Unruly Imaginaries: The Relational Lives of Queer and Trans Migrants

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Authors Zecena, Ruben

Citation Zecena, Ruben. (2021). Unruly Imaginaries: The Relational Lives of Queer and Trans Migrants (Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA).

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UNRULY IMAGINARIES: THE RELATIONAL LIVES OF QUEER AND TRANS MIGRANTS

by

Ruben Zecena

______Copyright © Ruben Zecena 2021

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF GENDER & WOMEN’S STUDIES

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2021 2

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by: Ruben Zecena titled:

and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

______Date: ______May 6, 2021 Eithne Luibheid

______Date: ______May 6, 2021 Maritza Cardenas

______Date: ______May 6, 2021 Francisco J Galarte

______Date: ______May 6, 2021 Adela Licona

______Date: ______May 7, 2021 Mary Murphy

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

______Date: ______May 6, 2021 Eithne Luibheid Gender and Women's Studies

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Acknowledgements

My writing on relationality is animated by the people who bring meaning to my life.

Amidst so much disarray in the world, I am grateful to have studied amongst generous mentors whose enseñansas deserve much more recognition than a few lines. I will continue to thank you for all that you have given me. My dissertation chair, Eithne Luibhéid, believed in this project from the start and treated my writing with the kindest eyes. Because of her, I started to find my voice as a writer—which has been the best experience of graduate school. I tried to make you proud when submitting chapters, but in the back of my mind I knew that regardless of what I submitted you would congratulate me on completing a draft and offer superb feedback. Thank you for the support, the care, and most of all, thank you for asking me to not “hide my light under a bushel.” I promise I won’t. Maritza Cardenas, the first and only Central American professor I have ever had, I am grateful for your ability to ask questions that helped solidify my arguments. Sometimes, your feedback motivated me during times when I seriously doubted my ability to complete a chapter or draft a job talk. Thank you for asking the important questions, pushing me to read texts closely, and teaching me about the theoretical possibilities embedded within poetry. Francisco Galarte, I will always see you as the cool Tio who will be there for anything. During my first semester of grad school, you arranged a dinner so I could meet Maritza. I am forever grateful for this kind gesture and for teaching me how to read texts generously. Even from far away, knowing I could count on you brought ease to my anxious virgo spirit. Adela Licona, your femtorship gave me permission to have fun while writing and find beauty in the project’s imperfections. Your teachings on the both/and—and the spaces in- between—helped to form and inform many of my arguments on relationality. Gracias for all the adelantes and joy! And finally, Kaitlin Murphy, you taught me to own my arguments and stand by them (an important lesson that I continue to work on). It has been a gift to learn about performance studies from you along with seeing my writing grow—which is a result of your fierce writing support. To all of my dissertation committee, mil gracias!! While I enjoyed my time as a graduate student, it has been a struggle (to put it kindly). I am beyond grateful that I experienced the struggle bus of grad school with this fabulous crew: Juan Ochoa (queer Jota supreme), Joanna Sanchez-Avila (Central American Darkz Diva), Aly Higgins (a chic writing partner with whom to pretend to write); and the best co-organizers with the Graduate Students of Color Collective: Connie Lira-Saavedra, Desiree Esquivel, and Cindy Trejo. Working at the Institute for LGBTQ Studies gave me a wonderful queer family: Angela Labistre-Champion, Sarah Maaske, Luna Chung, and hair icon (plus fabulous boss) Jill Koyama. I am also grateful to Andrew Huerta for your pedagogical mentorship every summer with UROC. To my academic sisters, Lizeth Gutierrez and Veronica Sandoval, las quiero mucho chingonas! Muchisimas gracias to the amazing mentors who continue to offer wisdom and care since I was an undergraduate student: Linda Heidenreich, Nishant Shahani, Ashley Boyd, and Marian Sciachitano. You sent me kind emails, checked up on me, collaborated on publications (hey Ashley!), introduced me to women of color feminism and young-adult literature, and gave me much needed support while on the job market. Thank you for teaching me what feminist mentorship looks like! Thank you for the laughs, drinks, and fun times to the best girls a gay could ask for: Patricia Flores, Anna Villatoro, Deyanira Lozano, Jacquie Contreras, Claudia Olguin, Marissa 4

Olguin, Carolina Silva, and Trisha Bautista Larson. Patty, in particular, has been my go-to for new adventures and trying out new restaurants since we were in high-school. Gracias amiga for bringing joy to my life and lots of cookies. In terms of how my research is influenced by my life, my family taught me about the beauty of migration and what it means to imagine new worlds. Their unconditional love and encouragement led this sissy brown boy to become a doctor. In many ways, my dissertation is indebted to their sacrifices. My parents, Sandra Zecena and Luis Zecena, always encourage me to imagine the impossible. Whether I was worried about getting enough scholarships to enroll in college as an undocumented student, or applying to jobs during the pandemic, my mom gave me the courage and energy to keep going. Gracias por todo a mis papas, my older brother Luis Zecena, my tios y tias, and my abuela. Throughout the writing process, my furry babies Miss Lola and Mr. Toby kept me company and reminded me when it was time to take a break from writing. Lola, in particular, has a tendency to demand my attention by putting her paw on the keyboard—a diva gesture that reminds me to live in the moment. I owe both of you many treats and walks for your spirited love. And finally, Josh Carter, you followed me to the desert and taught me about selfless love. This degree is as much yours as mine, as you have been my rock in times when the ground felt shaky and held me when I most needed it. And at times, you brought me hot Cheetos when you knew I had writing deadlines (proof that you are definitely “the one”). I am excited for the new worlds we will make together in Texas.

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Table of Contents

List of figures……...…………………………………………………………..…………………..6

Abstract..………...…………………………………………………………...……………………7

Introduction..…………………………………………………………………...………………….8 Materials and Methods…………………………………………………………………...13 The Relational Lives of LGBTQ Migrants………………………………………………15 Intervention: Between Rights-Bearing Subjects and Impossible Subjects………………20 Chapter Summaries………………………………………………………………………22

Chapter 1..…………………………………………………………………..……………………25 Migrating Like a Queen: Visuality and Performance in the Trans Gay Caravan Testimonios and Performance at the Border……………………………………………..28 Queens that Assemble……………………………………………………………………37 Photojournalism and the Everyday………………………………………………………45 Queen Relationality……………………………………………………………………...54

Chapter 2…………………………………………………………………..……………………..56 Undocumented Subjects: Queer Negotiations of Time, Rights, and Nation-Based Citizenship Relational Politics: Digital Spaces, Public Cultures……………………………………..58 Deferred Temporalities…………………………………………………………………..68 Relational Identities……………………………………………………………………...79 Queer Negotiations………………………………………………………………………84

Chapter 3…………………………………………………………..………..……………………86 Transgressing Representation: The Unspoken Desires of Migrant and Diasporic Lesbians Just Friends? Queerness and Relational Ways of Life…………………………………...88 Silence and Queer Latina Gestures……………………………………………………..101 Unspoken Desires………………………………………………………………………111

Chapter 4……………………………………………………………………..…………………113 The Materiality of Being: Narration, Nostalgia, and Non-Belonging Nostalgic Recollections, Nostalgic Reclamations……………………………………...115 Narrating Material Deviance……………………………………………………………122 Queer Embodiment, Queer Spaces, and Queer Futures………………………………...135 Conclusion: Queer Migrant Lives, Material Encounters……………………………….143

Conclusion………………………………………………………………...……………….…...145 Embracing Impossibility (Un)Documents: The Pain of Documentation………………………………………….146

References………………………………………………………………………………………156 6

List of figures

Figure 1……………………………………………………………………………………………9 Wedding ceremony. Image by Rodrigo Abd.

Figure 2…………………………………………………………………………………………..43 Heartbeats flyer. Art by Genevieve Heron.

Figure 3…………………………………………………………………………………………..48 Rainbow 17 marching. Image by María Inés Taracena.

Figure 4…………………………………………………………………………………………..50 Jocelin and Estefany. Image by María Inés Taracena.

Figure 5…………………………………………………………………………………………..61 Vota Jota screenshot.

Figure 6…………………………………………………………………………………………..63 Mariella testimonial. Art by Julio Salgado.

Figure 7…………………………………………………………………………………………..71 Brandon and Moises. Still from Forbidden (2016).

Figure 8…………………………………………………………………………………………..77 Statue of Liberty. Still from Forbidden (2016).

Figure 9…………………………………………………………………………………………..80 “I am UndocuQueer.” Art by Julio Salgado.

Figure 10…………………………………………………………………………………………96 Imagining queer futures. Still from Mosquita y Mari (2012).

Figure 11…………………………………………………………………………………………99 Queer portrait. Still from Mosquita y Mari (2012).

Figure 12………………………………………………………………………………………..105 Dancing scene. Still from Mosquita y Mari (2012).

Figure 13………………………………………………………………………………………..150 Jesús Valles. Screenshot from (Un)Documents (2020).

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Abstract

Unruly Imaginaries: The Relational Lives of Queer and Trans Migrants, focuses on the lives of subjects who are rendered impossible within national imaginaries: LGBTQ migrants. I argue that while LGBTQ migrants do not escape the frameworks of the nation-state, they are nevertheless not bound to it. Through textual analysis of cultural productions by and about

LGBTQ migrants, I demonstrate how they establish relational bonds as a tool for survival. As I suggest, relationality demands a careful engagement with difference; thus, women of color feminism and queer of color critique guide my analysis of these texts. My dissertation engages the coming together of trans women and gay men at the U.S.-Mexico border through the embodiment of femininity in the 2017 Trans Gay Caravan; the flexible subject positions and identity practices of undocuqueer migrants in film and digital media; the use of sitios y lenguas

(spaces and discourses) by migrant and diasporic lesbians in film that enable them to reclaim their differences on their own terms; the strategic use of material object relations to express an impossible subject position of non-belonging; and finally, I analyze how a queer migrant performer reconceptualizes dominant notions of personhood by challenging nation-state documents. Throughout my dissertation, I ask: What can we learn about nation-state formations from the vantage point of LGBTQ migrants? What are the possibilities of creating sites of subversion within the regulatory structures of the nation-state? And how can power emerge from the very subjects who are rendered impossible in the national imaginary? It is the impossible and fabulous lives of LGBTQ migrants that construct new subject positions from which egalitarian social relations are built across differences. Most importantly, Unruly Imaginaries contends that relationality offers a blueprint for LGBTQ migrants to survive and thrive in their everyday lives.

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Introduction

On November 17, 2018, 7 couples who belong to an LGBTQ migrant caravan from

Central America participated in a symbolic mass-wedding ceremony in the border city of

Tijuana, Mexico.1 Media outlets from Mexico, the U.K., and the U.S. reported that this ceremony was “a dream come true,” as it allowed LGBTQ migrants to fulfill their fantasy of getting married (something that is not possible in their countries of origin).2 The media coverage on this mass wedding ceremony framed and normalized it within nationalist logics. Stories such as these that frame institutional belonging through marriage are common and contribute to nation- building. However, I argue that the depiction of LGBTQ migrants participating in a symbolic wedding ceremony highlights relationalities that negotiate but are not finally constrained by nationalist logics. Because the spectacle of marriage was a symbolic act that occurred as the couples were preparing to request asylum in the U.S. based on their sexual/gender identities,

LGBTQ migrants are not simply affirming their attachments to nation-state logics; rather, by celebrating their marriages as a caravan in public they construct new subject positions that strategically navigate the contours of national belonging. For example, the image of Pedro Pastor and Erick Alexander Duran (figure 1) captures an unruly negotiation with nation-state frameworks. The image highlights an everyday moment of intimacy, whereby Pedro holds

1 Nicole Acevedo, “'Dream come true': Migrant caravan LGBTQ couples celebrate mass wedding,” NBC News, November 17, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/dream-come- true-lgbtq-couples-migrant-caravan-marry-seeking-asylum-n938051 2 See, for instance, Colin Durry, “Gay couple from migrant caravan marry as they arrive in Mexico-US border town,” The Independent, November 18, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/migrant-caravan-gay-couple-wedding- mexico-us-central-america-tijuana-lgbt-a8639986.html; Maya Srikrishnan, “Border Report: A Caravan Within the Caravan Has Arrived in Tijuana,” Voice of San Diego, November 12, 2018, https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/border-report-a-caravan-within-the-caravan-has- arrived-in-tijuana/; “Migrantes LGBT de la caravana contraen matrimonio,” Telemundo, November 21, 2018, https://www.telemundo52.com/destacados/migrantes-lgbt-de-la-caravana- contraen-matrimonio_tlmd-san-diego/1991039/ 9

Erick’s face with both of his hands and offers a wide smile. Erick is wearing a silver tinsel garland with stars, a white hat, and is holding onto a bouquet of flowers—offering a sparkly rendition of conventional marriage attire. In the background, there is a community of spectators who witness the symbolic marriage alongside one of the wedding officiants from a Unitarian

Universalist Church delegation. This image serves as a point of departure for considering how

LGBTQ migrants embed themselves within national imaginaries that render their subjectivities impossible. The image shows that in shadows of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, an impossible subject, the undocumented migrant, creatively maneuvers through national frameworks to establish relational bonds.

Figure 1. Pedro Pastor (left) and Erick Alexander Duran (Right) kiss. Image by Rodrigo Abd.

While majority of the media coverage on this mass wedding ceremony focused on

Pedro’s and Erick’s relationship, what enabled these LGBTQ migrants to come together in the 10 public sphere was support from transnational communities. Prior to their arrival in Tijuana, the

LGBTQ caravan which consisted of around 80 migrants splintered off from the larger migrant exodus of more than 3,600 migrants traveling through Mexico. There are several factors that led to the group’s decision to separate from the larger group, mainly their experiences with homophobia and transphobia along the way. Because LGBTQ migrants are conscious that they are more prone to violence while migrating through Mexico—this includes experiences with forced prostitution, abduction, and physical attacks—they made the decision to splinter off from the larger caravan and be the first to arrive at the port of entry in Tijuana, and hopefully, avoid any pending legislation changes imposed by the Trump administration which viewed these caravans as an “invasion” and a threat to the nation’s borders.3 In a press release by Diversidad sin Fronteras, an LGBTQ migrant advocacy group, they write that “In this massive exodus,

LGBT people have always been present.”4 The press release observes that, “As a community we have been organizing to support our needs and during our journey we have met and helped each other. We traveled together to care for each other, not only from the violence of the state and criminal organizations, but also from the violence from civilians migrating with us.”5 It is the simple act of caring for each other, celebrating each other, and showing up for each other that exemplifies how LGBTQ migrants establish relational bonds. The image of Pedro and Erick is mediated through acts of care, acts of relation that mobilize an imaginary transgression of normative nation-state logics. While it might seem antithetical to start a project on LGBTQ migrants with a symbolic marriage celebration, particularly as queer theory generally espouses

3 Jeremy W. Peters, “How Trump-Fed Conspiracy Theories About Migrant Caravan Intersect With Deadly Hatred,” The New York Times, October 29, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/us/politics/caravan-trump-shooting-elections.html 4 Diversidad sin Fronteras, “Las Soñadoras de Centro América,” Facebook, November 20, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/flotte.roberto/posts/10161439147731337 5 Diversidad sin Fronteras, “Las Soñadoras.” 11 marriage as heteronormative, I view this marriage celebration as an unruly formation of a new subject position that is negated and made possible through strategic negotiations with power.

Unruly Imaginaries analyzes how LGBTQ migrants, as represented in cultural texts, turn towards each other as a source for survival. The images of LGBTQ couples celebrating their symbolic marriages as a collective reveals the power in telling a different story of transnational migration, one that centers the relational over the individual. In my analysis of the everyday lives, politics, and imaginaries of LGBTQ migrants, I argue that while they do not escape the regulatory frameworks of the nation-state, they are nevertheless not bound to it. I consider how national frameworks of citizenship relegate LGBTQ migrants to an impossible position, where they are considered rightless subjects in the eyes of the law. From this impossible position, they create relational strategies for survival and imagine possibilities that we need to pay attention to, which is the focus of my dissertation. This state of (non)belonging leads me to ask: What can we learn about nation-state formations from the vantage point of LGBTQ migrants? What are the possibilities of creating sites of subversion within the regulatory structures of the nation-state?

And how can power emerge from the very subjects who are rendered impossible in the national imaginary?

By attending to these questions, I offer insight into how LGBTQ migrants craft their own survival through relationality. When writing about queer utopian longings, José Esteban Muñoz theorizes queerness as “a relational and collective modality of endurance and support.”6 For subjects who are constantly battling the forces of displacement, nation-building, heteropatriarchy, border policing, criminalization, and deportability, relational modes of

“endurance and support” serve as lifelines. While much of my analysis centers the world-making

6 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009, 91. 12 aspirations and imaginaries of LGBTQ migrants, I also engage the limits of relationality—and of survival itself—in creating a sustainable political movement. After all, many of the subjects that

I write about are forced to come to terms with institutional barriers in their lives. In the case of

Pedro and Erick, their symbolic wedding allows them to declare their love in public amongst their communities, but this will not mean much when they are questioned by immigration officials at the U.S. port of entry. The symbolic wedding ceremony certainly establishes meaningful connections amongst LGBTQ migrants. However, the wedding does not resolve their problems concerning nation-state power and regulation. What the wedding accomplishes is an insistence on the pleasures and joys of celebrating each other before caravan members subject themselves to U.S. immigration control. This is a fierce reclamation of power that might seem trivial but establishes relational bonds. While relationality offers a starting point where LGBTQ migrants can survive in a world brimming with violence, their imaginaries envision a future where LGBTQ migrants can survive and thrive in their everyday lives.

When engaging the lives of LGBTQ migrants as impossible, I am describing a subject position that is negated by the law and dominant national imaginaries. Here I build on the work of Mae Ngai, who offers a rich historical analysis of the subject position of undocumented migrants when she writes, “Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility—a subject barred from citizenship and without rights.”7 According to Ngai, the “illegal” migrant is a subject whose location within the nation is a “social reality,” and at the same time, a “legal impossibility.” Read in this light, Diversidad sin Frontera’s statement asserting that “LGBT people have always been present” in migrant social movements gains new

7 Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 7. 13 meaning, as it lays claim to the presence, existence, and social realities of LGBTQ migrants while attending to their legal impossibilities. I also allude to Gayatri Gopinath’s work in

Impossible Desires, where she “signals the unthinkability of a queer female subject position within various mappings of nation and diaspora.”8 Importantly, Gopinath does not attempt to bring visibility to an otherwise invisible subject; rather, she scrutinizes the dominant logics of nation and diaspora that make this subject position unthinkable, unimaginable, and impossible within heteropatriarchal structures of power.9 Following Gopinath’s challenge to the dominant logics of the nation and diaspora, my decision to focus on LGBTQ migrants is not about visibility (although making such claims would ethically recognize the important role that

LGBTQ migrants play in fighting for justice). Instead, I bring focus to their imaginaries because they emerge from and exceed the nation, drawing on their impossible subject positions to reimagine politics as we know it.

Materials and Methods

My dissertation examines the impossible subject positions and imaginaries of LGBTQ migrants by analyzing their representation in cultural texts, which encompasses a rich archive of photography, film, poetry, literature, as well as digital activist media that include flyers, murals, and video recordings. I draw from a range interdisciplinary methodological approaches, especially visual and performance theory, film theory, literary analysis, and formal aesthetic inquiry, to tend to these diverse materials. These texts are not always recognized as central to the dominant immigrant rights movement or LGBTQ politics, but they nevertheless allude to meaning-making practices and subcultural forms of knowledge production that contest the

8 Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 15. 9 Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 16. 14 limiting frameworks of the nation-state. Such focus on cultural practices is informed by Lisa

Lowe’s important observation that culture does not resolve the type of prohibitions that the nation-state imposes (such as undocumented status), but sometimes, “cultural forms succeed in making it possible to live and inhabit alternatives in the encounter with these prohibitions; some permit us to imagine what we have still yet to live.”10 The chapters examine the meaning-making practices of LGBTQ migrants through textual analysis, which gathers information about a text through a focus on language and sociopolitical contexts.11 Textual analysis enables me to interpret the powerful imaginaries of LGBTQ migrants as they utilize culture to express their critiques, desires, and longings for a different social order. These everyday practices of meaning- making, which are inclusive of relationality, make it “possible to live” as impossible subjects and offer an unruly imaginary of worlds that we have yet to live.

In what follows I sketch how relationality functions in the lives of LGBTQ migrants as a tool for survival and describe the theoretical frameworks that animate my understanding of this term. Then I offer a brief analysis of the intervention that Unruly Imaginaries makes in thinking beyond the restricting binary of rights-bearing subjects and impossible subjects. I situate women of color feminism and queer of color critique as necessary for making sense of an impossible and devalued subject position. Finally, I close by offering chapter summaries that provide insight into my analysis of cultural texts by and about LGBTQ migrants. Most importantly, Unruly

Imaginaries contends that when LGBTQ migrants forge relationality in their everyday lives, they draw on their impossible subject positions as a source of power that enables their survival.

10 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), x. 11 Alan McKee offers an insightful observation regarding the term “text” when he writes, “A text is something that we make meaning from.” See Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide (London: SAGE Publications, 2003), 4.

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The Relational Lives of LGBTQ Migrants

Writing a dissertation about LGBTQ migrants has led me to consider key aspects of transnational migration: displacement, legal barriers, alternative relations to time and space, experiences with (non)belonging, and impossible subject positions. Based on this analysis, I engage relationality as an everyday practice and survival mechanism that LGBTQ migrants employ to navigate shifting relations of power. Relationality animates LGBTQ migrants to imagine different worlds where they are not limited to institutional forms of belonging to the nation. When LGBTQ migrants come together to contest social power, they create political coalitions and solidarities that emerge from their ability to relate across differences.12 I take cue from Martin Manalansan who notes that LGBTQ migrant lives are “constituted through struggles that oscillate between exuberance and pathos and between survival and loss.”13 Instead of romanticizing a narrative of resistance, Manalansan offers an analysis of LGBTQ migrant lives that conveys how they “struggl[e] to create scripts that will enable them to survive.”14 Likewise, relationality is about learning how to occupy an impossible subject position where LGBTQ migrants forge their survival.

12 My use of the relational is related to, but distinct, from terms like coalition and solidarity. Coalition, for instance, indexes political movements with a common end-goal, whereas relationality is more about what transpires between social actors during these coalitions. For an excellent analysis of coalition see Karma Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). On the other hand, solidarity, as Chandra Mohanty suggests, is about “praxis-oriented” struggles towards liberation, see Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 7. Solidarity is closely aligned to relationality, but it does not quite capture the everyday relations that I map throughout Unruly Imaginaries. These relations can be political like feminist solidarity, but this is not always the case. Sometimes relationality is only about survival and does not transgress dominant power. 13 Martin Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), xi. 14 Manalansan, Global Divas, 121. 16

As a theoretical framework, relationality has many lineages that consist of indigenous philosophies of relation, Edouard Glissant’s work in Poetics of Relation, approaches to human/animal relations in feminist science and technology studies, and Marxist analyses of capitalist relations of production.15 Because Unruly Imaginaries is grounded in women of color feminism and queer of color critique, I base my understandings of relationality through the rubrics of difference. In other words, by attending to the valuing and devaluing of life, I am able to grasp how LGBTQ migrants create relational bonds as a form of survival.16 My understanding of the relational is indebted to the visionary work of Audre Lorde, whose words give meaning to the everyday struggles, pleasures, and politics of subjects who were “never meant to survive.”17

In her influential speech, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Lorde challenges Western-European ideologies that neglect meaningful engagements with difference.

She argues that because we are “programmed” to ignore, reject, and misname difference, “we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.”18 By arguing that “we have no patterns for relating” across difference, she points out a fundamental problem in Western constructions of the liberal rights-bearing subject: the inability of this subject to maintain ethical relations to Others, as this subject has been shaped and constructed to belong solely to the nation.

15 For a discussion of this lineage see Jodi Byrd, “What’s Normative Got to Do with It? Toward Indigenous Queer Relationality,” Social Text 38, no. 4 (2020): 119. 16 Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson exemplify how women of color feminism and queer of color critique define difference as the valuing and devaluing of life in “Introduction,” in Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). They write that difference is “not a multiculturalist celebration, not an excuse for presuming a commonality among all racialized peoples, but a cleareyed appraisal of the devising line between valued and devalued…Difference…has serious, fundamentally deadly consequences,” 11. 17 Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival,” The Black Unicorn (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 31. 18 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 115. 17

Her critique yearns for a reclamation of difference, in which differences are utilized as a rich ground to build egalitarian social relations. Unruly Imaginaries takes up this call by documenting moments in cultural texts where LGBTQ migrants see themselves as subjects with shared, but different, struggles for survival.

Rather than accept the limits of the nation-state, I consider how LGBTQ migrants convey a relational sense of self that differs from the rights-bearing subject of the nation. Returning to my opening example, Pedro and Erick’s symbolic marriage will not grant them privileges afforded to citizens in the U.S. They are first and foremost impossible subjects; however, their decision to be married alongside fellow caravan members registers a relational understanding of their subject positions (these migrants are not the same but share an impossible relationship to the nation-state). The political stakes of Unruly Imaginaries are laid bare in the relations that

LGBTQ migrants make possible because they do not align neatly with nation-building. As I demonstrate throughout the dissertation, LGBTQ migrants occupy their impossible subject positions within and against the nation.

Importantly, when LGBTQ migrants establish relationality for the purpose of survival, their challenges to institutional forms of belonging are not welcomed. In an interview discussing homosexual ways of life, Michel Foucault identifies the world-making potentials of relationality when he observes,

We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished. Society and the institutions which frame it have limited the possibility of relationships because a rich relational world would be very complex to manage. We should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric. We should secure recognition for relations of provisional coexistence…19

19 Michel Foucault, “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 158. 18

According to Foucault, a “relational world” presents a threat to dominant institutions of power because it would be “complex to manage.” Similar to Lorde’s critique of the Western liberal subject, Foucault is concerned with the power of institutions to weaken, deplete, and impoverish social relations. This concern is represented in the treatment of the LGBTQ migrant caravan when they arrived in Tijuana. Caravan members stayed at an Airbnb in an upscale neighborhood, which was paid for by the Texas non-profit organization RAICES. During a press conference with the caravan, the President of the Playas de Tijuana Neighborhood Association critiqued the caravan’s temporary stay in the neighborhood, commenting, “I’m not talking about discriminating against them because they came from a different country. Here, what we’re asking for is order.”20 Her desire for order in this neighborhood reflects what Foucault describes as the potential threat of a relational world: an inability to manage, control, and regulate subjects.

Moreover, she expresses nationalist sentiments against LGBTQ Central American migrants who are once again framed as invading imaginary communities.

Foucault further elaborates that, “Rather than arguing that rights are fundamental and natural to the individual, we should try to imagine and create a new relational right that permits all possible types of relations to exist and not be prevented, blocked, or annulled by impoverished relational institutions.”21 As reflected in Foucault’s statement, institutions of power impoverish social relations, leading to what Lorde diagnoses as an inability to relate across differences. This issue comes to light in an exchange at the press conference when a resident from the neighborhood expressed fear about the potential “danger” that the caravan would bring to the neighborhood, stating that someone in the group could “hurt us.”22 Her use of “us” poses

20 Srikrishnan, “Border Report.” 21 Foucault, “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,” 158. 22 Srikrishnan, “Border Report.” 19

LGBTQ migrants as the racialized Other, a stranger to the neighborhood who is assumed to be violent and socially deviant. Nakai Flotte, an organizer and co-founder of Diversidad sin

Fronteras, posed a different question: “How are we supposed to know that someone among you won’t hurt us?”23 The use of “us” in the resident’s statement reveals how institutions of power impoverish social relations because they position LGBTQ migrants as having no rights to belong to this imagined community. Flotte ingeniously challenges this logic by reading “us” against the grain, in which violence resides within the neighborhood, not the caravan. She is not asking for a right to belong to the neighborhood because LGBTQ migrants create their own imagined community from which they can articulate a relational “us.”

Ultimately, Unruly Imaginaries dares to imagine a relational world that compels new understandings of subjectivity and belonging. Lorde engages the possibilities of this relational world when she writes,

We have chosen each other And the edge of each other’s battles the war is the same if we lose someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling we seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting.24

Lorde conceives the act of choosing each other as forging “new paths to our survival.”25 In her short poem, she writes that when we meet at “the edge of each other’s battles,” there is the potential to lose—which has direct effects on the lives of impossible subjects. However, the potential to win may lead to “a new and more possible meeting.” Relationality is an attempt to

23 Srikrishnan, “Border Report.” 24 Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” 123. 25 Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” 123.

20 meet at the edge of differences and establish more possible worlds. To this end, I understand relationality as a meaning-making practice that elaborates new subject positions and creates a relational ground from which LGBTQ migrants lay claim to their survival.

