MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

of

José A. de la Garza Valenzuela

Candidate for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

______Dr. Stefanie K. Dunning, Co-Director

______Dr. Julie A. Minich, Co-Director

______Dr. Madelyn Detloff, Reader

______Dr. Anita Mannur, Reader

______Dr. Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. Graduate School Representative

ABSTRACT

IMPOSSIBLY HERE, IMPOSSIBLY QUEER: CITIZENSHIP, SEXUALITY, AND GAY CHICANO FICTION

by José A. de la Garza Valenzuela

Advocacy for the rights of undocumented migrants and members of the LGBT community have emerged as defining social justice movements in the early 21st century in the U.S. In both movements, citizenship has been invoked as a legal category of particular concern, the first advocating for a pathway to documented status leading to citizenship and the second asserting that denying same-sex couples the right to marry renders gay and lesbian communities second-class citizens. This dissertation uses the contemporary deployment of citizenship as point of departure, arguing against understandings of the category as defined by inclusivity. Exclusion, I argue, is a defining trait of citizenship, one that allows us to reorient considerations of cultural and legal membership in the U.S. Rather than considering citizenship as the site where disenfranchisement is resolved, I use the failures of citizenship as an analytical point of departure guided not by an interest in citizenship as a site of justice, but instead as a legal institution that insists on the impossibility of non- normative identity categories. In doing so, I turn my attention to legal, historical, and/or literary moments where our commitment to citizenship has failed to ascertain rights for queer and migrant communities. To interrogate the limits of citizenship, I analyze works by gay Chicano writers where I locate historical intersections of queer and migrant narratives that attend to depicting the limitations of citizenship. In each chapter, I pair a novel with a historical context that function as a legal setting for the disenfranchisement of queer migrant people. The first chapter considers the impossibility of culturally or legally identifying as citizen in John Rechy’s iconic City of Night in the context of anti-sodomy laws upheld in Bowers v. Hardwick. In the second, I analyze the retroactive criminalization of queer identity in The Rain God by Arturo Islas in the legal context of Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Chapter three discusses the contemporary surveillance of migrant communities in Arizona’s SB 1070 in relationship to Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines. The final chapter considers the depiction of queer exclusion, inclusion, and coming out during the Mariel boatlift in the graphic novel Sexile by Chicano artist Jaime Cortez. In the works here analyzed, I argue, citizenship functions as a political tool that incentivizes normative compliance, making queer and/or migrant communities subject to citizenship rather than creating an egalitarian possibility for the emergence of a queer migrant citizen subject.

IMPOSSIBLY HERE, IMPOSSIBLY QUEER: CITIZENSHIP, SEXUALITY, AND GAY CHICANO FICTION

A DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

by

José A. de la Garza Valenzuela

The Graduate School Miami University Oxford, Ohio

2016

Dissertation Directors: Dr. Stefanie K. Dunning and Dr. Julie A. Minich

©

José A. de la Garza Valenzuela

2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION IV

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS V

INTRODUCTION 1 "Queer Chicano Narrative"

CHAPTER ONE 23 "Public Sex, Private Citizenship: Bowers v. Hardwick and the Queer Citizen in John Rechy's City of Night"

CHAPTER TWO 59 "'Not in the Clinical Sense,' in the Legal Sense: The Ambiguous Queer Citizen in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service and Arturo Islas' The Rain God"

CHAPTER THREE 93 "Queer(ing) Migrants: Documenting Queer Border Crossings in Rigoberto González's Crossing Vines"

CHAPTER FOUR 130 "Out of the Shadows: Outing and the Institutionalized Erasure of Queer Migrant Narratives in Jaime Cortez's Sexile"

EPILOGUE 168 "Refusing Citizenship"

WORKS CITED 176

iii DEDICATION

For Blanca, Joe, and Jordy without whom the possible would still seem impossible.

For Curtis.

And for Rita, who has seen it all happen.

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’ve seen my world change from Oxford, Ohio since I arrived in August of 2008. To truly acknowledge those who have been integral to my development as a person and professional would require a tome of its own. I came out of the closet in this town. I saw the U.S. elect its first black president here. I read reports of the Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage from this corner of the state. And I saw people mobilize is small and large numbers around an array of issues that allowed me to more clearly understand that the idea of a just society required more than just reading and writing from people like me. Words are insufficient to express gratitude to those whose patience and careful encouragement have granted me the space and time to better understand myself and those around me in ways that have made this project not only meaningful, but personally transformative.

I would like to first thank the committee whose experience and kindness never let me forget that I could complete this project. Stefanie K. Dunning, Julie Minich, Madelyn Detloff, Anita Mannur, and Gaile Pohlhaus have allowed me to reimagine what it means to be a scholar and mentor by offering me their patience, reassurance, and words of encouragement when I couldn’t quite find the words to express how much I needed them. Gaile, your kindness and intellectual generosity is inspiring. Anita, your professional advice as I have prepared this dissertation has allowed me to better assess what I can accomplish. Madelyn, your support has meant so much to me. Of course, we know the personal is political, but from early on you have helped me understand that the professional can also often be personal. Your genuine attentiveness to graduate students as people with complicated lives and histories keeps so many of us going. Julie, thank you for your mentorship and commitment to my work. I am a better scholar because of your feedback and example. Your feedback on my thinking and writing throughout my time at Miami has helped me reconcile so much of who I am as a person with what I do as a writer. And Stefanie, I could not have finished this project without your ongoing encouragement and positive energy. You always made me feel like I could be a Beyoncé when my anxieties made me feel like I was being thrown out of Destiny’s Child. You always had the precise words and/or GIFs to let me understand my worth as a thinker. I am honored to have worked with all of you. As a queer person of color, I cannot help but be moved and encouraged every time I remind myself that I live in a time and place where our work together is possible.

The people I have been fortunate to meet while at Miami University have been a never-ending source of encouragement, reflection, and comfort. I would like to thank Alyssa Straight, Rachel Seiler, Nora Bonner, Daniel Barker, Will Runyan, Alison Welch, Shanti Chu, Catherine Averill, Jessica Ponto, Adam Burkey, Erin Burkey, Nicole Cannon, and Kathryn Perry for their friendship throughout the years. What made Oxford feel like home was the community I found away from campus. Paul de Saint-Rat, thank you for your friendship and positivity. And Daryl, I can’t express how meaningful it has been to know you. Your welcoming spirit, emotional support, and care have meant everything to so many of us. Without you and the community at The Circle my time in Oxford would not have been the same.

v Nobody witnessed my emotional and intellectual journey like my closest friends, my family from scratch. Sonya Parrish, you are one of the first people I met in Oxford and our friendship has grown into true kinship. We have seen each other through so much personally and professionally. Our stories will always matter. Andy Buchner, your friendship, advice, and respect meant more to me than I could ever express. Thank you for bringing the butchness to butch night. Kyle, lil’ bro, you are one of the smartest people I know. I would say I am proud of you, but if anyone ever kept it together it was you. And Bonnie, look at us! We have come a long way from the day we met. Because of you, this journey was all the more exciting and personally meaningful. I will never think of California without thinking about you, my queer bff. Classy B’s, thank you for lifting me up when I was down—literally and metaphorically. I would also like to thank Jon Rylander. We have awkwardly tried to figure out what it means to be queer in academia, and your friendship has often reminded me I am not alone on this queer journey. And Rita—the cutest little lady that ever lived—thank you for being the best dog, therapist, research assistant, and audience to my developing ideas. Nobody has seen this project come together as closely as you have. We made it, gurl!

There are two people who graciously heard more about this project than they ever needed to. Rachel Levy, you mean more to me than you could ever imagine. Your friendship has motivated me to constantly find ways to engage with those around me more kindly and lovingly. I have learned so much about myself because of your companionship, and I aspire to be more like you. You are more than a friend, more than a sister. I love you and will be forever grateful for your place in my life. Curtis Dickerson, you taught me so much about love and loss. You helped me understand how much I could care about another person in ways that reading and writing never would. I am accountable for my relationship to the world around me in ways I never before imagined because of you. Thank you for helping me make sense in life and in writing. Whatever I have accomplished in this dissertation is, undoubtedly, because of the two of you.

Finally and most importantly, I would love to express my most sincere gratitude to my family. Nobody has supported and enabled my intellectual curiosity like my mother, Blanca Valenzuela. Mamá, sin tus sacrificios, dedicación, y cariño, nunca hubiera logrado nada. Cualquier éxito logrado y por lograr te lo debo a ti. Sin tu apoyo, la trayectoria de mi vida sería muy distinta. My brothers, Jordy and Joe de la Garza, you are the reason why I keep writing. You challenge how I think and enrich my life in ways I will never be able to explain. I often believed I did not have it in me to finish what I started eight years ago. Every time I saw you, I knew that someone did. Alondra and Leonardo, my nephew and niece, you are too young to understand how much you mean to me. I am sorry for missing your birthdays and so many of the moments I didn’t see living so far from home. I’m writing this down so I don’t forget to tell you when you are older: don’t be afraid to be restless. It runs in the family. My grandparents came to the U.S. to work and returned to Mexico. Your grandparents did the same, but stayed. Su papi y sus tíos are restless in their own unique ways. The proof of my restlessness is in this dissertation. Mijos, in many ways, this is for you.

vi INTRODUCTION

Queer Chicano Narrative

As LGBT and migrant rights advocacy groups separately have and continue to organize around the issue of citizenship, this dissertation explores the historical relationship between shifting regulations of migration and representations of queer Latinos/as by authors of Mexican descent. Their written and graphic representations of the intersection of race, sexuality, and national identity underscore the historical lack of solidarity between advocacy movements in the U.S. Rather than rejecting the methods that have rendered them excludable from how citizens imagine the citizenry and nation, both movements pursue the right to inclusion by excluding others. The right to exclude, a defining trait of citizenship, has become the prospective reward for those who have found themselves selected out of legal membership to the nation. Those who, beyond the achievements of such modes of advocacy, carry the burden of exclusionary citizenship are left to comply with revised norms of behavior deemed appropriate of the citizen or risk exclusion and, often, the criminalization of their identities. A commitment to citizenship as an avenue of advocacy for human rights itself ensures that some, including many from our very own communities, will be excluded on the grounds of how they identify and perform their identities in relationship to the state and its citizenry’s legal and cultural demands. As a response to such a contemporary political and cultural climate, this dissertation aims to situate gay Chicano narratives in a historical and cultural understating of Chicana/o communities and link their representations of queer characters to legal representations of citizenship that inform contemporary queer and immigrant advocacy. Reconsidering Chicano Nationalism The influential El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, publicly presented in 1969 at the first National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, presents the founding political and cultural separatist ideals that have historically informed Chicano nationalism. The preamble of the manifesto introduces the political goal of unifying Chicano communities in the U.S. southwest, the mythical homeland of the Aztecs: “Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are

1 a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán” (“El Plan” 1). The Chicano Movement, the document suggests, would retain the political governing structure of the U.S. in a proposed sovereign Chicano nation. Many early Chicana/o activists hoped “reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun,” would prove “the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and out inevitable destiny” (“El Plan” 1). The Movement, then, emerged out of a desire to attain political, economic, and cultural sovereignty from U.S. governance and economic exploitation. Membership in the envisioned Aztlán would be contingent on performing “tasks which are justly called by our house, our land, the sweat on our brows, and by our hearts” (“El Plan” 1). The manifesto did not envision itself as divorced from civic performances of cultural compliance, by which I mean compulsory performances by community members that sustain those ideals imagined to uphold national unity upon which acknowledgement of inclusion are organized. Rather, it disagreed with how membership was administered legally and economically in the historical and cultural context of U.S. occupation. El Plan and the Chicano Movement, like many other organized advocacy movements, contested how the nation had come to define the citizen, what histories and traditions that category considered, and how non-legal membership in the nation was mediated by economic exploitation. The manifesto proposed the recognition of a different kind of citizen, which would require the ideological and political sovereignty of Aztlán. El Plan, asking activists to seek the freedom to imagine themselves as citizens— to fulfill that “inevitable destiny”—tasks the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s with performing a culture that requires heteronormative labor of citizens of Aztlán (“El Plan” 1). Foregrounding the importance of culture for the development of community, the manifesto states: “we must ensure that our writers, poets, musicians, and artists produce literature and art that is appealing to our people and relates to revolutionary culture. Our cultural values of life, family, and home will serve as a powerful weapon to defeat the gringo dollar value system and encourage the process of love and brotherhood” (“El Plan” 3). The Chicana/o artist was tasked to represent an economic and political opposition to the U.S. in some of the most intimate of community structures—the family and the home. The call for representations of nationalism in the domestic space made these settings places where belonging to the nation was relevantly contested. Queer

2 Chicana/o writers have depicted uneasy relationships to traditional forms of family, gendered labor, and sexuality in domestic spaces.1 Collectively, many of their works demonstrate that within the aspirants to a “nation autonomous and free—culturally, socially, economically, and politically” that “will make its own decisions on the usage of our lands, the taxation of goods, the utilization of our bodies for war, the determination of justice…and the profit of our sweat,” exclusionary forms of violence erased some of the dissenting experiences of those who failed to effectively perform the demands of these new models of citizenship, most notably queer men and women (“El Plan” 4). Nationalism The Chicano Movement defined nationalism as the link between those who participated in the movement. El Plan explains: “Chicanos (La Raza de Bronze) must use their nationalism as the key or common denominator for mass mobilization and organization” (“El Plan” 2). Later, the manifesto defines nationalism as a means of organization “that transcends all religious, political, class, and economic factions or boundaries. Nationalism is the common denominator that all members of La Raza can agree upon” (“El Plan” 2). While the movement envisioned nationalism as transcendent of certain categories, it did not understand nationalism as uniting differences rooted in gender and sexuality. To have access to and support Chicano nationalism, women and queer people were required to uphold, narrate, and celebrate a cultural movement designed to erase their experiences and identities to appeal to audiences whose expectation, El Plan suggested, was that cultural production support the nationalist movement and its guiding tenets. Compliance with the demands of Chicano nationalism was itself considered an affront against the U.S.’s occupation and exploitation. Within these specific historical and cultural contexts, the performance of Chicano nationalism renders one a citizen of Aztlán in dissidence of the U.S. economic, social, and political policies and historical imperialism insofar as such performances of resistance complied with the emerging definition of nationalism in the Chicano Movement. That is, resistance within the movement was defined by a person’s compliance new conditions for

1 For example, Gloria Anzaldúa describes a lesbian student’s misunderstanding of the term homophobia as the fear of returning home. She reflects on the statement explaining: “how apt. Fear of going home. And of not being taken in. We’re afraid of being

3 membership in the nation. Queer Chicana/o works have portrayed the exile of characters from Aztlán within the home and family. However, these narratives have been themselves, at some time or another, exiled from the canons of Aztlán’s cultural work in favor of cultural depictions that comply with the demands of Chicano nationalism, texts from which notions of the nation and Chicana/o identity have emerged. Those texts that have become iconic present identities, traditions, and performances that are appropriate of the simultaneously dissident and compliant Chicana/o nationalist subject. Chicana/o cultural history demonstrates the role cultural production has in the development of a national and/or community identity. According to Homi K. Bhabha, “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize in the horizons of the mind’s eye” (306). He defines the nation as “an ambivalence that emerges from growing awareness that, despite the certainty with which historians speak of the ‘origins’ of the nation as a sign of the ‘modernity’ of society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality” (306). If, in fact, the Chicano Movement was interested in cultivating narratives that upheld the imaginary nation of Aztlán, then texts by early writers representing a Chicano narrative tradition can be seen as exclusive representation of the modern Chicana/o citizen- through-nationalism. These representations unite the community through the citation of familiar customs and narratives, erasing the identities and experiences of, as Gloria Anzaldúa terms them, los atravesados2 in the transitional reality of the movement. To determine such texts as a demonstration of the emergence of the modern Chicana/o nation, the fulfillment of that inevitable destiny erases potential identities within the Movement for the expedient emergence of a cohesive representation of heteronormative Chicana/o identity. The transitional spaces Bhabha theorizes, in the context of modern nationalism, are where histories and identities are subject to compromise in the emergence of a new citizenry. Those spaces where he locates the ambiguity of nationalism in the emergence of the nation and its narratives, he explains, present “a problem of transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between

2 Los atravesados are, according to Anzaldúa, are the “prohibited and forbidden” inhabitants of the border—“the squinty-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead, in short, those who cross over, pass over, of go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (25).

4 vocabularies,” noting that conditions have an effect “on narratives and discourses that signify a sense of nationness” (307). For Bhabha, the representation of the emerged nation has the potential to erase experiences of subjects othered in ignoring the nation’s precarious emergence. He explains: “Traditional histories do not take the nation at its own word, but, for the most part, they do assume that the problem lies with the interpretation of ‘events’ that have a certain transparency or privileged visibility” (307). El Plan, in determining the kinds of cultural production it would privilege, limited access to narratives that contested the heteronormative imagined nation allowing for normative texts to circulate as definitive depictions of Chicana/o identity, marginalizing those authors and narratives engaging with the transitional realities of the imagined (hetero)sexist nation. Bhabha’s theorizations of nationalism defined by an ambivalence that is not represented by narratives of the emergence of the modern nation stem from Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation and nationalism. Anderson famously defined the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”3 (6). Most notably, he argues, the nation is imagined as a community because “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7). Anderson’s theorization is limited in offering a model of the nation defined as a community despite not because of the unequal and exploitative stratification of the members of the nation. He acknowledges, “If nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ‘historical,’ the nations to which they give political expression loom out of an immemorial past” (11). I would suggest that it’s important to consider that immemorial past as similar to the transitional social reality that, according to Bhabha, characterizes the temporality of the nation. What Anderson does not acknowledge is what maintains the horizontal comradeship that defines the nation as community. The nation does not emerge despite the vertical relationships with one another, but because of them. In the U.S., the legal regulation of hierarchical relationships between people has a history that precedes that of

3 The nation is imagined because no member will know all members despite acknowledging their community membership, limited by virtue of its elastic borders, sovereign in consistency with political ideas post-Enlightenment (Anderson 4-5).

5 the Chicano Movement in the U.S. What Anderson offers is a definition of the authority that citizenship and the labor involved in maintaining it has over how imagine a “new” nation. When El Plan ushers a cohesive vision for the Chicano Movement, it does so by mobilizing people around the vision of a new nation whose modern political infrastructure would establish new means to develop horizontal comradeships. The founding manifesto of the Chicano Movement, in its opposition to U.S. imperial exploitation, presented a plan explicitly employing nationalism as central to community membership. Early Chicano nationalism, through cultural and political interventions, recovered mythological histories as a political strategy, but simultaneously created what Anderson calls an “immemorial past” (11). In the transition from U.S. occupation to revolutionary resistance, the Chicano Movement left certain communities in a politically tenuous position. The hierarchical/vertical relationships between people were designed to uphold nationalist Chicano revolutionary sentiment, much like the stratification of communities in the U.S. uphold ideal notions of national citizenship. El Plan, for instance, explains that what the U.S. considered acts of delinquency, when in favor of the movement, were considered acts of revolution (“El Plan” 3). As part of Aztlán’s self- defense program, El Plan states: “For the young there will no longer be acts of juvenile delinquency, but revolutionary acts” (“El Plan” 3). Delinquency as a revolutionary act, however, had its limits in how it represented and supported the cause of the Movement. From these hierarchical relationships that uphold the nation—the horizontal camaraderie—emerge classes deemed criminal by the U.S. and whose criminal acts were rendered, rather than revolutionary, erasable by the Chicano Movement for failing to support the envisioned emergence of Aztlán. Queer Chicanas and Chicanos, in this cultural context, emerge as a community without membership, without citizenship. Queer Chicana/o Dissent In the influential anthology, This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Chicana Feminists editors Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa set out to collect works that represented the experiences of women of color. In the collection’s introduction, they explain:

6 This Bridge Called My Back intend[s] to reflect what we feel to be the major areas of concern for Third World women in the U.S. in forming a broad-based political movement: 1) how visibility/invisibility as women of color forms our radicalism; 2) the ways in which Third World women derive feminist political theory specifically from our radical/cultural background experience; 3) the destructive and demoralizing effects of racism in the women’s movement; 4) the cultural, class, and sexuality differences that divide women of color; 5) Third World women’s writing as a tool for self-preservation and revolution; and 6) the ways and means of Third World feminist future. (xxiv)

Moraga and Anzaldúa’s early collaboration brings together the emerging tenets of woman of color feminism where queer responses to the Chicano Movement would be rooted. They conclude their introduction stating: “Finally tenemos la esperanza que This Bridge Called My Back will find its way back into our families’ lives,” adding, “The revolution begins at home” (Moraga and Anzaldúa xxvi). In an essay in the collection, “La Güera,” Moraga explains her own relationship with privilege as a fair-skinned Chicana lesbian, famously stating: “lesbianism is a poverty—as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor,” warning her audience against ranking these forms of oppression (Moraga 29). Acknowledging her own privilege to claim her cultural stakes in the Women’s and Chicano movements as a woman of color, she explains that she embodies a Chicana experience rooted in both whiteness and brownness (Moraga 33- 34). In a corresponding essay, “La Prieta,” Anzaldúa explains her personal strategies to make peace with herself and what the world is. She notes: “It has taken me thirty years to unlearn the belief instilled in me that white is better than brown—something that some people of color never will unlearn,” noting that it is easier to inherit racism than to work against it (Anzaldúa 202, original emphasis). In both of their contributions, and in the goals of the collection, Moraga and Anzaldúa begin to articulate a radical queer Chicana vision grounded in the diverse experiences of people with intersectional identities foundational to the emergence of gay Chicano literary and cultural criticism. After the publication of This Bridge, both Anzaldúa and Moraga independently published works that spoke directly to concerns of queer Chicanas, ones that offer brief considerations of queer Chicano men. One of the principal critiques of the Chicano Movement in both Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera and Moraga’s The Last Generation is the roles to which women were relegated within the Chicano Movement.

7 Anzaldúa argues: “For a woman of my culture there used to be only three directions she could turn: to the Church as a nun, to the streets as a prostitute, or to the home as a mother” (Borderlands 39). Moraga describes the role of woman in the movement more directly: “Women were, at most, allowed to serve as modern-day ‘Adelitas,’4 performing the ‘three f’s’…: feeding, fighting, and fucking” (“Queer Aztlán” 157). They both offer early critiques of patriarchy and the sexist implications of a movement centered on nationalist brotherhood upheld by the subjugation of women and queer people. The critique of sexism in the Chicano Movement, in both works, turns briefly to a critique of Chicano gay men. Anzaldúa, more kindly than Moraga, explains: “Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity…but they are confused and entangled with sexist behaviors that they have not been able to eradicate” (Borderlands 106). Despite terming them “a new breed,” she claims: “We need a new masculinity and the new man needs a new movement” (Borderlands 106). Moraga similarly explains: “On some level, our brothers—gay and straight—have got to give up being ‘man’…. Men have to give up their subscription to male superiority” (“Queer Aztlán” 161). Gay Chicano men, specifically, were objects of compounded critiques subject to exclusion in response to their perceived proximity to femininity within the Chicano Movement, being considered too closely aligned with masculinity to contribute to a radical Chicana feminist vision, and criminals by virtue of their sexuality altogether in the majority of U.S. states. Unlike criminal acts committed by young nationalist militants, those committed by Chicanos/as by virtue of being queer and/or performing queerness were not themselves understood as radical by the

4 The term “Adelita” cites the role of women in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). The figure, based according to popular culture on an actual female soldier, was mythologized in the corrido (a folk ballad) titled “La Adelita” where she is described as a popular member of the troops who is both an object soldiers’ desires and desiring of the troop’s sergeant. According to Tabea Alexa Linhard: “Adelita has become a metonym for women’s participation in the Mexican Revolution as well as the symbol of an idealized femininity and even of women’s struggles today. She oscillates between women’s empowerment and women’s oppression, between political agency and subalternity” (91). For a history and analysis of representations of Adelita, see Alicia Arrizón’s “Soldaderas and the Staging of the Mexican Revolution” (The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies 42.1 [1998]: 90-112).

8 movement, frequently relegating queer Chicano men, without any attention of the movement or its radical feminist critique, legally and culturally to a criminal class. One of the objectives of this dissertation is to historicize the position of queer Chicano identity both within legal national narratives and Chicana/o cultural contexts. The briefly outlined historical context demonstrates how gay Chicano men were excluded from both the Chicano Movement and its subsequent queer Chicana critique. Early gay Chicano identity was dismissed by Chicano/a discourses and was only represented within national legal narratives that separately and sometimes simultaneously criminalized their queer and/or migrant identities. Anzaldúa and Moraga’s brief and accusatory critiques consolidate the queer Chicano as one whose representation was almost exclusively designed and written as criminalized by U.S. law. Anzaldúa acknowledgement of gay Chicano writing is limited to describing her first experience reading a Chicano novel, City of Night by gay Chicano John Rechy: “For days I walked around in stunned amazement that a Chicano could write and get published” (Borderlands 81). Moraga, however, more extensively critiques her contemporaries, novelist Arturo Islas and essayist Richard Rodríguez, whose writing, she claimed, begged to announce their “gayness” (“Queer Aztlán” 163). If neither of these writers offered new visions of Chicano masculinity, then they had failed to perform either Chicano nationalism or queer nationalist resistance. Many of them failed to perform a representation worthy of the citizenry’s attention, as evidenced by early reviews of Rechy’s City of Night5 and the troubled publication history of Islas’ The Rain God.6 Their novels, then, work against multiple erasures by operating in cultural opposition to the state’s legal persecution, the Chicano Movement’s rejection of queer masculinity, and the dismissal by early queer Chicana feminist critique. Works by gay Chicano men, since the 1963 publication of Rechy’s pioneering City of Night, have sustained questions of why and how their

5 See Chester, Alfred. “Fruit Salad.” The New York Review of Books 1.2 (1963): 6-7. 6 As Frederick Luis Aldama notes, despite Islas’ revisions to form, use of Spanish, and depictions of queer identity: “Mainstream publishers continued to respond to the manuscript negatively during the late 1970s and 1980s. Many continued to disapprove of its gay content—even in its more whispered form—as well as to its focus on Chicanos who were neither farmworkers nor gangsters” (41).

9 complex marginalization operates in their racial and national communities and narrate the implications of being understood outside of cultural and legal citizenship. Citizenship Rather than speculating as to what possibilities are offered in these texts as alternatives to citizenship, this dissertation seeks to analyze how gay Chicano writers, both early and contemporary, write as subjects whose belonging within a Chicano nationalist context and/or in the U.S. is never fully realized. Community membership often stands as a centerpiece in gay Chicano texts, both those here considered and otherwise. Though these writers don’t conflate the historical denial of membership in Chicano/a communities and the U.S.’s failure to recognize them as fully protected residents or citizens, their relationship between Chicana/o communities and the state are presented as intricately connected. Legal criminalization of queer identities, for instance, consistently merges with how Chicanas/os respond to institutional violence against queer bodies, demonstrating that both groups have been historically invested in the erasure of queer narratives to uphold exclusive notions of U.S. and Chicana/o citizenship. I critically position my analyses of works by gay Chicano writers John Rechy, Arturo Islas, Rigoberto González, and Jaime Cortez in relationship to a notion of the citizen at the intersection of Chicano/a, queer cultural critique, and critical considerations of U.S. legal history. Citizenship, in this dissertation, is the required performance of national belonging, whether to a sovereign or an imagined prospective state, used as a legal and/or cultural benchmark to determine whose membership in a community is sanctioned. Thus, citizenship, as a legal category, is regulated, and being a legal citizen does not itself define one’s performance as a member of a community as acknowledged and sanctioned. One can, in fact, be a legal citizen and be subject to fluctuating degrees of recognition as citizen, as is the case for LGBT and migrant communities in contemporary legal contexts. Such fluctuations in the acknowledgement of one’s citizenship, I argue, are in response to three defining traits of contemporary citizenship: (i) citizenship as a product of nationalism; (ii) citizenships as exclusive, but not mutually exclusive; and (iii) citizenship as regulated and regulating. Citizenship is a product of nationalism because it requires a consensus over who and how one is represented in producing the kind of citizen the citizenry wants to

10 imagine as constituent of the nation. Nationalism, for Anderson, emerges from a collective recognition of cultural artifacts that “command…a profound emotional legitimacy” (4). These recognitions produce artifacts that “became ‘modular,’ capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations” (Anderson 4). In his prescription, nationalism is able to encompass a variety of dissenting modes of understating cultural belonging. While nationalism can reconcile with a constellation of ideas of national belonging, there are certainly some ideologies and identities whose stars might seem too dim to be recognized by nationalism. Early Chicana/o criticism critically considered nationalism a potentially salvageable characteristic of the movement. At the height of Chicana feminist response, for instance, Moraga called for a new nationalism centered on the decolonization of the land and the brown female body explaining: “I cling to the word ‘nation’ because without the specific naming of the nation, the nation will be lost (as when feminism is reduced to humanism, the woman is subsumed). Let us retain our radical naming, but expand it to meet a broader and wiser revolution” (“Queer Aztlán” 159). For her, an attachment to nation is required for a material acknowledgement of the possibility of radical queer feminist Chicana nationalism as an alternative to Chicano nationalism, itself a radical alternative in opposition to U.S. nationalism and government policies. More recently, Chicano critic Richard T. Rodríguez, critiques nationalism as animating performances of Chicano family arguing that, without renouncing nationalism, we must distinguish between subaltern and state-marshaled nationalisms. He contends that we must recognize “the existence of nationalisms that rail against the state” that are often in conversation with state-marshaled nationalisms working “against subaltern forms in the struggle for a hegemonic ‘common sense,’” both of which he argues are organized around similar normative notions of gender and sexuality (7). Within this context, Rodríguez recovers Chicana/o nationalism, arguing: “if minority nationalisms endeavor to liberate their purported constituencies from the subordinating forces of the state, they must relinquish their dependency on exclusionary kinship relations” (7). This expansion of recognition of kinship relations within Chicana/o communities asks subaltern nationalisms to reconsider what performances of citizenship the community sanctions. His critique echoes

11 immigration reform advocacy that asks the U.S. to reconsider the reproductive and marital requirements through which it makes citizenship accessible. A citizen’s nationalism urges him or her to desire representation, which requires a commitment to the category of nation because it is the sanctioned members of the nation, the national and/or nationalist citizenry, who are able to recognize one’s performance as citizen a legitimate performance of national belonging. Citizenship functions as an exclusive category, though a person can possess and perform multiple citizenships that are not mutually exclusive. While, for instance, the “Oath of Allegiance” asks a resident to give up allegiance to any former state, the statement is only symbolic and performative.7 However, like U.S. born citizens allowed to have a second citizenship, a person being naturalized in the U.S. is able to, in many instances, retain citizenship in their country of birth. Transnational critic Aihwa Ong argues that citizenship is “informed by the transnational practices and imaginings of the nomadic subject” whose “very flexibility in geographical and social positioning is itself an effort novel to articulations between the regimes of family, the state, and capital, the kinds of practical-technical adjustments that have implications for our understanding of the late modern subject” (3 original emphasis). While a person can identify as citizen of multiple places and these distinct identifications elicit different performances of national desire and citizenship, these various citizenships coalesce in a singular person responding to legal, cultural, and capital responses to globalization. For Chicana/o communities, one of the responses to the shifting regimes of family, state, and capital was the emergence of citizens of what José David Saldívar terms a “transfrontera contact zone,” a “social space of subaltern encounters, the Janus-faced border line in which peoples geopolitically forced to separate themselves now negotiate with one another and manufacture new relations, hybrid cultures, and multiple-voiced aesthetics” (13-14). Outside of the contexts of national and geographical borders, cultural groups gather around manufactured narratives and traditions, he suggests. Citizenship, or belonging, in these

7The act that confers naturalized citizenship to a person is the “Oath of Allegiance,” which required the prospective citizen to state: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have therefore been a subject or citizen” (“Naturalization Oath”).

12 intra- and inter-national spaces functions through recurring negotiations of inclusions and exclusions that produce their own inclusive limits. Though Saldívar refers to forced separations in relationship to geographic and political demarcations, these violent separations also take place within smaller networks within these contact zones. Some are subject to such forced separations from communities as a consequence of cultural and political insistences on performances of hetero-nationalist Chicano and U.S. community membership. In other words, Chicanos/as can have access to citizenship in various community and legal contexts that all might simultaneously, in assessing what identities are valuable to the nation, disenfranchise queer men of color. Finally, citizenship is regulated and regulating, meaning citizen membership in cultural and legal communities compels a process of citizen selection and the constant surveillance of performances of the self and others that might fail to support the nation. Laws and culturally sanctioned behavioral norms serve as tools to regulate one’s inclusion or exclusion from national groups, among these the legal criminalization of queer and/or migrant identities. The late sociologist Lionel Cantú, Jr. brings them together as a “queer political economy of migration” where “sexuality, as a dimension of power, shapes and organizes processes of migration and modes of incorporation…. Identity is understood, therefore, as a social construct wherein sexual identities of gay migrants assume multiple and shifting meanings informed by structural variables, institutional policies, cultural influences, and the dynamics of migration” (21 original emphasis). Within this framework, the limits of queer people’s access to their recognition as legitimate citizen subjects are mediated by the performances required by economic and cultural shifts. However, these performances of queerness, whether of economic and/or cultural productivity, are subject to erasure when the queer performance has exhausted its utility to the nation. Eithne Luibhéid argues that the policing of queerness at the border and laws that have enabled such practices show that “lesbian and gay exclusion is less the history of a minor group than of self-constituting actions by the powerful who then erase the traces of their own production while stigmatizing and policing others” (ix). Gay Chicano writers, in resisting the compounded dismissal of the Chicano Movement and the U.S. state, feature in their queer protagonists an attention to the threats of erasure consequent of their unsanctioned racialized and queer identities. Citizenship requires the

13 erasure of non-compliance, as evident through detention and deportation in immigration policy or the refusal to extend the right to marry to same-sex couples that fail to perform state-sanctioned heterosexuality. In their claims to the rights of full citizenship and the pathway to naturalization, LGBT and immigration reform advocates have suggested that their corresponding constituencies are presently able to perform all requirements of citizenship. They assert that their sexual and migrant identities should be accepted as appropriate of the citizen subject, ones that are beyond the reach of state regulation because, aside from queer or migrant identities, they are willing to comply with the requirements of citizenship. In other words, contemporary advocacy movements, both social and nationalist, have organized around claiming ability to successfully perform citizenship despite, not because of, a fundamental identity difference. The Delinquent State: Defining Queerness The history of gay Chicano literature presents narratives that are, within their communities, derived from an assumed delinquent state. Culturally and politically, queer Chicanos remained subject to exclusion in domestic spaces and legal criminalization in public and national jurisdictions. Their delinquency did not depend on their actions. Rather, their cultural and political delinquency is a product of a suspicion that emerges from failures to perform nationalist and legally sanctioned masculinity. Neither the Chicano Movement nor the U.S. granted queer Chicanas/os fully authorized membership, producing a context in which, invalidated by the Chicano Movement, their legally criminal identities were rendered culturally delinquent rather than salvaged as revolutionary. Uniquely excluded by cultural nationalist movements and the law, texts about gay Chicano experiences offer a unique representation of the consequences of belonging, of functioning as the sacrificial identity in the quest for rights and nationhood. The separate exclusion of queers of color from same-sex marriage and immigration reform advocacy continues to ask queer Chicano men to speak from a delinquent cultural place, one where their concerns don’t comfortably fit either movement’s quest for the rights or prospect of full citizenship. Gay Chicano writers have, in advance of the Chicano Movement, demonstrated the violation of their rights in their narratives, responding to the different forms of disenfranchisement produced by shifting notions of citizenship in the U.S. Offering accounts that challenge cultural and national notions of

14 citizenship through depictions of legal and fatal consequences of exclusive definitions of nation, gay Chicano cultural production can be understood as a complex representation of the oppressive category of citizen, from the perspectives of men that have not been historically recognized as ever fully culturally or legally so. The assumed delinquent state is a consequence of compounded cultural and legal exclusions centered on the erasure of specific cultural narratives and negation of identities with the intent to ascertain normative cultural and/or legal definitions of citizenship. Delinquency is determined by one’s failure to perform heteronormative citizenship grounded in traditions and artifacts around which the citizenry has imagined the nation. Within the context of national and nationalist exclusion, queer Chicana/o bodies are placed in a delinquent state by their acknowledgement as less-than their assigned sex through their performance of gender. LGBT advocacy groups that uphold assimilatory gay and lesbian narratives of attaining full-citizenship through, despite same-sex attraction, otherwise normative citizen performances, erase the stakes of queer Latinas/os in same-sex marriage national debates. Challenging these compounded exclusions requires a commitment to a queer intervention where “queer as an analytic tool takes on complex meanings that allow for the elucidation of pasts that may not be otherwise visible in a discussion framed as gay and lesbian” (Hames-García and Martínez 2). This dissertation, in its analysis of writers producing queer narratives from an assumed delinquent state, turns toward queerness as a methodology, defining queer as a set of experiences that allow us to see identities otherwise dismissed as byproducts of the emergence of the nation. Queer is, then, an identity that is rendered disposable through intersecting forms of oppression whose narratives and experiences in the transitory space between dissent and citizenship are subject to erasure. Same-sex attraction, in this context, is not always queer. Some narratives of gay identity are privileged over others, making queer narratives subject to erasure through the repeated demand for representations of the aspiring gay citizen. Queerness, at times, does not require same-sex desire. Queerness is a consequence of cultural and institutional erasures that keep us from fulfilling the diversity and fullness of identity expressions. More specifically, queerness is an identity whose history is multiply and violently fractured and at risk of being erased. In this sense, many of the queer narratives by

15 Chicanos emerging from a culturally and legally assumed delinquent state reveal the cultural consequences of citizenship. Queerness, as expressed in the texts discussed in this dissertation, offers an opportunity to look at the representations of past exclusions in imagining how to approximate the fulfillment of national and cultural community by devising ways, as José Esteban Muñoz explains, to “dream and enact new and better pleasures” (1). In this dissertation, I consider what writing by gay Chicanos, from an assumed place of cultural and legal delinquency, explains to us about imagining community in the context of the pleasures of citizenship. If the works of gay Chicano writers reveal a lineage of oppression despite changes in the legal surveillance of queer citizens, it interests us to consider how rights can be made available outside of exclusionary modes of citizenship that subject people to citizenship. This, as a project, requires organizing the nation around the futurity of present political goals that requires reconsidering whether the category of citizen offers the most effective and ethical rubric for the allocation of human rights. The late José Esteban Muñoz asserts, “We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality to think and feel a then and there” (1, original emphasis). Though for him, then represents a futurity, this project, in turning to past literary and legal representations imagined the future of the nation, demonstrates that thinking and feeling a future “then and there” has to be done outside the historical confines of legal citizenship. Muñoz explains, “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer…. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine the future. The future is queerness’s domain” (1). To distill from the past, we must consider what we are distilling, and more specific to this project, if citizenship is worth distilling. The collection of works analyzed in this dissertation imagine and represent the consequence of the category of citizen as an aspirational mode of belonging suggesting citizenship, in part, keeps us from approximating a queer futurity. If advocacy movements suggest that citizenship represents a futurity or the full realization of queerness, we forget that queer citizenship only creates a new set of standards through which citizenship can be newly fulfilled and realized, maintaining what Muñoz describes as a utopic queer futurity at a distance. In this context, the gay Chicano writers whose works I analyze, rather than offering an

16 alternative to citizenship, ask if we can imagine an egalitarian diversity of queer expression while tethered to the selective political category of citizen. Methodology and Chapter Descriptions In the recently published pioneering anthology Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, Editors Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez propose that one of the goals of gay Latino studies, as an emerging field, turns less to maintaining queer texts in critical circulation and more toward piecing together a body of scholarship that reconsiders queer Latino cultural work. More eloquently, they explain the anthology “advocates less in support of ‘not forgetting’ gay Latinos and more in support of actively ‘re-membering’” (3). They define ‘re-membering’ as an acknowledgement of “a coalitional body that has been dis-membered by a history of ideological violence. In actively resisting that history of violence we are able not only to remember a history of conflict and coalition but also to re-member possibilities for collaboration in the present” (4). They insist: “Re-membering gay Latinos, then, is not an act of nostalgic recovery. Instead, it is a practice of piecing together and repopulating that which some would argue has never been” (4 original emphasis). To re-member, or to reconstruct and work against the compounded erasure of gay Latino experiences, requires the re-vision of critical and cultural relationships that have also been assumed to have never existed. In this dissertation I seek to re-member the relationship between citizenship as a category of nationalist and national belonging and work and experiences of queer Chicano men. In selecting the authors and texts for this dissertation, I considered iconic works by gay Chicano men, such as John Rechy’s City of Night and Arturo Islas’ The Rain God, and current queer representations of contemporary and historical migrant narratives such as Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines and Jaime Cortez’s Sexile. Though not exhaustive, failing to include works by Michael Nava, Manuel Muñoz, Alex Espinoza, Ricardo Abreu Bracho, Carlos Manuel, Richard Rodriguez, and the late poets Gil Cuadros and Francisco X. Alarcón, this dissertation offers an in-depth consideration of gay Chicano literature. The dissertation elaborates on the important contributions in gay Latino and/or multiethnic literary study such as the pioneering work of Juan Bruce- Novoa, Tomás Almaguer, José Esteban Muñoz, Lionel Cantú, Jr., David William Foster, Frederick Luis Aldama, as well as more recent work by Richard T. Rodríguez, Michael

17 Hames-García, Ernesto Javier Martínez, and Juana María Rodríguez.8 I selected texts that expressed a concern for the legal constructions of identity at the time of their publication, focusing on major shifts in the regulation of queer and/or migrant identity. The cultural scope and focus of the dissertation is grounded in an analysis of literary representations of queer Chicano experiences within a historical context in which definitions of citizenship are legally contested. Bringing together, or re-membering, the relationship between cultural and legal citizenship in the context of racialized queer identity allows me to understand these writers as speaking against compounded erasures from an assumed delinquent state. My dissertation brings together queer and Chicana/o criticism and turns to legal statutes regulating or contesting citizenship as analytic tools, allowing for an analysis of works by gay Chicano writers in critical contexts where the legal regulation of queer and migrant identities serve as a heuristic for critical and cultural analysis. In the first chapter, “Public Sex, Private Citizenship: Bowers v. Hardwick and the Queer Citizen in John Rechy’s City of Night,” I argue that that in regulating same-sex desire through the criminalization of sodomy, the state rendered privacy a right exclusive to heteronormative citizens, making queer citizens perpetually public subjects. I open the chapter by introducing a legal relationship between the historical setting of Rechy’s novel and the existing regulation of queer identity, primarily through anti-sodomy laws, whose constitutionality was first nationally considered by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986 in the landmark case Bowers v. Hardwick. In an analysis of the case, I demonstrate that the definition of citizenship that upholds anti-sodomy statues as legal requires a heteronormative performance to secure the acknowledgement one’s right to privacy,

8 See, for example, Bruce-Novoa, “Homosexuality and the Chicano Novel”; Almaguer, “Looking for Papi: Longing and Desire among Chicano Gay Men” and “Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior”; Muñoz, “Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity; Cantú, The Sexuality of Migration; Foster, El Ambiente Nuestro: Chicano/Latino Homoerotic Writing; Frederick Luis Aldama, Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality and Ethnicity; R. T. Rodríguez, Next of Kin: The Family in Chicana/o Cultural Politics; Hames-García and Martínez edited collection Gay Latino Studies: A Reader; Martínez, On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility; and J. M. Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces.

