sandra Cisneros and Dorothy Allison, alongside mainstream publications like Hispanic Magazine, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Lambda Book Report, have praised What Night

Brings for its powerful narrative and memorable characters. 2. As a designator of sexual subjectivity, “queer” acquired popularity in the 1990s as an broader alternative to the more localized terms “lesbian” and “gay,” although some dislike it as a nongendered referent. 3. Bernice Zamora’s foundational piece “So Not to Be Mottled” offers a poetic manifesto of intersectional identities in Eliana Rivero and Tey Diana Rebolledo’s collection Infinite Divisions (78).

4. Octavio Paz’s discourse on gender and especially female sexuality presents numerous conflicts arising from a binary view of human subjectivity. In particular, see his paradigm of la chingada/el chingon for rigidly dichotomous representation of gender expectations and his analysis of el pachuco for a similar elucidation of ethnic and cultural identity. Anzaldtiia’s mestiza consciousness intervenes into these dichotomies, offering alternatives to “either/or” subjectivity.

5. Like Anzaldua, Jacqueline M. Martinez also argues for the subversive potential of Chicana lesbian subjectivity. Martinez focuses on the seeming unintelligibility of Chicana lesbian identity within an Anglo-dominant heteronormative worldview. Through the enacting of “radical ambiguities,” Martinez suggests that Chicana lesbian subjectivity challenges colonialist oppressions and offers the promise of radical transformation (62—64). 6. Bell hooks theorizes about the distinction between a privileged view of home as a safe

and “politically neutral” site and a reclamation of the notion of home by African American women as a site of resistance and empowerment. Marci is unable to maneuver this transformation and ultimately she must abandon her home for an alternative home place. 7. For another Chicana lesbian account of the gender politics of childhood playthings, see also Monica Palacios, “Tomboy,” in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998).

196 NOTES TO PAGES 78-87 8. Pérez notes that envy of the male phallus is largely a myth of male “centralist” theorists like Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault (173). However, Marci’s strong desire for a penis seems to necessitate an alternate version of penis envy, since Marci wishes for male genitalia so as to authorize her attraction to girls and for the purposes of sexual pleasure. Cherrie Moraga interprets her own childhood dream of a female body with

an “out of control” penis as a suggestion of sexual potency and the desire to move sexually from penetrated to penetrator (119). Certainly the relevance of the phallus cannot be untangled from lesbian desire and sexuality, and Marci’s emphasis on the pleasure and privilege of the penis illustrates one of many points along a continuum of lesbian/queer female desire. g. Zavella’s interviews with Chicana and Mexican women reveal patriarchal strategies for silencing women’s desires. The women interviewed also suggested a challenge to the virgin-whore dichotomy with the role of la escandalosa, who emerges from sexual repression to embrace her desires and pleasures (228). Trujillo’s novel suggests the history of una escandalosa in-the-making, since Marci’s sexuality remains, largely, a private identity. 10. Lorde advises against any subversive act translated into the language and tools of a ruling power, since “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house” (110). Her discussion of the insufficiency of an oppressor’s tactics to interrupt systems of

oppression insists on a critical foundation of autochthonous theories of resistance around which U.S. Latina scholars like Emma Pérez (sitio y lengua), Aurora Levins Morales (certified organic intellectual), and the Latina Feminist Group (papelitos guardados) have developed frameworks of individual and collective identity.

11. Many feminist and postcolonial theorists have discussed the role of language in frameworks of colonial power and subsequent revolutions waged by colonized subjects. Emma Pérez posits that both gender and racial oppressions necessitate that women of color find alternate modes of communication apart from “sexual-racial violence mirrored in language, in words. A speculum of conquest to ‘penetrate’ further” (175). Frantz Fanon notes, “A man who has language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language” (18). However under the structures of colonial power, Fanon positions the acquisition of language as a complicated transforma-

tion for the colonized subject. Therefore, the colonized subject who can successfully : learn the colonizer’s language and act out cultural norms in essence “becomes whiter,” at least on the level of social performance. Concomitantly any revolution voiced using a colonial language risks being defined and perhaps doomed by a conformity to the colonizer’s ideals. 12. Because of the focus on inclusion and familial ties, I feel the concept of familiar alterity has uniquely viable applications for the LGBTQ community as well as people of color; however, the framework is relevant in many other circumstances wherein individuals seek community under the bond of shared difference and collective alienation from a ruling majority.

13. Jorgensen, born George Jorgensen, made the transition from male to female in 1952, emerging as one of the first widely publicized transsexuals in the U.S. popular media. 14. Here, again, ’m using queer not necessarily in the sense of lesbian, but simply nonnormative sexual desire. Marci understands the stigma that will likely be attached to her desires, and she is cautious about expressing them only when they may not be tied to her name or identity. Her fear of negative response situates her desires as queer long before she identifies them as lesbian or homosexual.

NOTES TO PAGES 94-117 197 CHAPTER 5 COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 1. For an alternative portrayal of Chicana lesbian motherhood, see Cherrie Moraga’s Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1997).

2. For acomplete list of de la Pena’s works, see Catriona Rueda Esquibel’s extensive bibliography in her book With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 2006), and Juana Maria Rodriguez’s online compiled list at http://www. indiana.edu/~arenal/lesbo. html. 3. See Mary Pat Brady, “Intermarginalia: Chicana/a Spatiality and Sexuality in the Work of Gloria Anzaldua and Terri de la Pena,” in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 83-110; Salvador C. Fernandez, “Coming Out Stories and the Politics of Identity in the Narrative of Terri de la Pena,” Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression, ed.

Lourdes Torres and Inmaculada Pertusa (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003),

68-77; and Catriédna Rueda Esquibel, “Memories of Girlhood: Chicana Lesbian Fictions,” in With Her Machete in Her Hand, by Catridna Rueda Esquibel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 91-127.

4. In this context, origin is understood as “perceived” given the circumstances of many diasporic subjects who despite living their entire lives in other countries, still trace a genealogy to a homeland that provides the basis for an individual and collective identity, regardless of birth elsewhere or lack of firsthand experience of this homeland. 5. Foran overview of the cultural phenomenon of passing in the United States, see Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

6. For an account of the coming out processes for Chicana feminists involved in Chicana/o student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, see Maylei Blackwell’s “Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc at California State Long Beach (1968—1971),” in Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, ed. Gabriela F. Arredondo, Aida Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Najera-Ramirez, and Patricia Zavella (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 59-89. Blackwell’s research uncovers testimonios of former MEChA members who were ostracized and even “buried” in a mock funeral ceremony, complete with gravestones for each of the female members who had openly expressed interest and commitment

to feminist issues through their participation in a group they called Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc.

7. See “Terri de la Pena: I Wrote This Book Because I Wanted to Read It,” in Happy Endings: Lesbian Writers Talk About Their Lives and Work, ed. Kate Brandt (Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1993), and Terri de la Pena, “The Latina Legacy,” Lambda Book Report 7.11 (1999): 12-13.