Intervention: Between Rights-Bearing Subjects and Impossible Subjects

By noting a difference between LGBTQ migrants and rights-bearing subjects, my dissertation scrutinizes how nation-state frameworks regulate, discipline, and control impossible subjects. I index power asymmetries that lead LGBTQ migrants to occupy an impossible subject position where they cannot exist outside of the nation-state but nevertheless maintain an unruly imaginary of the world. I invoke this binary not out of a desire to reify power asymmetries but to unsettle them. Quite simply, and as the previous section discusses, the texts that I analyze exist at the edges of the rights-bearing subject (citizens) and impossible subjects (LGBTQ migrants). In the edited collection, Queer and Trans Migrations, Karma Chávez and Eithne Luibhéid posit that,

People are never reducible to state and other dominant logics and are never ‘outside’ of these logics, either; people variously navigate state and other institutional demands in relation to identities and legibilities; people claim, inhabit, and give meaning to identity categories in ways that must be respectfully explored; and people transit among identities, too.26

Chávez and Luibhéid offer a generative space from which to analyze how LGBTQ migrants do not exist “outside” of the nation-state but are also not reducible to its frameworks. Unlike dominant approaches to identity in queer studies, which very often set up unnecessary debates on identity politics that erase difference, I underscore the importance of “respectfully” addressing identity practices and subject positions. This means not glorifying or essentializing identities, but

26 See Eithne Luibhéid and Karma Chávez, “Introduction.” In Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation, eds. Eithne Luibhéid and Karma Chávez (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 7. 21 rather, understanding that subjects engage in identity practices out of a desire to make sense of their subject positions in the world.

The chapters approach these identity practices and subject positions through the lens of women of color feminism and queer of color critique. Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick

Ferguson consider the “strange affinities” between women of color feminism and queer of color critique, as both of these fields engage difference as the valuing and devaluing of life; and yet, these fields “interrogate the desire to be valued, and therefore safe, within a system that punishes devaluation with death.”27 In my analysis of LGBTQ migrant imaginaries, I reveal how LGBTQ migrants negotiate nation-state frameworks, and at the same time, interrogate the power ascribed to these frameworks. When LGBTQ migrants request asylum at the border as a collective, as my first chapter reveals, they are not merely passive subjects requesting rights from the nation.

Rather, they contest how U.S. immigration regimes position undocumented migrants as impossible subjects by creating sites of possibility in coming together, which helps to explain why a group of LGBTQ migrants would celebrate a symbolic wedding during a perilous migration journey. Moreover, many of the subjects that I analyze do not stop short at their own survival and focus their energies on collective survival. They interrogate their “desire of valuation” by thinking beyond the frameworks of the nation-state.

This imaginary transgression reveals “a transformation that happens at the level of subjectivity.”28 A focus on impossible subjects illuminates new subject positions that transform how we inhabit the world and relate to each other (and the “we” in this sentence is always already a conditional state of being that requires the complex work of relationality). Unruly

Imaginaries calls for all migration scholarship to centrally question the desire for rights and

27 Hong and Ferguson, Strange Affinities, 14. 28 Hong and Ferguson, Strange Affinities, 16. 22 belonging in the lives of migrants. Moreover, my dissertation challenges dominant approaches in queer studies that merely reject heteronormative institutions of power, demanding for queer studies to consider what it means to not be able to simply reject power as in the case of impossible subjects. Cathy Cohen demonstrates how queer studies can move beyond the binary of heterosexual/homosexual by focusing “not in our shared history or identity, but in our shared marginal relationship to dominant power which normalizes, legitimizes, and privileges.”29

Employing this type of analysis allows me to respectfully engage the significance of Pedro and

Erick’s wedding, which can be easily misread as desiring recognition and visibility from the nation. Their symbolic ceremony registers a strategic negotiation with power that neither rejects nor fully embraces the nation-state, as evident in the treatment of the migrant caravan by Tijuana residents. In calling for a meaningful engagement with the lives of LGBTQ migrants, I envision the possibilities of inhabiting an impossible subject position from which to work towards collective survival.

Chapter Summaries

Unruly Imaginaries begins with analyzing the testimonios and photojournalistic representations of the 2017 Trans Gay Caravan. I analyze the coming together of trans women and gay men at the border through the embodiment of femininity as a visual and performative act that I call migrating like a queen. More specifically, the chapter shows how trans women and gay men draw on the spectacle as an everyday practice for survival. Their spectacular femininities enable them to build relations amongst each other, and at the same time, strategically request rights from the nation while critiquing asylum processes of isolation, individuation, and subjection. The requirement of individual, stable, and heroic migrant narratives in LGBTQ

29Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997), 458.

23 asylum processes are challenged by caravan members through their public testimonios and performative marches at the border.

Chapter 2 considers the impossible subject positions of undocuqueer migrants, who claim their existence through statements such as “I am Undocuqueer.” I demonstrate how the “I” in this statement turns into a relational “we” through imaginaries that contest and rework nation-state citizenship. I analyze a digital activist campaign called Vota Jota, sequences from the documentary Forbidden, and the mural “I am Undocuqueer” by Julio Salgado as three discursive sites that strategically draw on nation-state frameworks for survival purposes. Furthermore, I posit that LGBTQ migrants resist progressive narratives of nation-building by articulating different experiences with time and space. The analysis of the discursive strategies of undocuqueer migrants allows me to show how they create relations amongst each other and enact new forms of subjectivity.

Chapter 3 argues that the film Mosquita y Mari, directed by Aurora Guerrero, lays claim to a sitio y lengua (space and discourse) from which migrant and diasporic lesbians transgress dominant codes of representation.30 The protagonists of this film do not ask for visibility; instead, they speak through silence and embodied gestures. When Mosquita and Mari imagine alternative futures, they rely on acts of care and mutual support—which reveals the potentials of relationality to create more possible worlds. Overall, I demonstrate that by creating their own sitios y lenguas, the girls reclaim their difference in a world that renders them impossible.

Chapter 4 demonstrates how queer migrants turn to material object relations as a site of possibility, where they are able to store their memories of transnational migration, displacement,

30 Emma Pérez, “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes from a Chicana Survivor,” in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991), 99. 24 and loss, and utilize these objects to transport them to different futures. In particular, I analyze the nostalgic poetry of Sonia Guiñansaca and queer styles of narration in the novel Fiebre

Tropical by Juliana Delgado Lopera. In my analysis of both texts, I show how the relation between queer migrants and material objects calls into question the spatial/imaginary boundaries of the nation. I also pay close attention to how queer migrants and their heterosexual family members participate in what Scott Herring calls “material deviance,” as their attachment to material objects reveals a melancholic subjectivity that strays from the norm.31

Finally, I conclude my dissertation by ruminating on the relationship between LGBTQ migrants and material documents. I analyze Jesús Valles’ show (U)ndocuments because it offers a painful and illuminating representation of living sin papeles, without papers. Valles gives voice to an undocumented experience and grapples with the limits of citizenship. They also embrace life as “impossible people,” which offers one final example of how to negotiate impossible subject positions through relational tactics.32

31 Scott Herring, “Material Deviance: Theorizing Queer Objecthood,” Postmodern Culture 21, no.1 (2011). 32 Jesús Valles, (Un)Documents (Script, Austin, Texas, 2019), 19. 25

Chapter 1

Migrating Like a Queen: Visuality and Performance in the Trans Gay

Caravan

“Te amo y yo te veo, ok. Yo los voy a ver.” (I love you and I see you, ok. I will be watching you).33 —Isa Noyola

I begin with the parting words that Isa Noyola, a trans Latina activist and deputy director of the Transgender Law Center, offered to members of the first Trans Gay Caravan that took place on August 10, 2017, as they entered the gates of the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry in

Nogales, Arizona. The Trans Gay Caravan consists of seventeen trans women and gay men from

El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico, who traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border together in an effort to flee from gender and sexual violence in their home countries, gain political asylum in the U.S, and draw attention to the violence that structures their everyday lives across the hemisphere. Noyola’s promising words, “yo los voy a ver” [I will be watching you], foregrounds visuality as a powerful force that can preserve social relations between subjects

(caravan members) and the eyes of the beholder (Noyola). She kisses each member on the cheek and reassures them that no matter what happens on the other side of the border, they will be seen.

By stating “yo te veo” [I see you], Noyola posits herself as a witness to their lives and affirms their fabulous sense of self, as the members migrated through the gates of U.S. immigration control wearing tiaras, bleached hair, sunglasses, and heels. One of the members even wrapped a rainbow flag across his body to migrate, asserting not just his individual identity as a gay man, but his belonging amongst LGBTQ migrant communities. The loving gesture of kissing each

33 Nogales TV, “Caravana TransGay migrante busca asilo en EUA,” YouTube, August 10, 2017, video, 16:45, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wOQ48EiGqo 26 member on the cheek blends spectacular femininities together with ordinary acts of affection.

This gesture demonstrates how embodying high spectacles of femininity at the border becomes an everyday act of survival.

This chapter analyzes the Trans Gay Caravan’s march across Mexico and toward the

U.S.-Mexico border as a form of performative political intervention that I call “migrating like a queen.” I argue that when trans women and gay men come together at the border through the embodiment of femininity, they are able to draw on their collective power to redefine political strategies and migrate like a queen. In using the term “queen” as a coalitional rubric, I acknowledge the risk of collapsing and erasing differences between the categories of “gay” and

“trans.”34 However, I find value in recognizing the critical entanglements between queer and trans migrations, particularly as members of the Trans Gay Caravan continuously use the phrase

“chicas trans y chicos gay” when referring to themselves. This discursive act of self-definition places “trans” and “gay” alongside each other, not against or despite each other. Such discursive placement motivates my understanding of the term queen, which “is not about the production of the individual but instead about a movement, a flow, and an impulse, to move beyond the singular and individualized subjectivities…a being with, being alongside…”35 In the testimonios, flyers, video recordings, and political chants that I analyze, caravan members utilize spectacular and ordinary forms of femininity to embody the worlds they aim to shape. In these worlds, queens assemble together to contest the disciplinary regimes of U.S. immigration control—all the while wearing tiaras in public.

34 For an engaging analysis of the relationship between Trans Studies and Latina/o/x Studies, see Francisco Galarte, Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021). 35 José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, edited by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), xxxiii. 27

Through a focus on embodied femininity, this chapter asks: What visual and performative strategies do the members of the Trans Gay Caravan utilize to intervene in the everyday violence of U.S. immigration control? My analysis utilizes photography, video recordings, and photojournalism to document how the Trans Gay Caravan formulates new imaginaries. These imaginaries, as I analyze throughout the chapter, encapsulate how testimonio turns the individual

“I” into a relational “we,” political chants imagine the Americas as always already relational, frivolous dance parties animate political movements, and the affective force of pain in the lives of trans women and gay men can coexist with their joys, pleasures, and willingness to survive.

To understand how migrating like a queen offers strategies for survival, I begin by analyzing video footage from the Trans Gay Caravan’s crossing, which includes testimonios from a press conference and chants from caravan members as they assembled together at the border in

Nogales, Sonora. Next, I analyze the function of frivolity in promotional materials for a queer dance party and fundraiser for caravan members. Lastly, I analyze the photojournalistic coverage of the Trans Gay Caravan, demonstrating how a focus on the everyday allows for an understanding of pleasure in the lives of LGBTQ migrants. Migrating like a queen can be a challenging practice and is not a solution to U.S. immigration control. However, the visual and embodied performance of seventeen trans women and gay men fiercely marching toward the

U.S.-Mexico border together serves as a point of departure for analyzing the world-making possibilities embedded within this relational movement. The bonds, coalitions, and emerging relationalities of the Trans Gay Caravan set a strong precedent for the Central American caravans of 2018, many of which included LGBTQ factions. With tiaras, heels, and colorful banners, the

Trans Gay Caravan deliberately challenges the individualizing frameworks of U.S. immigration regimes and illuminates the glimmer, hope, and allure of migrating like a queen. 28

Testimonios and Performance at the Border

On August 10, 2017, a group of eleven trans women and six gay men traveled to the port of entry in Nogales, Arizona to ask for asylum. They constitute the first Trans Gay Caravan to cross the U.S.-Mexico border together and call themselves Arcoíris (Rainbow) 17. This name is distinctive of their many backgrounds, as many of them crossed multiple borders while experiencing excessive amounts of violence along the way. The majority of the caravan members met at La 72, a migrant shelter on the Guatemala-Mexico border that is known for being one of the few shelters that supports and dedicates resources for LGBTQ migrants.36 Before surrendering themselves to immigration control, the caravan held a march that lasted two hours on Nogales’s Calle Internacional. This performative march was documented by multiple media outlets and included colorful banners, animating political chants, and spectacles of high femme fabulosity. The march was organized with the help Nakai Flotte and Irvin Mondragón, who are volunteers at La 72 and founding members of the organization Diversidad sin Fronteras.37

Following the march, the caravan members walked up to the gates of U.S. immigration control with a fierce determination to not be separated from each other or be held in detention. These liberatory aspirations, however, were deferred when immigration control held the entire caravan overnight and transferred them to different detention centers in New Mexico (NM). This fraught relation between asylum, femininity, and borders constitutes the experiences of migrating like a queen, in which trans women and gay men insist on standing together in the face of nation-state power.

This performative crossing occurred at a crucial time when the Trump administration focused much of its efforts on deporting migrants, enforcing racist travel bans, and “building the

36 María Inés Taracena, “La Caravana de Resistencia,” NACLA Report on the Americas 50, no. 4 (2018): 387. 37 Taracena, “La Caravana,” 387. 29 wall.” When the Trans Gay Caravan presented themselves to U.S. immigration control, Deferred

Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programs were under scrutiny by Congress and pending future termination.38 Such anti-immigrant legislation and proposed policies build on former President Barack Obama’s administration, particularly the expansion of deportation practices and rhetorical attacks against migrants’ supposed criminality.

When Rainbow 17 reached the U.S.-Mexico border, they marched with a rainbow banner stating,

“1ra Caravana Trans Gay Migrante 2017.” The queens did not display fear about their future encounter with immigration control, even amidst a treacherous political landscape; instead, they joyfully embraced one another and relished in the community support that they received from both sides of the border. Despite the extreme violence that queens endure during their migration journeys, this joy takes part in what the Latina Feminist Group describes as testimoniando, a concurrent expression of the “alchemies of erasure and silencing” that Latinas endure as well as their “passions, joys, and celebrations.”39 As I suggest, testimonio is essential to migrating like a queen because it allows “chicas trans” and “chicos gay” to build social relations based on their shared understanding of violence, pleasure, joy, and survival.

Before their actual crossing, Rainbow 17 held a press conference that documents how testimonio enables the performance of migrating like a queen. According to the Latina Feminist

Group, the genre of testimonio rose out of political movements in Latin America and is often framed as a creative form of expression that contests and narrativizes lived oppression.40 They insightfully underscore that “through testimonio we learn to translate ourselves for each

38 Maria Sachetti and Nick Miroff, “How Trump is building a border wall that no one can see,” The Washington Post, November 21, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/immigration/how-trump-is-building-a-border- wall-no-one-can-see/2017/11/21/83d3b746-cba0-11e7-b0cf- 7689a9f2d84e_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.dcbc076e87a5. 39 The Latina Feminist Group, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 20. 40 The Latina Feminist Group, Telling to Live, 13. 30 other…”41 Testimonio challenges the demand for singular stories because the “I” in testimonio is always about larger community struggles and experiences. Accordingly, the press conference begins with a testimonio from Alexandra who remarks:

We come seeking the necessary security and protection as human beings who deserve liberty, who deserve happiness, who deserve the right to form our own opinions. We feel obligated to come here to ask for asylum in our quest for liberty…We are talking about a vulnerable group; we are unknown in society and it is because of this that we feel obligated to ask the U.S. government to allow us to leave under paroled detention.42

Realmente nosotras venimos aquí pidiendo la seguridad y la protección necesaria que como seres humanos témenos derecho a ser libres, a ser felices, a ser dueñas de nuestra opinión. Entonces nosotras nos sentimos obligadas a llegar asta aquí a pedir el asilo político en busca de la libertad…Estamos hablando prácticamente de un grupo vulnerable, que nosotras en la sociedad somos como personas desconocidas. Entonces por esa parte es que nos sentimos obligadas y pidiendo al gobierno de los Estados Unidos que nos deje salir bajo de palabra.

By using the first-person plural “we,” Alexandra’s testimonio makes a political statement because she frames epistemic violence against LGBTQ migrants through a relational lens. In calling her testimonio relational, I am describing how she expands the use of an individual story in asylum cases by foregrounding the caravan’s shared experiences with violence and

“obligation” to request asylum as a collective. She strategically poses LGBTQ migrants as

“vulnerable” groups in order to prevent detention and exercise what Judith Butler describes as the “plural and performative right to appear” in public.43 Because asylum cases can take as long as three years, and detention centers are notorious for placing trans women in solitary confinement, her request for paroled detention is significantly attuned to the powers of U.S. immigration control to separate LGBTQ migrants from each other and further (in)visibilize their experiences. Paroled detention is a process in which migrants are released from detention on the

41 The Latina Feminist Group, Telling to Live, 11. 42 Nogales TV, “Caravana TransGay Migrante.” 43 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 11. 31 condition that they will appear in all of their immigration proceedings. Because parole is sometimes, not always, available to migrants who request asylum at a port of entry and exhibit

“credible fear” of persecution, Alexandra’s use of the word vulnerable is strategic and rhetorical.

The “quest for liberty” in Alexandra’s testimonio underscores shared experiences with homophobia and transphobia, positing a relational understanding of epistemic violence and demanding the right to voice these experiences in public.

Her expression of how LGBTQ migrants are “unknown” in society indicates the particular struggles of her trans sisters. In calling attention to being “unknown” in society,

Alexandra is speaking truth to power because she expresses an ambivalent critique of what Eva

Hayward calls the imposed non-existence of trans subjects, a “sanctioned foreclosure.”44 Being unknown in society means being erased, exiled, and cast out of the national imaginary, and thus, nonexistence “indexes a plot, a social condition for making killable…an insistence on not- existing such that killability is unnecessary to articulate or make conscious.”45 It is important to note that all of the trans women were taken to the privately-run Cibola County Detention Center in Albuquerque, NM, and released under parole after a month in detention.46 This is the same detention center where Roxsana Hernández, a trans Latina migrant from Honduras, died in 2018 from lack of medical care and the violent treatment/negligence of immigration control.47

Evidently, trans Latina migrants face a “sanctioned foreclosure” against their lives, so testimonio is essential for Alexandra to insist on their existence. While Alexandra’s testimonio did not prevent detention, she was able to call attention to the violence of non-existence that makes trans lives “killable.” Through her careful articulation of unknowability, she brings attention to the

44 Eva Hayward, “Don’t Exist,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2017): 191 45 Hayward, “Don’t Exist,” 191. 46 Taracena, “La Caravana,” 388. 47 See Jennicet Gutíerrez and Suyapa Portillo, “Trans(formation) of a Movement.” NACLA Report on the Americas 50, no. 4 (2019): 392-394. 32 killability of trans migrant lives and utilizes testimonio as a tool in which she is able to request rights from the nation while simultaneously critiquing the “administrative violences” of nation- states.48

Building on Alexandra’s performative strategies, Kimberly, a Honduran trans woman and member of the caravan, begins her testimonio by stating that she will speak about violence against trans women in their countries of origin. Even though caravan members were explicitly prompted to offer their personal testimonios at the press conference, Kimberly also refuses to use

“I” when describing her experiences. This decision marks a desire to speak about the collective experiences of the caravan members as mediated through her when she states:

We come fleeing from our countries of origin, majority of the people do not accept us as trans girls. Our maltreatment begins in our very own families when they do not accept us for being trans girls. The punches begin in our families, when they kick us out from our homes…Many of us have been abused by gang members, even police officers have treated us badly, punched us, raped us…Another thing, we have also suffered through our migration here in Mexico. Many of us have been kidnapped, forced into prostitution. We come from our countries fleeing so much pain and so much suffering to come here to relive in Mexico what we have experienced in our home countries. So, we have the option to go to the United States in pursuit of safety…Our word will matter in the United States, it will not be like in our countries of origin where our word does not matter. Thank you.49

Nosotras venimos huyendo de nuestros países de origen porque la mayoría de las personas no nos aceptan como chicas trans. Nuestro maltrato empieza en nuestra familia, no nos aceptan por ser unas chicas trans. Los golpes empiezan en nuestras familias, cuando nos corren de nuestros hogares…Muchas de nosotras hemos sido abusadas por pandilleros, hasta por la propia seguridad, asta por los propios policías hemos sido maltratadas, golpeadas, violadas…Otra cosa, hemos sufrido también en el transcurso de nuestro camino aquí por Mexico. Muchas de nosotras hemos sido secuestradas, obligadas a la prostitución. Venimos de nuestro país huyendo de tanto dolor, de tanto sufrimiento para venir a revivir aquí en Mexico también lo que hemos pasado en nuestros países. Entonces témenos la opción de ir a Estados Unidos a buscar la seguridad…Nuestra palabra va a valer en Estados Unidos, no va a ser como en nuestros países de origen que no vale nuestra palabra. Gracias.

48 Dean Spade explains the relationship between trans subjects and the law through the term administrative violence, see Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Boston: South End Press, 2011). 49 Nogales TV, “Caravana.” 33

This testimonio reveals pain and suffering as key factors in the queen’s decision to migrate. One way to read Kimberly’s testimonio is to critique the ways in which she frames the U.S. as a benevolent nation that offers protection for trans women; thus, ignoring how she strategically draws on the performative power of this genre to ask for the right to migrate. Lisa Cacho explains this conflicting subject position when she observes, “Because the state renders criminalized populations of color ineligible for personhood, and consequently, ineligible for the right to ask for rights, they cannot be incorporated in rights-based politics.”50 In her testimonio

Kimberly is aware of her inability to ask for rights, so she has to negotiate migrant criminalization by making a claim on the nation. While the testimonio does not challenge rights- based politics and relies on imperialist narratives of U.S. exceptionalism, it forces the audience at the press conference to bear witness to violence.

Rather than a mere transaction, testimonio offers opportunities to engage the affective experiences of loss, trauma, violence, and displacement. As Kaitlin Murphy lucidly explains,

“Testimonio is an act of telling, but one in which the act of witnessing is seen as almost equally important.”51 By thanking her audience, Kimberly is acknowledging the affective experience that was shared, as well as the ethics behind witnessing violence for journalists who hold the power to shape media discourses on transnational migration. Furthermore, when Kimberly spoke about

“dolor”/pain, her voice cracked—it communicated an affective “pull” that Francisco Galarte explains is “much stronger than sympathy or empathy. It is an affectively charged connection forged through loss…”52 Testimonio provides an outlet for Kimberly to mourn loss, as she was

50 Lisa M. Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012): 8. 51 Kaitlin Murphy, Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 42. 52 Galarte, Brown Trans Figurations, 26. 34 not only displaced from her home due to transnational immigration flows, but she was also kicked out of her home by her family for being a chica trans. Thus, testimonio allows Kimberly to complicate what it means to bear witness to violence. In these testimonios, LGBTQ migrants are not asking for sympathy or empathy; they are asking for liberation as they cannot relive these everyday acts of violence any longer.

Clearly, LGBTQ migrants are skilled rhetoricians and performers, so it is important to consider how Kimberly’s testimonio engages complicated discourse on LGBTQ asylum and U.S. exceptionalism. When Kimberly addresses her experiences in Mexico, she demonstrates that for

Central American migrants, state violence does not end with the crossing of borders; rather, state violence follows, monitors, and controls their every move regardless of nation. Kimberly utilizes the affective pull of dolor to grapple with the fact that her palabra/word does not matter in

Honduras or Mexico; she does not take either nation-state for granted. And yet, a contradiction emerges because her testimonio expresses hope in the U.S., where she believes that her word will matter. This elusive expression of hope needs to be understood as performative and rhetorical because she understands that she has to express violence in Central America and Mexico in order to make a case for asylum in the U.S.

Following Kimberly’s testimonio, journalists asked questions that highlight the rhetorical value of this genre. Kimberly, who previously declared that things would be different in the U.S., was asked about the caravan’s plans if they are denied asylum and how the members will grapple with violence against LGBTQ populations in the U.S. This is a pivotal moment because not only are the journalists seeking to find flaws in the caravan’s testimonios, but they are also misreading these testimonios as simple truths. Kimberly confidently responded by stating that if they are denied asylum, members would ask for a transit visa to allow them to travel to Canada and 35 follow the same process. Her testimonio is rhetorically crafted because she demonstrates that the caravan is not loyal to the U.S., allowing her to imagine a hemispheric bridge across the

Americas where Rainbow 17 migrates from Central America to Mexico, the U.S., and possibly

Canada. This unruly imaginary encapsulates what it means to migrate like a queen: an everyday act of survival that does not falter in the face of nation-state power.

In regard to the question about violence against LGBTQ populations in the U.S.,

Kimberly reminds audience members that many organizations in the U.S. already offered support to Rainbow 17; thus, she demonstrates that their interest in migration emerges not so much from relying on nation-state powers but from the support of activist organizations, such as Mariposas

Sin Fronteras, Trans Queer Pueblo, the Transgender Law Center, and Familia: Trans Queer

Liberation Movement. Kimberly’s testimonio “transcends descriptive discourse to one that is performative,” and in doing so she engages audiences to “understand and establish a sense of solidarity as a first step toward social change.”53 Her initial gesture toward the benevolence of the U.S. should be understood as performative and intentionally using the power of testimonio to obtain asylum rights, as well as an act of transfer that uses embodied behavior to transmit knowledge.54 Here the lens of performance studies makes useful interventions by helping us understand that speech is not only about words, but also about corporeal enactments with the possibility of creating affective bonds.55 While Kimberly does not offer solutions to U.S. immigration control, she reworks the genre of testimonio to posit a transfeminista vision of the

Américas that contests nation-state power through embodied performance.

53 Dolores D.Bernal, Rebecca Burciaga, and Judith F. Carmona, “Introduction,” in Chicana/Latina Testimonios as Pedagogical, Methodological, and Activist Approaches to Social Justice, eds. Dolores D. Bernal, Rebecca Burciaga, and Judith F. Carmona (New York: Routledge, 2015), 2. 54 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 2-3. 55 Butler, Notes Toward, 8. 36

The last testimonio begins with the speaker stating, “I’m going to represent myself as a chico gay from the LGBT community,” and reiterates the caravan’s two-fold desire for protection and liberation.56 His testimonio follows:

I’m going to be brief because my compañeros and compañeras (co-conspirators) have spoken about the types of torture and violence that we suffer. We come seeking the liberty and protection that we do not have in our country and ask the U.S. government to let us leave under parole. LGBT people are 15% more likely to be raped and discriminated while in detention…The last thing I will tell you is that we are gay, chicos gay and chicas trans, joyful, real, but not perfect.57

Voy a ser breve, por que ya todos los compañeros y compañeras que vamos en esta caravana hemos hablado, hemos dicho las clases de torturas, la violencia que sufrimos. Venimos buscando la libertad y protección que no podemos tener en nuestro país, y pedirle al gobierno de Estados Unidos que por favor nos deje salir bajo palabra. Las personas LGBT somos propensas mas de 15% a ser violados y a ser discriminados ahí adentro…Y lo ultimo que les puedo decir es que somos gay, chicos gay y chicas trans, felices, reales, pero mas no perfectos.

The chico gay’s testimonio acknowledges the threat of violence while in detention, particularly the rape and abuse that LGBTQ migrants experience. However, his testimonio is not about defeat, as he is speaking with his compañerxs behind him and next to him. Cole Rizki describes the word “compañera” as “a word thick with complicity, friendship, solidarity, and struggle.”58

The chico gay listened to the testimonios of his compañerxs and when it was his turn, he repeatedly framed chicos gay and chicas trans as subjects who stand together, who are joyful, and who are “real.” These “multiple forms and practices of compañerismx generate unexpected solidarities and energize struggles against increased state austerity measures, heightened militarization, and expanded social and economic abandonment.”59 Embedded within his

56 Nogales TV, “Caravana.” 57 Nogales TV, “Caravana.” 58 Cole Rizki, “Latin/x American Trans Studies: Toward a Travesti-Trans Analytic,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, no. 2 (2019), 145. 59 Rizki, “Latin/x American Trans Studies,” 145. 37 testimonio is a rhetorical maneuver that demands liberation, asks for protection, and centers the relational bonds amongst trans women and gay men as an everyday practice of survival.

His subsequent interaction with a journalist, in particular, merits closer attention as it articulates an importance facet of migrating like a queen: sassiness. Following the chico gay’s testimonio where he explains his role in the caravan, a journalist asked, “Your name, do you want to tell me your name?” To which the chico gay responded, “I already said that I represent myself as a chico gay from the gay community.”60 At multiple levels, this response is sassy, but it is performative in the sense that he challenges the journalist’s power to ask for truth and subject his testimonio to individual experience. These testimonios demonstrate that for Rainbow

17, migration is not an individual journey but a collective, relational, affective, and performative experience. This type of migration is not intimidated by the powers of U.S. immigration control or the political ramifications of asylum. Through the relational and transfeminista practice of migrating like a queen, queens lay claim not so much to the nation-state but to their right to appear in public as a “plural form of performativity.”61 In this section I emphasized the multiple strategies of migrating like a queen as mediated through testimonio, in which caravan members imagine hemispheric bridges, grapple with conflicting subject positions as asylum seekers, and engage the affective forces of loss, violence, and pleasure. Ultimately, testimonio presents a dynamic strategy for political movements by shifting the focus away from the individual and centering relational bonds, otherwise understood as compañerismo, as a locus for liberation.