18 implied in the majority decision a right exclusive of the full citizen. I then use privacy as a framework to determine how the protagonist in City of Night, a journey through the queer underground scenes of the largest cities of the U.S. in a time when queerness was so heavily regulated by the law, complexly tries to understand himself and queer communities across the country as members of the U.S. citizenry. In the novel, I argue that hustlers, drag queens, and bar owners, in an attempt to secure privacy to form informal networks of citizenship for queer communities, fail to secure a permanent private status because of their position outside of normative citizenship models. Though the protagonist and characters he encounters repeatedly attempt to develop community in private and away from the public criminalization of their identities, their queerness as publicly defined by the law makes their private acts a public interest. Rendering their identities perpetually public, I argue, makes citizenship an impossibility for queer people, particularly for communities of color. As I demonstrate in my analysis of the novel, when privacy is attached to the performance of citizenship, any performance of privacy is never quite private outside of the successful performance of heteronormative nationalist citizenship. The second chapter, “‘Not in the Clinical Sense,’ in a Legal Sense: The Ambiguous Queer Citizen in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service and Arturo Islas’ The Rain God,” considers how the law was exercised against queer people to uphold their exclusion from the citizenry through immigration control measures. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court sustained the exclusion of queer migrants by legally upholding their definition as “psychopathic personalities” in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The petitioner in the case, Michael Boutilier, was ruled against for acts that anticipated his legal migration to the U.S. In that context, I argue citizenship does not simply compel a regulation of present performances of heteronormativity, but was deployed to retroactively regulate identifiable past performances of queerness. In this context, citizenship does not just require a current performance of heterosexuality, but more expansively that those who are not-yet-citizen perform heterosexuality as a sign of prospective citizenship. As I explain, this is historically evident in the institutions, medical examinations, and legal processes that emerged to police the migration of people who did not successfully perform prospective citizenship. In Arturo Islas’ The Rain God,

19 which traces the experiences of various generations of a family in the imaginary town on the Texas-Mexico border, the author problematically restages the process of granting migrant workers access to citizenship through invasive medical examinations that simultaneously make them ineligible for membership in the nation based on their sometimes sexual nature. My analysis of the novel shows how the law’s retrospective regulation of citizenship through the criminalization of queerness ensures acts of violence against one of the queer characters in the novel are ignored, undoing the citizen queer subject to erase queer histories with the purpose of retroactively asserting citizenship as heteronormative. In “Queer(ing) Migrants: Documenting Queer Border-Crossings in Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines,” the third chapter, I turn to a more contemporary novel that narrates the experiences of migrant vineyard workers. Crossing Vines, I argue, features queer characters that collectively display a concern for how to represent their sexual and gendered identifications. By looking at the ways in which the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 19869 and the contemporary controversial migrant surveillance measures ushered by Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 in 2010 are in dialogue through similar modes of regulating citizenship. Through an analysis of the opportunities and limits offered to queer characters by their representations in official and unofficial documentation, I show that documents, like green cards and naturalization certificates, compel performances of normative citizenship and heightened surveillance that intend to reveal what individuals and communities fail to successfully perform state-sanction citizen identities. My critical intervention is not interested in showing how these laws effect performances as much as it is concerned with how cultural regulations of identity compel similar performances and how failures to comply with documented identities are scrutinized in both cultural and legal settings. The chapter focuses on the performances of queer identity of a middle class Mexican migrant working in the fields and a former drag performer and how they are accounted for in cultural and institutional records. Crossing Vines, I conclude,

9 The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 is the most recent successful comprehensive effort to redefine how to identify prospective migrants and measures through which government agencies would then document their legal residence status.

20 represents the compounded erasures queer migrants are subject to in contemporary debates on queerness and migration. In the fourth and final chapter, “Out of the Shadows: Outing and the Institutionalized Erasure of Queer Migrant Narratives in Jaime Cortez’s Sexile,” I consider the cross-national interest in the presentation of migration through a graphic novel that, written by a gay Chicano, illustrates the biography of Adela Vazquez, a transgender Cuban migrant, activist, and performance artist. In the chapter, I argue that the documentation of citizenship domestically and the prospect of documenting it abroad as a standard through which legal documented migration is regulated demands a recurring process of “coming out” for queer migrants. I first discuss institutional appropriations of the coming out narrative in President Barack Obama’s announcement of his most recent executive order on immigration. I argue the executive order strips the metaphor of its queer referent to render the vexed history of immigration and queerness invisible in future attempts to legislate migration. I then analyze the historical context in which the U.S. sanctioned the entry of refugees aboard Mariel, Cuban migrants that left the Island when the U.S. briefly opened its borders to Cubans during the 1980s, to consider how the U.S. understood prospective membership in authorizing this specific instance of mass migration. I conclude by arguing that citizenship is a naturalizing category that compels repeated performances of normative identities in order to enjoy the fullness of authorized rights. From her birth to her current narration of her experiences in the graphic novel, Vazquez’s illustrated story demonstrates the ways in which citizenship insists on naturalized performances of identity to erase the violent ways in which failures to perform normative citizenship are criminalized. Through the analysis of queer Chicano texts in the context of the U.S. legislation of migration and queerness, I demonstrate that citizenship and the category of citizen require an exclusionary imagination of the future exclusionary nation that ignores the violent erasure of identities that constitute and uphold it. In this dissertation, I suggest that citizenship is farsighted insofar as it imagines an exclusionary future, but nearsighted in how it selects who constitutes and/or will be acknowledged as included in nationalist and national communities. It compels an interest in present consequence, attempting to erase personal and narrative experiences of current and future unsanctioned queer and

21 racialized identities, as LGBT and immigration reform advocates demonstrate in their respective aspirations to full and/or prospective citizenship. However, citizenship is hind- sighted by design, so to speak. While it doesn’t look back at those excluded as a means to imagine the future nation, it does acknowledge them to dismiss them in the effort to retain current normative notions of national belonging. Citizenship, as a category through which one claims rights, I argue, cannot offer minoritized communities an egalitarian promise. Gay Chicano writers, in their texts, demonstrate that a closer place to queer futurity lies beyond citizenship, which I suggest is the future challenge of rights-based advocacy and scholarship.

22 CHAPTER ONE

Public Sex, Private Citizenship: Bowers v. Hardwick and the Queer Citizen in John Rechy’s City of Night

Though the publication of John Rechy’s first novel, City of Night, anticipates the 1969 Stonewall Riots, often considered the starting point of the contemporary LGBT civil rights movement in the U.S.,10 the author has nonetheless been heralded as a pioneer of contemporary gay fiction. Similarly, published in 1963, the novel predates the emergence of the Chicano Movement in the late 1960s, however his critical recognition as an influential early Chicano writer has faced a more complex trajectory. In one of the earliest critical considerations of queer identity in Chicano literature, Juan Bruce-Novoa acknowledges City of Night’s importance, explaining that while the narrator explicitly notes his Mexican heritage, “At a moment when group identity took precedence in the political Movement, literature was expected to address openly the same concerns. If it did not, it was dismissed as irrelevant, or worse, non-Chicano” (70). The novel offers an exhaustive exploration of queer networks in cities across the U.S. in the mid 20th century that, while now deemed influential, was originally critiqued for, as Bruce-Novoa suggests, addressing concerns extraneous to the early Chicano Movement focused on labor reform through nationalist notions of brotherhood. In an interview with Rechy, Debra Castillo demonstrates the shifting opinions on Rechy’s work in the academy, asking the author about the impact of the emergence of queer theory on gay literature and the disciplinary contexts in which his work is studied more broadly (114). Rechy responds: “At one time I refused to use the word ‘gay”… [I]t made us sound like ‘bliss nellies.’... For years I continued to say ‘homosexual,’ not agreeing that an emphasis on sexual persuasion was all that bad, especially when it was that persuasion that branded us. Now I don’t hesitate to use the word ‘gay,’ although it’s a word I still dislike,” later noting he has a similar relationship to the term “Chicano”11

10 Recently, events predating Stonewall have received more critical attention, particularly the 1966 riot in San Francisco, the subject of Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, written and directed by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman (2005). 11 Rechy explains: “‘Chicano’ is another word I use but have difficulty with because in my childhood it was a term ‘Mexicans’—that’s what we called ourselves—used to demean other Mexicans, a class distinction” (Castillo and Rechy 114).

23 (114). Despite his ambivalence about the term ‘gay,’ Rechy considers his work that of a Chicano writer, at one point during the interview emphatically noting that City of Night’s “protagonist, dammit, is Chicano” (118). More recent scholarship directly addresses Rechy’s narratives as part of a queer and Chicano canon, though these considerations remain entrenched in considering why his early work bypassed representations of ethnicity to privilege depictions of queer urban experiences.12 However, critical interventions on how such depictions have been and continue to be relevant to Chicano/a culture remain scarce. In a 1984 reprint of City of Night, Rechy describes the reception of the characters and stories that would later make up his novel: “it seemed that not only my story but their lives and mine among them had been rejected: exiled exiles” (vii). Roughly fifty years after its original publication, City of Night remains in exile from critical conversation of queer Chicano identity. In this chapter, I reconsider City of Night’s contributions to Chicano/a culture through a framework that shifts the site of cultural analysis from a justification of Rechy’s representation of queer identities within a Chicano/a literary and cultural context to one that considers the legal scrutiny of queer people, specifically sodomy laws in effect at the time of the novel’s publication. This shift allows for a recuperation of Rechy’s pioneering work by reading him not only as a queer author, but also as one whose interest in the legislation of queer belonging offers contributions to contemporary notions of citizenship relevant to Chicano/a culture. Published in 1963, it is impossible to frame, as most critics do, the study of the novel within the context of the Chicano Movement that, since its origins in 1969, obfuscated the place of queer voices within

12 Karen Christian, for instance, suggests: “When Rechy’s first novel is read as a bildungsroman, it is not surprising that the narrator’s ‘search for self’ involves rejection of his ethnicity. He leaves his troubled family life in El Paso in the hope of remaking himself; this process involves an erasure of his past, including his cultural heritage” (44). Ricardo Ortiz reads City of Night as a text that struggles to represent a character’s reconciliation with being out as queer and of color, deeming the novel one that works “more often against than with itself in the construction of a subject at once libidinally and ideologically ‘free’” (113). Other recent works include considerations by Rafael Pérez- Torres and Jennifer Moon, whose consideration leans more heavily toward an analysis of Rechy as a queer writer.

24 Chicano/a communities despite queer people’s active participation in the movement.13 Ignored by the movement that responded to the state’s oppression of Chicano/a communities, queer people—gay men specifically—were only publicly represented by legislation that targeted their identities through statutes that criminalized sodomy. In this cultural context, I propose that Rechy’s City of Night sets into motion a gay Chicano literary tradition that, rather than situating queer communities as dissenting voices in a dissident social movement, is invested in resisting the ways in which the state, being one of the few entities willing to represent them altogether, imagined queer identities as criminal by insisting on limiting their access to citizenship as it legally crafted models of heterosexual national identity. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court, narrowly understanding the case as only applicable to sodomy acts between two consenting gay people, ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick to uphold the legality of existing anti-sodomy laws across the country. Michael Hardwick, placed under police custody after being found practicing consensual mutual oral sex by an officer who entered his apartment with a recalled arrest warrant, sued Georgia’s Attorney General, Michael Bowers, arguing that despite the original dismissal of his case, his private conduct remained liable for prosecution as a sexually active gay man. As defined by the state’s law, “A person commits the offense of sodomy when he performs or submits to any sexual act involving the sex organ of one person and the mouth or anus of another” (Bowers 201).14 While the statute aimed to criminalize acts of sodomy involving men, it did not restrict the offense only to those who identified as gay, in theory uniformly penalizing both queer and heterosexual anal and oral sex. The case came before the Supreme Court following the state of Georgia’s appeal to a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit that ruled the state’s sodomy law

13 This is not to say that queer people were not part of the Chicano Movement. As Maylei Blackwell suggests in ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement, the exclusionary rhetoric that ignored concerns of women also galvanized them to work against the disparity between the movement’s egalitarian mission and their marginalization within it. Similarly, early critiques of the movement by gay participants in the movement emerged, most notably works by gay Chicano writer Arturo Islas whose works, as I discuss in the following chapter, depict identity erasures through which the movement constituted its own notion of nationalist belonging. 14 Georgia Code Ann. 16-6-2 (1984)

25 unconstitutional. According to the majority decision, presented by Justice Byron White, the Appeals Court “went on to hold that the Georgia statute violated respondent’s [Hardwick’s] fundamental rights because his homosexual activity is a private and intimate association that is beyond the reach of state regulation by reason of the Ninth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the fourteenth Amendment” (190). Though arguably vague, Hardwick’s claim challenged the Georgia statute to seek the legal protection of the private sexual practices of two consenting adults against the reach of state law. The questions before the Court, then, centered on the constitutionality of the right to privacy, not on the legality of a citizen’s queer identity or sexual practices. The decidedly conservative Court, however, approached the case differently, interpreting Hardwick’s claim as an appeal to the constitutional right of queer people to practice sodomy. In a departure from the Appeal’s Court assessment of the case, the Supreme Court narrowed the question from a claim to the right to privacy to one of the right of gay citizens to engage in sodomy. The majority decision states: “The issue presented is whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy and hence invalidates the laws of many States that still make such conduct illegal and have done for a very long time” (191). Rather than ruling on whether the restrictive state law infringed upon citizens’ right to make decisions about private consensual sexual practices regardless of whether the case involved same-sex or heterosexual couples, the Court set out to formulate a definition of privacy articulated through a consideration of tradition and history. In other words, by virtue of representing sodomy laws as long-standing, the statute’s breech of a citizen’s right to privacy was presented as historically permissible. While Georgia’s statute does not discern between homosexuality and heterosexuality in criminalizing sodomy, the Court placed the burden of the law exclusively on intimate acts between men. In omitting the application of the law to the sexual conduct of heterosexual sex partners, the Court suggested that the privacy afforded to such couples to engage in acts of sodomy is available only to citizens engaging in relationships traditionally sanctioned by the state. The Court, then, did not consider the actual sexual practices forbidden by the state, but instead presented sodomy as a signifier of queerness granting the Supreme Court the authority to determine whether or not the state has an unlimited jurisdiction over the regulation of queerness as a non-

26 traditional sexual identity. The decision to uphold the Georgia statute, consequently, federally sanctioned laws that mark queer people as antithetical to a heterosexual tradition worth preserving by restricting their access to privacy.15 Few authors before Rechy explored the interstices of public and private queer life in the American urban landscape. Rechy’s bestselling debut novel introduced U.S. readers to queer subcultures rarely featured in mainstream contemporary publications, surprisingly becoming a bestseller despite early critics’ unfavorable reception. In his review, Alfred Chester describes City of Night as “concerned with those lives lived out darkly in what is nowadays called The Homosexual Underground, though never before has it been so much on the surface…. a blow by blow account, so to speak, of where to go for what you want (assuming of course you want it)—a kind of ‘Sodom on Five Dollars a Day’” (6). Though Chester goes on to call Rechy’s narrative an “awful” exploration of tired queer tropes, his description defines one of the novel’s primary contributions to queer writing: a depiction of public sites of queer expression nestled in some of the largest urban landscapes in the U.S. (6). Traveling through various cities, the novel’s anonymous Mexican-American protagonist embeds himself in communities of hustlers and drag queens where he learns of public practices devised to protect people from existing homophobic statues that persecute queer individuals by indicting sodomy as a criminal sexual practice. At the time of the novel’s publication, virtually all states in the U.S. criminalized consensual sodomy, many of them with no regard to whether the act took place in private or public, much like Georgia’s own statute.16 Rechy’s novel, in this context, offers a fruitful intervention that makes visible criminalized identities in

15 It is important to note that given the scope of the Court’s decision, sodomy and queerness were equated strictly in the context of the case. Queer people were also subject to legal prosecution on grounds of “masquerading” or allegedly wearing clothing, for instance, in a purposeful attempt to pass as the opposite sex. In the novel, Rechy presents tangential references to a preoccupation with simulating compliance with the law. In a description of Hodge Podge, a bar in Los Angeles, the narrator notes: “This is not a queer bar—it is an outcast bar…. On the dancefloor, too, lesbians—the masculine ones, the bull-dykes—dance with hugely effeminate queens, the roles of course reversed but technically legal” (171). In another instance, while at bar named The Carnival, also in California, the narrator notes: “a line of six young males dances the Madison: without touching—making it legal” (231). 16 In 1962, Illinois became the first to lift criminal penalties for consensual same-sex acts, but continued to criminalize the their solicitation.

27 practice through depictions of queer communities developing semblances of privacy in public contexts despite the state’s legal scrutiny over two decades before the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick. If the Supreme Court, in Bowers, ruled to produce a national category of the heterosexual citizen defined in opposition to a definition of queerness strictly tied to the criminalization of sodomy, City of Night weaves together a variety of representations of queer experiences to imagine the opposite—a queer citizen. The novel functions as the protagonist’s experimental journey through which the possibility or impossibility of citizenship is explored in relationship to state laws that, after Bowers, emerge as both national policy and a federal definition of queerness. I will argue that, despite the existence of sodomy laws at the time of City of Night’s publication, Rechy illustrates queer communities devising strategies to restage familial, marital, and reproductive traditions to understand themselves as citizens capable of producing private spaces to protect themselves from legal prosecution. I will demonstrate that Rechy imagines queer characters as capable of reproducing networks of privacy in public spaces in ways not afforded to them by the state in order to access a citizen’s authority to contest existing heteronormative legal practices. In this sense, queer people become the other through which Bowers conceived of a national heterosexual identity. Bowers narrowly defined citizenship as contingent on access to privacy, a right only available to those assumed to participate in traditional familial, marital, and reproductive relationships. In such contexts, the pursuit of privacy in City of Night offers queer characters merely a semblance of privacy and, consequently, only the veiled impression of the rights of citizen. Together, the legal case and the novel demonstrate that citizenship does not precede privacy. Rather, privacy is a right through which the state regulates access to full citizenship. Institutionalized Heterosexuality: National Heterosexuality, Citizenship, and Privacy As the first federal case addressing queerness as tied to sexual practices, Bowers v. Hardwick presents a legal question the Supreme Court regards one of privacy to determine whether the full rights of citizenship should be extended to queer communities. Following a description of the history of the case, White’s majority opinion delineates the

28 Court’s stance arguing: “This case does not require a judgment on whether laws against sodomy between consenting adults in general, or between homosexual partners in particular, are wise or desirable” (191). However, in the eyes of the Court, it did require a ruling on whether sexual activity between same-sex partners is constitutional. The Appeals Court ruled by citing precedent cases on social issues decided through appeals to the citizen’s right to privacy: child rearing and education, family relationships, procreation, marriage, contraception and abortion.17 Unlike the lower court, the Supreme Court argued the cited cases did not, together, produce a constitutionally protected notion of privacy, but instead articulated conditions upon which privacy was legally accessible. White discredits the applicability of the aforementioned cases to Bowers by stating: “No connection between family, marriage, or procreation on the one hand and homosexual activity in the other has been demonstrated either by the Court of Appeals or by the respondent” (192). In this instance, White delivers an opinion centered on the subject of the case rather than on ruling precedent on the right to privacy. As discussed in Bowers, privacy is denied to queer people by proposing that as subjects alien to traditional notions of family, marriage, and procreation, same-sex partners present a different legal question—whether queer people in the U.S. can be folded into traditional notions of citizenship intrinsically tied to family-centered sexual practices. White continues: “[A]ny claim that these cases nevertheless stand for the proscription that any kind of private sexual conduct between consenting adults is constitutionally insulated from state proscription is unsupportable” (192). In rejecting the Appellate Court’s decision based on privacy by virtue of Hardwick’s sexual orientation, the Supreme Court suggested that it is queer people’s failure to comply with sanctioned heterosexual social and sexual performances that render their claims to the right to privacy legally questionable. In doing so, the Court’s approach to Bowers simultaneously defined the full rights of citizenship as exclusive to those individuals protected by the Constitution and queer people as unprotected by U.S. law. In other words, the Constitution, as interpreted by the Court, can only be contested by the heterosexual subjects it protects, rendering queer people unable

17 Carey v. Population Services International, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, and Meyer v. Nebraska; Prince v. Massachusetts; Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson; Loving v. Virginia; and Griswold v. Connecticut, Eisenstadt v. Baird, and Roe v. Wade respectively.

29 to challenge the law and therefore exclusively subject to it. The majority decision makes clear that the state has the authority to selectively afford people a right, such as privacy, in relationship to specific forms of heteronormative compliance, particularly ones that are assumed to comfortably support the state’s interests in family, marriage, and reproduction that reinforce models of national heterosexuality. The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the constitutionality of anti-sodomy laws relied heavily on defining a fundamental right in relationship to sodomy, not privacy. Legal critic David A. J. Richards argues that one of the ways White distanced himself from engaging with a citizen’s right to privacy was through his definition of what constitutes a basic right. According to Richards, “We can see that White’s quarry really was constitutional privacy itself when we consider two arguments he offered for identifying basic rights: namely, those so implicit in ordered liberty that justice could not exist if they were sacrificed, and those deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions” (93). In the right-leaning majority opinion, White cites Palko v. Connecticut, centered on the relationship of the Fifth Amendment in cases of double jeopardy, to ask whether policing consensual sodomy as a practice between same-sex partners, not queerness as an identity, challenges ordered liberty and disavows justice, or whether sodomy itself can be understood legally as rooted in national tradition. The Court, in this instance, didn’t only purposefully misconstrue the case’s claims by refusing to reassess privacy as a fundamental right in the context of legal precedent, but further used an unrelated definition of a basic right to mark sodomy and queerness as a challenge to the order of liberty and justice. White, then, carefully separates sodomy from tradition and implicitly extends citizens the right to determine whether queerness is more closely aligned with sodomy or tradition. In separating heterosexuality from sodomy as a practice, the opinion presents queerness in closer imagined proximity to the sexual practice, something the Court suggests is removed from a national sense of order, justice, and tradition. Queer theorist Michael Warner asserts: “The act—a kind of sex that gay or straight or bi or other people could really perform—became an identity. In a dizzying series of logical moves, the Court ruled that Georgia could ban the sexual practice because of its connection to a despised identity,” though I contend that the Court argues that Georgia could ban sodomy

30 by legally describing it as an assault on tradition more broadly (Trouble, 30). White’s majority decision strategically invokes abstract notions of tradition that allow the ruling to represent sodomy and homosexuality as independently un-American and also the same. Based on Palko’s definition of a basic right, White explains: “respondent would have us announce, as the Court of Appeals did, a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy. This we are quite unwilling to do…. To claim that the right to engage in such conduct is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious” (187). The Court hesitates to link queerness directly to ‘such conduct’ because tying sodomy to queerness would tie the legality of a sexual identity to a sex act accessible to heterosexual people. If the Court presents sodomy and queer identities as independently antithetical to tradition, the future legalization of sodomy can be seen as separate from the decriminalization of queer identities, allowing the state to continue to legally imagine them as threatening to national heterosexuality regardless of the legal status of sodomy.18 White ensures that, in setting a precedent that determines inclusion as decided on the proximity of one’s identity and sexual practices to tradition, a model of national inclusion that legalizes sodomy can still circumvent the full inclusion of queer people into its citizenry. Though the Supreme Court presented both sodomy and queerness as challenges to tradition, the majority decision relates queerness to a violation of morality while reading sodomy as countering a traditional sense of order and justice. After defining a fundamental right and mocking a queer citizen’s access to privacy by asking whether oral or anal sex comply with his definition of ‘fundamental,’ White explains: “Plainly enough, otherwise illegal conduct is not always immunized whenever it occurs in the home,” further clarifying the limits of the case by stating: “it would be difficult, except by fiat, to limit the claimed right to homosexual conduct…while leaving exposed to prosecution adultery, incest, and other sexual crimes even though they are committed in the home. We are unwilling to start down that road” (196-97). If a fundamental right is determined based on how it stabilizes national order and a definition of justice, the Court’s

18 Though the Supreme Court decriminalized sodomy at the federal level in Hardwick v. Texas (2003), protection in the workplace for queer people, for instance, continue to be in effect to this day in various states in the U.S.

31 classification of homosexuality as a sex crime functions as a plea to understand queer communities as criminal outside of the context of sodomy. While sodomy was deemed a right not fundamental to the citizen, homosexual behavior was folded into a category of sex acts that violate traditional notions of marriage and family. Unlike adultery and incest, queerness presents the possibility, at the time Bowers is contested, of an identity that is developed outside of the structure of marriage and potential traditional reproduction between heterosexual couples. Incest and adultery, on the other hand, are presented by White as a challenge to traditional American morality within the normative structures of marriage and family. Though he seems to simply seek to criminalize queer identities in opposition to a monogamous sexual morality, his statement more specifically demonstrates that a traditional sexual identity is not inherently safe from perversion. The Court suggests that if there are traditional marriages and/or families, their integrity is defiled by criminal sexual practices that require policing to be kept from invading and destabilizing what offers order to the nation, namely heterosexuality. In this sense, White proposes that if homosexual conduct is to be kept outside of the marital and familial values that undergird national order, queerness must then be regulated publicly. Though the Constitution offers citizenship to all born within the borders of the U.S. and those born to subjects already citizen by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment, and an avenue to it through the process of naturalization, the category of citizen is not without restrictions. Naturalized citizenship, for instance, can be revoked in instances of treason or dishonorable military discharge, among other rare circumstances. However, as Mae M. Ngai notes, citizenship can also be restricted on the basis of one’s minoritized identity, making one what she terms an “alien citizen” (2521). Ngai argues: “The Alien citizen is an American citizen by virtue of her birth in the United States but whose citizenship is suspect, if not denied, on account of the racialized identity of her immigrant ancestry…. Alienage then becomes a permanent condition, passed from generation to generation, adhering even to the native-born citizen” (2521). Racism, she argues, undergirds alien citizenship, a legal category that “creates a problem of misrecognition for the citizen” (Ngai 2521). As a consequence of such misrecognition, “alien citizenship involves the nullification of the rights of citizenship—from the right to be territorially present to the range of civil rights and liberties—without the revocation of citizenship

32 status” (Ngai 2522). Within this construction, elements of the racialization of citizen subjects are understood as legally unassimilable. That is, the racialized identity of a person is not open to a legal corrective. The decision and dissent in Bowers describe a legal construction of queerness as a condition for which the law can function as a corrective intervention that offers incentives to perform sanctioned heterosexual identity. Hardwick’s original claim to privacy in the lawsuit, in being dismissed in favor of his constitutional right to engage in acts of sodomy, demonstrates that the Court understood his behavior as alterable and that his alien citizenship is contingent on the opposite gender of his sex partner. The right withdrawn from the queer citizen, in this case, is privacy. In the dissenting opinion, authored by Justice Harry Blackmun, privacy is defined as a person’s “‘right to be let alone’” (200).19 More specifically, Hardwick’s defense claimed the right to privacy insofar as it regarded sodomy in the context of consenting same-sex partners. Hardwick’s legal claim presents privacy as more than just the right to be left alone, more importantly placing queerness outside of the regulations that disqualify a person from being recognized publicly as law-abiding. In this context, queerness would be legally considered as not only unalterable, but furthermore irrelevant to how and where he is considered citizen. Privacy for minoritized communities, then, can be understood as the ability to access spaces where one can perform one’s identities freely outside of the view of public and the purview of state surveillance in ways afforded to one’s normative counterparts. Privacy is, therefore, a claim for an egalitarian legal possibility where one’s marginalized identity does not have a bearing on the intrusive interventions of the state and citizenry, where one’s acts, such as sodomy, are equally averted by state sanctions as they are for those whose citizenship is not alien. In referencing tradition and morality as a means to continue to criminalize sodomy and queerness, the Supreme Court took the opportunity to define a model citizen in opposition to queer people and undesirable sexual practices through what legal theorist Martha Nussbaum terms “projective disgust” (15). When the Court categorizes queer conduct as a sex crime, it does not suggest that heterosexual partners do not engage in anal or oral sex. It does, however, imagine queer people as the bearers of sexual practices

19 The dissent cites Justice Louis Brandeis’s dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928) to describe privacy.

33 that, if present in the heterosexual conjugal setting, only serve as evidence against an under-scrutinized threat to tradition and morality—a source of disgust. According to Nussbaum, disgust can be “extended from object to object in ways that could hardly bear rational scrutiny” by relying on “a double fantasy: a fantasy of the dirtiness of the other and a fantasy of one’s own purity. Both sides of the projection involve a false belief, and both conduce to a politics of hierarchy” (15, 17). In such a context, the Court invokes the fantasy of a pure traditional and moral national sexuality by fantasizing the dirtiness of sodomy and communities that are imagined to have relationships exclusively through it. Rather than imagining the heterosexual citizen as pure, the Court suggests that tradition and morality are threatened by sodomy in both same-sex and heterosexual contexts. However, while according to the Court’s perspective queer people can only have access to sex through sodomy, heterosexual citizens have the opportunity to have sanctioned sex and can chose to defend it by refraining from and vigilantly prosecuting sodomy. The model citizen, then, seeks to access the purity of traditional citizenship through moral sexual practices, a task unavailable to queer individuals already labeled by the law as people whose sex is always exercised through sodomy. According to Warner, “The nostalgic family-values covenant of contemporary American politics stipulates a privatization of citizenship and sex” that “organize[s] a hegemonic national public around sex. But because this sex public officially claims to act only in order to protect the zone of heterosexual privacy, the institutions of economic privilege and social reproduction informing its practices and organizing its ideal world are protected by the spectacular demonization of represented sex” (Publics 190-191). In other words, projective disgust is used by the Court to organize citizens around the pursuit of tradition and morality by portraying sodomy and queerness as criminal acts and identities respectively. The privatization of citizenship allows citizens who comply with a performance of traditional heterosexuality access to forms of privacy that use queer people as the public’s objects of disgust. In other words, the surveillance of sexual practices identified by the law as non- traditional demonstrates to heterosexual partners precisely what sexual practices they should feel free to engage in freely outside of the state’s vigilant eye. The public criminalization of queer identities distracts citizens from recognizing the purity of

34 tradition as a fantasy, understanding them as dissenting from a model of national heterosexuality, consequently rendering queer people more broadly as non-citizen. In the dissent to the Court’s majority decision, Blackmun defines privacy as the most fundamental of rights and argues that the outcome of the case threatens the rights of consenting adults to make decisions about their sexual practices. Blackmun explains that the “case is about ‘the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men,’” which he identifies as privacy (200).20 For him, the matter at hand is not whether homosexual sodomy is a constitutional right. Rather, Blackmun assesses the case as independent from queerness altogether. He explains: “Michael Hardwick’s standing may rest…on Georgia’s apparent willingness to enforce against homosexuals a law it seems not to have any desire to enforce against heterosexuals” further stating that the case “involves an unconstitutional intrusion into the privacy and his right of intimate association does not depend on any way on his sexual orientation” (202). In his dissent, Blackmun clarifies that the case, being decided on the legality of homosexual sodomy, unnecessarily justifies an increased surveillance of sexual practices and identities that defy traditional familial or marital models. In his assessment of the case, Richards argues that Blackmun’s dissent shows that White’s opinion “—by accepting constitutional privacy in the full range of its heterosexual applications and…refusing any homosexual applications—was itself the cultural agent of contemporary, modernist homophobia, seeing any evil in nonprocreational sex only in its homosexual forms” (100). As Warner would suggest, the Court defines the sexual practice it wants to represent—homosexual sodomy—and demonizes it to validate the familial, marital, and procreative traditions that grant one access to privacy. Hardwick’s sexuality, as Blackmun states, has no bearing on whether citizens have the right to privacy and centering the majority decision on it only allows the Court to extend the responsibility of safeguarding sanctioned sexual practices to individual states. The law, then, limits access to privacy to sexual partners whose relationships are potentially reproductive while making it unavailable to queer communities by federally portraying the institutionalized surveillance of queer people’s most personal matters as necessary to the order of the heterosexual nation.

20 Blackmun, in his dissent, cites Justice Louis Brandeis’ dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928) to describe privacy.

35 Blackmun’s primary argument against the majority opinion explicitly notes that if a state is to limit the equal treatment before the law afforded by the Due Process Clause, it must be in pursuit of a legitimate and secular state interest, one that is, at best, only implied in the decision. On restricting queer people’s access to privacy, the dissent states: “If that right [privacy] means anything, it means that, before Georgia can prosecute its citizens for making choices about the most intimate aspects of their lives, it must do more than assert that the choice they have made is an ‘abominable crime not fit to be named among Christians’” (201).21 Despite presenting a legitimate concern, Blackmun fails to acknowledge that the Court’s fundamental interest is not to present sodomy as detestable in relationship to Christianity, but instead as an act not fit to be named by the citizen. The majority opinion circumvents the task of defining privacy in favor of defining citizens as ones who police and legislate their own and queer people’s unsanctioned sexual practices. That is to say, the Court’s decision in Bowers legitimates a degree of intrusion that, according to Nussbaum, “is far worse for homosexuals than for heterosexuals, because the prudent heterosexual can figure out a way to be a law abiding citizen without giving up sex altogether, while the homosexual basically has to give up sexual relationships completely” (67). In advocating for the ‘prudent heterosexual citizen,’ White’s decision imagines queer people as law-breaking citizens whose privacy, as sex criminals, is legally subject to public surveillance and prosecution—a perpetual public other upon whom the law-abiding citizen can always project the ‘disgust’ of sodomy to uphold the fantasy of a pure (hetero)sexual tradition. Nussbaum proposes that citizenship privileges respect for a person over the person’s actions, and explains that doing so demands “respecting one’s fellow citizens as equals, [which] long tradition holds, requires seeing them as choosers and seekers who need a wide area of liberty around them, whether they use that liberty well or not” (xv). By limiting access to what queer people can choose and seek, the decision legally identifies them as public objects of scrutiny used for the grooming of prudent sexual citizens rather than as citizens themselves—the implied, but never explicitly mentioned, state interest outlined in Bowers v. Hardwick’s majority opinion.

21 Blackmun cites Herring v. State (1904) to critique the treatment of homosexuality by the Court’s majority opinion.

36 Though the dissent does effectively show that Georgia has no compelling state interest in limiting queer peoples’ right to privacy, it fails to demonstrate how the Court’s unconstitutional violation of rights establishes tradition as a compelling state interest. The majority opinion presents a strong case for honoring history and tradition as a legitimate state interest while the dissenting members of the Court abstractly justify the reasons why institutions like marriage, family, and sexual reproduction are legally protected. Blackmun argues: “We protect those rights [associated with the family] not because they contribute, in some direct or material ways, to the general public welfare, but because they form so central a part in an individual’s life” (205). The dissent further states that the law protects: the decision…to marry precisely because marriage ‘is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes’…. the decision whether to have a child because parenthood alters so dramatically an individual’s self definition, not because of demographic considerations or the Bible’s command to fruitful and multiply….[and] the family because it contributes so powerfully to the happiness of individuals, not because of a preference of stereotypical households. (205-06)

Though Blackmun attempts to challenge the assumed religious foundations of Bowers’ decision, the majority opinion never invokes the Court’s probable religious agenda in limiting privacy rights. White agrees with Blackmun’s argument that promoting a way of life that encourages the self-altering experience of parenting to access the powerful happiness of family legitimates a protection of marriage, reproduction, and familial institutions. He, however, expresses the legal gesture as protecting tradition. In the dissent, distinguishing between religious and state interests, Blackmun missed the opportunity to further critique the decision by recognizing that “history evidently did not bar from the development and elaboration of the constitutional right to privacy in the areas of contraception and abortion, and that, in fact, the failure to extend the principle of constitutional privacy to gay/lesbian sex…[is] an illegitimate exercise of judicial power” (Richards 113). Such an argument demonstrates that limiting privacy does not intend to purposelessly police homosexual sodomy, but instead criminalizes queerness to define the law-abiding citizen as a person whose engagement in heterosexual relationships that, through the possibility of traditional marriage, reproduction, and family life, grant him or her access to institutionalized privacy. In other words, Bowers v. Hardwick’s primary

37 legal contribution is defining citizenship as access to privacy and making access to it contingent on the performance of traditional heterosexual relationships that uphold models of national heterosexuality. Though Bowers v. Hardwick does not explicitly declare queer people non- citizens, the majority opinion does refrain from offering queer people what Blackmun identifies as the most fundamental right of a citizen—the privacy to make decisions about one’s person. Blackmun describes Bowers as a case that “implicates both the decisional and spatial aspects of the right to privacy,” meaning privacy is constituted by a citizen’s liberty to make private decisions and engage in private acts without the state’s intrusion (205). The majority opinion on the case never outlaws queerness or the ability to decide or engage in specific sex acts; rather, it upholds a state’s right to determine whether these identities and decisions can be performed in private or if queerness inherently renders queer acts a public interest. If queerness can indiscriminately jeopardize privacy, then the case institutionalizes queer identity as compulsorily public by legally making queer private interactions always potentially public. Such tensions with a larger public are defined by Warner as counterpublics whose “participants are marked off from persons or citizens in general. Discussions within such a public is understood to contravene the rules obtaining in the world at large…making different assumptions about what can be said and what goes without saying…it maintains at some level…an awareness of its subordinate status” (Counterpublics 56). For Warner, counterpublics require a context of publicness that allows “actions to count in a public way, to be transformative” (63). In a context where queer identities and acts are legally deemed inherent public concerns, however, access to transformative publicness can seem a romantic notion. As Nussbaum emphasizes: “Sodomy laws had a demonstrable connection to violence against lesbians and, particularly, gay men. By defining gay men as outlaws, they gave notice…that violence against that group was not going to be taken as seriously as violence against other citizens” (67). While publicness does afford counterpublics an outlet for transformative political action, it also makes them vulnerable to violence by refusing their right to privately seek and choose how to contest their disenfranchisement. When the Supreme Court refutes Michael Hardwick’s ability to articulate his own oppression as a queer man on the grounds that he does not have standing to claim equal access to

38 privacy as afforded by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, the Court makes evident that without privacy, Hardwick does not himself have a citizen’s authority to challenge tradition and/or unjust law. As outlaws, queer people do not have to seek publicness, because any semblance of privacy accessible to them is always potentially public if it challenges the tradition of national heterosexuality. City of Night and Queer Semblances of Privacy Privacy—the right to be a seeker and chooser in intimate matters without government intrusion—is imagined in City of Night as potentially attainable at a time when virtually all states in the U.S. enforced laws, like Georgia’s, targeting queer communities by criminalizing sodomy. As I have explained, the laws, in criminalizing a common sexual practice among queer communities, stripped members of these of their citizenship by restricting their legal access to privacy and deeming them, in so doing, outlaws. In his 1977 documentary novel, The Sexual Outlaw, Rechy identifies within these communities a figure he terms the sexual outlaw: “The archetypal outsider, he is a symbol of survival, living on the very edge, triumphant over the threats, repression, persecution, prosecution, attacks, denunciations, hatred that have tried to crush him from the beginning of ‘civilization,’” who “after the hunt…knows he’s won the old ancestral battle—just because he is still alive and free” (299). Though Rechy would probably argue that the sexual outlaw does not need privacy, City of Night portrays such figures as public actors who despite being persecuted by homophobic laws understand themselves as citizens with the authority to challenge them. As literary critic Thomas Heise explains, the novel moves from its theme of “loneliness and anonymity of the newcomer in the big city” to “a frank counter-narrative of an emergent queer citizenry” (177). If, as Blackmun argues in his dissent to Bowers, privacy is the most comprehensive of citizen’s rights and the novel traces the development of a queer citizenry, the characters must have access to a mode of privacy parallel to that denied by anti-sodomy statues in effect across the U.S. at the time. Through an analysis of the novel’s anonymous narrator and protagonist who hustles from New York to California; Miss Destiny, a drag queen aspiring for a ‘real wedding’; and Sylvia, a regretful bar-owner and mother waiting for her estranged gay son to return home, I will demonstrate how Rechy offers characters he deems outlaws alternate semblances of privacy within City of Night to represent them as citizens.

