WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.723 align:middle line:84% Always a little anticlimactic after 00:00:01.723 --> 00:00:02.890 align:middle line:90% that beautiful introduction. 00:00:02.890 --> 00:00:06.270 align:middle line:84% Thank you so much, Carmen, for the generous reading. 00:00:06.270 --> 00:00:07.800 align:middle line:90% Thank you, Hannah. 00:00:07.800 --> 00:00:11.850 align:middle line:84% Thank you, Becka, board members, audience, and especially 00:00:11.850 --> 00:00:13.740 align:middle line:90% Prageeta for imagining this. 00:00:13.740 --> 00:00:16.270 align:middle line:90% 00:00:16.270 --> 00:00:19.330 align:middle line:84% In the Afro-Latino Reader, editors Miriam Jiménez Román 00:00:19.330 --> 00:00:23.890 align:middle line:84% and Juan Flores argue for the fact of Afro-Latinidad, 00:00:23.890 --> 00:00:26.530 align:middle line:84% a phrase they borrow from Frantz Fanon's essay, 00:00:26.530 --> 00:00:29.800 align:middle line:90% The Fact of Blackness. 00:00:29.800 --> 00:00:33.490 align:middle line:84% Fanon does not mean fact in the sense of indisputable evidence, 00:00:33.490 --> 00:00:36.220 align:middle line:84% but rather as Blackness as lived. 00:00:36.220 --> 00:00:37.850 align:middle line:90% "L'expérience vécue." 00:00:37.850 --> 00:00:38.350 align:middle line:90% Right? 00:00:38.350 --> 00:00:41.800 align:middle line:84% Which gets wearily translated into fact. 00:00:41.800 --> 00:00:43.600 align:middle line:84% His essay begins with the speaker narrating 00:00:43.600 --> 00:00:45.430 align:middle line:90% his own objectification. 00:00:45.430 --> 00:00:47.860 align:middle line:90% Dirty n-word, or simply, Look. 00:00:47.860 --> 00:00:48.670 align:middle line:90% A Negro. 00:00:48.670 --> 00:00:51.550 align:middle line:84% And proceeds to flesh out a radical consciousness 00:00:51.550 --> 00:00:54.520 align:middle line:84% in and against racist colonial histories and realities. 00:00:54.520 --> 00:00:57.670 align:middle line:84% That consciousness is central to many of the poems Jiménez Román 00:00:57.670 --> 00:01:00.010 align:middle line:84% and Flores include in the Reader. 00:01:00.010 --> 00:01:02.810 align:middle line:84% Victor Hernández Cruz's African Things, 1971. 00:01:02.810 --> 00:01:07.507 align:middle line:84% Tato Laviera's "The Salsa of Bethesda Fountain," 1979. 00:01:07.507 --> 00:01:09.340 align:middle line:84% And these poems-- the fact of Afro-Latinidad 00:01:09.340 --> 00:01:12.940 align:middle line:84% is not just about archiving or recuperating African Things 00:01:12.940 --> 00:01:16.240 align:middle line:84% in a Latino context, but about a performative poetic that 00:01:16.240 --> 00:01:20.675 align:middle line:84% interrupts both non-Black Latino and non-Latino Black, time 00:01:20.675 --> 00:01:21.175 align:middle line:90% and space. 00:01:21.175 --> 00:01:25.000 align:middle line:84% Quote, "and permit me to say these words in Afro-Spanish." 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:25.960 align:middle line:90% Laviera. 00:01:25.960 --> 00:01:29.230 align:middle line:84% And quote, "How do Latin Boogaloo sound like you?" 00:01:29.230 --> 00:01:31.007 align:middle line:90% Cruz. 00:01:31.007 --> 00:01:32.590 align:middle line:84% There was a productive tension between 00:01:32.590 --> 00:01:36.490 align:middle line:84% Afro-Latinidad's interrupted politics of the lived thing 00:01:36.490 --> 00:01:39.700 align:middle line:84% and the politics of queer utopian potentiality developed 00:01:39.700 --> 00:01:41.710 align:middle line:90% by José Esteban Muñoz. 00:01:41.710 --> 00:01:43.870 align:middle line:84% Including utopia, Muñoz counters, 00:01:43.870 --> 00:01:46.150 align:middle line:84% white queer theorists of radical negativity 00:01:46.150 --> 00:01:48.640 align:middle line:84% and anti-relationality, such as Lee Edelman, 00:01:48.640 --> 00:01:51.790 align:middle line:84% by claiming queerness as a potentiality. 