Queens That Assemble

A potent indicator of the visual and performative dimensions of migrating like a queen is the way in which femininity takes center stage in the Trans Gay Caravan. In her ethnography on

60 Nogales TV, “Caravana.” 61 Butler, Notes Toward, 8. 38 transformistas and beauty queens in Venezuela, Marcia Ochoa proposes spectacularity as a lens to understand how cultural meanings of femininity are produced and made legible in the contexts of beauty pageants and red districts. She writes, “Spectacularity is an important dimension to consider in accounting for how gender is produced in and on the body within discourse.

Spectacular femininities, then, are femininities that employ the conventions of spectacularity in their production.”62 These are the kinds of femininities that the queens of Rainbow 17 embody.

As mentioned early in the essay, “queen” is a useful term for describing trans women and gay men, and Ochoa situates spectacular femininities as a common ground for these subjects when she states that the spectacle “appear[s] time and again among gay men and transgender women in

Latin American and other contexts…”63 Ochoa argues that the spectacular makes discursive conventions available for all kinds of everyday performance. I draw from Ochoa’s arguments on spectacular femininities because of a scene in the caravan’s performance when they chant: “Que perra, que perra, que perra mi amiga, cruzando las fronteras con todas las culeras.”64 A rough translation of this chant is “My friend is a badass bitch, a badass bitch, crossing borders with all the faggotry.” Following Ochoa, this speech act draws on the spectacle to mediate a spectacular femininity, one that captures everyday moments of relationality between chicas trans and chicos gay.

In alluding to the visual and performative work in Rainbow 17’s crossing, I am attending to how the queens produce, contest, and alter meaning-making practices. For example, the chant

“que perra” references a popular song by Dominican singer La Real Lazzy that has gained traction in gay clubs throughout Latin America. According to the singer and writer, the chorus

62 Marcia Ochoa, Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 203. 63 Ochoa, Queen for a Day, 202. 64 Nogales TV, “Caravana.” 39

“que perra” is a phrase that she uses with her friends to praise each other at the club but emerges from gay communities.65 What makes Rainbow 17’s reworking of the phrase full of potential is not so much its origins or popularity among gay men. Rather, the use of “que perra” functions as a disidentification, what José Esteban Muñoz describes as “the survival strategies [that] the minoritarian subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”66 As Muñoz asserts, this is a tactical maneuver that minoritarian subjects employ to disidentify with dominant meanings and ideological apparatuses. In the case of

Rainbow 17, they encountered a phobic majoritarian public sphere that stresses citizenship as a marker of belonging. Neither rejecting nor fully identifying with the nation, as in the case of

Kimberly’s testimonio in the previous section, queens disidentify with the world of state borders and “perform a new one” through spectacular, ordinary, and relational femininities.67

In order to negotiate how citizenship punishes sexually marked bodies, caravan members disidentified with the original meaning of the song and intensified what is elided and punished in the public sphere: nonnormative genders/sexualities. The visual image of badass bitches crossing nation-state borders among faggots creates a rupture in the public sphere by celebrating subjects who are deemed perverts in dominant culture; thus, reworking the meaning of the song but also the transphobic and homophobic public spheres that LGBTQ migrants encounter throughout their migration. According to Martha Balaguera, cultural anxieties about trans women who migrate from Central America to Mexico are exemplified in migrant shelters when she writes,

“prevalent anxieties about chicas trans’s sexuality bring about a host of rules and an arbitrary

65 Luis Trujillo, “La Real Lazzy despeja la incognita de ‘Que Perra mi Amiga,’” dia a dia, October 30, 2017, https://www.diaadia.com.pa/fama/la-real-lazzy-despeja-la-incognita-de-que-perra-mi-amiga-327462 66 José E. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 4. 67 Muñoz, Disidentifications, xi. 40 regulation of space that often leads to their isolation.”68 Migrating like a queen runs counter to these systems by establishing points of connection among trans women and gay men; therefore, refusing the violence of isolation and creating a space for everyday acts of kinship, friendship, and conviviality. Such tactical maneuvers, like disidentification, highlight the ways a phobic majoritarian public sphere monitors and polices the coming together of sexually marked bodies.

Alluding to the importance of space, Jason De León describes the U.S.-Mexico border as an abstract killing machine that uses the vast landscape of the desert to (in)visibilize the violent measures of border policing.69 Focusing on Nogales, where Rainbow 17’s performative crossing occurs, De León writes, “The goal is to render invisible the innumerable consequences this sociopolitical phenomenon has for the lives and bodies of undocumented people.”70 De León’s analysis explicitly articulates the power of nation-state borders to inflict violence but make it invisible, and his arguments on Nogales prompt critical reflections on the performative power of queens that assemble in such deadly terrain. In her analysis of the performative work of assembling in public, Butler writes,

When the bodies of those deemed disposable or ‘ungrievable’ assemble in public view (as happens time and time again when the undocumented arrive in the streets in the United States as part of public demonstrations), they are saying, “we have not slipped quietly into the shadows of public life: we have not become the glaring absence that structures your public life.71

Her observation demonstrates that even when challenged with extreme forms of violence, disposable bodies may assert power in coming together. The chant “que perra” voices this power because by calling themselves badass bitches and claiming the term “culeras”/faggots in public

68 Martha Balaguera, “Trans-migrations: Agency and Confinement at the Limits of Sovereignty.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43, no. 3 (2018): 652-653. 69 See Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying in the Migrant Trail (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015). 70 De León, The Land, 2. 71 Butler, Notes Toward, 152. 41 view, the Trans Gay Caravan commands attention through a playful rendition of social norms.

Thus, posing a direct challenge to the blinding forces of nation-states and the (il)legibility of violence at the border.

While wearing tiaras in public may seem like a minor or frivolous aspect of Rainbow

17’s crossing, their tiaras function as a spectacle that exceeds the logic of disposability. Rather than become a disposable body, these queens insist on carrying rainbow banners, dressing their bodies in accordance to cultural conventions of femininity, and wearing tiaras to shine light on the disturbance that their bodies perform. Writing on frivolity, Ochoa asserts,

My focus is always on the frivolous: those people most excluded from political possibility because of how ridiculous the idea is that they have any politics. It is in the lives of transformistas, of translatina immigrants to the United States, making their survival out of impossibilities, that I have found the core of political possibility.72

Despite nation-state logics and policies that render migrant trans women and gay men disposable, it is their frivolous bodies and tiaras that make possible a visual and performative redefinition of the political. All of the trans women wore tiaras throughout their performative crossing whereas only one of the gay men wore a tiara. Nevertheless, the other gay men embodied femininity through different visual cues such as oversized sunglasses and bleached hair. Paying close attention to these details demonstrates how the Trans Gay Caravan assembles in public and disrupts the logics of disposability through spectacular femininities.

One of the most playful examples of migrating like a queen as a frivolous, and yet powerful, strategy for survival can be gleaned in the queer dance party/fundraiser event called,

“Las Chingonas de la Caravana.”73 This party featured Genesis, Katalea, and Chuleta, three members of Rainbow 17, to raise funds for their asylum cases and celebrate Katalea for being

72 Ochoa, Queen for a Day, 245. 73 See “Heartbeats///Baile Queer,” Facebook, October 13, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/events/519477508477474/ 42 granted asylum. The event was organized by the Tucson-based group Heartbeats, which plans queer dance parties in the Sonoran Desert to raise funds for social justice causes. It occurred on

October 13, 2018, and was advertised through flyers and a Facebook event. The advertisements for this party showcase the minor, every day, and working-class politics of LGBTQ migrant organizing. In her analysis of promotional materials from the now-defunct organization

ContraSIDA Por Vida in San Francisco, Juana María Rodríguez draws attention to the

“transformative powers of reading and writing language and images as symbolic codes.”74 In a similar vein, I analyze the visual and textual material from this event as important sites of creativity, frivolity, and relationality.

For instance, the text from the Facebook event captures the significance of frivolous and nonnormative sites of relationality when it states,

Come out and throw down for these incredible women fighting their asylum cases!!!! There will be music, performances, the calm before the storm, the s t o r m I t s e l f, the perfect language of moving together, snacks and bevs, the installed dreams of everyone who wants you to have the best fucking nite ever, a place to put ur dirty green paper that feels soooo good, 3am mopping and laughing after it’s all done…75

The style and form of this text incites textual, corporeal, and relational movements. As readers, we are invited to “throw down” together and in solidarity with the fierce and fearless members of the caravan. The shortened words and playful tone demonstrate that by assembling together, a space is created for frivolous actions such as dancing, flirting, drinking, or simply laughing. The storm that the text references, and creatively spaces out to create flow in the text, is aligned with the asylum hearings that are pending for Chuleta and Genesis. These spaces are vital for the sustenance of bonds and relations among trans and queer communities. Instead of dreaming state legislation, readers are invited to raise funds for the caravan members and party alongside these

74 Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 48. 75 “Heartbeats///Baile Queer,” Facebook. 43 queens. Notably, the violent and deadly effects of the Pulse nightclub shooting, which occurred during “Latin” night and killed forty-nine patrons, serves as an important reminder that literal

“heartbeats” cannot be taken for granted in trans and queer of color spaces. In this instance, a frivolous dance party is about having a good time as much as it is about standing in solidarity with the survival of LGBTQ migrants.

Figure 2. Heartbeats flyer for the “Chingonas de la Caravana” queer dance party. Art created by Genevieve Heron.

In the flyer that accompanies this text, which was created by artist Genevieve Heron, the queens of Rainbow 17 pose in front of a disco ball to display their fabulous powers (figure 2).

These include Chuleta’s magic wig, Katalea’s “destructive” twerking powers, and Genesis with her fierce and dangerous heels. In the context of the violent processes of LGBTQ asylum, this 44 flyer reimagines the precarious conditions of migrant trans women to highlight their fabulous powers. The extravagant use of magenta in the background of the flyer, along with different shades of violet, purple, and pink for the caravan members that are represented, promises a vibrant, energetic, and exciting night filled with desire. Once again, the queens of Rainbow 17 stand together in an exuberant manner as they confront migration regimes and processes that aim to deport, regulate, and discipline their bodies. At the same time that the flyer provides logistical information about the dance party (and the fundraising efforts), it also redefines what counts as

“political” through a frivolous aesthetic. In short, the event does not take itself too seriously and allows for ordinary events such as a dance party to become sites of possibility for LGBTQ migrants. Creative practices such as the flyer and the dance party grapple with the losses and violences of migration by insisting on relational and frivolous modes of politics.

The queens in the flyer are, in Rodríguez’s words, divas, atrevidas, and entendidas. As she writes, “Divas are a breathing, swishing, eruption of the divine, a way of being in the world, of claiming power as movement, glances, voice, body, and style. Atrevidas dare to fulfill desire, challenge assumptions the world has given us. Entendidas share a knowledge, understand the significance and nuances of queer subaltern spaces.”76 Rodríguez’s beautiful description helps to illuminate the importance of frivolity in the Trans Gay Caravan. After all, the queens utilize movement strategically in the world and on the dance floor. They dare to challenge the powers of migration regimes by standing and moving together, like a relational dance. They share a deep understanding of violence, displacement, and loss, but they also inhabit spaces where their bodies are free to move excessively and seductively. The emphasis on movement, both in the text and the flyer’s evocation of dancing, works metaphorically to describe fierce and relational modes of migration, what I call migrating like a queen. In this instance, LGBTQ asylum

76 Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad, 24. 45 practices are shifted from individual and heroic stories to the fabulous, glittery, and fierce assembling of queens in the public sphere and queer subaltern spaces. As such, migrating like a queen offers a platform for queens to come together and transform sites of (im)possibility into relational and coalitional spaces of survival.

Photojournalism and the Everyday

Because video and photography are important aspects of the Trans Gay Caravan, it is important to examine the visual registers through which this performative protest is documented.

Emphasizing the caravan’s everyday politics of survival, I offer an analysis of the photojournalistic practices of Mariá Inés Taracena and examine how she “capture[s] seemingly banal moments of being-together.”77 As a photojournalist, I consider how she does not merely document violence in the plight of LGBTQ migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, but attunes her visual lens to the everyday pleasures, struggles, and scars of transnational migration.

Taracena is a news production fellow at Democracy Now! who documents borderlands activism and transnational migration struggles through multimedia narratives. She migrated from

Guatemala City at the age of 13 and began her journalistic career in Tucson, Arizona, publishing in several news venues including Arizona Public Media and Tucson Weekly. Her publications on the Trans Gay Caravan are strongly impacted by her own migration experiences. As she importantly writes, “the complexities and beauties of the Sonora-Arizona borderlands and my home country have inspired my work... My multimedia narratives share stories of migration and displacement, LGBTQIA resistance in the U.S., Mexico, and Central America.”78 In this brief biographical sketch, Taracena breaks away from the objectivity that journalists are supposed to maintain. She also challenges reductionist accounts of transnational migration by alluding to the

77 Cole Rizki, “Familiar Grammars of Loss and Belonging: Curating Trans Kinship in Post-Dictatorship Argentina,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no.2 (2020), 201. 78 For more on Taracena’s work see: “Intro,” September 2, 2019 https://www.mariainestaracena.com/intro 46 beauty, resilience, and complex struggles established in borderland spaces. Unlike popular coverage of Central American migration to the U.S., Taracena’s photojournalism does not aestheticize migrant suffering.79 I analyze Taracena’s photojournalism because she provides a lens from which we can see, feel, and understand what it means to migrate like a queen.

A compelling feature of Taracena’s coverage of the Trans Gay Caravan is her keen attention to the embodied experiences of migration. When writing about one of the queens who migrated from Central America, Taracena turns attention to the body when she observes,

“Estefany has many scars—some are visible on her face—lifelong reminders of the death threats and abuse she survived in Honduras. She has short, curly black hair. Her brown eyes are round and wide. She wears bright pink lipstick, and her lashes stretch all the way up to her eyebrows.”80 In alluding to the scars in Estefany’s face, Taracena is sharply attuned to the social and embodied injuries that trans women are subjected to in their home countries. Cole Rizki warns that trans women’s suffering is often “consumed as a spectacle,” but in this short and vivid description, femininity moves the reader towards self-fashioning practices of survival. In short,

Taracena’s descriptive writing sheds light on the everyday: the quotidian realities in Estefany’s life. She performs gender through embodied behavior, and like the other queens in the caravan, she applies products like make-up and fake lashes without restraint. While Estefany has suffered many losses, the bright pink lipstick and long lashes serve as a form of self-fashioning in which lays claim to her body and her right to exist. With her lashes stretching up to her eyebrows,

Estefany brings renewed glamour to the visual landscapes of those who see her. According to

79 For an engaging analysis of “solidarity aesthetics” in Central American visual culture see Kency Cornejo, “US Central Americans in Art and Visual Culture,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 80 María Inés Taracena, “Displaced LGBT People from Central America, Mexico Head North for Survival,” Arizona Public Media, September 8, 2017, https://news.azpm.org/p/news-topical-border/2017/9/8/116373-displaced-lgbt- people-from-central-america-mexico-head-north-for-survival/ 47

Ochoa, this glamour is crucial for transformistas to forge a sense of belonging and claim power in hostile environments. However, Ochoa cautions that glamour is slippery, it may potentially create a space for survival but “it will not save you.”81 Behind the glamour, the scars on her face are indeed “lifelong reminders” of the power of the state to inflict violence on the bodies of

LGBTQ migrants.

Despite these slippery attachments to glamour, femininity, and survival, the emphasis on scars, both visible and invisible, allows for a contestation and reinterpretation of state power. In terms of political asylum, scars may work as grounds for “protection” by the state. For LGBTQ migrants, the contestation of power occurs in the contradictory relationship between asking for protection by the state and liberation from the state. This is evident in the case of Marcelo

Tenório, who in 1993 became the first gay migrant to be granted asylum by an immigration judge based on his sexuality. Before this case, gay and lesbian migrants struggled to make an argument for sexual minorities to be recognized as marginalized groups. When being pressured to prove his right to asylum, Tenório and his legal representative were compelled to draw on colonialist discourse to paint a violent and backward picture of the global south. As Juana María

Rodríguez compellingly writes, “The undocumented refugee seeking asylum, trapped between legal constructions of citizenship, rights, and nations, speaking publicly against a ‘home’ that has excluded him, embodies the excesses of nationalism.”82 This corporeal excess is made legible when Tenório lifted his shirt to show his scars, which were used as evidence of the homophobia he experienced in his homeland and enabled him to win his case. In the case of Estefany, the scars reference social injuries, but the glamour she embodies is used strategically to posit femininity as a ground for new relations of power. Scars are about suffering, loss, and

81 Ochoa, Queen for a Day, 89. 82 Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad, 96. 48 displacement, but when Estefany migrates like a queen her scars hold the potential to demand both liberation from and protection by the state. Unlike the solidarity aesthetics in dominant photojournalistic practices covering Central American migration, which create unilateral relations of power, Taracena’s photojournalistic focus on the ordinary remaps the visual economies of power between the Global North and South (particularly in relation to political asylum). This type of photojournalism reinterprets the world by enabling something frivolous like long lashes, and something painful like scars, become starting points for political movements.

Figure 3. Rainbow 17 marching next to the border fence. Image by María Inés Taracena.

In remapping relations of power, Taracena’s photojournalism also mines the everyday to locate dignity and respect in the lives of LGBTQ migrants. For instance, Taracena succeeds in capturing minor and everyday acts of relationality among LGBTQ migrants without objectifying their plight. Her article on the displacement of LGBTQ migrants, published with Arizona Public 49

Media, features an image of Arcoirís 17 marching together next to the border (figure. 3). The image brings a sense of stillness to a moment of energy, protest, joy, and movement. Marching with their tiaras, bleached hair, eccentric sunglasses, hooped earrings, skinny jeans, bright red lipstick, and colorful dresses, the queens in this image provide a glimpse into the multiplicity of self-fashioning practices that animate relational movements. By providing a quality of ordinariness and stillness to this fabulous march, Taracena challenges homophobic, transphobic, and homogenizing visual registers that would otherwise focus on this moment as evidence of sexual deviance south of the border. According to Rodríguez, “the colorful extravagances of latinidad and the flaming gestures of queer fabulousness are ways to counteract demands for corporeal conformity…”83 This image brings new meaning to the coming together of trans women and gay men, as it carves out an alternative space where Central American and Mexican migrants come together unapologetically at the edges of first world and third world nations

(spaces of surveillance). The framing devices of the camera, which are profoundly marked by the straight lines of the border fence, signal towards the illusory spaces of Latinidad, a contentious signifier that grapples with the everyday homogenization of Latina/o/x populations in U.S. national imaginaries. Taracena documents the relation between trans women and gay men beautifully by focusing on their everyday acts of survival with the added touch of flair.

What remains unthinkable in the representation of migrants is the possibility of pleasure and dignity in the decision to migrate. This is not the case in the Trans Gay Caravan, and

Estefany makes this clear when she reminds us, “We are brave women. We made it here to

México. There are things that happened to us in our home countries that we want to

83 Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 6. 50 forget…What we saw was brutal, but something good will come out of it.”84 Her optimism, and the assertion of the brutalities she has witnessed, are contradictory, but it is precisely these contradictions that help to establish migrating like a queen as a relational practice. In her analysis of Proyecto 10Bis, an artistic and performative project by Mexican trans artist Lia García where she photographs herself in close intimacy with prison inmates while wearing hyperfeminine clothes, Cynthia Delgado Huitrón offers the notion of “Haptic Tactic” to highlight the ways

García “transgenders touch in ways that serve as a balm for a hyperviolent state by (re)producing hypertenderness.”85 For Huitrón, haptic tactic is a method that animates affective, intimate, and sensuous encounters when contending with state power. Thinking through haptic tactics,

Estefany’s words are no longer mere signs of optimism, but they allude to a desire to instantiate relationality—this is the “something good” that comes out of working through the pain, loss, and trauma of migration.

84 Taracena, “Displaced LGBT People.” 85 Cynthia Delgado Huitrón, “Haptic Tactic: Hypertenderness for the [Mexican] State and the Performances of Lia García,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, no. 2 (2019): 167. 51

Figure 4. Joselyn, left, and Estefany, right, at the US-Mexico border. Image by María Inés Taracena.

Like much of García’s photography, which Huitrón describes as utilizing hyperfeminine tropes to “touch” and “caress” (transtocar), the queens of Rainbow 17 bring tender, touching, and relational performances to the lens of the camera. The simultaneous use of the everyday and excessive femininity is particularly present in an image (figure 4) where Joselyn and Estefany hold each other’s arms while posing for the camera with the vertical steel slats of the border fence in the background. Written on each steel slant are painted words like “Dignidad,” “No Mas

Frontera,” and “Todas Tienen Derechos” [Dignity, No More Wall, All Have rights]. The word

“todas” [all] is gendered, using the feminine version of the noun. The words are neither carefully sketched nor are they intricately painted, sometimes they are even scribbled onto the steel slats for space, exemplifying an everyday sensibility. The focus is Joselyn and Estefany, who are both wearing tiaras and fiercely staring into the camera’s eye. Behind the fence are some of their allies in the U.S. who traveled to Nogales to support the caravan. By eating a paleta, a popsicle,

Estefany breaks from the norms and forms of the spectacular, highlighting the everyday action of eating a paleta on a hot summer day in the Sonoran Desert. Taracena’s staging of the everyday and the hyperfeminine together creates an avenue for pleasure in the face of state power, “it exposes the bareness of life at the limits of death.”86 This pleasure emerges from and resides at the border, making this image punctured with meaning.87

The pain, loss, and suffering these women experience in their home countries, Mexico, and the border cannot be fully represented through photojournalism. However, Taracena frames this image in such a way that meaning abounds through the setting of the border. I cannot help but connect Gloria Anzaldúa’s “open wound” metaphor to Roland Barthes’ theory of the

86 Huitrón, “Haptic Tactic,” 167. 87 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 26. 52 punctum and Sigmund Freud’s work on melancholia to describe this powerful image. For

Anzaldúa, the border is an open wound where “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”88 This wound, which in Anzaldúa’s imagination is always bleeding, is necessarily a site of trauma. For Barthes, the punctum in an image is that thing that “pricks” and “wounds,” it animates meaning.89 Importantly, he does not explore photography “as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think.”90 In theorizing the punctum,

Barthes is describing wounds that cannot heal, losses that cannot bear the weight of moving forward. Accordingly, the pain that the queens of Rainbow 17 endure cannot be healed or sutured through visual representation. Moreover, this inability to heal is what Freud distinguishes as melancholia, which “behaves like an open wound…it proves easily able to withstand the ego’s wish to sleep.”91 Rather than substituting a lost loved object for another—which in the case of migrants would mean finding a new home in a new nation or working towards cultural assimilation—the melancholic remains wounded. Without surveying further into psychoanalysis,

I make these connections to ask the following questions: Why relationality? Why tiaras? Why pleasure? And why hypertenderness?

Whereas traditional photojournalism brings pleasure to the consumers of migrant suffering, migrating like a queen helps to establish pleasure as part of the everyday lives of

LGBTQ migrants. The losses that structure the everyday for these queens, as understood through the theories of Anzaldúa, Barthes, and Freud, are without a doubt wounds that cannot heal. This does not mean, however, that relational visualities cannot intervene in the visual representation of caravans like Rainbow 17 and activate loss as a ground for new relations. Pain and trauma are

88 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza 4th ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 25. 89 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26. 90 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 21. 91 Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991): 172. 53 significant markers of migration, but migrating like a queen also attests to the joys and pleasures that traverse through the embodiment of femininity (in spite and through loss). For Huitrón,

García’s decision to wear hyperfeminine clothes inside prisons serves a,

counterintuitive function, for it is through Lia’s trans-embodiment of these feminine archetypes that she foregrounds the performativity of gender and sexuality through ritual while revealing the subtle tensions found in our own complicity within these fantasies, avowing not just the pain but the potential for pleasure that they hold.”92

Seeing through the dual lens of pain and pleasure has world-making possibilities, and this is key to migrating like a queen. After all, in the image of Joselyn and Estefany they are neither smiling nor crying, they are holding each other. They hold their ground as queens who insist on their survival, insist on their existence. They evoke sensualities and sexualities that will not be contained by nation-states. The relations of power held between the viewer and the image are not as simple as the creation of empathy, for the multitude of losses and displacements that queens experience also structure the core of their identities, their pleasures, and their hypertender femininities.

Instead of shocking the viewer with images of violence, Taracena’s photojournalistic lens teaches the world to revel in the presence of these queens and their visual manifestations. As

Manalansan elaborates, “The primacy of the everyday provides an ethical basis for considering the theatrical aspects of social life.”93 The performance of femininity does not heal, it may not even hold onto the promise of survival as evident in the number of queens who were forced to self-deport following their performative crossing. And yet, the relations forged between the queens, the viewer, and the image stage scenes where loss and pleasure can coincide. Taracena’s photojournalism envisions loss, pain, trauma, glamour, and pleasure as necessary components of

92 Huitrón, “Haptic Tactic,” 166. 93 Martin Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 16. 54 migrating like a queen. She captures everyday social relations as a fierce reclamation of the world.

Queen Relationality

This chapter examined migrating like a queen as a relational mode of migration that trans women and gay men employ to challenge the individuating powers of U.S. immigration control, but as my textual analyses demonstrate this strategy has the ultimate goal of survival. By offering the notion of migrating like a queen, I acknowledged and engaged political strategies that are not recognized as fruitful to the dominant immigrant rights movement or LGBTQ politics. My employment of a performance studies and visual culture studies lens allowed me to read testimonios as more than simple truths and helped me navigate complicated questions on frivolity, femininity, glamour, and sexuality. However, more research on the intersections between migration, visuality, and performance are necessary, especially when a liberal rights framework uncritically posits LGBTQ visibility as a progressive ideal. Without a doubt, sexual, gendered, and racial anxieties about international migration illustrate the political stakes of migrating like a queen and serve as a point of departure for imagining and imaging migration otherwise. Migrating like a queen requires meaning-making practices that actively work to transform the world by creating relations that refuse, contest, and offer alternatives to nation- state violence.

Here I close by offering a brief analysis of a political chant from Rainbow 17’s activist repertoire. Just like photojournalism illustrates a creative interplay between violence, survival, and joy, the caravan’s political chants brought energy to their performative crossing. Weeks prior to their performance, Diversidad sin Fronteras launched a video campaign with recorded chants 55 from Rainbow 17 to raise funds for their bus fares, lodging, and food. The transfeminista visions, desires, and longings of Rainbow 17 are powerfully documented in the following chant:

Make it tremble, make it tremble, make immigration controls tremble, América is a house without nation. Make them tremble, make them tremble, make misogynist men tremble, América will be transfeminista. 94

Que tiemble, que tiemble, que tiemble migración, América unida una casa sin nación. Que tiemblen, que tiemblen, que tiemblen los machistas, América unida sera transfeminista.

Not only does this chant enact a strong critique of nationalism, but it also threatens the sexist, misogynist, and transphobic structures of nation-states through the repeated use of the relative pronoun “que.” In doing so the chant ambitiously dislocates the nation from las Américas, imagining a transfeminista hemisphere that emphasizes bridges and not borders. As the queens strongly assert, misogynist men and racist immigration controls will not have a place in this transfeminista hemisphere. The chant is a threat as much as it is a repository of utopic longings.

It voices the queen’s imaginaries, who refuse to tremble in the face of U.S. immigration control.

Significantly, the queens were able to perform this chant in the public because of their collective power. Instead of merely providing visibility, migrating like a queen performatively asserts that trans women and gay men, from different geopolitical locations, have the power to come together in the public sphere, and in that power rises the promise of relationality.

94 Loktavanej Irving MONDRAGON, “Primera Caravana Trans Migrante 2017,” YouTube, July 18, 2017, video, 0:59, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1nCKgPGX4E 56

Chapter 2

Undocumented Subjects: Queer Negotiations of Time, Rights, and Nation-

Based Citizenship

Vota Jota is a digital campaign that aims to increase voter registration amongst LGBTQ

Latinx communities in the key states of Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. It was launched by the activist organization, Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement (Familia), and provides a platform to engage topics such as prison abolition, immigration justice, and ending the criminalization of queer and trans workers. The playful consonance between “Vota” and “Jota” encourages Jotería, a reclaimed term by LGBTQ Latinx communities, to partake in nation-state politics through voting. However, what distinguishes Vota Jota from other voter registration campaigns is that many of Familia’s organizers are undocumented. Thus, raising the following question: how can undocumented LGBTQ migrants, who lack the right to vote, participate in

U.S. politics? Emilio Vicente, Familia’s communications and policy director, observes that Vota

Jota provides “an opportunity for people who can't vote in the elections to still be able to raise their voices on the issues that they care about.”95 Vicente’s response eloquently describes the ability of LGBTQ migrants to assert their collective power without having access to the privileges afforded by citizenship. In providing an avenue for LGBTQ undocumented migrants to influence political elections, Vota Jota’s initiative breaks the alignment between the nation- state, citizenship, and rights. This type of strategy prompts different questions regarding undocumented organizing, such as, through what means do queer and trans migrants hold power

95 Nico Lang, “This First-of-Its-Kind Campaign Is Getting Out the Latinx LGBTQ+ Vote,” them., October 9, 2020, https://www.them.us/story/vota-jota-latinx-voting-campaign 57 as non-citizens? And what can be gained from challenging the linear and progressive narratives of nation-based citizenship?