8. See Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnationalisms, Transnational Feminisms

and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarc6n, and Minoo Moallem (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 9g. All excerpts from Negr6n-Muntaner Frances, Brincando el charco (New York: Hispanic Productions: Distributed by Women Make Movies, 1994). Subsequent references will be designated with the abbreviation Brincando. 10. Michele Serros, Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard (New York: Riverhead Books, 1993). u. I offer the page references from the film’s screenplay in Troyano’s collected printed works in J, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing between Cultures (Boston: Bluestreak, 2000). The visual aspect of the 1994 filmic production was equally consulted.

198 NOTES TO PAGES 118-142 12. For another example of queer Latina identity and desire translated through the language of spirituality, see the final scene in Monica Palacios’s performance “Tomboy,” in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998).

13. All references and quotations from Enriquez’s film A Journey Home are taken from http://blip.tv/file/295537.

CHAPTER 6 PERFORMING THE EROTICS OF HOME

| I. The performances from which I am working were included in Palacios’s 2002 onewoman show Queer Soul, a retrospective of twenty years of her work as a comic and

performance artist. Performances ran September 20, 21, 27, and 28 at Highways | Performance Space in Venice, California. For additional information, see my article on Queer Soul’s debut: “Monica Palacios Celebrating 20 Years as a Queer Performer,” Lesbian News, September 2002.

2. Palacios’s comments taken with permission from unpublished correspondence. 3. All references to “I Don’t Have to Explain” taken with permission from the author’s unpublished manuscript. 4. “La gloria eres ta” is an original composition by Cuban musician Jose Antonio Mendez (1927-1989).

5. I am careful to distinguish between the performer and her performative persona. Though much of Palacios’s work is inspired by her personal experiences, collapsing the artist and the character does a grave disservice to the creative elements of her performance. For clarity, I refer to the artist by her surname and the fictitious character she embodies as “Monica,” 6. See also Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach’s Stages of Life: Transcultural Performance and Identity in U.S. Latina Theater (Tucson: University of Arizona, 2001). 7. For further discussion of the interstitial spaces of rites of passage rituals, see Victor Turner’s From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982). 8. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Of Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947).

9. Gloria Anzaldia, Borderlands: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999).

10. Sony Pictures, 1992, directed by Barbet Schroeder. 11. From the 2002 National Queer Arts Festival Official Press Release and Program.

12. See Judith Halberstam’s “Drag Kings: Masculinity and Performance,” in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 1997), 400-417. 13. All quotations from Tropicana and Gomez’s June 8 and 9, 2002, performance of Single Wet Female in San Francisco. 14. See also W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 15. Columbia/Tristar Studios, 1993., directed by Nora Ephron. 16. In her work Milk of Amnesia/Leche de Amnesia, Tropicana recalls her constant need to control memory: to remember to remember. This urgency was especially strong as a child in Cuba when she would lie in bed at night trying to burn the path to her friend’s house in her mind. One night she realizes control has escaped her: “I did this repeatedly so I wouldn’t forget. I would remember. But then one day I forgot to remember.

NOTES TO PAGES 146-163 199 I don’t know what happened?’ (53). Not only the desire, but also the desire to remember, elude Gomez’s portrayal of Margaret on a variety the levels of meaning and memory Tropicana’s Milk/Leche maps out. Perhaps for Margaret as an internally colonized sub-

ject, “forgetting” her mimicry of dominant affect might suggest more effective and thus devastating loss.

CHAPTER 7 DANCING WITH DEVILS I. This merged subject position parallels the final scene in Marga Gomez and Carmelita Tropicana’s collaborative performance Single Wet Female. 2. See chapter 3 for further discussion of the Malitzin Tenepal’s significance in Chicano and queer Chicana history and representation. 3. This mode of direct address echoes Gloria Anzaldua’s text “Speaking in Tongues,”

a theoretical article written in letter form in order to directly address her critical audience. 4. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1986), 23-75.

5. For additional discussion of the critical repercussions of the silencing and superficial treatment of gender and sexuality among communities of color, see my earlier discussions of Ana Castillo’s Massacre of the Dreamers, Aida Hurtado’s The Color of Privilege, and Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Sister Outsider.

6. William J. Spurlin presents the inherent connections between the study of imperialist systems of power and those structures of oppression affecting queer subjects: “As queer and postcolonial scholars, it is important that we address seriously the psychic violence, effected through homophobic strategies of excessive codification and regulation, directed toward lesbians and gay men outside of the Euroamerican axes of queer politics so that we may more credibly work towards the liberatory imperatives of both fields of inquiry and help revise the heterosexist and other oppressive ways in which self, citizenship, community, and cultural identity and difference are presently configured and understood” (Spurlin 198). 7. Negotiations of the phallus as a symbol of hypermasculine power emerge in both Monica Palacios’s “Tomboy” and Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings. For Palacios’s

performative subject, “male sexual power” threatens to silence her prior to her discovery of her lesbian identity. Trujillo’s protagonist, Marci, initially conforms to the rules of heterosexism and patriarchy when she prays for a penis to authorize her desire for girls. Both narrative voices eventually break from patriarchal power structures, authorizing their own dreams and desires from within their own female bodies rather than attempting to perform hyper-masculine models of gender and sexual identity. 8. Juani’s emotional disregard for the penis parallels Pelén’s castration dream in Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, where he offers his severed member to the novel’s narrator, his lesbian counterpart, thus illustrating both Cherrie Moraga and Adrienne Rich’s theorization of lesbianism as a challenge to male sexual power and patriarchy. See Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pas6 por sus labios (Boston: South End Press, 1983); idem, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1997); and Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1986).

200 NOTES TO PAGES 172-184 CHAPTER 8 OUR ART IS OUR WEAPON 1. If you answered no to this question, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).

2. Nearly two decades later, José Esteban Munoz, in his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), suggests a similar practice in the work of queer performers of color, which he terms “Queer World-Making.” 3. Fora foundational text on the complications of invisible or unmarked status of Anglo and male identity categorizations, see All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Feminist Studies, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, Barbara Smith (New York: Feminist Press at City University of New York, 20093).

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INDEX

academia, 3, 6-7, 16, 30, 40, 69, 97; and and Palacios’s performances, 127—129; and invisibility, 180-184; and theoretical Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 147, 155; and production, 169-178; and women’s Rodriguez, Richard, 14; and self-definition,

studies, 184-190 25-27; and theoretical production,

accents: and Gomez’s jaywalker, 48, 50, 171-176; and Troyano’s Carmelita 52-54, 59, 65; and identity labels, 18, 26, Tropicana, 116-117; and Trujillo’s What

33 Night Brings, 70, 76, 83, 195n5

acculturation, 19, 21, 102, 140 Anglo lesbians, 31, 61, 99; and de la Pena’s affect: and de la Pena’s “Mariposa,” 108; and narrative work, 92, 110-111; and de la Gomez’s jaywalker, 45-46, 55, 57; and tierra’s quiz, 31; as identity label, 19, Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, 137, 25-26, 31; and Rodriguez, Richard, 13-14