00:01:51.790 --> 00:01:54.340 align:middle line:84% As a quote, "Certain mode of non-being that 00:01:54.340 --> 00:01:56.770 align:middle line:84% is eminent, a thing that is present, 00:01:56.770 --> 00:02:00.670 align:middle line:84% but not actually existing in the present tense." 00:02:00.670 --> 00:02:02.890 align:middle line:90% How do we read queerness as-- 00:02:02.890 --> 00:02:04.390 align:middle line:84% You want me to shrink it so it fits? 00:02:04.390 --> 00:02:05.057 align:middle line:90% Now you tell me. 00:02:05.057 --> 00:02:06.340 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:02:06.340 --> 00:02:08.574 align:middle line:90% Well, it's a little off-center. 00:02:08.574 --> 00:02:09.437 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:02:09.437 --> 00:02:10.270 align:middle line:90% I'm in my flow here. 00:02:10.270 --> 00:02:10.780 align:middle line:90% Keep going. 00:02:10.780 --> 00:02:12.670 align:middle line:90% Yeah, cool. 00:02:12.670 --> 00:02:15.250 align:middle line:84% So how do you read these de-centered queerness 00:02:15.250 --> 00:02:20.013 align:middle line:84% as potentiality in and against the fact of Afro-Latinidad? 00:02:20.013 --> 00:02:21.430 align:middle line:84% Like so much of performance study, 00:02:21.430 --> 00:02:24.670 align:middle line:84% Muñoz seeks to de-center the archive, 00:02:24.670 --> 00:02:27.700 align:middle line:84% proposing an ephemeral archive attuned to a broader conception 00:02:27.700 --> 00:02:30.640 align:middle line:84% of evidence and developing a critique of how hegemonic 00:02:30.640 --> 00:02:33.010 align:middle line:84% archives perpetuate the marginality or outright 00:02:33.010 --> 00:02:37.020 align:middle line:84% invisibility of queer subjects, especially pre-Stonewall. 00:02:37.020 --> 00:02:40.120 align:middle line:84% Yet, what of the counter archive is theorized by scholars 00:02:40.120 --> 00:02:42.670 align:middle line:84% of Black visual culture, such as Ian Baucom, 00:02:42.670 --> 00:02:45.910 align:middle line:84% and of counter-archival politics as central to Afro-Latinidad, 00:02:45.910 --> 00:02:48.670 align:middle line:84% that at least as far back as the work of Afro-Puerto Rican 00:02:48.670 --> 00:02:51.610 align:middle line:84% writer and collector, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, 00:02:51.610 --> 00:02:54.370 align:middle line:84% who in his essay, The Negro Digs Up His Past, 00:02:54.370 --> 00:02:57.550 align:middle line:84% famously proposes the quote, "Dust of Digging," 00:02:57.550 --> 00:03:01.510 align:middle line:84% as a counter-archival challenge to a racist textonomies 00:03:01.510 --> 00:03:04.840 align:middle line:84% alongside and against Muñoz on utopia. 00:03:04.840 --> 00:03:08.410 align:middle line:84% How do we read for an unbecoming Afro-Latinidad? 00:03:08.410 --> 00:03:10.900 align:middle line:84% And I'm referring here to Antonio Lopez's book 00:03:10.900 --> 00:03:14.340 align:middle line:84% Unbecoming Blackness, which you can ask me about later. 00:03:14.340 --> 00:03:17.020 align:middle line:84% Muñoz's Cruising Utopia tends to locate Blackness, 00:03:17.020 --> 00:03:22.090 align:middle line:84% not in the Afro-Cuban as in Lopez's book or Afro-Latino, 00:03:22.090 --> 00:03:24.610 align:middle line:84% but in the points of contact between his project of queer 00:03:24.610 --> 00:03:28.480 align:middle line:84% futurity and the Black radical tradition as theorized by works 00:03:28.480 --> 00:03:31.090 align:middle line:84% like Fred Moten's In The Break, and folks might know 00:03:31.090 --> 00:03:33.960 align:middle line:84% the chapter on Amiri Baraka's play, The Toilet, 00:03:33.960 --> 00:03:35.958 align:middle line:90% in Muñoz's book. 00:03:35.958 --> 00:03:37.000 align:middle line:90% It's a beautiful chapter. 