39 The Sexual(ly) Outlaw(ed) City of Night begins by isolating its anonymous protagonist from his hometown of El Paso and casting him into the underworld of sex work across various cities to stage a recurring negotiation between the need to find spaces where he can exercise queer sexual practices and the threat of the state’s surveillance. The novel’s opening sentence describes “America as one vast city of night stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard…America at night fusing its darkcities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness” (9). Rechy uses the protagonist’s migration across the country to bringing together urban queer scenes through a character that slowly learns that his ability to have sex with other men is always subject to the threat of being accosted and/or arrested by the police. As Heise suggests, “From the start, Rechy frames his narrative as national in scope and urban in focus, with an opening sentence that looks to a future national space of one sprawling queer megalopolis” which the novel’s narrator must learn to navigate (177). The novel, then, traces the process by which the narrator comes to understand queer identity and how such is imagined in a broader national setting characterized by the law’s surveillance of queer bodies. In this context, Rechy employs the figure of the hustler, who epitomizes his definition of the sexual outlaw, as the means by which his readers access the experiences of queer people as they attempt to defy the state’s surveillance of intimate acts, enabling them to understanding themselves as queer citizens in private and public spaces despite the scrutiny of the law. After the protagonist leaves El Paso, he eventually arrives in New York City where Pete, a fellow young hustler, initiates him into the trade of sex work by separating their sexual labor from any personal queer implications. Within the framework of the novel, Pete demonstrates, being arrested for hustling is preferred to being held in custody for being gay. Following a brief episode where Pete arranges for the narrator to dress in leather for a familiar customer, he instructs the protagonist on effective techniques to pick up tricks. Though roughly the same age as the narrator, Pete takes on the role of mentor and outlines his rules of the trade to the protagonist: “Walk up to people, don’t wait to be asked; if you do, you may wait all day. Forget about the vice squad, and you will never get caught. A quick score in the toilet for a few bucks can be worth more than a big one that takes all day” (38). Rather than explicitly identifying the narrator as a queer man,

40 Rechy represents him as a character negotiating his need to earn money with the threat of being arrested or harassed by law enforcement—a negotiation that depends on a financial mediation of queer desire. That is to say, the narrator’s identity is defined in relationship to his labor rather than his sexual identity as a means to avoid the scrutiny of sodomy laws and similar statutes that criminalize gay male conduct. Despite the fact that sex work was and continues to be an illegal enterprise, to embody a semblance of queerness within the economy of the novel would jeopardize one’s ability to make money. Therefore, both sex work and homosexuality considered illegal, to perform heterosexuality allowed the hustler to consider himself less of a target of surveillance than if he embodied characteristics or behavior police officers could deem queer. Through Pete’s mentorship, Rechy outlines the underworld of sex work as one invested in semblances of normative identity performances rather than defined queer ones, despite both being punishable by the state. Pete continues his instruction by stating: “Stand at the urinal long after you are done pissing. At the slightest indication of interest from someone in one of the cubicles, go up to him quickly before he gets any free ideas and say, ‘I’ll make it with you for twenty.’ But go for much less if you have to” (38). According to Pete’s rules, the successful hustler always presents himself as one who capitalizes on ambiguity as a strategy through which one can avoid state surveillance or attain a semblance of privacy whether in relationship to sexuality, the location of the exchange, or the amount charged for sex. Though it seems like Rechy uses hustling as a way to limit the ways in which his characters can express their sexual identity, Diana Palaversich argues that the author locates hustling as the most effective site of rebellion against the stability of heteronormative society. She argues: “El lugar predilecto en esta rebelión pertenece al hustler, quien para Rechy representa el soldado de la vanguardia de la revolución (homo)sexual cuya razón de vida es socavar y destruir las bases de la sociedad heterosexual que oprime al homosexual” (129).22 If the hustler, as a figure, functions as Rechy’s primary tool to interrogate the stability of heterosexual society, Pete’s

22 “The predilect place in this rebellion belongs to the hustler, who for Rechy represents the soldier of the vanguard of the (homo)sexual revolution whose reason to live is to undermine and destroy the foundations of heterosexual society that oppress the homosexual.” (my translation)

41 mentorship of the narrator shows the narrator how to carve out a space where he can navigate the city, indeed to access citizenship according to Heise, while negotiating between his need to secure an income and the state’s surveillance of the manner in which he does so (177). Queerness veiled as sex work, the evasion of surveillance minimally afforded by the stall in a public restroom, and the inflation of the price to have sex with a hustler all become means to interrupt how the characters might be made subject to the state’s legal persecution in its attempts to institute a heterosexual nation. Amongst the most vexing representations in City of Night is the critique characters who identify as hustlers wage against the explicit expression of queerness by those they deem feminine, which is articulated early in the novel through a brief conversation between Pete and the narrator. Though Palaversich does argue that the figure of the hustler is the site where Rechy anchors a rebellion against heterosexuality, she explains that he does so by reinforcing masculinity as oppressive. This creates within the novel stratifications that privilege the masculine over the feminine, despite the novel’s explicit subversion of heterosexual social models. She argues: “En su adoración de lo masculino como...superior y del desprecio de lo femenino como inferior, que no se distingue …de las divisiones antagónicas que ocurren en el ambito heterosexual,…[Rechy repite] la lógica heteronormativa y…demuestra su incapacidad de liberarse de los valores machistas que critica” (123).23 In one of the earliest iterations of these divisions, the narrator explains: “Pete was touchy about one subject: his masculinity” (40). He further recounts a conversation where Pete argues: “Whatever a guy does with other guys, if he does so for the money, that don’t make him queer. Youre still straight. It’s when you start doing it for free, with other young guys, that you start growing wings” (40). In the novel, same-sex relationships come at a cost, one that is not always monetary. Though he earlier instructs the narrator to take any compensation rather than not turning a trick, Pete marks a strict division between any and no pay at all. In the absence of a financial exchange, the hustler himself incurs the cost by compromising, according to Pete, his claim to heterosexuality, which in turn makes the hustler more

23 “In his adoration of the masculine as…superior and the contempt of the feminine as inferior, that does not distinguish…from the antagonizing divisions that occur in heterosexual settings,…[Rechy repeats] the heteronormative logic and…demonstrates his inability to liberate himself of the patriarchal values he critiques.” (my translation)

42 vulnerable to state surveillance and prospective arrest. Though I agree with Palaversich in that some of Rechy’s narrative risks stabilizing sexist norms by restaging them amongst queer communities, there are instances, such as this one, where the risk offers a critical intervention through the depiction of the divisions between masculinity and femininity. Pete’s commodification of sex between men places his sexuality outside of the scrutiny of the law. Though hustling was itself criminalized, a semblance of straightness affords him the illusion of access to citizenship in ways limited to those who explicitly identify as queer. Rather than a function of Rechy’s own investment in stabilizing heterosexual norms, the distinction between being legally understood as queer and straight is representative of a legal climate where criminalizing one’s actual identity has more far- reaching implications than being found guilty, as an arguably straight man, of engaging in an outlawed profession. By the time the narrator leaves New York City, he and Pete are both presented as having sexual desires for men outside of the context of hustling, though they do not explicitly identify as gay men in the early episodes of the novel. After roaming through the city together in search for tricks, Pete and the narrator arrive at the latter’s apartment. Pete insists on seeing the place, even inviting the protagonist to his shared room afterward to have a drink. Despite the narrator’s reluctance, Pete enters the apartment and immediately compliments it stating: “This is nice…. You know, I have actually been thinking of getting a small apartment—with someone, maybe—you know, split the rent—it wouldn’t be much that way…you like living alone, spote?” (50). Though the narrator tries to ignore what he soon recognizes as sexual advances, Pete suggests: “shacking up with another guy for a while—we could hustle together…. I was even thinking…that fuckin street—it bugs me—sometimes I get nightmares about those toilets—I mean, all those fags—and—well, if I got a job, even—and split the rent with someone,” before he is interrupted by the narrator’s announcement that it’s past midnight (50-51). Though the conversation frames Pete’s desire for a more intimate association with the narrator within the semblance of heterosexuality granted by hustling earlier in the text, Pete’s most provocative suggestion foregrounds the appeal of shifting the location of sex work from public spaces to the privacy of a shared apartment. Though they would continue to have sex with men for money, making them by virtue of the

43 novels logic heterosexual, Pete asks the narrator to consider a relationship where shared expenses come to approximate the financial exchange that makes hustling a potentially heterosexual practice. Pete and the narrator hypothetically dividing the expense of a shared living space suggests that in paying for half of the rent, both the narrator and Pete are paying for the other to be able to occupy the shared spaces within the apartment. This exchange opens up a possibility where, albeit indirectly, one would be paying for the other’s access to a private space, a site where the illusion of having sex for rent money shields their queer desire. Pete, in this scene, attempts to bring together his potential desire for the narrator and the advice he previously offered, implying that filtered by the shared expense of rent—a financial exchange—their relationship could potentially lie outside of the parameters of queer desire. Thus, they could continue to be straight, for shared rent would allow them to identify as roommates, whereas outside of their monetary arrangement, the intimate relationship Pete’s request implies could be understood as queer and, therefore, criminal. Rechy continues to put pressure on the hypothetical division of living expenses that encodes their relationship as heterosexual when Pete, taking advantage of the time, asks to stay the night. The narrator states: “I lay on the very edge of one side of the bed and he lay on the very edge of the other. A long time passed. Hours” (51). Noticing neither is able to sleep, Pete offers to leave, “But he didn’t move…. And then I felt his hand, lightly on mine. Neither of us moved. Moments passed like that. And now his hand closes over mine. Tightly. And that was all that happened” (51). Within the complex sexual economy of the novel, such an approximation of the physical expression of queer identity foregrounds Rechy’s insistence on creating spaces where characters can separate their ability to make decisions based on their sexual identities outside of the context of legal scrutiny. Rechy opens the novel with a failed attempt at securing a private space where both the narrator and Pete are able to define their sexual identities outside of the context of economic exchange. Literary critic Kevin Arnold explains: “it is representationally impossible for the subject to occupy both masculinity and homosexuality in the discursive space of Rechy’s novels. Characters are either masculine or they are not, and if they appear…gay, regardless of what they actually desire

44 sexually…they are not considered masculine” (127, my emphasis). To elaborate on his argument, it is important to consider why Rechy makes such representation impossible. Rather than a crisis of representation, Rechy offers a setting where masculinity, in the case Pete and the narrator’s relationship, demonstrates a sense of protection from the legal prosecution of their potentially queer identities, or a crisis centered on privacy’s unavailability to queer people. Pete’s departure is prompted by the narrator’s acknowledgement of a neighbor who could potentially hear them: “The man in the other wing of the building, on the other side of my window, began to cough very early, and I got up and hurriedly dressed. ‘I have to go out,’ I told Pete” (51). This acknowledgement alerts Pete to the risk of his intimate gesture outside of the semblance of heterosexuality afforded by the economic exchange fundamental to the distinction between hustler and queer person. Pete responds by leaving, stating: “‘I’ll see you around The Street…. ‘Man,’ he says—but his voice was forced, as mine was. ‘I got a real tough score lined up today—hes worth Twenty’” (51). Neither Pete nor the protagonist can be both masculine and queer because it is the façade of masculinity that affords both characters access to the practice of queer sex acts. Indeed, in allowing characters to continue to identify as masculine only through and economic exchange despite engaging sexually with other men, Rechy sheds light on the impossibility of freely identifying as gay without the semblance of privacy made available through a performance of masculinity. Miss Destiny’s Wedding Following his visit to New York City, the protagonist goes to California and settles briefly in Los Angeles where he introduces the most iconic of Rechy’s sexual outlaws. Miss Destiny, “a slim young queen with masses of red hair (which she fondly calls her ‘rair’)” which “tumbles gaily over a pale skinny face almost smothering at times,” is presented as the overseer of the drag scene near Pershing Square who, despite being “20 but quite as possibly 18 and very probably 25,” does not hesitate to share with fellow queens and hustlers experiences in which her privacy has been violated (95). Immediately after meeting the narrator, Miss Destiny tells him: “I went to this straight party in High Drag (and I mean High, honey—gown, stockings, ostrich plumes in my flaming rair)” where, after dancing with a police officer also attending the party, she is placed under arrest for violating laws against masquerading, or impersonating a woman

45 (95, original emphasis). Her description of the party suggests that her high drag interrupts the straightness, so to speak, of the event. Miss Destiny’s drag encroaches upon the private domain of straightness and is then exposed to the corrective interventions of the law. Such an intervention, Judith Butler argues, “compel fear at the same time that it offers recognition at an expense” (121). That is, Miss Destiny’s arrest does not only depict the precarious cultural place of queer people subject to homophobic statues, but furthermore the ways in which the performance of queerness becomes subject to policing. Butler elaborates: “In the reprimand the subject not only receives recognition, but attains as well a certain order of social existence in being transferred from an outer region of indifferent, questionable, or impossible being to the discursive or social domain of the subject” (121). This social existence, as she implies, does not necessarily entail positive outcomes for the queer subject. While Miss Destiny, in high drag, dances with a man who is a police officer, it is the enforcement of the law while at an event where such a performance is otherwise arguably welcome that her queer identity assumes the public legal definition of outlaw and her dance partner assumes the role of police officer at the party. The private setting, a place where the guest are free to choose how to perform their identities, becomes a place of public significance when the fear instilled by the law turns the event not only into a site of corrective intervention for Miss Destiny, but also one for those in attendance preforming heterosexuality. The party, then, is presented as a site that, despite initially offering guests a private setting were they could freely perform their respective identities, becomes a public setting through legal interventions that demonstrate what identities the lawful citizen should choose to perform. Though not under the exercise of California’s sodomy law, Miss Destiny’s arrest brings to attention the precarious public position of queer people in the U.S. under legal statutes that police their identities, sexual practices, and gender presentations. Explaining that she is arrested for impersonating a woman, Miss Destiny’s harassment illustrates Rechy’s construction of the homophobic exercise of the law as an assault against private acts. While recounting her arrest, Miss Destiny invokes the scene, “her prince-charming turns out to be: the vice squad [….] Miss Destiny gathers her skirts and tries to run [...] but the vice grabs her and off she goes […] the feathers trembling now nervously. Miss Destiny insists she is a real woman [….](But oh…how can she hide THAT THING

46 between her legs which should belong there only when it is somebody else’s?)” (96, original emphasis).24 Her account demonstrates the distance between how she understands her own presentation of queerness as a private, even if seemingly intentional, decision. In her description of the event, the feathers tremble while her body remains represented only through her self-description as woman. Her depiction of the anecdote as a normative fantasy—the officer as prince and Miss Destiny therefore as princess—are then complicated by legal intervention. As Butler explains, “the call by the law which seeks to produce a lawful subject, produces a set of consequences that exceed and confound what appears to be the disciplining intention motivating the law” (122). In her dress and embodiment, the feather and “that thing between her legs” become excesses through which the law disciplines the queer subject (96). Rechy’s depiction of the law’s intervention, what Butler would consider an interpolating performance, demonstrates the law does not only target representations of queerness, but also the queer body itself. In representing the quivering feathers as signifying the criminalized excess of performance of woman and Miss Destiny’s consideration of her penis as the part of her body that renders her criminal, Rechy shows the lack of distinction between queer performance and the queer body in a legal context. Miss Destiny’s drag is criminal because of her body, and her body is criminal because of her drag. Within the framework of the law, the body and performance, as Butler argues, are confounded as they mutually inform what one another mean. Though independently Miss Destiny’s body and her dress could represent masculinity and femininity, together they are rendered, by the law, criminal and therefore of public interest. In a second instance, Miss Destiny shares an account of a wealthy love interest, Duke, who is disinherited once his family discovers their son’s partner is a drag queen and not “a real woman” (107, original emphasis). Miss Destiny explains that, like Duke when they met at a society party in Philadelphia, her lover’s parents did not originally suspect she was in drag. Once again, she invokes the memory and describes her first night with Duke: “Oh they go home that night and Miss Destiny must confess she is not a

24 It’s important to note here that within the universe of the novel, Miss Destiny is presented, along with other sexual outlaws in the bar scene, as drag queens, though one could argue that in some instances the novel might be describing trans women, despite not explicitly recognizing them as such.

47 real woman, but oh, oh, he doesn’t care, having of course flipped over her, and he takes her to his country estate, his family naturally being Fabulously rich, and they simply Idolize Miss Destiny” (107, original emphasis). Passing as a woman and being understood as participating in a heterosexual relationship, Duke’s family idolizes Miss Destiny in the privacy of their country estate. Here, Rechy shifts Miss Destiny’s role from one whose public expression of queerness is accepted after attending a party to one who can, by performing a seemingly heterosexual relationship, access the private space of the home afforded to normative citizens. Though she does not explain when or how Duke’s parents become aware of her performance, she does confess following the discovery: “He was truckdriver, and sometimes we were so poor we couldn’t even make it: I had to hustle in drag in order to keep us going—of course he didn’t know this” (108). Once she, as well as Duke by virtue of being with her, is publicly understood as queer, they are ousted from the privacy of the home and Miss Destiny in particular reduced to publicly procuring sex for money to afford a standard of living unimaginable to them when the performance of their relationship was assumed normative. Their rejection from the family estate renders Miss Destiny doubly vulnerable to arrest as a queer person and a sex worker. While the first account demonstrates how the intentional exuberance of her drag makes her vulnerable to arrest and the second one illustrates how queerness discredits one’s access to the privacy of the home, they both lead Miss Destiny to understand that the performance of normative femininity grants her conditional privacy—the right to be left alone. Following each account, Miss Destiny contemplates how a wedding would resolve the violations inflicted upon her privacy. After detailing her arrest, she explains: “Miss Thing said to me (Miss Thing is a fairy perched on my back like some people have a monkey or a conscience)... ‘Miss Destiny dear, have a real wedding this time.’… A real wedding” (98). Literary critic Karen Christian argues that the drag queens in City of Night “offer evidence of the insufficiency of the binary model of gender,” for “When the performance of drag—the imitation of a feminine ‘essence,’ which is itself an imitation, is considered along with the queen’s sex, the gender that is constructed is neither male nor female” (47). However, Miss Destiny understands that her gender performance, unless perceived as normatively male or female, does not afford her as permanent a protection from legal and social scrutiny than a real, legal wedding. Miss Destiny’s

48 description of her ideal wedding invokes what would latter emerge in the 1980s drag ball scene in the U.S. as “realness.” Within the context of drag, Butler explains, “‘Realness’…is a standard that is used to judge any given performance within the established categories [of the drag ball]. And yet what determines the effect of realness is the ability to compel belief, to produce a naturalized effect….which no performance fully approximates” (129). As Miss Destiny’s anecdotes demonstrate, realness emerges in early queer history as a strategy of survival. Miss Destiny’s concern for the realness of the wedding exceeds her interest in the fantasy of a wedding. She imagines it as one “every young girl should have at least once…with the most beautiful queens as bridesmaids! And the handsomest studs as ushers!.... And Me!...in virgin white…coming down a winding staircase…carrying a white bouquet!...and my family will be crying for joy…and a real priest will puhfawn the Ceremony!” (98, original emphasis). In her imagined wedding, she brings together both events, one where queens can make up the wedding party without suspicion from the police and where the privacy afforded through the wedding ceremony is not only recognized as legitimate by family members, but also by the church and state. Rechy designates the performance of the rite then legally exclusive to heterosexual people as the site where the novel’s sexual outlaws can access privacy through their chosen performances of the wedding party’s traditionally masculine and feminine roles. However, this semblance of privacy is contingent on their ability to continuously perform such roles. If the imagined ‘real wedding’ is to grant Miss Destiny access to citizenship available through privacy, its realness depends, like her relationship with Duke’s parents, on a convincing performance of the ‘essence’ of the wedding ceremony, that which grants its participants citizenship—normative heterosexuality. However, realness as a strategy of survival emerges not only in a desire to pass as woman, but also in opposition to the criminalization of queer performance and identity. For Miss Destiny, the fantasy of the wedding is not divorced from an interest in ensuring immunity from the legal prosecution. Therefore, the wedding does not only challenge Miss Destiny and her bridesmaids to pass as women, but it further argues for the legal recognition of queer performances in their varied embodiments as those of legitimate citizen subjects for whom privacy is made available. The wedding’s realness is less concerned with the

49 queens complying with the law, which they could do by performing normative masculinity, than it is with revealing the varied performances of masculinity and femininity that can be considered legitimate by the law. In this sense, realness functions not as a performance of compliance with normative femininity and marriage, but as a political act that recognizes queer people’s access to citizenship through marriage. If successful, the performance reveals the law’s interest in compelling heterosexuality through institutions like marriage, which would render criminalized acts, like sodomy, outside of the state’s surveillance, or private. The citizenship afforded by Miss Destiny’s wedding is contingent upon the successful performance of a traditional marriage. Arnold argues that Rechy constitutes desire in relationship to sexual identifications that require an uncontentious relationship with normative sexuality and gender. He explains: “Rechy’s work articulates the sense in which subversion (i.e. of masculinity or identification more generally) is not only not possible, but that it might not be desirable in the first place since it affords us a representational economy that makes desire possible…. incorporated as an integral component of that desire” (129). According to Arnold, the limitations imposed by traditional identification are desired by characters for whom transgression of sexual norms is integral to how they imagine and experience desire. However, such an analysis fails to account for characters like Miss Destiny whose desire is informed not by the potential transgression of norms, but instead by the consequent loss of the ability to freely occupy public and private spaces at one’s own discretion, or what Heise describes as a classical definition of citizenship (177). Arnold further states, “This structure of sexuality is contingent upon a non-subversive relation to sexual and gendered norms…. They have to be there as integral components of the sexual economy for the subject to navigate its desire, even when the components function as threats or limits” (129). However, for Miss Destiny normativity instead functions as a barrier from what she desires, leading her to imagine access to citizenship as only available through a performance of heteronormative marriage. If she desires the ability to make private decisions about her public gender presentation without legal or social scrutiny—to attend parties and be nestled in the privacy of the home without the threat of arrest or family estrangement—she must procure a space where the exclusivity of citizenship can reconcile with queerness, which

50 she sees as available to her only in the a fantasy of a traditional wedding. To those for whom the failure to convincingly perform normative identities does not inform desire, these traditional standards represent the limits of the semblance of privacy afforded through their performance of normative identities. Rather than a desirable threat, for Miss Destiny a violation of sanctioned performances of the heterosexual citizen involves a renunciation of her own desire for citizenship. Though the novel does not offer an account of Miss Destiny’s wedding given that the narrator leaves Los Angeles for a brief stay in San Diego, several accounts of the ceremony await him upon his return. While he originally hears rumors that Miss Destiny disappears after her wedding, the narrator later hears from Pauline, another drag queen, that law enforcement interrupted the wedding. She details, “It was A-tro-cee-ous. She had her winding staircase, alright, too, and she stumbled on her train and ripped her veil and came face down! Then the place was raided….And can you imagine the sight? Miss Destiny in bridal drag sitting crying in the paddywagon” (118). The scene asks readers to invoke the first account of Miss Destiny’s confrontation with the law to stress the precarious conditions in which queer people seek privacy. The novel offers various gradations of Miss Destiny’s private and public performances to shift the reader’s attention from whether or not she is able to pass as a woman to whether or not privacy is ever accessible to a queer person through even the most convincing performance of normative femininity. Christian argues that these moments of displacement, the instances in the novel where the drag queens performances are interrupted and deemed outlaw, arise “in part from heterosexual society’s smug sense of security in regard to gender identity. Yet it is a false security; in order to maintain its status, the dominant culture must identify its Others…and denounce them for the excesses that make them visible” (48). In this context, Rechy presents in the rumors about the wedding a space to consider if, despite their most concerted efforts, performances of normative identities intended to produce and secure unsanctioned modes of privacy can ever be considered anything other than excessive reproductions of heterosexual rites. As Butler suggests: “This ‘being a man’ and this ‘being a woman’ are…. beset by ambivalence precisely because there is a cost in every identification, the loss of some other set of identifications, the forcible approximation of a norm one never chooses, a

51 norm that chooses us, but which we occupy, reverse, resignify to the extent that the norm fails to determine us completely” (120-21). In other words, can Miss Destiny’s performance of normative femininity, specifically in a context of an extravagant wedding where the performance of high drag might be perceived as more discrete than her appearance at the party where she first gets arrested, afford her the perpetual sense of privacy that performing normative masculinity would? Is she better served by resignifying or occupying the norm? The narrator finally learns that Miss Destiny has allegedly been cured through psychiatry and that she “is getting married, man!—to a real woman!” (119). Though Rechy hesitates to portray queer people as unable to ascertain any form of privacy, Miss Destiny’s alleged ‘recovery’ from homosexuality suggests that despite any attempt to perform a compliance with normative marital practices, any semblance of privacy secured by queer people in City of Night offers only a temporary and unstable illusion of citizenship. Sylvia and The Rocking Times In another episode, City of Night’s protagonist is introduced to law enforcement practices in New Orleans leading up to Mardi Gras by Sylvia, the owner of The Rocking Times, one of the city’s hustler bars. Soon after arriving in Louisiana, the anonymous narrator finds himself preoccupied with police surveillance upon stepping into Sylvia’s bar. Though the main character has yet to explicitly violate any legal statute, he is accosted by two police officers. He states: “Obviously I havent been careful enough; the vice cops are already standing behind me. ‘Where are you staying?’ one asked me. I turn to face the face of the stone-cold cop-eyes…” (295). Overhearing the question, Sylvia, even before meeting the narrator, emphatically dismisses the cops responding: “He’s staying with me… You know where that is, dont you boys?” to which they respond, “That house of yours sure must be crowded,” before leaving the premises (295). Though Rechy never sets the novel in Sylvia’s home, her attachment and counseling of the drag queens and hustlers that frequent her bar stages The Rocking Times as the home where these communities are protected from the persecution of law enforcement officers. Following her intercession when the cops harass the protagonist, Sylvia is often presented as the mediator between the sexual practices of the bar’s patrons and a sense of social order available through the compliance with law that allow The Rocking Times to grant

52 queer communities a semblance of privacy, a place where they can perform their identities with a diminished threat of harassment and arrest. Because the narrator understands that the police officers observe him with “the look of someone who says: ‘This is only the beginning of the game—a hint: we’ll get you eventually; if not here, then somewhere else,” the bar is presented as potentially offering privacy only insofar as Sylvia, as a heterosexual woman, can speak on behalf of her clientele (295). In other words, unable to themselves guarantee a sense of privacy that protects them from the persecution of law enforcement, queer characters at the bar require Sylvia to mediate their contact with the law to be understood publicly as law-abiding citizens, if only temporarily. City of Night, thus, presents Sylvia as a character who is not only able to offer her bar’s patrons a semblance of privacy, but also as a regulator of imagined citizenship who is able to grant or refuse access to privacy and belonging on her own terms.25 Though Sylvia is willing to offer her bar’s patrons protection from the cops, she does establish a code of conduct that patrons must comply with to access the limited privacy available at The Rocking Times. Better acquainted with the bar owner, the narrator witnesses Sylvia’s admonishment of a drag queen named Lily rumored to have stolen money from a score she meets at the bar. Though Lily insists she did not take more

25 By “imagined citizenship” I mean the ways in which the patrons at The Rocking Times, through Sylvia’s intercession, get to understand themselves as protected members of a community in ways that contradict their legal definition as outlaws. These queer men and women are not, in a historical context, protected from state surveillance in the way they imagine themselves to be in this specific location. Their belonging in the community is imagined, as Benedict Anderson suggests, “because, regardless of the exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship” (7). However, subject to legislative acts that understand them as culturally inferior in, per se, a vertical or morally hierarchical sense, the differences that are obfuscated by Sylvia’s intervention allow them to access what Renato Rosaldo terms “cultural citizenship,” or “the right to be different or belong in a participatory democratic sense. It claims that, in such a democracy, social justice calls for equity among citizens, even when such differences as race, religion, class, gender, or sexual orientation potentially could be used to make certain people less equal or inferior to others” (402). Rather than using Rosaldo’s term, it’s important to consider how Sylvia’s intervention, which allows the protagonist to imagine himself as a participant in the bar and city’s community, reveals the artifice of their citizenship or belonging in ways not precisely captured by Anderson or Rosaldo’s frameworks independently.

53 than she was paid, Sylvia proceeds to lecture those present on the necessity of rules asserting: “Screwed up world without laws! [....] But even in a world without laws –and mostly, hell, we all know it—mostly it’s lawless because it’s a scene—…a scene people shun, are […] afraid of, don’t even know exists—even in that kind of world […] youve got to have some kind of—hell yes—decency—some kind of rules. In my bar, I make those rules” (303, original emphasis). Though Sylvia recognizes the absurdity of asking her audience to abide by rules when they are legally perceived as unlawful, she does draw a distinction between those queer people who are willing to commit to her own standards for sexual labor and those who are not. She, in effect, having the ability to dismiss the cops, takes upon herself the role of regulating the behavior of the hustlers that conduct business at her bar by threatening to make the space and its semblance of privacy unavailable to those who refuse to abide by her rules. According to Sylvia, a hustler or queen can only steal from a trick if he flaunts his money or fails to pay the amount owed. She states: “There’s got to be some kind of morality!...Not the bull they teach you in Sunday-school. I mean: just living in the world you find yourself in—with its own rules, considering everything” (303, original emphasis). Though she suggests there is a potential to develop a queer sense of morality informed by the sexual and social practices of queer communities, Rechy’s novel offers such a possibility as available only in a place that offers the appearance of privacy through heterosexual intercession. As Nussbaum argues, “Because until very recently gays who openly looked for sex and expressed desire in places where heterosexuals may openly do so would be prosecuted or even arrested, gay bars and gay-friendly businesses….have a centrality for gays and lesbians that they do not have for straights” (170). Though in the novel The Rocking Times functions as the center of self-definition, as described by Nussbaum, the space is only available through a dismissal of legal statutes and the establishment of norms developed an enforced by a heterosexual character. Thus, while Rechy presents the bar as a locus of sexual anarchy, Sylvia demonstrates that the privacy afforded by the bar is not a site of lawless sexual exploration but instead a place where new codes of conduct redefine inclusion while remaining committed to a social model that imagines the citizen as willing to comply with a reimagined moral code.

54 Later in the novel, Sylvia reveals her own stakes in keeping the gay-friendly bar in operation by confessing that she estranged her son after he came out to her, unable to reconcile his queerness as an iteration of masculinity. After Kathy, another drag queen that frequents the bar, tells Sylvia that her health continues to deteriorate as evidenced by her latest fainting spell, the bar owner confesses to her and the narrator that she threw her own son out of the house after he came out in a similar way as Kathy’s parents responded to her coming out. She recalls the moment her son left: “I made him stop…’Shut up!’….’What you are trying to tell me isn’t true!’…. ‘Youre a man God damn it! Youre a…man,’” further clarifying, “You know why I couldn’t face what he was trying to tell me?...Because I felt—…guilty. Crushingly, crushingly guilty—as if—as if he were accusing me in making this confession to me…And I—didn’t--understand” (313, original emphasis). Sylvia suggest her son was no longer allowed in the home after the exchange, which reveals once again how queerness limits a person’s access to private domestic spaces. Arnold accurately describes Rechy’s novels as “‘anti-coming out narratives’, articulations of the impossibility of identification, of reconciling masculinity with homosexuality into a stable identification” (121). Sylvia’s expression of remorse suggests that it is not her son’s queerness that she is unable to accept. Rather, it is queerness’ apparent irreconcilability with how she imagines masculinity that refuses her understanding of queerness as a legitimate identity. As an out gay man, Sylvia’s son cannot be afforded the private space of the home without being publicly understood by his mother as a man in a normative sense. In estranging him, Sylvia places the burden of an irreconcilable masculinity on her son aware that understanding him would shift public critique toward her inability to produce a normative citizen. While Kathy proceeds to comfort her by insisting that after all this time she is able to reconcile her son’s queerness and masculinity, Sylvia states: “either like a queen—in the highest, brightest screaming drag…or hustling a score, trying to prove with another man…that I was right, that he is a man… even if he has to prove it by finding another man who will pay him for his…masculinity…Even with a bloody gash on his head proving it with violence…I want to see him…to tell him Im sorry” (314, original emphasis). Even while expressing regret for the estrangement of her son, Sylvia can only imagine herself apologizing to him in a context where the iteration of his

55 queerness validates and reinforces the limited semblance of masculinity she assumes is available to him. It’s important to note that while drag queens and hustlers might be understood as queer by Rechy’s readers, within the context of the bar, where the performance of such identities is often equated with prostitution, sex work is presented as attesting to a queer man’s expression of masculinity. As Heise states, prostitution in City of Night is not a representation of “homosexuality but is actually a denial of it. In the complex sexual economy of the novel, gay-male prostitution produces one’s sexual orientation and one’s gender as heterosexual and masculine” (183). The novel produces settings where sex between queer men is substituted for monetary transactions offering a narrative space “in which sex becomes work” rather than a hustler or queen’s expression of queer desire (182). For Sylvia, high drag, hustling, and a gash on her son’s head would offer proof of his expression of masculinity through prostitution, granting her the opportunity to understand him as masculine despite openly identifying as a gay man. Her stakes in producing a semblance of privacy at The Rocking Times represent her personal investment in securing a location where her son can be understood as a person worthy of inclusion upon his unlikely return, or the possibility of accessing citizenship. In this context, Kathy is incorrect in stating that Sylvia reconciles masculinity with queerness. Rather, what Sylvia seems to understand is that if citizenship is to be available to her son in any capacity, it requires sites like The Rocking Times where sex work can reframe his queerness as a potential performance of masculinity. Through Sylvia’s procurement of privacy at The Rocking Times, Rechy proposes a possibility for public places to offer themselves as sites that exist between the privacy afforded to heterosexuals and the public scrutiny of queer people. If citizenship is contingent on access to privacy attainable by a person’s ability to be understood as a normative member of a family model, Sylvia’s account suggests that by offering a space where masculinity can be reassessed to include hustlers and drag queens, The Rocking Times can offer sexual outlaws the privacy necessary to imagine themselves as citizen. In his analysis of the bars as sites of contact, Heise argues: “What is formed in these socially and economically devalued terrains are knowledges and intimacies that are public, political, potentially collective, and not tethered to the domestic space of monogamy and reproductive ideals,” further clarifying, “such spaces underscore that one’s right to the

56 city is not (or should not be) dependent on first attaining normative sexual standards” (192). While Rechy does offer a possibility for the emergence of a queer citizenry that employs new ‘knowledges and intimacies,’ they are ultimately arbitrated by Sylvia who continues to anchor her understanding of her son as a man to his performance of masculinity as mediated by the commodification of his sexual practices. That is to say, if The Rocking Times functions as a site where queer characters can imagine themselves as citizens outside of the performance of normative sexual standards, as Heise suggests, it only does so by ignoring Sylvia’s commitment to a code of conduct that, while informed by the bar’s queer scene, insists on a claim to morality to create the privacy necessary to imagine new queer configurations of belonging and inclusion. Within the context of City of Night, queer characters’ ability to develop public, political, and collective appeals to citizenship outside of the context of normative sexual practices necessitate a sense of privacy, or evasion of surveillance, that allows them to conceive of unsanctioned modes of belonging without the state’s legal intervention accessible at The Rocking Times only by complying with Sylvia’s definition of morality and masculinity. Conclusion From the outset of the novel, the narrator describes his project as, “embarking on that journey through the nightcities and nightlives—looking for I dont know what— perhaps some substitute for salvation” (19). When interviewed, Rechy often elaborates on the phrase explaining: “There is a phrase that occurs in every one of my books, with slight variation: ‘no substitute for salvation.’ By that I mean that, early on, we’re promised salvation in religious terms. When we pull away from religion, nothing takes the place of that promise, and so we try to locate substitutes—sex, etc.—but there are none” (42). When we consider the moral imperative that informs the Supreme Court’s decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, the outlined state interest in reinforcing the need for a heterosexual state, we can consider the project of City of Night as drawing away from a religiously charged notion of citizenship and belonging. When that is denied to queer people by imposing limits on their access to privacy, what I have described as imperative to one’s ability to perform citizenship, the characters in the novel set out to find substitutes for a form of citizenship that saves them, so to speak, from the legal scrutiny of sexual practices and the criminalization of their identities. In hindsight, Rechy clearly

57 articulates the impossibility of finding alternative forms of salvation within normative social structures. Despite setting out to find a substitute for national belonging, the characters in City of Night are never quite able to find a semblance of privacy as a successful substitute for a mode of privacy legally sanctioned by the state. By the end of the novel, the anonymous protagonist returns to El Paso, unable to relate to other men on terms outside of the commodification of queerness or a compliance with particular normative institutions such as weddings. The restrictive limits on citizenship outlined in the majority opinion in Bowers do not originate in the decision. Rather, the decision institutionalizes the restriction of access to privacy as a means to limit who gets to navigate cities freely as citizen, which was already a purpose of longstanding homophobic statues that criminalized, in a broad sense, imagining queer people as potentially citizen. And while Rechy remains aware that a substitution for salvation, in this context through a the legal redemption of the straight citizen’s engagement in non-normative sexual practices, is impossible, City of Night does not make that impossibility central to the protagonist’s journey. Rather, Rechy’s debut novel traces the trajectory of the narrator’s realization that spaces where queer people can access citizenship’s legal salvation cannot be carved out in a system committed to heterosexuality as fundamental to securing the order of the nation. Wile City of Night does not offer a clear depiction of the failure of citizenship and salvation, it does point to circulating representations of queer identity, namely the implied threat of homophobic legislation, to place the burden of the failure of representation on the state’s own understanding of its citizenry.

58 CHAPTER TWO

“Not in the Clinical Sense,” in a Legal Sense: The Ambiguous Queer Citizen in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service and Arturo Islas’ The Rain God

In her influential essay, “Queer Aztlán: The Re-Formation of Chicano Tribe”, Cherríe Moraga stages a critique of gay Chicano men over their reluctance to publicly acknowledge their homosexuality. Moraga names specifically Richard Rodriguez, author of Hunger of Memory, and Arturo Islas as Chicanos whose writing privileges discretion over an explicit treatment of homosexuality in their biographical and semi- autobiographical works. She argues: “Unlike ‘queens’ who have always been open about their sexuality, ‘passing’ gay men have learned in a visceral way that being in ‘the closet’ and preserving their ‘manly’ image will not protect them, it will only make their dying more secret” (163). In regard to Islas, she more specifically states: “I remember my friend Arturo Islas, the novelist. I think of how his writing begged to boldly announce his gayness. Instead, we learned it through vague references about ‘sinners’ and tortured alcoholic characters who wanted nothing more than to ‘die dancing’ beneath a lightning- charged sky before the thunderstorm,” later referencing the author’s death in 1991 and asking, “how many lives are lost each time we cling to the privileges that make other people’s lives more vulnerable to violence?” (163, 163-64). However poignant of a critique, the very character upon which Moraga centers her admonishment is made vulnerable to violence in the precise moment where his sexuality is most explicit. In Arturo Islas’ 1984 novel The Rain God, the death of the referenced tortured rain dancer, Felix, serves as the centerpiece of the account of multiple generations of the Angel family following their migration to the U.S.26 If Moraga’s critique calls attention to the

26 In Migrant Souls, Islas’ sequel to The Rain God, the author’s description of the Angel family stresses a distinction between the terms “migrant” and “immigrant.” The narrator states: “They had not sailed across an ocean or ridden in wagons and trains across half a continent in search of a new life. They were migrant, not immigrant, souls. They simply and naturally went from one bloody side of the river to the other and into a land that just a few decades earlier had been Mexico” (41-42). For the purposes of this chapter, I will use the term “migrant” to describe the Angel family and those instances where people move from one location to another while using “immigrant” to describe those whose purpose in crossing the border is implied to be informed by their “search for a new life” in the novel.

59 ambiguity with which Islas treats homosexuality in The Rain God, this chapter proposes that such ambiguity is a product of a historically situated legal understanding of queerness centered on the cultural impact of the Immigration and Nationality act of 1952 and its treatment of gay immigrants. In other words, while Moraga asks how many lives are lost as a consequence of the closeting of public figures, I will propose that Islas’ novel illustrates how lives are lost not exclusively through closeting, but also through the exercise of justice influenced by a legal system insistent on the exclusion of queer immigrants. Rather than yielding to compelling legal and cultural contexts that demand the respective closeting and outing of queer characters, The Rain God presents characters whose stories emerge at the intersection of queer visibility and invisibility. Given the importance Moraga places on the explicit treatment of homosexuality in works by gay Chicano writers, her critique defines the influence of these authors narrowly by circumventing the fact that the legal contexts in which the texts are historically set offer their works other avenues for cultural intervention. Islas biographer and literary critic Frederick Luis Aldama explains: “Mainstream publishers were not ready for…a complex exploration of queer sexuality within a Chicano family that begins and ends with death” (40).27 Set at the Southern border between the time the U.S. Congress passes the Immigration and Nationality Act of 195228 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, The Rain God engages with a set of restrictions on queer immigrants that gives the ambiguous expression of queerness in the novel a legal relevance outside of Moraga’s critique. The novel’s namesake, Felix Angel, stands out as the family’s ‘sinner’ for whom a transgression of the cultural and familial traditions dictated by his mother, Mama Chona, proves lethal. Despite being married to a woman, having children, and being stably employed as a foreman charged with the recruitment of immigrant workers, his extramarital indiscretions have not only cultural, but also legal implications at a time when the state’s heightened interest in the exclusion of queer immigrants becomes ambiguously institutionalized. According to legal historian Margot Canaday, “While an alien could be excluded or deported before 1952 for committing

27 In its first stages, the manuscript was titled “Día de los muertos,” or “Day of the Dead,” foregrounding the novel’s central theme. 28 Also known as the McCarran-Walter Act.

60 crimes of moral turpitude (i.e. homosexual acts), a prohibition barring aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality was enacted in 1952 to explicitly prevent homosexual aliens from entering or remaining in the country,” a move she notes broadens the legal identification of queer people from those who commit homosexual acts to those who showed “markers of psychopathy that revealed to immigration officials a propensity to commit a homosexual act” (214-215, emphasis added).29 So, while Islas does not offer in Felix a character that is explicitly “out,” in the latter’s pursuit of men, soldiers and prospective immigrant employees included, the author does present a character who illustrates the institutional persecution of queer immigrants as a man understood as gay in a legal sense through his propensity to engage in same-sex relationships.30 To illustrate the legal contestation of the definition of homosexuality, I will turn to the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which upheld the legality of Congress’s intent to exclude queer immigrants by defining them as psychopathic personalities in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. In the case, petitioner Clive Michel Boutilier argued against his ordered deportation by claiming that while the immigration statute in question barred from entry to the U.S. those suffering of psychopathic personalities, the wording of the law did not explicitly define queer immigrants as an excludable class. In such a context, his deportation, the defense claimed, would be a violation of Due Process. In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled against Boutilier expressing in the majority opinion delivered by Justice Tom C. Clark: “Congress used the phrase ‘psychopathic personality’ not in the clinical sense, but to effectuate its purpose to exclude from entry all homosexuals and other sex perverts” (122). Rather than addressing the vagueness of the term, the Court extensively considered the petitioner’s history of same-sex relationships to determine not only whether Boutilier was indeed gay, but also whether he was so, more specifically, at his time of entry to the U.S. In its ruling, the Court demonstrated that despite recognizing a person’s migration

29 Homosexual acts, here, indicate sex with people of the same sex. The Supreme Court assumes homosexual acts to be understood as sexual contact, not necessarily the pursuit of same-sex relationships. 30 In a similar way as Bowers v. Hardwick, as discussed in the first chapter, Boutilier folds the behavior between two people into a sexual identity. Thus, in Boutilier, like in Bowers, the Court establishes a causal relationship between sexual act and the legal understanding of a person’s identity as “homosexual.”

61 into the country as legal, it could retroactively deny the legality of one’s presence in the country as a consequence of queerness. In his study of sexual equality, legal critic Marc Stein argues that the Supreme Court contributed to the development of a hierarchy of citizenship by turning away from libertarian and egalitarian notions of sex amongst citizens. He explains: “the Court authorized special rights and privileges for adult, heterosexual, marital, monogamous, private, and procreative forms of sexual expression. The heteronormative doctrine simultaneously contributed to the ongoing formation of class, gender, and race hierarchies in the United States” (18). These hierarchies, according to the late Lionél Cantú, Jr., further stratify the legal concept of citizen, which he defines as composed by native-born and naturalized citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants rather than a singular legal category (45). At the intersection of these categories, Cantú argues, emerges the legitimate citizen subject: “the white heterosexual native-born American male,” which in turn “subordinated or delegitimized those of other groups, including migrants” (45). If we understand the ruling in Boutilier as the Court’s means to delegitimize the legal presence of a prospective citizen on the basis of his propensity to commit homosexual acts through a retrospective consideration of his sexual history, I will argue that The Rain God’s Felix offers us a more complex representation of queerness than Moraga suggests. In denying Due Process to Boutilier by refusing to acknowledge the vagueness of the exclusionary statute, the Supreme Court shifted accountability for vagueness from Congress to queer bodies, thus making the 1950s and 1960s a period where the slightest propensity to commit queer acts was deemed queer, rendering Felix gay in a legal sense. The arguments presented in the majority decision and dissent in Boutilier depict the state’s legal investment in maintaining the vagueness of the exclusionary statute to produce new modes of denying justice to queer bodies. While queer people were subject in the U.S. to legal disenfranchisement at the hand of an array of laws including the regulation of their sexual practices through sodomy laws, as presented in the opening chapter, the exclusion of queer people by deeming them psychopaths became, through immigration policy, the broadest way to regulate the expansion of a queer population in the U.S. It’s important to note that the immigration policy at the time was not interested in excluding queer people altogether, but instead presenting queer identity as a broad and

62 alterable category that allowed space for unforeseen characteristics and/or circumstances to define an excludable immigrant class. Canaday explains the new statute was “not a preexisting device that officials tried to retrofit to police homosexuality, it was rather designed with that purpose in mind…[T]he finely honed tool relied on ambiguity to do its work…‘Loosely written laws’ were called for because they widened the net as to what kinds of evidence could be ‘read’ by state officials as homosexuality” (215). Boutilier demonstrates, by considering the petitioner’s sexual history prior to his entry, that the legal net was cast widely enough to allow the courts to retroactively criminalize and delegitimize an immigrant identity that was once considered legal, suggesting citizenship and prospective citizenship are conditional not only on the current compliance with the law, but also with a personal propensity to comply with it. While the law was crafted to retroactively predict that a person could have a propensity to perform homosexual acts, it simultaneously institutionalized a standard that forces prospective immigrants to demonstrate a propensity to perform American citizenship. As Cantú explains, “American citizenship itself impels a performance, a fabricated act by which an actor must convince others that she/he is what she/he purports to be…. Immigrants to the United States are impelled to perform certain acts or…to make claims as if they were ‘citizens’” (36). The Court in Boutilier, I will demonstrate, demanded that immigrants perform citizenship not only in the present, as Cantú suggests, but also required a history of performing potential U.S. citizenship by threatening to retroactively delegitimize one’s legal presence in the country if one was not yet citizen. In this chapter, with the treatment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 in Boutilier as context, I will argue that Arturo Islas’ The Rain God offers through Felix an exploration of queer Chicano and immigrant identity that is less contrived than Moraga’s critique implies. As a character that functions as a primary point of contact between employers and immigrant workers, his willingness to informally perform invasive medical examinations required by law before their entry to the U.S. makes him complicit in the violation of standing immigration law. Through an analysis of his medical examinations of immigrant workers, unofficial physicals often sexually intrusive enough that they would disqualify a migrant worker for legal entry, I will argue that Felix facilitates a breach of the law that offers potentially queer migrants an avenue for entry to

63 the U.S. that remained unavailable through exclusionary immigration statues at the time the narrative takes place. Like the examinations, Felix’s contact with immigrants allows readers to understand that these exams not only revealed information about a person’s health, but also had the power to test, sometimes in violating ways, an immigrant’s propensity to commit homosexual acts or, conversely, perform heteronormative American citizenship. I will then analyze Felix’s brutal murder at the hands of a soldier he pursues and his family’s inaction in response to the event to demonstrate how the exclusionary statute enables social sentiments that make one ineligible to claim justice on the grounds of one’s queerness. By setting analyses of Felix’s invasive physical inspections alongside his murder and its aftermath, I will show that these examinations make Felix and said immigrants ineligible for the full protection of the law offered to heteronormative citizens and prospective citizens through the provision excluding psychopathic personalities from the U.S. In doing so, I intend to demonstrate that, while limited, Islas’ representation of queerness in The Rain God reveals a legal impulse to make individuals presumed to be queer unable to claim justice by assessing their propensity to perform queerness as antithetical to a performance of citizenship. That is, in allowing the retroactive analysis of queerness, exclusionary statutes such as those of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 make any prior performance of queerness potential evidence against a person’s rightful claim to the legal rights of citizenship. Queer in a Legal Sense: Vagueness and Retroactive (In)Justice In Boutilier, the court addresses Clive Michael Boutilier’s claim to having been unrightfully deported by ruling on whether or not legislators originally intended to exclude homosexuals from entry to the U.S. under the category of ‘psychopathic personalities’ in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The decision and dissent on the case reveal that in addressing the petitioner’s claim, the Court considered not only what it meant to be queer, but also what was required of an immigrant to be legally understood as a prospective citizen. Boutilier, then, outlines how an immigrant, documented or not, was understood as queer in a legal sense and how legislation regulating migration worked as a tool to further restrict queer behavior amongst the U.S. citizenry.

64 Before outlining a rationale for considering Boutilier a queer migrant, Clark’s opinion contextualizes the Court’s decision with the petitioner’s application for naturalization in the U.S. The majority opinion states: “The petitioner, an alien, has been ordered deported to Canada as one who upon entry into the country was a homosexual and therefore ‘afflicted with psychopathic personality’ and excludable” under the provisions of the 1952 immigration act (118). Having appealed a decision by the INS’s Special Inquiry Officer and the Court of Appeals, Boutilier argued that his exclusion under the law’s provision remained as vague, as his defense suggested, as any claim that the petitioner was himself homosexual as defined by the law. After affirming the Court of Appeal’s decision, the majority opinion swiftly moves from stating that the petitioner entered the country in 1955 to declaring: “In 1963 he applied for citizenship and submitted to the Naturalization Examiner an affidavit in which he admitted that he was arrested in New York in October 1959 on a charge of sodomy, which was later reduced to simple assault and thereafter dismissed on default of the complainant” (119). The Court later makes clear that the petitioner’s conduct after his entry is not relevant to the decision, implicitly presenting Boutilier as one who is unable to comply with the legal statutes regulating the lives of citizens, the same that limited the rights of queer citizens of the U.S. at the time.31 The Court then does not just consider the immigrant’s behavior prior to his entry, but identifies him as a person who prior to petitioning citizenship status was unable to perform lawful citizenship. As Cantú suggests, “Conventionally, democratic citizenship is conceptualized as a relationship of rights and obligations between an individual and the state” (40). In the context of Boutilier, these conventions are determined by legislative bodies and, given the level of domestic restrictions placed on queer residents of the U.S., to imagine queer migrants as potential citizens is contingent singularly on their ability to fulfill the obligations of citizenship by complying with the very laws that deny them rights as queer people.