140-141, 198-199nI6 Aniston, Jennifer, 65

affinity, 70, 83, 108, 128, 143 anonymity, 82, 87, 180

African Americans, 56, 63, 99, 178, 195n6 anxious repetition, 139, I41 agency, 2, 6, 8, 12; and Gomez’s jaywalker, Anzaldua, Gloria, 5~8, 92, 94, 108, 130, 160, 42~47; and identity labels, 16, 18-19, 28; I8I—182, 188, 19InI, 199n3; and Aztlan, I-2, and Negron-Muntaner’s Brincando el 93, 103, 106; and borderlands, I—2, 8, 17, charco, 115-116; and Obejas’s Memory 61-62, 99, 113, 119; and identity labels,

Mambo, 160; and Palacios’s 16-17, 20, 23-30, 34; and mestiza

performances, 123, 13I~132, 134; and consciousness, II, 71, 74, 115, 133, 146-147, Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 157; and Trujillo’s 160, 195nn4,5; naming as survival, 12, 15, What Night Brings, 68, 75, 80, 83, 86, 25, 43; and self-definition, 25-28

89-90 Aparicio, Frances, 100-102, III

Alarcon, Norma, 16 Arellano, Cathy, 20-21

Aldama, Frederick Luis, 191n4 Arrizon, Alicia, 22, 121, 124, 134 alienation, 30, 35, 160; and de la Pena’s art as weapon, 168-169, I7I

narrative work, 102-103, 105, 108-109, III; assimilation, 20—21, 80; and de la Pena’s and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 70-71, 83, narrative work, 100-102, 107—108; and

88, 196nI2 Gomez’s jaywalker, 48-49, 58, 63; and

Allison, Dorothy, 195n1 Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, alterity: and de la Pena’s narrative work, 100, 135-136, 138-139, 142 108; and diasporic identity, 98-99; famil- Aztlan, I-2, 93, 103, 106 iar, 83, 85-86, 89, 92, 196n12; and Gomez’s

jaywalker, 46, 48, 52-58, 64, 67; and Baywatch (television show), 55-58 Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 158; and beauty, standards of, 57-58, 75-76, 149 Palacios’s “Tomboy,” 132; and Trujillo’s being home, 5, 92, 95, 98, 143-144. See also

What Night Brings, 70, 72, 82-89, I96nI2. home

See also otherness Beltran, Lola, 125

Anglo identity, 2, 6, 11, 13; and de la Pena’s Benmayor, Rina, 45-46 Faults, 152; and de la Pena’s “La Maya,” Bhabha, Homi, 139, 141, 179, 184

100, 104-105, 112; and de la Pena’s bilingualism, 48~49, 105, 10, 175 “Mariposa,” 107-108, 110—112; and blackface minstrelsy, 138 Enriquez’s A Journey Home, 119—120; and Blackwell, Maylei, 197n6

Gomez’s jaywalker, 42, 44-46, 48-52, blasphemy, 155 55-57, 64;. and Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Body Heat (film), 59 Wet Female, 137-140; and identity labels, Bourdieu, Pierre, 53 19, 25-27, 29, 31, 36-38; and Negron- Brady, Mary Pat, 12, 93, 97 Muntaner’s Brincando el charco, 113-114; “The Bridge Poem” (Rushin), 24 211

212 INDEX Brincando el charco (Negron-Muntaner), comadrazgo, 90, 149, 155

112-116 coming home, 4—5, 92—93, 98, 144, 167; and

Brown: The Last Discovery of America de la Peria’s “La Maya,” 99, 102—105; and

(Rodriguez), 13-14 de la Pena’s “Mariposa,” 105-106, I109—II;

Butler, Judith, 46, 76-77, 172 and Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet

Female, 142~143; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams,

Cabranes-Grant, Leo, 33 145, 148, 150; and Serna’s “tierras Carlson, Marvin, 50, 53-54 sagradas,” 95. See also home Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen coming out, 57, 99, 143, 197n6

(Troyano), 116-118, 168 communities, I-7, 10-13, 93-94, 98—99; and

Castillo, Ana, 3, 8, 87-88 de la Pena’s narrative work, 99—I0I, 103,

Catholicism, 72, 76, 78, 81-82, 86-89, 117-118 105-108, 111; and de la tierra’s quiz, 29-30; center/periphery model, 22, 36-37, 98; and and Enriquez’s A Journey Home, 118; in

Gomez’s jaywalker, 41-42, 44, 46, 48, Gomez’s jaywalker, 41; and 54-56; and Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, 136, Female, 140; and Palacios’s “I Don’t Have 139-140, 143; and identity labels, 17-27,

to Explain,” 124 29~30, 34-36, 40; and Negrén-Muntaner’s

Chavez-Silverman, Susan, I00—102, III Brincando el charco, 112—114; and Obejas’s

“Chicana falsa,” 13, 113 Memory Mambo, 159-160, 199n6; and

Chicana Falsa (Serros), 174 Palacios’s performances, 125-127, 129; and Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 154-155; and Warned Us About (Trujillo), 11, 20-23, 28, Rodriguez, Richard, 14-16; and

69, 71-72 Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted ad, 34; and

Chicanas: and ching6n/chingada paradigm, self-definition, 25~26; and Serna’s “tierras

60-61, 194nI3, 195n4; and home, I-2, sagradas,” 96-97; and theoretical

93—95; and identity labels, 4, 7, 12, 19-20, production, 170, 173, 175-177; and 24-25, 27, 29, 35, 48, 72. See also queer Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 117; and

Chicanas Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 68-70, 72, 76,

Chidiac, Lamya, 187 82—84, 87—88, 90, I96nI2

child abuse, 69, 72-75, 77-79, 89-90 Compajnieras: Latina Lesbians (Ramos), 20, ching6n/chingada paradigm, 60-61, 194n13, 160

195n4 complicating home, 6, 92, 113-114, II7, 144,

Christian, Barbara, 6, 37, 175, 182-183 154. See also home

“Chyk-ana,” 24, 72 conformity, 30; and Gomez’s jaywalker, Cisneros, Sandra, 195n!I 46-48, 50, 52, 54, 56-57, 64; and

citizenship, 45~46, 57, 83, If2, 119 Negr6n-Muntaner’s Brincando el charco, class distinctions: and de la Pefia’s 112—113; in Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted “Mariposa,” 108; and Gomez’s jaywalker, ad, 32; and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 76, 43-44, 46, 49, 55; and Gomez/Tropicana’s 80, 82, 89, I96nII Single Wet Female, 137-138; and identity corporeality, 121-123, 130—I3]I, 147, 153, 162,

labels, 20, 22—23, 27, 28-29, 34; and 172

Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 159-161; and Cortés, Hernan, 154, 194—195n14

Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 70 creative subversion, 74-75, 78, 89

Clifford, James, 106-107 creativity, 4, 6, 8, 17, 40, 93, 95; and Clinton, Bill, 57, 194n12 Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, 136, the closet, 57, 98-99, III 139; and Negron-Muntaner’s Brincando el

coalitional politics, 2, 27, 29; Sandoval’s charco, 113, 115; vs. theoretical production, views on, 70, 83; and Trujillo’s What Night 169—173