00:03:37.000 --> 00:03:40.300 align:middle line:84% Muñoz describes his queer futurity as resembling 00:03:40.300 --> 00:03:43.780 align:middle line:84% the Black radical tradition in how it operates in a quote, 00:03:43.780 --> 00:03:46.510 align:middle line:84% "relational and collective modality of endurance 00:03:46.510 --> 00:03:48.040 align:middle line:90% and support." 00:03:48.040 --> 00:03:51.280 align:middle line:84% Muñoz's reading of Baraka's play stresses its queer dimension 00:03:51.280 --> 00:03:54.070 align:middle line:84% and also queers Baraka through an irreverent approach 00:03:54.070 --> 00:03:56.290 align:middle line:84% to the archive attuned to the ephemeral. 00:03:56.290 --> 00:03:58.790 align:middle line:84% So there's chisme-- gossip about Baraka 00:03:58.790 --> 00:04:00.670 align:middle line:84% and in effect, that becomes an opportunity 00:04:00.670 --> 00:04:05.410 align:middle line:84% to queer Baraka and deploy him, right, for a project that 00:04:05.410 --> 00:04:09.190 align:middle line:84% affirms, as he puts it, the way in which, 00:04:09.190 --> 00:04:12.820 align:middle line:84% the quote, "interracial and the queer co-animate each other." 00:04:12.820 --> 00:04:15.010 align:middle line:84% End quote, the fragmented gesture 00:04:15.010 --> 00:04:18.130 align:middle line:84% that signals an endurance slash support. 00:04:18.130 --> 00:04:20.980 align:middle line:84% As beautiful as this reading is, I am struck by the distance 00:04:20.980 --> 00:04:22.990 align:middle line:84% between Muñoz's relational reading of Blackness 00:04:22.990 --> 00:04:26.980 align:middle line:84% and queerness supporting each other and queer Afro-Latino 00:04:26.980 --> 00:04:29.860 align:middle line:84% poetics that might consider queerness and Afro-Latinidad 00:04:29.860 --> 00:04:35.790 align:middle line:84% as strategically complicating and challenging each other. 00:04:35.790 --> 00:04:36.290 align:middle line:90% One way 00:04:36.290 --> 00:04:38.540 align:middle line:84% Afro-Latinidad can challenge the queer utopian 00:04:38.540 --> 00:04:40.700 align:middle line:84% is by confronting queer potentiality 00:04:40.700 --> 00:04:43.538 align:middle line:84% with the materiality of Afro-Latino bodies. 00:04:43.538 --> 00:04:45.080 align:middle line:84% I might have skipped one there, but-- 00:04:45.080 --> 00:04:47.810 align:middle line:90% 00:04:47.810 --> 00:04:50.720 align:middle line:84% and so we could think about writing pre-Stonewall queer 00:04:50.720 --> 00:04:54.320 align:middle line:84% histories with Afro-Latino contra archival histories 00:04:54.320 --> 00:04:57.330 align:middle line:84% and practices from Schomburg to the present day. 00:04:57.330 --> 00:05:00.020 align:middle line:84% On the other hand, centering queerness 00:05:00.020 --> 00:05:02.540 align:middle line:84% can challenge the fact of Afro-Latinidad 00:05:02.540 --> 00:05:04.370 align:middle line:84% by highlighting the marginalization 00:05:04.370 --> 00:05:08.090 align:middle line:84% and/or silencing of queer voices in Afro-Latino context, 00:05:08.090 --> 00:05:11.420 align:middle line:84% and by stressing the performativity and potentiality 00:05:11.420 --> 00:05:12.830 align:middle line:90% of racialized bodies. 00:05:12.830 --> 00:05:15.560 align:middle line:84% To stage these tensions is to open up political spaces 00:05:15.560 --> 00:05:17.450 align:middle line:84% and the terms are not just theoretical. 00:05:17.450 --> 00:05:20.660 align:middle line:90% They are also institutional. 00:05:20.660 --> 00:05:21.950 align:middle line:90% And think of it. 00:05:21.950 --> 00:05:25.700 align:middle line:84% As rich as Latino studies, I should say, has been as a field 00:05:25.700 --> 00:05:27.470 align:middle line:84% over the past 15 years, I can't think 00:05:27.470 --> 00:05:30.380 align:middle line:84% of a single major figure in that field that 00:05:30.380 --> 00:05:32.090 align:middle line:90% identifies as Afro-Latino. 00:05:32.090 --> 00:05:35.720 align:middle line:90% Present company included, right? 