31 The Court’s claim that Boutilier was afflicted with homosexuality then, which would legally deem him a psychopath, is only in reference to the Public Health Service’s (PHS) certification of his homosexuality in 1964, following his petition for citizenship in 1963. Because the PHS failed to legally identify the petitioner as a homosexual at the time of his entry in 1955, his deportation represents a judicial abuse of the law that required retroactively sanctioning the use of the 1964 medical assessment as a means for exclusion.

65 In characterizing Boutilier as unable to fulfill the conventional responsibilities of citizenship, the majority decision declares that the state is obligated to deport those who cannot abide by its laws. Because laws regulating migration to the U.S. are drafted in the legislative branch of government, its enforcement makes institutions like the Courts and the INS arbiters in determining who does or does not qualify for prospective citizenship in relation to the law. Given that immigration is one of the ways the U.S. has increased its population, the assessment of a migrant’s propensity to be citizen is integral to the regulation of the composition of the citizenry and definition of the nation.32 Eithne Luibhéid argues: “Immigration control is not just a powerful symbol of nationhood and people, but also a means to literally construct the nation and people in particular ways” (xviii original emphasis). In standing by Boutilier’s deportation order, then, the Court authorizes the state to construct its citizenry as not only heterosexual, but also anti- homosexual in ways that have implications for citizens and non-citizens alike. In his dissent to the majority decision, Justice William O. Douglas explains: “Deportation is the equivalent of banishment or exile” (132). By establishing a parallel relationship between deportation as a means to discipline immigrants to banishment/exile to implicitly refer to the extreme way in which citizens could be disciplined, Justice Douglas suggest the primary concern of the court was not to regulate migration as much as it was to illustrate how far the state could go in punishing the violation of the legal conventions of citizenship and heterosexuality outlined by Congress. In other words, because Boutilier, despite being a legal resident, had yet to attain citizenship status, the case demonstrated through his deportation just how far the state was willing to go to criminalize homosexual behavior and identity domestically and ascertain that immigrants are unable to apply for citizenship once again. While the state could not legally banish queer citizens, it did, in this instance, produce a definition of homosexuality that could lie outside of the definition of citizen. In order to uphold Boutilier’s deportation order, the Court had to compromise his ability to perform lawful citizenship by presenting acts between the petitioner and others of the same sex as a departure from the terms on which he was legally admitted to the

32 Luibhéid identifies four ways in which the U.S. has attained population: immigration, slavery, colonization, and reproduction (viii).

66 U.S. and deeming him a psychopath. The case then is less interested in showing how the state refuses to engage with queerness than it is with securing psychopathic behavior as the means by which the state mediates its relationship to queer people. The majority opinion states: [B]oth of petitioner’s psychiatrists “concede that the respondent has been a homosexual for a number of years but conclude that by reason of such sexual deviation the respondent is not a psychopathic personality.” Finding against petitioner on the facts, the issue before the officer was reduced to the purely legal question of whether the term “psychopathic personality” included homosexuals and if it suffered illegality because of vagueness. (120)

While the law deems excludable, in this context, specifically those identified as psychopathic personalities, Clark’s shifts early in the case from attending to the relationship between queer behavior as symptomatic of psychopathy to the legal relationship between queer people and the state as mediated by the law’s terminology.33 In doing so, he avoids criminalizing the relationship between same-sex partners, already criminalized domestically, in favor of challenging the relationship a queer person could have with the state as a potential citizen. If as Cantú argues, “Citizenship is a socially constructed identity that delimits an individual’s relationship to a political community (in this context the nation state),” rendering Boutilier’s queer behavior a strictly legal question makes the decision one specifically concerned with deeming the petitioner an undesirable potential citizen rather than one that is invested in criminalizing only his queer behavior (40). Consequently, defining queer immigrants as unable to fulfill the obligations of citizenship served the secondary purpose of delegitimizing the citizenship status of queer people in the U.S. Despite the clinical assessment that determined that a correlation between queerness and psychopathic behavior was different than that vaguely expressed in the immigration statute, the Court’s logic suggested that because homosexuality historically disqualified one from lawful entry to the U.S., the exclusionary clause legally deemed a queer person a psychopath. In the drafting stages of the immigration statute, the

33 It’s worth noting that while the public definition of homosexuality as mental illness was not exclusive to the Court, Justice Clark’s hesitation to conflate homosexuality with psychopathy serves as evidence of an early departure from pathologizing queerness.

67 Public Health Service (PHS), charged with the medical examination of documented immigrants, suggested that the term “psychopathic personalities” would be a suitable term to replace the explicit exclusion of queer people from migrating to the U.S. However, by the time of the Court’s ruling on Boutilier, the PHS “admits the term is ‘vague and indefinite,’” according Douglas’ dissent (130). However, despite the PHS’s shift in its stance, the Court looked toward the drafting history of the case to make its decision. Justice Clark explains: “The legislative history of the Act indicated that beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Congress intended the phrase ‘psychopathic personality’ to include homosexuals such as the petitioner” (120). Because, as the majority opinion notes, one component of the primary legal question at hand is whether the term is illegal due to its vagueness, Clark’s dismissal of the PHS’s opinion on the terminology as insufficient for the deportation of the petitioner leads the court to define under what terms a queer immigrant is excludable from potential citizenship. Canaday suggests the Court established two “givens: first, the notion that homosexuality designated not merely a behavior, but a kind of person, and second, that homosexual persons were psychopaths— incapable of being good citizens—and therefore excluded under the terms of the immigration law” (241). Thus, when the PHS retracted its commitment to identifying homosexuality as a symptom of psychopathy, the Court relied on a legal diagnosis to determine who is fit to perform U.S. citizenship. In doing so, it not only ruled against queer migrants, but explicitly challenged queer people’s right to justice by denying them Due Process in characterizing them as unable to responsibly exercise citizenship. In order to uphold the deportation of Boutilier, the Court relied on his prior same- sex relationships as symptomatic of an outlawed condition. The majority opinion states: “The existence of this condition over a continuous and uninterrupted period prior to and at the time of petitioner’s entry clearly supports the ultimate finding upon which the order of deportation was based” (123). The majority’s rationale, then, proposes that despite any kind of change in his behavior, his prior performance of queerness gives the state grounds to challenge the legality of Boutilier’s subsequent entry to the U.S. This logic offers what Cantú identifies as the particular outcome of the ruling: if the law intended to limit the entry of queer people to the U.S. and Boutilier’s behavior was used to identify him as a queer migrant, then the Court’s legal logic supported his exclusion on the basis of a

68 singular behavioral characteristic. However, “it did not solve the problem of determining resolutely who exactly had this characteristic—who exactly was the “homosexual”?” (Cantú 50, original emphasis). Because the PHS had determined the term “psychopathic personality” unsuitable as a de facto diagnosis for queer behavior, the question gained particular relevance in the aftermath of the Court’s decision.34 Boutilier, by upholding the legality of the vague immigration statute, strengthened the authority of institutional entities such as the INS to identify excludable identities, specifically queerness. Queer people’s exclusion, therefore, was not a result of their own disclosure of queer identities or behavior, but rather a consequence of state agencies procedurally gathering evidence to warrant the deportation of those suspect of being queer. Luibhéid suggest that this institutionalized persecution is reflective of the history of queer migration to the U.S.: “For it was not lesbians and gay men who initially sought to be recognized by the immigration service. On the contrary, it was the immigration service that sought, in sometimes bizarre and frightening ways, to identify and penalize lesbians and gay men who tried to enter the country” (ix). The vague clause, in granting power to the INS to develop means to incite queer immigrants to declare their homosexuality before the state, stripped them from not only access to potential legal residence in the U.S., but also limited the ways in which they might come to understand and articulate their own respective sexualities. Overriding the complex ways in which a migrant might identify him/herself as queer allowed the state to reduce immigrants’ sexual identities to a means of identifying them as potential citizens or as Other. Canaday

34 By the late 1970s, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), formerly in charge of certifying a queer immigrant’s sexuality, relinquished such responsibilities. The INS responded by explaining the PHS was mandated to comply with the inspections by law. The conflict reached its height, as Canaday explains, when British alien Carl Hill appeared at the San Francisco port of entry in June of 1979 wearing a gay pride button…. When he was ordered by the INS to a PHS hospital for examination he (with attorneys for the San Francisco based Gay Rights Advocates) brought suit against Surgeon General [Julius B.] Richmond to prevent the exam” (250). Within a week of settling the case, “Richmond issues a memo stating that the APA considered homosexuality a ‘form of behavior’ and not a medical defect. The ‘determination of homosexuality could not be made through medical diagnostic procedure,’” therefore advising the INS to halt referrals of immigrants suspected of being homosexual to PHS hospitals for certification (Canaday 250). Procedurally, Richmond’s suggestion dismantled the vague process through which immigrants, like Boutilier, had been deemed excludable since 1965’s immigration act.

69 explains that rather than respecting “the complexity of the sexual lives of aliens they encountered…. The INS and the courts instead imposed a simple (and simplifying) equation: homosexual act=homosexual person=psychopath =deportation” (246). Thus, to maintain a definition of homosexual acts as evidence to deport an immigrant, the Court required the protection of the clause’s vagueness despite its violation of Boutilier’s right to Due Process. In conjunction with domestic policy policing the performance and visibility of queer people in the U.S., as I discuss in Chapter 1, the majority opinion in Boutilier consolidates the state’s disposition to mediate its interactions with queer citizens and immigrants through suspicion. The Supreme Court’s overreach in Boutilier demonstrates a judicial complicity with a legislative intent to manipulate the law to justify restrictions on queer people’s access to just and fair treatment before the law. In this context, those who are subject to the law are as suspect of failing to perform normative sexuality and citizenship as the state is of denying queer people a fair and equal treatment in the drafting and administration of the law. Cultural theorist Michael Hames-García proposes: “Given the many reasons for being suspicious of state legal systems, a question that arises is how (or whether) one can pursue justice in opposition to such structures” (XXVII). He observes that contemporary legal theory fails to consider the ways in which the lived experiences of those subject to the law can inform a revised understanding of the realities of existing legislation. In other words, the law does not emerge from those who have to live within the prescribed parameters defined as just, yielding legal systems that make suspicion of failing to uphold a behavioral standard the very means by which justice is administered. In Boutilier, the Court dismisses the petitioner’s claim in favor of strengthening the power of the state to determine not only what full membership in the nation requires, but what characteristics a participant, citizen or not, must hold in order to ascertain membership. According to Canaday, “In doing so, the Court determined that the homosexual was a kind of person, but more importantly it rejected the medical terms on which homosexual identity had historically been based. The Court described homosexuality as a legal-political identity category” (245). As an alternative to the tension between positive and natural law, which in this case redefined queerness through

70 the legal pursuit of suspicion, Hames-García proposes that a different legal landscape can emerge from “theories that have the possibility of being judged more or less accurate according to how well they account for the causal features of the world…(that is those features that influence how we act, think, or exist),” that consider “subjectivity in knowledge-generating practices and…unobservable (yet causal) aspects of reality” (XXV).35 If the Court refused in Boutilier to recognize the petitioner’s challenge to the law as constructively contributing to a more just administration of the law, the ruling delegitimizes his entry to the U.S. to produce a queer legal-political identity category purposefully unintelligible to the law, identifying him as unproductive as a prospective citizen. The ruling in Boutilier, in effect, produced for queer people a diluted notion of citizenship by defining heterosexuality not only as an obligation of the citizen, but also a condition through which immigrants to the U.S. could be imagined as prospective citizens. By upholding the petitioner’s deportation, the Court reinforced a selective notion of legal belonging that “enabled the discursive production of exclusionary forms of nationalism that took concrete shape in immigration laws and procedures, but extended well beyond the border to produce particular visions of the U.S. nation and citizenry” (Luibhéid xi). Though legal statutes criminalizing queerness existed at local levels of government, a more explicit vision of purging the nation from queer people emerged from the administration of immigration law. Because queer immigrants were legally deemed disposable due to their assumed or actual homosexuality, queer citizens were understood as minimally protected from exclusion by the fact that they were born in the U.S. despite being envisioned as otherwise undesirable constituents of the nation. In the context of Mexican immigration, Cantú argues: “if a Mexican man is marked as marginal (i.e., outside the imagined ‘Mexican’ community) before migration, then a very real social separation may precede the actual physical separation of migration” (33, original emphasis). Similarly, in marking queer people as extraneous to the imagined nation, queer citizens and immigrants are legally separated from the citizenry before they are

35 He terms this post-positive realism. See Fugitive Thought (2004), Paula L. Moya’s Learning from Experience (2002), and their co-edited collection Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the predicament of Postmodernism.

71 ever legally persecuted and/or deported. Cantú adds: “Moreover, a gay immigrant’s liminal phase may persist regardless of his or her legal status. The gay immigrant is an outsider in more than one respect, for as an ‘erotic minority’ he or she has transgressed society’s moral, sexual, and even gender borders” (34). If citizenship is considered as a category composed by hierarchical gradations of a person’s legality before the state, then all members suspect of belonging to such an erotic minority lie at the margins of full citizenship. In other words, queer people, regardless of legal status, are subject to a full subset of laws that make their membership or prospective inclusion in the citizenry “less than” rather than absolute. By retroactively identifying Boutilier as queer at the time of entry, the Court proposes that for queer people such subjection is not chronologically limited, but instead functions as a timeless threat where collected evidence that legally confirms one’s non-normative sexuality can be used to regulate one’s past, present, and future claims to the category of citizen. Thus, a queer citizen is never really quite fully such; rather, queer citizens are always conditionally citizen. Queer in a Literary Sense Despite being a university professor, poet, and novelist groomed intellectually at the height of the Chicano Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Arturo Islas’ relationship with the political strife of Chicano communities has been considered quite complex. Thought of as somewhat conservative in his engagement to the racial and sexual politics of his time, the author of The Rain God, according to Aldama, “did not exactly follow a 1970s brown-power ideological line. He made efforts to keep politics separate from cultural-aesthetic endeavors, though he understood why traditionally marginalized groups identified the personal as political” (xiii). In a historical context, Islas’ relationship with the political can be understood as informed by the Chicano Movement’s own implicit rejection of queer people as it devised an imagined a Chicano national voice grounded in traditional family structures, able-bodied notions of labor, and culturally entrenched gender roles.36 So, while Islas might have understood the instances in which an individual’s personal experiences could be understood as political, the movement that purportedly sought to make political claims on his behalf did not represent his particular personal experiences as a queer disabled person of color. Literary

36 See El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.

72 critic Yolanda Padilla explains: “For him, the idea that the writer should voice an agenda, political or otherwise, was an affront to artistic integrity central to any literary endeavor and one that would result in inferior work,” noting that the author explicitly critiqued the publishing institutions emerging from the movement as challenging the freedom of Chicano authors by pressuring the latter to “create ‘positive Chicano images’” (13). In his first novel, Islas fails to comply with the demand of Chicano publishers to represent sanitized cultural portraits of Chicano/a identity and instead explores the tragedy of tradition by observing the experiences of a Mexican-American family from the perspective of, as the novel implies, a gay narrator. Islas’ choice to present the story as an account by a gay character drew divided critical responses in relationship to how his work addresses the assumed challenges of gay Chicanos, “reprimanding him for failing to produce fiction that explicitly supported that community or by embracing him as a forthright gay advocate, despite the much more complicated picture that arises when one examines his life and work” (Padilla 14). Yet, despite his own opinions on the relationship between art and politics and the critical responses celebrating or condemning his representation of Chicano queer identity in the novel, The Rain God does historically situate queer subjectivity as not quite Mexican or American. Islas ambiguously portrays the queerness of his characters as the locus of disenfranchisement where Chicano political ambition and U.S. legal authority intersect. In the second half of this chapter, I will focus on Islas’ ambiguous treatment of queer identity in The Rain God by analyzing his portrayal of the novel’s most explicitly queer character, Felix Angel. I will situate my analysis in the historical context of the legal implications of Boutilier to illustrate that Islas’ project, in addition to a tension with heteronormative Chicano cultural traditions, demonstrates an explicit historical interest in the legal treatment of queer migrants and citizens in the U.S. Antonio C. Márquez contends: “Simply put, the difference between Islas’s novels and other Chicano historical narratives is his innovative historical imagination…. [I]t offers a historicity that places the characters in relation to history and culture, and it also discloses the author’s recasting of interpretation of history” (5). If, indeed, Islas’ engagement with history reflects the particular tension of U.S. and Chicano culture with queer identity in the present, the

73 critical interrogation of his vague representation of sexuality at the time of the novel’s publication is a product of the historical moment. Historically set when queerness was regulated federally by immigration law and locally through state statutes, a consideration of Felix’s expression of same-sex desire in and outside of the workplace at the Texas-Mexico border, the geographical setting of the novel, allow for a more forgiving reading of Islas’ own cultural intervention in a legal and cultural understanding of queer identity. Felix’s sexuality, literary critic Michael Hardin argues, is most accurately understood as “closeted, and it is this insistence in Del Sapo37 on heterosexuality that forces Félix into the unhealthy manifestations of his sexuality” (237). As a character that pursues same-sex extramarital affairs and has an intimate relationship with his son, JoEl, Felix offers a point of entry to a discussion of a variety of culturally and legally unsanctioned relationships with men, though these are rarely fully presented as rape or incest. In regard to such a representation of queerness, Padilla suggests: “Felix is neither a ‘positive image’ of Chicano subjectivity nor a figure of oppositional gay pride. While we find no culminating achievement of either of these paradigms of identity in Felix, what we do find are quietly persistent indications that a mass of uneven power dynamics informs his expressions of sexuality and masculinity” (15). These unrealized illicit relationships, for Felix, function as a means to distinguish queer desire from potential violations ignored by the state’s surveillance in favor of the criminalization of homosexuality altogether. Islas’ representation of queerness is then at best unsettling—a depiction that refuses to settle on a dismissal of the complexity with which queer bodies navigate cultural and legal landscapes that blur the parameters of licit and illicit at a historical juncture where queer people’s access to belonging and justice are limited in both Chicano and U.S. contexts. Potential Citizenship Though the novel does offer a glimpse into Felix’s private domestic life, the majority of the sections dedicated to the character involve his engagement with other men in public spaces. The first half of the novel details the observations of the Miguel Chico as he explains the family’s relationship to the his grandmother’s ideas regarding her

37 The city in which the novel takes place emulates El Paso, Texas. In the sequel to the novel, which revisits the Angel family, the city is identified as Del Sapo.

74 bloodline’s purity in relationship to those she deems sinners. While what makes Felix a sinner remains unspoken amongst the family, Miguel Chico offers portrayals of his uncle outside of the domestic setting to illustrate how Felix relates to those Mama Chona considers unworthy of her family’s attention. One of the first descriptions Islas provides of Felix outside of a domestic setting describes his employment: “He had been a graveyard shift laborer when his daughters, Yerma and Magdalena, were very young, but after Roberto and JoEl were born he was promoted to regular shift foreman. In the last five years, he had been put in charge of hiring cheap Mexican workers” (115). Though the novel rarely dwells on the legal status of the family’s migration, Felix becomes the principal character through which Islas explores the border as a legal demarcation. Islas is careful to present Felix as a character that wields authority over immigrants by virtue of his legal status in the U.S., arguably citizen. For instance, the narrator explains: “He had accepted the promotion on the condition that these men immediately be considered candidates for American citizenship and had been surprised when the bosses agreed. After thirty –five years, he was content with his work at the factory” (115). While Padilla explains that Felix’s insistence on making citizenship accessible to Mexican laborers “indicates the importance he [Felix] places on social justice,” I would add that it also presents Felix as one who is continuously engaged in the production of Chicano subjects. Having the influence to hire potential citizens after the birth of his fourth child, Felix’s ability to produce American citizens is not limited to biological reproduction (26). He continues to expand the citizenry not just by procreating, but also by producing additional citizens by maximizing the legal authority offered to him by his employer and mediating which and under what conditions immigrants could enter the country to work. This particular form of citizen production allows Felix to be, arguably, the character with the most influence in the expansion of Chicano communities in the novel. However empathetic Felix’s concern for Mexican’s prospective American citizenship makes him, the novel stresses the character’s preoccupation with his responsibility to traffic migrant laborers. The narrator explains: “The Mexicans he hired reminded Felix of himself at that age, men willing to work for any wage as long as it fed their families while strange officials supervised the preparation of their papers” (115). By construing the employees as reminiscent of his own early concern with financial stability,

75 the narrative creates a positive correlation between Felix’s own identity and that of the people he hires. If he was once like them, through government intercession they come closer to being like him. To be clear, the novel does not present this as an assimilationist gesture from Felix’s perspective. Rather, it illustrates how Felix’s own subjectivity, despite having the power to convince his employers to make citizenship available to those employed, is not that of the government or that of the immigrant employee, but rather one not quite Mexican or American, but a hybrid cultural identity to which he intends to initiate those he employs. Describing Felix’s position, the narrator states: “As a middleman between them and the promises of North America, he knew he was in a loathsome position of being what Mexicans called a coyote; for that reason, he worked hard to gain their affection” (115). Though the narrator, seemingly sympathetic to Felix, simply alludes to the character’s role as a coyote, Padilla describes it as “the pejorative term for those who act as intermediaries between Mexicans trying to find work in the United States and U.S. contractors looking to cheap labor. They are viewed as dishonorable in Chicana/o culture because of their willingness to exploit their countrymen and women for personal gain” (18). By presenting Felix’s relationship with the migrant laborers as both benevolent, as an intermediary between them and the state, and disgraceful, as a coyote, Felix is conveyed as a character that is neither exclusively oppressing nor oppressed. Rather, Islas offers Felix as a complicated character who, operating in both modes, demonstrates how this very contradiction renders his authority null later in the context of queer oppression. If Felix, as the narrator suggests, is interested in gaining the affection of the migrant workers he is charged to hire, his primary means of doing so are the physical examinations he performs on them. The novel describes Felix’s understanding of affection through his relationship to their bodies: “Even after losing most of his own hair and the muscles he had developed during his early years on the job, he had not lost his admiration for masculine beauty. As he grew older that admiration, instead of diminishing as he had expected, had become an obsession for which he sought remedy in simple and careless ways” (116). In procuring the affection of his employees, he also gives way to an admiration of their bodies in seemingly sanctioned contexts. The examinations “consisted of tests for hernias and prostate trouble and did not go beyond

76 that unless the young worker, awareness glinting with his trousers down, expressed an interest in more” (Islas 116). His relationship with immigrant workers, whose access to documented status and employment are contingent on these examinations, reveal the power his authority as citizen wields demonstrating how it can be employed for purposes beyond those required of the examination. Padilla suggests: “The transgression here is not that Felix initiates sexual contact with other men, but that he uses subterfuge to make that contact possible and does so in a situation in which he holds tremendous power over his employees” (27). However, the historical state-mandated examinations were similarly not limited to the inspection of an immigrant’s health and instead, like Felix, allowed those preforming them to try to infer homosexual identity from the immigrant’s response to the physical. In a legal context, of course, this kind of physical contact becomes illicit in the moment that it exceeds the required medical examination without offering those who allegedly welcome Felix’s advances to the state for deportation. However, Felix’s invasive inspections otherwise share the same purpose with those mandated by the INS: identifying people’s propensity to commit queer acts. Though the novel does suggest that Felix’s examinations should be understood as an exploitative exercise of authority, the narrator continues to present the character in a favorable light by describing his guilt over performing those procedures on those that do not consent to them. The narrator notes: “The offended, who left hurriedly, were careful to disguise their disgust and anger for fear of losing their jobs. He could not find words to assure them. In most cases, however, the men submitted to Felix’s expert and surprisingly gentle touch, thanked him, and left without seeing the awe and tension on his face” (117). The narrator is careful to note Felix’s unease with negative responses to the medical examinations, which could culminate in his own public indictment as a queer person. In contrast with the description of those who might consent to Felix’s touch, those who don’t reveal that Felix’s authority finds its limits where performances of heterosexuality begin to function as corrective interventions to legally deviant behavior. His response, more importantly, underscores how the identification of queer people for prosecution is privileged over considering the potential sexual assault immigrants are vulnerable to as part of state-sanctioned procedural inspections.

77 To consider Felix’s medical examinations exclusively exploitative circumvents the critique of immigration policy and its relationship to queer identity in the novel. In the description of the logistics of the procedure, the narrator explains: “Before they were permitted to become full-time employees, the men were required to have physical examinations. These examinations, Felix told them, were absolutely necessary and, if done by him, were free of charge” (116). As previously mentioned, Padilla reads it as a form of deception where Felix, “seemingly unaware of his transgression…sexually exploits these young men when they first arrive at their jobs and are at their most vulnerable” (26). Similarly, literary critic Rosaura Sánchez proposes that while the novel is “ambivalent about Felix, presenting him as a gentle man who is not bigoted like the rest of the Angel family,” it features “his exploitations of Mexican workers whom he hires as factory foremen and fondles under the pretense of a necessary medical examination” (70). While poignant, the critical consensus fails to account for the institutionalized requirement of medical examinations to determine whether an immigrant was a homosexual/psychopath following the adoption of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. While, as portrayed, the examinations were indeed an abuse of power, the intent here subverts the state’s mechanism to exclude queer migrants. Because in Boutilier the Supreme Court determined that the petitioner was excludable for being afflicted with psychopathy/homosexuality at the time of entry, Islas’ critique is particularly relevant for situating the examinations at the men’s time of entry. If having sexual encounters with men allowed the court to enforce Boutilier’s deportation, Felix turns the medical examinations, typically performed by PHS physicians authorized by the INS, into places where immigrant workers go from potential citizens to legally excludable migrants and where his own authority as citizen loses meaning as a queer man. The stakes, however, are lower for Felix as he, unlike those immigrants consenting to his advances, does not risk deportation. The critique of the examinations as manipulative and exploitative, while applicable, cannot solely be placed on Felix, for while his intent is to come in intimate contact with the laborers, the intent in the actual institutionalized examinations was to identify immigrants who could be excluded for engaging in the very acts portrayed in the novel. To indict Felix’s actions exclusively as intruding violations of immigrant bodies

78 fails to account for other functions this complex representation of queerness offers. If the state engages in similar medical inspections with the purpose of deporting those it identifies as queer, queer immigrants who might consent to Felix’s inspections are less likely to be deported by virtue of their queerness. In this case, Felix’s examinations subvert the relationship between the state and queerness by making the invasive procedure one that allows otherwise excludable immigrants entry to and documented status in the U.S. And while Felix does not risk deportation, he is exposed to other forms of prosecution, specifically in violation of sodomy laws that, as discussed in the first chapter, would deem his physical contact with men criminal. His depiction is intended to be unsettling, particularly in depicting fictional prospective violations that were, at the time, a standard immigration procedure. Despite creating a space within the system through which queer immigrants might be afforded the opportunity to enter the U.S., his inspections are presented as bordering on sexual assault. However, the text, in mirroring the procedural inspections mandated by the INS, serves as an indictment of the potential violations of queer people at the hand of the state that, unlike Felix, can suffer no prospective consequence in intrusively inspecting the queer-identified body. Thus, while problematic, Felix’s examinations put a crack in the legal restriction that filters queer people from those who are understood to effectively perform heteronormative citizenship, granting those who consent to his advances access to citizenship in a historical-legal context in which they would otherwise be subject to deportation. While the novel’s treatment of Felix in relationship to the immigrant laborers is brief, it anchors an understanding of his sexuality as subversive despite the fact that it is not made public in the novel. As the narrator concludes the description of Felix’s examinations, he notes that the men, consenting or not, had a common response: “It did not occur to them that a man might take pleasure in touching them so intimately…. Most forgot the experience, occasionally referred to him behind his back but affectionately as Jefe Joto, and were grateful for the extra money he gave them for the sick child at home” (116-117). If Felix sought to ascertain their affection, he managed to do so, but in a way that itself calls attention to the complex way in which Felix embodies both the oppressor and the oppressed. If Felix’s role as a boss requires his determination of whether someone can qualify for labor and citizenship, in a historical context where his actions

79 and the migrant worker’s responses could serve as evidence for the latter to be deemed excludable, then the affectionate and oxymoronic term Jefe Joto—gay boss—implies how Felix himself is recognized as queer (Padilla 28). In regard to his sexual advances, Padilla contends: “His unorthodox sexual practices and desires blur the boundaries between straight and gay, masculine and feminine, passive and aggressive,” to which I would add licit and illicit (26). This reciprocated expression of affection, as discrete as Felix’s own sexual encounters may be, identify him as queer, which in other contexts could have life-threatening implications that remind readers that despite being citizen and an authority in the workforce, those privileges find their limits in the extreme means by which the state polices and punishes those who fail to perform heterosexual citizenship. “Felix had time to be afraid” As the novel hints at Felix’s extramarital encounters with men, his relationship with his wife Angie splinters, particularly as Felix develops a closer relationship with his son JoEl. The primary conflict in The Rain God is the vexed relationship the various members of the Angel family have with the importance Mama Chona places on her descendants leading a dignified life, which in Felix’s case is presented through his marriage to Angie and his sexual advances on other men. Despite Mama Chona’s insistence, as the novel suggests, that her children marry partners whose indigenous ancestry is not evident in their skin tone, Felix marries Angie, though his family “thought her a ‘lower-class Mexican’” (120). For R. Sánchez, Mama Chona and the Angel family’s traditional views on race and class inform Felix’s deep-rooted insecurity, one caught between his marriage’s affront to the family’s entrenched racist and colorist ideology and his own pursuit of fair-skinned men outside of the domestic setting. She argues: “this ideology is not unconscious; it assumes concrete manifestations at every turn. Because fair skin is a mark of worth for the Angel family, Félix, for example, has to marry Angie without his mother’s blessing since his wife is considered…an ‘Indian’ for being dark complected” (R. Sánchez 72). Yet again, Islas stifles Felix’s portrayal as an ethical counterpart to racial disenfranchisement by rooting his attraction to whiteness within the home. Before the narrator accounts for his interest in fair-skinned men outside the domestic space, he alludes to Felix’s incestuous attraction to his son, JoEl, who unlike his siblings has fair skin and “cinnamon eyes” (119). The narrator describes Felix’s

80 relationship with his fourteen-year-old son: “His protective feelings for the child perplexed and disoriented him because they seemed stronger than his desire for his wife…. Slowly, without intending it, [Angie] stifled her own desires and lay awake watching her husband and son in their timeless embrace,” which eventually leads Angie to leave the conjugal bedroom and sleep on a cot in her daughter Lena’s bedroom (122- 23). This relationship illustrates that the character’s “unconscious shame and guilt about his ethnicity and race become entangled with his insecurities as a homosexual” (M. E. Sánchez 291). Its important to consider, however, that in addition to revealing Felix’s relationship to race and queerness, the closeness he maintains with his son does so in ways that are socially unsanctioned. So, when Islas does present Felix as complying with his mother’s persistence in his children pursuing fair-skinned people, he does so in a way that brands an interest in whiteness illicit. Felix’s relationship with his son, while in some ways a reflection of his troubled relationship with race and homosexuality, cannot be considered outside of the lack of legal security for queer people. The critical attention on the father-son relationship focuses primarily on the correlation between JoEl and the soldiers Felix admires later in the novel. The narrator details that while at a local bar, Felix observes a soldier walk in, “the light outside blinded him so that he saw only a silhouette of a young man in uniform cross the threshold. JoEl’s eyes disappeared into the far corner of the room” (118). The allusion to JoEl in the description of the soldier, who Felix would later pursue, and “The innuendos about Felix sleeping with his son…in Angie’s absence from the marriage bed,” for M. E. Sánchez, “suggest Felix might have sexually assaulted his young son” (293).38 The scene in which the soldier enters the bar, however, is almost immediately preceded by a quarrel between Felix and one of his employees. When Felix hears one of them refer to him as Jefe Joto, he stares at the laborer, prompting him to respond: “‘Hey, Jefe, it was only a joke,’ after which the narrator explains, “The young Mexican pronounced the English ‘j’ like a ‘y’ and Felix said to him angrily, ‘Hey, pendejo, why

38 It’s important to note here that in making this argument, critics ignore a passage in the novel that explains how Felix disassociates his pursuit of men with his family relationships: “He was secure in the love of his children, even when they quarreled with him, and he knew that Angie loved him. He was not looking for any of them in this boy’s [an American soldier] mouth. He was looking for something else” (135).

81 don’t you stop being a stupid wetback and learn English?’ Then murmuring an apology” (117). The narrator follows the observation regarding the man’s pronunciation by noting: “Any disagreement with JoEl caused Felix to be irritated with everyone,” demonstrating that his altercation with the workers is informed and even echoes a prior disagreement with his son, JoEl (117). Given Felix’s earlier description of the migrant laborers as reminders of his former self and the peculiar stylization of his son’s name, the parenthesis in the narrative between the factory and bar scenes asks readers to consider that JoEl can also be understood as pronounced YoEl—I/him. If the novel, in fact, implies a thematic association between the migrant workers and JoEl and his physical contact with both is inferred to be improper, Islas foregrounds the illegality of these affairs based on the objects of Felix’s desire rather than criminalizing queer desire altogether in anticipation of his eventual murder. So when literary critic John Alba Cutler, for instance, describes Felix as “unarguably machista, taking advantage of his power as father and employer,” he limits his reading to only two ways in which the character’s behavior can be considered suspect without acknowledging that, regardless of who the object of Felix’s queer desire might be, his homosexuality is already itself considered unlawful (15). Such a reading, while pointing toward the unequal power relationships between Felix and the men her pursues, never fully account for the relationships of power between Felix and the state. In fact, though unsettling, Felix’s implied sexual abuse of immigrant workers and his son successfully guides readers to identify potential rape and incest, rather than the character’s propensity to engage in homosexual acts, as criminal. Legally, Felix’s queerness is criminal outside of the specifics of his same-sex relationships. That is, suspicion of sexual assault and/or incest is legally secondary to suspicion of homosexuality in a cultural context where queer people are already understood by the state to have a propensity to commit criminal sex acts, as I illustrate in my discussion of Bowers v. Hardwick in the first chapter. In implying that Felix’s (Yo) relationships to a male (El) are illicit in the context of his professional or familial relationship to them, Islas relieves the burden placed on queerness as a criminal behavior at a time when any queer relationship between Yo and El is deemed legally unsanctioned by shifting the reader’s attention to potential sex acts that are also elicit outside of homosexual contexts. Islas, then, makes Felix’s relationships

82 with Mexican laborers and his son readily understandable as potential physical violations to challenge his audience to recognize physical abuses of queer people outside of queer contexts as violations the state’s criminalization elides by making queerness synonymous with sexual perversion. Felix’s brutal murder at the hands of an American soldier serves as the centerpiece of the novel, a result of the character’s most explicit sexual pursuit of another man. Unlike Felix’s relationships with his prospective immigrant employees or his son, which are never quite detailed, the narrator’s account of his uncle’s advances on the soldier are described from the moment he meets him to the moment he is killed using legal institutions and demarcations as backdrops for the pursuit. The narrator explains: “Felix and the young soldier had met in a bar around the corner from the courthouse. The bar serves minors and caters to servicemen and has enough of an ambiguous reputation to be considered an interesting or suspicious place by the townspeople on the ‘American’ side of the river,” noting that typically, “the citizens north of the river went to dives and nightclubs across the border in search of release or fantasy and returned to their homes refreshed, respectably intact” (114, 114-115). The setting suggests that there is some illicit behavior, such as serving minors, which can occur within proximity to the court and remain ignored law enforcement. In describing the patrons of the bar as citizens, the text implies that their identity as such requires them to uphold particular standards of social and sexual behavior. Any deviation from such standards can only be explored across the river, ensuring that their masculinity remains unquestioned upon their return to the U.S. Within the legal setting, Felix’s pursuit of the soldier takes on an additional meaning; not only is his pursuit one where he intends to physically express his admiration and desire for other men, but in the context of the novel it will also test the limits of his own citizenship as a queer person. M. E. Sánchez contends that Felix’s pursuit “activates a series of hierarchical oppositions that go back to a remote historical past…. [But] also evoke hierarchies of ethnicity and sexuality in Felix’s contemporary moment: the young Anglo heterosexual soldier…with the older, Chicano, homosexual Felix” (292). While the novel restages to the moment of European conquest by positioning Felix as the conquistador, it also restages U.S. immigration to Mexico prior to Texas independence to

83 compare the historical power of whiteness to the continuous powerlessness of brownness in a contemporary U.S. context. The narrator explains: “Once [Felix] had assured them that he was not interested in them for any perverse reason, they fell into his charming trap. Later, when he did make sexual allusions…they either responded according to their needs and desires or in embarrassed abrupt ways. Felix did not force them to do anything they did not want to do” (135). More so than the immigrant laborers, these soldiers have a bodily autonomy secured by their citizenship. While the heterosexual immigrant laborers have the opportunity to dismiss Felix’s advances, their relationship with him continues to be subordinate within the work place. On the other hand, Felix’s queer identity makes him subordinate to U.S. soldiers despite both of their status as citizen within a historical- legal framework. While the soldiers can arguably maintain their prospective employment in response to their discretion, as citizens the soldiers don’t stand to gain anything from dismissing Felix’s sexual interest. In this sense, the novel’s representation of soldiers’ refusal negates Felix’s earlier representation as a conquistador, presenting the soldiers as subordinating Felix’s queer brown body and erasing any undesirable element of his identity, namely queerness. The novel illustrates that unlike the historically forceful takeover by white colonizers, the limits of Felix’s conquest are the decisions made by the soldiers in their response to his sexual propositions, suggesting that despite both being citizens, Felix’s citizenship is understood in specific contexts as different from that of the soldiers he attempts to seduce. If, as I contend, Felix’s pursuit of the young soldier also constitutes The Rain God’s exploration of the limits of citizenship for queer people of color, the former’s murder presents the most extreme denial of citizenship. Given that in the novel’s historical setting federal courts are actively deciding how to expel queer immigrants and Felix’s own relationship with citizenship is presented as procuring a documented status for Mexican laborers following required physical examinations, his murder can be understood as the state’s corrective action upon its recognition of Felix as queer. After a brief verbal exchange, Felix offers to drive the soldier from the bar near the courthouse to the military base, suggesting they stop by a canyon to observe the setting sun. The soldier states he’d rather not go to the canyon, but Felix insists on a brief stop, placing his hand on the soldier’s thigh, to the former’s disapproval, soon after their arrival to their

84 destination. The narrator describes Felix’s persistence and the soldier’s response: “‘Don’t be scared. I’m not going to hurt you. Let’s have some…’ The blows began before he finished. They were a complete surprise to him, and the anger behind them stunned and paralyzed him,” before he opens the door to fall out of the car insisting he was joking (137). Hardin, reading Felix as a bisexual character, explains: “Given the rampant homophobia of the border, it does not make sense that his murder is precipitated by the threat to the binary [gay/straight]; more likely, it is caused by the queer ‘threat’ to a heterocentric society” (236). It’s important to note, here, that queerness is only understood as a threat insofar as it is embodied, the novel suggests, by a queer citizen on the U.S. side of the border, for if queer desire is to be expressed by a U.S. citizen, it has a haven in Mexico free of consequence in the U.S. The soldier’s attack of Felix is not just a rejection of unwanted advances, but a literal undoing of the citizen through physical violence, as the narrator describes: “The stones in his mouth looked like teeth as he spat them out, and he turned to avoid the blows to his back. The kicking continued and he felt great pain in his groin and near his heart” (137). In an act of sexual policing, the soldier not only pushes Felix away, but also mangles and tears his body apart physically literally unmaking the queer citizen. In beating his genitals and chest, the soldier denies not only Felix’s physical and emotional expression of queer desire, but furthermore the queer citizen’s very right to exist. Padilla asserts: “his murder redefines the marginalized ethnic and sexual body as always mediated by horrific trauma” (13). She adds, given that the narrative structure of the novel places the account of his death after the discovery of his body, “Underscoring this notion, the first time the narrative presents Felix’s character, he is already a corpse” (13). Thus, the reader never meets Felix as a living citizen, but rather as a corpse whose death is a consequence of his queerness and evidence of his justified rejection as citizen in the U.S. Felix’s murder at the hands of a uniformed soldier near a military base does not suggest that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but functions rather as a statement that for those citizens recognized as queer, the U.S. is a wrong place at all times. While Islas’ representation of queerness has been considered subtle, the implications for Felix demonstrate that such an implicit portrayal strategically demands that that reader challenge the legal notion of what is considered illegal or legal in regard

85 to queerness. The last description of Felix after the soldier leaves him alone to die states: “Felix had time to be afraid before he heard his heart stop” (138). This moment, I argue, is where Islas lets go of any sense of ambiguity regarding Felix’s relationship with other men. His relationships with laborers, his son, and the soldier all vacillate between a confirmation of consent to his sexual pursuit and a withdrawal in response to a negation of it. But Islas leaves no room for ambiguity in suggesting that rather than regret, as he often expressed after being rejected, Felix feels fear. Padilla urges us to “consider Islas’s muted approach to homosexuality as a strategy of representation rather than a problem in the work,” reminding us that in the context of Islas’ politics, “announcing the gayness of his characters in order to affirm homosexuality is not a central part of his vision” (24). She proposes that the author opts to complicate a particular brand of masculinity by situating queer subjectivity in the context of the family, to which I would add the context of citizenship and belonging more broadly (24). The discovery of Felix’s dead body by soldiers patrolling the military base demonstrates that “His death at the hands of a reluctant Anglo ‘prey’ is portrayed as a case of civil rights discrimination against Mexicans,” who, even after death in this case, are under consistent surveillance (R. Sánchez 70). Though the portrayal does lend itself to be read as racial discrimination, it is also evident that the soldier’s fatal attack of Felix is also in response to his queerness in a U.S. context. In conjunction with the responses by the state and family to his death, we can also infer that the murder dilutes Felix’s status of citizen by limiting the ways in which people can claim justice in response to homophobic violence. Denying (In)Justice Since The Rain God’s introduction to Felix begins after his murder, the novel interrogates how we account for stories in which violence is exercised against queer bodies. Once Felix’s body is discovered, his younger brother Miguel Grande, a policeman with aspiration to be selected chief of police, is notified and asked to identify his brother’s corpse: “On the way, he thought he saw Felix’s car, but he did not ask about it. Miguel suspected that Felix had been caught playing around with a soldier, had gotten into some kind of fight, and was now in the next room with a few broken bones and some teeth missing” (80). The narrator adds: “He hoped there were no newspapermen around because such a story would have some effect on his chances for chief” (80). Even before

86 seeing his brother’s body, Miguel Grande crafts a narrative that holds his brother accountable for limiting his access to upward mobility within the ranks of the police department. More importantly, as Hardin notes, “ The blame is shifted from the soldier to Félix, from the murderer to the victim” (235). Miguel Grande’s response, then, is not only that of a brother who recognizes his brother as queer, but also as a representative of the state invested in denying Felix’s queer identity both culturally and legally. He in fact states: “Goddammit, Felix, you’ve got a wife and four kids. When are you going to learn not to fool around with the little boys?” (80). Before even being told what led to his brother’s assault, Miguel Grande uses Felix’s prior affairs with soldiers as evidence to place the burden of violence on him rather than on the soldier or his family’s own willful denial of his homosexuality. Though Miguel Grande has no reason to suspect that his brother was attacked in response to unwanted sexual advances, his description of the soldier as a boy and of Felix as a person who refuses to learn his place as a queer citizen presents the latter as knowing better at the very moment that Miguel Grande himself refuses to know, or acknowledge, his brother’s own sexual identity. As Cutler argues, the novel insists on “the solidity of cultural barriers against Mexicans and homosexuals…. The effect of that truth, though, is akin to the effects of ritual sacrifice. As characters submit to the state’s and culture’s determination to look the other way, they submit to the idea that Felix’s death is justified… stem[ming] communal aggression and prevent[ing] it from overflowing” (17). In this context, Miguel Grande’s immediate assumption that his brother’s assailment is both a recognition and a denial of queerness; he recognizes it as potentially instigating an altercation, but hopes the encounter is not publicly recognized as a means to deny the discriminating barriers that stand between him and his ascension to the position of police chief. Policing Felix’s queerness, by this false logic, relieves Miguel Grande from being himself racially policed. Employed to enforce the law, Miguel Grande’s recognition of his brother’s dead body has added legal implications outside of his personal failure to acknowledge his brother’s queer identity. Miguel Grande’s insistence on misrecognizing his brother culminates in his glance at the corpse, “It was unrecognizable. There was no face, and what looked like a tooth was sticking out behind the left ear…. The back of his head was mushy. The rest of his body was purple, bloated, and caved in at odd places. One of the

