point Bruno Latour’s challenge in “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” to revivify criticism by shifting our attention away from matters of fact to matters of concern. “What if, ” Latour asks, “explanations resorting automatically to power, society, discourse had outlived their usefulness?” (229). What would it mean to read Chicanx literature, then, if not as verbally indexing the ways that oppressed social subjects experience power? Such a reading strategy requires thinking of literary texts not as reflective objects consumed by reflecting subjects, but as events in and of themselves that exist in and make the world.
I build readings that eschew a distinction between subjects and objects in favor of considering texts as “things” as Latour defines them: as either object, event, or place, as a “gathering” or an “issue” that launches a “multifarious inquiry” into the nature and motivations of a particular coming together. Homeboy Beautiful, to illustrate, does not represent actual queer Chicanxs from the 1970s. It deploys highly ironized stereotypes who sometimes appear in frame but sometimes, as in the case of “Homeboy Makeover” from issue 2, remain largely off-stage to indicate their status as figments of an Anglo-American imaginary. In the zine, queer Chicanx concerns linger in the province of text and drawing, awaiting their emergence into the photographic real, just as the broader queer political debates hover in the background of issue 2 as so many spray-painted slogans signaling a political future at which queer Chicanxs have not yet arrived and adumbrating a political present in which they are not fully seen. Their invisibility, though, is rendered not as disempowerment but as an effect of intra-communal struggles over the plurality of queer chicanidad reminiscent of Beltrán’s insistence on the impossibility of Latinx politics.
Homeboy Beautiful makes room for a queer Chicanx future that had not in 1978, and still has not as of this writing, arrived. In bringing the zine together with Santa Anna’s leg to introduce the things in my chapters, I aim to critique, as Latour suggests, not as “one who debunks, but as one who assembles” (“Critique” 246). The interludes in which I present the leg and the zine suspend the time of reading to invite reflection, to encourage looking without interpreting. I have avoided analyzing the leg and zine in favor of appreciating them as events, as flashpoints illuminating my methodology and gesturing toward the theories that ground it. These interludes also indicate how I am thinking about the human body in this book, as stuff existing in synergistic relation to other stuff, not bound by narrative constraints. This approach—critique by assemblage—proffers a way to think about Chicanx cultural production as doing something other than reflecting history or subjectivity. Approaching texts as events and bodies as confederations of things pushes us to think about what else Chicanx literature might be doing.
I write “something other than reflecting history,” but it is true that the literary texts at the core of Racial Immanence emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which also saw the consolidation of a “Hispanic” middle class in the United States and the promotion of the “Decade of the Hispanic.” This was a time of high visibility and increased rhetoric around Latinx concerns, but also a time of decreasing household incomes and heightened political antagonism (Stepler and Brown). In literary historical terms, this period corresponds with the emergence of queer mestizaje in the very influential writings of Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others whose work depicts subjects in contradistinction to bourgeois white heteronormativity. While Anzaldúa does write extensively about the unruly body as a conduit for philosophical revisions of subjectivity—as I discuss in chapter 4—she remains most known, valued, and anthologized for the queer subject she ushered into print. In bringing together a very different set of texts from the same moment, by contrast, I propose another way of characterizing this period of Chicanx literary history. The authors in Racial Immanence respond to the corporate consolidation of “Hispanic” identities not by asserting counter-subjectivities but by undermining representation and visibility as political and aesthetic strategies.
Praxis
I tease out this undermining in my readings by connecting textual bodies to a series of extralinguistic objects. Though the literary works I discuss were produced mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, the material objects in my study trace a chronological sweep from fifteenth-century Aztec stone carvings to twenty-first-century Chicanx punk rocker Álvaro del Norte’s accordion. My argument in Racial Immanence works both chronologically and by accretion, simultaneously providing and interrupting a temporal structure by unfolding a specific historical period into interlocking moments of lingering. First, I trace a microhistory of racialized objects, beginning with the central premise that objects always resist, in one way or another, the desire to own them. Though this looks different at different points in time, from it can be extrapolated an enduring truth about our inability to know “things.”
I follow this idea through a series of accretive chapters that reimagine political community and the work of reading and writing. Communities comprise bodies, and Racial Immanence is about how bodies create choratic networks that are both in and of the world. In each chapter the body is an occasion to linger, and in these moments the intersections of race with time, visuality, the planet, and the extraterrestrial are figured anew. Attending to the machinations of the body, I argue across my readings, posits the body as a portal through which the imbrications of the political and the aesthetic can be reconceived. In this I have been inspired by Stacy Alaimo’s germinal work on transcorporeality, her neologism for the ways “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (Bodily Natures 2). I turn to Alaimo most explicitly in chapter 3’s discussion of AIDS and the Latinx political imaginary, but her influence is apparent across the entirety of this book.
Chapter 1 takes up the work of Dagoberto Gilb and the compromised bodies that inhabit his fiction. Here I am interested in the relationship between sensation and language in Gilb’s work and how bodies produce their own temporality, their own lingering moments during which race becomes an immanent condition of his protagonists’ experience of time. I frame my analysis with a discussion of the discovery in 1790 of the Aztec calendar stone in Mexico City. There is no clear anthropological consensus on the purpose or meaning of the stone’s markings, which convey time as well as events of geologic, religious, and political significance. In its fusing of time and space, the stone allows me to present temporality and materiality as intertwined and race as the chora from which these concepts issue in Gilb’s fiction.
These ideas ground my explorations of the body in the remaining three chapters. In chapter 2 I postulate the body as mediator of form as well as stuff. Reading Cecile Pineda’s novel Face (1985) together with contemporary art and commercial photography, I argue that the body is both form itself and a thing through which form passes; it mediates between forms by being both the subject and the structure of the photographs in the novel and the photo projects I read alongside Face. In addition to choratically mediating things and forms, the body marks a crisis of signification in my reading of Chicanx AIDS fiction in chapter 3. There, my framing object is barbasco, the wild Mexican yam from which synthetic hormones were first derived, thus enabling the development of, among other things, oral contraceptives. In addition to interrupting the linear time of heterosexual reproduction, barbasco’s size, root structure, and resistance to commercial cultivation occasion a rethinking of indigeneity and global markets. I use this reimagined indigeneity as a lens through which to read Gil Cuadros’s and Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s depictions of the body as mediating sex, death, and the roots of culture in City of God (1994) and Coachella (1998) respectively.
Chapter 4, finally, moves from Cuadros’s and Taylor’s earthly concerns to ponder the body’s mediation of technology and the extraterrestrial. Using the work of contemporary Mexican digital installation artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s idea of “participation platforms” to ground my reading