00:05:35.720 --> 00:05:42.440 align:middle line:84% So we could think about the project, Cruising Utopia, 00:05:42.440 --> 00:05:45.260 align:middle line:84% and be struck at the White Angloness 00:05:45.260 --> 00:05:47.710 align:middle line:84% of Muñoz's pre-Stonewall investments. 00:05:47.710 --> 00:05:52.010 align:middle line:84% A lot of like Frank O'Hara, Andy Warhol, Jim Schuyler, right? 00:05:52.010 --> 00:05:53.780 align:middle line:84% And I would throw out just maybe one name. 00:05:53.780 --> 00:05:55.590 align:middle line:84% What would we do with, say, Lorca? 00:05:55.590 --> 00:05:57.860 align:middle line:84% Do we think about that trajectory and think about Poet 00:05:57.860 --> 00:06:00.380 align:middle line:84% in New York, so Lorca as a poet was cruising 00:06:00.380 --> 00:06:02.030 align:middle line:90% utopia in a certain way. 00:06:02.030 --> 00:06:06.950 align:middle line:84% Lorca's influence on gay queer Latino subjects, somewhat 00:06:06.950 --> 00:06:08.155 align:middle line:90% complicatedly, because what? 00:06:08.155 --> 00:06:10.280 align:middle line:84% Lorca spent like, a year in New York and that's it? 00:06:10.280 --> 00:06:12.200 align:middle line:84% And so in Spain in any case, right? 00:06:12.200 --> 00:06:14.690 align:middle line:84% But then also his influence on Baraka, on the project 00:06:14.690 --> 00:06:16.190 align:middle line:90% of Afro-surrealism, right? 00:06:16.190 --> 00:06:18.500 align:middle line:84% Cante Jondo and Duende and so on, 00:06:18.500 --> 00:06:20.660 align:middle line:84% and strains of Afro-surrealism, and also 00:06:20.660 --> 00:06:26.240 align:middle line:84% thinking about that Lorca as an influence on Baraka's play. 00:06:26.240 --> 00:06:27.650 align:middle line:84% Its [INAUDIBLE] centric politics. 00:06:27.650 --> 00:06:30.050 align:middle line:84% Its blurring of beauty and violence and its insistence 00:06:30.050 --> 00:06:32.750 align:middle line:84% on the revolutionary power of objection-- maybe 00:06:32.750 --> 00:06:35.060 align:middle line:90% as a blueprint for The Toilet. 00:06:35.060 --> 00:06:38.000 align:middle line:84% And then, of course, we get the problem the other way, right? 00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:41.390 align:middle line:84% This is from Ana M. Lara's essay in the Afro-Latino 00:06:41.390 --> 00:06:46.340 align:middle line:84% Reader, Uncovering Mirrors: Afro-Latina Lesbian Subjects. 00:06:46.340 --> 00:06:48.590 align:middle line:84% Quote, "I'd always been taught to understand my gender 00:06:48.590 --> 00:06:51.560 align:middle line:84% and sexuality as something specifically heterosexual 00:06:51.560 --> 00:06:54.860 align:middle line:84% and predetermined by the fact of my Latina-ness." 00:06:54.860 --> 00:06:58.040 align:middle line:84% So the air quotes there on that fact. 00:06:58.040 --> 00:07:00.710 align:middle line:84% And quote, "if we are to engage Afro-Latina lesbian subjects, 00:07:00.710 --> 00:07:03.840 align:middle line:84% we must be willing to engage what does not yet exist. 00:07:03.840 --> 00:07:07.310 align:middle line:84% Focusing on the essay, Lara is looking for Afro-Latina lesbian 00:07:07.310 --> 00:07:09.380 align:middle line:90% subjects and finds none, right? 00:07:09.380 --> 00:07:12.590 align:middle line:84% So we could think about the-- finds eight, I should say, 00:07:12.590 --> 00:07:16.500 align:middle line:84% but none that is attuned to the project she is developing. 00:07:16.500 --> 00:07:21.170 align:middle line:84% So the tensions between the Afro-Latino and the queer, 00:07:21.170 --> 00:07:23.780 align:middle line:84% also to the limitations of both Schomburg's digging 00:07:23.780 --> 00:07:28.860 align:middle line:84% and Muñoz's cruising, right, as archival projects. 