87 testicles was missing” (81). If the family’s relationship with Felix’s sexuality is marked by a denial of his evident pursuit of desire outside of his marriage and family life, then the narrative challenges Miguel Grande to recognize his brother in an unrecognizable state. That is, if Felix’s affairs function as evidence the family purposefully ignores but recognizes as indications of his queerness, then the novel forces Miguel Grande to confirm Felix’s identity without making available any physical traits recognizable as his brother’s. Miguel Grande cannot identify him, saying, “That’s not my brother,” only to be shown his brothers wallet and legal identification documents, evidence Miguel Grande cannot refute (81). His recognition of the corpse comes only after it is mediated by state- issued documentation. Cutler contends: “The novel insists on the materiality of bodies, but always as bodies in relation to one another. It does not move to recuperate ‘the family’ in any banal way…but rather to reenvision, to reshape the possibilities of la familia, to demand new forms of ethical relation within the networks of filial relation” (9). The Rain God does this in part, following Miguel Grande’s identification of the Felix’s body, by describing how he accounts for his brother’s death to the rest of the family. After picking up his wife, Juanita, on his way to Felix’s home, Miguel Grande “told her everything as if it were a police report and gave her strict instructions not to repeat any of the details to Angie. He would tell her only that Felix was dead and that the causes were under investigation” (83). She responds by stating that Angie will insist on a funeral with an open casket, to which he responds, “Don’t tell her anything. Agree to everything. I’ll make whatever arrangements need to be made. Please do as I say for once” (83). Assuming the tone of a police officer, Miguel Grande ensures that even in his death, Felix is not recognized as a victim of a homophobic murder, stressing the state’s power and insistence on making queerness and the policing of sexuality unrecognizable as violence. The novel, then, does not insist on a more ethical relationship between bodies through characters like Miguel Grande, who correlate justice with compliance with the law and access to the systems charged with its administration. Rather, Islas employs such character’s unethical relationship to Felix’s death to later foreground the following generation’s departure from traditional modes of family and justice. Unlike Miguel Grande, Felix’s daughter, Lena, is able to recognize her father’s murder as an unjust act, demonstrating that for Islas, the ability to discern an act of

88 violence as just or unjust is not singularly rooted within the legal system. The Rain God, as an account by Miguel Chico, the son of Miguel Grande, functions as an alternative narration of the Angel family history, shedding light on family secrets, like the causes of Felix’s death, that the family tries hard to conceal. Cultural critic Julie Avril Minich argues, “The Rain God stages the collapse of the pre-Chicano Movement Mexican American family struggling for a space within the so-called American Dream,” a fantasy informed, I argue, by a compliance with legal statutes that mark the Other as potentially citizen (698). She adds that the voices of the following generation of the Angel family depict “the post-Movement reconstruction of the Chicana/o nation” in Migrant Souls, Islas’ 1991 follow-up to The Rain God (698). The sentiment that Minich reads in Migrant Souls, I suggest, originates in both Miguel Chico’s account of the family and Lena’s recognition of injustice in The Rain God. As Miguel Grande and his niece wait for the jury to investigate Felix’s death, Lena begins to recognize how the state administers justice: “The bar where Felix had picked up the young man who killed him was across the street and around the corner,” and reminded of the morgue while in the court Lena recalls, “The official in charge had not allowed her to see Felix and told her Miguel Grande had already made a positive identification” (84). However, the narrator notes: “Lena sensed he [Miguel Grande] was hiding something” (84). Given that “‘The family,’ as usual—more concerned with its pride that with justice—had begun to lie to itself about the truth,” when Lena “began to realize that the sexual implications of her father’s murder were going to keep them from strongly pursuing justice, she took matters into her own hands” (85, 85-86). Using the same evidence available to her uncle, she is able to determine that justice, in the context of her father’s queer identity, would not be served by police officers or the justice system. Miguel Grande understands justice as a continued secrecy regarding his brother’s law-breaking sexual conduct, whereas for Lena, Felix’s homosexuality is secondary to the act of murder. While for Miguel Grande the site of injustice is Felix’s failure to think “about the rest of us,” Lena understands justice as holding the soldier accountable for murder rather than her father for sexual interests that anticipate his meeting the young man (83). Lena’s response to the justice system’s failure to incriminate her father’s murderer suggests her understanding of the hierarchies of citizenship as informed by

89 queer and racial identity. M. E. Sánchez explains that the novel sets “Felix’s daughter’s insistence on seeking justice for his murder against Miguel Grande’s efforts to suppress the embarrassing situation” (296). Saving the family from the embarrassment of Felix’s queerness, for Miguel Grande, allows the family to, as Minich suggests, have continued access to the American Dream, as illustrated by his decision to forego pursuing justice for his brother’s murder in attempts to maximize his own chances at promotion. However, Lena acknowledges, through her relationship to Felix’s death, their limited, if in any way available, access to that dream. The narrator presents a conversation between Lena and an assistant to the District Attorney’s office: “She sat down facing him as he explained how the evidence convincingly showed that her father was in fact ‘excuse me ma’am’ a homosexual and that he has seduced other men, some of whom were willing to testify during a jury trial,” adding, “The young soldier had acted in ‘self-defense and understandably,’ given the circumstances, and that there was no reason to prosecute him. He had already been transferred to another base” (87). Islas, here, aligns Miguel Grande’s response to Felix’s death to a mode of justice complicit with the state’s willingness to retroactively use a person’s history of otherness to spare the heterosexual citizen from criminal charges. Importantly, the state intervenes by transferring the soldier to another base, exonerating him from murder in favor of retroactively criminalizing Felix’s homosexuality. To understand himself as a potential full citizen, Miguel Grande has to perpetually comply with the law’s limitations on citizenship, even when they make his brother’s murder a crime less grave than Felix’s queer identity. Lena, however, understands the rights of full citizenship as unattainable as a woman whose cultural history marks her as Other. As the narrator explains, “A few months later, she was glad to find out he [Miguel Grande] had not been selected chief, thinking it might force him to understand what life was really like for ‘low class’ Mexicans in the land that guaranteed justice under the law for all” (88). Through Miguel Chico’s account of Lena’s understanding of justice, Islas demonstrates that for a new generation of Chicanas/os, justice for all is encoded in the state’s recognition of one’s full citizenship, one that is inaccessible to those whose personal and political histories are ones of otherness in relationship to the state. Conclusion

90 I opened this chapter by suggesting that rather than understanding the absence of queer representation in The Rain God as a means to critique the author, as Moraga does, we can use the ambiguity of queerness in the novel as an analytical point of departure to shed light on its more radical contributions to a Chicano literary tradition. Aldama explains: “Islas often channeled his frustration about living in a homophobic society in his fiction….Islas used his fiction to come to terms with a society that not only saw him as a great peril to the heteromasculine mainstream, but that taught him, he continues, ‘to loathe his condition [so deeply it] pierces to the heart’” (86-87). It is important to consider that the representations of queerness in The Rain God demonstrate that the insistence on a heterosexual performance of masculinity is not just mediated by cultural tradition, but also by legal definitions of queerness. Set in a historical context in which the very definition of queer people as non-citizens is contested, The Rain God works as an exposition of the intersection of cultural and legal strategies employed against queer people to limit their visibility and restrict their access to justice. Legal statutes that, in their intent to purge the citizenry from queerness, have justified the deportation and murder of queer people mediate the degree to which Felix’s sexuality is made explicit in the text. If we read The Rain God in a historical context in which the state’s judicial and legislative institutions define queerness in strategically vague terms, the novel presents a veritable experience of queer life in which the right to claim justice as prospective and current citizens is stripped from people as a consequence of queerness. In that regard, when Moraga asserts that the lives of queer people are at stake in authors’ reluctance to explicitly account for queer identity, she opts to disregard how legal and physical violence have historically been part of the narrative of queer people in the U.S. If Boutilier demonstrates that citizenship precludes queer people by denying them access to justice by all available means, Islas’ representation of a generation of Chicanos/as that see justice as untethered from legal notions of heteronormative citizenship offer a vision of a more inclusive nation. Following her critique of Islas, Moraga asserts, “Without a dream of a free world, a free world will never be realized. Chicana lesbians and gay men do not merely seek inclusion in the Chicano nation; we seek a nation strong enough to embrace a full range of racial diversities, human sexualities, and expressions of gender” (164). The Rain God, however cautious in its

91 representation of sexuality, is not insisting on queer exclusion. In fact, by presenting Felix as a character who interrupts, even if problematically, the means by which the state filters queer people out from prospective citizenship and responses to his death that refuse legal processes that privilege the indictment of queerness over murder, Islas seems to share with Moraga a vision of a nation that relaxes the cultural and legal restrictions on modes of national belonging. Islas shows his readers how selective models of citizenship create fissures in legal systems that allegedly guarantee justice for all. If citizenship does not secure one’s access to justice, then citizenship, like justice itself, is always conditional, the former of which, the novel suggests, can always be manipulated to exclude any given identity historically identified as other in the production of the nation.

92 CHAPTER THREE

Queer(ing) Migrants: Documenting Queer Border-Crossings in Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines

Inspired structurally and thematically by Tomás Rivera’s classic …y no se lo tragó la tierra/…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Rigoberto González’s 2003 Crossing Vines brings together a consideration of queer and Chicano identity through a series of vignettes detailing the experiences of a California migrant community in the span of a day. Though the vignettes offer a variety of perspectives, the novel’s queer characters merit special attention given a historical context when immigration policy increasingly focused on family reunification. Sandwiched between the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), the last successful overhaul of immigration policy in the U.S., and the concurrent emergence of laws like Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) and California’s Proposition 8, demanding proof of legal residence status and banning gay marriage respectively, Crossing Vines is a pioneering fictional representation of the implications of heteronormative immigration policy for queer migrants. Crossing Vines directly interrogates the limits imposed on queer people as migrants in the U.S. following the passage of the IRCA, which determines who was a desirable migrant by granting a person documented resident status in the U.S. Though the novel does not explicitly narrate people’s concern with attaining citizenship, foregrounding the migration accounts of queer characters reveals the historical impossibility of their documented status. So while the novel doesn’t quite contemplate the process of attaining citizenship itself, it does consider the differentiation between those who could belong and those who couldn’t and, more importantly, how they perform their legal presence in the aftermath of the IRCA. That is, the novel’s interest in whom and how one legally belongs is contextualized by how immigration reform defines the category of citizen. Citizenship, according to international relations critic David Jacobson, “determines the criteria of membership, that is, who may or may not belong to or join ‘the people’; and…the nature of the ‘conversation’ between the individual and the state—the rights and obligations of the citizen, the kinds of access the citizen has to the state, and the kinds of demands the state can make upon the citizen” (7). In this context,

93 because citizens assume the authority to determine who can join the citizenry and what relationship the state has with citizenship as a legal category, undocumented migrants limit the ability of citizens to select them out of prospective belonging and representation. Moreover, when such undocumented migrants are also gay and/or queer, the power to imagine how the citizenry is composed is stripped from those explicitly deemed undesirable by the law. In this chapter, I will shift my attention from gay Chicano narratives that focus on queer people who are already in the country to those who immigrate to the U.S. In doing so, I will explore a shift in legal consideration of citizenship from the IRCA’s focus on family reunification to a contemporary debate on immigration at the intersection of legislation targeting undocumented migrants for exclusion, like SB 1070, and the seemingly inclusive movement to secure same-sex marriage in the U.S. At this legal juncture, I will show, the interests of queer undocumented migrants are forfeited in favor of those of people deemed by the state readily available for sexual and racial assimilation, particularly in the context of the recent emergence of a queer citizenry. By considering migration central to the experiences of queer characters in the novel, González critiques racist legal practices that frame American immigration narratives and the gay liberation movement’s long-standing dismissal of queers of color, specifically gay undocumented immigrants.39 If the marriage equality movement in any way sought to envision more inclusive U.S. communities and receptive legal climates for LGBT interests, it’s imperative to interrogate why the movement remained tethered to exclusive models of citizenship production that have historically undergird U.S. immigration policy more broadly. An unquestioned consideration of migration central to the history of the U.S. elides the racist legal practices that have upheld the myth of the immigrant nation. As cultural critic Bill Ong Hing proposes, “We are a nation of immigrants. However, the

39 In her influential essay “Queer Aztlán: The Re-Formation of Chicano Tribe,” Cherríe Moraga cites a conversation with queer Chicano playwright Ricardo Bracho describing the relationship between queers of color and the radical queer communities: “We discussed the limitations of ‘Queer Nation,’ whose leather-jacketed, shaved-headed white radicals and accompanying anglo-centricity were an ‘alien-nation’ to most lesbians and gay men of color” (147).

94 simplicity of that statement conceals the nation’s consistent history of tension of whom we collectively regard as ‘Real Americans’ and, therefore, who we would allow into our community” (3). He implies that the nation has historically developed methods of exclusion based on citizens’ collective vision of what the nation should be. Within this framework, migrants do not have an open invitation to the nation of immigrants, but instead are part of a category of excludable members of an American community.40 Migration is a means to reimagine not only the composition of the citizenry, but to also reassess the terms through which people are welcome to alter the vision of the nation’s attitudes toward prospective migrants. As Jacobson explains, migration challenges the legitimacy of the state through “The devaluation of citizenship, together with the weakening of sovereign control and the principle of national self-determination,” further contending, “The ability of the state to self-govern comes into question, conflicts arise on immigration and foreign populations, and, most important, the ‘pact’ between state and citizen is broken” (9). If undocumented migrants indeed interrupt how citizens conceive of membership in the nation, the legislation of immigration is the site where excludable identities are determined as a means to affirm the sovereignty of the state and also where new definitions of citizenship can emerge. Challenges to the ways in which the U.S. has limited its recognition of Mexican and Chicano/a potential membership in the nation have come primarily through organized social movements, most significantly the 1960s Chicano Movement whose political demands were outlined in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. The movement’s primary manifesto clamored with urgency for the development of local social and political infrastructures that would make evident the presence and demands of Chicanos in a socio-cultural context that recognized Mexican-American communities exclusively

40 Cultural critics such as Lisa Lowe and Mae Ngai argue that such exclusions are not limited to immigrant communities. Lowe explains that people of color are subject to a type of “abstract citizenship” noting that for such communities “‘political emancipation’ through citizenship…requires the negation of a history of social relations that publicly racialized groups and successively constituted those groups as ‘nonwhites ineligible for citizenship’” (27). Ngai terms those already citizen whose rights are foreclosed by the legal treatment of their minoritized identities “alien citizens,” explaining: “As a legal matter, alien citizenship involves the nullification of the rights of citizenship—from the right to be territorially present to the range of civil rights and liberties—without formal revocation of citizenship status” (2522).

95 through the productivity of their labor. However, as Chicana feminist critics have argued, the movement’s propositions were designed along patriarchal and homophobic precepts that allowed for a political identity to emerge from the neglect of the needs of women and queer people.41 The preamble to the manifesto contends: “We are free and sovereign to determine those tasks which are justly called for by our house, our land, the sweat of our brows, and by our hearts,” defining sovereignty in terms of traditional notions of labor and home life (Anaya and Lomelí 1). In other words, the early movement did not envision itself as all-inclusive; rather, it explicitly set out its stakes as reclaiming the sovereignty to establish its own conditions of desire and desirability. El Plan later explains that cultural production by Chicano artists is charged with representing the revolutionary stakes of the movement: “Our cultural values of life, family, and home will serve as a powerful weapons to defeat the gringo dollar value system and encourage the process of love and brotherhood” (Anaya and Lomelí 3). In doing so, the manifesto suggests that a revolutionary challenge to U.S. disenfranchisement depends on the cultural negation of female and queer identities that do not conform to traditional notions of home and family. As Cherríe Moraga notes: “What was wrong about Chicano Nationalism was its institutionalized heterosexism, its inbred machismo, and its lack of cohesive national political strategy” (148-49). In this context, the Chicano Movement’s explicit demand for political rights buttressed on heteronormative social structures ignored the political wrongs, so to speak, through which the movement sought to ascertain their full political representation and inclusion in the U.S. The IRCA, a departure from the legalization quotas of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, later reconfigured the terms of the state’s desire for migrants based on both its concern for family reunification and the importance of documenting legal residence in the U.S. The act changed the relationship between the state and undocumented migrants by extending legal status to communities previously understood as excludable, setting a precedent that indicated that those communities presently deemed unwanted could in the future be understood as conditionally desirable. Jacobson elaborates on this new mode of inclusion: “In effect, membership in this society was

41 See, for instance, Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan” (Borderlands/ La Frontera, San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. 37-45).

96 established on the grounds of the actual social and economic links such aliens had with Americans, also known as ‘membership by proxy,’ rather than through the channels of the sovereigns state” (43).42 However, membership by proxy through immigration reform was not only regulated by social and economic factors, but also by sexual identities that informed the kinds of proximity a migrant could have to membership in the U.S. Assuming migrants to be heterosexual, the law authorized the legalization of undocumented migrants who had been present in the U.S. and their families, anchoring the proximity of membership in the nation to heterosexuality. Jacqueline Stevens notes the relationship between the legislation of marriage and migrations stating that they are “what enable the state to reproduce itself” (108). This suggests that basing prospective inclusion on heterosexual models of kinship remains the means by which the state seeks to maintain its sovereignty in determining what forms of identity it is interested in sanctioning and reproducing. Coupled with an insistence on producing an infrastructure through which a migrant can be identified as legally present in the U.S., documents like green cards become tools through which the state limits potential membership to heterosexual migrants and, furthermore, polices sexuality to ensure a straight reproductive citizenry. Crossing Vines sets the migration of queer people as a possibility against the erasure of such identities by U.S. law and cultural representations informed by a Chicano nationalist politic. The novel renders the border a site where queer migrations challenge the state and the Chicano Movement’s attempts to claim the sovereignty to define who is represented in each respective community. Cultural critic Gloria Anzaldúa famously describes the border as the home of forbidden people, los atravesados, and “una herida abierta43 where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” (25). It’s important to consider here how for Anzaldúa depiction of the border is not just a perpetually open wound, but is more importantly imagined as the blood’s refusal to be occluded by the scab. Healing, for her, comes at the

42 Jacobson borrows the terms from Peter S. Huck, who coined it in “The Transformation of Immigration Law” (Columbia Law Review 84.1: 1984, 1-90). 43 “an open wound”

97 expense of denying the blood’s flow as evidence of that open wound, a foreclosure of the representation of los atravesados, those queer identities central to the emergence of a border culture. That is, those worlds are not done grating, are still bleeding, and remain quite unready to heal. The U.S.-Mexico border, in this sense, functions as what cultural critic Alicia Schmidt Camacho describes as a transnational space “in which distinct national localities are linked together by migratory flows…. that may also stand in opposition to the bounded community of the nation-state” (5). As context, this chapter will connect the IRCA, SB 1070, and Proposition 8 through their legal intent to halt the flow of queer people into the U.S., to police the healing of the wound, so to speak. As a legal insistence on the erasure of queer migrant bodies, these laws function as a legal patchwork that denies the migration of queer people and make the border a site where forbidden identities are constantly in flux. As Juana María Rodríguez contends, “The law is already set up as a rigid discursive site where performance and language practices are structured to create conclusions about identity. Here, the subject is continuously being constrained by the mandates of legal discourses…. obligated to perform, and performances exact a price; the risk is carnal” (34). Indeed, legal discourses produce the border as a site where non-normative sexual identities are subject to erasure and where queer migrants challenge such negations to affirm a queer presence despite being deemed legally and culturally excludable in U.S. and migrant communities respectively. By exclusively foregrounding the border-crossing experiences of queer people, González’s Crossing Vines imagines the queer migrants’ entrance to the U.S. as a direct challenge to their historical legislative exclusion. If, as citizenship scholar Siobhan B. Somerville implies, a history of queer exclusion in the legislation of immigration facilitates “the state’s own construction of immigrants and citizens as ‘lovable,’ and others as inappropriate objects for the nation’s love,” I will propose that the legislation of migration is invested in both excluding queer people and producing migrants as queer regardless of their sexual identities (661). This chapter will argue that laws that mediate transnational migration are part of a legal system that uses queerness as a legal heuristic of exclusion that restricts the legal entry of queer people to the U.S while simultaneously queering migrants that might identify otherwise to legally justify their exclusion. I will first outline how the state has historically used legislation to produce queer migrant

98 identities through a comparative analysis of the law’s considerations of family reunification in the early 20th century exclusion of Asian migrants and the family’s central role in the IRCA’s approach to documenting legal inclusion. I will then explain how in the aftermath of immigration reform that made legal documentation integral to one’s recognition as part of U.S. communities, legislation like SB 1070 in conjunction with the concurrent debate on marriage equality made documents such as green cards serve a dual function as signifiers of legal and straight migrant identities. With this as cultural context, I will argue that González’s Crossing Vines, through the migration of its queer characters Aníbal Perez Ceballos and Moreno/Tiki Tiki, presents queerness as a sexual identity scrutinized by the compulsory requirement of legal documentation that, when not marking migrants as legal, renders them Other by forcing them to identify as a person they are not. In doing so, the novel identifies queer(ed) migrants as subjects through whom the citizenry oppositionally determines inclusion, rendering contemporary legislation of migration a site where the state’s sovereignty to select how to imagine its citizenry is desperately asserted. Queered Migrants Since the late 19th century, legislative action on immigration has modeled exclusionary legal migration through the regulation of race and assumed sexual practices of migrants. Such models of exclusion have limited the legal inclusion of migrants in U.S. communities to those who can comply with economic and racial assimilation. According to Hing, “The racialization of who is a true or real American has affected U.S. enforcement policies directed at only certain undocumented aliens,” producing a social climate where migrants are the subject through which an authentic American citizen is imagined and through which a definition of America itself is reaffirmed (2). If the legislation of migration produces nationalist definitions of belonging, then the exclusionary standards outlined by the law trace the ways in which the state has historically defined the “American.” In this sense, the historical exclusion of queer people has served to define legal membership in a U.S. community as straight, which in turn presents immigration policy as one of the citizenry’s reproductive processes in the U.S. That is, immigration law has functioned as a compulsory affirmation of the imagined citizenry’s straightness. Cultural critic Eithne Luibhéid argues that the exclusions based

99 on gender and sexuality demonstrate the federal immigration control’s impulse “to ensure a ‘proper’ sexual and gender order, reproduction of white privilege, and exploitation of the poor,” making “the U.S. immigration control apparatus a crucial target for queer intervention because it significantly regulates sexuality and reproduces oppressive sexual norms that are gendered, racialized, and classed” (“Queering Migration” xiv, x). The stabilization of normative sexual and gendered identities signal to both citizens and migrants the conditions upon which legitimate membership in U.S. communities can be claimed. If, as Somerville argues, regulations of legitimate membership have been “central to the ways in which models of consensual citizenship have been imagined, codified, and popularized in the United States,” then the migrants who enter the country despite being deemed excludable are legally recognized as violators of such terms of consent (286). Immigration policy, then, has not only served as a tool to define who and how one is considered American, but has also historically excluded migrants by presenting them as threats to the terms of consent upon which legal membership is granted by legally queering them. Immigration legislation’s exclusionary practices have historically burdened excluded migrants by defining them as deviant as well as their counterparts residing in the U.S. in relation to such excluded communities. Citing the Page Law of 1875, which criminalized the migration of Asian sex workers to the U.S., Luibhéid argues: “The fact that Asian prostitutes, specifically, were targeted…underscored the salience of intersecting gender, class, and sexual categories in constructing alleged ‘threats’ to white patriarchy” (Entry Denied 5). By 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act decreed that while “the wives of Chinese merchants were eligible to join their spouses, the wives of Chinese laborers were not, thus introducing a class distinction around the eligibility for family reunification” (Luibhéid, Entry Denied 6). While granting Chinese laborers membership into U.S. communities by proxy, as Jacobson would explain, the act recognized the potential value of Chinese labor while simultaneously limiting the ways in which they could be understood as prospective citizens by limiting the entry of their spouses. Cultural critic Lisa Lowe suggests that the legacy of the act is evident in how, up until the mid-20th century, “Chinese masculinity was marked as different from that of…’white’ citizens owing to the forms of work and community that had been historically available to

100 Chinese men as the result of immigration laws restricting female immigration,” leading as she later clarifies to their “‘feminized positions” (11). Immigration policy at the turn of the century can be understood as an apparatus that both selected the migrant classes the state was interested in (re)producing as American and legally barring working class migrants from reuniting with the families that would publicly mark them as normatively masculine. By regulating the ways in which a migrant can be publicly understood as a candidate for inclusion in U.S. communities by stripping them of markers of their actual sexual identities, immigration policy queers migrants regardless of their sexuality with the intent of justifying their exclusion. To clarify, while the state does exclusively target queer people for exclusion, queerness has functioned historically as a rubric through which the state organizes exclusion to an extent that immigration policy, such as the exclusion of migrant’s wives, has been designed to render migrant heterosexuality questionable and suspect. The history of immigration policy demonstrates that by using race and sexual behavior as exclusionary measures the state, in effect, regulates migration by legally suggesting prospective migrants be understood as queer subjects. It’s important to consider that queer, in this instance, does not exclusively refer to the migrants’ sexual identity, but rather an identity sometimes legally manufactured by the state to mark individuals as unwelcome in U.S. communities. Somerville suggests that considering U.S. immigration policy in queer contexts allows us to “shift our focus from whether or not the alien is ‘someone who desires America,’ and instead pay attention to the ways in which the state selects its own objects of desire and produces them as citizens” (662). The law’s early interest in the reunification of middle class families, for instance in the Chinese Exclusion Act, demonstrates the state’s desire to make belonging available to those who uphold traditional nuclear families perceived to be economically productive and sexually reproductive. In her critique of the regulation of U.S. naturalization practices, Somerville argues that the family has historically served to define the production of citizens as a heterosexual practice. She argues: “The reference to (white) (sexual) reproduction reanimates a more (literally) familiar model—and perhaps a more familiar affect—of national belonging produced through bloodlines” (668). And while immigration policy’s original emphasis on race has evolved to a broader consideration of

101 class and gender as informing the state’s desire of a migrant, an interest in the family unit has allowed queerness to remain the site where the state produces exclusionary migrant categories. The legacy, then, of early immigration policy is how the state has, in privileging the heterosexual nuclear family through family reunification policies, implicitly rendered queer migrants excludable and limited those economically and otherwise unproductive by the law suspect of queerness by restricting their ability to sponsor their respective wives’ legal migration to the U.S. In this sense queerness, for the law, is more than just an excludable identity. Historically, the implication of queerness has functioned as a strategy for the regulation of migration more broadly. Building the “Show Me Your Papers” State Throughout the 20th century, the use of immigration policy as a legal mechanism to restrict the entry of migrants to the U.S. finally consolidated in the most recent successful attempt at immigration reform, the IRCA. In the early 20th century, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 institutionalized a system that restricted the number of migrants that could enter the country through quotas that disproportionately admitted European migrants while limiting the number of African and Asian migrants into the U.S. The quota system remained in place for almost half a century until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 dismantled existing immigration policy in favor of a process centered on addressing a domestic demand for labor and the unification of families of documented migrants. In conjunction with privileging family reunification, the policy maintained the exclusion of queer people, first introduced in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, as discussed in the second chapter. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed into law the IRCA, a congressional bipartisan effort pushed forth by a Democratic supermajority in both chambers of the U.S. Congress. The act drastically altered immigration law through provisions intended to restrict unsanctioned migration to the U.S. such as “a legalization program for certain illegal aliens already in the country, sanctions against employers who hired illegal aliens, increased border enforcement, and a program allowing illegal aliens to be employed as temporary agricultural workers” (Jacobson 42). While the new law focused on controlling and managing undocumented migrants already in the U.S. through these provisions, Jacobson argues: “Legal

102 immigration policies were, for the most part, left untouched” (45). By allowing the continued restrictions imposed on queer migrants and more firmly grounding the legal migration of people in traditional familial models, the IRCA can be considered a legal attempt to model those undocumented migrants in the U.S. into desirable prospective citizens while concurrently seeking to strengthen the state’s authority to determine who could enter the country by retaining the ability to characterize undesirable migrants as sexual deviants. The most important contributions of the IRCA notably focus on managing migrants already in the U.S. by acknowledging their economic contributions through documentation that serves as proof of their productivity and, furthermore, extending such documented recognition to those whose family relationships could be proven legitimate. Though, as Hing argues, while “Many lawmakers supported the legalization program because of the contributions that undocumented workers had already made to the country, and charged the nation with a responsibility to account for those contributions,” the state retained the authority to select whose contributions would be accounted for and how (162). Similarly to El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, as I previously argued, the IRCA produced a notion of national membership informed by a person’s economically productive labor and the reproductive potential of the family. Anticipating the effects of the recognition of migrants in relationship to their economic productivity, Jacobson states: “the precedent of retroactive legalization will force a more permanent institutionalization of some principle of membership by proxy” (43-44). I would contend that an institutionalization of membership by proxy was not a consequence of the IRCA, but instead the means by which the law proposed a path to membership. That is to say, the form of labor that allowed membership by proxy was not narrowly defined, but instead expanded to consider migrant reproduction as part of the valuable labor of undocumented migrants. The act, in fact, appraised the value of migrant workers in relationship to their ability to be economically productive and their potential to reproduce a working migrant class by presenting the family unit in closer proximity to legal residence in the U.S. and assuming queer migrants economically unproductive and non- reproductive by upholding the restrictions that barred their entry.

103 The IRCA’s fundamental procedural contribution to immigration policy is the burden placed on migrants to prove their legal presence in the U.S. Like Jacobson argues, retroactively sanctioning the presence of undocumented migrants in the U.S. did shift the ways in which citizenship and, I would add, legal residence was legally imagined by the state. By recognizing migrants’ economic productivity and reproductive potential of prospective citizens as a means to sanction their presence in the country, the state made possible what Aihwa Ong terms flexible citizenship, or “the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing economic conditions….produced within particular structures of meaning about family, gender, nationality, class mobility, and social power” (6). The legislation anticipated that by relaxing the conditions through which one could become a prospective citizen in relationship to capital need, it could restructure the ways in which it could exclude new undocumented migrants. Requiring proof of documented residence status available through labor and kinship, the state assumed, eliminated any incentive available for migrants who could not conform to those conditions of legality. The state, indeed, produced policy that allowed the families of newly documented migrant workers to inherit legal residence in the U.S. through the productivity of migrant labor. While admittedly expanding access to prospective citizenship, the IRCA’s focus on family reunification codified naturalization as a mode of belonging based on familial affect and birthright. To prove their identity, Hing states, the act required that a migrant present “passport, birth certificate, any national identity document bearing a photograph and fingerprint, driver’s license, baptismal record/marriage certificate, or affidavit of a knowledgeable individual,” a history of employment, and clear criminal record, financial responsibility, and good moral character (168). These legal documents, in turn, served the double duty of proving that migrants fulfilled the state’s desire for their labor and membership in the nation and to attest to their relationship with family members who were newly eligible for legal entry to the U.S. The IRCA’s expansion of the terms of belonging rendered the eventual documentation of legal residence—the U.S. Resident Alien Card or green card—a means to test migrants’ willingness to comply with the state’s demand for (re)productive heterosexuality while simultaneously proving the legally queered identity of

104 undocumented migrants. Not anticipating how migrants might strategically navigate the new conditions of entry, the law identified these documents as proof of a person’s working and reproductive potential. However, as Ong claims, any meanings assumed by the state to be produced by such a document “are gradually being replaced by its counterfeit use in response to the claims of global capitalism” (2). She further explains, “The realignment of political, ethnic, and personal identities is not necessarily a process of ‘win or lose,’ whereby political borders become ‘insignificant; and the nation-state ‘loses’ to global trade in terms of its control of the affiliations and behavior of its subjects” (2-3). Rather, while the entry of undocumented migrants might, among other things, be informed by a demand for labor, the documents devised by the state itself place their own demands on those who carry them. In limiting the legal entry to the spouses and children of migrants, U.S. legislation such as the IRCA demonstrate “sexuality is encoded as heterosexual and organized around biological reproduction…. [attesting] more to the hegemony of heterosexuality than to its inevitability or naturalness. Hegemonic status is not surprising given that heterosexuality is ‘necessary to the state’s ability to constitute and imagine itself’” (Luibhéid, Entry Denied, 3).44 Therefore, state- issued documents such as green cards do not only allow the state to prove one’s legal entry into the U.S., but furthermore allow the state to identify the presumed heterosexuality it demands of those it desires as laborers and perpetuates its persecutions of queer and queered subjects deemed unproductive and ineligible for entry. Queer Migrants If the intent of the IRCA was to retroactively legalize the presence of undocumented migrants already in the U.S. and devise a process by which documentation would be required for employment to preemptively reduce prospective migrants incentives to enter the U.S., the emergence of state bills targeting migrants in the 21st century point to the act’s failure. Immigration scholar Sophia J. Wallace credits the failure of the IRCA to “provisions for workplace sanctions and broad interior enforcement powers that are frequently not enforced by executive agencies” (264). In 2010, as a response to the federal government’s alleged failure to enforce existing

44 She cites Lucy Slayer’s Laws Harsh as Tigers (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995. 1).

105 immigration law, Arizona pioneered the proposal and ratification of state legislation requiring local law enforcement to identify the legal status of those determined suspect of being undocumented in the unprecedented SB 1070. The bill’s most controversial provision states: “For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or agency…where reasonable suspicion exists that a person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person” (Arizona). Anticipating public reception of the measure, Governor Jan Brewer argued in a press release the day before signing the bill into law: “A government’s principle responsibility to its citizens is to provide safety and security. States have never been expected, even in prosperous economic times, to sustain the national defense of our borders…. I am doing everything within my power to ensure and promote safety for our citizens along our southern border” (Office of the Governor). In the context of Gov. Brewer’s remarks, SB 1070 instituted immigration policy that deemed specific racialized bodies as “reasonably suspect” until proven “legal,” requiring documentation of one’s legal entry to the U.S. as proof that one is not a threat to national security, and setting precedent for individual states to interpret and enforce federal immigration law. Rather than pointing at the federal governments leniency in prosecuting employers who hired undocumented migrants, the “show me your papers” clause placed the burden of the law’s failed enforcement on documented and undocumented Latino/a communities in the state. That is, by requiring people to prove their “legality,” the Arizona government assumed documented Latino/a migrants and citizens as Other with the purpose of identifying those ineligible for entry to reassert the nation-state’s authority to compose its citizenry by locally enforcing laws traditionally overseen by the federal government. While SB 1070 garnered national attention for racially profiling Latino/a communities, the state law additionally shifted how legal documentation was used to identify migrants. While the IRCA’s policy crafted a system where both migrants and employers were theoretically held accountable for reducing incentives for undocumented migration through documents that confirmed someone’s employability, SB 1070 encoded the lack of documentation as a national threat. If, as I have argued, documentation served

106 to prove the (re)productive potential of migrants,45 the Arizona statute seemed to consider the reproduction of undocumented migrants as a threat that merited particular urgency. In this context, the law uses documentation to limit the reproduction of brown bodies and race as the widest net through which the law can produce suspicion, deeming white citizens and migrants, both documented and undocumented, as a an identity worth reproducing. According to Doris Marie Provine and Gabrielle Sanchez, SB 1070’s provisions “rely on the expansion of police powers and search beyond traditional boundaries in pursuit of vaguely defined objectives….to calm public anxieties. In Arizona, the fear is of ‘Mexicanization’ with associated cultural, language and economic changes that are unwelcome by the Anglo majority” (469). In this context, Brewer and the statute’s concern for national security functions as a thinly veiled concern for the way in which Mexican migrants are legally imagined as threatening to the primarily white composition of the state’s citizenry. As Hing explains, “The Eurocentric vision of America is the driving force behind vigilante racist attacks on what is perceived as immigrant America. To the perpetrators, this is about an exclusive membership limited to real Americans” (265, original emphasis). So, while the law seems to validate its racist suspicion of Latinos/as as a concern regarding national security, its actual preoccupation is the self-preservation of Arizona’s white citizenry, which the statute ensures by granting any of the state’s citizens the authority to file a suit against government officials who fail to comply with the law (Provine and Sanchez 468). In this sense, legal documentation

45 Productivity, in this context, is both a migrant’s economic productivity and the threat of his/her reproductive potential. Though I focus here on the law’s broad rhetorical gesture that encodes migrant productivity as economic and biological (potentially producing capital and children), scholars such as Leo Chávez and Jonathan Xavier Inda have both explored the state’s regulation of immigrant reproduction. Chávez presents a legislative overview of the policing of immigrant women’s reproduction interrogating constructions of Latina reproduction as threatening to the state. Inda, in a study focused on the availability of prenatal care in immigrant communities, argues: “el Estado, para fortalecer la salud de la población, trata de eliminar de froma rutinaria esas influencias a las que considera dañinas para el crecimiento de la nación…. [L]a exclusion del inmigrante…se codifica como una labor social y noble, necesaria para asegurar la supervivencia del cuerpo social” [the state, to strengthen the population’s health, tries to eliminate in a routine way those influences it considers harmful to the growth of the nation…. The immigrant’s exclusion…is codified as a social and noble labor, necessary to ensure the social body’s survival] (41, my translation).

107 serves to both prove whose reproduction is deemed desirably productive and whose is considered a threat to the state. Anticipating the passage of SB 1070 by nearly two years, a concern with the effects of policy on the assumed heteronormative citizenry was voiced in the aftermath of a voter referendum that defined marriage as a heterosexual institution in California’s Proposition 8. In similar ways as SB 1070 seems to lobby for the protection of the U.S. citizen, Proposition 8 sought to protect the institution of marriage. On the subject, Michael Warner explains: “Marriage sanctifies some couples at the expense of others. It is selective legitimacy. This is a necessary implication of t he institution, and not just a result of bad motives” (82). Challenging the now familiar politically conservative arguments that sanctioning same-sex marriage would normalize queer behavior and the effects of same-sex parenting on children assumed to be heterosexual, what has come to be regarded as the most important movement to protect civil liberties for queer people in decades was quickly and independently followed by the emergence of a national concern over immigration reform. Yet, the overlapping interests of these two national conversations have been largely ignored, despite immigration policy’s history of disenfranchising queer migrant communities. Family reunification as a queer concern never emerged as a right of interest to the Marriage Equality Movement or amongst immigrant reform activists highlighting the ways in which these movements perhaps understood each other as limiting the possibility of progress of their respective causes. However, as Luibhéid asserts, “When queers migrate to the United States, they become inserted into that history and inherit its many legacies,” adding that the continued discrimination of immigrant communities challenges the models of citizenship as an avenue to freedom (“Queering Migration” xxvi). In the context of the concurrent rise of debates on gay marriage and immigration reform to national prominence, ignoring how same-sex marriage offers opportunities for queer people to attain legal residence in the U.S. as part of its public platform reinforces the state’s view that queer migrants have no productive or reproductive value to the nation. To be clear, the hesitance of either movement to consider the rights of queer migrants to precipitate the progress of their own agendas does so at the expense of the continued identification of queer migrants as

108 suspect and excludable, strengthening the state and citizenry’s power to define them as legally Other. While the movement for marriage equality made strides in the recognition of the legal rights of same-sex partners, the movement limited the scope of its advocacy to demanding the state grant those rights by documenting such relationships as legal. Though queer undocumented migrants have gained access to legal residence status through their same-sex citizen spouses as a consequence of the federal recognition of their legalized unions, the effects of the law can be considered a byproduct of the movement rather than a protection it sought to secure. Limiting the plight of gay and lesbian communities to the recognition of same-sex unions disregards the burden historically placed on migrants through the state’s traditional understanding of marriage and families. Luibhéid explains: “Precisely because heterosexual marriage remained so highly privileged before within the law, officials were haunted by fears that substantial numbers of immigrants were gaining legal status through marriage fraud (that is, entering into marriage simply as means to gain legal residence)” (Entry Denied 24). Thus, marriage as a heterosexual institution did not just intend to limit legal entry to the U.S. to heterosexual migrants, but further placed pressure on migrants to prove normative sexual orientations that would later be assumed by the presentation of documents that confirmed legal residence in the U.S. in the aftermath of the IRCA. Marriage, as Warner explains, “is never a private contract between two persons. It always involves the recognition of a third party—and not just voluntary or mutual recognition, but an enforceable recognition” (117). In seeking out the state’s legal sanctioning of same-sex marriages, the marriage equality movement both ascertained a slew of legal rights previously limited only to heterosexual couples and strengthened the state’s authority to define what marriage itself means. If, as Warner notes, “A marriage license is the opposite of sexual license. Sexual license is everything the state does not license, and therefore everything the state allows itself to regulate,” then efforts by marriage equality advocates did little to challenge the ways in which the state deploys marriage (97). The IRCA’s family reunification efforts, offering residents’ spouses and children legal resident status, did not weaken the federal government’s surveillance of migrants, but instead intensified the scrutiny of the relationships it offered as a vehicle for legal entry to the U.S.

