LITERACY, SEXUALITY and EMPOWERMENT in QUEER CHICANO NARRATIVE a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Grad

PLEASURE, READING: LITERACY, SEXUALITY AND EMPOWERMENT IN QUEER CHICANO NARRATIVE A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English. By Alberto A. Lorenzo, M.S. Washington, DC August 21st, 2014 Copyright 2014 by Alberto A. Lorenzo All Rights Reserved ii PLEASURE, READING: LITERACY, SEXUALITY AND EMPOWERMENT IN QUEER CHICANO NARRATIVE Alberto A. Lorenzo, M.S. Thesis Advisor: Ricardo Ortiz, Ph.D. ABSTRACT The theme of reading and writing resonates through the works of Arturo Islas, Richard Rodríguez, and Rigoberto González. The very idea of engaging in the production of literature in the form of a novel, a memoir, or an autobiography is already speaking in its own way about a kind of exposing, revealing, or reclaiming. This project seeks to engage the three texts in a critical, theoretically informed conversation guided by the following themes: reading as a pleasurable, voyeuristic act with the intent of escape; family politics and the tensions between the overarching, oppressive notions of masculinity in the problematic context of Chicano culture; and the queer identity of our writers as notions of homosexuality and outness are manifested in the text. While this analysis attempts to answer questions about childhood, language, and sexuality within their works through the lens of psychoanalysis, it also seeks to engage queer, Chicano theorists directly writing to and from this cultural, historical moment. iii Dedication When I was in the third grade in Havana, Cuba, my mother was one day called to the principal’s office where the art teacher was holding a drawing. The drawing was that of a girl wearing a dress with a ribbon around her waist; she had two pigtails and an elongated bang that resembled that of Ariel from Disney’s The Little Mermaid. The teacher told my mom that while other boys in class had chosen to draw soldiers, planes, or Cuban landscapes (“why not draw la Sierra Maestra?!), I had chosen to draw a “mariquita” or “sissy” thing. I immediately started crying, which infuriated my already annoyed mother. She told the teacher to go to “el carajo” or “hell.” My mother later took me to a psychologist regarding my unusual behavior around the playground and in the house. During my time with the doctor, I was asked to draw my family. When the drawing was done, he explained to my mother that there was nothing wrong with me, that I simply admired the women in my family a lot more than the men. I had carefully traced dresses, shoes, hairpins, eyelashes, and accessories on all the women including my aunt who was pregnant at the time; all the men, however, looked like stick figures with little dots and lines for eyes and lips. I know this story because when I came out to my mother at the age of 29 while she was in the middle of getting dressed, she told me this very story right before she hugged me and reminded me of her unconditional love. Afterwards she wiped her tears, turned away from me and asked me to tie her dress tightly from the back. There was an awkward silence. We both laughed. I dedicate this project to my mother for making me the man I am today. Alberto Lorenzo iv Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter I: Pleasure and Escape: The Act of Reading ..................................................................... 6 Chapter II: The Chicano Family: Notions of Femininity and Masculinity ................................... 22 Chapter III: Sexuality: A Return to Desire ................................................................................... 39 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 55 References ..................................................................................................................................... 57 v Introduction In his 2006 memoir, Butterfly Boy, Chicano poet and memoirist Rigoberto González recalls being exposed to his parents by his brother for playing with dolls: “my father looked away as if he had not heard a thing, and that made me feel even worse – I had shamed him…being a sissy-boy had no place in our home” (96, 97). In this memoir, González addresses the tensions in his family around his sexuality from an early age. Being exposed as queer is one of the greatest nightmares that a Chicano boy could face. As gay and latino myself, I have often jested that it is better to tell your parents you are pregnant and unaware of the identity of the father than to admit being a homosexual. Butterfly Boy falls within the genre of Chicano literature that began tracing what many scholars regard as a queer male textual genealogy since the late 1970’s. This thesis focuses on three primary works from that genealogy: Hunger of Memory (1982) by Richard Rodríguez, The Rain God (1984) by Arturo Islas, and Butterfly Boy (2006) by Rigoberto González. Although not openly identifying as queer in Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodríguez chronicles his education