Brings, 70, 82-88, 90, 196nI2 criminalized roles, 5, 18; and Gomez’s

Cochina: The Twelve Days of Christmas jaywalker, 42~—47, 58, 62; and

(Gomez), 48 Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted ad, 32-33

colonized subject: and de la Pena’s narrative critical production, 170—177, 180 work, II—112; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 58; Cruz, Cindy, 143, 173, 187

and Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Cuban Americans, 13, 101-102; in Obejas’s Female, 138~140, 142-143, 198—199n16; and Memory Mambo, 145, 158-161; Troyano,

identity labels, 18—19, 26, 34-35, 193n22; Alina, as, 116—117 Memmi’s views on, 5, 80, 138-139, 179; cultural citizenship, 45-46, 57, 83 and Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 161; and

theoretical production, 173, 175; and Davy, Kate, 122 Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 70, 72, 76,80, | decolonization, 4, 35; and Gomez/

195n5, 196nII Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, 136, 143; and

The Colonizer and the Colonized (Memmi), Pérez’s decolonial imaginary, 123, 136,

138 193n22; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 157

The Color of Privilege (Hurtado), 176, I91n4 DeGeneres, Ellen, 56

INDEX 213 de la Pena, Terri, 5, 92, 94, 97, 99—I12,.120, | erotics, 2-3, 5, 13, 123, 143-144, 146, 183; and |

131, 150-152, 162 ns de la Pena’s narrative work, 100—IOI, .

de la tierra, tatiana, 29-31 108—II0, 112; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 59;

“Del otro lado” (Anzaldiia), 23, 99, 160 and Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female,

Derrida, Jacques, 17, I92nn10,I1 136-137, 141, 143; and Negr6n-Muntaner’s

“Describe Your Work” (Palacios), 38 Brincando el charco, 115-116; and Obejas’s desire, 2—3, 5-6, 13-14, 20, 93—95; and de la Memory Mambo, 158; and Palacios’s Pena’s Faults, 152; and de la Pena’s “La performances, 123-128, 133-134; and Maya,” 92, 99—IOI, 103—104; and de la Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 147-149, 153, 156 Peria’s Margins, 109; and de la Pena’s essentialism, 10-12, 94; and de la Pena’s “Mariposa,” 107-111; and Enriquez’s A narrative work, 100, 102-104, 106, I51; in de

Journey Home, 118, 120; and Gomez’s la tierra’s quiz, 30-31; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 57, 60; and Gomez/Tropicana’s jaywalker, 49, 53, 64, 66; and Gomez/ Single Wet Female, 136, 142, 198—199n1I6; Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, 139; and

and Negrén-Muntaner’s Brincando el identity labels, 25, 30-32, 34; and charco, 115-116; and Obejas’s Memory Negron-Muntaner’s Brincando el charco, Mambo, 158, 161-163, 167; and Palacios’s 112; and Palacios’s “Taqueria Tease,” “I Don’t Have to Explain,” 123-128; and 134-135; in Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted

Palacios’s “Taqueria Tease,” 133-135; and ad, 32, 34 Palacios’s “Tomboy,” 130-131; and Pérez’s Esto no tiene nombre (journal), 29-30 Gulf Dreams, 146-150, 152-154, 156-157; ethnicity: and de la Pena’s narrative work, and Serna’s “tierras sagradas,” 95-96; and 99, 105-106, 108, I1I—II2, 151-152; and de la Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 117-118; and tierra’s quiz, 31; and diasporic identity, Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 68—69, 71-72, 98-99; and Enriquez’s A Journey Home, 119;

77-91, 196nn8,9,14 and Gomez’s Cochina, 48; and Gomez’s

diasporic identity, 98, 197n4; and de la jaywalker, 41-42, 44-50, 53-56, 58, 61-62, Pena’s narrative work, 97, 99, IOI—-103, 65; and Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet 106, 108; Hall’s views on, 103, 105-106, I14, Female, 137, 140, 142143; and identity

194n7; and Negrén-Muntaner’s labels, 18-24, 26-27, 29, 31, 33, 35-36; and

Brincando el charco, 113-114; and Pérez’s Negron-Muntaner’s Brincando el charco,

Gulf Dreams, 153 113-114; and Obejas’s Memory Mambo,

différance, 17, I92nnI0,11 160—161; and Palacios’s “I Don’t Have to difference, 2-3, 5, 12, 145-146; and de la Explain,” 123-124, 126-127; and Palacios’s Pena’s narrative work, 105, 107, IIO, I5I; “Taqueria Tease,” 133-135; and Palacios’s and Enriquez’s A Journey Home, 118; and “Tomboy,” 131; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, Gomez’s jaywalker, 44, 47, 50-56, 64—67; 155; and Rodriguez, Richard, 15; and and identity labels, 19, 21, 23, 26-27; Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted ad, 33; and linguistic, 7, 47, 50-54; and Palacios’s self-definition, 26-27; and Serna’s “tierras performances, 124, 127, 132, 134; and sagradas,” 96; and theoretical production, Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 147, 150; risks of 172, 175; and Troyano’s Carmelita deleting, 36, 38; and Rodriguez, Richard, Tropicana, 117; and Trujillo’s What Night 14-16; and theoretical production, 173-174; Brings, 68, 72 and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 69-72, excesses, 2, 13, 15, 38; and de la Pena’s Faults,

82-86, 88-89, 196nI2 151; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 56, 62; and

Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, Performance of Politics (Munoz), 200n2 136-138; and Obejas’s Memory Mambo,

domestic abuse, 149-152, 154, 157, 161, 199n6; and Palacios’s “Taqueria Tease,”

163-164 134; and theoretical production, 173-174;

“don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, 57, 194n12 and Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 169; “Dreaming of Other Planets” (Moraga), 8 and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 72, 84

“Dyk-ana/Dyk-icana” (L6pez), 24 exotic other, 44, 47, 49-52, 65, 104, 107 dyke as identity label, 22-25, 27, 29, 48, 72,

193n18 familiar alterity, 83, 85-86, 89, 92, I96nI2 family, 2, 5, 13, 23, 36, 93; and de la Pena’s

Ellison, Ralph, 178-179 “Mariposa,” 106-108, 111; and Enriquez’s A The Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay, Journey Home, 119; and Gomez/ Bisexual, and Transgender History in - Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, 136-138,

America, 19 142; and Obejas’s Memory Mambo,

Enriquez, Monica, 5, 94, 118-120 158-160, 164—166; and Palacios’s “I Don’t erasures, 12, 35, 94, 194n12; and Gomez’s Have to Explain,” 125; and Serna’s jaywalker, 42, 44, 55; and Pérez’s Gulf “tierras sagradas,” 96; and Troyano’s Dreams, 155; and Rodriguez, Richard, 16, Carmelita Tropicana, 117; and Trujillo’s 194n9; and Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, What Night Brings, 69-70, 72-79, 83-84, 117; and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 73 87-88, 90

214 INDEX Fanon, Frantz, 18, 58, 138-139, 142, Hayworth, Rita, 75

192—193NnI2, I96NI1 hegemony, 98—IOI, 111, 138; and theoretical Faults (de la Pena), 150-152 production, 171-173, 175, 177-178, 180, femininity, 30-31, 75-77, 79, 94, lI7, 130, 149 184-185 feminists, 6, 10, 17, 26, 34, 196n1; and de la help-wanted ad (Romo-Carmona), 32-34 Pena’s narrative work, 100-101, 106; Hernandez, Ellie, 157