I begin with this example because Vota Jota brings citizenship to bear on otherwise ignored populations, particularly LGBTQ undocumented subjects and their ability to effect change through culture. Vota Jota is not merely about voting, as it utilizes digital media, art, and music to express a critique of the relations of power that the nation-state upholds. Thus, Vota

Jota provides a useful point of entry into how undocumented subjects navigate the impossible conditions of living within the nation-state as non-citizens. In this chapter, I examine the discursive strategies that LGBTQ migrants employ in media, art, and documentary film. My analysis shows the formation of alternative imaginaries to those of nation-based citizenship and rights via cultural production. I argue that when LGBTQ migrants are subjected to the dominant frameworks of the nation-state, such as citizenship, they enact new subject positions to negotiate, challenge, and reimagine institutionalized forms of belonging to the nation.

The political interventions of LGBTQ migrants index different relations of power as a result of the impossible subject positions that they occupy within the nation-state. When undocumented migrants are constructed as “illegal” criminals, they are quite literally positioned as rightless subjects in the eyes of the law. In the case of undocumented LGBTQ migrants, whose racialized sexualities and genders are constituted within regimes of normativity, their subject positions are determined by their lack of citizenship and non-normative role outside of the nuclear family. Nevertheless, Vota Jota enables LGBTQ migrant activists and artists to participate in politics as non-citizens while imagining new subject positions. Lisa Lowe provocatively observes that “If the law is the apparatus that binds and seals the universality of the political body of the nation, then the ‘immigrant,’ produced by the law as margin and threat 58 to the symbolic whole, is precisely a generative site for the critique of that universality.”96 She underscores that cultural productions emerging from the lived experiences of migrants have the potential to “displace” the fiction of national unity. If cultural productions have the capacity to imagine different relations of power between migrants and the nation-state, they might also intervene by repurposing the frameworks of the nation-state. Undocumented subjects, who cannot vote, cannot ask for rights, and cannot move freely, must engage in complex negotiations with the nation that are neither reformist nor inclusionary (to assume otherwise would necessitate a pathway to legal recognition). These negotiations are first and foremost about survival and result in a flexible subject position that stems from shifting relations of power.

This chapter is comprised of three sections that trouble the relationship between LGBTQ migrants and nation-based citizenship. In the first section, I provide a detailed analysis of Vota

Jota’s strategic use of media to offer an understanding of politics as a relational activity. The next section analyzes scenes from the documentary film, Forbidden: Undocumented and Queer in Rural America (2016), to argue that the lives, struggles, and politics of non-citizens cannot be encapsulated by the progressive temporalities of the nation-state. The final section demonstrates how the digital mural, “I am UndocuQueer” by Julio Salgado, transforms the use of an individual identity into a relational movement that creates spatial recognition for non-citizens. Put together,

I analyze these three discursive sites to show what cultural texts might reveal about the impossible relationship between the nation-state, citizenship, and LGBTQ migrants.

Relational Politics: Digital Spaces, Public Cultures

To engage how Vota Jota provides a discursive space in which LGBTQ migrants reframe nation-based citizenship and rights, this section analyzes the campaign’s use of digital media

96 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 8-9. 59

(website, advertisements, and music) with a focus on what it means to organize relationally as non-citizens. Vota Jota sought to increase voter registration amongst LGBTQ Latinx communities through a series of educational materials, advertisements, and videos that launched a month prior to election day. It started with a partnership between Familia and the Latinx advocacy group Mijente. As part of the campaign, Familia allocated $30,000 to run advertisements in swing states with strong Latinx populations through digital platforms such as

Facebook, Pandora, Spotify, and the queer hook-up apps Grindr and Scruff.97 Familia’s organizing director, Úmi Vera, explains that the ultimate goal of Vota Jota is to empower queer and trans migrants. She says, “The way I see it, we are integrating electoral strategy into our radical abolitionist politics.”98 This is the first time that Familia has become involved with electoral politics, as the organization focuses on direct action tactics, such as the 2015 protest in which Familia organizers shut down an intersection near the Santa Ana, California detention center to protest the detention of undocumented trans migrants (the city ended its contract with

Immigration Customs Enforcement after continued pressure from activists in 2016). However, the current political election prompted Familia to find a way to make the voices of LGBTQ migrants heard regardless of voting restrictions. This merger between abolitionist politics and electoral strategy does not pit one form of organizing against the other. Rather, Vota Jota provides a digital space in which undocumented subjects engage in complex negotiations with the nation-state. In this case, media works as an advocacy tool to build relations between citizens and non-citizens while drawing on different political strategies.

97 Lang, “This First-of-Its-Kind Campaign,” them. 98 Tina Váquez, “LGBTQ Latino voters ‘show up and show out’ for 2020 election,” Prism Reports, Prism, November 2, 2020, https://www.prismreports.org/article/2020/11/2/lgbtq-latino- voters-show-up-and-show-out-for--election 60

In order for Vota Jota to maintain an abolitionist politics while promoting voter registration, the campaign utilizes queer strategies through style and form.99 When discussing the imaginative work of Vota Jota, Umí Vera explains that, “The word jota means faggot … so we oftentimes reclaim our faggotry as a political act.”100 The campaign’s name, Vota Jota, is an example of how LGBTQ migrants transform relations of power through language. In this reclamation of language, a sign that is meant to be an insult (Jota) transforms into a political signifier, and subjects who cannot vote (non-citizens) transform the means through which politics are enacted. Emboldened by faggotry, Vota Jota shifts the painful history of words like

“faggot,” and in doing so, Vota Jota transforms language for political purposes. Moreover, Vota

Jota does not stop short at the inclusion of undocumented subjects into the national citizenry.

Like its logo depicting a closed fist with sharp acrylic nails (figure 5), Vota Jota grasps electoral politics through queer reclamations of power. Unabashedly queer, the campaign utilizes language to work towards the liberation of LGBTQ migrants from the tight grips of the nation- state.

99 David Eng, “Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies,” Social Text, 15, no. 3-4 (997): 41. 100 Kate Sosin, “‘Don’t sell us short’: How activists plan to turn out the queer Latinx vote,” The 19th*, September 15, 2020, https://19thnews.org/2020/09/dont-sell-us-short-how-activists-plan- to-turn-out-the-queer-latinx-vote/ 61

Figure 5. Screenshot from the Vota Jota website.

To the extent that Vota Jota transforms relations of power, it also provides a digital space to imagine different futures for queer and trans migrants. Here I am referencing Vota Jota’s colorful website that lists the campaign’s demands, provides information about how to register to vote, and even includes a music playlist for Jotas to “turn up.” The website consists of a long scrolling layout with different sections and is fully available in both English and Spanish. The first section declares in bold letters, “We demand a future for all of us” (figure 5). This is a conscious statement in which Vota Jota exercises the right to make a demand from the nation.

However, this demand is different from citizenship-based claims because it marks the future as belonging to everyone regardless of immigration status. The statement continues with the words,

“We know that power is never conceded, so we must roll up our sleeves and organize like hell to protect the lives and dignity of our jotería, our families, our lovers and all of our communities.”

Positing a critical outlook that is vigilant about power, Vota Jota envisions a relational and tangible future. This demand resembles what Karma Chávez calls a differential vision, an 62

“impure orientation, committed to a politics of relation with others that may differ in their approach…but that share a commitment to resisting hegemonic systems of power, even as they might understand that system differently.”101 When the term jotería is utilized, it is important to recognize that jotería is plural, with the term offering different meanings and purposes. Like

Chávez writes, a differential vision elicits an impure orientation where subjects draw on different strategies to “fight like hell” against systems of power. It makes sense that promoting voter registration is just one strategy out of many. Working towards an alternative future may take different turns and strategies, but through a focus on the lives and dignity of jotería, Vota Jota maintains that the future is not exclusive of non-citizens.

These differential visions take on new meaning in the context of state violence, as their purpose is not only to imagine alternative futures but also to reckon with the urgency of state violence against racialized and non-normative communities. Strategically placed at the top of the website, there is a timer that marks the 2020 election day. This timer instills a sense of urgency, as it marks the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the national election day. The website utilizes time as a currency for action, and in the process, it marks the future of jotería as something to be fought for in the present. At first glance, the timer is used to remind citizens to register to vote before election day. However, when the website is read as a whole, the timer marks a queer future that is “not yet here.”102 For example, below the timer, Vota Jota provides a list of demands that confront systems of criminalization, detention, and policing without offering simple solutions. They are written in short declarative statements that hail the reader to imagine a world in which universal healthcare is, indeed, available to all. These demands render

101 Karma Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2013), 47. 102 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, New York University Press, 2009), 1. 63 abolitionist politics intelligible within electoral strategy and document the perspectives of non- citizens. Following the demands, Vota Jota registers that “when we fight for those most marginalized, we fight for all of us.” This fight makes queer futures palpable in the face of structural violence, particularly for subjects whose future is determined by the law. Because Vota

Jota’s timer is embedded alongside abolitionist demands, the future can be imagined as existing beyond the structural violences of the nation-state. In other words, Vota Jota’s website generates an affective, relational, and colorful response to electoral politics, in which politics are not just about voting but also about the survival of jotería. When the future is not determined by citizenship, time has the potential to reverse the violent relations of power that characterize the nation.

Figure 6. Vota Jota testimonial, “Mariella,” Julio Salgado.

In addition to the website, Vota Jota employs visual art by Julio Salgado in the form of digital posters to voice the desires of LGBTQ migrant organizers, whose testimonials enliven the complex negotiation between the nation-state, citizens, and non-citizens. In figure 6, Mariella, an 64 organizer from California, is standing with a cloud of butterflies flying above her head. Holding onto a megaphone with her eyes closed, she emotes a sense of peaceful determination. The fluorescent colors and visual arrangement of this image, particularly the inclusion of her written testimonial, indelibly references the “I am Undocuqueer” project. Salgado created this project to visually represent the testimonials of undocuqueer migrants through digital posters that became widely utilized in LGBTQ migrant activism. Critics such as Melissa Autumn White observe that while these posters generate an important archive of queer migration activism, the testimonials

“illuminate the tensions between queer world making desires and the seductions of methodological nationalism that powerfully reproduce the nation-state as a taken-for-granted and unavoidable territorial frame of reference.”103 The logic behind this critique rests on the idea that

LGBTQ migrants have a choice between reproducing the “unavoidable territorial frame” of the nation-state or refusing to comply. What is missing from this critique is that undocumented subjects do not negotiate with the nation-state out of sheer complicity. While undocumented subjects may be forced to subject to nation-state frameworks, they cannot be simply “seduced” into these frameworks because they are already considered rightless subjects and have limited options. Mariella’s testimonial complicates White’s critique, as it demonstrates the complex negotiation between LGBTQ migrant activism and nation-state frameworks. She explains that when she votes, she has her “undocumented fam, incarcerated fam, and young folks” in mind.

Through this statement, Mariella demonstrates that her commitments reside amongst people who are blocked from voting. She is not performing nationalism when she votes but enacting an abolitionist desire for freedom. Moreover, her pointed use of language makes a clear distinction between not being able to vote and being blocked from voting. Shuttling between the

103 Melissa Autumn White, “Documenting the Undocumented: Toward a Queer Politics of No Borders,” Sexualities, 17, no. 8 (2014): 980. 65 frameworks of the nation-state, and her abolitionist desires, Mariella shows that LGBTQ migrant activism involves contradictory negotiations with the nation-state. Most importantly, Mariella’s negotiation emerges as a desire for relationality—illustrated through her challenge of the

“temporary system we voting in” and commitment to “co-creating the harmonious ways we truly want to live by.” A generous reading of these testimonials helps to account for the complexity of participating in systems of power but refusing to concede to the nation-state.

A closer look at these testimonials also suggests that Vota Jota incorporates and transforms electoral strategy for tactical purposes. For instance, Jorge Gutierrez, Familia’s executive director, explains the inspiration behind Vota Jota when he proclaims,

I am undocumented, queer and I cannot vote but I am organizing to bring out the LGBTQ Latinx community to register to vote and get them to vote. I know elections and politicians alone will not save us or keep us safe…But as a community organizer, I see this election as an organizing opportunity to create room for what’s possible in the short- term because so many people are hurting right now. My commitment to organizing for racial justice is beyond this election cycle, but I cannot stand on the sidelines when there is so much at stake for so many of us. That is why we at Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement decided to launch our #VotaJota civic engagement campaign…104

Gutierrez articulates the important tensions between voter registration and political representation. Thus far, I have argued that Vota Jota provides an outlet for undocumented subjects to be heard. However, in this testimonial, Gutierrez’s complicates political representation by critiquing the very systems that he seeks to shape. Even though political elections “will not save us,” Gutierrez is focused on the “short-term” while keeping an eye

“beyond this election cycle.” Speaking about his participation in the campaign, Gutierrez observes that he does not have the privilege to “stand on the sidelines.” The flexible movement between the past, present, and future challenges nation-state frameworks, which subject LGBTQ

104 “Who Inspires You to Vote? ¿Quién te inspira a votar?,” GLAAD, October 29, 2020, https://www.glaad.org/blog/who-inspires-you-vote-¿quién-te-inspira-votar 66 migrants to constant regulation of mobility, of rights, and in this case, of political imagination.

His rejection of a singular strategy and multi-layered temporal vision performs what Chela

Sandoval calls a differential consciousness, which is a mobile activity that “functions like the clutch of an automobile, the mechanism that permits the driver to select, engage, and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power.”105 This tactical maneuver is informed by

Gutierrez’s subject position as a queer undocumented migrant who cannot vote but seeks political change. By not compromising to a singular solution and managing to move between short-term strategies and long-term goals, Gutierrez shows that Vota Jota adjusts, transforms, and expands the possibilities of our current political moment.

Just as he grapples with the limitations of electoral politics, and imaginatively maneuvers through nation-state frameworks, Gutierrez evokes relationality as a necessary political practice that differs from nation-based citizenship. Emerging from the intensities, crises, and urgencies of nation-state violence, he maintains that, “We are not waiting for anyone to come to our communities and do the work we must do because we got each other, and we know the issues and solutions we need to create communities free of prisons, cages, police, violence and white supremacy.” Unlike the neoliberal belief in personal responsibility, Gutierrez asserts that “we got each other.” His evocative use of relationality as a political practice demonstrates that a world free of prisons, cages, and state violence is possible. Relationality is essential to gain access to this world because it brings into being a vibrant exchange of political strategies that enable “the work we must do.” The “we” in his statement is not fixed, as it demands “a new subjectivity, a political revision that deni[es] any one ideology as the final answer, while instead positing a tactical subjectivity with the capacity to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be

105 Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 57. 67 moved.”106 For Gutierrez, refusing to wait any longer is a double refusal of the nation-state, particularly when undocumented subjects are told to “wait in line” for rights that may never come into existence. In the context of immigration politics, which constantly frame immigration reform as “progress,” refusing to wait provides a blueprint for an abolitionist future through a temporal disruption of narrative progression. This negotiation with the nation-state is relational, tactical, and expansive. It eschews the supposedly fixed and progressive future of the nation in order to do the “work” that is needed.

To conclude this section, I turn to one final example from the Vota Jota campaign that captures a relational negotiation with the nation-state. At the bottom of the campaign’s website, there is a section that provides readers with digital flyers to share on social media, merchandise to “mobilize in style,” and a Spotify music playlist “for jotas, and by jotas” to “turn up.” The playlist includes popular and iconic hits such as “Todos me Miran” by Gloria Trevi, “WAP” by

Cardi B, “Truth Hurts” by Lizzo, amongst others. It begins with Rebeca Lane’s “Libre, Atrevida y Loca,” which sets the tone for the tactical, fabulous, and flexible rhythm of the campaign.

Following the lyrics of the song, which travel from Mexico to Guatemala to Argentina, the playlist offers a playful negotiation with nation-state boundaries. In essence, the playlist, with its call for jotas to dance, turn up, and party, offers a way to counter singular notions of electoral strategy. By insisting on the power of music, the playlist allows for queer subjects to participate in politics as relational bodies in motion, grasping the rhythm of Vota Jota through corporeal gestures and movements. Incorporating music, art, media, and fabulous virtual events such as a drag show broadcasted through Facebook, Vota Jota achieves what Lisa Lowe insightfully describes as the imaginative force of culture when she writes, “Where the political terrain can

106 Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 58. 68 neither resolve nor suppress inequality, it erupts in culture. Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined.”107 Lowe argues that the

“political terrain” is not capable of addressing unequal relations of power due to the structures through which the nation-state operates. In contrast, Vota Jota functions as a site of transformation that enables different forms of “subjectivity, collectivity, and public life” to emerge. Through culture, Vota Jota envisions relationality as a vehicle of power from which subjects construct political identifications and subjectivities. Therefore, providing a site for undocumented subjects to negotiate with the nation-state while remaining vigilant about shifting relations of power. Overall, Vota Jota envisions relationality as a political practice that can be widely accessed in the present, in the future, on the dance floor, and in the virtual world.

Deferred Temporalities

The complex negotiation between LGBTQ migrants and the nation-state is also at stake in the documentary, Forbidden: Undocumented & Queer in Rural America, which allows me to explore how time influences the lives, politics, and activism of undocumented subjects. The documentary stages a heartfelt, moving, and compelling story in which the protagonist, Moises

Serrano, partakes in a journey towards the “American Dream.” It was released a month after the

Supreme Court blocked former President Barack Obama’s immigration plan, which extended deferred action to parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The documentary’s timeline also includes the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized marriage equality across the nation.

In terms of narrative, Forbidden captures different moments in Moises’ life, such as his participation in immigrant rights activism, moving in with his boyfriend, enrolling in college,

107 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 22. 69 and finally, the film closes with Moises visiting the Statue of Liberty. Like the fiction of the

American Dream, the film structures a linear narrative in which Moises is able to pursue his dreams through hard work and determination. However, during his journey, Moises expresses ambivalence about his relationship with the nation-state as an undocumented subject, going to the extent of calling his undocumented status “psychological warfare.” While Moises clings on to the promise of the American Dream, he is conscious of the contradictions between his aspirations, nationalism, and his desire to change the world. The range of spatial and temporal displacements in the film compose a contradictory narrative in which Moises grapples with his desire for rights while critiquing of relations of power. Building on the previous section, I shed light on how Moises’ negotiation with the nation-state is determined by citizenship, time, and a contradictory relationship to rights.

Prior to analyzing specific scenes in which the film directly grapples with time, it is important to stress how Moises negotiates the contradictions in his life through the embodiment of difference. During a “Coming Out of the Shadows” rally, which was organized by the migrant rights organization El Cambio, Moises builds on the performative power of coming out as a challenge to hostile social worlds. He underscores that at the rally, “it was ok to be an undocumented immigrant, it was ok to be gay, it was ok to be queer, it was ok to be Southern, it was ok to be fierce.” Here Moises utilizes repetition to show how the rally animates him to embody difference in the public sphere. In other words, the rally offers a “good-enough” space in which Moises comes out as undocumented, as queer, and as a fierce activist in the rural South who is determined to exist.108 By dramatizing the experience of being expelled from the national

108 The concept of a “good-enough space” comes from the insightful work of performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o in Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 38. He argues that the Ball scene produces a good-enough space 70 citizenry (in terms of his undocumented status), coming out enables Moises to claim social belonging as a non-citizen. Thus, in risking the possibility of deportation, he comes out to defy the sovereignty of the nation-state even as he intends to seek rights from the nation.

This coming out scene leads me to analyze the intervention that Forbidden makes within queer critiques of rights-based politics. When rights, such as the right to marry, the right to migrate, and the right to be visible, are narrated as a future orientation, the nation limits perceptions of time for the benefit of state power. This type of linear progression is characteristic of dominant LGBTQ politics, in which queers come out to gain visibility from the nation, and assumingly, to access social belonging. Such temporal framework begs the question, is Moises

“coming out of the shadows” at the rally for the nation or for himself? At the beginning of the film, Moises states, “my rights as an undocumented man and my rights as an LGBTQ man are one and the same, and we have to fight for both if we want full equality for everyone in this nation.” In asking for “equality for everyone in this nation,” and merging LGBTQ and immigrant justice struggles, Moises places hope in the nation to unify individuals and embrace differences through rights. His desire for rights might be described as queer liberalism, which David Eng,

Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz define as “the contemporary liberalist demands of a nationalist gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subject petitioning for rights and recognition before the law.”109 This seemingly transparent relationship between coming out, petitioning for rights, and gaining recognition from the law hinges upon a reciprocal process between the nation-state and queer citizen subjects who seek “full equality.” However, this neat, linear, and progressive narrative is necessarily foreclosed to undocumented subjects. After all, Moises’ desire for rights

for Black and Latinx performers to transform experiences with quotidian violence into extravagant performances—enabling queer fantasy to come to life. 109 David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, “Introduction: What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Social Text,84-85, no. 23 (2005), 10. 71 emerges as a desire for the right to have rights. Because he is not a U.S. citizen, his only recourse for rights is to negotiate with the nation-state through multiple activist strategies. Different from queer liberalism, which speaks to the experiences of U.S. citizen subjects, the relationship between undocumented subjects and the nation-state is predetermined by citizenship, producing the terms through which undocumented subjects experience temporal delays in their access to citizenship-based rights.

Figure 7. Brandon and Moises. Still from Forbidden (2016).

Significantly, the film offers two scenes that open up space to complicate the structures of time for queer undocumented subjects. In the first scene, Moises and his partner Brandon discuss their plans to move in together while looking at apartment listings. At one point, Brandon comments that an apartment’s kitchen is perfect for cooking. Immediately, Moises responds by teasing him about his inability to cook. The mise-en-scène of this scene is important, as both of them are sitting on Brandon’s bed and in a brief but touching moment, Moises rests his head on

Brandon’s shoulder (figure 7). The formal elements of this scene, with the cameras’ close-up and the saturated warm colors, make it a scene of vitality, intimacy, and fantasy. In seeing Moises 72 and Brandon plan their future together as a loving gay couple, a cinematic argument is made for the fantasy of the good life—which is temporally attached to a domestic future.110 Even at the end of the film, the documentary includes a statement confirming that as of 2016, Moises and

Brandon are still dating. This scene, and the documentary as a whole, promises stability and happiness through queer domesticity, making it easy to dismiss the linear progression of the film as a vivid example of queer liberalism.

And yet, when it comes to negotiating his subject position as a non-citizen, Moises demonstrates that time has multiple rhythms and motions. In the sequence that follows their fantasy of the good life, the couple is riddled with questions about their future. In this scene, the camera has shifted from Brandon’s side to that of Moises. Instead of being shot at eye level, which provided a full view of the couple’s faces and smiles, this scene is shot at a lower angle and the viewer looks up to the couple. Their bodies are more relaxed in this scene, which contradicts the actual tone and content of their conversation. Moises begins by asking the marriage question: “So, what are we going to do about, like, marriage and stuff like that?”

Brandon leans back and responds that he does not know and is scared by the proposition. As he speaks, the camera zooms in on Brandon’s face, tightening the visual frame and making the viewer linger with the pending marriage proposal. The silence is broken by Moises when he admits that he is also scared by the idea of marriage. Rather than follow a clear path towards the future, this ideal gay couple troubles the links between domesticity, marriage, and citizenship- based rights. Radically different from the marriage proposals that queer theorists have in mind in their critiques of marriage equality, the possibility of marriage creates an impasse in which

Moises and Brandon are stuck with fear and an unknowable future.

110 Lauren Berlant writes at length about the fantasy of the good life in Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 27. 73

This negotiation between their future and citizenship-based rights (marriage) powerfully captures the shifting relations of power that structure the lives of undocumented subjects. As a conclusion to their conversation on marriage, Moises remarks, “I know it’s selfish to think about this but honestly citizenship in three years is what is...ideal…I wouldn’t have to wait for the

DREAM Act or immigration reform.” Because Brandon is a U.S. citizen, Moises makes it a point to remark on their racialized difference as queer subjects with different access to rights. For

Moises, marrying Brandon is not just about love, as it would provide him with a pathway to citizenship, and thus, speed up the impasse that he is stuck within. What might seem like a minor or selfish response by Moises is actually an astute description of the temporal time lag that undocumented subjects face in everyday life. In his self-described “selfish” response, Moises brings to light a refusal of waiting through the temporal inscription of “wouldn’t-have-to-wait.”

As I have previously discussed when analyzing the work of Vota Jota, refusing to wait creates an alternative time and space for undocumented subjects living in the cruelties of the here and now, it is a rich temporality that radiates with unfulfilled possibilities and persistent desires.111 Moises’ articulation of wouldn’t-have-to-wait indexes an alternative and livable future. Notably, this alternative future depends on having access to citizenship-based rights; thus, while marrying

Brandon would allow Moises to stop waiting on legislation like the DREAM Act, his life would still depend on the regulatory frameworks of the nation-state. Here I am not critiquing Moises for not wanting to wait but showing how his desire to not wait is conditioned by citizenship.

Following the trajectory of Moises moving in with Brandon, along with tracking shots of immigrant rights events that he helped to organize, the film transitions to his desire to pursue higher education. After being accepted into Sarah Lawrence College, the film offers a sequence

111 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 74 in which he waits to read his funding package. Once his package is delivered, he holds up a green folder that reads, “Time to Celebrate!” The scene shows Moises reading his funding letter without offering any commentary. A contradiction emerges between the folder’s directive,

“Time to Celebrate!,” and his visible disappointment. The camera cuts to a point of view shot of

Moises looking at his computer screen with the college’s cost of attendance per semester:

$69,378. In disbelief by the costly tuition amount, along with the insufficient funds that he received from the college, he remarks, “What education is worth…120 thousand dollars for four years…I mean…I talk all the time about not giving into…these elite institutions…this was my dream.” The drawn-out pauses in his statement highlight the temporal delays in his plan to enroll in college. Even though he obtained good grades in high school, worked a full-time job, was active in community events, and was even accepted to college, he still cannot afford to pursue his dream—which is drawn-out, always out of reach, and always determined by citizenship.

Towards the end of the film, Moises makes an appeal to the college and obtains enough scholarships and grants to enroll. Making this appeal to the college is instructive of how undocumented subjects navigate structural impossibilities. While the appeal may be read as a sign of meritocracy, it reveals the survival strategies that Moises has developed as an undocumented subject.

When he first reads the funding package, Moises is stuck in what Lauren Berlant theorizes as an impasse, which is “shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on.”112

According to Berlant, the impasse “induce[s] a poetic of immanent world making,” it is an overwhelming sense of “crisis ordinariness” that forces subjects to grapple with the cruelties of

112 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 8. 75 the present.113 When Moises and Brandon discussed the possibility of marriage, they left the conversation up in the air, but they did not limit their imaginations to nation-based citizenship.

While marrying Brandon would allow Moises to apply for citizenship, his life would have been decided by the nation-state, so the couple chooses to live their lives on their own terms. In this sequence, giving up is not an option, and Moises finds an alternative pathway that allows him to pursue higher education with the knowledge that his “dream” is not granted by the nation-state.

The sequence demonstrates that time is a transitive and compounding experience in the lives of undocumented subjects, whereby Moises experiences an impasse that pushes him to recognize the limits of the nation-state. In this scene, the narrative progression of the film is interrupted to show the possibility of a future beyond the purviews of the nation-state and the fiction of the

American Dream.

Taking into account how Moises has grappled with the temporalities and structural impossibilities of the nation-state, I turn to the final sequence of the film in which Moises experiences a compounding sense of melancholia. This sequence is foreshadowed at the beginning of the film when Moises shares a story about his “enchantment” with “Lady Liberty.”

When he was eight years old, he asked his teacher what is written inside the Statue of Liberty’s

“notebook.” The teacher responded by sharing the famous lines from “The New Colossus” sonnet: “Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to be free.”114 Moises explains that at that moment, he knew “that lady Liberty was talking about my family, and about my community…so I felt welcomed and I felt special.” However, as he grew older, he began to recognize anti-immigrant rhetoric and discourse in his social surroundings. Exasperated by these

113 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 8. 114 Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” Lit2Go https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/133/historic-american- documents/4959/the-new-colossus/ 76 contradictions, he asks, “This is my home. This is my country. How can my own country that I love tell me that I don’t belong here?” His optimistic attachment towards the Statue of Liberty is necessarily tied to the nation-state, which he sees as his home, but this attachment is ruptured by his status as a non-citizen. The disappointment within his question marks a pivotal moment of subject formation, in which Moises glances backward to the past and sees a disparity between his desire to belong in the nation-state, the American Dream, and the racist nativism that he encounters in everyday life. In this moment, lacking U.S. citizenship serves as a locus for subject formation, producing a sense of what Alicia Schmidt Camacho calls migrant melancholia, a mode of subjectivity that “marks the loss of a social contract.”115 His melancholia, and the irredeemable loss of a homeland, casts a shadow on his image of the Statue of Liberty. When he comes to the realization that the country that he loves does not love him back, “the specter of state failure looms large.”116 By glancing backward, Moises manages to see the cruel and optimistic promises of this national icon.

115 Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 286. 116 Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 286. 77

Figure 8. Moises and the Statue of Liberty. Still from Forbidden (2016).

