Ambientes_New Queer Latino Writing Read online

  This is what José Muñoz has recently posited in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2010) when he notes, “turning to the aesthetic in the case of queerness is nothing like an escape from the social realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations. Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”12 And it is toward that utopian future of democratic possibilities, beyond the national amnesias regarding queer Latino inequality and abjection with which I began this introduction, that the queer Latino writing included in Ambientes envisions versions of “home” differently, ways of being in our world that instantiate practices of queer Latino freedom for our present and our futures.

  NOTES

  1. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, “Hispanics are the nation’s largest minority ethnic group. They numbered 46.9 million, or 15.4% of the total U.S. population, in 2008, up from 35.3 million in the 2000 Census,” yet they are also the least likely to graduate from high school not to mention college (http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=121). These statistics also make the United States the third-largest “Hispanic” country in the world.

  2. Stavans, Acosta-Belén, and Augenbraum, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, liii.

  3. Lima, The Latino Body, 22–55.

  4. For a fuller accounting of Ruiz de Burton’s novel in relation to Anglo-American encroachment, see my “Spanish Speakers and Early ‘Latino’ Expression.” The Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage (RUSHLH) project has been responsible for much of the important archival and recovery work to unearth and rediscover texts otherwise destined to oblivion in archives and individual collections across the country. Directed by Nicolás Kanellos, the project seeks to “locate, identify, preserve and make accessible the literary contributions of U.S. Hispanics from colonial times through 1960 in what today comprises the fifty states of the Union.” RUSHLH is housed at the University of Houston, and the project’s important publishing imprint, Arte Público Press, has been responsible for altering our understanding of the national “American” literary landscape (see http://www.class.uh.edu/hispanicstudies/resources.asp and http://www.latinoteca .com/recovery/).

  5. Eng, “The End(s) of Race,” 1484.

  6. By “queer” I am following Alexander Doty’s critically important use of the term. He writes, “I am using the term ‘queer’ to mark a flexible space for the expression of all aspects of non- (anti-, contra-) straight cultural production and reception” (Making Things Perfectly Queer, 3). The initial critique of cultural (hetero)normativity emerged in the United States in the 1990s. The standard texts include Michael Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993), Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (1997), and many others. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1993) also provided an influential critique of heteronormative power relations by charting how “heterosexual” men bonded “homosocially” in order to perpetuate class and heterosexual power while maintaining erotically charged intimacies. It was not until the late 1990s and, more productively into the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, that queers of color began to systematically imbricate questions of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and language into the polemic. An exception that proves the rule was Tomás Almaguer’s important early essay, “Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity” (1991). However, the major book-length studies to accomplish this in Latino cultural studies were José Esteban Muñoz’s Dis-identifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), José Quiroga’s Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (2000), Juana María Rodríguez’s Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (2003), and others.

  7. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:53–73.

  8. On April 23, 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer passed Immigration Law SB1070, which, in effect, sanctions racial profiling and discrimination. The Arizona law makes the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and gives the police broad powers to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Additionally, Governor Brewer signed House Bill 2281, which effectively prohibits schools from offering courses at any grade level that advocate ethnic solidarity, are deemed unpatriotic, or are considered to cater to specific ethnic groups. In effect, this literally erases Latino literary or cultural studies as well as related programs at schools, colleges, and universities. As of this writing, Arizona Republicans will likely introduce legislation in the fall of 2010 that would deny birth certificates to children born in Arizona—and thus American citizens according to the U.S. Constitution—to parents who are not legal U.S. citizens.

  9. Butler reads Continental philosophy’s relationship to power in decidedly ecumenical terms. In her analysis, “power that at first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity” (Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 3). She continues, “If there is no formation of the subject without a passionate attachment to those by whom she or he is subordinated, then subordination proves central to the becoming of the subject” (7).

  10. Picano, A True Likeness, xv.

  11. Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad, 5.

  12. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Almaguer, Tomás. “Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (1991): 75–100.

  Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

  ________ Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

  _________. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

  Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

  Eng, David. “The End(s) of Race.” PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008): 1479–93.

  Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction, translated by

  Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.

  Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

  Lima, Lázaro. The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

  ________ “Spanish Speakers and Early ‘Latino’ Expression.” In American History through Literature, 1820–1870, edited by Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert D. Sattelmeyer, 1118–23. New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 2005.

  Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

  _______. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

  Picano, Felice, ed. A True Likeness: Lesbian and Gay Writing Today. New York: The Sea Horse Press, 1980.

  Quiroga, José. Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

  Rodríguez, Juana María. Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

  Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo. The Squatter and the Don: A Novel Descriptive of Contemporary Occurrences in California. Edited by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992. First published in 1885.

  Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

  Stavans, Ilan, Edna Acosta-Belén, and Harold Augenbraum, eds. The Norton Anthology of
Latino Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

  Warner, Michael. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

  Kimberle

  ACHY OBEJAS

  I have to be stopped,” Kimberle said. Her breath blurred her words, transmitting a whooshing sound that made me push the phone away. “Well, okay, maybe not have to—I’d say should—but that begs the question of why. I mean, who cares? So maybe what I really mean is I need to be stopped.” Her words slid one into the other, like buttery babies bumping, accumulating at the mouth of a slide in the playground. “Are you listening to me?”

  I was, I really was. She was asking me to keep her from killing herself. There was no method chosen yet—it could have been slashing her wrists, or lying down on the train tracks outside of town (later she confessed that would never work, that she’d get up at the first tremor on the rail and run for her life, terrified that her feet would get tangled on the slats and her death would be classified as a mere accident—as if she were that careless and common), or just blowing her brains out with a polymer pistol—say, a Glock 19—available at Wal-Mart or at half price from the same cretin who sold her cocaine.

  “Hellooooo?”

  “I hear you, I hear you,” I finally said. “Where are you?”

  I left my VW Golf at home and took a cab to pick her up from some squalid blues bar, where hers was the only pale face in the place. The guy at the door—a black man old enough to have been an adolescent during the civil rights era, but raised with the polite deference of the previous generation—didn’t hide his relief when I grabbed my tattooed friend, threw her in her car, and took her home with me.

  It was all I could think to do, and it made sense for both of us. Kimberle had been homeless, living out of her car—an antique Toyota Corolla that had had its lights punched out on too many occasions and now traveled unsteadily with huge swatches of duct tape holding up its fender. In all honesty, I was a bit unsteady myself, afflicted with the kind of loneliness that’s felt in the gut like a chronic and never fully realized nausea.

  Also, it was fall—a particularly gorgeous time in Indiana, with its spray of colors on every tree, but in our town, fall held a peculiar seasonal peril for college-aged girls. It seemed that about this time every year, there would be a disappearance—someone would fail to show up at her dorm or study hall. This would be followed by a flowering of flyers on posts and bulletin boards (never trees) featuring a girl with a simple smile and an offer of a reward. Because the girl was always white and pointedly ordinary, there would be a strange familiarity about her: everyone was sure they’d seen her waiting for the campus bus, or at the commons or the bookstore, or at the Bluebird the previous weekend.

  It may seem perverse to say this, but every year we waited for that disappearance—I’d grown up in town and it had been going on forever, it seemed—not in shock or horror, or to look for new clues to apprehend the culprit: we waited in anticipation of relief. Once the psycho got his girl, he seemed pacified, so we listened with a little less urgency to the footsteps behind us in the parking lot, worried less when running at dawn. Spared, we would look guiltily at those flyers, which would be faded and torn by spring, when a farmer readying his corn field for planting would discover the girl among the papery remains of the previous year’s harvest.

  When Kimberle moved in with me in November, the annual kill had not yet occurred—the butcher was late—and I was worried for both of us, her in her car and me in my first floor one-bedroom, the window open for my cat, Brian Eno, to come and go as she pleased. I had trapped the window sash so that it couldn’t be opened more than a few inches—that’s all Brian Eno needed—but that meant that it was never closed all the way, even in the worst of winter.

  In my mind, Kimberle and I reeked of prey. We were both boyish girls, pink and sad. Her straight blonde hairs moved in concert and she had features angled to throw artful shadows; mine, by contrast, were soft and vaguely tropical, overwhelmed by a carnival of curls. She was certain she could fight off any asshole, but I wasn’t so sure. We both seemed to be in weakened states. Her girlfriend had caught her in flagrante delicto and walked out; depression had swallowed her in the aftermath. She couldn’t concentrate at her restaurant job, mixing up simple orders, barking at the customers, so that it wasn’t long before she found herself at the unemployment office (where her insistence on stepping out to smoke cost her her place in line so many times she finally gave up).