Hurtado’s views on, 129, 155; and heteroglossia, 53-54 Palacios’s performances, 129, 134; and heterosexuality/heteronormativity, 2, 6, Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 117-118 14-15, 94, 98; and de la Pena’s narrative

Fernandez, Salvador C., 97 work, IOI, UI, 151-152; and Gomez’s

Flores, Juan, 192nII jaywalker, 46, 56-61, 64, 67; and Flores, William V., 45-46 Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, Fonda, Bridget, 136 136-138, 140-141; and identity labels,

Forte, Jeannie, 133-134 23-24, 29, 36-38; and Negr6n-Muntaner’s

Foucault, Michel, 38-39, 172, 196n8 Brincando el charco, 113, 116; and Obejas’s

Freire, Paulo, 3 Memory Mambo, 159-162, I99n6; and

Freud, Sigmund, 50, 196n8 Palacios’s performances, 124-125, 128-130,

Friends (television show), 65 132—133, 135; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams,

Fuss, Diana, 30 148-150, 152-154, 156; and Serna’s “tierras sagradas,” 96; and Trujillo’s What Night

gaydar, 15, 98, 192n8 Brings, 68, 70-72, 74, 81-83, 85, 89, 91,

gays, 4, 194n12; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 195n5, 199n7

49-50; and identity labels, 15, 27, 192n8; Highways Performance Space (Santa Monica, and Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 159, 199n6 CA), 124, 129 gaze, 39, 116; colonialist, 142;and dela Pena’s Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, 197n6

“La Maya,” 104; and de la Pena’s Hispanic as identity label, 4, 18-20 “Mariposa,” 107, 108, 109; and Gomez’s Hoffman, Dustin, 63 jaywalker, 42, 51, 58; and Negron- Hollywood, 33, 35; and Gomez’s jaywalker, Muntaner’s Brincando el charco, 115, 116; 41-47, 52, 54-66; and Gomez/Tropicana’s and Palacios’s “Taqueria Tease,” 133-134, Single Wet Female, 136; and Trujillo’s What 135; and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 81 Night Brings, 75-76 gender, 4-8, 12-13, 34~35, 98; and de la “Hombres Talking About Life, Sex, and

Pena’s narrative work, 106, 108, 112, Sangre” (collaborative show), 129-130 151-152; and de la tierra’s quiz, 30-31; and home, I-6, 9, 12-13, 92-93, 144-145, I9InI; Gomez’s jaywalker, 41~42, 50~—51, 55-57, and de la Pena’s narrative work, 97, 99, 60-61; and Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet IOI—111; and diasporic identity, 97-99, Female, 136-137, 142~143; and identity IOI-103, 197n4; and Enriquez’s A Journey labels, 14-16, 22, 24, 26, 29-31, 33-35; and Home, 118-120; and Gomez/Tropicana’s Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 159, 161, 167; and Single Wet Female, 136, 140, 142-143; and Palacios’s “Tomboy,” 128-130; and Pérez’s identity labels, 21, 29, 40; and NegronGulf Dreams, 154-156; and Rodriguez, Muntaner’s Brincando el charco, 113-114; Richard, 14-16; and Romo-Carmona’s and Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 145, 158, 167; help-wanted ad, 33; and Serna’s “tierras and Palacios’s “I Don’t Have to Explain,”

sagradas,” 95-97; and theoretical 123, 125, 128, 143; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, production, 172-173, 178-179; and 145, 148, 150, 154, 157, 167; and Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 117-118; and self-definition, 25-26; and Serna’s “tierras Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 68-72, 75~86, sagradas,” 95-97; and Troyano’s Carmelita

88, 90, I96nII Tropicana, 117; and Trujillo’s What Night

gender-fucking, 31, 193n21 Brings, 73-74, 77, 89, 195n6 Gil-Gémez, Ellen, 99, 108 “The Homeland, Aztlan/El otro México”

Gilroy, Paul, 98, 106-107 (Anzaldua), 1-2

194nn2,9, 199nI home

Gomez, Marga, 4~5, 41-67, 122, 135-143, 150, homemaking, 2, 95, 98-99, 102, 119. See also

Gomez-Pena, Guillermo, 25 homoerotic desire, 68, 96, 137, 141, 149, 153,

Gonzalez, Deena, 70 156

Greetings from a Queer Senorita (Palacios), 128, | homophobia, 2, 23, 26-27, 38~39, I9InI; and

133 de la Pena’s narrative work, 103, 108, 112;

grotesque, 151-152, 155, 162, 164, 166 and Gomez’s jaywalker, 46, 56, 67; and Gulf Dreams (Pérez), 145, 146-157, 161, 164, Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female,

167, 178, 199nn1,8 141; and Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 160, 162, 199n6; and Palacios’s “I Don’t Have

Hall, Stuart, 12, 103, 106-107, 114, 148, 194n7 to Explain,” 123-124; and Pérez’s Gulf

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 151 Dreams, 147; and Trujillo’s What Night

Harris, Geraldine, 50-52 Brings, 69

INDEX 215 homosexuality, 23, 27, 31, 57,156,194n12; and _invisibilities, 178-184, 19qn12; and de la

de la Pefia’s “Mariposa,” 108; and Gomez’s Pena’s “La Maya,” 97, 1o1; and de la jaywalker, 56-57, 59; and Obejas’s Memory tierra’s quiz, 29; and Gomez’s jaywalker, Mambo, 162-163; and Trujillo’s What Night 4-5, 42, 46-47, 58, 66; and identity labels,

Brings, 87—88, 196n14 29, 36-37, 39; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 157; hooks, bell, 57, 170-171, 195n6 and Rodriguez, Richard, 4, 13-16, 39, How to Be a Chicana Role Model (Serros), 37 191n4; and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 5,

Huggan, Graham, 65 73-75, 80-81, 83

humor, 50-52, 54, 135 Invisible Man (Ellison), 178-179

Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez), 16

Hurtado, Aida, 129, 155-156, 169-170, 176, Jackson, Samuel L., 63

184-185, 189, 191n4 Jagose, Annamarie, 27, 69

hypermasculinity, 150-152, 155, 162, 167, jaywalker (Gomez), 4-5, 41-67, 194nn2,9

199nN7 Jaywalker (in jaywalker), 41-48, 50-66, I94n2 | Jorgensen, Christine, 84-86, I96n1I3

identity, 4, 12, 23, 29, 40, 93; and dela Pefa’s A Journey Home (Enriquez), 118-120 narrative work, 102, 105, 108-109; and de

la tierra’s quiz, 30; and diaspora, 97-98; Keating, AnaLouise, 24 and Enriquez’s A Journey Home, 118, 120; Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 57 and Gomez’s Cochina, 48; and Gomez’s Koyama, Emi, 187 jaywalker, 41, 45, 48-49, 53, 56, 194n7; and

Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence, ITI

136-137, 140; and Negr6n-Muntaner’s Lake, Ricki, 66 Brincando el charco, 12-113; and Obejas’s language, I, 3-5, 7, Io—13; and de la Pena’s