Although Moises initially desires what the Statue of Liberty promises, a sense of belonging, citizenship, and civil protections, the nation-state forbids him from obtaining access to these promises because of his position as a queer undocumented subject. This impossible subject position is visually represented in a shot where Moises looks directly at the camera with the Statue of Liberty in the background (figure 8). In the shot, the statue is turned away from

Moises, but he is also looking in a different direction. The statue stands tall, directly at the center of the shot, and Moises stands queerly off-center with his hands on his pockets. At multiple levels, this shot is a powerful depiction of the contradictory relationships between LGBTQ migrants and the nation-state. While Moises “cannot not want” citizenship-based rights and national belonging, the statue denies him any form of recognition.117 Alternatively, Moises

117 Here I am invoking the work of Gayatri Spivak in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). When describing deconstruction, she observes that it is “a persistent critique of what we cannot not want…” (110). In line with Spivak, I am arguing that undocumented queer subjects cannot not 78 decides to look straight at the camera, perhaps making the viewer reckon with the impossibilities of this double backing. He performs what Lisa Lowe insightfully calls an immigrant act. She contends that, “One of the important acts that the immigrant performs is breaking the dyadic, vertical determination that situates the subject in relation to the state, building instead horizontal community with and between others who are in different locations subject to and subject of the state.”118 As Lowe instructs, immigrant acts establish alternative relationships to the state in which vertical lines are disrupted. Without resolving any contradictions, this double backing marks a break within progressive discourse in immigrant rights activism, LGBTQ politics, and the documentary’s linear narrative. The double backing expands our breadth of vision in such a way that forces us to see the cruel and optimistic promises of U.S. citizenship for what they are: unstable fictions of the American Dream. Through the double backing, Moises turns his attention to the viewer, asking us to imagine alternative formations in which subjects are not bound to the limits of the nation-state.

By turning to time as a transitive and compounding experience, I identified the multiple relations of power that trigger the film’s narrative. I analyzed different strategies that Moises utilized to negotiate with the nation-state, such as coming out, dwelling on the question of marriage without compromising to a singular solution, and performing an immigrant act that elicits new subject positions. Throughout this section, negotiating with the nation-state is not just about complete subjugation, but also about imagining and spatially arranging different configurations of time. Because the film structures a narrative of linear progression, particularly through its limited representation of obtaining rights through citizenship, it is essential to look

want rights and social belonging. The social conditions of “cannot not want” is what inspires their complex negotiations with the nation-state. 118 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 35-36. 79 closely at sequences in which Moises grapples with the alluring promises of the nation-state as a form of temporal disruption. In his final act, he looks at the viewer, the people, and not at the imagery of the nation-state.

Relational Identities

In this final section, I analyze the mural, “I am UndocuQueer” by Julio Salgado, as a relational matrix through which undocumented subjects maintain the ability to come together as a collective and shift relations of power. In particular, I show how relationality shapes the “I” in

Salgado’s mural, transforming it from a declarative statement of individual identification into a colorful arrangement of voices that speak back to nation-state power. Julio Salgado, who identifies as an undocuqueer migrant, is the senior projects manager for The Center for Cultural

Power and co-founder of the “Dreamers Adrift” YouTube series. Although Salado is often credited with coining the term “unducuqueer,” he remarks that he cannot take credit for the term and does not remember its origins.119 When reflecting on what the term undocuqueer means to him, he reflects,

I use two identities that are supposed to make me weak and empower myself. As an undocumented person, I am seen as criminal. As a queer person, I am seen as somebody who is going to hell. So how do you turn that [around]? For me, through the art, I turn that [around] by showing ourselves in dignified ways that embrace the terms that make us feel like we are less than human.… ‘Undocuqueer’ is not a law. It is not a bill. It is an idea.120

In this light, producing art about undocuqueer migrants is not about nation-based citizenship or rights. For Salgado, undocuqueer presents an opportunity to engage in queer world making, it is a discursive mark that produces meaning and incites new ideas. Salgado utilizes visual media as an artistic tool for re-signification, in which he embraces dehumanizing terms, such as queer, and

119 Hinda Seif, “‘Layers of Humanity’: Interview with Undocuqueer Artivist Julio Salgado.” Latino Studies 12, no. 2 (2014): 304. 120 Seif, “‘Layers of Humanity,’” 305-306. 80 shifts their meaning to envision the world differently.121 In his response, he continuously uses the word “seen” to articulate his experiences with racist nativism and homophobia. By using the language of “seen,” he illustrates the power of the visual to inflict violence, but he turns this power around by pursuing art as a form of political praxis. In merging undocumented and queer together, through visual and linguistic codes, Salgado creates what Judith Butler calls a “break” within discourse.122 This discursive maneuver illustrates “the performative power of appropriating the very terms by which one has been abused in order to deplete the term of its degradation or to derive an affirmation from that degradation…”123 Overall, art animates Salgado to shift relations of power and affirm his identity as an undocuqueer migrant.

Figure 9. Julio Salgado, “I am UndocuQueer!,” digital mural.

In the process of transforming language for political purposes, Salgado imagines strategic subject positions and political identifications. The mural above, “I am UndocuQueer!,” was featured in San Francisco’s Galería de la Raza, located in the mission district, as part of Pride

121 Relatedly, I have analyzed this particular strategy of transforming language for political purposes with the example of Vota Jota. 122 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 144. 123 Butler, Excitable Speech, 158. 81 month in June 2013. The digital mural depicts self-identified undocuqueers wearing t-shirts with their written testimonials to call attention to the relations of power between “the undocumented and LGBTQ community” (figure 9). The multi-color shirts are meant to represent the pride flag, making a direct acknowledgment and connection to the pride festivities that took place during its exhibition. While the three undocuqueers at the center of the mural are smiling with inviting postures, the others shrug, look to the side as if ambivalent towards the public, and one is depicted holding a loudspeaker. Upon closer examination, the shirts that they are wearing send a clear message to dominant LGBTQ communities in San Francisco: “I exist!” Visually and textually compelling, the mural characterizes the phrase, “I am UndocuQueer,” as a vibrant social domain that empowers LGBTQ migrants to claim their existence within the streets of San

Francisco.

Without ignoring the visual elements of this mural, it is important to consider how space gives texture and meaning to the phrase, “I am UndocuQueer.” Space plays a central role in the work of Salgado and Galeria de la Raza, especially with the racial dynamics of San Francisco and the long history of gentrification that has been well documented by numerous scholars in queer studies and queer of color critique.124 By placing this mural for public viewing in the mission district during Pride month, and merging “undocu” with “queer” in bold font, an intervention is made against the displacement queer communities of color in San Francisco.

Juana María Rodríguez describes the conditions through which subjects encounter discursive space when she writes,

124 See for instance, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, “‘Mira, yo soy boricua y estoy aquí’: Rafa Negrón’s Pan Dulce and the Queer Sonic Latinaje of San Francisco,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies XIX (2007); Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Place: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 82

Identity is about situatedness in motion: embodiment and spatiality…The subject brings to the encounter her own set of decoding practices that are mediated by the regulatory power of a particular discursive space, but not wholly determined by them. The challenge becomes how to conceptualize subjectivity through both semiotic structures (discursive spaces) and agency (identity practices) by investigating the ways these fields work to constitute, inform, and transform one another. Discursive spaces exist as sites of knowledge production.125

In this passage, Rodríguez probes discursive space as an important site of meaning-making, knowledge production, and relational identity formation. She demonstrates that the interplay between discursive spaces and identity practices is important in the subversion of meaning, which is mediated through “the regulatory power” of a discursive space, and yet, “not wholly determined” by these frameworks. Located in San Francisco, which is generally considered a gay mecca, Salgado’s mural utilizes identity practices and decoding strategies to subvert dominant meaning. Strategically placed in a city that violently displaces racialized communities, the mural creates a relational matrix where gentrification is not the only vector of power, as the relational identity practices of undocuqueer migrants carve out a space for them to claim as their own.

These visual, spatial, and aesthetic strategies constitute the relational processes through which undocuqeer migrants negotiate with nation-state frameworks. When engaging the work of

Salgado, particularly the “I am UndocuQueer” posters, Gayatri Gopinath cautions that “the reliance on a politics of visibility, authenticity, and autonomous selfhood…runs the risk of replicating the very terms upon which liberal citizenship is based.” Her critique points to the contradictory terms through which undocuqueer migrants negotiate with the nation-state. If anything, Gopinath’s critique demonstrates that while undocuqueer migrants are not bound to nation-state frameworks, they cannot escape them either. These negotiations have flaws, are not perfect, and are anything but pure. However, the mural elicits meaning-making practices that

125 Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad, 5. 83 refuse a cohesive and unitary viewing experience; thus, positing a challenge to the individual citizen of the nation who obtains rights through legal recognition. Much like the identity practices of undocuqueer migrants, the mural offers an amalgamation of voices, faces, colors, and messages that make it impossible to point to “one” story or person to stand for the whole.

The “I” in his series transforms into a relational “we” through positioning undocuqueer subjects together. The bold claim, “I am UndocuQueer,” can only be registered by the general public because of the power that undocuqueer migrants gain through relationality. As a negotiation with space and nation-state frameworks, “I am UndocuQueer” claims identity practices that go beyond the scope of visual representation.

When undocuqueer migrants utilize identity practices to negotiate with nation-state frameworks, they gain a vantage point that enables them to decode, identify, and reimagine relations of power. In my reading of the mural, this vantage point emerges from a politics based on coalition and relationality. This reading is informed by Angela Davis, who makes a crucial observation in her discussion of women of color formations when she notes, “the most exciting potential of women of color formations resides in the possibility of politicizing this identity— basing the identity on politics rather than the politics on identity.”126 Angela Davis’ profound observation rings true to the politics, struggles, and visions of undocuqueer migrants. For instance, Perna, who is wearing a yellow shirt, cites Audre Lorde in her testimonial when she observes, “as a queer undocumented person, I know that there is no such thing as single issue struggles because we don’t lead single issue lives.” Her claim on space, language, and identity uses self-fashioning practices to envision an intersectional and relational movement. Her shirt

126 Angela Davis, “Interview with Lisa Lowe: Angela Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 318. 84 manages to base her identity on a politics of difference, not the other way around. Yosimar

Reyes, who is wearing a purple shirt, further suggests that in basing the identity on politics, there lies a possibility to shift relations of power. His shirt reads, “My purpose is to continue living like an open wound. Setting a reminder that by not recognizing my existence, this country will bleed onto death.” His shirt references Gloria Anzaldúa’s famous lines in Borderlands in which she writes about the border as an open wound that will not be sutured.127 Like Perna, his citation captures the power behind basing his identity on politics, which allows him to create an unruly imaginary in which the nation’s territorial and imaginary frames are challenged. The citational work in both of these statements marks an attempt to grapple with the politics of difference, whereby intersectional frames of analysis allow for the excavation of meaning. The shirts reveal the importance of insisting on existence. Ultimately, I am undocuqueer is a rallying call, it is a call to coalition, a call to relationality, and a call to stand together in the face of structural impossibilities.

Queer Negotiations

In my analysis of LGBTQ migrant activism, film, media, and art, I demonstrate that the ever-present concern for citizenship, rights, and national belonging is not resolved through simple solutions or unitary strategies. The negotiation between LGBTQ migrants and the nation- state persists and it constantly requires new subject positions from which to navigate shifting relations of power. When analyzing the digital media campaign Vota Jota, I show how activists repurpose nation-state frameworks to work towards an abolitionist future. In the documentary,

Forbidden, there is no narrative closure to the social dilemmas that Moises faces as a queer undocumented subject. His life does not fit the mold or the progressive narratives of the nation-

127 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza 4th ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 24. 85 state. By analyzing the contradictory space of his subject position, in which he cannot not want rights, I intervene in the critique of queer liberalism to demonstrate the political stakes and limitations of negotiating with the nation-state as a non-citizen. In the final section of this chapter, I closed by turning towards the strategic use of identity practices to transform discursive spaces. The rallying call behind the statement, “I am UndocuQueer,” affirms the power of relationality as a transformative political practice. In these three examples, I navigate questions on citizenship-based rights and queer strategies that keep open the discussion on the limits and possibilities of relationality. Rather than critique LGBTQ migrants for negotiating with the nation-state, my chapter focuses on what LGBTQ migrants might reveal about nation-state frameworks through these conflicting and imaginative negotiations. Future engagements with non-citizen political formations might go beyond the space of contradiction and focus on the material conditions that leave LGBTQ migrants with no other choice but to negotiate. These negotiations serve as a reminder that while there is no escape from the nation, there is always the possibility to expand, shift, alter, and remap the territorial and imaginary frames of the nation- state.

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Chapter 3

Transgressing Representation: The Unspoken Desires of Migrant and Diasporic Lesbians

In an interview describing her inspiration for the critically acclaimed film Mosquita y

Mari (2012), director and writer Aurora Guerrero speaks at length about a childhood friend with whom she shared intimate ties. Guerrero declares: “We never put words to it, and I never gave it its proper place in my life as my first love.”128 Guerrero parallels this experience with the film, where two young Latinas forge an intimate relationship in a working-class migrant community.

Her discussion of not having a language or “place” in her life to speak about unspoken desires suggests a yearning for what Emma Pérez calls a sitio y lengua, which she describes “as self- constructed Chicana spaces to create Chicana discourses.”129 Guerrero’s reflective musing on her childhood friend gives meaning to a queer relationship that would otherwise be overlooked and remain untold. She insists on the significance of this relationship when she states, “Even if we don't put a label on it, it doesn't take away what it was…And it was very special, and it was very intimate, and it changed my life. It might not have changed her life. But it changed mine.”130 The relationship opened up new worlds for Guerrero, as this experience introduced her to queer ways of life that deviate from the forced enclosures of heteronormativity.

Without putting a label on the relationship, Guerrero builds on this childhood memory to tell a coming-of-age story about Yolanda (nicknamed Mosquita), a studious daughter of migrants, and Mari, an undocumented Latina who takes on the financial responsibility of

128 Nishat Kurwa, “In 'Mosquita Y Mari,' A Tale Of Self And Community,” NPR, March 7, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/03/07/147586107/in-mosquita-y-mari-a-tale-of-self-and-community 129 Emma Pérez, “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes from a Chicana Survivor,” in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991), 99. 130 Kurwa, “In 'Mosquita.” 87 supporting her single mother and sister. The film captures their emerging love in the streets, train tracks, and abandoned car shops of Huntington Park, Los Angeles. Guerrero’s inspiration for

Mosquita y Mari serves as a provocation for excavating the film’s forbidden social bonds, friendships, and relationalities. Her yearning for a sitio y lengua from which to represent lesbian subjects begs the question: What is so threatening about lesbian relationships that they are made unspeakable in the world? I argue that the film offers a sitio y langua from which lesbian migrants and diasporic subjects can reclaim their difference against the grain, offering a cinematic transgression of representation that allows for Mosquita and Mari to be heard and seen on their own terms. This is a political act of self-construction that speaks through silence and exists in sitios not recognized by the nation.

Through cinema, Guerrero captures what Gayatri Gopinath calls the “impossible desires” of queer diasporic and migrant women.131 She signals towards the untold, unthinkable, and unimaginable possibilities of a “queer female subject position” that is located at the nexus of the nation, diaspora, and migration.132 Because Mosquita y Mari manages to listen to the unspoken desires of lesbian migrants and diasporic subjects, it challenges the ideological and visual codes of representation that elide female same-sex desire from dominant national imaginaries. The difficulty and contradiction of representing lesbian desire in film illustrates an epistemological challenge that is more complex than making “visible the invisible” or “speaking about the unspeakable.” Thus, I turn to sitio y lengua because it offers a space and discourse from which visual codes may be shifted, ideologies reworked, sexist gender norms provoked, and narratives denarrativized.

131 Here I reference Gayatri Gopinath’s insightful mapping of queer female diasporic desire through the hermeneutic of “impossibility.” See Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 15. 132 Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 15. 88

The chapter analyzes the impossible subject positions that Mosquita and Mari occupy as powerful transgressions of cinematic codes of visuality and speech. I demonstrate that through silence, embodied language, and queer imaginaries, the girls transgress dominant forms of representation in cinema. Teresa de Lauretis pushes for this mode of feminist filmmaking when she calls on feminist film theory “to articulate the relations of the female subject to representation, and vision, and in doing so to construct the terms of another frame of reference, another measure of desire.”133 Mosquita y Mari offers “another measure of desire” because it demands a sitio y lengua that grapples with the representational limits of heteronormativy for diasporic and migrant lesbians. To this end, this chapter begins with a focus on what it means to live life queerly, to veer off normative tracks of representation and establish relational bonds amongst Latina lesbians whose subject positions cannot be represented through dominant tropes of visibility and publicity. I engage how the girls shift transnational immigration flows through memory, imagine queer futurities, and document their existence. Following this analysis, I turn to the function of silence and embodied gesture as representational strategies that articulate, enunciate, and give voice to how Latina migrant and diasporic lesbians express their desire. In both of these sections, Mosquita and Mari mobilize new understandings of lesbian desire as inflicted by their migrant social worlds. The film is a rich point of entry into the intimate lives of subjects whose relationships are deemed impossible within heteropatriarchal structures of representation.

Just Friends? Queerness and Relational Ways of Life

In his influential interview, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” Michel Foucault provocatively states, “The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but rather,

133 de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 68. 89 to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.”134 He urges us to consider homosexuality “not as a form of desire but something desirable,” and suggests that the challenge homosexuality brings to heteronormative cultures is relationality, the fostering and forging of friendships.135 His notion of friendship and homosexuality as a “way of life” resonates with Mosquita and Mari’s relationship. Much in the same way that Guerrero felt troubled by the difficulty of naming her childhood relationship as her first love, Mosquita and Mari are subjected to regulatory constructions of gender, sexuality, and migration that constrain their ability to attain the status of a lesbian couple. They never kiss, have sex, or publicly disclose their relationship to friends and family as anything more than friendship, but their mutual care and support of each other speaks to the desirable ways of life that Foucault has in mind. Tom Roach reads Foucault’s theorization of friendship as animating a “radical queer politics” that “fights against the institutional impoverishment of the social fabric, and for the creation of unconventional forms of union and community.”136 Whereas dominant LGBTQ communities seek visibility and inclusion, Mosquita and Mari claim a sitio y lengua through the unspoken, eliciting “unconventional forms of union” where their desires are heard through silence. The tender cariño that the girls share, their silent gestures, and their lingering touches offer unconventional strategies to establish relational bonds.

From this point of view, queerness lays the ground to understand how Mosquita and

Mari’s relationship transgresses visual codes of representation. A major premise of the film is

Mosquita helping Mari study for their math class in an abandoned car shop. This space becomes

134 Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 135. 135 Foucault, “Friendship,” 136. 136 Tom Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (New York: SUNY Press, 2012), 14. 90 a sanctuary of sorts, as it enables the girls to share looks, stories, and glances that are undeniably queer in the fullest sense of the word. Because Mari is undocumented, she consistently articulates a lack of motivation to apply herself in school observing that it is “a waste of time” given her immigration status. Nevertheless, Mosquita relentlessly pushes Mari towards academic success and constructs an imaginary future where both of them attend college together. Although

Mosquita’s attachment to education hinges upon the belief in the myth of meritocracy, their imagined future is consistently changing and beckons further migrant crossings that disrupt hierarchical and heteronormative relations of power. According to Jill Dolan, “To be queer is not who you are, it’s what you do, it’s your relation to dominant power, and your relation to marginality, as a place of empowerment.”137 Read in this light, Mari’s relationship to dominant power (undocumented status) and Mosquita’s desire to help Mari with her schoolwork highlights queerness as a rich source of empowerment. Moreover, to understand their relationship as queer

“references an alternative hermeneutic,” as this interpretation requires “the particular interpretive strategies that are available to those who are deemed ‘impossible’ within hegemonic nationalist and diasporic discourses.”138 It is through their impossibile relationship that hegemonic relations of power are challenged, demanding a fuller understanding of queerness that centers the relational over the individual.

The relationship between Mosquita and Mari is an eloquent depiction of a life untethered to the progressive and linear narratives of “straight time,” which promises a happy future through marriage, children, capital accumulation, and a commitment to love as scripted by the nation-

137 Jill Dolan, “Introduction: Building a Theatrical Vernacular: Responsibility, Community, Ambivalence, and Queer Theater,” in The Queerest Art: Essays on Gay and Lesbian Theater, eds. Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwala (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 5. 138 Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 22. 91 state.139 From the very beginning, Mosquita and Mari are true “partners in crime” with their first interaction consisting of Mosquita going to Don Pedro’s grocery store where Mari steals merchandise from a refrigerator after he refuses to give her a job. Mari uses Mosquita’s body to hide from Don Pedro and runs out of the store after Mosquita warns her, “he’s looking!” Prior to this encounter, they had only shared glances from across the street since Mari recently moved to the neighborhood. This scene establishes their relationship as one of transgression, not only against Don Pedro’s watchful eyes, “he’s looking!” but from a time and space that renders their queer relationship impossible.

While they are unable to access the necessary financial resources and freedom to fulfill their desires, it is through their imaginations that the girls experience queerness. In her reading of the film as a queer diasporic state of suspension, Gopinath elucidates that “queerness and relationality take place in those in-between, dead-end, wasted, or anachronistic spaces produced by the merciless logic of a neocapitalist order, that are seemingly without mobility or use value within this logic…”140 As an extension to Gopinath’s elegant reading of mobility and immobility in the girls’ life, I find that when imagining a future together, the girls transgress dominant understandings of immigration flows, diasporic connectivities, and progressive accounts of straight time. As mentioned earlier, the abandoned car shop that Mari claims as their own creates a sitio, a space, from which the girls forge a queer way of life. Resting on the hood of an immobile car, Mosquita asks Mari to tell her “something that you’ve never told anyone.” Mari narrates her migration story, beginning with leaving Mexico and her grandma behind when she

139 For scholarship in queer theory that engages temporality see Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The There and Then of Queer Futurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 140 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 82. 92 was five. Interestingly, Mari speaks more about her memories of her grandma than of her migrant experiences in the U.S. She tells Mosquita about walking to the river with her grandma to watch the birds fly, and her grandma telling her that if she tries hard enough, she can “hear the wind going through [the bird’s] feathers as they fly by. I swear to you for a moment I could.”

What is significant about this story is that in the hood of an immobile car, Mari transports

Mosquita to her life in Mexico. The detailed account of hearing the wind ruffle through the bird’s feathers indexes a sensorial perception of and desire for mobility. Despite their current state of immobility, Mosquita and Mari manage to use their imagination to travel across borders, times, rivers, and nations.

Contrary to the notion of diasporic subjects as “stuck” on the past and incapable of moving forward, Guerrero powerfully captures the use of memory to build future relations. As

Mari elaborates her story, she looks onto an opening in the ceiling of the garage and sees dust particles that are floating in the air. When watching this scene unfold, I was curious about

Guerrero’s aesthetic choice to bring attention to this minor, mundane, and almost insignificant detail. But as Gopinath argues, it is “the small and antimonumental pleasures and struggles that give texture and meaning to the everyday.”141 The rays of light that enable the dust particles to become legible are emblematic of queer archival practices that center the histories and memories of subjects who are deemed impossible within national imaginaries. The dust particles in this scene hold a close resemblance to the function of dust bunnies in Alexandra Juhasz’s beautiful documentary, Video Remains.142 This documentary features her friend Jim, who is dying of

AIDS, as he tells stories about his life while on the beach, alongside footage of queer youth of color meeting at the Los Angeles AIDS project in the early 2000s. When speaking to her

141 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 78. 142 Video Remains, directed by Alexandra Juhasz (2005; produced by Alexandra Juhasz), online. 93 hairdresser, Anthony, Juhasz learns a story about his friend Alexandra who was in the process of moving out of her apartment and into a hospital where she died of AIDS. Anthony movingly shares that as they cleaned out her apartment, he offered to vacuum the dust bunnies off the floor, but Alexandra refused telling him: “Leave them there for all the memories of all the good times we had here. Throw them in the air so the next person will remember what it was like when we had our great get-togethers and our parties and our great moments of intimate conversation and planning for other things in our lives and our goals.” In this story, it is the material remains of dust that best represents queerness as a relational way of life. My intention here is not to diminish the life and death matters of Juhazs’ documentary, or to erase the differences between Mari’s and Alexandra’s stories, but instead to glean from these stories how

“dust” becomes a mobile repository for queer memories. After all, it is dust that creates an imaginary bond between Anthony and Alexandra despite her death, Mari and her grandma despite their distance. Dust travels in the air, accumulates on the floor, and above all is an example of the power and resilience of memory.

Similar to the work of dust in the film, which accounts for queer memories within the nation, the relationship between Mosquita and Mari yields an imaginary future that ruptures how

Latina/o/x and queer migrations are represented. The national citizenry is imagined as under the threat of the racialized migrant Other, as evident in Donald Trump’s speech where he depicts migrants from Mexico as rapists and criminals. At the same time, LGBTQ migrants who apply for asylum in the U.S. are represented as victims of the cultural homophobia and transphobia of the Global South. Eithne Luibhéid describes this imaginary construction as a “liberationist narrative” that inscribes the queer migrant into a “movement from repression to freedom, or a 94 heroic journey undertaken in search of liberation.”143 Such liberationist narratives pose the U.S. as a benevolent nation and misrepresent the multiple vectors of power that affect the lives of migrants. When Mosquita and Mari discuss their future, they transgress these supposedly linear, straight, and progressive narratives of transnational migration. Following her migration story,

Mari tells Mosquita, “Ten years from now I’m going to save up and visit my grandma in Jalapa,

Mexico, by then who cares if I can’t make it back.” Mosquita, on the other hand, responds by confessing that she is unsure about what she wants to do with her life; thus, breaking away from the belief of attaining a stable future through education. Mari quickly suggests for Mosquita to become a truck driver. In a teasing and lighthearted manner, Mosquita asks her, “Are you gonna ride with me?” This is an imagined future that Mari anticipates when she proposes, “You can take me to my grandmas, you could stay if you want.” Liberationist narratives of transnational migration organize the future as strictly bound to the newfound “freedoms” of the U.S. nation- state. However, Mari remaps South-to-North immigration flows to envision alternative relations to time and space, which is best described as queer futurity. To access this future, Mari rejects her life in the U.S. knowing that state immigration controls will prevent her from returning. The fact that Mari does not care if she can return to the U.S. serves as a testament to the transgression of state institutions and the imaginative possibilities of a transnational imaginary. Mosquita’s willingness to share her future with Mari simultaneously promises a way of life, a rejection of the here and the now that enables them to explore the “then and there” of lesbian subjectivity.144

Not only do they defy the progressive temporalities of straight time, as they quite literally

“go back [in time] to where you came from” as diasporic and migrant subjects, but they also craft

143 Eithne Luibhéid, “Introduction: Queer Migration and Citizenship,” in Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, eds. Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxv. 144 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 29. 95 a future that centers the relational over the individual. During the girls’ dialogue, the camera uses the shot/reverse shot technique to transition between Mosquita and Mari speaking, with their bodies separated through the editing of the film. Answering Mari’s proposition to stay with her grandma, Mosquita longingly says, “Yeah, I could see that.” The photographic quality of this scene strikingly maps corporeal desire, as Mosquita turns her body towards Mari (figure 1) and they gaze vibrantly towards the ceiling. José Esteban Muñoz, who theorizes queerness as a utopic longing, notes that, “We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”145 The ceiling, with the rays of light and particles of dust, orients their bodies towards each other as they envision a future that is luminous. Their tender embrace, and the camera’s depiction of their bodies coming together in the final shot, poses a challenge to the representation of migrants as having no future. The girls are able to share the cinematic frame when imagining a queer future together (figure 10), revealing how the editing of the film allows them to share moments of intimacy (their lives are

145 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 96 sutured together).146 Furthermore, the saturated light of this scene makes the “warm illumination” of queerness almost palpable for the spectator. It is the girls’ interdependent futures and mutual care that lays bare the possibilities of living relational ways of life.

Figure 10. Imagining queer futures. Still from Mosquita y Mari (2012)

Integral to the analysis of relationality are the particular survival strategies that transform hegemonic relations of power. In the film, the girls’ employ strategic methods to read encoded messages in their lives, which helps to expose how dominant practices of representation are not viable options for subjects whose relationships are deemed impossible. In Methodology of the

Oppressed, Chela Sandoval observes, “The semiotic perception of signs in culture as structured meanings that carry power is a basic survival skill necessary to subordinated and oppressed citizenry.”147 The crucial work of semiotic perception lies in the ability to discern power and deconstruct social meaning. For instance, when the girls lay claim to the abandoned car shop,

146 For a discussion of suture in film through the shot/reverse shot technique see Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 147 Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 130. 97 they are sitting inside a car reading written messages on the ceiling. These include statements written inside bubble shaped hearts like “I love Chuy,” “Hydo and Rusbi por vida” [for life],

“Guera y Chaparra friends for life.” When Mosquita reads the “friends for life” message out loud, Mari steps out of the car to write her own message. She uses her finger to trace the words

“M & M Fuck the Rest!” on the car’s dirty windshield. Once again, dust enables their relationship to transgress representational and institutional limits. The “Fuck the Rest!” message functions as an in-your-face rejection of the normative ordering of social life, as it challenges the terms through which relationships are recognized by the state as well as the ownership of space.