109 In conjunction, advocacy efforts responding to SB 1070 and Proposition 8 had limited effects for queer migrants painting a bleak picture in regard to who is willing to explicitly lobby against this community’s disenfranchisement. Cultural critics Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo propose that SB 1070 functions as “a tool of both surveillance and containment, acting to enforce and manage post-9/11 notions of threat and citizenship by: assuming U.S. citizenship as white; assuming as alien-ness of brown bodies; and assuming a threat of alien brown bodies that must be criminalized and contained” (267-268). By ignoring how the laws institutionalized requirement of proof of legal residency or citizenship serves to police other undesirable characteristics, namely queerness, in undocumented migrants, the social responses to Arizona’s unprecedented law continues to “assume that immigrants are heterosexual or/and that queer subjects are already legal citizens,” rendering queer migrants one of the groups most vulnerable to institutionalized violence (Somerville 281). Same-sex marriage advocates’ dismissal of the consequence of marriage for undocumented queer migrants operated under the same assumption, placing the queer migrant outside of the public discourse through which it imagined the constituency of those whose rights they purportedly sought to defend. Furthermore, as Warner argues, “The modern legal machinery of marriage is powered, paradoxically, by the love-couple’s ability to transcend the law. The state merely certifies a love that is beyond law; but by doing so justifies its own existence as keeper of the law” (103). In this context, the movement for marriage equality, in limiting its demands to the rights that come with the legal documentation of same-sex unions, supported the state’s ability to justify its own existence as a regulator of legitimate subjectivity in the same way that SB 1070 functions to address the primarily citizenry’s concern for self- preservation. The queer migrant, then, at the turn of the 21st century emerges as subject whose historical otherness remained uncontested by a contemporary interest in the advocacy for immigration reform and marriage equality. Recognizing the Queer Resident The first vignette centered on a queer character focuses on Aníbal Pérez Ceballos, a recent migrant to the U.S. whose narrative, more so than any other character in the novel, fluctuates between the experiences that take place during the workday and the reasons that prompt him to migrate north. The son of a wealthy entrepreneur from

110 northern Mexico, Aníbal’s migration runs counter to a typical narrative that considers migration as a result of financial need. González presents Aníbal’s departure from Mexico as a resistance to the pull of financial stability asking what the implications of migration might be in the occasion that upward mobility, or the fantasy of it perpetuated by the tired trope of capital accumulation, is less at stake. By presenting an alternative account of migration, the novel sets queerness at the center of a migrant narrative to complicate what is presumed to drive the disenfranchisement of migrant communities. While Aníbal is attentive to familiar subjects, such as the use of counterfeit identification documents, his consideration of them in relationship to queer identity illustrate how these textual sites where the identities of characters like Aníbal can be imagined pose both risks and opportunities to those whose sexual identities are inextricably linked to their migration. As a context for the motivations for Aníbal’s migration, the novel describes the place from where he migrates as a site segregated into resident and migrant communities that remain, however, mutually constitutive. The narrator explains that the differentiation between those that permanently reside in Mexicali—a city located at the border between California and the Mexican state of Baja California—and those who are seen as transient city dwellers informs both behavioral expectations for those who live along the border and those who cross it. According to the novel, “The unwritten rule was that if a man had roots on the border he maintained them. Only poor migrant campesinos46 from southern Mexico actually crossed it; if they lived on the border they did so in ejidos,47 the barren outskirts of the city with no running water and no street names. They didn’t live anywhere and nobody really cared” (76). The border, in this sense, is depicted as a site where people who are acknowledged as legitimate residents live in mapped out and named places, whereas migrants, living in uncharted parts of the city, undergo a process of erasure that literally positions them at the margins of recognition. Through such “Transborder communities,” according to Schmidt-Camacho, “Mexican nationals, migrants, and Mexican Americans have continuously exposed the limits of state formation for both the United States and Mexico. Their provocation of national

46 “Farmers” 47 “Farms”

111 sovereignty…addresses the entwined processes of racial, gender, and class subjection, territorial displacement, and agency from the part of the displaced” (4). By describing the migrants as poor Southern campesinos, González invokes the stereotypical perception of migrants as explicitly classed and implicitly raced, a literally displaced intersectional identity through which the border residents oppositionally define themselves. But as Schmidt-Camacho suggests, migrants whose narratives are imagined outside of these prescribed race and class descriptions, which González shows through Aníbal’s migration, challenge the disenfranchisement through which transborder citizens define their sovereignty. As the narrator explains, “if a long-term border resident took that extra step into foreign soil then everyone would wonder: no money? no pride in México? no place to hide?” (76). Because the border residents, whose presence can be mapped in the city, can be located, their migrations as noticeable absences demonstrate how migrants are socially and spatially dislocated on both the U.S. and Mexican sides of the border. Crossing Vines situates Aníbal’s consideration of migrant identities in queer contexts, such as observing the border with his lover Jorge, to define migration outside of the desire of capital accumulation and introduce the plausibility of his migration despite first presenting Aníbal as an unlikely migrant subject. In one of the anecdotes presented in the novel, Aníbal and Jorge sit on the second floor of a hotel under construction by his father at the international border. Though prospective migrants remained largely invisible to Mexicali residents, Aníbal’s father “had to admit the company stood to gain by this tragedy—the new hotel had a better view of the international border’s wire and steel barrier. Mexico’s Great Wall—a perfect tourist draw for the new hotel, and a discreet bonus for his father’s company” (183). Overlooking the border, Jorge notes: “If you look closely, you can see the wetbacks crawling through the shadows like rats…. If these people could actually think ahead, they wouldn’t be sneaking into the United States to compensate for their lack of education and money, not to mention common sense” (184). He then suggests the construction of a second border “in the middle of Mexico to keep back the Mixtec-Zapotec peons and Central Americans” (184). Through Jorge’s observations, the novel suggests the presence of migrants, otherwise considered practically invisible temporary settlers at the outskirts of the city, is only recognized at the moment that they cross the border, which benefits Aníbal’s father financially and

112 allows his lover to assert his own status as privileged Mexican citizen. Schmidt-Camacho argues: “the border operates as a critical juncture for imagining community and exerting claims over either nation.... [T]he crossing itself…shapes the political disposition of the larger transnational community of unauthorized migrants…in the United States” (287). In response to Jorge’s characterization of migrants crossing the border, Aníbal denies him a kiss. This gesture suggests that the border serves as a site of surveillance where border- crossings and the characters’ sexualities are both available for observation. In the same way Jorge critiques migrants as a citizen, their expression of affection is also subject to the citizenry’s observation and critique. Aníbal’s relationship with Jorge, both through his perceptions of migrants and his later invitation to leave the city with him, presents the border as not only a site where migrants are queered or deemed other, but also where queerness emerges as an unsanctioned identity in González’s novel. As Crossing Vines fills in the reader on details of Aníbal’s life in Mexicali, it reveals that the character was engaged before migrating north. As Aníbal’s commitment to marry Talina, the daughter of lawyers, “was about to be printed in the papers, Jorge came forward….pleading with him to call off the engagement, to run away with him the way they fantasized after making love. Aníbal and Jorge. Forever” (76). Interrupting the engagement through which, as a long term resident, Aníbal would maintain his roots at the border, he confesses his plans to Talina who in turn shares them with her father. This revelation depicts the border as a setting that “socialize[s] migrants in their passage from citizenship to noncitizenship, authorized status to unauthorized status” (Schmidt Camacho 287). However, Aníbal’s shift from authorized to unauthorized resident functions in relationship to his recognition by others as queer rather than to the popular local perception of migrant communities based on class and race. Aníbal’s migration, then, is motivated both by his former fiancé and family’s acknowledgement of him as queer through financial and familial marginalization and the erasure of his queerness from documented accounts of the broken engagement. The character imagines the public spectacle through headlines that would circumvent a public confirmation of his queerness: “Talina has a change of heart; Talina’s too young; Young Pérez Ceballos needs to secure his future first,” resigning himself to “the escape: the

113 move out of his parent’s household and into Nana’s, the resignation from Industria Pérez, and the jump across the international border, without Jorge who had betrayed him” (76- 77). Having a place to hide and access to money if heterosexual, his absence through migration would be understood publicly as a lack of pride in his country, according to the novel. However, as literary and cultural critic Ernesto Javier Martínez argues, “Queer Latino/a migration (from ethnic space to white queer space) is driven not necessarily by a desire to dissolve ethnic heritage and ties to communities, but rather a desire to express queer desire and sociability,” though these migrations “are never simply autonomous ‘decisions’ to move away in order to actualize alternative forms of sexual desire…but are always complexly motivated…to realities of urban displacement” (92, 93). Similar to migrants assumed by the community to be financially destitute, Aníbal’s queerness, precluding his family’s financial support and employment, dislocates him and renders him invisible to those considered legitimate citizens of the border city. He is, in effect, queered—made other—into the migrant class, but unlike heterosexual migrants, his queerness makes him not only ineligible for socially recognized residency through marriage in Mexico, but also limits his access to a legal residency similarly available in the U.S. through marriage and/or family reunification policies. The dissolution of his prospect for marriage and family in Mexico, the literal dissociation from marriage as economically or personally productive, renders him legally a queered migrant by virtue of identifying as queer. Though the novel doesn’t describe Aníbal’s crossing of the U.S.-Mexico border, passages that narrate his experiences as a migrant in the U.S. restage his departure from his family through his fantasies of following seasonal grape-picking routes with a fellow migrant worker and assumed love interest, Carmelo. For Aníbal, ready to commit to accompanying Carmelo, “The understanding was clear, but left unspoken. Carmelo would keep his girl on that side of the border, and his male companion on this one” (77). However, unlike his exchanges with Jorge, the novel neither presents Carmelo’s invitation nor an extended conversation with Aníbal. Rather, the invitation is only referenced by the narrator who explains: “lately, Carmelo had been more aggressive with his invitation, almost desperate. Accepting Carmelo’s proposition would give him more distance from the border, from Jorge and Talina, and from his parents” (88). Because his

114 consideration of migration is always tied to following a same-sex love interest, the novel appears to follow what Martínez critiques as a late 20th century assumption that queer Latino/a migration operated as a “counterhegemonic acknowledgement that they were negotiating queer subjectivities and knowledge through the very act of surviving collectivities through movement,” what he calls a model of “migration-as-emancipation” (80-81). Imagining Carmelo as a fellow queer migrant allows Aníbal to fantasize about collective queer survival. But González’s novel refutes the precarious model by explicitly noting the character’s inability to document their relationship. In one instance, the narrator notes Carmelo asked Aníbal to photograph him in front of a house with a well- kept lawn. Not included in the photograph, “Aníbal imagined the look of envy on the faces of those who saw the pictures across the border…. Little did they suspect that it was the eye behind the camera that saw the truth…the necessarily hidden truth” (77). Queerness, left unstated, is a truth only possible though the character’s fantasies in the novel. Unlike his engagement to Talina, his relationship to Carmelo, if real, would be legally unauthorized, but allows him the liberty to imagine a romantic relationship that can circumvent the demands placed on him by complying to heterosexual marriage in Mexicali. However, following a shooting at the warehouse where they both work, Carmelo, more concerned with the events that take place than his alleged lover’s wellbeing, leads the narrator to explain that Aníbal “was so good at making things up, at inventing identities, creating romances, and projecting a sentimentality on the unsuspecting victim of his desire” (189). Never confirming or denying the relationship between the two, the narrator simply points to the impossibility of the legally unauthorized relationship. The truth of Aníbal and Carmelo’s relationship, then, remains as concealed from the reader as the hidden truth the photographer bears in relationship to Carmelo’s photograph. When González represents queer characters’ identities in relationship to legal documentation, he presents such documents as textual sites where queer migrants can, in part, imagine alternate identities and relationships. After Aníbal migrates to the U.S., he quickly gets promoted from the field to the warehouse where he weights and packages picked fruit. As the narrator notes, the story of his migration can be traced through his shifting identities: “Aníbal became Juan Carlos Macías Leyva,” the name on his

115 counterfeit green card, “who became Scaleboy, one transformation after another as if that took him farther and farther away from his shames” (77). Like other migrants in the field, Aníbal took on other identities prescribed by his position at work and the name registered on his falsified green card. The narrator explains: “Most of them carried false IDs like he did. Aníbal mused at the thought of dying, wearing the name on his fake green card, Juan Carlos Macías Leyva. Aníbal Pérez Ceballos would dissolve completely” (37). Though migration does offer him the opportunity to reimagine his own fate through the use of the unofficial documentation, the imagined identities these credentials offer are contingent on the documents not being acknowledged as unofficial. These forms of identification allow González to challenge the narrative of migration-as-emancipation through “attention to what it feels like to be negotiating hostilities in place and space” (Martínez 94). The novel shows both the imagined liberating possibilities available to Aníbal through the identity of Juan Carlos Macías Leyva while aware that his documents can be subject to federal inspection and lead to prospective deportation. If Aníbal were to die, as the narrator notes, his actual identity, erased by the fake document, would leave behind a corpse whose name, when and if officially identified, could only be confirmed as an alias. However, as the novel suggests, the alternative to the identities available to him through his falsified green card functions as its own form of erasure. The narrator states: “The last thing Aníbal needed was an immigration official scrutinizing his falsified documents. They’d tear his green card up and throw him back to Mexicali that same afternoon. They’d tear him away from Carmelo” (38). The novel, presenting the narrator’s account of Aníbal’s relationship with Carmelo as questionable, implies that this relationship is as legitimate as his identification is legally valid. As Luibhéid explains, the exclusions enforced by documents like green cards “have their counterparts not only in exclusionary citizenship laws but also in symbolic exclusions that mark certain U.S. citizens as Others, despite their formal legal membership in the community” (“Queering Migration” xii). In both Mexico and in the U.S., Aníbal’s formal recognition as resident is only available through a cultural and legal performance of heterosexuality. If his legal membership in Mexicali is restricted as a consequence of breaking his engagement and his access to legal residence in the U.S. is, in a historical and legal context, accessible only through heterosexual marriage, then Aníbal’s survival depends on eluding the

116 scrutiny of his falsified green card to avoid his deportation. This is not to say that González considers falsified documents as an ideal site of queer performance and expression of desire. Rather, Crossing Vines suggests that when the recognition and documentation of one’s belonging is culturally and legally limited to heterosexuality as performed through marriage, the queer migrant’s options are reduced to falsifying one’s identity or falsifying one’s sexuality.48 Aníbal, cannot simultaneously be Aníbal and queer or Juan Carlos and un-queered. In fact, while in the U.S., he cannot identify as queer or Aníbal because both of his true identities must remain hidden, both being respectively excludable. Simultaneously, identifying as a queer person or as Juan Carlos aligns Aníbal with those migrant communities subject to erasure in Mexicali. Thus, migrating enables and forecloses Aníbal’s ability to concurrently perform queerness and legal citizenship respectively, foregrounding the novel’s focus on the impossibility of queer embodiment within the legal and cultural regulation of migration. While González, in this sense, does not offer a concrete resolution for the queer character, exploring the falsified identities available to Aníbal reveals the legal and cultural impossibility for the emergence of a legally recognized queer resident in the context of sexually regulated citizenship. Documenting Queer Lives and Deaths

48 In presenting queer characters as closeting their sexuality and their migrant status in the U.S., Crossing Vines elaborates on broader theories of the closet, like Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s study of “the open secret” in Epistemology of the Closet (“Introduction: Axiomatic,” 1990) She suggests that the closet mediates the distinction between what people implicitly know and what they explicitly acknowledge in relationship to sexuality. She states: “in a culture where same-sex desire is still structured by its distinctive public/private status, at once marginal and central, as the open secret, [one] discovers that the line between straining at truths that prove to be imbecilically self-evident…[and] tossing off commonplaces that turn out to retain their power to galvanize and divide, is weirdly unpredictable,” adding, “it is only being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative” (22). For Aníbal, “the obvious” is a dual identification, both queerness and undocumented status, and merging both sexual identity and immigration status in the green card expands what is considered queer and elevates the stakes in acknowledging a migrant subject’s queerness. That is, there are networks of power that, in failing to acknowledge Aníbal’s queerness and undocumented status, respond to his falsified documents in response to how they stand to benefit from his labor and/or deportation.

117 Unlike Aníbal, Crossing Vines treats the sexual identity of its second prominent queer character, Moreno, more implicitly by contrasting other character’s speculation of his sexuality with his former experiences as a drag queen named Tiki-Tiki in Mexicali. Moreno, a field worker in the same vineyard as Aníbal, becomes one of the novel’s central figures by housing the husband of his cousin, Chela, when he leaves their family home during her second pregnancy. While they acknowledge his queerness and at times briefly describe his stint as a drag performer at a border nightclub, Moreno’s sexual identity is only implied by comments of other characters in the book or presented as the narrator’s account of his memories during the workday. Shot to death by a novice police officer in response to one of Moreno’s playful gestures after being repeatedly pulled over by law enforcement in the same vignette, the accounts of his earlier life experiences and murder offer in the novel a more definitive representation of the fatal consequences to the erasure of queer experiences. Whereas Aníbal’s legal status is clearly discussed in the novel, Moreno’s is vaguely treated, moving the reader to focus more specifically on how suspicion is produced through the exclusion of his queer and queered migrant narratives. Suspicion of his sexuality, in fact, drives the narration of his story revealing the personal and legal effects of such suspicion on how Moreno can be recognized as a member of his community and a victim of violence. The ambiguity with which the migrant community acknowledges Moreno’s sexuality is presented when Moreno is first introduced in the novel. Readers first meet Moreno as he wakes up in a room he shares permanently with two fellow migrant workers, Ninja and Tamayamá, and temporarily with Cirilo, who has a history of leaving his home while his wife is pregnant. Avoiding blame for the foul smell of the room, Cirilo blames Moreno, the only other person awake in the house, for undercooking the previous night’s dinner: “All three of you were firing cannons in your sleep, thanks to those beans…. I though all you jotos49 knew how to cook” (26, my emphasis). Though Cirilo could be implying Moreno is the only queer person in the house, it also offers an early possibility that all three roommates could be queer, an assumption furthered by Moreno’s response to the statement, kicking Tamayamá saying, “I’ll show you a joto….Wake up, you cocksucker” (26). The home, as a private space, is the only setting

49 “queers”

118 where Moreno’s homosexuality is openly discussed, albeit not around his vaguely described roommates. After Cirilo lightly reprimands him, “Let him sleep, Tiki- Tiki…don’t be a cabrón,” Moreno replies: “I’m letting you get away with that shit only because you are sometimes family” (46). González, placing high stakes on knowing whether others understand Moreno to be queer, suggests, as Luibhéid states, “when migrants in the U.S. claim gay, queer, or other identities, these claims do not simply reflect assimilation to dominant Western sexuality norms. Rather, they reflect complex processes of cultural transformation that occur within relations of power” (“Queering Migrations” xxxi). In the context of his labor at the vineyard, a confirmation of Moreno’s sexuality outside of the privacy of a conversation amongst family has potential consequences in how people perceive his ability to do field labor or whether he can continue to live with his coworkers. Later, Ninja asks Moreno, rumored to have starred in films in his drag persona Tiki-Tiki, the origin of the ideas for the films. Asked by Cirilo to drop the subject, Ninja responds, “It’s only talk….We all know Moreno likes women. Right Moreno?” (145). Cirilo speeds up before an answer can be offered, suggesting to the reader that Ninja and Tamayamá are not themselves queer and might, in fact, be unaware of Moreno’s sexual orientation despite the rumored performances in drag. Ninja’s unanswered question reveals both Moreno and his family’s investment in keeping the information private and his roommate’s interest in not knowing by refusing to assume the rumors a confirmation of his roommate’s queer identity. Rather than portraying the scene as an investment in the character’s closeting, the novel presents it as a point of contested investments that deem Moreno’s closeting as productive. Neither Moreno nor his coworkers stand to benefit from the public acknowledgement of the former’s queerness, for assuming the former as less productive in the field would produce an added burden of labor on those migrant workers in his proximity. Entwined in his cousin’s marital conflicts, Moreno’s place in the family, as a queer person, becomes the subject of conversation through the family’s suggestion that his maleness interferes with his ability to successfully perform stereotypical feminine roles in a domestic setting. Before Moreno wakes up at the beginning of the novel and Cirilo jokingly criticizes his cooking, the narrator explains: “For all of his feminine qualities, Moreno couldn’t make a decent meal when it was his turn in the kitchen” (22).

11 9 Cirilo, aware of Moreno’s queer identity, relegates Moreno to the role of the feminine presence in his temporary home, understanding his it as feminizing. However playful the gestures appear, his affective relationship with Moreno is presented as the recognition of his queerness as misplaced femininity. When Moreno encouragingly tells Cirilo that he is not judging him for leaving his family’s home, the narrator explains: “Moreno was the closest Cirilo had ever come to a brother. Of course he couldn’t tell Moreno he loved him, but there was no word more appropriate, or more rejected in the vocabulary of spoken appreciation between men. So in the end, Cirilo decided to say nothing sentimental” (27). The novel reveals that within the family structure, Moreno’s queerness interferes with how his relatives can express affection because his sexuality risks added scrutiny to what that affect might mean within the community. Queerness, in this context, offers the opportunity to reconsider, as Chicano critic Richard T. Rodríguez argues, “what family has been and, especially, what it could be for those who fall outside of its otherwise regulatory borders…. in forms and practices that displace its otherwise normative domesticating effects” (3). That possibility, nevertheless, finds its limits in heterosexual characters’ inability to relax the strictures around masculinity and femininity that undergird their normative notions of what constitutes a family. The refused opportunity to express his affection shows that Moreno and Cirilo’s brotherly relationship is contingent on the former’s recognition as heterosexual. When he attempts to offer advice to Chela, his cousin, she similarly mediates her response by challenging his gendered identity: “Just because you dress like Doña Furibunda doesn’t give you the right to act like the metiche” (87). In this instance, Chela imposes limits on Moreno’s ability to insert himself into her marital affairs by citing his failure to perform, as a man, the implied form of femininity required to offer such counsel. He, then, is unable to offer Chela advice because, despite what his feminized clothing suggests, he fails to live up to the femininity that would allow him to meddle into the family’s domestic affairs. In this sense, Moreno’s family acknowledges his sexuality as a simultaneous failure to effectively embody masculinity or femininity, not being masculine or feminine enough to be comfortably integrated into the heteronormative familial space. When González finally presents Moreno’s memories of his drag character Tiki- Tiki, he doesn’t limit the role of drag in the novel to a critique of an absolute sense of

120 femininity, but more broadly challenges the perceptions of racialized bodies in the context of migration through Moreno’s performance as a Chinese character. As the narrator explains, Moreno “suffered from an Asian fetish” from a young age, an interest that stemmed from his admiration of Chinese migrants. Unlike American tourists, the narrator states, to Moreno “The Chinese were everything graceful” (146). Inspired by his cultural obsession, “Sixty pounds and twenty years ago he was Tiki-Tiki, the olive-skin geisha. Clad in a gold kimono and an obi lined with Austrian crystals….the pair of ivory chopsticks sticking out of the wig’s bun was studded with abalone shell, Tiki-Tiki exploded with spark each time she bowed” (145). Judith Butler has famously argued that drag queens’ parody of gender “does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate,” proposing that the repeated citation of characteristics broadly thought of as feminine reveal “that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without origin” (175). However, her argument does not account for the parodic performance of race, in which a citation of another racial identity could be understood as racist in similar ways as drag has been critiqued as sexist. However, González presents the stakes of Tiki-Tiki’s racialized performance as a similar interrogation of an original performance of race in the context of migration. The narrator explains that Moreno’s father once told him that in Mexicali: “the Chinese lived beneath the city, within a labyrinth of tunnels that only they knew how to enter and exit,”50 and that following a fire in the business district, “Out of nowhere hundreds of Chinese materialized…. And where do you think they all came from?” (145). Like Ninja’s inquiry about Moreno’s film career, the question of their origin remains

50 Moreno, dressing in racialized drag, is not just citing femininity, but also a history of multiethnic migration in the aftermath of the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, earlier discussed in this chapter. As Joseph Nevins explains: “Until 1882, the Bureau of Immigration…functioned merely as a gatherer of statistics. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, however, resulted in the bureau receiving field operatives who worked from ports of entry along the [U.S.-Mexico] international boundary…. However, the fact that the smuggling of Chinese migrants into the United States was a highly lucrative, well-organized business, combined with the porosity of the boundary, ensured that most Chinese migrants who wanted to enter the United States from Mexico without authorization surely did so” (41). Moreno’s performance must then be understood as a representation of erasures of gendered, queer, and migrant histories at the U.S.-Mexico border.

121 unanswered. Because the novel doesn’t detail any character’s journey across the border, the means by which they are in the U.S. are as elusive to the reader as the origin of Chinese migrants is to Moreno or his father. Tiki-Tiki, in the novel functions as what Chela Sandoval calls “the oppositional agent who accesses differing identity, ideological, aesthetic, and political positions….a set of principled conversions that require movement through, over, and within any dominant system of resistance, identity, race, gender, sex, class, or national meanings” (25 original emphasis). Rather than parodying Asian identity, Tiki-Tiki instead collapses narratives of migration to and from Mexico by Chinese and Mexican people respectively to critique the impulse to document migrants’ origins altogether in a way that derides the ways in which the state tries to produce meanings by using race as a sign of otherness. However, because González uses the character to illustrate the consequences of identity suppression, he limits Moreno’s ability to effect a sustained subversion of gendered and migrant identities by limiting his ability to continuously perform as Tiki- Tiki. When the drag queen used to make appearances in the border city’s red light district, “Unlike most of his family, Chela made an effort to drop by. Since women didn’t frequent these establishments, everyone thought she was one of the local bull dykes” (87). Though Chela is the only family member who attends her cousin’s engagements, the manner in which she is seamlessly integrated into such queer spaces suggests the cultural productivity of Moreno’s performance. If, as Butler argues, “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency,” Chela’s attendance offers her the possibility to witness Tiki-Tiki’s subversive performance and imagine alternate iterations of her own performance of gender outside of the normative parameters normatively limited by sex. Indeed, in stating: “when she hung out to the late hours of the night she didn’t object to have a young woman sit on her lap,” the narrator presents her as embodying a contingent performance of gender available through the setting’s temporary interruption of the rehearsal of normative feminine identity (87). For Moreno, though, the ability to continue to perform is limited both physically and spatially. The narrator explains the end of Moreno’s drag career: “Tiki-Tiki was a costume, a stage personality, a weekend mask….until his growing girth began to force the satin sashes outward, and his skin

122 began to sprout coarse hair as a result of a latent puberty,” which his boss tried to remediate with diets, pills, and skin treatments (147). Now an older and heavier migrant, he is not only unable to embody the then delicate Tiki-Tiki, but also without access to do so as a migrant worker whose family and work relationships require, in the very least, an attempt at a compulsory performance of heterosexual identity. Though Butler goes on to suggest, “The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely…in the possibility of failure to repeat…or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction,” queer migrants like Moreno are negated the possibility to fail the parodic repetition altogether (179). Within a context where legality is contingent on the performance of heterosexuality, the stakes for the queer migrant who would perform the parody is, more than the failure to repeat, the failure to simultaneously perform legal presence. The possibility to scrutinize the political construction of gender available to Moreno as a citizen in Mexico is hindered by the authorized political identity a migrant is compelled to perform in the attempt to avoid the state’s scrutiny of his/her legal presence in the U.S.51 On their way back to the vineyards, where migrant workers were required to stay for an additional shift in the grape-packing warehouse where a United Farm Workers’ protest would eventually take place, Moreno, Cirilo, Ninja, and Tamayamá were stopped twice by immigration officers amongst the heavy traffic of other workers trying to reach the same destination. Remembering his performance days while turning paper into origami figurines, Moreno is shaken back into the present when “An INS squad car flashed its lights behind them…. ‘La migra’” (148). The officers greets them, inspects their falsified documents, and asks, “What’s the problem, amigo?” when Ninja states the procedural inspection would make them late to their shift. Cirilo cautiously responds

51 Certainly, LGBT identity is also scrutinized in Mexico, though the historical trajectory of the recognition of LGBT rights has been different. By 2001, proposals to amend the first article of Mexico’s Constitution included protections for individuals’ sexual preferences. In 2004, transgender people were legally authorized to change their name and gender on birth certificates. Staring in 2006, Mexico legalized same-sex unions, culminating in the Supreme Court’s June 3, 2015 expansion of the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions. Though queer characters in the novel were no more legally protected in Mexico than they were in the U.S., presenting them as queer migrant characters invokes a heightened level of scrutiny that these characters would not be subject to in their home country, elevating the stakes of their surveillance.

123 “Don’t piss him off, pendejo” (148). Though Tamayamá fears the officer is reporting the migrants in the vehicle, the officer handed back their green cards and apologized for the inconvenience after asking “Cirilo a series of trite questions that [he] answered politely” (148). If, as Provine and Sánchez argue, the institutionalization of a policy like “SB 1070 helps to condition the public to accept police stops based on ethno-racial profiling, legitimising [sic] practices that already existed in some police agencies when the law was adopted,” the law only legally justifies routine modes of surveillance migrants were already informally subject to and strategically navigated. Such policies heighten the surveillance of migrants, for the law authorizes them to respond to a broad suspicion informed by race rather than a specific inquiry into probable cause (Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo 267). While Cirilo is interrogated and Ninja expresses concern for being late, Moreno folds paper into an origami star and avoids all interactions with the officer, limiting his ability to further scrutinize the migrants in response to his masculinity, which the novel makes clear is already suspect amongst his coworkers. Unlike Ninja, who is silenced by Cirilo, Moreno’s silence in the scene suggest that in a precarious moment when his legal presence in the U.S. is under suspicion, in fact facing a threat of removal, Moreno resists rehearsing the inspection procedure choosing to temporarily absent himself from the routine to reduce the risk of the permanent erasure as a consequence of deportation. As Martínez argues, “queer Latina/o identities and subjectivities are harnessed in direct engagement with the specialization of knowledge and power in the social realm” (81 original emphasis). However, these direct engagements don’t necessitate and explicit responses to the officer, for Moreno’s silence limits the evidence immigration officials can use to justify his deportation to the documents he inspects, suggesting a person’s actions and words can make evident characteristics that cannot be accounted for by official documentation. Following their contact with the border patrol officer, the migrant workers are stopped once again, this time by a police officer who fatally shoots Moreno after a more explicit resistance to the procedural inspection. Almost immediately after leaving the site of their first stop, they are once again pulled over: “‘They are out to get us, alright,’ Moreno said shaking his head…. Moreno slid his green card out of his wallet again. He immediately noticed Ninja’s laminated photograph: brown lips, dark skin. Anyone would

124 have made the same mistake, he thought, tapping the stiff, unbendable card against the dashboard” (149). The narrator’s observations suggest both the migrants’ awareness of the state’s surveillance and the effects of such scrutiny of their identities in the way their identities are legally imagined. Schmidt-Camacho asserts: “The condition of being ‘undocumented’ does not simply imply a lack of legal protection or status but rather entails the active conversion of the migrant into a distinct category of stateless personhood” (302). Through the description of Ninja’s lips and skin tone on the green card, González shows that migrants are reduced to racial characteristics law enforcement officers are legally allowed to criminally profile and, furthermore, by presenting the document as adhered to the dashboard, that these markers are made compulsorily available by discriminatory government practices now enshrined as law in various states of the U.S.52 After the first inspection of their green cards, the novel demonstrates that the documents, if falsified, function to deem undocumented migrants disposable and removable through state inspections. When the characters are ordered to step out of t he car, “Moreno turned around and laughed at the young and obviously inexperienced police officer. The Chinese star twirled in his hand…. Moreno decided to poke fun at him by aiming the Chinese star and flicking it toward him” (150). Moreno’s interruptive act, considering his fascination with origami as informed by his interest in Asian cultures as his drag, can be considered what Martínez terms queer migrant labor: “an understanding of queer migration through the body as a form of deep social inquiry….[that] finds knowledge acquisition possibilities of spatial resistance worthy of further interrogation” (78). Portraying Moreno’s resistance through his flinging of the harmless paper star, González suggests the act is only a threat to the novice officer through his suspicion of Moreno’s racialized body. The officer fatally shoots Moreno, prompting the novel’s consideration of how the scrutiny of queerness limits the ability to document the deaths of undocumented migrants.

52 Wallace explains: “Twenty-three additional state legislatures have introduced legislation similar to SB 1070 since the passage of the Arizona law. I define a bill as a copycat if it contains provisions requiring people to produce documentation of their legal status to local law enforcement…. Of the 24 bills introduced, six states have passed and signed these measures into law as of December 2011” (266). The “show me your papers states” include Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Utah, and Mississippi.

125 Moreno’s murder is then folded into the narrative of the shooting at the company warehouse, events that the novel treats simultaneously to demonstrate the stakes of erasing violence against migrant workers. Having heard news of a shooting during the UFW protest at the company warehouse, Chela thought Moreno had been hurt during the protest, until Cirilo clarifies that they never made it to their workplace and that her cousin is dead. As a response, Chela states: “I still think we should demand a criminal investigation…. Maybe get the Chavistas involved. They’ve got funds and those college- educated Chicano lawyers working for them” (196). Cirilo responds: “It was an accident. There’s nothing they can do for us. Besides, they told us Lozano was going to take care of everything. He’s raza” (196). Though Cirilo asked Chela to trust Lozano, the owner of the company, given that he was also Latino, her trust in him and the Chavistas, the Chicano labor union organizers, fails to consider the distance both the company and the labor union might try to establish between themselves and the murder given the setting of the shooting. For instance, Lozano unaware of Moreno’s death, tends to the warehouse shooting, learning from his lawyer that Jesse, the wounded worker, would not press charges adding: “we’ll be working with the district attorney to smooth things over with this whole Moreno thing” (176). Confused by the lawyer’s comment, Lozano devises a strategy to respond to the sure-to-be rumors among next year’s migrant workers: “What is said is not as important as what is heard. What happened had happened to some other crew in some other valley. And the news of conspiracy will have come and gone like a brief unexpected breeze” (176). Invested in the erasure of the memory of the shooting given that it was he who shot and wounded himself and his girlfriend, Jesse is not the single rumor Lozano would deal with. The warehouse matter resolved, in recognizing Moreno’s death abstractly by pawning off the violent act on another community, Lozano attempts to absolve himself of the failure to account for Moreno’s death through an unspoken acknowledgement of his absence. The subject of Moreno’s loss is finally put to rest when Cirilo urges Chela to reconsider the investigation of her cousin’s death out of fear that Moreno’s queer identity would serve to dismiss the importance of his lost life. Cirilo, wondering how productive the investigation would be asks Chela: “What’s the use in raising hell?.... Even if we manage to get some fancy lawyer to consider the case, he might change his mind after he

126 finds out Moreno was a transvestite. I’ve seen this kind of information used on television to humiliate the dead. Moreno deserves his peace, doesn’t he?” (196). Noting that Moreno’s identity could be used against him, the novel suggests that following up on the murder would be productive only if the victim were heterosexual, demonstrating that in the death of a queer migrant can be more respectfully acknowledged through a community’s dismissal of the act of violence rather than through the state’s dismissal of his life as one worth legally accounting for. Moreno’s queerness, largely unacknowledged by most characters in the novel while alive, becomes the primary way in which his identity could be acknowledged by his community and the state after his death. Chela, however, makes evident the consequence of the potential dismissal of Moreno’s death to the community: “This is the reason why gringos get away with all this mierda53 they throw at us. We have to fight back, throw some chingada mierda54 their way. It’s not so hard. You just pick up the stinky brown stuff and aim” (197). Her desire for a response to their disenfranchisement illustrates what Schmidt-Camacho terms migrant melancholia: “an emergent mode of migrant subjectivity that contests the dehumanizing effects of the unauthorized border crossing,” through the recognition that “the ethical imperative of survival cannot conform to the geopolitical fiction of sovereign borders” (286 original emphasis). Though Chela feels compelled to respond to the death of her cousin, her eventual compliance with Cirilo’s suggestion reflects that the ability to resist the dehumanization of migrant workers often fails to considered the complex ways in which they are, in fact, dehumanized. The gendered structures that uphold contemporary immigration policy and have historically informed organized Chicano resistance to oppression place Moreno’s in a more precarious situation in resisting than his heterosexual counterparts. In this context, migrant melancholia is a function of heterosexual migrant identity, for, like heterosexual undocumented migrants, queer migrants also attest to the fiction of state borders, but must further navigate the borders historically placed on gender upon which Chicano activism has buttressed its resistance. In suggesting Cirilo, the community, the union, and Lozano should respond to Moreno’s death, Chela doesn’t acknowledge that in the

53 “shit” 54 “fucking shit”

127 patriarchal context of the depicted Chicano community, resistance is only available to heteronormative subjects, for Moreno’s death is itself a consequence of his playful, even queer, active resistance of the state’s scrutiny. Locating Queer Migrant Narratives In Crossing Vines, Rigoberto González hesitates to offer readers any resolution in regard to how to document the largely ignored experiences of queer migrants. He does, however, illustrate the doubled risk of erasure queer migrant narratives face through the shared heterosexist principles that have historically undergirded the state and Chicano notions of citizen and family inclusion respectively. As I proposed in the introduction to this chapter, undocumented queer migrants are both marginalized in legal and social context for being queer and queered through immigration policies make legally impossible their inclusion as non-citizen. In the interstices of state policies and social movements that come together in a compulsory demand to document heterosexual identities, queer migrants like Aníbal and Moreno struggle to negotiate and claim the agency to imagine and remember sites where the possibility of queer expression is available. But González refuses to comfortably offer those spaces to his characters in favor of demonstrating queer migrants’ high stakes in performing any embodied act of resistance to the state’s homophobic exclusionary measures. For Aníbal, the embodied experience of his arguably imagined affairs with Carmelo put him at risk for deportation through the public acknowledgement that he is neither queer nor the person registered on his falsified green card. Similarly, Moreno’s choice to maintain his queerness as subject of speculation allows him to later be considered among the migrant community a person whose life is worth mourning and remembering. Aníbal’s deportation would place him in direct proximity to a family whose acknowledgement is contingent on the erasure of his queer past in similar ways as Moreno’s peaceful rest and remembrance is conditional on the community and state’s ability to ignore his queerness. For González, undocumented queer migrants are subject to compounded systems of surveillance informed by longstanding policies and modes of political resistance that make queer lives, rather than impossible to document, identities states and communities legally and culturally render unproductive and un-representable, deeming queer migrant experiences ultimately disposable.

128 Considering González’s novel in the context of a history of queer exclusion, the author’s reluctance to offer optimistic resolutions to his queer characters seems justified. Though the legal restrictions through which the state has historically queered migrants to regulate migration have been relaxed, the legal possibilities for queer migrants remain meager. From the regulation of migration through the scrutiny of migrant sexual behavior and the IRCA’s commitment structuring immigration policy around heteronormative notions of the reproductive family, U.S. immigration policy has remained intent on the erasure of the possibility of a prospective queer legal resident or citizen. If what Aníbal and Moreno work against are racist and heterosexist institutions whose exclusion and inclusion are defined by a recognition of their full membership in the U.S. communities through legal documentation, the contemporary movements advocating for queer and migrant rights seeking such documented recognition require the obfuscation of migrant and queer identities respectively. In this sense, Crossing Vines rather than asserting a vision for the acknowledgement of queer narratives, instead demonstrates that the state’s historical interest in identifying and excluding queer migrants and contemporary advocacy movements, in conjunction, erase the narratives and experiences of queer migrants. Like Cirilo’s proposition to let Moreno rest in peace, these movements invest themselves in the erasure of the experiences of those who are both queer and migrants as to not interfere with the progress of the advocacy for queer or migrant rights.

129 CHAPTER FOUR

Out of the Shadows: Outing and the Institutionalized Erasure of Queer Migrant Narratives in Jaime Cortez’s Sexile

Amidst failed congressional attempts to pass legislation granting undocumented migrants a path to naturalized citizenship,55 on November 20th, 2014 President Barack Obama introduced executive action measures that would defer deportation to an estimated five million out of approximately eleven million undocumented migrants in the U.S.56 In a televised address, he offers what he termed a “deal” explaining: “If you’ve been in America for more than five years…have children who are American citizens or legal residents…register, pass a criminal background check, and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes—you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation” (n.p.). Under those stipulations, he added, “You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law” (Obama). Though purportedly an attempt to encourage lawmakers to compromise on reforming the current immigration system, Obama’s actions do not differ from legislative precedents, specifically the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) discussed in the third chapter, that have made one’s access to prospective documented status contingent upon proof of parental ties to citizens, clean criminal records, and financial stability. The announced executive order demonstrates, as Eithne Luibhéid explains, “heteronormativity animates both anti- and pro-immigrant imagery and discourses in ways that reiterate, yet continually recode, sexual, gender, racial, and class distinctions and inequalities in relation to constructs of

55 Most recently the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 which, despite passing in the Senate with the bi-partisan support of Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Jeff Flake, Charles Schumer, Dick Durbin, Bob Menendez, and Michael Bennet, has failed to come to the floor in the House od Representatives. 56 The introduced policy came to be known as the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). The proposed executive action has faced legal opposition and has been subject to a temporary injunction since February 16, 2015 issued by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Texas, joined by 25 other states, sued the United States to halt the implementation of DAPA and an expansion of an earlier executive order Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the injunction on November 9, 2015. United States v. Texas is pending review by the Supreme Court of the United States as announced on January 19, 2016.

130 nation-state, nationalism, and citizenry” (175). Guised as a progressive gesture toward the reconfiguration of who has access to residence in the U.S., the proposed executive action excludes, among other communities, queer people who lie outside the historically prescribed traits deemed desirable in a prospective migrant demonstrating that, as Luibhéid asserts, “the production of the valorized norm…is intimately tied to the abjection of queers and queerness” (172). Retooling the trope of “coming out,” the pro- immigration executive action elides how coming out has been historically used as a means to deny queer people eligibility to enter the U.S. while implicitly excluding them from the outlined protections from deportation offered to undocumented migrants characterized as having assimilative potential. Though immigration law has undergone change, the legal impulse to assimilate migrant communities that undergirds immigration policy has proven to have significant staying power. As contemporary debates on immigration reform illustrate the value and desire for inclusion of migrant communities in the U.S., the foreseeable possibilities offered by lawmakers fail to renounce the privilege of whiteness in their legal mediation of migration. In his critique of what he describes as traditional models of U.S. citizenship, José Esteban Muñoz explains that Latino/a communities are asked to negotiate “‘feeling brown’ in a world painted white, organized by cultural mandates to ‘feel white’” (“Feeling Brown” 205). In other words, the regulation of immigration produces a false dichotomy that pits brownness against normative definitions of the American citizen subject, presenting the performance of non-normative identities, including race, as threatening in their non-compliance with privileged identity benchmarks. In such a context, Luibhéid explains: “normalizing regimes produce heterogeneous, marginalized subjects and positionalities in relation to a valorized standard of reproductive sexuality between biologically-born male-female couples who belong to the dominant racial-ethnic group and the middle class” (171). As she notes, the valorized legal standard is not limited to race, but rather functions at the intersection of performances of race, class, gender, and sexuality, which have historically served as exclusionary standards in U.S. immigration policy. When President Obama encourages undocumented parents without criminal records willing and financially able to pay retroactively calculated taxes to “come out of the shadows,” we must, as Muñoz explains, “analyze the material and

131 historical import of affect…to better understand failed and actualized performances of citizenship” (“Feeling Brown” 205). “Coming out” functions only as a metaphor in the Obama administration’s effort to reform the immigration system by erasing how it has historically functioned as a an institutional practice to regulate the migration of queer people to the U.S. Coming out, in the context of immigration policy, not only limits queer people’s ability to migrate to the US., but more precisely codifies queerness as foreclosing a person’s ability to perform U.S. citizenship and/or legal residence by default. Under the guise of reform of the immigration system, the Obama administration’s executive order upholds the exclusion of queer migrant communities that has historically revolved around the state’s forcible insistence on the outing of migrants as either undocumented or queer. While homophobic migration policies have preemptively excluded prospective migrants by restricting queer access to legal documented statues in the U.S, the announced executive action makes queer people vulnerable by refusing queerness as a protectable and valorized migrant subjectivity in the U.S. altogether. According to performance theorist Diana Taylor, state policies that render queer communities invisible, in such a way, legally reduce the representation of queer people in an archive of citizen subjects, producing a national narrative that denies queerness as part of the citizenry’s composition. More importantly, the continued exclusion of queer people from immigration policy further limits how citizenship can be embodied and performed by a queer migrant subject. She argues: “Embodied expression has participated and will probably participate in the transmission of social knowledge, memory, and identity pre- and post-writing,” indicating that at risk in the erasure of queerness in immigration policy is the place of queerness in nation-making memory and knowledge (16). The history of queer exclusion, then, must be understood as participating in a national project that transmits an understanding of queer identity as disposable, excludable, and prosecutable that insists on expunging queer histories, identities, and cultures from recorded national narratives. Often understood to procure anonymity in response to the threat of detention and deportation, undocumented migrants and advocates for immigration reform have used the metaphor of “living in the shadows” to condemn policies that render migrant

132 communities deportable when identifiable as undocumented. However, in the context of legal actions that exclude queer migrants from protections, President Obama’s speech invokes the historical disenfranchisement of queer migrants including, for instance, the restrictions upheld in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the HIV travel ban that remained in effect until 2009.57 In ignoring the ways in which queerness has served as a standard of exclusion of migrants to the U.S., President Obama’s speech echoes the strategies employed by the state to since the presidency of Jimmy Carter. As discussed in the third chapter, following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the state actively engaged in immigration control policies that sought to identify migrants’ sexual identities with the intent of securing the imagined heterosexuality of the nation. While these restrictions remained largely intact in the IRCA OF 1986, were upheld by the Supreme Court in Boutilier, and animated the further expansion of restrictions of queer migration through the HIV travel ban, the ways in which such policies were employed and enforced shifted in the context U.S.-Cuban in the early 1980s. The government’s surveillance shifted from a policy of active identification of queer people to strategies that prompted self-identification that granted the state the flexibility to include or exclude queer people in relationship to a broader anti-communist foreign policy agenda. In this context, I will demonstrate that “coming out” as a means to ascertain legal status in the U.S. is rooted in a queer legal history where one’s self-identifying as other served as a mechanism of survival while simultaneously marking one as a prosecutable migrant subject. In this final chapter, I will discuss how statutes regulating migration and exile institutionalized outing as a means to limit the opportunities queer communities had to claim citizenship, which contemporary gay Chicano artist Jaime Cortez challenges in the graphic biography Sexile. The narrative presents the account of transgender activist Adela Vasquez who arrived to the U.S. from Cuba as part of a brief and conditional opening of

57 Responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis, Senator Jessie Helms included an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act 1987 that authorized President Ronald Reagan to add AIDS to the U.S. list of excludable diseases, legally barring those with the virus from travel and/or migration to the U.S. More than two decades later, President Obama overturned the restriction that stigmatized queer and/or HIV-positive communities both abroad and domestically.