Memory Mambo, 158-161, 199n6; and Faults, 151; and de la tierra’s quiz, 29-32; Palacios’s performances, 123, I3I—132, 135; and Gomez’s Cochina, 48; and Gomez’s and Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted ad, 34; jaywalker, 48—54; and identity labels, 17-25,

and Serna’s “tierras sagradas,” 96; 27-36, 39-40, 192—193n12; and Obejas’s theorizing, 11-13; and Troyano’s Carmelita Memory Mambo, 163; and Palacios’s “I Tropicana, 116—117; and Trujillo’s What Don’t Have to Explain,” 123-124; and Night Brings, 69—72, 76, 81, 84, 90, 195n3, Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 147-148, 150, 153-154;

196nn9g,10. See also identity labels; and Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted ad,

intersectional identities 32-33; of self-definition, 25-27; and

identity labels, 4, 10-13, 16-40, Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 70, 72, 74, 82, 192—193nnIO—12; and de la tierra’s quiz, 87-90, 196nI1. See also linguistic 30—32; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 41-43, 55; difference; linguistic reappropriation; and language, 17-25, 27-29, 192—193n1I2; sitio y lengua; Spanish language and Lopez, Jennifer, 35-37, 55; resistance Latifah, Queen, 63 to, 20-25, 193n18; risks of deleting, 35-40, Latina Feminist Group, 6, 1I96nIo 193n22; and Rodriguez, Richard, 13-16, Latina lesbians: and de la Pena’s “La Maya,” 39-40; and Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted 97; in de la tierra’s quiz, 30—31; and ad, 32—34; and self-definition, 25-27; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 41, 43, 47, 49-50,

Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 72 55-58, 63, 66-67; and identity labels,

identity politics, 4, 94, 98; and de la Pena’s 16-20, 27, 29-32, 40, 192NII; in “Mariposa,” 106; and de la tierra’s quiz, Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted ad, 32—34.

30; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 58, 62; See also queer Chicanas; queer Latinas resistance to, 22, 24-25, 28; and Rodriguez, Latina/o identity, 99; and Gomez’s Cochina,

Richard, 16, 40. See also identity labels 48; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 61-66; and “I Don’t Have to Explain” (Palacios), 123-128, Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female,

131, 143, 198nI 137-143; and identity labels, 7, 17-19, 27, 29

inclusive erotics, 108-110 Latinidad, 8-9, 47-55, 64-65, 100, 137-138, 169 indigeneity, 19; and de la Pena’s narrative Latin Lezbo Comic (Palacios), 132 work, 97, 100-105, 107—I11; and Rodriguez, Leal, Luis, 93

Richard, 16; and Serna’s “tierras Ledesma, Alberto, 191n4 sagradas,” 95-96; and Trujillo’s What Lehring, Gary, I94nI2

Night Brings, 76 Leigh, Jennifer Jason, 136

Infante, Pedro, 125 lesbians, 4, I94n1I2; and de la Pena’s “La Infinite Divisions (Rivero and Rebolledo), Maya,” 100; and de la tierra’s quiz, 31; and

195n3 identity labels, 17, 19-22, 25-27, 29, 31; and

intersectional identities, 7, 12-13, 29, 191n4; Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 159, 161-163, and Palacios’s “I Don’t Have to Explain,” 199nn6,8; and Rodriguez, Richard, 13-16, 125; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 146-147; and 39-40; and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, Rodriguez, Richard, 13—16; and Trujillo’s 196n14. See also Anglo lesbians; Latina

What Night Brings, 69—71, 195n3 lesbians; queer Chicanas; queer Latinas

216 INDEX Levins Morales, Aurora, 6, 183-184, I96nIO Najera-Ramirez, Olga, 125

Levinson, Barry, 63 national identities, 12, 17, 98-99, 102; and de linguistic difference, 7, 47, 50-54 la Pena’s narrative work, 102—103, 106,

linguistic reappropriation: and Gomez’s 108, 112; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 46; and jaywalker, 43-44; and identity labels, 10, identity labels, 23, 29, 33, 35; and Obejas’s

20, 22-23, 27 Memory Mambo, 158-161; and Serna’s Lopez, Ana M., 17 Carmelita Tropicana, 117

Living Chicana Theory (Trujillo), 69 “tierras sagradas,” 95-97; and Troyano’s Lopez, Jennifer, 35-37, 55, 61-66 National Queer Arts Festival (San Francisco),

Lopez, Natashia, 23-25, 34, 48, 71-72, 94, 99 136

Lorde, Audre, 2~3, 6, 13, 80, 89, 108, 136, 143, native speakers, 48, 51, 53-54

173, 177, 183, I96nIoO | Nava, Gregory, 64

Negotiating Performance (Taylor), 17

machismo, 60-61, 151, 162 Negrén-Muntaner, Frances, 5, 94, I12—I16,

mainstream representation, 98; and Gomez’s 120

Cochina, 48; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 4, 41, Noriega, Chon A., 17

45-46, 49, 54-59, 61-66; and “Notes from a Chicana Survivor” (Pérez), 39 Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female,

136-138, 140—I41, 143; and identity labels, Obejas, Achy, 6, 144-146, 152, 157-167, 199n8

18, 20, 23, 28, 30-33, 36-38, 40; and Oboler, Suzanne, 18-19, 30, 34, 55 Palacios’s “I Don’t Have to Explain,” 123, Off Center Arts (Austin, TX), 136 126; and theoretical production, 172, 176 “100% Latina Lesbian Checklist,” 30-31

La Malinche, 60, 154, 194-195nI4 origin, 5, 16-20, 25-26; and de la Pena’s

las margenes, 34~35, 95 narrative work, 102-103, 105, 109; and Margins (de la Pefia), 109 diasporic identity, 2, 98—99, 197n4; and Martinez, Jacqueline M., 19, 195n5 Enriquez’s A Journey Home, 118; and masculinity, 14; and de la Pefa’s narrative Gomez’s jaywalker, 53, 64; and work, 106, 151-152; and Obejas’s Memory Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, 137, Mambo, 162~164, 166—167; and Palacios’s 140; and Negron-Muntaner’s Brincando el “Tomboy,” 130; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, charco, 112, 114; and Obejas’s Memory 150, 152, 156; and Trujillo’s What Night Mambo, 145; and Romo-Carmona’s

Brings, 75, 77-79, 86 help-wanted ad, 33; and Serna’s “tierras

Massacre of the Dreamers (Castillo), 3 sagradas,” 95

master’s tools/house, 80, 89, 173, 177-178, Ortiz, Fernando, 133, 140

184, I96nIO otherness, 123; and Enriquez’s A Journey

“La Maya” (de la Pena), 97, 99-105, I09, Home, 120; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 41, 44,

IlI—112 47, 49, 51-54, 65; and Gomez/Tropicana’s

Memmi, Albert, 5, 80, 138-139, 179 Single Wet Female, 138-140, 143; and

Memorias de la revoluci6n/Memories of the identity labels, 26, 33, 37-38; and Negrén-

Revolution (Troyano), 168-169 Muntaner’s Brincando el charco, 113; and

Memory Mambo (Obejas), 145-146, 157-167, Palacios’s performances, 129, 134; and

199n8 Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 154; and Trujillo’s

merengue, 141-142 What Night Brings, 83-84 mestiza consciousness, Il, 71, 74, 115, 133,

