knits other objects together in ever-shifting patterns of the real.
A key question for me in Racial Immanence, then, is whether or not it is possible to think of race as something more than a human construct, to see Santa Anna’s leg as something other than a surrogate limb. What if, I wonder, inspired by the artists gathered within these pages, race is something real and material that nevertheless eludes language? Can we think of race without subjection? Can we imagine the body—can we imagine Santa Anna’s leg—not as indexing a racially managed subject but as an object among objects? How does Chicanx cultural production help us think of race as something that exceeds the individual, and what are the political and ethical implications of that imagining?
Figure I.1. A life-sized diorama at the Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield, of US soldiers capturing Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna’s wooden leg. Photo courtesy of the author.
To explore these questions, in writing Racial Immanence I have had to fight my own desire to interpret; I have instead forced myself to linger in the experience of reading to sense how chicanidad is not represented but produced in moments of textual engagement. Rather than make meaning, I have tried to honor texts’ resistance to interpretation. Modeling a transportable method, I have crafted readings as moments of what political scientist William Connolly theorizes as “emergent causality.” He defines this as “the dicey process by which new entities and processes periodically surge into being” (179). Doing this, I have responded to Antonio Viego’s call in Dead Subjects for revised notions of ethnic subjectivity that are “guided by the refusal of what we are currently made to be” (29).8 We should not, Viego argues, expect twenty-first-century Latinxs to act like or be guided by the behavior of historical Latinx subjects. He sees Latinx studies projects as motivated by a desire to root the future in a continuation of the past, a move that he says “drains the future into the past and burrows the past into the future” (22). Such historicist expectations produce, according to Viego, “dead subjects” unable to move forward in time, whereas he advocates for the flourishing of Latinx subjectivities that refuse to perform institutionally recognized latinidad.
Santa Anna’s leg, I contend, refuses to perform the drama of the US-Mexico border. Such refusals, I argue, are where the progressive potential of Chicanx and Latinx cultural production lies. Latinidad rests on a set of social expectations that must be upended if latinidad is to be anything other than an ethnic performance dictated by an Anglo-dominant majority.9 If, as Connolly argues, political change relies on intervening in how people perceive the world, rather than on changing what they perceive, latinidad must create moments of experiential dissonance wherein Latinxs refuse, in Viego’s words, “what we are currently made to be” (29).10 Viego finds that dissonance in Lacan’s refutation of ego psychology; for Cristina Beltrán, embodied political action is crucially dissonant; and Juana María Rodríguez reads queer gestures, either literal movements of the body or figurative manipulations of “how energy and matter flow in the world,” as dissonantly performative (4). Such moments disrupt the temporality of expectations; they render the future perennially surprising, impeding linearity and suspending time.11
That suspension can be the work of latinidad. Parallel efforts can also be made in Latinx studies if scholars create moments of intellectual dissonance wherein we refuse to look at and for that which our institutions have come to expect. Viego argues that “Latino,” a famously empty signifier eluding specific class and race distinctions, occupies a liminal time between a future knowledge and an always already knowing. “The temporal paradox,” explain Joshua Guzmán and Christina León, “collapses the demand for knowledge with an anticipation that forecloses any serious encounter with the object” (271). The now of latinidad is always already lost, constantly performing itself in the present moment of Anglo consumption, allowed neither past nor future.
Guzmán and León conjure “another ‘now’ for latinidad” (263) and in Racial Immanence I answer their summons to linger in the ambivalent present of latinidad, “to slow down the work of understanding latinidad and instead to dwell in the space of its many times and places” (272). To linger in the now of latinidad is to draw back from the desire to know and to turn toward the appreciation of an embodied present that does not necessarily point toward a future understanding. Lingering means embracing the future contingent as an emergent causality that halts the linear flow of an appreciation of the other that already knows what it wants to know.
Instead of learning what they already know, readers of Racial Immanence will witness the objects gathered herein fostering networks of connection that deepen human attachment to the material world. Readers will be challenged to think of text as a physical engagement and to see reading as a process of connection rather than interpretation. To consider reading as merging with the stuff of the world opens the door, as I explain more fully in my final chapter, to an ethics of shared vulnerability that reimagines the political.
Methods
Interlude 2: The Zine
In 2015 Maricón Collective, a group of queer artists and activists from East Los Angeles, produced a limited run of exact replicas of the first two issues of Joey Terrill’s Homeboy Beautiful. Maricón Collective were known as public historians who organized community-building dance parties with publicity materials featuring its members’ queer Chicanx art. They produced a zine of their own, but with the Homeboy Beautiful reissues, they paid homage to a pioneering queer Chicanx artist.
Terrill’s life, explains Richard T. Rodríguez, “represents a remarkable archive of Chicano, gay male cultural and political engagement consistently ignored or rendered nonexistent by revisionist scholars and activists” (467). Since the 1960s Terrill has performed politics through his art and activism, building, as Rodríguez describes, a “repertoire of interlocking lived, artistic, and activist practices” that made it possible to be queer and Latinx in the public sphere (467). Homeboy Beautiful, which Terrill printed and circulated in the late 1970s, was one such performance.
A tongue-in-cheek satire of popular women’s magazines, Homeboy Beautiful includes segments on fashion such as, in issue 2, “Leather for Homegirls” and a “Homeboy Makeover” in which a group of homeboys kidnap “Joseph Cornish,” an Anglo librarian, and make him over so he looks like a “native of Lincoln Heights.” Included are photos of a violent beating described as massages to Cornish’s back and neck with a two-by-four and “fancy footwork to ease away tension in the pec area.” There is an advice column, and, in issue 2, there are journalistic pieces like “Exposé: E.L.A. Terrorism,” in which Santo, an investigative journalist, embeds with a “radical homeboy terrorist group” engaged in “White-people kidnappings!!!!” In this photo essay the group kidnaps a couple from their home in West Los Angeles. The group finishes the couple’s board game before taking them back to East Los Angeles and forcing them to eat tortillas, chilies, and menudo. They are then made to watch Spanish-language television before the group leaves the couple dazed and confused on the streets of East Los Angeles.
The violent silliness of issue 2 culminates in the takeover of the Homeboy Beautiful editorial offices by the “homo-homeboy terrorists,” who put up political banners and spray-paint slogans across the walls. “We the Homo-Homeboys of Los Angeles,” they declare, will hold the Homeboy Beautiful editor hostage until “we feel that Homeboy Beautiful magazine sincerely attempts to represent the ‘ambiente’ of Homo-Homeboys in their publication.” Even as the zine pushes against Anglo-dominant representations of chicanidad—placing a newspaper clipping declaring, “In case you hadn’t heard, Chicanismo has come of age” next to an announcement, “Next Issue: Passing into White Society”—it recognizes intra-communal tensions over hetero- and homonormativity.
Even as it makes these explicit arguments about representation, the zine’s overall playfulness and convoluted narratives of undermined editorial control make it difficult to read as an argument for accurate