133 both nations’ borders known as the Mariel Boatlift. As Cortez illustrates, her experiences shed light on a crisis of queer representation at a juncture where the homophobic policies of the Castro regime that characterized queer people as counterrevolutionary and U.S. immigration policy’s longstanding legal exclusion of queer migrants that forced queer Cubans to both come out as queer to leave the island and closet themselves to evade deportation once in the U.S. If, as Muñoz asserts, such disenfranchised communities can employ “survival strategies…in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides and punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship,” which he notably terms disidentification, I will argue that the work of Cortez disidentifies with institutional processes designed to “out” queer people to present a far more complex consideration of the trope of “coming out” (Disidentifications 4). At stake for Cortez is documenting the intended erasure of queer communities from the citizenry in official records and the performances of queerness by minoritized communities as sites where knowledge about queerness can emerge to contest state-sanctioned homophobic policies. Unlike the most recent U.S. policy invoking coming out as a conditional site of relief for migrant communities, Cortez illustrates that coming out is rarely a site of relief. I will conclude arguing that current attempts at presenting coming out as an exclusive site of relief can only operate through the elision of the experiences of queer communities for whom coming out is never a singular act of relief, but rather a reoccurring performance where one’s potential membership in a community is at risk when made subject to the potential majoritarian erasure of queer experience. Archiving Queerness In criminalizing queer identity domestically and enforcing the exclusion of queer migrants from entry to the U.S. in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA), the U.S. controlled how lived experiences of queer people in the U.S. were imagined and represented as part of U.S. cultural memory. In the context of Cuba-U.S. relations, legal statutes and the treatment of queer citizens were characterized by documenting queer identity for exile and exclusion respectively, consequently producing tropes through which queer people were both identified for exclusion from the citizenry and in each nation’s historical memory. Taylor identifies two modes of memory: the archive and the

134 repertoire. She explains: “‘Archival memory exists as documents…supposedly resistant to change” that separate “‘knowledge’ from the knower” (19). She adds, however, “What changes over time is the value, relevance, or meaning of the archive, how the items it contains get interpreted, even embodied” (19). A privileged mode of recording memory, the archive often overshadows the embodied experiences and knowledge-making performances of memory. The repertoire, Taylor explains, “enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, oralitity…all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge…. The repertoire requires presence: people participating in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’” clarifying, “As opposed to the…archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same” (20). In excluding migrants, domestic U.S. immigration policies were animated by the fear that the not-yet-here could be, and in specifically targeting LGBT communities that those not- yet queer, without legal intervention, were at higher risk of coming out as queer. By creating the legal disincentive to publicly identify as gay and deporting migrants who identified as queer, the state intended to limit who could ‘be there,’ as Taylor suggests, to transmit memory of queer history and identity. Published by The Institute for Gay men’s Health (a partnership of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and AIDS Project Los Angeles), González’s Sexile broadens the historical and political contexts that inform the ways in which queer migrants narratives are accounted and unaccounted for in U.S. archival memory. Rather than exclusively speaking of queer experiences at the end of the 20th century in the context of tired stereotypes of sex, communicable disease, and death, the text traces the history of Vazquez’s migration in both Cuban and U.S. historical and legal settings. In doing so, González presents queer identity as subject to a multiplicity of archival erasures that foreground the protagonist’s survival despite legal restrictions on her migration in the 1980s, a pivotal period in U.S. legal history where the criminalization of queer identity was being upheld in the courts and the emergence of expanded restrictions on queer migration compounded the surveillance of queer bodies. At the interstices of the criminalization of queer identity in both Cuba and the U.S., queer people found themselves negotiating performances of gender and sexuality that ran counter to the ways in which both countries legally respectively crafted and enforced heterosexual national

135 narratives. As Eithne Luibhéid explains, “National heteronormativity is…a regime of power that all migrants must negotiate, making them differentially vulnerable to exclusion at the border or deportation after entry while also racializing, (re)gendering, (de)nationalizing, and unequally positioning them within the symbolic economy, the public sphere, and the labor market” (174). González presents such a regime of power as multifaceted in the context of Vazquez’s migration, accounting for both a migrant’s experiences after the point of entry to the U.S. and how migrant narratives are archived in anticipation of a person’s migration. Specifically, Sexile demonstrates how legally recorded instances of outing and closeting operate in the context of the Mariel boatlift, where queer people, seeking and vulnerable to exclusion in Cuba and the U.S. respectively, engage in ongoing outing processes as they respond to varied definitions of queerness and criminality. In the context of queer migration, the tensions between the U.S. and Cuba are reflected in the immigration policies that allowed queer Cubans to leave the island and enter the U.S. as part of the Mariel boatlift, which demanded contradictory performances of sexuality under state surveillance. The Mariel boatlift serves as the centerpiece of Sexile, marking the mass exodus of Cuban nationals to the U.S. following the mass entry of Cuban citizens into the Peruvian embassy in 1980. In response to Peru’s inability to accommodate all Cuban asylum-seekers, Cuba opened Mariel Harbor and the U.S. its borders to those willing to leave Cuba after international pressure to assist Peruvian efforts during President Jimmy Carter’s administration. Between April and October of 1980, thousands left Cuba, including, the Castro regime argue, undesirables such as criminals, people with disabilities, and homosexuals, though, as Capó explains, “about 80 percent of the Marielitos did not have a criminal past” (86). For queer people, to leave the island entailed explicit performances of homosexuality deemed illicit in Cuba. That is, the state project of identifying queerness as excludable from the citizenry became the standards through which queer Cuban citizens could procure the prospect of asylum in the U.S. incentivizing, for some, the performance of sexuality identifiable as undesirable and unproductive to the revolutionary state. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the subsequent Castro regime buttressed a nationalist revolutionary identity on normative masculinity. The Castro

136 regime relied, as Julio Capó, Jr. explains, on Marxist-Leninist definitions of the lumpen proletariat to characterize queer people “as counterrevolutionary individuals who did not represent the diligent, virile, and altruistic proletarian man. Homosexual ‘lumpen’ openly flaunted their sexuality and could not properly contribute to the Cuban Revolution because they lacked…’revolutionary genes’” (84).58 Capó notes that by 1965, media attention shed light on institutionalized policies that punished homosexual behavior with forced labor as part of the Military Units to Aid Production program (80). Though the state utilized metaphors indicating queer people’s genetic lack of disposition to perform productive revolutionary work, forcing queer people to work in labor camps suggests a false correlation between labor and sexual identity that identifies labor as a corrective intervention that can infuse productivity into an otherwise unproductive citizen identity. Thus, labor was not just a consequence of heterosexual identity and performance, but heterosexuality was in fact its of kind of national labor. The state desired a specific kind of desire, so to speak, establishing a logic by which a person expressed affect for the nation’s revolutionary ideals through forms of labor themselves codified as exclusive to the heterosexual citizen. However, if one understands the punishment of queer performances as suggesting and understanding of the queer citizen as capable of performing acts of labor, it is important to interrogate what kind of labor queerness performs and how the productivity of queer performance is accounted for in archival national narratives. The incarceration of queer people in Cuba can be understood as a strategy of repertorial erasure by which performances of queerness were separated from the heterosexual citizenry with the intent of offering a corrective to counterrevolutionary behavior to produce the desired citizen. If, as Muñoz argues, such policies “meant to block access to freedom to those who cannot inhabit or at least mimic certain affective rhythms that have been preordained as acceptable,” then the state understood itself as capable of eliciting the sexual performances it desired and deemed revolutionary (“Feeling Brown” 206). As Susana Peña explains, the criminalization of homosexuality

58 Capó cites Freiderich Engels’ definition of the lumpen proletariat: “scum of the depraved elements of all classes, which established headquarters in the big cities” (The Peasant War in Germany, 3rd ed., New York, 2000: xii).

137 in Cuba specifically targeted queerness as a performance rather than as an identity, noting that it was through the policing of hairstyles, clothing, and mannerisms were deemed “visible markers of homosexuality” (487). She clarifies: “The gravest crime was not same-sex sexual acts per se but, rather, transgressing gender norms in ways associated with male homosexuality—in other words, appearing visibly or ‘obviously’ gay” (487). As opposed to U.S. domestic policies, as discussed in the first chapter, where the state empowered itself to intrude in private spaces where sexual acts were legally rendered indicative of homosexual identity through anti-sodomy laws, in Cuba the concern was the visible public identification of queerness as part of revolutionary masculine identity. Sanctioning homosexuality would suggest the acceptance of what Castro’s revolutionary rhetoric rendered part of the lumpen proletariat into the revolutionary, anti-Capitalist citizenry. Given, as Capó explains, that “To the Castro regime, homosexuality represented a sexually expressive culture that manifested itself in individual indulgence and hedonism,” the folding homosexual identity into the definition of the revolutionary male citizen would indicate the state’s sanctioning of practices “it attributed to capitalists and the bourgeoisie” (84). Consequently, the prosecution and punishment of public homosexual performances demonstrates, rather than a rejection of homosexuality altogether, the state state’s desire for masculinity that conformed to the revolution’s anti- capitalist ideals. Visible performances of queerness in Cuba functioned as a way to identify and incarcerate those the Castro regimes sought to temporarily alienate from the heterosexual citizenry and later served to identify those eligible for exile, a permanent erasure of queer repertorial memory in Cuba. These visible performances, however, were not limited to those who had been previously identified as homosexual, but a broader means through which both queer and heterosexual citizens left the country. Peña explains: “the officially recognized (and stigmatized) homosexual was a gender-transgressive male whose public behavior was ostentatious and who took the passive role. As men who understood themselves to be homosexual performed this loca character, they reflected the official caricature of the homosexual back toward the state that had heightened its stigmatization” (489). If the imprisonment of queer people in labor camps can be considered the state’s deliberate attempt to limit the visibility of queer people and their presence in the nation’s

138 revolutionary narrative, the state elicited performances that perpetuated stereotypes that limited the archival narrative of queer citizenship on the island as undesirable. As Peña elaborates, “Certainly, some degree of condescension is at work here, for the men exaggerated a stereotype that they knew did not encompass who they were or who homosexuals were more broadly” (489). In regulating the specific queer performances deemed excludable as part of the process through which asylum-seekers could leave Cuba, the state narrowly defined how queerness would be considered as part of a larger national narrative that upheld revolutionary ideals of masculinity in opposition to the excess that characterized performances of masculinity it authorized as excludable. Peña further explains: “even consciously constructed performances entailed real material and political consequences. If the men were convincing, authorities expedited their exit from the country. If they were not convincing, they might be refused an exit permit but marked as wanting to leave” (489). These performances for state officials, then, served the dual function of defining the excludable queer citizen and creating a national archive of those who left and/or wanted to leave. The Mariel boatlift, in this context, allowed the state to select how it would account for dissidence in a national narrative of the revolution and the Castro regime. The U.S. itself juggled the state’s longstanding domestic criminalization of queer identity, specifically the entry of queer migrants to the country, and the acceptance of Cuban refugees, some of which were queer or performed queerness to leave their home country. In this instance, the U.S. was confronted with the need to strike a balance between the institutionalized homophobic policies that would bar many Cuban asylum- seekers from entry and the state’s interest in condemning what is considered human rights violations as part of it’s Cold Ward opposition to the communist Cuban state. While, as political scientist and geographer Eric Neumayer argues, “those who need a visa and have been approved by the country’s consulate or embassy abroad are regarded as not undesirable and not representing a risk…. the final decision of whether one can enter a foreign space is made at the border itself and there is always the risk of being rejected” (75). Whereas standard immigration procedures suggest a cooperation between two states, the home country certifying in granting a visa that the documented migrant can return and the host country often authorizing entry by a migrant under the home

139 country’s commitment to readmit its citizen, Cuban citizens leaving Mariel Harbor were popularly depicted as undesirable citizens in Cuba and unwanted migrants in the U.S.59 Describing the immigration policy crisis, Capó explains: “While the U.S. Coast Guard and the INS maintained that those who violated U.S. immigration laws would be liable to corresponding fines, President Carter and his administration…applied lax rules to those who entered the country” (82). For queer migrants whose expedited exit from Cuba was contingent on a recognizable performance of stigmatized queer tropes, the point of entry to the U.S. functioned as a setting where compulsory performances of desirability determined their ability to remain in the U.S. Specifically, these performances required a migrant to provide documentation certifying them as authorized to leave their home country and an immigration official’s identification of the migrant’s presence as not bearing a risk to the U.S. by drawing conclusions about his or her current or prospective criminal status based on their behavior upon entry. The expedited exit of queer people in Cuba found its counterpart in in the U.S. in the expedited negotiation of the exclusionary clause of the INA that barred queer migrants to the U.S. The decision to accept of reject queer asylum-seekers from Cuba became for the U.S. a critical moment in which it would assert its concern for human rights violations by publicly indicting the persecution of queer people in Cuba. Capó explains: “Should the federal government deny entry to the homosexuals, the administration would run the great risk of appearing inconsistent, contradictory, and hypocritical in its condemnation of oppressive regimes and political systems” (94). However, sanctioning the entry of queer Cuban migrants had higher stakes given that the U.S. not only criminalized queer identity and non-normative sexual practices, but would soon uphold standing homophobic laws and expand restrictions of gay migration through

59 Capó describes these characterizations as a “hangover from the ‘Lavender Scare’” of the 1950s in the U.S. (85). He explains: “The expulsion od homosexuals from Cuba—and the public condemnation that homosexuals were enemies of the revolution and potential risks to the state—poses and interesting parallel to the pre-Stonewall United States. The purging of American homosexuals from the federal government in the 1950s, for examples, over fears that they posed a risk to the state as morally weak characters vulnerable to Soviet influence and blackmail demonstrates another context in which a state attempted to ferret out and regulate sexuality to advance its own political agenda and ideology—in this instance, Cold War anti-Communism” (85).

140 the exclusion of HIV-positive migrants. The challenge presented to the Carter administration was not only whether to include or exclude queer asylum-seekers, but also an opportunity to occlude the ways in which the U.S. itself participated in the imprisonment and deportation of queer people the international community urged the state to critique. Though the administration extended special waivers early to some queer asylum-seekers, if later “announced it would not classify the Marielitos as ‘refugees’” (Capó 94). Rather, the U.S. crafted a new migrant classification, labeling such migrants “entrants.” While the new classification granted queer Cuban migrants temporary entry, it failed to ensure that they would not be deported at a later date. The Carter administration, unable to amend the exclusionary clause of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, changed the protocol through which state officials would identify queer migrants. By September of 1980, as Capó explains, the Justice Department “concluded that it had ‘the legal obligation to exclude homosexuals from entering the United States, but it will be done solely upon the voluntary submission by the alien that he or she is homosexual’” (96). In other words, while the state was legally obligated to exclude queer people, it was not itself obliged to identify migrants as excludable queer subjects. Responsibility for identification practices then shifted from the state to migrants themselves, allowing the U.S. to both enforce the exclusionary statute and appear before the international community as relaxing its homophobic restrictions on migration. According to the new protocol, the Justice Department asked the INS to refrain from directly asking a migrant about their sexuality and contemplate “barring the homosexual only if he or she made ‘an unsolicited, unambiguous oral or written admission of homosexuality.’ One’s mannerisms, form of dress, or possessing ‘gay’ paraphernalia…would no longer warrant full investigation” (Capó 96). The new policy, in rejecting the visible markers used in Cuba to identify and criminalize queerness, distinguished itself from the communist political system it condemned before the international community while continuing to criminalize queerness domestically. The Carter administrations policy did, however, allow for the identification of queer migrants by making them responsible for voluntarily reporting those they suspected of being queer. In doing so, the state, in addition to holding migrants accountable for voluntarily procuring their own exclusion, in effect also charged migrants with the

141 identification of queer people legally eligible for deportation within their own communities. As Capó explains: [I]f a third party at the scene identified an individual as homosexual, the INS would have to undertake a ‘secondary inspection.’ This would warrant having an official ask the suspected individual if he or she was a homosexual. In regard to the third-party exclusionary clause, the INS noted that “the likelihood of a third-party stating that an alien is homosexual is remote. (96)

The shift in responsibility to identify queer migrants from state officials to migrants themselves, first, assumes that the Cuban asylum-seekers would privilege solidarity as exiles over the accusations animated by the homophobic revolutionary culture attributed to the Castro regime. That is, the U.S. assumed that while capable of homosexual behavior, asylum-seekers were only remotely capable of homophobic acts. Secondly, it presented the closeting of queer migrants as a resolution to the homophobic statutes that defined both U.S. immigration policies and the domestic criminalization of queer identity. The new policy did not in fact relieve queer migrants from the burden of performing heterosexuality, but instead postponed the interrogation of their sexual identity by making their ability to remain in the U.S. contingent on their willingness to deny their queer identity and/or performing heterosexuality in ways that appeased the potential suspicions of other migrants. The Carter administration’s policies, in this instance, initiated queer migrants into a U.S. legal system that required them to remain closeted to avoid later incrimination in the U.S. Though the U.S. attempted to differentiate it’s approach to identifying queer people from those practices that characterized Cuban persecution of queerness as counterrevolutionary, both governments’ policies compelled performances of sexuality through surveillance and criminalization of homosexuality. Peña explains that queer migrants, specifically Cuban asylum-seekers in the context of the Mariel boatlift, became subject to what she terms the state’s “gaze,” or “the methods used by the state to identify sexual populations as well as to highlight the ways in which the state systems intersected with the interests and desires of the Cuban and U.S. states” (483). Their seemingly varied approaches to identifying queer people for deportation in the U.S. or imprisonment in Cuba did not represent shifts in how both states engaged with queer communities but

142 instead served to further contrast capitalist and communist political systems before an observant international community. Peña further contends: “The Cuban state’s gaze relied on the assumption of gay identifiability. In practical terms, Cuban interests in homosexuality necessitated a mechanism by which they could identify this population” (483). While Cuba relied on assumed visible markers of homosexuality, the strains between Cuban and U.S. states “required that U.S. authorities develop a selective gaze that sometimes saw and other times refused to see homosexual Mariel Cubans” (484). These institutionalized forms of “seeing,” both in Cuban and U.S. contexts, in effect regulate the way in which sexuality is folded into national narratives that uphold heterosexuality as the proper sexual mode of each country’s respective citizen. Though Peña understands these two modes of the state gaze as distinct, they both participate in national projects seeking to expunge the citizenry of queerness in nationalist narratives that characterize competing communist or capitalist political systems. Jointly, foreign and domestic policy promoting queer persecution and exclusion sought to wither the memory of queer presence in the U.S. by restricting the number of people who could engage in memory-making performances outside of state-sanctioned archival records. Sexile, which presents written and illustrated the experiences of a transgender migrant in the context of queer migrant exclusion during the Mariel boatlift, offers a performative queer Latina/o narrative about migration that expands on the memory of queer disenfranchisement and cultural survival. This narrative bridges the memory-making opportunities of the archive and the repertoire by not only presenting textual representations that transmit memories of queer lives during the Mariel boatlift but also compel embodied readings of illustrated narratives to consider the state- sanctioned denial of the queer citizen as a knowledge-producer worth remembering. Depicting Queerness in Cuba Published in 2004, Sexile narrates the early life of Adela Vazquez, a transgender performance artist and activist whose migration to U.S. sheds light on queer migrations during the escalating debates over criminalization of queer identity and migration in the U.S. One of many Cubans to arrive to the U.S. as part of the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, her story is presented as a series of recollections of her memories of leaving Cuba, coming to the U.S., and transitioning. The biographical comic book makes readers her primary

143 interlocutors, offering scenes of present-day Adela sitting in a chair conversing with an absent interviewer. Available in both English and Spanish, Sexile contextualizes Vazquez’s life and the comic itself with a foreword by Patrick “Pato” Hebert and a brief introduction by the author. In the introduction, Cortez states interviews with Vazquez served as the prime material for Sexile, which he determined a story that he needed to present to audiences, “Not just because I’m a queer, a child of immigrants, or a lover of both comics and sexual narratives, but because this story is so fucked up, fabulous, raggedy and human that it opens a vast space where we can all ponder our own sense of risk, exile, and home” (vii). While one could assume that Cortez is the person at the receiving end of Adela’s account, the author is never presented, immediately rendering the reader the one to whom Adela intimates her most personal experiences of queer identity in exile. Prefacing the text’s thematic content, Hebert opens his foreword with a set of guiding questions, “What does it mean to leave what you love in order to become what you love? What does it mean to locate yourself again and again while keeping company with so many tremendous losses? How does that shape your sense of risk? Belonging? Desire?” (iii). His pairing of a question of relocation with one of personal location in the context of loss is no coincidence. Sexile is a narrative organized around its protagonist asserting her identity as a woman outside of Cuba, outside of binary gender and sexual identities, and coming out as both queer and woman at various moments in the text. Hebert adds: “Sexile is about remembering that all kind of changes came crashing to the shore in the early 1980’s. Since that time, Adela has lost dozens of friends. Sexile won’t bring them back, but it might help us discern what such histories mean for today” (iv, my emphasis). Thus, in the context of the text’s own production history, Sexile is not only a piece that attempts to archive Vazquez’s lived experience, but specifically depicts a story that, itself a product of interviews and conversations, asks readers to join the conversation that should be, according to both introductory notes, remembered as part of the archive and repertoire of queer experience in the U.S. The graphic novel opens by establishing a correlation between Adela’s birth and the Cuban Revolution as two distinct revolutionary moments. The text’s first panel is a full-page illustration of Fidel Castro triumphantly waving toward the reader as part of a parade celebrating the victory of the Cuban Revolution accompanied by Adela’s words,

144 “Not to brag, but my birth was revolutionary” (3). At the same time, the protagonist is born in war-torn Camagüey, where she is assigned male at birth. Her expectation, she notes, was that her genitals would fall off at the age of ten: “my pussy would grow, and finally I’d become a girl” (6). Moving briskly through her childhood sexual experiences, Adela recollects an instance at the age of fifteen when she performs in her school’s drag show. Juxtaposed with classmates who carelessly dressed as women, she places second to one dressed as a pregnant woman, stating: “When I stepped on stage, all my classmates got real quiet. My shit was too real for them” (10). Self-admittedly empowered by the experience, preset-day Adela interjects: “Dressing as a woman was illegal and I was doing it for a school event…. It should have been heaven, but Cuba had no place for MY revolution. Only rules and closets and traps for freaks. I met queens who were captured in the 60s forced into labor camps to get ‘fixed.’ Riiight” (10, original emphasis). Accompanied by an illustration of the narrator in the present day against the outline of the island, her narrative intermission implies that in retrospect she understands the risk of her performance that, while empowering her to publicly perform femininity, exposed her to criminalization in the early years of the Castro regime. As historians Carrie Hamilton and Elizabeth Dore explain, “certain topics are made taboo inside Cuba not through direct censorship, but via the construction of dissident voices as ‘counterrevolutionary,’ a technique dating back to the early years of the revolutionary regime. One of the first groups to be targeted by this technique were men identified as homosexual” (193). Present-day Adela, in this instance, sheds light on Hamilton and Dore’s assertion by citing criminalized queer people as the site of knowledge from which she determines the risk of her performance. The “queens” offer her a political awareness that she shares with the reader as a narrative aside that allows her early embodiment of feminine identity to be thought of as revolutionary outside of the Castro’s formal political revolution. Though the text archives her experience, the reader understands the stakes of her performance only when Adela transmits the knowledge passed on to her by a queer forced to understand revolutionary sexual identities as strictly heterosexual. In the subsequent scene, Adela demonstrates a disidentificatory relationship with the revolution as the Ministry of Armed Revolutionary Forces summons her. Muñoz argues: “Disidentification negotiates strategies of resistance within the flux of discourse

145 and power. It understands that counterdiscourses, like discourse, can always fluctuate for different ideological ends and a politicized agent must have the ability to adapt and shift as quickly as power does within discourse” (Disidentifications 19). When Adela receives her draft letter, presented in Spanish, her body is absent from the illustration, which depicts her hands holding the missive over a desk. The letter, addressing Adela as Jorge Antonio Vázquez, her given name, along with her date of birth, address, and state-issued identification number, presents the state’s archive as the person whom the illustration refuses to embody. Adela’s textual account, offered within the panel, states, “Funny. The woman I was going to become was there when I got my national draft notice from the army. Ms. Thing took charge of the situation right away and saved my life” (11). As a strategy of survival, the performance of disidentification “scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications” (Muñoz, Disidentifications 31). In this instance, Cortez’s illustration refuses the conflation of Adela and Jorge, or Adela’s own identity as woman, even when the text describes it as an identity in flux, with how the state identifies her as a potentially revolutionary citizen. When Adela asserts the presence of Ms. Thing, she further distances her own revolution from that of the state, revealing a setting where the state attempts to gain control over the minoritized citizen. Taylor explains that in the case of documents, such as the draft letter, that seem to posses certain permanence, “the archive exceeds the live” (19). However, as she notes, “There are several myths attending to the archive. One is that it is unmediated, that the objects located there might mean something outside of the framing or archival impetus itself. What makes an object archival is the process whereby it is selected, classified, and presented for analysis” (19). The document itself cannot represent Adela’s identity in dissent, limiting the document’s portrayal to a fiction produced and safeguarded by the state. Immediately preceded by Adela’s explanation of the isolation of queer people in labor camps to ‘fix’ them, the text demonstrates a state interest in forcing bodies into compliance with the a record that archives not only personal information, but strictly defines what identities can be considered revolutionary. That is, the archive, in this instance, can only remain unmediated if the body is ‘fixed’

146 both metaphorically through forced labor and literally when Adela’s body correlates to the archive’s definition. In this moment, Sexile foregrounds the importance of the repertoire, by textually representing Adela’s present-day account of her past, setting the oral account that serves as inspiration for the comic in opposition to the ways in which the government documents Adela’s identity. Because refusing the government’s identification entails a risk of removing the narrator, which Taylor would describe as the knower, from the knowledge that accompanies the image of the document, the presence of both Jorge in the document and Adela in the commentary render the protagonist a narrator whose interjections or reportorial performances operate in dissent against the archive. Adela’s own revolution, as illustrated by her response to the draft letter and performance before military officials, involves strategically asserting her identity in opposition rather than in compliance with assimilating normalizing social contexts. After receiving the letter, Adela thinks, “Me in the army?” followed by a panel featuring her pensive face and text stating: “Ridiculous, Bad for me. Very bad for the army. Bad for the march of the revolution” (11). Whether she refers to the Cuban Revolution or her own revolution remains unstated, but the vagueness is less an oversight than a strategic narrative gesture that helps situate her thoughts as immediate responses rather than retrospective insights from present-day Adela. In regard to the visual and verbal narration in Latino comics, Frederick Luis Aldama argues: “author-artists can play with various degrees of presence of one or the other to control the rhythm and flow of the story, the pace at which the reader viewer constructs narrative gestalt” (131). For Aldama, this particular trait is largely limited to independently produced comics where the author- artist can retain some control over the shifting momentum of the narrative (133). Cortez’s depiction of Adela’s response in this instance halts the narrative to heighten the effect of the decision the protagonist is presented with. The final panel on the page illustrates Adela, then presenting as male, at the center of the open doors as she explains: “I’ll have to go deep into the closet” (11). The text is overlaid on what would be the walls of the closet, though within the illustration they are darkened completely functioning technically as closure, which Scott McCloud describes as an obfuscation of the totality of an image to allow readers to “mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (67). In

147 this scene, the text locates the reader within the closet, one Adela explains she must enter. In the following panel, strategically placed in the following page, one sees Adela sporting a button-down shirt rolled and tied high on her waist, low-rise jeans cut at the knee and safety-pinned to expose a flash of her legs, accessorized with sunglasses on her head and sandals adorned with flowers. In contrast with the previous panel, this one is not enclosed, but instead stands freely, technically known as bleeds, which McCloud argues compounds a sense of timelessness (102-103). In the text, this illustrates Adela out of the closet both literally and metaphorically, presenting a distinction between how she understands herself as a queer person and the caricature of queerness compelled by the state. But more importantly, her coming out of the closet, one where readers are textually situated by the previous illustration, suggests to readers that we have as much access to the materials she does within the closet. The pants, shirt, sandals, and glasses are quotidian materials, versions of ones we might ourselves have access to, pointing to varied gendered performances of readers as the raw material from which she draws to constitute her own gendered presentation. Rather than suggesting that to conflate our own experiences of gender performance with Adela’s, I contend Sexile strategically positions readers as witnesses of the strategies she employs to challenge the way the state archive represents her—a part of the spatial and cultural contexts in which Adela enacts political resistance. Aldama proposes: “When we view a Latino comic book story, we are not only putting ourselves in another’s shoes; we are able to imagine from the visual and verbal fragments and signposts provided a character in a whole world” (129, original emphasis). While that may be the case for experiences limited to the archival representation of the comic book as text, Sexile refuses the reader the opportunity to stand in Adela’s shoes by presenting scenarios that are unique to her experience of resistance to state-sanctioned discriminatory policies. When Adela reports to the military officers, she is lined up along with the other draftees, presented as gender-conforming men who stand at a slight distance from the protagonist. Coyly, Adela refuses to undress for a medical inspection: “In front of the boys? You CAN’T be serious” (13, original emphasis). Cortez then presents two panels side by side that present the recruiting officer’s responses. In the first, he is sweating while holding a megaphone while the other recruits stare in awe following

148 Adela’s refusal to follow orders. The second, illustrating the still-sweating officer by himself, shows him stating into a lowered megaphone: “Get outta my face. Right now. Get your candy ass over to the psychiatrists office at the rear of the stadium” (13). In both instances, the officer is looking in the direction of the reader. However, when he orders Adela to head to the psychiatrist, the reader can be assumed to be positioned next to Adela rather than being in her shoes. The text and illustrations are careful to distinguish between the reader and the protagonist. That is, we are not living her world, but are invited to understand that we are part of an extension of it. She shares her story with us, and Cortez invites us to experience it with her, not as her, particularly given that she is unable to experience it as herself but rather as a subordinate iteration of one, in this context, defined by the archive as Jorge. Cortez concludes the military narrative sequence with the confrontation between Adela and the psychiatrist, where the tension between the archive and the protagonist’s performance of queerness is most heavily stressed. When Adela reaches the desk and explains she has been sent to see him, the psychiatrist responds: “You sure you’re not supposed to go to the Federation of Cuban Women?” (14). In the following panel, unbound and bleeding into the rest of the page, Cortez presents a portrait of the narrator, partially circled by a wreath of roses, with a butterfly resting on her head as he stares directly at the reader who is viewing Adela from the perspective of the psychiatrist. Adela is neither a person who could be useful to the revolutionary army, but had to get psychiatrically assessed to avoid military service. The following panel is split into three sections. The first features an image of the psychiatrist scratching his beard stubble, which reinforces the preceding image as one to be read as the examination. The narrow strip simply reads “STAMP!” In the final portion, the letter, which began the narrative sequence, is presented once again with the stamped text, “INELLIGIBLE FOR SERVICE: HOMOSEXUAL” across the letters opening paragraph instructing Adela to attend the recruitment meeting (14). The letter, however, is cropped so that the only information available is the protagonist’s given name, her date of birth, and a partially legible address. Her federal identification number is completely absent from the illustration.

149 On its own, the text represents Adela’s rejection from the national archive on the grounds of her narrowly understood queer identity. An acknowledgement of her identity as a transgender woman is made impossible, much like her potential identification as a heterosexual one. Her performance is salient given the narrative it refutes. If, as Taylor argues, “Instead of focusing on patters of cultural expression in terms of texts and narratives, we might think about them as scenarios that do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description,” we can understand that without representing Adela’s performance, the knowledge that emerges from the archive is only her inability to perform the duties of a revolutionary heteronormative citizen. The document itself, a product of Adela’s own strategic rejection of the duties imposed on her as citizen, erases the labor of her own revolution while simultaneously redefining what constitutes a revolutionary performance within the context of the graphic novel. The narrative then positions readers as witnesses of her revolution, potential comrades so to speak, who can attest to what the archive does not represent. Queer Departures and Arrivals Following her strategic performance of queerness to avoid enlisting in the military, Adela is once again prompted to present herself as a queer man before state officials to leave the island as a refugee to the U.S. Having been fired from her position as a teacher for wearing foundation and tweezing her eyebrows, she is initiated into local queer communities through baptisms where she is granted a drag name and participates in public performances in feminine attire on makeshift catwalks in El Casino Campestre Park where they would “drink and kiki till they threw our asses out at night” (19). Presumably public affronts to the revolution, Adela’s performances are momentarily presented free from the risk of detention and internment, offering the reader the opportunity to perceive the ways in which unsanctioned sexual identities produce reportorial experiences, such as naming and organizing popular fashion shows, that depart from the identities recorded by the government in official records previously presented to the reader. A full-page panel abruptly interrupts these depictions of queer kinship, allowing Adela to explain: “I would still be in Cuba, baptizing queens, but on April fourth of 1980, a bunch of Cubans hijacked a bus. They drove down Havana’s 5th Avenue and crashed the bus into the gates of the Embassy of Peru” (21). The school bus

150 is depicted above the text, while portraits of Castro and President Jimmy Carter are offered at the bottom of the panel. The protagonist explains that while Peru granted temporary asylum to the Cuban refugees, the country would be unable to harbor all ten thousand of them permanently. Though, as the Adela explains, “President Carter at first said it was a Latin American problem…. Carter decided the USA would welcome any leftovers with ‘open arms’” after other countries had taken some refugees (21). In response, the narrator notes, Castro retaliated by telling “Cubans they could go to Mariel Harbor and leave. He told Miami Cubans to come in their boats and take their bitches home to the U.S.A. He even released some crazies, convicts, and political prisoners so they could leave. Let Carter sort them out! Ha!” concluding later in the panel, “Almost 125,000 men, women and children left their families, friends, jobs, classes and cells for Florida. They were called ‘Marielitos,’ just like the Harbor. I was one of them” (21). The mass migration of the Marielitos, importantly, is made possible by a joint rejection of standing Cuban and U.S. immigration policies, where the former would allow citizens to leave the island and the latter would waive certain restrictions on immigration to enable the entry of queer migrants to the U.S. The narration and illustration of the Mariel exodus highlights both the ways in which queer people were caught in the crossfire of both U.S. and Cuban migration policies and practices. The final statements in the panel detailing the events that precipitated the migration from Mariel Harbor end with Adela explaining: “Some people in Cuba say that the day the Marielitos left was the day Cuba flushed the toilet,” adding, “Flush away, bitch” (21). Literary critic, Theresa M. Tensuan, explains that domestically, “In the wake of the mass emigration…from Mariel Bay to the Florida coast, Castro was both vilified and celebrated” for having allowed queer people to leave the island (181). Allowed to migrate with groups of convicts and political prisoners, queer people were deemed undesirable to the revolution, but were, according to U.S. immigration policy, similarly unwanted in the U.S. Ruby R. Rich and Lourdes Arguelles state: “As in the past, the U.S. government prioritized anticommunism over homophobia” leading the state to relax immigration quotas and existing barrier to entry for people with criminal backgrounds, which in this case included queer people (128). Like U.S. exclusionary immigration policies against queer migrants, purging Cuba of queer citizens allows for

151 the erasure of queer people as subjects who could, like Adela did in the park, transmit knowledge and build community at home, allowing the archival record to stand in for the absence of the queer citizen body. Furthermore, queer bodies deployed to the U.S. were utilized as objects of warfare having been rendered otherwise useless to the revolution at home. Understanding the person she raised as a gay man, Adela’s grandmother calls her and explains, “This is the only chance for people, people like you. But you have to move fast. Go get a passport now, before they change their minds,” prompting Adela to once again report before Cuban state officials (22). Adela’s grandmother reminds readers that the mutual concessions being made by both Cuban and U.S. governments might be tenuous and that declaring one’s self as queer to the Cuban government involves a high political risk if the temporary policy is overturned or expires. Thus, Adela goes to the immigration office, presented in the graphic novel as three independent panels connected by a text box stating: “I went to the office the next day, stepped up to the immigration officer and told him I was a fag and wanted to immigrate” (22). In the third panel, the officer, facing the reader, says: “Good riddance. Your deviant vices suck the blood of the revolution. Your boyfriend Carter can have all of you people,” further instructing her when to present herself in Mariel Harbor (22). Proving that one was “homosexual to leave Cuba during the Mariel Exodus,” Hamilton and Dore argue, “underscores the extent to which homosexuality was treated as a security problem as well as a disease” (195). When Adela declares herself as queer before the officer, she does so differently than when she eludes the draft. She is presented at a distance in the second panel, holding a bag and wearing a button-down shirt and pants in front of a crowd of people. Unlike the previous encounter, she is not exaggerating her queer identity, but instead presents herself to be considered for exclusion from the citizenry. When the officer describes Carter as Adela’s boyfriend, no response is presented, for the immigration official is assessing her as a threat that is more useful to the revolution as a tool of feminization of the U.S. than as a citizen in Cuba. Implied in the text is that Adela will leave Cuba without an opportunity for re- entry. If, as the official states, queer people suck the life out of the revolution, then the U.S. stands in for the labor camp, one where the queer body does not have to be rehabilitated but whose queerness has the potential to suck the life out of the U.S.’s own

152 revolutionary prospective intervention in Cuban affairs. The final panel in the narrative sequence shows Adela hugging her grandmother stating: “I touched every person I loved for the last time,” before the protagonist joins others, convicts and political prisoners, who all lie outside of what Cuba deems appropriate revolutionaries and the U.S. would, under any other circumstances, deem undesirable migrants (22). Though Sexile’s plot does largely rely on a depiction of Adela’s memories of life before and after migration, it raises the stakes of coming out to the government with the purpose of migration by briefly considering the time between being deemed eligible for exile and actually departing the island. After a long wait for the bus that will take her to Mariel Harbor, an officer approaches her and to explain it will not arrive until 5 early the next morning, and asks her to come back then. Fearing the mobs gathered at the entrance of the immigration office, Adela asks the officer to let her stay for the night, which he refuses. However, he suggests: “How about if I sneak you out in an army truck, broder?” (24). Tensuan suggests: “Through delineations of differences in inflection, articulation, and representation, Sexile schools its reader in the complicated dynamics in which social conventions, sexual exchanges, geographic locations, and creative rearticulating engender identities” (180). The reader, having been offered a narrative precedent where Adela strategically disidentifies with prospective state oppression, expects her to once again elide the government’s demands. However, the fact that Adela did not explicitly come out to the military official when being drafted like she did to be eligible to leave the island changes the response presented in the text. The officer identified her as “broder” which simultaneously suggests he might help her and marks her as a prospective American subject—not just a counterrevolutionary, but also a prospective foreign adversary. Though we never see Adela step into the truck, Cortez restages the moment Adela peers into the closet by presenting at the end of a page a mob opening the back doors of the vehicle facing the reader and the protagonist hidden within. Unlike the frame’s preceding referent, the doors are drawn instead of being presented as closure, or negative space. Readers see the mob from Adela’s perspective, forcing them to position themselves as the prospective victim of the attack. However, Cortez shifts the view of the readers in subsequent frames to remind them that they are not experiencing the narrative from Adela’s perspective. When Adela is physically assaulted, readers see her body with

153 lose enough proximity that they are assumed to view it from the perspective of the assailants, challenging readers to identify with one camp and disidentify with the other. Adela’s assault consolidates the erosion of the repertoire as a site of transmission of memory. As a prospective exiled subject, in transit between Cuba and the U.S., Adela is denied the ability to perform acts of resistance that can be remembered. Readers are only witnesses to the assault through present-day Adela’s account. As the knower, the one who experiences the mob’s performance of violence, Adela’s imminent departure separates her from the knowledge produced in that moment, leaving behind only witnesses who can credit their actions as acts justified by a revolution that has deemed Adela counterrevolutionary in formal documents and by virtue of her authorization to migrate to the U.S. The last frame before she boards the bus is a close-up of her bruised eye alongside the text, “I woke up back in the fucking army base. But really, in my heart, I had already left Cuba” (26). Neither quite a revolutionary citizen nor yet physically exiled, Adela’s body as a vessel of embodied memory is shown as a subject whose experiences outside of those accounted for in the archive have already been rendered an invisible part of national memory. Tensuan suggests: “the movement between two worlds can be like an entry into an amniotic state of suspension—one that engenders the promise of transformation, as well as the specter of oppressions one is trying to escape can themselves shape-shift and be found in new forms in the promised land” (180). Though it seems like Adela departs a home that is subject to a homophobic regime to arrive in a place where sexual and personal freedom can be more freely experienced, when the vessel she boards arrives in Florida she is greeted by a group of women holding rosaries, soda cans, and gum, together exclaiming “Welcome to America!” (36). Rather than offering a counterpoint to the sexually corrective labor camps previously alluded to in the text, Adela’s first image of the U.S. is already loaded with assimilatory and normalizing imagery. The narrator states: “A line of fancy Cuban women were waiting for us…. They gave us USA flags, bibles, and the little ‘Welcome to America Book’ that showed you the poem to the flag and ‘Jose Can You See’” (36). As Tensuan suggests, the homophobic state practices shift, this time presented as a greeting where normalizing efforts, under the guise of acculturation into American identities, themselves prompt heteronormative performances of identity. Adela’s migration as a queer subject, one must

154 recall, is a consequence of relaxed U.S. policies that otherwise barred queer migrants from entry to the U.S. The assimilatory reception of the Marielitos was not limited to heterosexual communities, but further exacerbated by queer communities in the U.S. After being processed for admission to the U.S., Adela explains: “They sent us to an airplane garage. I never seen so many people in one building. It was exciting and scary to think how big Miami must be, then they told us we wouldn’t go to Miami yet. We had to go to a place called Arkansas to wait for a sponsor who can give us a place to stay. Fuck” (37). Given that sponsors were likely to be relatives, queer Marielitos whose families remained in Cuba, were subjects of public accounts that procured the interest of sponsors. In regard to the arrival of queer Cubans, Rich and Arguelles explain: “Their gayness and its lack of acceptance in Cuba seemed to provide the necessary claim for refugee classification, and the news media, in particular the gay male press, was quick in publicizing dramatic stories about the political repression of homosexuals on the island” (128). These stories failed to address the conditions in which such refugees were detained and failed to distinguish the testimony of queer Cuban refugees and U.S. coming out narratives. They explain: “refugee testimony, which begins with personal experience and fashions it into an officially accepted version of history that is sure to secure refugee status, has a different purpose from the coming-out story which shatters an official falsification of history through the facts of personal experience recognized by any gay peers” (128-29). Both before and after their migration, Adela strategically outs herself as a queer man, implicitly or explicitly, to circumvent any complicity with the Cuban regime that refused what she understands her revolution, not for potential acceptance. Sexile urges readers to think of coming out not solely as an act that entails prospective acceptance of one’s sexuality, but also an act of self-preservation entailing the risk of prospective invisibilities. In both Cuban and U.S. cultural contexts, coming respectively ensures one’s exile or deportation, excising the queer body from the production of archival records that come to define how we remember the place of queer people in national narratives. Her exile effects an erasure of the mob’s physical assault from a Cuban national imaginary, while her declaration of queer identity in the U.S. allows her to remain in the country at the expense of her independence and mobility

155 without a sponsor. Though imagining herself settling in Miami, Adela is detained in a migratory limbo that can only be understood as freedom in relationship to the violence exercised against her body in a Cuban national context. As Che Gosset argues, “However, the queer and trans inclusion promised by carceral order is the so-called ‘freedom’ to be held in queer and trans inclusive prison cages,” for outside of the detention center, the U.S. itself continued to criminalize performances of queerness through, for instance, anti-sodomy statutes in effect until 2003, as I explain in the first chapter (41). The threat of domestic criminalization, then, makes the detention center the site where Adela is most free to express her queer identity, given that it is that very identity that gives her access to asylum in the U.S., though it does so at the expense of her physical liberty. In fact, the Arkansas detention center is the setting of the most explicit depiction of sex presented in Sexile. Left without a bunker to sleep on, Adela sits outside on a bench, later approached by another refugee who offers her a warm bed and access to a private shower. Present-day Adela explains: “I was a wreck, child. Tore up, beat down, dirty, hungry, but after just forty eight hours in the U.S.A., I had a papi and a private crib…. I almost didn't realize he was seducing me, but then I realized and thought, ‘I know this. It’s beauty and sex getting me what I need.’ Different country, same exchange. Pussy power, baby, pussy Power” (40). After showering, having sex, and sleeping, Adela adds: “Fort Chaffe, was crazy. We were 14,000 Cubans guarded by hundreds of American soldiers and FBI agents, but at the same time, we were feeling free for the first time…. Freedom was like a drug we didn’t now how to take” (42). In Arkansas, sodomy laws were reinstated against same-sex couples in 1977, making Adela’s sexual relationships during her stay in Fort Chaffee not only illicit, but subject to the policing eye of the soldiers and FBI agents she references. Adela explains: “Some of the refugees were busted as spies,” followed by an illustration of heterosexual couple arguing and a panel that depicts a woman offering to have sex with two men: “get your good hot pussy right here, papi. $2 each or both of you for $3” (42). Epidemologists Manuel Carballo and Harald Siem note that a consequence of immigration toward urban centers makes migrants vulnerable to risky sexual practices: “They arrive in urban centres that lack the capacity to economically or socially absorb them, and are often left to innovate or adapt

