Imagining LatinX Intimacies. Edward A. Chamberlain
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both spoken and beneath the surface: to create alternative and meaningful spaces where Latinx queers can congregate, share knowledge, and resist processes that threaten their lives.
Looking to the cultural history of queer Latinx experiences, the act of creating social spaces and intimacies takes place in a number of ways both planned and otherwise. While there are many permutations of this socio-spatial phenomena across the US mainland and beyond, one of the previous and high-profile examples of alternative space-making is a space known as “Nuyorico”—a portmanteau term that captures the alchemy of connecting New York City’s geography and Puerto Rican cultures.[35] To a similar extent, queer groups of all heritages have come together to fashion alternative community spaces like those of the Radical Faeries, who instantiated shared spaces in natural settings in a kind of “back-to-the-land counterculturalism.”[36] Much like the Radical Faeries and Latinx queers discussed here, I myself have found a need for queer social spaces for the sake of developing a close, intimate connection with like-minded people. After entering college for instance, I attended our campus’s queer student union, which was established in the late 1970s and went by the name “Gay Union of Trenton State” (GUTS). As I attended the weekly meetings, I wished such a social space had existed at my rather straitlaced high school. The scarcity of such sites is troubling for a range of reasons and points to the value of reimagining sites that might not initially seem to have queer social potential. To fashion these social contexts is a critical and creative process that lays a crucial groundwork for new alliances and homes for ethnic and social groups such as queer Latinx peoples who are made to feel like outsiders. In looking to the extant research, forms of home have received more attention by researchers in Latina/o and Latinx studies in recent years.[37] Often such studies focus on social dimensions of Latina/o families, yet only a few of them have begun to theorize the multifaceted queer dimensions and efflorescence of Latinx intimate spaces in modern representation.
Spanning the space of the family home to more expansive social realms, this book speaks to the fraught relations that Latinx queers experience in heteronormative cultural contexts in the United States during the 1990s and early 2000s. This book largely gives its focus to examples, ideas, and theories of non-normative Latinx sexualities and spatial thinking, while also remaining attentive to the distinctive ways that notions of “place” have been envisioned by scholars.[38] The concepts of space and place are helpful tools for understanding the troubled and unique social relations produced in and around queer Latinx communities. In an article written for Time Magazine, the cultural historian Julio Capó insightfully comments on these troubled relations by highlighting the ways that “queer and transgender Latinos have historically fallen victim to habitual and casual violence by both the state and civilians.”[39] This dismaying and painful pattern of violence takes place in innumerable landscapes, constituting an unsavory sociopolitical phenomenon that I call spatial violence—an ingrained predicament that is perpetrated through quotidian relations and processes of the white and heterosexual US nation-state. Disturbing forms of spatial violence occur at one of the spaces commonly explored in the field of Latina/o studies—the borderlands—resulting from various kinds of discrimination and physical violence take place at borders and within the wake of such sites.[40] Envisioned as an herida abierta (open wound) by Anzaldúa, this liminal kind of socio-physical space looms large in Latina/o and Latinx cultural production from the latter half of the twentieth century and into the present.[41] To counter that vulnerability of being wounded, queer Latinx peoples use their creative ingenuity to imagine beneficial spaces of connectivity, including new visions of domestic life and social spheres occurring in less obvious expanses such as the Internet where the spatial dynamics of diffusion and discontinuity allow for less fixity in human spatiality.[42] These spaces also include the geographies of coalition-building, which can take place across a range of sites and is one of the beneficial outcomes of fostering queer spaces. Imagining Latinx Intimacies highlights this coalition-building to speak to the positives of fostering bridges across social divides and finding common cause for the purpose of creating positive social change.
Instead of accepting the idea of the family home and one’s local homeland as being the most important social space of community-building and self-creation, this book explores the manner in which queer Latinx peoples craft a variety of socio-spatial experiences. This in turn provides blueprints for living a more desirable and rewarding life that is not predicated on the structures of capitalism, which are often sexist, homophobic, and racist in their composition. I use the word blueprint intentionally here to speak to the belief that the caustic homophobia of the past and present necessitates the creation of new plans for inclusive and forward-thinking communities. Such blueprints can open our minds to the alternative ways of existing in a world that has taken a punitive stance against brown peoples who exhibit transgressive genders and sexualities. In looking back, the sociologist Sean Cahill expounds on these dynamics through a lens of sexuality studies by identifying how “the religious right has sought to pit gay and lesbian people against people of color and to portray the two communities as mutually exclusive.”[43] As Cahill shows in his study of black and Latino same-sex households, the divisive acts of some traditionalists can sometimes have the effect of inhibiting the formation of coalitions that can engender positive formulations like community dialogue in socially diverse spaces.
As a part of this building of coalitions, the research collected in Imagining Latinx Intimacies provides a glimmer of the multiplicity of sociopolitical coalitions that can be built. This book however, has limits, too. Much of it focuses on the lives of young people and those entering mid-life. More research and coalition-building must be done to support the lives of elder Latinx queers, who sometimes have been cast aside. Nonetheless, this coalition-building has been (and continues to be) crucial for creating political progress. As David Eng explains, “our historical moment is defined precisely by new combinations of racial, sexual, and economic disparities.”[44] In light of ongoing inequalities, a more enlivening and thoughtful set of blueprints is necessary. Developing such blueprints can allow us to foster the more hospitable “queer futurity” that has been theorized by scholars like Muñoz.[45] Moreover, as researchers show, the real-life experiences of encountering discrimination, hate, and violence in the private and public spheres negatively affects the emotional and physical well-being of queer Latinx people as well as similarly marginalized sexual minority groups. Being displaced from one’s home, as we see happen in González’s novel The Mariposa Club, has been shown to have a profound impact on one’s self-esteem, sense of self, and self-development. In studying The Mariposa Club, which shows a young transgender girl being forced out of her home, there is a parallel with González’s own experience. In an interview, he explains, “like many gay men, I had to leave my family in order to thrive. But that lack of familial love—that emptiness—continues to haunt me.”[46] Such struggles also have been explored by scholars such as T. Jackie Cuevas, whose research on gender variant critique in Chicanx communities attests to the challenges of blazing a trail beyond the gender binary.[47] In this same context, recent studies have shown that queer Latinx youths are twice as likely to feel they lack social belonging in their communities, and they are also twice as likely to be excluded in public school spaces where students bully LGBTQ students for going against the norms of gender and sexuality.[48]
Considering how queer Latinx artists have been pressed by traditionalist norms and policies of people such as the now-deceased Senator Jesse Helms, who actively fought against federal funding for art programs and AIDS research, there is a great need for spaces to connect, create, and practice forms of self-care in the 1980s and thereafter.[49] Such spaces are, like the identities that frequent them, shaped by several factors, including nonconforming experiences of gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality. This book neither purports that all Latinx experiences are similar, nor does this project use the nomenclature of Latino, Latina, or Latinx to blur the many diverse lives of individuals considered here. I employ an approach that is similar to that of scholars such as Muñoz, who have articulated critiques about the manner in which the experiences of Latinx peoples are often generalized. In the past, critics spoke about “the Latino culture,” which conjures to mind a monoculture that flattens the distinctiveness and multiplicity of Latinx social experiences.[50] Instead