146-147, 160, 195n4 . pachuco figure, 102, 195n4 Mexican food, 128, 133-135 198nn1,5, 199n7

Mexican Americans, 4, 13-16, 39, 102 Palacios, Monica, 5, 38-39, 122-135, 143, I50,

Mexican love songs, 125-126, 128 passing, 36, 56-57, 98, 113, 116, 119, I94nI2 Mexico, I, 16, 23, 93; and de la Pena’s patriarchy, 50, 94, 143; and de la Pena’s narrative work, 97, 100-108; and narrative work, IO1, 106-107, 112, 151-152; Enriquez’s A Journey Home, 119; and and Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 162-163, 167,

Serna’s “tierras sagradas,” 96 199n8; and Palacios’s “Tomboy,” 123,

Milk of Amnesia/Leche de Amnesia 128-130, 132; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams,

(Tropicana), 198—199nI6 148-149, 152, 155-156; and Trujillo’s What mimicry, 139-140, 198—I99nI6 Night Brings, 69-72, 74-75, 78-81, 89,

Minh-ha, Trinh T., 10, 153, 173, 179, 184 196ng, 199n7

misogyny, 13, 26, 40, 89, IOI, 108, 155, 162 Paz, Octavio, 10, 60-61, 102, 194nI3, 195n4

mistranslations, 50-52 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 3

Montoya, Gina, 21-23, 25 pedestrian life in Los Angeles, 41, 43-45, 47, Moraga, Cherrie, 2, 6, 8, 24, 26-28, 92-93, 53, 61, 65-66

II2, 138-139, 143, 156, 159-160, 170, 199n8 penis envy, 68, 77-80, 162—163, 196n8,

motherhood, 93-94, 96-97 199nn7,8

Munoz, José Esteban, 45-46, 55, 57, 94, 108, Pérez, Emma, 4, 6, Il, 39, 70, 144-157, IG6I, 164,

I2I—122, 200n2 167, 178, 196nn8,IO, 11, 1I99nnI,8; and

INDEX 217 decolonial imaginary, 123, 136, 193n22. See and Enriquez’s A Journey Home, 119; and

also sitio y lengua : Gomez’s jaywalker, 44, 50, 55-57, 65; and performativity, 5, 12, I2I-122; Arrizn’s views Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, On, 22, 42, 121; Butler’s views on, 46, 76-77; 137-138, 140-141; and identity labels, 17,

and de la tierra’s quiz, 29; and Gomez’s 20-25, 27, 29, 31, 33-36; and Obejas’s

jaywalker, 42, 46-52, 58; and Memory Mambo, 160—161; and Palacios’s “I Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, 143; Don’t Have to Explain,” 123, 126; and

and Palacios’s performances, 123127, Rodriguez, Richard, 13-16; and 130-131, 133, 135; and Trujillo’s What Night Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted ad, 33-34;

Brings, 76-77 and Serna’s “tierras sagradas,” 95, 97; and

Performing la Mestiza (Gil-G6mez), 108 theoretical production, 172-173, 175, pleasure, sexual: and de la Pena’s “La Maya,” 178-179; and Troyano’s Carmelita

tor; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 60; and Tropicana, 116-117; and Trujillo’s What Negrén-Muntaner’s Brincando el charco, Night Brings, 70, 75-76, 196nIt 115-116; and Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 162; “The Race for Theory” (Christian), 182-183 and Palacios’s performances, 131-132, 134, racism, 26, 38, 94; and de la Pena’s “La

143; and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, Maya,” 101, 103; and Gomez’s jaywalker,

78-80, 90-91, 196nn8,9 46, 57, 67; and Gomez/Tropicana’s Single

“Prisioneras del amor” (musical number), Wet Female, 141; and Palacios’s “Tomboy,”

117-118 129; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 155; and

Puerto Ricans, 35-36, 55, 64, III; and theoretical production, 171, 175-176; and Enriquez’s A Journey Home, 119; in Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 71 Negr6n-Muntaner’s Brincando el charco, “radical ambiguity,” 19, 195n5 112~116; in Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 145, “Raging Exotics: Women of Color Caucus”

158—161, 163 (Portland State Univ.), 185-190

Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology (Sandoval- Ramos, Juanita, 6, 20, 160

. Sanchez and Saporta Sternbach), 38 rape, 154-157, 165-166

Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 95, 195n3

queer: as identity label, 2, 4—5, 12, 25-27, 29, return home. See coming home 195n2; and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, Reuter, Donald, 192n8

69, 72. See also entries beginning with Rich, Adrienne, 82, 199n8 queer Rivero, Eliana, 34-35, 95, 195n3

queer Chicanas, I, 3, 5, 7—-II, 92-95, 98-99, Rodriguez, Juana Maria, 28-29, 170 197n6; and de la Pena’s narrative work, 92, Rodriguez, Richard, 4, 13-16, 39-40, 98, 99-112, 151-152; and Enriquez’s A Journey 191n4, 194n9 Home, 118, 120; and identity labels, 13, Roman, David, 121 15-17, 19, 39; and Palacios’s performances, Romero, César, 123 123-128, 130-135; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, Romo-Carmona, Mariana, 32-34 145-150, 152-154, 156-157; and Rodriguez, Rueda Esquibel, Catri6na, 6, 8, 90, 97, 149

Richard, 4, 13, 15-16, 39; and Serna’s Rushin, Donna Kate, 24, 34 “tierras sagradas,” 95~97; and Trujillo’s Ryan, Meg, 14!

196nI4 Saffran, William, 98 queering, 4, 48, 83 Sanchez, Rosaura, 16 What Night Brings, 68-72, 80-91, 195n5,

queer Latinas, I-6, 8~13, 92-95; and art as.a Sandoval, Chela, 70, 83 weapon, 168-169, 171; and de la Pena’s Sandoval-Sanchez, Alberto, 38, 134 narrative work, 99—IOI, 108, I1J; and Saporta Sternbach, Nancy, 38, 134 Enriquez’s A Journey Home, 118-120; and Sappho, 19-20 Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, Schlossberg, Linda, 36, 57 136-143; and identity labels, 16-20, 22, 27, Schweizer, David, 136, 142

29; and Negrén-Muntaner’s Brincando el Selena, 64

charco, 115-116; and Obejas’s Memory self-definition, 25-28, 43, 47, 71, 88, 90—91 Mambo, 145, 158-161, 163-164, 166; and self-hatred, 136, 138-139, 143, 154

Serna’s “tierras sagradas,” 95-96; Serna, Cristina, 5, 93-97, 105, I20, 145, 150, and theoretical production, 169-178; and ° 156 Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 117-118. Serros, Michele, 37-38, 113, 174-175

See also Latina lesbians sexism, 13, 38, 39, 94; and de la Pena’s Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive narrative work, 1o1, 103, 106; and Gomez’s