156 new values that can be inconsistent with the demands of adjustment and resettlement,” which they suggests leads to “serial and potentially high-risk sexual relationships in which knowledge of condoms is deficient” (41). Though the scenes in the detention center demonstrate Adela left to find shelter and sexual comfort while detained, the fact that it happens under the supervision of state officials suggests that, despite Carballo and Siem’s suggestion, the very practices that take place in the center condition queer migrants to perform identities that will render them vulnerable to disease and incarceration after they leave Fort Chaffee. If the migrants held in the center are policed closely enough to identify spies, the failure to police sexual behavior can be perceived as an intentional production of a criminalized class that, due to the circumstances of their migration, cannot be excluded under relaxed immigration policies. Out in the U.S. When Adela finally leaves Fort Chaffee, which I described earlier as a migratory limbo, she does so sponsored by Rolando Victoria, illustrated in the text as the Virgen de la Cardiad del Cobre. Though readers don’t get an account of Adela leaving the detention facility, Cortez present the image of Rolando as the virgin to mark her passage from freedom in captivity to Los Angeles, where the presented patron saint and sponsor teaches Adela how to navigate life in the U.S. Adela introduces Rolando by explaining: “He was the most bitchy, hilarious, faggoty faggot ever…. Rolando was a nurse and he had been a nurse in the United States for twenty one years. He was my alcoholic angel in America. I stayed with him rent-free for two years. Like a good Cuban mama, and he taught me the six commandments of living in the U.S.A.” (45). The knowledge about queer life and survival that was restricted in Arkansas is presented as six commandments that surround Rolando as la virgen holding Adela in his arms, a place reserved for Christ as a child in traditional iconography depicting the saint. In both her description of Rolando as his mother and the relationship illustrated between Rolando/virgen and Adela/Christ, Cortez emphasizes a development of kinship through knowledge transmission that foregrounds queer survival. The commandments stress financial responsibility (“A good garage sale is a gift from heaven. Don’t waste it;” “Always pay the rent on time.”), sexual etiquette (“Stare not at the crotches of menfolk. It’s bad manners;” “In Cuba we learned that giving head is lowly. This is not Cuba.”), and an

157 awareness of being in the U.S. (“Learn English. Yesterday;” “You are forever crowned by the pain of exile. Get used to it, girl.”) (45). Rolando’s strategies for survival in the U.S. stand as strict departures from the assimilatory flags and booklets Adela receives from Cuban women when she arrives to Florida, underscoring, as Richard T. Rodríguez argues, that “‘reinventions of family in forms and practices…displace its otherwise domesticating effects” (3). Though the domesticating effects referenced by Rodríguez are those that are animated by racism and homophobia as central to traditional domestic spaces, they also translate to domestic political spaces where laws and policies targeting queer communities are similarly animated by heteronormative domesticating and assimilating nationalist goals rooted in heterosexual kinship. As opposed to the woman holding rosaries for the Cuban migrants in Florida, Rolando’s commandments do not present the U.S. as a site of deliverance. Cortez’s depiction of Rolando restages the first contact Adela has with the U.S. by disidentifying with religious iconography presented earlier in the text. As Muñoz notes, to disidentify “is not to pick and choose what one takes out of an identification. It is not to willfully evacuate the politically dubious shameful components within an identificatory locus. Rather, it is the reworking of those energies that do not elide the ‘harmful’ or contradictory component of any identity” (Disidentifications 12). Instead of presenting religion and nationalism as the conditions through which the U.S. becomes a site of deliverance for Adela, as the first greeting implies, Cortez foregrounds Rolando and Adela’s performance as the virgin and Christ respectively to show readers that queer survival is contingent on personal agency and accountability rather than the divine or political intercession of religion or U.S. patriotism. Erased from the introduction to the U.S. in the archival texts offered by the benevolent Cuban women, the disidentificatory depiction of queerness makes evident the transmission of reportorial knowledge through which Rolando explains to Adela that, as queer people, they must procure their own salvation and survival. Though Sexile was published with the purpose of HIV/AIDS awareness and outreach, the subject does not appear in the text until Rolando has a conversation with Adela about sexually transmitted diseases. After telling Rolando that she has contracted gonorrhea from a patron at a bar, Rolando quickly finds the man and slaps him. Adela

158 explains: “After lecturing [the bar patron] about sexual hygiene and sexual courtesy, Rolando rushed back home and sat me down for my STD sermon. It was early in 1981, and sexually transmitted diseases were a joke to the queer world. You got them, you went to the clinic and got meds and that was it. But Rolando had seen something hella serious” (46). Given that Rolando is a nurse, it’s surprising that responsible sexual practices do not have a place in his commandments. The absence of sexually transmitted disease in the commandments reflects both what Adela cites as a casual approach to sex-related medical conditions and the scarce knowledge of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s. Tensuan argues Rolando’s “pronouncements speak directly to practices which are not a part of official discourses” which allows readers “a subversive education on how one can achieve success as a sexual, political, and economic subject, but also reframes the cultural contexts that give rise to particular models of identity” (185). Though Adela approaches sexually transmitted disease as treatable, Rolando’s interjection reveals that not all disease is the subject of official medical discourse. Rolando’s explanation is presented in a frame featuring a decimated body in a hospital gown connected to medical equipment. To the body’s right, Rolando appears stating: “Queens. Young queens. They’re coming into the hospital sick. They get crazy exotic cancers and infections and then they die,” continuing on the other side of the body, “Horrible, painful deaths, niña. Their immune systems collapse and they die and we have no idea how to treat it or even what it is” (47, original emphasis). While the panel functions as an archival depiction for the reader, within the narrative the moment underscores how as a witness of AIDS-related deaths, Rolando valorizes experiential knowledge as a site of learning. When Cortez illustrates the body as part of an archival narration of experience, the body at the center of the panel records the early history of queer people with HIV allowing the viewer to read the virus as such, though at the time it was not a part of an official medical discourse. The portrayal recovers the early HIV- positive body, whose place in queer cultural memory is at risk of erasure by not being named or archived, as Taylor explains, “affirming that embodied performance could make visible that which had [can be] purged from the archive” (Taylor 178). Rather than rendering AIDS-related deaths consequences of unnamed ‘exotic cancers,’ Cortez urges

159 readers to understand the embodied experiential knowledge of HIV as part of a comprehensive history of the virus that anticipates its archival record. The means through which Adela learns of the then unnamed virus raises the stakes of oral transmission of experiential knowledge, which Cortez presents by refusing a metaphorical consideration of HIV. As a witness to the death of queer people from AIDS-related complications, Rolando serves as a knower whose warnings are not yet supported by the archive. When Rolando makes Adela promise to always use a condom, she jokingly replies: “But what if I want to get pregnant and start a family?” (47). Rolando then screams, “This is not a joke, loca! Ju promise right now-condoms every time you fuck” (47, original emphasis). In her introduction to “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag explains: “Illness is not a metaphor, and the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (3). Historically, she argues, “Disease, which could be considered as much a part of nature as it is health, became the synonym of whatever was ‘unnatural’” as a consequence of disease metaphors (74). Similarly, when Adela invokes heteronormative sexual practices with the parodic intent of bearing children, the metaphor renders Ronaldo’s account unnatural in an attempt to dismiss illness as non- threatening. At stake in Ronaldo’s refutation of the metaphor is the affirmation of the queer body as worth remembering not despite but because of the conditions of its health. Cortez’s depiction of the body and his defense for it’s place in queer memory, both in the archival record of the comic and the performative account depicted, demonstrate how heteronormative social structures strategically elide the history HIV and the potential consequence of erasing those narratives have for queer people like Adela. This emphatic recovery of the queer body in anticipation of official discourses on HIV insists on the strategic transmission of traumatic memory. Taylor asserts: “Strategies, like people, have histories.... The strategies work to reappear those who have been erased by history itself” (169). Sexile’s depiction of Rolando’s early account of AIDS-related death shows the very experiences and lives subject to erasure by dismissing reportorial forms of knowledge transmission in favor of the archive. Though Rolando soon passes away from complications stemming from his alcoholism, Sexile continues to emphasize depictions of sites where Adela continues to

160 learn about HIV and sexually transmitted diseases. When Rolando last urges Adela to always use condoms while having sex to avoid contracting the unnamed illness, she complies with obedience saying, “(Sigh) Yes mother” (47). However, in the next scene that addresses a site of knowledge transmission regarding HIV, the narrator names the virus, explaining that it was spoken of and taught about in clubs targeting queer audiences. Cortez presents this in a frame that depicts a stage where three trans women are performing, one of the holding a dildo encased in a condom. Adela explains, “At Cha Cha Cha, we’d watch the trangenders. Their shows were magic. They turned the shitty clubs into fabulous fairy lands,” adding, “They were L.A. gorgeous. Hair, tits, shoes, men and more men. They were teachers too, bringing HIV information to clubland” (56). Featuring what can be a assumed to be an instructive performance about the virus, the magic the trans women offer is a demystification of HIV for audiences like Adela. As social anthropologist Virginia van der Vliet argues, “at a time where the only real strategies were to contain the pandemic depend on sex education and behavioural change, any political ideological or religious grouping that stands to lose from and AIDS campaign—or benefit from opposing it—may elect to pursue its own goals rather than do battle with the virus” (41). In the absence of a comprehensive strategy to learn about HIV and educate communities on it beyond the archival descriptions that tied the virus to contested criminalized identity categories, sites like the club become centers of knowledge transmission that shift attention from those who living with the virus to how to prevent contracting it. Though HIV had been described to Adela by Rolando, a nurse, who had closer proximity to official discourses and archives on the virus, it’s important to note that it is not named until HIV is mentioned in the context of a club, where knowledge is transmitted through queer performance. According to Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, “The early naming of the syndrome as GRID (Gay-related Immunodeficiency Disease) literally offered an identity-based social category of membership that conveniently distances many men (including Latinos) from considering themselves at risk; not identifying as gay, they believed the new disease had little to do with them and their (homo)sexuality” (178). He later adds: “For Latinos who did identify as gay or bisexual, the representation of the disease…primarily as a white gay man’s disease offered another level of

161 convenient denial of the stigma associated with the disease and these men” (178, original emphasis). Thus situated, an awareness of the disease through archival means in effect presented HIV and AIDS as transmittable by people identified as gay in a cultural context where the identity was criminalized and not broadly understood as applicable to communities of color, often themselves ostracized by white U.S. queer communities. To come out, or identify as gay, in this context, made a person subject to state surveillance, criminalization, detention, and stigmatization as being HIV-positive, compounded risks to one’s privacy, liberty, and health perpetuated by homophobic domestic U.S. policies. Furthermore, the early association of AIDS with gay identities offered spaces for men who have sex with men (MSM) to elide awareness of health risks by not identifying as gay. Roque Ramírez explains: “To encourage MSMs to practice safer sex and reduce the risk of infecting women partners, the argument goes, images and text need to suggest sexual behavior, but not a social identity other than the implied heterosexual one. Yet one of the consequences of such a strategy is to make Latino men who do identify as gay less visible” (179, original emphasis). Thus, both limiting the identification of AIDS with a specific sexual identity and strategic responses that forego sexual identities for sexual practices in education communities about HIV transmission both make available avenues to elide the prospect of contracting or transmitting the virus. In setting medical discourse and advocacy a club, where the scrutiny of queer identities and criminalization of same- sex intercourse are temporarily lifted, Sexile demonstrates that performance as a site of knowledge transmission is able to more effectively address gay and non-gay-identified communities outside of the historical meanings attributed to queer identity and the criminalized practice of sodomy. The club also serves as a site where transgender identity is made visible for the reader and Adela through the public performances of trans women. The scene, once again, invokes Adela’s arrival to the coast of Cuba, where three Cuban women greet her. The frame featuring the performers is followed by a smaller one where Adela, in the audience, thinks to herself: “What’s it like to be like them, a beautiful girl?” followed by a scene where Adela looks at herself in the mirror with her penis and testicles tucked between her legs (56). In the following panels, the protagonist is depicted applying lipstick, seductively sitting on a couch, posing in a blouse and skirt, and one where,

162 walking in front of two men catcalling her, she explains being a woman “meant giving up my big, fat bag of male privileges” (57). Her experiences presenting as female anticipate the scene where she comes out to her family and friends. Adela states: “I had hella gay friends. I always thought those queens were wild and open to all kinds of sexuality and gender, but that wasn’t true” (58). Three of her friends, gay men, respond by criticizing her ability to pass, questioning whether or not she could cease to identify as male because “That’s how god made you deal with it,” and a refusal to call her by her chosen name— Adela—given that “you will always be Jorge to me, okay?” (58). The final response comes from her mother, who asks “But how can you become a woman with a deep voice like yours?” (58). In the final frame of the page, Adela confesses that the responses hurt her. These frames serve to anticipate the stakes of her gender transition. As Rodríguez explains, in identifying Adela as Jorge, a gay man rather than as a woman, the responses show that “in order to sustain the primacy of fixed notions of manhood, nation, and family, gay men must be seen as failed men, literally and figuratively converted into failed “women”—subjected to a nonreproductive, sexually submissive…role, simultaneously branded as confused men who require that necessary sex change to become women” (156). However, in Adela’s case, the responses she receives from gay men demonstrate that critiquing her ability to transition additionally upholds the primacy of gay male identity, rendering her a failed woman in the precise moment she identifies herself as one. When her friends privilege gay male identity by saying she does not “look real,” that God made her a man, or that they will never “call you no ‘Adela,’” they invoke both the body as an impossible archive of female identity and a collection of archival material such as records indicating her sex assigned at birth and given name, as dependent on her male, even if queer, identity. The frames that follow, however, outline her stakes as deeply interlaced with her concerns over access to citizenship. The following four the frames strip the comic from any audience except for the reader to whom Adela intimates the stakes of her transition. The top half of the page features two frames that in conjunction form Adela’s face. In the first, she is presented as male donning a collared shirt and slicked hair while in the second she appears wearing a blouse, blond curls, and a beaded necklace, though both depictions feature a furrowed brow. In the first panel, Adela explains: “Hacerme mujer es

163 la cosa más difícil y importante en todo el mundo. Tengo miedo de ser rechazada, de tener problemas con mi ciudadanía y darle un ataque de corazón a mi abuela si algún día regreso a Cuba con tetas” (59).60 Foregrounding the importance of “becoming woman,” she explains the transition risks alienation within the queer community presented in earlier panels and her consequent inability to procure U.S. citizenship. To stress the latter, she expresses a fear of giving her grandmother a heart attack if she showed up with breasts in Cuba. The implied consequence of her transition is then deportation, which culminates with the prospective loss of queer family and the death of her closest biological family member. Muñoz argues: “Because stigmatized people are presented with significantly more obstacles and blockages than privileged citizen-subjects, minoritarian subjects often have difficulty maintaining distance between the very material and felt obstacles that suddenly surface in their own affective mapping of the world” (“Feeling Brown” 209). Though Adela identifies as a woman, she understands her entry to the U.S. as contingent on her identity as a persecuted queer man. As I explained earlier, following Rich and Arguelle’s analysis, Adela’s ability to secure asylum in the U.S. is contingent on her testimony of being a persecuted queer man. Presenting as a heterosexual woman, she fears, invalidates the means through which she entered the U.S. in the first place. Not-yet-citizen, she does not perceive herself as permanently in the U.S., and her transition might complicate the very process through which she can become citizen, which until recently was not only difficult, and today requires a transgender person’s gender identity to be itself archived on state-issued documents. If, as Rich and Arguelles argue, coming out narratives are contingent on the disavowal of an official, yet false, history through one’s personal experiences, narratives,

60 While I am using the English version of the text published online as a primary source, both it and the Spanish version of the accessible digital formats present page 59 only in Spanish. In the published hardcopy, the written text is in English. Given the limited availability of hardcopies of the text, however, I am quoting the Spanish text and offering my own translation for the purposes of accessibility. My translation is literal and, likely, differs in style from the original English text. All citations without a footnoted translation are from the original text in English.

“Becoming a woman is the most difficult and important thing in the whole world. I am afraid of being rejected, to have problems with my citizenship and give a heart attack to my grandmother if I one day return to Cuba with tits” (my translation).

164 and identifications recognized by gay peers, the statement that follows her concern with citizenship functions as her coming out to the reader. On the second panel, where Adela is illustrated presenting as female, she states: “Así que, puta, me gustaría un poquito de comprensión con esto. Tú no tienes que apoyarme cuando me estoy haciento mujer, pero si no puedes estar junto a mí, necessitas salir de mi vida. Tú decides” (59).61 Her statement positions the reader as queer by calling her “puta,” shattering any resistance to Adela’s identification as woman and demonstrating her coming out risking access to citizenship or membership in a queer community. It also, and most importantly in the text, foregrounds the ability to express a narrative that does not conform to the male gay identity archived in Cuban military documents, as presented early in the narrative, or immigration documents, as implied by her ability to secure asylum. In other words, she refuses the authority the archive exercised over her identity as not-yet-woman in Cuba or not-yet citizen in the U.S., suggesting that certain narratives and identities make necessary an acknowledgement of one’s performance of the self outside of documented identities. If, as Muñoz explains, “The fiction of identity is one that is accessed with relative ease by most majoritarian subjects” and “Minoritarian subjects need to interface with different subcultural fields to activate their own sense’s of self,” then Adela’s decision confrontation of the reader shows that her identity is not activated by her compliance with the archive but instead by her use of it as a point of departure (Disidentifications 5). Coming Out: The Contemporary Metaphor I opened this chapter considering how contemporary U.S. immigration policies have invoked coming out as a means to relieve migrant communities from the burden of surveillance and deportation, arguing that in its contemporary iteration, the metaphor is stripped from its queer historical context. As the subject of Cortez’s graphic biography, Sexile, Adela Vazquez’s relationship to queer identity and migration to the U.S. sheds light on queer migrant experiences often left out of queer narratives at the end of the twentieth century and the unstable metaphor of coming out as multifaceted and

61 “So, bitch, I’d like a little bit of understanding with this. You don’t have to support me when I’m becoming a woman, but if you can’t stand next to me, you need to leave my life. You decide” (my translation).

165 reoccurring experience. As a literary text, the comic book often seems to weave together many of Adela’s experiences in effect making the text neither strictly about migration, trans identity, nor HIV-awareness and prevention. Rather, in writing and illustrating Adela’s biography, Cortez bridges U.S. queer cultural tropes like coming out and the protagonist’s performance of queerness in Cuba and the U.S. to complicate notion of coming out as a universal queer experience. Instead of anchoring the narrative on a singular identity, Sexile reveals the many ways in which identities are represented and what is lost when those representations are limited to official documents, records, and discourses. More importantly, Adela’s life narrative demonstrates that the metaphors through which states describe policy often fail to consider the complex identities and experiences of the people they intend to govern both intentionally and unintentionally. In its contemporary iteration, coming out is animated by a homogenizing impulse that places the historical legal impetus to conform to normative sexually reproductive and law-abiding standards without regard to the multiplicity of ways in which migrant identities have been marginalized and criminalized. Coming out of the shadows, as a legal strategy, rather than considering the subjects whose fear of detention and deportation it intends to ameliorate, continues to define migrants as embodying a singular identity category. This has been, historically, the way in which the U.S. devises exclusionary measures. Gender, nationality, race, class, sexual orientation, and sexual identity have served as singular organizing identities in exclusionary immigration policy in the U.S. without regard to how those identities intersect. When the Obama administration encourages those migrants who are in a position to prove their ability to perform the heteronormative and financial responsibilities of a documented resident in the U.S. to come out of the shadows, it fails to consider what experiences and strategies of survival are performed in the shadows. By asking people to come out, the metaphor aligns being undocumented with being queer while simultaneously erasing the legal history of coming out, using the progressive language of queer politics while at the same time anachronistically displacing the queer subject. Sexile, specifically, dwells on such a crisis of representation, asking the reader to contrast the experiences engraved in national memory through archival records and the performances of identity excluded from such records that make a narrative, such as

166 Adela’s, possible. U.S. immigration policy, then, remains committed to imagining a person only as a prospective documented resident or citizen, subjecting the migrant’s lived experiences of arrival and life in the U.S. to erasure. In other words, when seemingly inclusive policies, particularly in current debates about immigration reform, suggest that it is time to acknowledge the contributions of migrant communities to the state, it’s important to consider how the state valorizes the future contributions of migrants, not those already made while ‘in the shadows.’ When the state makes coming out contingent on retroactively paying taxes, it is not concerned with addressing the abuse of migrants in the workplace or seeking out the retroactive payment of wages under instituted minimum wage rates. When the state offers protections to people with children in the U.S., it fails to consider that part of life in the shadows can often involve leaving children or parents in a home country, for instance. Sexile illustrates and narrates Adela’s life in the shadows, a narrative that, by virtue of how policy is legally designed, is erased from the stories of migration deemed worth considering part of U.S. national memory. As such, Sexile documents how the state not only determines and selects how one can live within its national borders, but also how migrants, specifically those who identify as queer, struggle to live and account for their experiences against an official record intent on keeping those narratives in the shadows and closets of archived national memory.

167 EPILOGUE

Refusing Citizenship

When I applied for naturalized citizenship, I was concerned about legally foregoing a national identity that had until then defined me. As a former Mormon, I fearfully thought of it as a legal baptism that would wash away the iniquities that came before it, my Mexicanness reduced to a forgettable sin. This dissertation, in many ways, is my attempt to piece together a queer and migrant literary history that citizenship has fractured by analyzing narratives that I needed to read and revisiting painful histories I needed to come to terms with as a queer Chicano. This dissertation, in many ways, is an exercise in resisting citizenship as a rubric of analysis in an attempt to locate narratives of loss it discourages us from remembering and identify places where our interpretative interventions can shift how we understand our own legal belonging. The texts I analyze don’t seek to reimagine the progress of migrant and queer communities, but instead linger on the pressure citizenship places on us to forget. In City of Night John Rechy’s protagonist leaves El Paso in search of modes of belonging only to return home following an episodic catalogue of queer exclusions. Arturo Islas’ The Rain God concludes by showing the reader that despite a new generation’s recognition of the murder of Félix Angel as unjust, the crime will be met with impunity. Similarly, Rigoberto González reminds us in Crossing Vines that as members of disenfranchised communities, we are often asked to set aside the violation of our rights and even the murder of our peers by institutional inaction. And finally, in Sexile, Jaime Cortez urges us through Adela Vázquez’s biography to consider the various ways in which our stories have been told and the complex means through which we remember and share our experiences in response to legal and cultural communities that have long insisted they remain forgotten. This project is as much a contribution to queer Latino scholarship as it is my most sincere effort to understand the lives that citizenship has historically negated as a memory to my queer generation. As such, it’s an indictment of citizenship as a means to understand my identity as subject to citizenship rather than as a citizen subject. The year my family entered the U.S. remains a mystery to me. It had not occurred to me to ask my mother for any specifics until I conducted an independent study on

168 Mexican American literature as a graduate student at Sam Houston State University in the spring of 2008. The irony of studying Chicana/o literature and culture at an institution named after one of the leaders of Texas independence was not lost on me. Having spent my childhood in Houston, I grew up being taught American history, and living in Mexico during my early adolescence, I recall my desire to learn my culture. Identifying as Mexican came easy to me. It was in many ways something unique to me given that both of my siblings had been born in the U.S., and strictly identifying as Mexican was a commitment I held dear until very recently. Describing myself as a Chicano or Mexican- American was not necessarily off-putting to me, but doing so seemed dangerous. If I didn’t hold on to my nationality, I risked loosing something about myself. When I finally asked my mother for a date of entry, she couldn’t offer a specific answer. All that was left of our joint passport was a black and white photo of our faces. She told me it must have been 1988, but just as likely 1987, offering only what she considered an embarrassing anecdote that defined her arrival to the U.S. She explained to me that throughout the drive across Southeast Texas, she kept seeing billboards with the name of a man she assumed must have been incredibly wealthy. To see his name so many times was impressive to her, until she asked my father who Mr. Furniture was. She explained to me that it was then, in her mid-twenties, that she realized how difficult living in this country would be for her. That same semester, my final one in Texas, she encouraged me to apply for naturalization. The application fees were projected to hike dramatically and she didn’t want me to squander the opportunity to become a U.S. citizen. After convincing her that I would give the prospect some thought, she told me she had already saved money for me to file my application. She refused to allow me to spend a single cent on it, telling me it was something she wanted to give to me. The though of refusing my mother’s request seemed selfish, considering she worked part-time cleaning rooms at a nearby hotel. Citizenship meant something to her, and my prospective U.S. citizenship meant even more. She told me then that she had given my siblings their U.S. citizenship by giving birth to them in the U.S. and that she thought it was her responsibility to give me mine. Nearly twenty years after first entering the country hidden under a blanket on my

169 mother’s lap, I submitted the necessary paperwork and set aside my reservations about the process. When I was summoned to appear before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services mid-semester, I sat in the waiting room reading Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez anxious that my oral interview would keep me from returning in time to attend class. Nearly done with the novel, I had already read the early passages that depicted Guálinto, the protagonist, and his family engaging with the assimilatory impulse of the education system at the turn of the 20th century and had moved closer to the passages that present him as a sellout as he returns to the Río Grade Valley as an adult. When my name was called, I was escorted to the office where I would undergo the standard interview. As I walked, I asked myself who I was doing this for. Was I becoming a citizen to save myself the trouble of renewing my resident status? Wasn’t that supposed to be permanent? Was naturalization imminent for me? I entered the office and sat before an elderly white woman. She was as pleased to go through the motions of the process as I was to perform for her. After asking me a series of questions on U.S. civics and history and reading a paragraph aloud to her, she handed me a pen and told me to write down the sentence: Martha Washington was the first First Lady. She challenged my capitalization of Washington’s title, and I saw my last opportunity to resist the demeaning process. I began to argue with her, but she quickly told me it didn’t matter because I had passed. She promptly filled out some paperwork, asked me to sign a few forms, and told me I would present myself at a high school gym for my swearing in ceremony. The date she first suggested was the day I was scheduled to fly to Ohio as a prospective doctoral student at Miami University. I told her she would have to reschedule, which prompted her to ask: “What could be more important than this Mr. de la Garza?” Personally, I consider citizenship a status of arrogance, particularly in the U.S. In the national imaginary, citizenship grants a person full rights before the law. One cannot attain anything beyond that legally offered to the citizen. In this sense, the law presents citizenship as aspirational. On April 2nd, 2008, I entered a high school gym at dawn for what was, for some, a solemn moment. I, along with several hundred people that included prospective citizens and their families, waited for the judge to conduct the performative spectacle. After a brief introduction, the judge asked us to stand and repeat the Oath of

170 Allegiance. I mouthed the words, never quite saying them, as I looked at the people around me, some in tears in the arms of their loved ones. I had decided to attend the ceremony alone. As part of the oath, the crowd swore to “renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen” (Naturalization). In unison, we also declared on oath: “I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same…that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely” (Naturalization). I felt like a fraud. A liar. Like a person who had misbehaved at the very event that was supposed to prove that I had followed the rules. A malcriado, as my mom would say. After the ceremony, I got in line to exchange my green card for my certificate of naturalization, unable and unwilling to respond to those who were congratulating one another and me on the legal milestone. I handed the person behind the table my green card, she threw it in a bin along with the others, and handed me a piece of paper I crumpled and shoved into my messenger bag. I refused to acknowledge becoming a naturalized citizen or the apparent relief it brought to those with whom I uttered the oath. I was angsty at twenty-one. At the exit of the building, vendors, most of them Latinos/as, lined the ramp leading to the door. They were selling pan dulce, coffee, hot chocolate, balloons, and plastic diploma holders unofficially emblazoned with official the seal of the U.S. The vendors reminded me of my uncle selling birds at a flea market, the same where I took a job at fourteen selling tools. Their approach still seemed familiar: hold the product out to those walking by, offer it at full price, and offer to knock off a buck or two because they seemed like good people. I thought of the wrinkled certificate in my book bag, embarrassed, and walked faster hoping to reach my car before crying in front of those celebrating their new citizenship. I could not look at a vendor in the eye and tell him or her that I didn’t give a fuck about preserving the integrity of my certificate without feeling like I was having a temper tantrum. I knew that if I lingered, I would eventually hand one of them a five-dollar bill and find myself in tears trying to smooth out the piece of paper into the diploma cover. When I arrived home, my mother hugged me and told

171 me she was proud of me. And then she reprimanded me for my erratic behavior after I explained I had done everything short of running away from the building that morning. She tried to console me by saying people on the morning talk shows explained that Mexico allowed you to hold dual citizenship, and that I should think of the oath as a little white lie. Uncle Sam was not going to find out and the Statue of Liberty was not going to take off her chancla. As she explained to me, I was a twenty-one year old who had always been well-behaved, would soon have a master’s degree, and was set to begin a Ph.D. program, and had no reason to feel like my reservations about being a naturalized U.S. citizen meant that I was falling short to any expectation as a Mexican citizen. Becoming a naturalized citizen gave me a false sense of security as I left Texas to pursue a doctoral degree. I though all I had to do was follow the rules and my citizenship would remain untouched and unquestioned. Leaving Texas as a committed Mormon, I was accustomed to learning standards of religious behavior that allowed me to integrate into a community. My approach to religion was reflected in my approach to my civic identity: learn the rules, follow them, and reap the rewards of being a good citizen. For the first two years at Miami, I complied with the university’s yearly request for proof of citizenship, receiving questioning looks every time I presented the wrinkled naturalization certificate. I began to associate my citizenship with the yearly request, feeling like despite having attained it, my legal status could and would be subject to scrutiny. While at Miami, Arizona passed the infamous Senate Bill 1070, advocacy for same-sex marriage received national attention, and the economy collapsed like it hadn’t in generations. Ohio’s Senate Bill 5 threatened collective bargaining rights in 2011 and rumors of the privatization and corporatization of the university gained traction with local student and activist communities. Around the same time, a queer undergraduate student was beaten at night while walking on campus and another had been chased out of a drag show and assaulted outside of the hosting venue. I came of age politically, so to speak, as a doctoral student, noting that neither citizenship nor government institutions respected what I thought of as the migrant, queer, and/or working-class person’s right to survive. I came to understand I was not a fraud because of the personally naïve notion that attaining U.S. citizenship refuted my insistence on a nostalgic attachment to Mexican identity. Rather, I was a fraud because in following the rules, in being a well-behaved citizen, I

172 was reaping the benefits of citizenship under false pretenses. If I was going to uphold my commitment to U.S., as I had vowed to do under oath, I could only do so at the expense of the physical and institutional violence my people—migrant, queer, working class— endured, forms of violence my unquestioning acceptance of the rules kept me from recognizing as an affront against my own physical and intellectual integrity. I left Mormonism soon after moving to Ohio and “came out” the summer after I completed my coursework at Miami. And by coming out I mean acknowledged myself publicly as gay, though I am certain everyone around me knew or at least knew better than to ask. Recently out of the closet and looking to define my prospective dissertation project, I often sat alone inducing what I can only describe as political meditations. I read the news and watched online videos, noting recurring words in public circulation that described how people represented people like me: faggot, immigrant, sodomite, millennial, citizen, poor, student, homosexual, activist, queer, etc. I reviewed countless lists of words, trying to understand the historical and political moment I was living in. I needed to acknowledge what it meant and felt like to be painfully described. Citizenship, I thought, set me up for failure. If citizenship was a perpetual commitment to following the rules or abiding by the law, it was a category that I would never live up to as a migrant, gay, working class man. Instead of being acknowledged as members of communities across the country, people like me were deliberated in the courts, protested against on the streets, and legislated in local and national chambers. These political acts weren’t procuring our inclusion. They were complicating our very ability to comply with the law, and they had been for decades. Of course, the history of queer exclusion was not new to me, but understanding it as my history was. Understanding myself outside of my aspirational desire to be a lawful citizen certainly was. If I was going to write about queer citizenship, as I eventually determined, I needed to understand how I arrived at queerness and how I related to citizenship. I couldn’t write a dissertation that I would find personally consequential as a young man who had just told his loved ones he was gay. Despite any effort on my part, all I was legally allowed to be was deviant, and I insisted on refusing myself the luxury of political compliance. But citizenship has a strong gravitational pull. I wanted to personally and proactively untether myself from it, and I struggled for many years to

173 imagine my intellectual and political advocacy outside of a public narrative that tugged people like me toward the desire for full-citizenship. I rolled my eyes at the marriage equality movement’s yearning to move from “second-class” citizenship to full citizenship perhaps because those quoted in the news seemed accustomed to the luxuries of “first- class” living. Now that same-sex couples can wed, many of us continue to travel through life in “coach.” What motivated the early stages of my research was a yearning to understand myself outside of theoretical academic prescriptions. I needed to attempt to live my methodological approach to resisting citizenship as an organizing category. I worked around my teaching and reading schedules to protest and occupy whatever I could, from local renegotiations of university bus contracts to the 2011 Spring Taskforce Summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council in Cincinnati. To be recognized as citizen, I learned, couldn’t be a point of resolution for political advocacy. Approximating full citizenship couldn’t be what we aspired to achieve as advocates. That model simply appeared to nicely address one social concern to give way to multiple others that could be revisited a decade later. This dissertation is the product of my personal interest in researching not what questions about queer identity and migration were left unresolved, but how they managed to remain so. In other words, how did our commitment to citizenship fail us? Are there community-building strategies we can pull from narratives that depict the failures of prospective citizenship as an advocacy strategy? Thinking about citizenship as an aspirational category allows us to think of ourselves as compliant if the law would only carve out a space for our otherwise law-abiding behavior. Within that framework, we appeal to what we assume to be the most empathetic and potentially benevolent elements of the law and government. After being sworn as a citizen, I recall the judge offering a brief speech telling us enthusiastically that who we were and where we were from “didn’t matter anymore." That when someone asked where we were from, we could proudly say we were from America. Traditional models of social advocacy function the same way. Once we are initiated into “full citizenship,” the communities advocacy movements purportedly represent are intended to think of an achievement such as the legalization of gay marriage and immigration reform as a point of departure that forgets those imprisoned, deported, and still deportable that are part of who we allegedly were. This is

174 because citizenship is dependent on exclusion, and centering our advocacy efforts around the prospect of full citizenship already assumes part of the constituency of the movement as excludable. That is perhaps the most threatening characteristic of citizenship, the ways in which it animates narratives of resistance as procuring full inclusion of the oppressed despite fully understanding that our full recognition as part of the citizenry is extended at the expense of the exclusion of our very own. These persistent exclusions are the exercises of cultural and state violence we are asked to forget when we finally become fully citizen. As a scholar, activist, and citizen-in-cultural-dissent, I think of this dissertation as my attempt to remember.

175 WORKS CITED

Aldama, Frederick Luis. “This Is Your Brain on Latino Comics.” A User’s Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction. Austin: U of Texas P, 2009. 107-34. Print. ---. Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Print. Anaya, Rudolfo and Francisco Lomelí, eds. “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.” Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989. 1-5. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983. Print. Anzaldúa, Gloria. “La Prieta.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Eds. Cherríe Moraga and Anzaldúa. New York: Kitchen Table, 1981. 198-209. Print. ---. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Print. Arizona. Legislature. Senate. 49th Legislature, 2nd Session. SB 1070, Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act. Phoenix: State of Arizona, 2010. Web. ---. Office of the Governor. Governor Brewer Announces Arizona Border Security Plan. Phoenix: State of Arizona, 2010. Web. Arnold, Kevin. “‘Male and Male and Male’: John Rechy and the Scene of Representation.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 67.1 (2011): 115-134. Web. Bhabha, Homi. “Narrating the Nation.” Nationalism. Eds. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith. New York: Oxford U P, 1994. 306-312. Print. Blackwell, Maylei. ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement. Austin: U of Texas P, 2011. Print. Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service. 387 U.S. 118. 118-135. No. 440. US Supreme Court. 1967. Web. Bowers v. Hardwick. 478 U.S. 186. 182-221. Supreme Court. 1986. Web.

176 Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Homosexuality and the Chicano Novel.” Confluencia 2.1 (1986): 69-77. Web. Butler, Judith. “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion.” Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. 121- 40. Print. ---. “Subversive Bodily Acts.” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. 101-80. Print. Canaday, Margot. “Who Is a Homosexual?: The Consolidation of Sexual Identities in Mid-twentieth-century Immigration Law, 1952-1983.” The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. 214-59. Print. Cantú, Lionel, Jr. The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men. Eds. Nancy A. Naples and Salvador Vidal Ortiz. New York: New York UP, 2009. Print. Capó, Julian. “Queering Mariel: Mediating Cold War Foreign Policy and U.S. Citizenship among Cuba’s Homosexual Community, 1978-1994.” Journal of American Ethnic History 29.4 (2010): 78-106. Web. Carballo, Manuel, and Harald Siem. “Migration, Migration Policy and AIDS.” Crossing Borders: Migration, Ethnicity and AIDS. New York: Taylor and Francis, 1996. 31-49. Web. Chávez, Leo. “A Glass Half Empty: Latina Reproduction and Public Discourse.” Human Organization 63.2 (2004): 173-188. Web. Chester, Alfred. “Fruit Salad.” The New York Review of Books 1.2 (1963): 6-7. Web. Christian, Karen. “Invisible Chicanos: Gay and Lesbian Identities in the Fiction of Sheila Ortiz Taylor and John Rechy.” Show and Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S. Latina/o Fiction. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1997. 25-54. Web. Cortez, Jaime. Sexile/Sexilio. Los Angeles: AIDS Project Los Angeles and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, 2004. Web. Cutler, John Alba. “Prosthesis, Surrogation, and Relation in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 38.1 (2008): 7-32. Web.

177 Delgadillo, Theresa. “The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.” American Literary History 23.3 (2011): 600-24. Web. “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.” Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. Eds. Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989. 1-5. Print. García, Ramón and John Rechy. “Interview with John Rechy.” Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana 32.1 (2003): 39-46. Web. González, Rigoberto. Crossing Vines. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2003. Print. Gosset, Che. “ We Will Not Rest in Peace: AIDS Activism, Black Radicalism, Queer and/or Trans Resistance.” Queer Necropolitics. Eds. Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Possoco. New York: Routledge, 2014. 31-50. Print. Hames-García, Michael and Ernesto Javier Martínez. “Introduction: Re-membering Gay Latino Studies.” Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader. Eds. Hames-García and Martínez. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. 1-18. Print. Hames-García, Michael. Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Print. Hamilton, Carrie, and Elizabeth Dore. Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2012. Print. Hardin, Michael. “Make a Run from the Borderlands: Arturo Islas’s The Rain God and Migrant Souls and the Need to Escape Homophobic Masternarratives.” Critical Mappings of Arturo Islas’s Fictions. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Tempe: Bilingual P, 2008. 219-239. Print. Heise, Thomas. “Wasted Dreams: John Rechy, Thomas Pynchon, and the Underworlds of Los Angeles, 1960s.” Urban Underworlds: The Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2011. 169-212. Print. Hing, Bill Ong. Defining America through Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004. Print. Islas, Arturo. Migrant Souls. New York: Avon Books, 1991. Print. ---. The Rain God. (1984). New York: Perennial, 2003. Print. Jacobson, David. Rights across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.

178 Linhard, Tabea Alexa. “Adelita’s Death.” Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2005. 91-116. Print. Lowe, Lisa. “Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique.” Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 1-36. Print. Lugo-Lugo, Carmen and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo. “Containing Un-American Bodies in Arizona.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 26.2 (2014): 265-72. Web. Luibhéid, Eithne. “Queer/Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 14: 2-3: (2008): 169-90. Web. ---. “Queering Migration and Citizenship.” Introduction. Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings. Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú, Jr., eds. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. ix-xlv. Print. ---. Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Print. Márquez, Antonio C. “The Historical Imagination in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God and Migrant Souls.” MELUS 19.2 (1994): 3-16. Web. Martínez, Ernesto Javier. On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. Print. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: William Morrow, 1993. Print. Minich, Julie Avril. “Enabling Aztlán: Arturo Islas Jr., Disability, and Chicano Cultural Nationalism.” Modern Fiction Studies 57.4 (2011): 694-714. Web. Moon, Jennifer. “Cruising John Rechy’s City of Night: Queer Subjectivity, Intimacy, and Counterpublicity.” disclosure: A Journal of Social Theory 15 (2006): 42-59. Web. Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa. “Introduction.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Eds. Moraga and Anzaldúa. New York: Kitchen Table, 1981. xxiii-xxvi. Print. Moraga, Cherríe. “A Long Line of Vendidas.” Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. Cambridge: South End P, 2000. 82-133. Print.

179 ---. “La Güera.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Eds. Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. New York: Kitchen Table, 1981. 27-34. Print. ---. The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry. Boston: South End P, 1993. Print. Muñoz, José Esteban. “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs).” Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader. Eds. Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. 204-219. Print. ---. “Introduction: Feeling Utopia.” Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York UP, 2009. 1-18. Print. ---. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Print. “Naturalization Oath of Allegiance of the United States of America.” 1952. U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Department of Homeland Security, 25 June 2014. Web. Neumayer, Eric. “Unequal Access to Foreign Spaces: How States Use Visa Restrictions to Regulate Mobility in a Globalized World.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 31.1 (2006): 72-84. Web. Nevins, Joseph. “Local Context and the Creation of Difference in the Border Region.” Operation Gatekeeper: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.- Mexico Boundary. New York: Routledge, 2002. 32-49. Print. Ngai, Mae M. “Birthright Citizenship and the Alien Citizen.” Fordham Law Review 75.5 (2007):2521-30. Web. Nussbaum, Martha C. From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print. Obama, Barack. “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Immigration.” Address. Cross Hall, Washington, D. C. 20 Nov. 2014. The White House. Web. 05 Jan. 2015. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Print.

180 Ortiz, Ricardo. “Sexuality Degree Zero: Pleasure and Power in the Novels of John Rechy, Arturo Islas, and Michael Nava.” Journal of Homosexuality 26.2-3 (1993), 111-26. Web. Padilla, Yolanda. “Felix beyond the Closet: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Relations of Power in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 34.2 (2009): 11-34. Print. Palaversich, Diana. “Grito luego existo: La homosexualidad y la disidencia política en la narrativa de Reinaldo Arenas y John Rechy.” Hispanófila 138 (2003): 111-34. Web. Peña, Susana. “‘Obvious Gays’ and the State Gaze: Cuban Gay Visibility and U.S. Immigration Policy during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16.3 (2007): 482-514. Web. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. “The Ambiguous Outlaw: John Rechy and Complicitous Homosexuality.” The Fiction of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities. Peter F. Murphy, ed. New York: New York UP, 1994. 204-25. Print. Provine, Doris Marie and Gabriella Sánchez. “Suspecting immigrants: exploring links between racialized anxieties and expanded police powers in Arizona.” Policing and Society 21.4 (2011): 468-79. Web. Rechy, John. City of Night. (1963). New York: Grove, 1984. Print. ---. The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary. New York: Grove, 1977. Print. Rich, B. Ruby, and Lourdes Arguelles. “Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience, Part II.” Signs 9.4 (1985): 120-36. Web. Richards, David A. J. “Bowers v. Hardwick: The Debate among the Justices, Justice Powell’s Shift, and the Opinion of the Court.” The Sodomy Cases: Bowers v. Hardwick and Lawrence v. Texas. Lawrence: UP of Nebraska, 2009. 85-107. Print. Rodríguez, Juana María. “Divas, Atrevidas, y Entendidas: An Introduction to Identities.” Queer Latinidad: Identity Practice, Discursive Spaces. New York: New York UP, 2003. 5-36. Print.

181 Rodríguez, Richard T. Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Print. Roque Ramírez, Horacio N. “Gay Latino Cultural Citizenship: Predicaments of Indentity and Visibility in San Francisco in the 1990s.” Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader. Eds. Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. 175-197. Print. Rosaldo, Renato. “Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy.” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 402-11. Web. Saldívar, José David. “ Introduction: Tracking Borders.” Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 1-14. Print.

Sánchez, Marta E. “Arturo Islas’ The Rain God: An Alternative Tradition.” American Literature 62.2 (1990): 284-304. Web. Sánchez, Rosaura. “Ideological Discourses in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God.” Critical Mappings of Arturo Islas’s Fictions. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Tempe: Bilingual P, 2008. 61-76. Print. Schmidt-Camacho, Alicia. Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.- Mexico Border. New York: New York UP, 2008. Print. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Introduction: Axiomatic.” Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. 1-63. Print. Sommerville, Siobhan B. “Notes toward a Queer History of Naturalization.” American Quarterly 57.3 (2005):659-75. Web. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. New York: Anchor, 1990. Print. Stein, Marc. Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2010. Print.

Stevens, Jacqueline. “The Nation and the Tragedy of Birth.” Reproducing the State. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 102-48. Print. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.

182 Tensuan, Theresa M. “Crossing the Lines: Graphic (Life) Narratives and Co-laborative Political Transformations.” Biography 32.1 (2009): 173-189. Web. van der Vliet, Virginia. The Politics of AIDS. London: Bowerdean, 1996. Print. Wallace, Sophia J. “Papers Please: State-Level Anti-Immigrant Legislation in the Wake of Arizona’s SB 1070.” Political Science Quarterly 129.2 (2014): 261-91. Web. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone, 2002. Print. ---. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

183