Prior to entering the car shop, Mari opened a gate with a sign that read “NO ENTRY/

WITHOUT PERMISSION/ LOITERING/ FORBIDDEN BY THE LAW.” This sign calls attention to the power of the law to exclude and prohibit the public from entering spaces, marking the car shop as private property even if it is abandoned by the owners. That the girls chose a private space to claim as their own speaks to their ability to not merely ignore signs, but to transgress and deconstruct the power inscribed within them. What distinguishes their “Fuck the Rest” message from the others is a queer critique of state institutions that uses space strategically and reads signs otherwise.

Because Mari traces this message through dust, her message attains an ephemeral quality that can easily be erased through time. In Los Angeles, where Latina lesbian spaces have continuously faced the threat of extinction due to economic displacement and gentrification, the sexual construction of space is ardently political. Written in dust, the message leaves a discursive mark on the car that lays claim to a sitio y lengua, a space and language that is forbidden, prohibited, and curiously imbued with desire. Emma Pérez discusses sitio y lengua as the power of queer Chicanas to “seize sociosexual power” and affirm a “space and language in an 98 antagonistic society.”148 The dust on the windshield enables Mari to trace a way of life, utilizing dust to connect her memories of Mexico together with the future that she imagines with

Mosquita. She imaginatively insists on the power of relationality to transgress dominant constructions of time and space. Most explicitly, the letters on the dusty windshield signal the power of queer Latinas to claim their own sitios and lenguas from the fringes of society. This antagonistic society, however, will not be receptive to the types of sites and discourses that

Mosquita and Mari make available in the film. Pérez interrogates this issue by asking, “We, the subjects, write; we, the subjects speak. But, do you listen? Can you hear?”149 Even as Mosquita and Mari transgress dominant codes of representation, their sites and discourses will remain unheard and unseen.

While dust creates an ephemeral transgression of time and space, the film alludes to a more tangible negotiation of lesbian representation through the family portrait. The film begins with shots of Huntington Park seen through the eyes of Mosquita, who is in the back of her parent’s car and on the way to a photography studio. Once at the studio, the film emphasizes a close up shot of the omnipresent photography camera. This shot transitions into a sequence of her family arranging themselves into different poses for the camera, and it should be noted that they are all dressed up for the occasion. At one point the photographer, who later in the film hires

Mari to pass out flyers, brings out stools for her parents to sit on. These minor details exhibit how the family portrait is a highly mediated image that is carefully constructed, even when the final product seems like a transparent depiction of “real” life. The mis-en-scène of this sequence has two functions: to inscribe the migrant family within a portrait of life that aspires towards

148 Pérez, “Sexuality and Discourse,” 162. 149 Pérez, “Sexuality and Discourse,” 179. 99 middle-class status, and to establish the nuclear family as the norm for all migrant families.150

Marianne Hirsch further elaborates that,

The family photo both displays the cohesion of the family and is an instrument of its togetherness; it both chronicles family rituals and constitutes a prime objective of those rituals. Because the photograph gives the illusion of being a simple transcription of the real, a trace touched directly by the event it records, it has the effect of naturalizing cultural practices and of disguising their stereotyped and coded characteristics.151

According to Hirsch, the naturalizing effects of the family portrait disguise cultural norms and the work of ideology in the practice of image making. It also presents a fictive vision of

“togetherness,” which is important to highlight since Mosquita’s exploration of queer desire is shut down by her parents who mistakenly believe that she is spending all of her time pursuing a boy. Just as the family portrait aims for cohesion, the film’s representation of its manifold visual strategies provides spectators with the tools to dissect power in the formation of the nuclear family.

150 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 79. 151 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7. 100

Figure 11. Queer portrait. Still from Mosquita y Mari (2012).

Queerness is not necessarily a straightforward rejection of the nuclear family, but it certainly troubles the relations of power that make the family portrait a privileged tool for representation. The film returns to the photography studio when Mosquita gifts Mari a CD with five dollars inside that she won playing at an arcade. When Mari was distributing flyers for the studio and advertising passport pictures—a subtle a connection between photography and migration documents—she sees an image display of Mosquita’s family portrait on the studio’s door. Almost as a response to her “outsider looking in” stance when seeing this image, Mari uses the five dollars to purchase a portrait image with Mosquita (figure 11). Unlike the original family portrait, which is put on display, this image is touched and held by the girls. The tactile quality of the second image alludes to what Tina Campt theorizes as the “haptic dimension” of photography that enables these material objects to be circulated, held, and shared relationally.152

By holding their image with their hands, the girls maintain a queer relationship to photography that lives in the here and the now but will also gain a life of its own in the future. Describing

“haptic temporalities,” Campt argues that images produce “affective temporalities initiated at their moments of production through a desire to create a material object of sentiment to have and to hold.”153 Since the family portrait is foreclosed to Mari, as her single mother cannot provide her with the means to attain a nuclear family, she desires a material object that documents her queer relationship with Mosquita. Upon holding the image, Mari proclaims, “See! That’s what

I’m talking about. That says, ‘I’m here.’” Mosquita corrects Mari saying, “No…We’re here.”

Although there is nothing spectacular about the image, it enables the girls to assert their lives in

152 Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 18. 153 Campt, Image Matters, 34. 101 the here and the now. Campt’s understanding of “image-making as a collective and relational site of enunciation” proves useful to underscore the significance of self-representation for Mosquita and Mari.154 This form of representation is different from national arguments for LGBTQ visibility because the image is not produced for mass consumption. Instead, the image grasps power because of its ability to be touched and held. By touching the image, the girls imagine relations that exist outside the frames of the nuclear family and capitalist production.

Through my analysis of queer imaginaries, dust, memory, and haptic images as transgressions of time and space, I purposely critique dominant modes of representation that render lesbian subjects as impossible within diasporic and migrant communities. This critique differs from a reductive framing of queerness as good and heteronormativity as bad, as I specify the particular technologies of representation that fail to account for different modes of desire. For instance, in analyzing the normalizing functions of the family portrait, I am not critiquing the practice per se as much as the social power ascribed to the nuclear family. This is not a call for inclusion or assimilation into dominant modes of representation, but an invitation to consider

“how to produce the conditions of visibility for a different social subject.”155 Through sitio y lengua, the film transgresses dominant forms of representation and documents a “different social subject” within the nation. The display of unconventional social relations in the film takes up

Pérez’s call to listen to subjects deemed unworthy of representation.

Silence and Queer Latina Gestures

Forging relationships between Latina lesbians invokes particular modes of articulation, enunciation, and desire: lenguas. Here I am not alluding to essentialist notions of homosexual identity but to how Latina lesbians employ everyday survival practices to negotiate

154 Campt, Image Matters, 24. 155 de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 9. 102 representational limits. This section builds on the work of queer Chicana and Latina feminists to ask how the representation of silence and gesture in the film become creative responses to the violence of gendered and racialized homophobia. During moments of intimacy between the girls, there is an abundance of silence, such as when Mari gives Mosquita a ride on her bicycle or when they cuddle in the living room of Mosquita’s home. This silence does not index a lack communication between the girls, as they employ embodied language strategically to communicate desire without needing to rely solely on words. In her analysis of Latina lesbian oral histories, Yolanda Chávez Leyva profoundly asserts, “For lesbianas Latinas, silence has been an enigma, a survival strategy, a wall which confines us, the space that protects us.”156 This insightful observation demands an expansive understanding of queerness and sexuality that is not limited to Western notions of publicity and visibility in the formation of lesbian identity. Silence produces alternative meaning-making practices that are embodied and felt, enabling queerness to mean something that is different from visibility. An engagement with silence does not refute the power of claiming sitios y lenguas, rather, it is an opening for silence to be heard on its own terms.

Embracing silence as a site for queer subject formation intervenes in the dominant narrative of “coming out” of the closet as a liberatory experience. Queer of color critique and women of color feminism provide strong arguments against the obligation for queers to come out in a visible manner. For instance, Carlos Decena’s concept of the tacit subject shows that for some Dominican migrant men, the verbal declaration of sexuality is redundant. He argues that in the practice of coming out, a subject may be revealing something that is already known, what he

156 Yolanda Chávez Leyva, “Listening to the Silences in Latina/Chicana Lesbian History,” Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998), 429. 103 refers to as tacit.157 Coming out forces a subject to verbally adhere to Western and universalized constructions of sexuality that ultimately erase difference; and depending upon the subject’s social location, coming out is not always necessary or desired as it may lead to violence.

Moreover, Gopinath maintains that coming out of the closet is “often characterized as journeys toward an essential wholeness, toward the discovery of a true gay identity through a teleological process of individuation that is granted representative status.”158 Gopinath critiques coming out as an individual journey whereby a “true” and fixed gay identity is discovered. Alternatively, when the girls are exploring their lesbian desires, they are always subjects in the making, not fixed subjects with complete understandings of their sexuality. Because coming out of the closet has become a dominant trope in LGBTQ films, Mosquita and Mari’s refusal to come out disrupts these individualized and essentialist framings of lesbian identity.

The sequences in the film where Mosquita and Mari express their desire stress embodied knowledge, gesture, and touch as alternative meaning-making practices that differ from the heightened visibility of dominant LGBTQ politics. During a study session, Mosquita leads Mari into the living room to play music. Once the music starts, Mosquita holds her arm out to Mari as an invitation to dance. Mari smiles, looks at Mosquita and reaches forward to lift herself from the couch. At first, they are both moving loosely to the rhythm of the music as individuals, but eventually, Mosquita pulls Mari closer to her body and holds onto her lower back. As the girls move from side to side, the camera zooms in on their bodies, framing their faces closely to portray their longing gazes (figure 12). Both of them transition from dancing with wide smiles to more intense facial expressions. In these brief moments, the girls look directly at each other, with

157 Carlos Decena, Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire Among Dominican Immigrant Men (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 19. 158 Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 172. 104 their lesbian looks daring to do more than dancing. The camera pans down to a shot of

Mosquita’s school pictures in the living room and concludes with a close shot of Mosquita’s hand holding Mari’s back. This small and ordinary gesture animates lesbian desire between the girls, as the look, the hand, and Mosquita’s invitation to dance transmit the powerful energies of the erotic. Juana María Rodriguez theorizes queer Latina gestures as deeply sensorial, embodied, and sensual modes of communication. She suggests that “gesture is a kind of touching, a way of sensing what might flow between us. It is sexual in the queerest of ways…it is multisensory, asynchronic, polysemous, perverse and full of promise.”159 If Mosquita were to verbally ask

Mari to dance, the power of this scene would diminish as the look in Mari’s face responds to the thrill, hunger, and the sexual energy that “might flow” between the girls. Her look establishes this scene as one of lesbian desire and creates an immaterial bond that cannot be represented by words. Furthermore, Mosquita’s invitation for Mari to dance is executed by reaching out her hand, a gesture that pushes against the verbal requirement to make one’s sexual desires known through words.

159 Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 1. 105

Figure 12. Dancing scene. Still from Mosquita y Mari (2012).

In light of the music playing in this scene, it is important to consider how music does not substitute for silence but is used strategically in the film to register the power of queer Latina gestures. The girls begin dancing to the song “Bestia” by Hello Seahorse!, which elaborates desire as articulated through the body: “No tengo que hablar para darme a entender / Mis ojos te lo dicen todo /Mi boca arrulla lo que pienso [I don’t have to speak to make myself understood/

My eyes say it all/ My mouth whispers what I’m thinking].”160 The spectator acquires another mode of perception that uses music to listen to the language of desire. Silence plays a key part in this scene, even with the music playing, because it is their silent and embodied gestures that enable the girls to know, or at least guess, what each other might be feeling. The song registers this corporeal language of desire when it states, “Sabras lo que siento/ Con sólo tocar mi piel

[You will know what I’m thinking/ Only by touching my skin].” Touch, movement, and playful

160 Hello Seahorse!, “Bestia,” EMI Music Mexico, track 1on Bestia, 2009, compact disc. 106 renditions of silence make sexuality known. The strong capacity of silence to communicate desire suggests that in the representation of lesbian subjectivity, particularly within the space of the migrant/diasporic home, public visibility and verbal articulations of sexuality are superfluous.161 Additionally, the transgression of language becomes an avenue to represent an otherwise irrepresentable subject, the lesbian migrant/diasporic subject. It is not the case that lesbian subjects are impossible, but that language and dominant forms of representation are unable to express their deeply felt and embodied sensual desires.

From this perspective, it is crucial to note that contradictions emerge within the desire to see lesbian representation in film. Mosquita y Mari eludes conventional narrative structure by not giving in to the desire for the girls to define their relationship or establish a sense of coherence in their lives. This lack of narrative closure signifies a different language of desire that does not preclude the possibility of remaining in a state of openness to the future. Following their intimate dancing scene, Mari sees Mosquita resting on the couch and tucks her in with a blanket. This time, Mosquita signals for Mari to join her by lifting the blanket and telling her, “Just for a little bit. I’m cold, Mari.” Once Mari accepts, the film cuts to a close-up shot of Mari’s face as she tells Mosquita “You’re probably going to go away for college, huh?” The camera focuses on

Mari with Mosquita’s face blurred in the background, and Mosquita responds with, “Wherever they accept us, here, somewhere else.” Mari is surprised by the “us” in Moquita’s response because she has not imagined the possibility to actually go to college as an undocumented

161 Here I am alluding to Martin Manalansan’s analysis of speech as superfluous in the interaction between queer subjects of color and their parents. He examines the case of a filipina lesbian whose mom always addresses her partner as her “friend,” and nevertheless, invites the partner to home-cooked meals. Manalansan observes that in these occasions, “silence stands in sharp contrast to the kinds of discursive norms of coming out. It has a quiet dignity and carries multiple meanings.” Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 30. 107 student, much less with a girl that she is attracted to. Ahmed’s analysis of contingent lesbianism is useful because it suggests “not only that we become lesbians but also that such becoming is not lonely; it is always directed toward others, however imagined.”162 Mosquita reassures Mari about the possibility to attend college by telling her that somehow, they will figure it out together. Thus, positing a contingent lesbianism where their ability to attend college depends on their shared struggles and shared desires. The hand-held camera and blurriness of the shot is not meant to signify authenticity or realness; instead, these strategic devices signal a renewed sense of intensity to the moment that was captured. In the context of their conversation, the hand-held camera brings urgency to a queer futurity that is in the process of becoming. The language of desire is expressed through formal editing devices that construct queer futures “here” but are also open to the future as existing “somewhere else.” Rather than limit lesbian subjectivity to a fully established relationship in the here and the now, the film’s aesthetic techniques insist on representing the girls’ material realities as important for shaping their futures.

In sharp contrast to dominant representations of lesbian relationships, the film refuses to portray intimacy through verbal declarations of love or kissing. After their dialogue on attending college, the girls say “thank you” to each other and for a second it seems as if Mari is about to kiss Mosquita on the lips. She caresses Mosquita’s cheek, touches her chin in a circular motion, reaches forward, and stops, laying her head in close proximity to Mosquita’s face. The camera pans down to Mari’s hand which is resting on her chest. At first glance, Mari’s decision to pause before kissing Mosquita might be read as the film’s failure to represent lesbian desire. However, the lingering touch of Mari’s hand and her caressing of Mosquita’s face registers queer desire, albeit differently from the expectation for them to kiss. Rodríguez succinctly writes about the

162 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 103. 108 queer Latina gesture of touch when she observes, “The reach of the hand forward to touch the face of the Other is also a process of extending the limits of one’s spirit to diminish the space between bodies.”163 Unlike the individualizing process of coming out of the closet or establishing a lesbian relationship through public visibility, touch is a gesture that redefines what counts as sexual. Guerrero does not privilege a universal lesbian couple over the small and intimate gesture of touch; she accentuates the silent, lingering, and relational functions of this gesture to create a bridge between their bodies. By touching Mosquita’s face, Mari reaches across space to create a relational sense of self. Such touching insight reveals that living and surviving as lesbian migrants and diasporic subjects does not have to be, in Ahmed’s words, a lonely experience.

It is precisely the intermingling between touch and silence that produces a rich semiotic ground to transgress ideological constructions and representational constraints. Writing about

Cherríe Moraga’s work as a “cartography of desire,” Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano pays close attention not only to the construction of the lesbian body and desire but also the “deconstruction of conventional codes that govern the representation of female desire and the female body…”164

Following Yarbro-Bejarano, doing this work enables the "unspeakable speaking and unrepresentable desire of lesbian subjects of color” to be imagined.165 Within the context of the film, the cartography of desire between Mosquita and Mari is effectively realized when Mosquita uses her fingers to touch Mari’s uncovered stomach. The camera work stretches time during this scene, asking the viewer to linger with this image and Mari’s curious fingers. The stretching of time documents a queer desire that is at once curious and careful. Following this scene of intimate caressing, the girls hear Mosquita’s parents opening the door and they both sit upright at

163 Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, 4. 164 Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 4. 165 Yarbro-Bejarano, The Wounded Heart, 4. 109 opposite ends of the couch. Mari leaves in a rush with Mosquita’s mom asking what was going on. Her confusion is resolved by Mari who tells her that they were studying for finals and finished. Although the girls were abruptly interrupted by the parents, they were able to explore queer desire by using their fingers to trace the contours of each other’s bodies. These traces map out a cartography of desire on the lesbian migrant/diasporic body, even if only for a moment.

Touch provides a tool for the girls to communicate desire without the demand to come out publicly to their parents, society, or each other.

Touch is not the only means to express desire, which Mosquita makes apparent when she gazes at Mari and stresses the exploration of sexuality. Dominant theories about representation, identification, and subjectivity in much of film theory focus on the function of the gaze in cinema. Laura Mulvey’s influential text, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” argues that men hold power over the gaze in narrative film (an active role) and women bear the weight of being objects of the gaze (a passive role), describing their “to-be-looked-at-ness” as a site of pleasure that is mediated through the male gaze.166 When left unchallenged, Mulvey argues that film codes “the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.”167 In Mosquita y

Mari, the gaze functions as a site where gender and sexual norms are enforced, transgressed, challenged, and negotiated. The film’s sitio y lengua responds to Mulvey’s plea to “conceive a new language of desire,” particularly through the nuance of Latina lesbian desires, gestures, and gazes.168 The film represents this alternative sitio y lengua when Mosquita visits Mari's home for the first time. Upon entering, Mosquita pays attention to the moving boxes that are scattered throughout the living room. Following a scene where Mari’s mom reprimands her for not

166 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975), 11. 167 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 8. 168 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 8. 110 unpacking, Mari leads Mosquita into her bedroom where she takes off her shirt to put on a necklace with an amulet attached to it. Later in the film, we learn that this amulet belonged to her late father who used to work as a truck driver. As Mari puts on the amulet in front of a vanity mirror, which rests right above her belly button, Mosquita gazes at her reflection and tells her,

“you look nice, Mari.” When Mosquita compliments how she looks, Mari quietly says “yeah,” touches the amulet, and begins caressing her stomach while staring down. She slowly looks up at the reflection in the mirror and looks to the side with a gentle smile. She is gazing at Mosquita who is gazing at her body. Neither girl becomes an object of desire in this scene because Mari is aware of Mosquita’s gazing, and instead of having her eyes looking down at the floor she looks up and gazes back at Mosquita. This gazing expresses a reciprocal line of desire; it offers a sitio y lengua whereby Latina lesbians utilize the gaze to reclaim their role as subjects in film with sexual desires.

To some extent, the film’s refusal to narrate a conventional romance is also a refusal to privilege limited notions of the couple form in cinema.169 Even in films that represent LGBTQ relationships, they follow conventional fantasies of the good life where LGBTQ couples are included as long as they maintain social norms. The film’s focus on silence, touch, looks, and gesture is an effort to break away from dominant forms of representation, further eliciting the ability to transgress codes of representation and grapple with the nuances of lesbian desire.

Returning to Chávez Leyva, the silence of lesbian desire in film is a “silence of knowing, of imagining…”170 Guerrero is not asking for cinema to make visible the invisible or speak about the unspeakable, she is providing alternative cinematic codes that enable the diasporic and

169 For critiques of the couple form see Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. 170 Chávez-Leyva, “Listening to the Silences,” 430. 111 migrant lesbian body to experience the queer pleasures of touching, caressing, gazing, and imagining representation otherwise.

Unspoken Desires

In this chapter I argued that Mosquita y Mari strongly captures the “impossible desires” of lesbian migrants/diasporic subjects through the transgression of dominant codes of representation. I illustrate how the film creates a sitio y lengua (place and space) that rearranges immigration flows and power relations, showcases silence and gesture as tools of enunciation for

Latina lesbians, and offers strategic representational tools for unrepresentable subjects. Overall, the chapter looks at the multiple strategies that a queer Chicana director employs in order to tell a story about Latina lesbian relations in a working-class migrant community.

Here I turn to Guerrero’s final message in the film regarding sitios y lenguas because it represents the power of Latina lesbian relations. At the end of the film, Mosquita feels betrayed by Mari when she catches her using their abandoned car shop, their sitio, to hook up with a guy for money (which was the result of Mari not being able to find work in the formal economy). She runs out of the car shop without saying a word, leaving Mari in a conflicting position where she wants to run out after Mosquita but needs the money to survive. Mosquita seeks out las cuatas, the friends that she used to hang out with before meeting Mari. She cruises with them in a moving van—the opposite of the immobile cars that she would use with Mari—and las cuatas encourage her to sit on a guy’s lap. This is an obvious hint to participate in heterosexual chains of desire and socialities. Mosquita’s feeling of betrayal does not last long, as she leaves her friends in a rush and begins walking through the streets of Huntington Park. It is as if she is searching for something that she cannot name or hold in place; she is looking for the sitio y langua that she thinks she has lost. After walking for a few blocks, she sees Mari from across the 112 street. Mari does not say a word but looks at her briefly and smiles. Mosquita smiles back, expressing a sense of understanding and connection despite what she witnessed at the car shop.

Even when seeing each other from across the street in public, they are able to utilize silence and gesture to communicate queer social bonds. As Gloria Anzaldúa eloquently writes in her letter to

Third World Women Writers, “The lesbian of color is not only invisible, she doesn’t even exist.

Our speech, too, is inaudible. We speak in tongues like the outcast and the insane.”171 It might seem “insane” to speak through silence, or to forgive betrayal, but Mosquita is aware of Mari’s struggles as an undocumented migrant and simply understands. The film provides one final call to envision queer desire differently by leaving the spectator with a shot of the dirty windshield with the words “M & M Fuck the Rest!” Indeed, the film’s last message is to fuck the rest, to transgress time and space, to speak through silence, and to gesture towards different means of communication and enunciation. The relationship between the girls is unspoken because dominant tools of representation and speech are not available to them. It is their silence that speaks and says it all.

171 Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. Ana Louise Keating (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 26. 113

Chapter 4

The Materiality of Being: Narration, Nostalgia, and (Non)Belonging

In the previous chapter I argued that relationality can take the form of unspoken desires that transgress dominant codes of representation within the nation-state, such as the words “M y

M” on a dirty windshield. This chapter extends this analysis by offering close readings of texts that focus on the everyday material object relations that queer migrants utilize for survival purposes; the materiality of dust, after all, is what enabled Mosquita and Mari’s relationship to be put into words. I argue that queer migrants articulate the embodied experience of non- belonging vis-à-vis their relationship to everyday material objects. For queer migrants, material object relations are necessarily about the affective experience of non-belonging. I contend that through their relationship with material objects, queer migrants express ambivalent feelings of nostalgia, loss, and melancholia. Their impossible subject positions, in which queer migrants do not experience belonging in the U.S. or in their home countries, apprehends new interpretative strategies. For instance, in the texts that I analyze queer migrants articulate nostalgia as productive for creating relational bonds and they also find world-making potentials in melancholia. When migrants exhibit non-normative relations to material objects, they are called melancholic or nostalgic since they cannot “let go” of objects. I rally against these judgments, which dismiss the experience of non-belonging as trivial, by asking how these affective relations transform normative notions of subjectivity.

In engaging material object relations, I build on the work of Martin Manalansan who theorizes “mess” as a queer challenge to normative ascriptions of value, functionality, and conduct. According to Manalansan, queer migrants maintain wayward relationships to objects that “hint at and suggest the long, arduous process of resilient struggles, fleeting pleasures, 114 hopeful aspirations, and manifold failures.”172 He offers ethnographic examples of queer and trans migrants who hoard discarded objects to argue that these objects “unfol[d] new vistas for what is significant and (im)possible for building new coalitions around immigration and queer issues.”173 What makes the relationship between migrants and material objects queer is not necessarily sexual practices, although these certainly occur and provide important pleasures.

Like Manalansan, I am interested in conveying how a non-normative relationship to material objects deviates from the norm. These material object relations do not serve the dominant purposes of functionality; rather, these objects can help queer migrants contend with an impossible subject position that makes them feel alienated from the world. In this chapter I draw attention to objects such as toys, phones, and old photos that may be read as disposable.

However, it is precisely the disposability of these objects that migrants identify with, as their lives are treated as disposable and impossible through nation-state logics. Thus, I demonstrate how queer migrants articulate their relationship to material objects as a transgression of nation- state logics of value, personhood, and possibility.

First, I analyze the interplay between nostalgia and material object relations in Sonia

Guiñansaca’s chapbook Nostalgia & Borders. My analysis focuses on the ordinary objects that shape queer migrant lives, such as old toys left behind, phones, and calling cards. The unhappy memories embedded within the text refuse the romance of “return” to the homeland and exhibit a queer embrace of transnational non-belonging. Next, I analyze the function of material objects in the novel Fiebre Tropical by Juliana Delgado Lopera. Here I pay close attention to how the main character, Francisca, narrates a story that capitalizes on the power of objects to store memories,

172 “The ‘Stuff’ of Archives: Mess, Migration, and Queer Lives,” Radical History Review 120 (2014), 105. 173 Manalansan, “The ‘Stuff’ of Archives,” 105. 115 play with gender embodiment, and imagine queer temporalities and spaces. Importantly, her narration disrupts developmental and progressive narratives that are exemplary of LGBTQ coming of age novels, in which coming out of the closet is represented as a liberatory experience.174 Put together, my analysis of these texts call into question normative ascriptions of value and articulate queer forms of relation.

Nostalgic Recollections, Nostalgic Reclamations

This section turns to Sonia Guiñansaca’s Nostalgia & Borders to consider how nostalgia shapes the relationship between queers, migrants, and material objects. When utilizing the term nostalgia, I am referencing Svetlana Boym’s definition of this term as a “longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.”175 This understanding of nostalgia comes to terms with the experience of “longing without belonging,” a conflicting subject position that Guiñansaca’s work exquisitely articulates through poetry about transnational migration. Nostalgia & Borders is a self-published chapbook with 18 poems that grapples with the loss of a homeland as influenced by the poet’s life, who migrated from Ecuador to New York when they were five (they lived under the care of their grandparents until their migration). Much of their poetry offers recollections about material objects such as old photos, calling cards, phones, and make-up, which help to establish how Guiñansaca reconciles loss through nostalgic poetry. These material objects register the affective, physical, and psychic structures of nostalgia, leading Guiñansaca to poetically embrace non-belonging within nation-state frameworks.

174 For a sharp analysis of queer Latinx young adult literature and the coming-out trope that conjoins with the genre of the bildungsroman, see Angel Daniel Matos, “A Narrative of a Future Past: Historical Authenticity, Ethics, and Queer Latinx Futurity in Aristotle and Dante,” Children’s Literature 47 (2019), 30-56. 175 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), XIII. 116

Once Guiñansaca migrates to New York to be reunited with their parents, they do not recognize their parent’s faces at the airport because they never had access to their images.176 On the other hand, when Guiñansaca travels back to Ecuador years later, it is not the parent’s faces that they fail to recognize, but the feeling of home because their social outlook on the world is overpowered by loss. Guiñansaca grapples with the uneasy feelings of nostalgia upon traveling back to Ecuador, offering a complex meditation on mobility, video recording, and death. They come to recognize “the toll that being undocumented has taken. I did not get to be with my grandparents when they died. In Ecuador, I videotaped their tombstones and their old casita, and

I traveled back with this footage on my iPhone to show my parents. But I have not healed from all those lost memories.”177 While Guiñansaca’s iPhone allows them to record images and videos, a privilege that was not available to them as a child, their grandparents are now dead, so the iPhone’s purpose does not record life but loss. I begin this section through a brief reflection on the iPhone because it demonstrates that material objects are fraught with meaning and cannot always be restorative. This loss is what animates Guiñansaca to put words on paper and make meaning out of impossibility, doing the poetic work that Audre Lorde recognizes as “giv[ing] name to the nameless.”178 When Guiñansaca accepts that she cannot heal, she signals towards the genealogy of nostalgia, as this term emerged as a medical symptom that “caused the afflicted to lose touch with the present” and was understood as “the disease of an afflicted imagination” when it was discovered by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in 1688.179 Countering the medical

176 Sonia Guiñansaca, “Migrant Organizing: A Retelling,” in Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, eds. Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman, second edition (New York: Seal Press, 2019), 226. 177 Guiñansaca, “Migrant Organizing,” 226. 178 Audre Lorde, “Poetry is not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (New York: Crossing Press, 2007), 37. 179 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 3-4. 117 imperative to “cure” this dis-ease, the material objects in Nostalgia & Borders help to embrace an ambivalent, afflicted, and unruly positionality within nation-state frameworks.