in the United States in this autobiography, “without a doubt the best- known and most controversial of all latino autobiographies” (Firmat 255). According to critics like Randy A. Rodríguez, “it is easier to critique and reject his work for the denials of Mexican identity and identification with Anglo-America than for his closeted homosexuality, or ‘secrets’”(396). In Hunger of Memory, Rodríguez narrates a story of coming to language. For example, he often revisits his relationship with his grandmother and the sense of “intimacy” that her use of Spanish and telling of stories created (40). However, Rodríguez points out that while Spanish gives him a sense of comfort, as he became more proficient in and acclimated into American culture, Spanish became the “other” language (28). Rodríguez denies being able to 1 identify one of the languages as his “family language,” as it would dishonor those he has loved as a child and those he loved as an adult (40). At the end of Memory, he reveals letters by his mother in which she admonishes him for writing about their “private” family life (193). In this work, his family’s migrating to the United States from Mexico causes Rodríguez to struggle for a sense of belonging in both his public and private lives, between his use of English or Spanish for self-expression, and between claiming or rejecting a North-American and/or a Chicano identity. Living in the United States, Rodríguez finds that the duality of language becomes a defining part of his identity, determining how he can navigate the private and public dimensions of his life. Just as a writer sits in solitude speaking to whoever, in Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodríguez, refers to as a “faceless” reader (197); the reader sits, possibly in solitude, intimately listening to a distant speaker revealing his deepest secrets, fears, expectations, disillusionments, excitements, among many other intimate revelations. This is how Hunger of Memory comes across: as a secret story being whispered from afar by a soft-spoken speaker, in this case, Richard Rodríguez. Arturo Islas’ novel The Rain God (1984), tells the story of a Mexican-American family living on the Texas-Mexico border and how its religious tradition and education shapes the lives, and the deaths, of members of said family. Rain God has also been acknowledged by many as a landmark of Chicano literature (Viego 92). Islas’ Rain God and sequel novel, Migrant Souls (1990), have been heavily criticized for the ill-perceived failure to present positive portrayals of queer Chicano characters. Cherríe Moraga has complained about Islas’ queer characters being “sinners and tortured alcoholics who wanted nothing more than to die dancing beneath a lighting-charged sky just before a thunderstorm” (163). Rain God contains two central queer characters: Miguel Chico, whose experiences are often paralleled with those of Arturo 2 Islas,’ thus often read as a fictional representation of the author; and Felix, a closeted married men who enjoys sex with sixteen-year old boys. While Rain God has been critiqued in depth in search of information that would help shape notions of queer Chicano literature because of Islas’ homosexual identity, it is clear that he embeds a strong message about the power dynamics of the Chicano domestic sphere and the disruptive nature of hegemonic hypermasculinity as manifested in the text in the relations between Miguel Chico and his father, Miguel Grande and also between Felix, and his son, JoEl. Miguel Chico goes on to earn a doctoral degree and teach in San Francisco; the family questions his sexuality when he does not marry within the traditional, enforced timeframe, and instead devotes himself to his work as a professor of literature. The theme of reading and writing resonates through the works of Arturo Islas, Richard Rodríguez, and Rigoberto González. The very idea of engaging in the production of literature in the form of a novel, a memoir, or an autobiography is already speaking in its own way about a kind of exposing, revealing, or reclaiming. In the context of one’s personal history, perhaps one could interpret such “rewriting” as a form of reclaiming and reshaping; as a chance to share a different version of experiences, in most cases, one’s own. This project seeks to engage the three texts in a critical, theoretically informed discussion guided by the following themes: reading as a pleasurable, voyeuristic act with the intent of escape; family politics and the tensions between the overarching, oppressive notions of masculinity in the problematic context of Chicano culture; and the queer identity of our writers as notions of homosexuality and outness are manifested in the text. While this analysis attempts to answer questions about childhood, language, and sexuality within their works through the lens of psychoanalysis, it also seeks to engage queer, Chicano theorists directly writing to and from this cultural, historical moment.

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