Spaces (Rodriguez), 170 jaywalker, 46, 57, 67; and Obejas’s Memory Queer Soul (Palacios), 198n1 Mambo, 162; and Palacios’s queer world-making, 12I—122, 181, 200n2 performances, 128-129, 132—133; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 155; and Serna’s

race, 12, 98—99; and de la Pena’s narrative “tierras sagradas,” 96; and Trujillo’s What work, 99, 108; and de la tierra’s quiz, 31; Night Brings, 78, 82, 89, 91

218 INDEX sexuality, 3, 5-6, 94, 98-99; and de la Pena’s “Speaking in Tongues” (Anzaldua), 181-182, narrative work, IOO—IOI, 103-104, I107—II0, 199n3 112, 151; and de la tierra’s quiz, 31; and Sphere (film), 63

Enriquez’s A Journey Home, 120; and spirituality, 69, 90, 95-96, 132 Gomez’s Cochina, 48; and Gomez’s Spitta, Silvia, 1oI-102

jaywalker, 50, 56-57, 59-60; and Spurlin, William J., I99n6

Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, Stavans, Ilan, 162-163 136~—137, 140—143; and identity labels, Steen, Monica, 187 19-25, 27-29, 31, 33-34; and Negron- stereotypes, 6, 17, 33, 38; and Gomez’s Muntaner’s Brincando el charco, 115-116; Cochina, 48; and Gomez’s jaywalker, 42, and Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 159-163, 167, 46-49, 52, 54, 56, 58-61, 63-64, 66, 199n8; and Palacios’s performances, 194n13; and Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet 126—127, 130-135; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, Female, 138-140; and Palacios’s 147-148, 155; and Rodriguez, Richard, 16; “I Don’t Have to Explain,” 127; and Pérez’s and Romo-Carmona’s help-wanted ad, 33; Gulf Dreams, 154; and Troyano’s Carmelita

and Serna’s “tierras sagradas,” 96; and Tropicana, 169; and Trujillo’s What Night theoretical production, 172-173, 175, 178; Brings, 77 and Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 117; Stone, Sharon, 63 and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 68-72,75, subversive strategies, 94; and de la Pena’s

77-78, 81-84, 87-88, 90, 196n9 narrative work, 100, 102, III, 150; and

silences, 4, I2, 99; and de la Pena’s narrative Gomez’s jaywalker, 50, 52; and work, 97, 151; and de la tierra’s quiz, 29; Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female,

and Gomez’s jaywalker, 42; and 139-140; and Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 150;

Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, 142; and Palacios’s performances, 126, 134; and and identity labels, 29, 38, 193n22; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 150, 156; and Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 164-165; and theoretical production, 171, 173; and Palacios’s “Tomboy,” 129; and Pérez’s Gulf Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 118; and Dreams, 150, 155; and Rodriguez, Richard, Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 71, 73-75,

16; and theoretical production, 173; and 78-82, 89, 195N5, I96nI0 Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 117; and Svich, Caridad, 46, 49 Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 69, 73-74, 80,

82-83, 86 “Taqueria Tease” (Palacios), 133-135

Simerka, Barbara, 132 Taylor, Diana, 17, 29

similitude, 5, 92, 144-146, 167; and Obejas’s Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (del

Memory Mambo, 158; and Palacios’s Alba Acevedo et al.), 180 performances, 123-128, 132-133; and Tenepal, Malintzin (La Malinche), 60, 154,

Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 146-147, 150 194-195nI4

Single Wet Female (Gomez and Tropicana), theoretical production, 169-178, 180-181

135-143, 199nI Third World perspective, 3, II, 37, 100, 123,

sitio y lengua (space and language), 4, 6, 8, 168-169, 176, 181

II-13, 26; and de la Pena’s “La Maya,” 102; This Bridge Called My Back (Anzaldia and

and de la tierra’s quiz, 29; and Gomez’s Moraga), 24, 179, 181 jaywalker, 5, 62, 66; and identity labels, 21, | “Throws Like a Girl” festival, 136

24-25, 40; and Obejas’s Memory Mambo, “tierras sagradas” (Serna), 95-97 165; and Rodriguez, Richard, 15, 40; and Tirado White, Lidia, 28

theoretical production, 174-175, 177; tokenizing, 34, 41, 62, 65-66, 70 and Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 116; “Tomboy” (Palacios), 128-132, 199n7 and Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 5, 69-72, “To(o) Queer the Writer” (Anzaldta), 16

74-75, 78, 82-83, 89-91, I96nIO “tortillera,” 15, 27-28

sodomy, 59-60 traitors, 60, 94, 194-195nI14

Solis, Javier, 125 transsexual/transgendered identities, 56, 68, Spanglish, 22, 51-52, 110, 124 78, 83-85, 89, 196nI3

Spanish language, 7; and de la Pena’s tropicalization, 100-102, IlI—12, 138 “Mariposa,” 108, 110; and de la tierra’s Tropicalizations: Transcultural quiz, 30~31; and Enriquez’s A Journey Representations of Latinidad (Aparicio and Home, 120; and Gomez’s Cochina, 48; and Chavez-Silverman), 100-102, III

Gomez’s jaywalker, 48-54; and Tropicana, Carmelita, 5, 16-118, 122, 135-143, Gomez/Tropicana’s Single Wet Female, 137, 150, 198—199nI6, I99nI; and art as weapon, 139; and identity labels, 19, 20-23, 28-31; 168—169, I71 and self-definition, 25-27; and Serna’s Troyano, Alina, 94, 116-117, 135, 168. See also

“tierras sagradas,” 95; and Tropicana, Carmelita

theoretical production, 174~175; and Troyano, Ela, 94, 116—118, 120, 168 Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 116 Trujillo, Carla, 5-6, 8, 20, 68-91, I95nI, 199n7

INDEX 219 71-72 oe series), 50, 61

“Trying to Be Dyke and Chicana” (Lopez), 23, “Voices from the Margins” (performance

Turner, Kathleen, 59-61 voyeurism, 116, 134-136, I4I unmarked status, 36, 38, 44, 46, 55-56, 119, Watkins, Mel, 138

122 “Welcome to America” (Romo-Carmona),

“The Uses of the Erotic” (Lorde), 183 32-33

U.S.—Mexico border region, 1, 49, 93, 119 What Night Brings (Trujillo), 68—91, 195n1, 199N7

Van Gennep, Arnold, 133 whitening, 18, 36, 57, 113, 138-139,

verisimilitude, 53, 157 192—193nI2, I96NII

victimization: and de la Pena’s Faults, 151; With Her Machete in Her Hands: Reading and Obejas’s Memory Mambo, 164, 166; and Chicana Lesbians (Rueda Esquibel), 90

Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 148, 154-155; and women healers, 95-96 Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana, 117; and women’s studies, 184-190

90 Xicanisma, 8

Trujillo’s What Night Brings, 72-75, 78-80,

violence, I, 6; and de la Pena’s Faults, 151-152;

and Gomez’s jaywalker, 47; and Obejas’s Yamada, Mitsuye, 179 Memory Mambo, 145-146, 160-161, 163-167, | Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 35 199n6; and Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, 145-146,

148-150, 154-157, 167; and Trujillo’s What Zamora, Bernice, 195n3

Night Brings, 69, 73-76, 79, 81, 89-90, Zavella, Patricia, 78, I96n9 196nII

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