In a poem called “Learning Departure: For people who had to migrate when they were children,” the speaker offers a reflection on the experience of losing one’s belongings as losing the ground upon which subjects forge their sense of self. The experience of migrating as children makes objects, such as stuffed animals, pivotal to identity formation, so to lose these objects means to experience a loss that will never be mended:

1. Your tiny brown hands gripping brown and burgundy suitcases With gently packed memories The sorrows will poke off the seams Only one stuffed animal toy will come with you Escoge uno, abuelita said The rest, you tell them you will be back You hide them under your bed Hoping they don’t collect too much dust Too much resentment Becoming fragmented souls in the dark Like birds aching to. Fly with chipped wings Learning that they are not meant for the sky 2. And you will land in a foreign airport The suitcases never make it With no belongings You take it as a sign That you will never belong Maybe you too are not meant for the sky And you learn resentment.180

The burgundy suitcases collect sorrows that are dangerously poking off the seams and are packed with memories. When the speaker recollects their grandma asking them to choose one stuffed animal to take to the U.S., the speaker wonders whether their other toys will “collect too much dust.” The speaker quietly considers the materiality of dust as the materiality of resentment, in

180 Sonia Guiñansaca, Nostalgia & Borders (New York: 2016), 6. 118 which the toys that are left behind become “fragmented souls in the dark.” These poetic lines on

“people who migrate as children” longingly embrace the conflicting, damaging, and nostalgic experience of fragmentation. They also reveal the feminist practice of “wonder,” whereby

“Wonder is an encounter with an object that one does not recognize; or wonder works to transform the ordinary, which is already recognised, into the extraordinary.”181 Wondering about lost objects transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, helping the speaker understand their sense of self through lost objects. Ultimately, this nostalgic and fragmentary sense of self allows the speaker to come to terms with having no belongings.

This notion of fragmentation is facilitated through what Boym calls ironic nostalgia. She usefully distinguishes between ironic nostalgia and utopic nostalgia when she writes,

[Utopic nostalgia] stresses the first root of the word, nostos (home), and puts the emphasis on the return to that mythical place on the island of Utopia where the greater patria has to be rebuilt ... Ironic nostalgia puts emphasis on algia, longing, and acknowledges the displacement of the mythical place without trying to rebuild it...182

She explains that when utopic nostalgia registers exile as disparaging loss, a subject who experiences ironic nostalgia embraces and could potentially take pleasure in the confounding nature of exile. In the second stanza of the poem, the speaker compares their complete lack of belongings to being left behind like their toys who are “not meant for the sky.” This speaker does not try to return to their homeland or mend their fractured sense of self; instead, like ironic nostalgia, they make amends with the fact that they will never belong in the U.S. or their homeland. When describing their toys, the speaker offers vibrant imagery of “aching birds” wanting to fly with chipped wings. This imagery allows them to envision their own sense of fragmentation and nostalgia in relation to the toys. The speaker responds to loss by

181 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 179. 182 Boym, Common Places: Mythologies and Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 284. 119 understanding that origins, homelands, and wholeness are sites of impossibility for subjects without belongings. Thus, like their toys which are committed to learning to fly without wings, the speaker embraces non-belonging in a foreign land and refuses to hold romantic ideals about national belonging.

The manner in which Guiñansaca’s poetry communicates nostalgia offers a snapshot of the ordinary, trivial, and inconsequential objects that make up “[t]he materiality of the everyday.”183 In a poem called “Calling Cards,” the speaker reflects on the ability of phone lines to cross lands and oceans. The second part of the poem follows:

We survive through phone lines A cycle of dialing Numbers

On the other line waited abuela On the other line waited memories On the other line waited birthday wishes That should have been given in person.184

The speaker acknowledges the important role of phone lines for migrants to connect with loved ones across borders. Phone lines communicate birthday wishes, they allow grandchildren to connect with their abuelas, and most importantly, they offer lines of survival. The last line, however, interrupts the poem’s positive appraisal of material objects by calling attention to the inability to communicate these messages in person. The speaker is conscious about the workings of the nation-state in restricting mobility, so while phone lines are able to bypass U.S. immigration control, their body cannot. This last line is textured by deviance because it refuses to perform happiness for the nation, and thus, “The unhappiness of the deviant performs its own

183 Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 125. 184 Guiñansaca, Nostalgia & Borders, 1. 120 claim for justice.”185 Calling cards and phone lines communicate the deviant feelings of the speaker because they demonstrate that survival is not enough.

Following the grandma’s death in the poem, the speaker reflects:

The phone goes unused (Like the passport in my wallet) No more dialing.186

Evidently, the promise that phones used to hold has been lost because these phone lines stop having “heartbeats.” While I do not want to blur the lines between the speaker in these poems and Guiñansaca, it is important to recognize how “Calling Cards” helps Guiñansaca negotiate their inability to see their grandparents alive again. Ahmed’s queer phenomenology is useful to understand the disconnect between the speaker and the phone lines. Originally, the speaker is oriented to what the phone lines promise, a form of connection, relation, and communication.

However, the speaker becomes disoriented to the material objects that used to bring them joy. As

Ahmed observes, “disorientation might begin with the strangeness of familiar objects.”187 In losing their initial orientation to material objects, the speaker engages in the messiness of queer lives who stray off to the side and are oriented in the “wrong” way. This loss is not necessarily fatal, as it opens the possibility for new lines to emerge, which can be seen at the end of the poem when the speaker reflects, “Dad wants to hold my hand/ But mostly we look at each other hoping to find comfort/ He says that I look like abuela.”188 Even though the speaker is no longer interested in phone lines due to the grandma’s passing, they are able to hold space for the grandma in their shared memories with their dad. Thus, “it is often loss that generates a new

185 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 105. 186 Guiñansaca, Nostalgia & Borders, 3. 187 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 162. 188 Guiñansaca, Nostalgia & Borders, 3. 121 direction.”189 Such loss allows subjects to “change courses,” and thus, revisit the possibility to create social relations regardless of broken connections. When the speaker’s dad verbally communicates that he sees the grandma’s face in the speaker, a new form of relation is discovered through the embodiment of memory. This nostalgic reclamation of loss occurs when objects lose their original meaning, positing a new understanding of the afterlives of objects, subjects, and phone lines.

Coming to terms with loss and (non)belonging does not mean giving up on material object relations. In fact, Guiñansaca’s chapbook ends with an ode to femmes of color, “Glory,” in which objects help to adorn the queer migrant body. This poem focuses on how a queer migrant recreates her mom’s morning rituals as an act of self-making. For example, the speaker marvels at her mom’s placement of black eyeliner on her face when she states, “(For a migrant woman these are lines she welcomes).”190 Playing with the visual imagery of painting lines with black eyeliner brings to light a resignification of borders through femme poetics. Nostalgia is not as overt in this poem because it is an ironic nostalgia that revels in the pleasures and freedoms of non-belonging. I end my analysis of Nostalgia & Borders with “Glory” because it offers a poetic articulation of the materiality of being, especially in the following lines:

Every morning creating self into existence Between lipstick and softness Between borders and belonging (These are ways I survive).191

This ode to femmes of color takes advantage of material object relations as a locus for queer migrant subject formation. Nostalgia is typically underestimated and overlooked in cultural theory, so it matters that these lines show how nostalgia can be productive for bringing about an

189 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 19. 190 Guiñansaca, Nostalgia & Borders, 25. 191 Guiñansaca, Nostalgia & Borders, 25. 122 interstitial space from which to negotiate borders and belonging, lipstick and softness, and important to this chapter, the queer relations between objects and non-belonging.192 Reclaiming nostalgia is indeed a reclamation of the supposedly deviant body that cannot let go of their attachment to material objects. Ultimately, Guiñansaca’s Nostalgia & Borders is a fierce poetic intervention that reclaims underestimated and pathologized subject positions. As a queer migrant poet themselves, they recognize the value of nostalgia for relationality, self-making, and embracing the affective power of (non)belonging within nation-states.

Narrating Material Deviance

In my reading of the novel Fiebre Tropical by Juliana Delgado Lopera, I analyze how the protagonist uses narration to challenge dominant forms of national belonging through queer configurations of time and space. As I suggest, Fiebre Tropical breathes new life into the imaginary and territorial borders of the nation because it allows the novel’s protagonist,

Francisca, to negotiate a conflicting subject position of non-belonging. Her narration gives expression to the irredeemable loss of a homeland and the cultural displacements that she experiences when she migrates from Colombia to Miami. Her voice is not entirely melancholic, however, as she infuses humor with a queer sensibility to imagine alternative social relations. On the first page, Francisca sets the tone, rhythm, and accent for the novel when greets her readers with the energizing words: “Buenos días, mi reina. Immigrant criolla here reporting desde los mayamis from our ant-infested townhouse.”193 This matter-of-fact observation establishes a willingness to understand her precarious conditions through humor, producing a queer Latina narration that plays with relations of power to alter meaning. At various moments, I turn to

192 See Nishant Shahani’s nuanced analysis of the critique of the politics of nostalgia in Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of a Reparative Return (Lanham: Lehigh University Press, 2012), 6-8. 193 Juliana Delgado Lopera, Fiebre Tropical (New York: The Feminist Press, 2020), 1. 123 material object relations, such as old radios, dolls, welcome home signs, and food, to demonstrate how Francisca’s narration resignifies and repurposes meaning. At a symbolic level, these material objects tell important stories about the physical/emotional baggage that migrants carry, which can also be called their belongings

As a queer Latina narrator, Francisca’s accented narrative embodies migratory movements, which she consciously claims when describing her language play: “my tongue delight[s] in trying out new moves.”194 Eschewing narrative progression, Francisca offers humorous side-comments, tells stories out of order, interrupts events, and focuses on ordinary objects in her life as tools for world-making. Her voice can be heard throughout the written text, emphasizing the text’s “orality, [its] spoken status, challenging the reader to hear the narrator rather than simply read the text.”195 Her ability to make material objects come to life in the narrative, alongside her hilarious observations about her matriarchal family, helps to make sense of her world amidst the physical and temporal displacements of transnational migration. When her world is turned upside down, she turns to material objects to touch, grasp, and establish social bonds.196 This tactile quality of material objects offers Francisca a sense of permanence and a repository of desire, which shapes how she narrates stories about the intertwined experiences of queerness and migration. Overall, her queer style of narration functions as an ambivalent form of address that grapples with wanting a sense of belonging in the nation without being able to fulfill this desire. As I explore later in this section, she reveals a material deviance

194 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 168. Emphasis added. 195 Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 116. 196 Scholarship in queer theory and queer of color critique engages the importance of material objects for survival purposes. For instance, see the work of Ann Cvetkovich on queers and materiality in “Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice,” Feeling Photography, eds. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 124 that strays from the norm. In trying to reconcile her feelings of non-belonging by holding onto material objects, Francisca imagines queer temporalities where she is not limited to temporal progression or spatial boundaries.

Following her bienvenida to the narrative, in which she reports from los mayamis,

Francisca describes a scene where she helps to unpack her family’s belongings. After finding her grandma’s old radio, the two of them “practiced our latest melodrama in the living room” with

“La Tata [her grandma] half-drunk directing me in this holy radionovela brought to you by

Female Sadness Incorporated.”197 As an everyday object, the radio allows Francisca to make the best out of their current situation, in which she unpacks her family’s belongings in the living room with a broken AC and her half-drunk grandma directing her in an imaginary melodrama.

The radio is essential to the structure of the novel, or radionovela as Francisca calls it, because it illuminates a queer time and space away from the here and now. José Esteban Muñoz, writing on the aesthetic value of objects in queer cultural productions, observes that, “The anticipatory illumination of certain objects is a kind of potentiality that is open, indeterminate, like the affective contours of hope itself.”198 The radio has the potential to transport Francisca to new worlds, so she claims the role of narrator in the first line of the novel as a gesture that keeps the future open. Francisca’s world consists of smoking cigarettes against her mom’s wishes, reading

Sylvia Plath, begrudgingly attending a Colombian evangelical church, and joining the youth group to get closer to the pastor’s daughter. Her conflicting subject positions as a punkera, lesbian, queer, ambivalent Christian follower, and feminist reader pulls her to the radio as a lifeline that gives her a platform to narrate her queer desires.

197 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 1. 198 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 7. 125

This strategy of holding onto material objects for world-making purposes is not new to her family, as her grandma treats material objects as precious to her life. When her grandma was a teenager, she had many suitors but she refused to marry; thus, demonstrating apathy towards what Jack Halberstam calls “reproductive time,” which he explains as the cultural imposition to marry, have children, and uphold heteronormative constructions of time and space.199 The love of her life was not a man, but the juicy and sometimes heartbreaking melodramas that she listened to on the radio. Francisca narrates this material object relation between her grandma and the radio by stating, “it was only when the radionovelas came on and homegirl turned them all the way up that she could refocus, that she could live.”200 By acknowledging what these stories mean to her grandma and drawing attention to the liberatory aspects of a teenage girl living out her dreams and pleasures through a radionovela, Francisca allocates power to the stories that material objects make possible. A radio is not simply a radio, it is a transmitter of possibility, potentiality, and radiant futures. The grandma welcomes the radio’s soundwaves with gratitude because they allow her to tune out the piercing calls of reproductive time, literally and figuratively as the grandma would turn the radio “all the way up” whenever her dad welcomed potential suitors to their house. In relating the grandma’s early obsession with the radio,

Francisca shares, “They knew, cachaco, they just knew Albita and the shiny brown box had a tight connection all of them secretly wished for but could only dream of having…A murmur trail followed Alba wherever she went. Her very own son y ton, her personal soundtrack.”201 There is a stylistic and Spanglish rhythm to Francisca’s narration, inserting Colombian colloquialisms such as “cachaco” into the narrative. These narrative choices allow Francisca to de-pathologize

199 Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 10. 200 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 193. 201 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 196. 126 her grandma’s relationship to the radio because they are addressed to an audience that understands what it means to be forced to navigate multiple languages and social expectations.

Furthermore, her narration illustrates the queer potentials embedded within the ability to live life according to our own personal soundtracks. Because Francisca chooses to de-pathologize her grandma’s relationship to the radio, as this relationship is not productive or re-productive, she allows for queerness to emerge in the most unthinkable places: in the relationship between queers, migrants, and everyday objects.202

This queer relationship with material objects is also about loss and migration, as

Francisca and her family members are adamant about utilizing objects as tools for memory. For instance, the grandma’s bedroom walls are covered with letters, unframed pictures, and handwritten notes that she sticks onto the walls with clear tape. Commenting on this fetishistic relationship to material objects, Francisca’s mother exclaims, “ay, so low-class,” and asks her to use a frame if she will continue to perform this seemingly perceived tacky behavior.203

Responding to this critique, the grandma firmly states, “Este...este es el museo de mi vida”

[This…this is my life’s museum].204 The grandma invokes queer archival practices to document her life through objects, and thus, teaches Francisca what it means for objects to carry stories and cherished memories. What makes the mom’s critique of these objects rife with meaning is her critique of mess, disorder, and disarray in the grandma’s bedroom, which Manalansan calls the

“stuff” of queerness. As he discusses, mess “funk[s] up queerness in a way that retains the mundane, banal, and ordinariness of queer experience and its mercurial and often intractable

202 E. Patrick Johnson’s theorization of “quare” is influential to my reading of the grandma’s radio, particularly the ability for queerness to emerge amongst working-class communities of color. See, “Quare Studies, or (Almost) Everything I learned about Queer Studies I Learned from my Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001). 203 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 26. 204 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 26. 127 qualities.”205 The grandma’s collection creates a museum of discarded and disposable objects that are queer because they challenge dominant national imaginaries that erase the livelihoods of migrants.206 While forced displacement often leads to the loss of objects, and Francisca complains about her inability to bring all of her belongings to Miami, the grandma negotiates this loss by making sure that all of her walls document her existence. She “funks” up queerness by bringing to light the messy “stuff” and disorder of the everyday, creating a disorderly museum for everyone in the house to behold. Francisca’s detailed narration of this story produces an alternative world where her grandma’s “low-class” behavior is essential to her survival as a migrant woman whose stories and objects are anything but disposable.

The novel narrates the importance of material object relations not just for survival purposes, but also to playfully comment on the gender ideologies that they uphold. While the mom critiques the grandma for “low-class” behavior, she becomes obsessed with holding a baptism for her son that she miscarried prior to Francisca’s birth in Colombia. This obsession leads her to purchase a discarded toy in the clearance section at Ross, with the plan of holding a symbolic baptism for the doll through the evangelical church that the family joins after moving to Miami. Before she brings this toy to Francisca’s attention, Francisca complains that her mom made her wear a yellow dress to church stating, “Ay Mami. In my heart I knew the dissonance my body felt every time I wore a dress, a kind of stickiness.”207 Francisca’s decision to call her embodied dissonance “stickiness” reveals the impressions that objects leave behind, which Sara

205 Manalansan, “The ‘Stuff’ of Archives,” 98. 206 Writing on photography and queer archives, Ann Cvetkovich observes, “Queers have long been collectors because they are not the subject of official histories and thus have to make it themselves by saving materials that might be seen as marginal,” 275. 207 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 11. 128

Ahmed defines as the work of stickiness: “what objects do to other objects…”208 Because of the embodied dissonance that she experiences, which is partly due to her mother’s gendered expectations, Francisca turns to humor when she sees her mom dressing up the doll: “The gender of the doll was questionable—equal amounts of blue and pink—and my insides chuckled thinking Mami was dressing a girl doll in boy drag. So much for that beloved son!”209 In calling attention to the questionable gender of the doll, she expresses a critique of normative gender/sexual ideologies.210 As Ahmed discusses in relation to objects, "things become queer precisely given how bodies are touched by objects."211 While the mom intends for the doll to stand in as a symbol her dead son, she misguidedly dresses the doll as “a girl doll in boy drag.”

When put together with the “girl doll,” the materiality of feminine and masculine clothing garments makes this doll a queer object through which Francisca is able to poke fun at her mom’s gender policing.

This moment of queer gender-bending relates to the experiences of migrants because the mom is trying to replace her long-lost object (the homeland) with a new object, the doll. In short, the doll helps to distract her while she grapples with the feelings of loss and melancholia. In her discussion of melancholic migrants, or affect aliens, Ahmed describes melancholia “as a way of reading or diagnosing others as having ‘lost something,’ and as failing to let go of what has been lost.”212 The mom struggles to find a place for the doll within the home and constantly argues

208 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 91. 209 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 15. 210 Here I am thinking alongside the work of Hana Masri, who argues that discarded objects at the U.S.-Mexico border are useful to reveal gender/sexual ideologies. See, “Queer Border Objects and the Sucio Material Politics of Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 5, no. 2 (2018): 1-22. 211 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 162-163. 212 See her chapter on melancholic migrants in, Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 129 with her family members about this melancholic attachment. As a narrator, Francisca tries to be understanding but reaches a point where she cannot express her true feelings to her mom, noting,

“Mami, I wanted to say, let it go.”213 She made it a habit to taunt her mom about the doll whenever she had a chance, but at this point, she can only narrate her thoughts to the reader. By utilizing the word “it” to describe the doll and failing to call the doll by her brother’s name,

Francisca leaves the “it” open to interpretation. She diagnoses her mom as a melancholic migrant by asking her to let “it” go, albeit lovingly and refusing to say these words out loud. As readers, we come to understand that the mom’s obsession with the doll was never really about her dead son. Instead, the mom is utilizing the doll to reconcile the experience of loss.

At the baptism, which was an embarrassing affair for Francisca, she helps to translate her mom’s melancholic attachment to the doll through her queer style of narration: “in Mami’s head this [the baptism at the pastor’s backyard] was the freaking Hilton en Cartagena papá…this view of a gray lake with a growing pile of trash was the extravagant! luxurious! sueño Americano we’d all been waiting for.”214 In her narration, the American Dream is represented by piles of trash that she mockingly calls extravagant and luxurious. The baptism reveals the mom’s non- normative and melancholic attachment, particularly as she fantasizes about attaining the

American Dream through the baptism of a discarded doll that she refuses to throw away—going to the extent of rescuing the doll from the trash when La Tata throws it away. Scott Herring, whose work brings together material culture studies and queer theory, explains that the relationship between subjects and objects is highly scrutinized because objects are supposed to

213 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 62. 214 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 56. 130 maintain social relations—thus, creating normative standards for material object relations.215 He cautions that when subjects do not maintain these standards, their behavior, such as the mom’s relationship to the doll, is cast as abject, what he insightfully calls “material deviance.”216 Instead of pathologizing the mom’s attachment to the doll, what happens when her behavior is read as a critique of the American Dream?

This question demands an analysis of material deviance between queers, migrants, and objects, whose conduct strays and deviates from the norm. As Herring discusses through his analysis of material deviance, “Rather than witness the materiality of the world enhance and confirm social relations, we instead watch it unhinge them.”217 By dramatizing the spectacle of a

Christian baptism for a doll, Francisca’s narration reveals the mom’s material deviance as a contestation of nationalist social norms. While the mom may be read as “crazy” for holding a baptism for a doll, it is only through material deviance that Francisca can joke about the contradictory ideologies of the American Dream. As Francisca mischievously narrates, her mom

“left her life back in that País de mierda to come win in the U S of A, and motherfucker look at her ganando.”218 Even while questioning her methods, Francisca holds space for her mom by narrating the mom’s ability to take charge of her life and execute the baptism of her dreams. In the end, Francisca’s narration demonstrates that winning/ganando can take the form of migrant women refusing to concede to national forms of belonging. After all, in her narration, that “País de mierda” (Colombia) turns into a pile of trash (the U.S.).

215 Scott Herring, “Material Deviance: Theorizing Queer Objecthood,” Postmodern Culture 21, no.1 (2011). 216 Herring, “Material Deviance.” 217 Herring, “Material Deviance.” 218 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 56. 131

Such blatant critiques of nation-state frameworks emerge from the various disappointments that Francisca experiences in Miami and Colombia, as she sees a disparity between the American Dream and the migrant social worlds that she inhabits. In a glaring moment of disenchantment with the nation she asks, “Where was the Miami life we all dreamed about from those Marc Anthony music videos? Where was our South beach and our

Versace…Where was that sense of superiority that we’d briefly felt the moment we told everyone in Bogotá we were moving the United States—uuuuy a los Mayamis.”219 In this passage, Francisca’s narration begins with the English spelling of “Miami” and ends with the

Spanglish inflected way of saying “los Mayamis.”220 Through queer narration, Francisca bifurcates two images of Miami, one of capitalist forms of relation and one of migrant longings.

Progressive narratives of migrant assimilation produce a dream-like fantasy of Miami that leaves

Francisca grappling with the feeling of disappointment. However, upon migrating to Miami, she recognizes that migration is not a neat/orderly experience. Once again, Manalansan’s description of mess is useful because it “involves not a cleaning-up but rather a spoiling and cluttering of the neat normative configurations and patterns that seek to calcify lives and experiences.”221

Through a Spanglish narration, in which Miami becomes los Mayamis, Francisca spoils the fantasy of Miami with the palm trees and expensive flair. Her Spanglish narration plays with language as much as it plays with the spatiality and temporality of Miami, where the place of

Miami gains a different sound, image, and temporal (dis)arrangement.

To understand how the novel makes use of narration as a challenge to these national imaginaries, I turn to a scene in which Francisca grapples with the elusive promise of the

219 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 27. 220 Thanks to Maritza Cardenas for bringing this literary function to my attention. 221 Manalansan, “The ‘Stuff’ of Archives,” 99. 132

American Dream. Francisca migrated to Miami with her mom, sister, and grandma after her mom divorced her father. Upon arrival, the mom finds solace in her evangelical community, but she is also stressed about her inability to pay the bills and lack of work opportunities. As the novel unfolds, we see the mother struggle with depression while the grandmother becomes an alcoholic. Francisca is receptive to the lack of food in the fridge and her family’s failure to adapt to their new environment. This blunt narration of economic precarity resists teleological narratives of migrant assimilation while accounting for the affective forces that leave her parental figures in a state of distress. While she longs to tell her friends in Colombia about her dismal situation, she cannot “deal with the sadness, the embarrassment of this new life. How could I explain this to them? Coming to the USA is the dream! And I should be happy happy happy!”222 The fictional and illusory promise of the American Dream leaves the narrator feeling ashamed about her inability to experience happiness. Instead of a progressive narration of happiness, the repetition of these words does not end with accumulated joy, alluding to a critique of what Ahmed calls the promise of happiness. As she notes, “happiness” is utilized as a

“technology of citizenship, as a way of binding migrants to a national ideal…If the promise of citizenship is offered as a promise of happiness, then you have to demonstrate that you are worthy recipient of its promise.”223 If Francisca is going to believe in the promise of happiness, then she cannot voice any sense of unhappiness to her friends because it would mark her as an unworthy citizen of the nation. And yet, by the third time the word is repeated, her happiness becomes questionable as she reveals feelings of shame to her readers. Shame directs attention to the failures of the American Dream, which promise supposedly stable and happy social orders. In narrativizing shame, Francisca poses a challenge to the fiction of the American Dream.

222 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 59. 223 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 133. 133

At the same time that Francisca calls attention to the promise of happiness, she directs her reader’s attention to the role of material objects in mediating her uneasy feelings with nation- state frameworks. The baptism leads her to not only question her own happiness, but she also considers walking out of the townhouse and taking a bus back to Colombia. However, she knows that she does not have the money or means to return back home. She looks at her phone for over an hour until she comes to the realization that “there was no one outside Miami, nobody who would come for me. As Mami said, Esta es our new vida, Francisca. Look around, this is your home now.”224 Her mom’s inquisitive words, “this is your home now,” suggest that space and time, particularly the words “home” and “now,” function as binding mechanisms that arrest

Francisca within the limits of nation-states. Looking at her phone for over an hour, which is meant to connect her to the world through the simple touch of a few buttons, makes her understand that even with the possibility of return, her connections to her homeland are broken and impossible. Coming to terms with her new life generates an ambivalent understanding of her subject position within nation-state frameworks. Looking at her phone exposes her the vulnerabilities, pleasures, and struggles of non-belonging. Her narration does not speak about a romantic return to the homeland or a progressive story about migrant assimilation. Rather, her narration is trapped between the territorial borders of the present, the nation, and Miami.

Even while embracing her impossible and ambivalent subject position, she also aspires towards transnational forms of mobility that offer queer ways life. Due to Francisca’s apathy towards the church, Carmen, the pastor’s daughter, makes it her personal goal to convert

Francisca into the arms of Jesus. While Francisca does not initially seek belonging in the highly gendered spaces of the church, she accepts Carmen’s invitation to hand-out Christian flyers out

224 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 59. 134 of necessity. According to Francisca, passing out flyers with Carmen means getting out of the townhouse and getting in a car, and in her words, “Leaving is always the best option. At least you’re moving, pretending you’re off somewhere else.”225 The flyers offer an occasion for

Francisca and Carmen to spend time together and travel through the streets of Miami. What is striking about her assessment of mobility is that it demonstrates that being on the move can be promising when it is on her own terms. This type of mobility allows Francisca to build a relation with Carmen in a moving car, where they tease each other, share gossip, and later in the novel, begin to touch one another. The moving car does not liberate Francisca from her material conditions, but it does allow her to pretend she is not here or there, ni aqui ni alla, but somewhere else in a queer time and space. This is an imaginary and temporary relief from the cruelties of her present conditions, where “Fantasy functions not as an escape from the real-world materiality of living, breathing bodies, but as a way to conjure and inhabit an alternative world in which other forms of identifications and social relations become imaginable.”226 The transnational borders between the real and the imaginary are blurred through the material conditions that push

Francisca into queer fantasy worlds. While she does not escape from her “real” world, she uses mobility and materiality as a tool for imagination, narration, and world-making.

Importantly, these world-making desires are constantly mediated through the racial melancholia of loss. During their car rides, Carmen asks Francisca questions about her life, asking why she always wears a black hoodie during the hot and humid summers of Miami. If

Francisca were to answer these questions truthfully, as she reveals to the reader when describing her relationship to material objects, she would explain to Carmen that she “decided to wear black

225 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 97. 226 Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 26. 135 and only black as my mourning veil for all that was lost.”227 Francisca becomes what Ahmed calls an affect alien because she maintains a melancholic relationship to the black hoodie, which is loaded with meaning due to the anti-black policing of this material object.228 Her conscious embodiment of loss through the black hoodie becomes a site of possibility, as it allows Francisca to rebel against forced displacement through the simple act of dressing in black. Interestingly, she cannot “let it go,” which is what she silently pleaded for her mom to do in relation to the discarded doll. Without choosing to do so, the mom, grandma, and Francisca partake in an affective community of “shared grief.”229 The grandma has her museum of discarded objects, the mom has her doll, and Francisca wears her black hoodie. These material object relations, according to Ahmed, become “a failure to get over loss.”230 By not letting “it” go, she enacts a sartorial politics that embraces loss, and thus, establishes a transgressive form of relationality amongst her family members that simultaneously critiques nation-state frameworks.

Queer Embodiment, Queer Spaces, and Queer Futures

Thus far, I have demonstrated how Francisca narrates deviant relationships to material objects, critiques the American Dream, and offers a generous understanding of melancholia.