  It quickly followed that she went home one rosy dawn and discovered that her landlord, aware that he had no right to do so but convinced that Kimberle (now four months late on her rent) would never get it together to legally contest it, had stacked all her belongings on the sidewalk, where they had been picked over by the students at International House, headquarters for all the third-world kids on scholarships that barely covered textbooks. All that was left was a tennis racket with broken strings, a few T-shirts (mostly black) from different political marches, books from her former and useless major in Marxist theory (one with a note in red tucked between its pages that read “COMUNISM IS DEAD!” which we marveled at for its misspelling), and, to our surprise, her battered iBook (the screen was cracked though it worked fine).

  Me, I’d just broken up with my boyfriend—it was my doing, it just felt like we were going nowhere—but I was past the point of righteousness and heavily into doubt. Not about my decision; that I never questioned. But about whether I’d ever care enough to understand another human being, whether I’d ever figure out how to stay after the initial flush, or whether I’d get over my absurd sense of self-sufficiency—I was haunted by those questions.

  When I brought Kimberle to live with me she hadn’t replaced much of anything, and we emptied the Toyota in one trip. I gave her my futon to sleep on in the living room, surrendered a drawer in the dresser, pushed my clothes to one side of the closet, and explained my alphabetized CDs, my work hours at a smokehouse one town over (and that we’d never starve for meat), and my books.

  Since Kimberle had never visited me after I’d moved out of my parents’ house—in truth, we were more acquaintances than friends—I was especially emphatic about the books, prized possessions I’d been collecting since I had first earned a paycheck. I pointed out the shelf of first editions, among them Richard Wright’s Native Son, Sapphire’s American Dreams, Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando, a rare copy of The Cook and the Carpenter, and Langston Hughes and Ben Carruthers’s limited-edition translations of Nicolás Guillén’s Cuba Libre, all encased in Saran Wrap. There was also a handful of nineteenth-century travel books on Cuba, fascinating for their racist assumptions, and a few autographed volumes, including novels by Dennis Cooper, Ana María Shua, and Monique Wittig.

  “These never leave the shelf, they never get unwrapped,” I said. “If you wanna read one of them, tell me and I’ll get you a copy, or xeroxes.”

  “Cool,” she said in a disinterested whisper, pulling off her boots, long, sleek things that suggested she should be carrying a riding crop.

  She leaned back on the futon in exhaustion and put her hands behind her head. There was an elegant and casual muscularity to her tattooed limbs, a pliability that I would later come to know under entirely different circumstances.

  Kimberle had not been installed in the studio more than a day or two (crying and sniffling, refusing to eat with the usual determination of the newly heartbroken) when I noticed that Native Son was gone, leaving a gaping hole on my shelf. I assumed that she’d taken it down to read in whatever second I had turned my back. I trotted over to the futon and peeked around and under the pillow. The sheets were neatly folded, the blanket too. Had anyone else been in the studio except us two? No, not a soul, not even Brian Eno, who’d been out hunting. I contemplated my dilemma: how to ask a potential suicide if they’re ripping you off.

  Sometime the next day—after a restless night of weeping and pillow punching that I could hear from the bedroo
m, even with the door closed—Kimberle managed to shower and put on a fresh black tee, then lumbered into the kitchen. She barely nodded. It seemed that if she’d actually completed the gesture, her head might have been in danger of rolling off.

  I suppose I should have been worried about Kimberle’s whereabouts when she wasn’t home, given the threat of suicide she’d so boldly announced. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t worried at all. I didn’t throw out my razors, I didn’t hide the belts, I didn’t turn off the pilot in the oven. It’s not that I didn’t think she was at risk, because I did, I absolutely did. It’s just that when she told me she needed to be stopped, I took it to mean she needed me to shelter her until she recovered, which I assumed would be soon. I thought, in fact, that I’d pretty much done my duty as a friend by bringing her home and feeding her a cherry-smoked ham sandwich.