Here I address how food, clothing garments, bodily fluids, and welcome home signs operate as meaningful objects that allow Francisca to embody queer worlds. As Carmen drives them to their flyer distribution location, Francisca likes to pretend that they are both running away in a white spaceship about to take flight. Once again, Francisca plays with the meaning of mobility, but in this instance the spaceship signals a transnational imaginary that travels out of this world. On one of these adventures, Carmen asks Francisca if she wants an empanada. This simple question

227 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 64. 228 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 141. 229 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 141. 230 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 141. 136 alters the narrative structure and flow, as Francisca seamlessly shifts her narration from the car ride in Miami to her memories of eating empanadas in Bogotá. She explains that while in

Catholic school, she would buy “fat empanaditas” with her friends and break into the chapel to play la Ouija (a Ouiji board).231 She remembers that on her last day of school in Bogotá, she made a blood pact with her friends to symbolize their lasting friendship regardless of distance and time. They each cut the tips of their index fingers and mixed drops of red blood inside of their empanadas, making the rice turn pink. Francisca ate her empanada to make a corporeal attachment to her friends but also her beloved city. While the girls are quite literally eating empanadas together, Francisca is certainly flirting with the idea of what it might symbolize for

Catholic school girls to eat empanadas together with pink rice in the middle. Like their decision to play with a Ouija board inside of a chapel, the consumption of the empanadas is simultaneously a queer communion between blood, flesh, and rice.232 Francisca tells the reader that she ate the last empanada “because whatevs, there’s no way Bogotá would leave me. There was no way I was really leaving Bogotá.”233 In a sense, Francisca carries a piece of home in her body, allowing her to build a connection to the land that is not so much about the nation as much as it symbolizes her cherished friendships and queer transgressions of religious practices. The car ride serves as a point of departure in which Francisca creates a disorienting narrative about the body and its ability to experience multiple temporalities and spaces at once. Through mobility, her imagination, and the consumption of food, she embodies queer worlds.

231 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 99. 232 Writing on the performance artist Xandra Ibarra, Christina León observes that the use of blood by queer Latinx cultural workers stands as a direct challenge to “the sterility” of whiteness in “Forms of Opacity: Roaches, Blood, and Being Stuck in Xandra Ibarra’s Corpus,” ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (2017): 385. 233 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 100. 137

In foregrounding how material objects play a role in her embodiment, such as the consumption of the empanadas, Francisca’s narration also draws attention to normative expectations regarding her gender embodiment. At every turn, the women in her family police her gestures, her clothes, and even her body hair. As a result, she does not always feel at home in her body, which is clear in a scene where Carmen convinces Francisca to change her shirt after a long day of passing out flyers. Carmen insists that Francisca smelled terrible, so she gave her a yellow shirt from her own days of Catholic school in Colombia. Significantly, the materiality of objects allows migrants to maintain connections to their homelands, where objects serve as a channel for lost memories, so it matters that her yellow shirt has a double connection to the nation and to the church. As Francisca tries to take off her dirty shirt, one of her earrings gets stuck and she ends up ripping it out by accident and bleeding with her dirty shirt halfway on.

Cursing at her grandma for making her wear the earrings, which were supposed to make her look more “guapa” (pretty), she begins to feel an overwhelming sense of shame at her half-exposed body, thinking of Carmen “staring at my belly, my gray bra, at the mole with the hair I forgot to pluck because I did not know someone was about to see me half naked…I never ever wore stupid pearl earrings and now I only looked like a maldito joke with no tits…”234 In this humorous and exasperated narration, Francisca grapples the violent policing of her body, with the pearl earrings acting as an enforced sign of femininity that ultimately punctures her flesh and makes her bleed. This scene holds a close but distinct resemblance to the empanada narrative, with Carmen’s Catholic school shirt gesturing towards Colombia and Francisca’s blood invoking queer embodiment. However, her rejection of the earrings, and inability to take off her black shirt in exchange for the yellow shirt narrates a story about a fragmented queer body that cannot

234 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 121. 138 be easily put together. When she thinks of Colombia, she desires a connection to the land, but she also recognizes the violence of national belonging on her body. In this instance, Francisca cannot wear the yellow shirt with its ties to her lost homeland and Catholic school because its social relations are ultimately damaging to her body; thus, positing a critique of patriarchal nationalism that is represented through material object relations. Unlike the empanadas, which allowed her to embody a sense of home through queer communion with her friends, this scene illustrates Francisca’s corporeal refusal and inability to embody the patriarchal nationalism that she experiences in Colombia and the United States.

In Fiebre Tropical, queer embodiment is not limited to pain or relational bonds, it can also lead to playful gestures and caresses. When she starts bleeding Carmen laughs nonstop, which Francisca understands as laughter directed at her body and further damaging her sense of self. However, Carmen tells her to sit down and begins smelling her armpits, sliding her fingers underneath the shirt’s collar and finally pulling it off. This playful and touching embrace promises ecstasy in the face of corporeal discomfort, and Carmen proceeds by telling Francisca that she has a secret that will remedy her ear’s bleeding. Carmen’s distinctive naming of this remedy as a secret elicits a queer understanding of what is about to happen, this is called “being in the know” in queer communities. The narration invites the reader into a shared understanding of illicit and highly sexual desires, what Juana María Rodríguez calls sexual futures.235 Francisca lets the reader know that she may be “making shit up,” but that Carmen pressed her hands against her neck and told her to hold still.236 Filled with anticipation, the narrator proclaims, “She

235 For a discussion of the importance of sex in queer studies, see Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, 15- 17. 236 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 122. 139 did not kiss me, mi reina. Well, kinda. Not really.”237 Whereas the narrator usually uses the phrase “mi reina” to bring the reader back to reality, Francisca changes this dynamic by taking the reader on a queer fantasy trip, in which fantasy “allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.”238 This scene began with Francisca feeling the pain of nationalist gender/sexual ideologies, but it ends on a queer fantasy trip where she is allowed to feel at home in her body through Carmen’s gentle caress.

Francisca quickly reveals that Carmen’s remedy for her bleeding, which remained unspeakable, was sucking on her earlobe. Filled with ecstasy about the tongue-to-ear action that she receives, she states, “Not sure how long this lasted. Maybe real-life thirty seconds, maybe a minute, but it was eternal. We were there sixty years until her tongue grew wrinkly and we passed out from old people’s disease. We died side by side while she still sucked on my lobe…”239 It matters that Francisca is an unreliable narrator, as she clearly rejects temporal progression because in her experience, the thirty seconds, or one minute in which Carmen sucked on her earlobe lasted an eternity. Muñoz best describes this temporal digression by noting,

“Queerness’s time is the time of ecstasy. Ecstasy is queerness’s way.”240 Through this alternative configuration of time, Francisca imagines living a queer life with Carmen where they age together and the sucking never stops. She offers a queer temporality that stretches the minutes and seconds in which her body and Carmen’s touch. The book was written during the Obama and Trump administrations, but it never foregrounds its historical and political context. This absence and stretching of time allude to how migrant abjection continues from one

237 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 122. 238 Judith Butler cited in Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, 26. 239 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 123. 240 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 187. 140 administration to the next.241 If narrative progression signals towards nationalist time, then

Fiebre Tropical presents a different paradigm that critiques the lasting continuities of racialized abjection, pausing to consider what it might feel like to participate in a queer stretching of time that does not move forward. Once again, blood acts as a symbol for relationality and desire, in which Francisca’s spatial position within the nation does not matter as much as the relations that she creates through the exchange of blood and material objects.

Thinking about queer embodiment foregrounds ambivalent relationships to the nation- state, which restricts the possibility for queer desire to be expressed verbally. Francisca’s brief romance with Carmen ends after a moment of exalted confidence when she rests her hand on

Carmen’s leg during one of their car rides. This gesture surprisingly confounds Carmen, whose displays of affection do not linger and are only ever playful. The resting hand presumes intimacy and scares Carmen because of her own sexual desires, in which gesture “register[s] what cannot or should not be expressed in words. And sometimes it signals what one wishes to keep out of sound’s reach.”242 Because Francisca’s narration does not follow teleological narratives of sexual liberation, in which coming out of the closet is necessary for queer subject formation, the resting hand acts as a gesture of forbidden queer desire. The use of embodied and non-verbal communication does not mean that Francisca’s narration of this scene, or Carmen’s response, reflects a “backward” sexuality. Instead, the embodied gesture of the hand shows that relationality cannot be taken for granted and exists within, not outside, social norms. Days later,

Francisca finds out that Carmen left for Colombia without telling her or saying goodbye. As the days go by, she does not hear any word about Carmen, so Francisca begins wearing black again

241 A grim example of these racialized continuities/progressions is Joe Biden’s administration extending “migrant facilities” for children in detention. 242 Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, 4. 141 and stops attending church functions with frequency. She tries dating boys to feel a sense of connection, belonging, and intimacy, but this proves futile as she is not emotionally or physically attracted to them. Just as she tries to find belonging in the nation, the one person that made her feel at home in her body has left, making her feel a compounding sense of loss.

Navigating the pain of a broken heart, Francisca reflects on her relationship to the nation and her physical home when she states, “When we first moved to Heather Glen Apartment

Complex, Mami was all excited because, Nenas, this is our first house (apartment, I corrected her. Townhouse, Mami corrected me) in the US OF A.”243 She says that the rental agent promised new facilities with crystalline lakes and “unforgettable sunsets by the pool. That’s exactly what he said and what was written on the Welcome to your new home! Flyer. Didn’t say nothing about pissed off raccoons unwilling to move out of the plastic lounge chair with the cigarette burns.”244 In these detailed descriptions about broken promises and broken dreams, she becomes ambivalent about belonging to the nation. The national imaginary has played a trick on her entire family and she is rightfully resentful. Nevertheless, when hanging out at the community pool she meets a girl named Andrea who offers her a cigarette. Francisca is instantly attracted to her, and after this brief encounter she seeks her out again. Instead of an explicit moment of flirtation, the cigarette, as a material object, unearths the possibility for queer desire to emerge between these two potential lovers. The novel closes with Francisca trying to forge a connection with Andrea, who very openly wants to support Francisca and possibly do more. I end with this final relation between Francisca, material objects, and Andrea because it illustrates that in trying to find a home in the nation, Francisca ultimately fails. Throughout the narrative, she feels alienated from nationalist and heteropatriarchal structures. It is only through suspended

243 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 269-270. 244 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 270. 142 and non-linear narratives that she is able to establish queer relations that are not limited to nationalist time and space.

The novel ends with Carmen coming back from Colombia and pretending as if nothing ever happened between her and Francisca. They are only friends in her eyes. Determined to finally leave Miami, Francisca walks out of the townhouse one night with some money that she saved up to go back to Colombia. Her first impression outside of the townhouse is the “welcome home” sign of the apartment complex. This sign serves as a reminder that she cannot return home because she has lost connections to the land and to the people. She quickly gives up on the idea of escape and finds Andrea at the community pool. Francisca shares that,

We lay there smoking and eating pop-tarts side by side while a pair of raccoons ransacked the garbage. I pressed my hand into hers. We stayed like that for what seemed like hours, then she rolled toward me, pulling me to her, letting all her warmth cover me like a blanket. She kissed the back of my neck and I pretended that I wasn’t crying.245

The novel’s ending affirms the necessity to give up on the promise of national belonging and diasporic return to the homeland. Neither the United States nor Colombia will ever allow

Francisca to feel welcome as a queer migrant seeking a place of dwelling, a place called home.

In the final passage, Francisca’s tears mourn her loss of a social contract, but she also finds corporeal recognition and understanding in the lingering kisses of Andrea. Thinking about materiality in this scene brings attention to the objects that enable the girls to share this moment of pain, loss, and desire. In his discussion of a queer poem about sharing a coke with a lover,

Muñoz writes that the very act of sharing “signifies a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potentiality.”246 Similarly, the ordinary act of sharing pop-tarts with Andrea allows Francisca to once again participate in the stretching of time where hours pass

245 Lopera, Fiebre Tropical, 281. 246 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 6. 143 by without notice. Eating pop-tarts and smoking cigarettes helps to set up the scene in which the girls caress one another, and Francisca feels the warmth of Andrea as a blanket that covers her body. As Muñoz writes, this “warm illumination” indexes a “queer relationality [that] promises a future.”247 While this burst of corporeal affection is not entirely subversive, it allows Francisca to experience a sense of home in the shadows of the nation and demonstrates the significance of relationality as a political practice of survival.

The novel documents how queer migrants establish social relations outside of nationalist discourses of belonging, whereby their relations can function as a gentle embrace and reprieve from the exigencies of daily life within the nation-state. Through a focus on material object relations, queer embodiment, and social bonds, I highlight the significance of unruly imaginaries that enable Francisca to narrate her life on her own terms and through her own optics.

Conclusion: Queer Migrant Lives, Material Encounters

In discussing material object relations as a rich ground for queer migrant subject formation, I have suggested that writers who embrace the experience of non-belonging can practice and imagine new subject positions. Francisca’s unruly narration of Fiebre Tropical unabashedly critiques the fantasies of the American Dream. She sees the value in material objects in her family, as discarded dolls, photographs, notes, and black hoodies help her family remain grounded as unapologetic migrant women. They do not let things go in her household because to let go would mean to accept the hegemonic terms of belonging in the nation.

Moreover, through her playful narration and material object relations, she is also able to experience queer desire and queer embodiment. Old radios, cigarettes, and pop-tarts are ordinary, mundane, and trivial objects that help Francisca navigate loss and displacement. In my analysis

247 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 6-7. 144 of Nostalgia & Borders, I focused on the affective power of nostalgic relations to material objects, such as burgundy suitcases, phone lines, and make-up. I suggest that by refusing the romance of wholeness and return to the homeland, the speaker in Guiñasaca’s poem accepts loss as constitutive of subjectivity. Such loss is not passive, however, as the speaker recognizes the major injustices of migration and voices that their forms of relation are not enough.

These narratives and poetic interventions produce an archive of ordinary materialities, or as my chapter title indicates, the materiality of being. By focusing on texts that take pleasure in the act of world-making, where make-up helps to adorn the queer migrant body and queer narration takes us on a journey to alternative temporalities and spaces, I highlight the formation of a new subject position within the nation-state. This subject position does not rely on citizenship or nationalism to belong to the nation. Rather, this subject, with her accented tongue and femme embodiment, claims non-belonging as a direct challenge to nation-state frameworks.

145

Conclusion

Embracing Impossibility

Unruly Imaginaries attests to the dignity, power, and fabulous lives of impossible subjects. Through the texts that I assembled together, I offered an account of how LGBTQ migrants exist within the confines of the nation-state while producing imaginaries that transgress it. Institutions of power will continue to criminalize and devalue the lives of the subjects that I write about. But as I demonstrated throughout my dissertation, LGBTQ migrants question the very terms through which lives are valued and devalued. They utilize their differences strategically to build new social relations, as evident in Chapter 1 where trans women and gay men come together in the public sphere to contest the individualizing and violent processes of asylum. Their use of spectacular femininities and everyday acts of care at the U.S.-Mexico border redefines dominant political strategies; most importantly, their insistence on coming together shows how relationality operates as a tool for survival and allows them to migrate like a queen. Moreover, I proposed that LGBTQ migrants contest nation-state frameworks through strategic negotiations with power. I illustrate this point in chapter 2 where “undocuqueer” functions as a flexible identity and subject position from which LGBTQ migrants challenge institutional forms of belonging even while drawing on the frameworks of the nation-state. They claim their existence through phrases such as “I am UndocuQueer,” where the “I” is always already about the collective survival of LGBTQ migrants. My dissertation has also argued that the imaginaries of LGBTQ migrants do not seek visibility or recognition from the nation-state.

As I contend in chapter 3, migrant and diasporic lesbians transgress dominant codes of representation by speaking through silence and embodied gestures. I show how the film

Mosquita y Mari creates a sitio y lengua that allows the two protagonists to establish a queer 146 relationship on their own terms, and simultaneously, this sitio y lengua refuses the need for recognition from dominant national imaginaries. Lastly, I have pointed to the everyday material object relations that impossible subjects hold onto with care. These objects help LGBTQ migrants store their memories, express their desires, and give shape to their imaginaries. Deviant relations to material objects, those which stray from the norm, led a queer Latina narrator to stretch moments of intimacy and shuttle through time and space; these material object relations also led a queer femme migrant poet to embrace the world-making potentials of nostalgia. Put together, these cultural formations offer a glimpse into the impossible lives of LGBTQ migrants, whose aspirations and world-making desires cannot be controlled by the nation-state.

The unruly imaginaries of LGBTQ migrants offer a relational understanding of subjectivity that grants us the ability to relate to one another across differences. If, as Audre

Lorde reminds us, we cannot relate to each other as equals, relationality provides a method from which the “I” becomes a relational “we.” In order to reach this point, subjects must be willing to confront institutions of power and structural impossibilities. This is hard work that demands an acknowledgement of difference and transforms our understandings of personhood. My analysis of cultural texts about LGBTQ migrants reveals that they build relational bonds out of necessity and a willingness to participate in shared struggles for survival. My focus on the strategies, imaginaries, and methods through which LGBTQ migrants make something out of nothing responds to the issue of impossibility. To conclude my dissertation, I offer a short reading of the show (Un)Documents because it unsettles nation-state frameworks by exercising relational bonds amongst migrants, queer and otherwise, who are rendered impossible people.

(Un)Documents: The Pain of Documentation 147

In their solo show (Un)Documents, Jesús Valles centers the queer migrant body as it navigates the impossibilities of nation-state documents.248 Their performance tells a story about the loss of relations that occurs through U.S. immigration regimes, demonstrating how the border is not merely a promise about national belonging but functions as a threat against the racialized migrant Other.249 In their life, documents are not sites of possibility, as their brother’s undocumented status led to his deportation. According to Valles, “sin papeles,” the state of being undocumented/without papers, is a misnomer because it ignores how undocumented people “are painful libraries of nothing but paper.”250 They explain that when Immigration Customs

Enforcement (ICE) conducts work raids, paperwork is filed in which the names of the undocumented appear as a threat to the nation’s “fiction you lust for.”251 Valles strongly captures the power of questioning material and symbolic documents when they observe that they want to imagine papers otherwise: “I’d like to imagine an undoing, a less painful way to papers.”252

Valles notes that when undocumented people pass away—amidst the bills, immigration forms, leases, and other material documents—their traces remain in love letters, poems, notes, and scratches on the wall that document “we were here once” because these are valid documents, too.253 By narrating the many documents through which undocumented people come into existence, they unsettle nation-state frameworks and open the door to new forms of existence.

248 For my analysis of (Un)Documents, I watched the digital live performance on November 14, 2020, through Teatro Audaz. For this reading, I reference Valles’ unpublished script alongside notes I took from the live performance. See Jesús Valles, (Un)Documents (Script, Austin, Texas, 2019). 249 Valles, (Un)Documents, 4. 250 Valles, (Un)Documents, 26. 251 Valles, (Un)Documents, 26. 252 Valles, (Un)Documents, 2. 253 Valles, (Un)Documents, 26. 148

Documents are represented as pieces of paper that Valles utilizes strategically during the performance, whether to signal their permanent resident status application or the self-deportation forms that their brother was forced to sign by immigration officials. This paperwork gains a life of its own, particularly as it has the power to ascribe legal/illegal status. When describing their experience crossing the border as a kid, in which Valles was told to go to sleep inside the hollowed-out cushion of their father’s truck, they heard a border patrol agent ask their family members for their documents. Inside of the hollowed-out cushion, Valles mouthed the words

“American” as a response to the agent’s request for documentation.254 Significantly, the agent’s power to ask for documentation hails the undocumented subject to produce documents that serve as proof of national belonging. Because both of their parents were permanent residents at the time, unlike Valles who was born “too soon” on the Mexico side of the border, they are able to cross without further inspection. Once they reach the El Paso side of the border, Valles reflects on the experience of becoming undocumented with the words: “Now you are a some / thing with no papers / You are an I. / I am here. Undocumented.”255 They are no longer in Mexico, they are now “here” and undocumented, becoming an “I”—a thing without papers. In the moment of crossing, Valles is robbed of their subjectivity because they lack state documents that mark national belonging, and thus, becomes an impossible subject.

In this instance, Valles writes about their undocumented status as an individual experience, but I question whether this “I” is ever about the individual. When narrating their naturalization ceremony, Valles is standing center stage holding up a small U.S. flag with their right hand placed on their chest (figure 13). There are papers littered across the floor and a U.S. flag is projected onto the background. They describe that at the ceremony they were standing

254 Valles, (Un)Documents, 8. 255 Valles, (Un)Documents, 7. 149 next to a Korean woman who was also becoming a citizen. Her mom passed away three years earlier, but as Valles points out, attending her funeral would have put her naturalization application to “waste.”256 Prior to reciting the Oath of Allegiance, Valles proclaims, “Citizenship means you always grieve from far away. Wave the flag. / Here I am. / Hand over your heart.”257

Here Valles indexes the loss of relations that occurs not because of distance but the rules that migrants are subjected to when applying for citizenship, that is, travel restrictions imposed by

U.S. immigration control. While performative patriotism is expected during these naturalization ceremonies, their corporeal discomfort is evident throughout the performance and serves as a medium to document pain. Valles feels the pain of the woman who was forced to grieve her mom’s death at a distance alongside their own pain regarding the sacrifices of becoming a citizen. They offer a relational sense of self whereby migrants stand alongside each other and feel for each other. While bearing different traces of migration histories, Valles and the Korean woman share the experience of being cast as impossible people.

256 Valles, (Un)Documents, 13. 257 Valles, (Un)Documents, 13. 150

Figure 13. Jesús Valles performing (Un)Documents. Screenshot from digital performance with Teatro Audaz (2020).

When performing the naturalization ceremony, the queer migrant body becomes a site from which to critique the arbitrary rules of citizenship. As Rebecca Schneider writes, “the explicit body in representation is foremost a site of social markings, physical parts and gestural signatures of gender, race, class, age, sexuality— all of which bear ghosts of historical meaning, markings delineating social hierarchies of privilege and disprivilege.”258 Schneider’s analysis of the body helps to explain why Valles focused on loss in the moment of becoming a citizen, as the ghost of the woman’s mother appears as an absent presence that haunts the body. Soon after the ceremony, Valles’ body becomes “a site of social markings” that cannot be easily integrated into the nation. They begin to move their body like a serpent, dropping the flag and using both of their hands to produce the visual imagery of a serpent opening its mouth. This is an intense

258 Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997): 2. 151 moment in the show where Valles explicitly articulates, through movement and speech, a differential consciousness “within which one experiences the violent shattering of the unitary sense of self as the skill that allows a mobile identity to form takes hold.”259 Referencing biblical allusions to serpents, which treat their knowledge as deceitful/perverse, Valles recognizes their tongue as “forked” because they speak in different tongues. Their performative and symbolic use of serpents helps them reconcile becoming a citizen, which “tastes like blood,” with the violent history of the U.S.-Mexico border that produces illegal/impossible subjects.260 The queer migrant body, as performed by Valles, bears the social markers of impossible histories and subjectivities even after becoming a citizen, prompting a differential consciousness where the unitary sense of self is shattered. Overall, Valles utilizes their body to make legible the violence of citizenship and national belonging on relational social fabrics.

What prompts Valles to desire different forms of documentation, which they regard as personhood, is a deep understanding of the subjugating power of papers, particularly as their brother’s lack of papers led to his deportation. When their brother is taken away by ICE, they ponder whether writing their brother’s name on paper, Govelin Arreola Morales, would make him documented. At home, they see papers piling onto the dining room table, which include statements from immigration lawyers, mortgage bills, and other documents that “had powers we couldn’t fathom. The papers on the table could make people come into existence. And they could bring him back to us, or they could make his lungs cry only a far-away music. ”261 Papers determine which bodies belong to the nation and which are kept in detention, hidden from sight and away from the national imaginary. The cries of the undocumented, as Valles notes, are

259 Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000): 196. 260 Valles, (Un)Documents, 13. 261 Valles, (Un)Documents, 17. 152 registered as background music to the project of nation-building. This ambivalent reflection on documents shows that papers have the power to make people into subjects of the nation, or in the case of Valles’ brother, papers can produce impossible subjects with no rights to exist. Valles’ painful reflection on their brother’s deportation stages a critique of how nation-state documents make undocumented lives unintelligible.

After visiting their brother in Mexico following his deportation, Valles returns to El Paso and uses a gentle voice to perform the role of their mother sitting on a chair lamenting: “Bueno.

Lo que esta hecho, esta hecho.”262 Valles quickly stands up and turns towards the table, utilizing their hand, which is shaking at this point, to slam hard against the table, wishing “the table would break under the weight of the papers, and the papers would burst into flames, and the borders would break open, and the lines between here and there wouldn’t be and he’d be here, and not there. He’d be everywhere and there would be no countries, just kin.”263 As Valles narrates their wishes, they switch voices, with one voice expressing their anger regarding the incommensurate weight of documents on their body, and the other voice expressing their mother’s soft sorrow, as she “blames herself for the uneven citizenship of two brothers.”264 Citizenship is a marker of difference between the brothers, as they are estranged by distance and legal documentation.

However, when expressing their anger at the weight of documentation, they reference the spatial markers that turn migrants into impossible subjects. By wishing for the lines between “here” and

“there” to disappear, Valles imagines an alternative world without countries. The “here” that made Valles undocumented after crossing the border is now expressed as an everywhere, which allows for relational kinship formations to emerge.

262 Valles, (Un)Documents, 18. 263 Valles, (Un)Documents, 18. 264 Valles, (Un)Documents, 18. 153

As Valles straddles between a here and a there, they reference the weight of citizenship on their subjectivity and kinship structures. They remark that their U.S. passport and ability to move across borders is a weight that produces not “brotherly love” but fraternal guilt.265 In the first half of the show, they wrestle with the machismo that their brother embodies, “scratching his balls,” fraternizing with older men, and lying to women. Before finding out about the ICE raid, Valles reflects on the word carnal, which signals a brotherly relation and affection as well as flesh: “Mi carnal / My brother, my flesh, my blood / The subject of a document, too.”266

Valles invokes the cultural framework of carnalismo to grapple with their conflicted relationship. Richard Rodríguez contests the heteropatriarchal familial arrangements of carnalismo, which is meant to unify Chicano men as they partake in a Chicano nationalist movement. He pushes for a broader understanding of this term when he asks, “What does it mean to promote a brotherhood that does not strictly rely on a gay or straight bond but rather aims to bridge the interests of Chicano men despite sexual identification?”267 In a similar vein,

Valles repurposes carnalismo to signal a relation that is not built upon heteropatriachal social bonds and contests nation-state frameworks. In reflecting on their relationship to their carnal,

Valles is able to register, respect, and engage difference, not just that of sexuality but also citizenship status. In the end, what creates fraternal guilt and weighs down on Valles is citizenship, and they insightfully conclude that “my citizenship means someone elsewhere always suffers.”268 By engaging difference through relationality, which in this instance takes the

265 Valles, (Un)Documents, 18. 266 Valles, (Un)Documents, 16. 267 Richard Rodríguez, Next of Kin: The Family in Chicana/o Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 120. 268 Valles, (Un)Documents, 18. 154 form of carnalismo, Valles opens up a space where citizens can reflect on how their privileges come at a cost: the suffering of Others.

As a show, (Un)Documents does not resolve issues regarding power struggles, nation- state frameworks, ethical relations between citizens and (non)citizens, and the heavyweight of documentation. Instead, it seeks to document the impossible lives of undocumented people. One of the most powerful scenes of the show is when Valles responds to an imaginary question,

“How did your parents handle it? When your brother was deported?”269 They answer:

“Impossibly. My parents handled it as impossibly as they could.”270 Valles goes on to explain how their parents created “worlds out of nothing but necessity,” and proudly shares that their mom furnished their entire home out of discarded objects. This was the “garbage” of the people whose homes she used to clean. Their father, on the other hand, “built cities” out of discarded bricks and rock. While Valles’ family lacks legal documentation for their deported son, they are not lacking in imagination. Valles’ focus on impossibility helps to reclaim dignity in the face of uncertainty when they state, “I am a child of two architects of the impossible. We handled that shit the way we always handle it. We are impossible people.”271 This response showcases the world-making potentials of relationality, as it ascribes value to living, being, and existing as a relational community of impossible people. Ultimately, (Un)Documents demonstrates how a queer migrant unsettles nation-state frameworks by building relational bonds across differences.

As a whole, I envision Unruly Imaginaries as an important intervention within the analysis of transnational migration and gender/sexual/racial formations. Despite the generative critiques of heteronormativity, homonormativity, and queer liberalism in queer theory, I find that

269 Valles, (Un)Documents, 19. 270 Valles, (Un)Documents, 19. 271 Valles, (Un)Documents, 19. 155 most of these critiques focus on white citizen subjects. Thus, I resist the lure of simply rejecting institutions of power because different subjects have different access to power. Some subjects are impossible people, complicating the means through which they can challenge institutions of power. I have intentionally focused on impossible subjects, those people whose lives, politics, and imaginaries are understood as anything but possible. And these subjects have taught me important lessons: The relational involves a gathering of subjects across differences and an unruly negotiation with power. The relational offers the prospect of survival at the edges of nation-state frameworks. The relational serves as blueprint for LGBTQ migrants to survive and thrive in their everyday lives.

156

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