00:07:28.860 --> 00:07:31.290 align:middle line:84% And so I propose maybe we think about the intersections 00:07:31.290 --> 00:07:31.790 align:middle line:90% of the two. 00:07:31.790 --> 00:07:35.698 align:middle line:84% Maybe crigging or druising, right? 00:07:35.698 --> 00:07:37.490 align:middle line:84% So having heard enough-- that's really bad. 00:07:37.490 --> 00:07:40.910 align:middle line:84% Having shared enough theory, let me just share with you three 00:07:40.910 --> 00:07:43.490 align:middle line:84% moments of what I'm calling queer Afro-Latino poetics, 00:07:43.490 --> 00:07:46.610 align:middle line:84% a very exploratory term that seeks to put pressure on its 00:07:46.610 --> 00:07:48.950 align:middle line:84% constituent parts and thus on assumptions that 00:07:48.950 --> 00:07:49.880 align:middle line:90% the wholeness-- 00:07:49.880 --> 00:07:51.370 align:middle line:90% Muñoz-- or the given-ness-- 00:07:51.370 --> 00:07:53.270 align:middle line:90% Jiménez Román and Flores-- 00:07:53.270 --> 00:07:55.400 align:middle line:84% about queerness and Afro-Latinidad, 00:07:55.400 --> 00:07:58.572 align:middle line:90% and number one, revelation. 00:07:58.572 --> 00:08:00.530 align:middle line:84% One of the most surprising things about Melissa 00:08:00.530 --> 00:08:02.720 align:middle line:84% Castillo-Garsow's groundbreaking Manteca, 00:08:02.720 --> 00:08:04.790 align:middle line:84% an anthology about Afro-Latin@ poets, 00:08:04.790 --> 00:08:06.950 align:middle line:84% published this year by Arte Público, 00:08:06.950 --> 00:08:09.980 align:middle line:84% is a relative paucity of queer content. 00:08:09.980 --> 00:08:13.010 align:middle line:84% I say surprising because Manteca is a corrective 00:08:13.010 --> 00:08:14.210 align:middle line:90% in so many other ways. 00:08:14.210 --> 00:08:16.372 align:middle line:84% Its gender parity, its inclusion of younger 00:08:16.372 --> 00:08:18.080 align:middle line:84% and performance-oriented poets as well as 00:08:18.080 --> 00:08:20.420 align:middle line:84% poets writing in Spanish, making room for poets 00:08:20.420 --> 00:08:22.880 align:middle line:84% from backgrounds historically underrepresented 00:08:22.880 --> 00:08:24.140 align:middle line:90% in Latino poetry. 00:08:24.140 --> 00:08:27.530 align:middle line:84% Dominicans, Afro-Mexicans, Panamanians-- Lorenzo Thomas 00:08:27.530 --> 00:08:29.332 align:middle line:90% in there, which is really cool. 00:08:29.332 --> 00:08:31.790 align:middle line:84% The minimal queer content is also surprising given that one 00:08:31.790 --> 00:08:35.480 align:middle line:84% might argue that Castillo-Garsow queers the Afro-Latin@ 00:08:35.480 --> 00:08:37.640 align:middle line:84% by boldly refusing to define the term, 00:08:37.640 --> 00:08:40.970 align:middle line:84% and by insisting on the @ sign from the Afro-Latin@, 00:08:40.970 --> 00:08:44.000 align:middle line:84% and pronouncing it like that Portuguese "ou", right? 00:08:44.000 --> 00:08:47.990 align:middle line:84% to signal non-binary and diasporic roots and routes. 00:08:47.990 --> 00:08:50.270 align:middle line:84% I would echo Castillo-Garsow's insistence 00:08:50.270 --> 00:08:52.760 align:middle line:84% on that @ sign while also insisting 00:08:52.760 --> 00:08:54.320 align:middle line:90% on its queer performativity. 00:08:54.320 --> 00:08:57.050 align:middle line:84% Folks may know Juana María Rodríguez's classic book, 00:08:57.050 --> 00:09:00.100 align:middle line:84% Queer Latinidad, which is a book that introduced that @ sign, 00:09:00.100 --> 00:09:00.600 align:middle line:90% right? 00:09:00.600 --> 00:09:02.017 align:middle line:84% That then gets picked up, so there 00:09:02.017 --> 00:09:05.420 align:middle line:84% is a kind of epistemology, right, from both queer 00:09:05.420 --> 00:09:09.040 align:middle line:84% and Afro-Latino studies of that non-binary @. 00:09:09.040 --> 00:09:11.870 align:middle line:84% For Castillo-Garsow, that @ also embodies the subject-centered 00:09:11.870 --> 00:09:14.270 align:middle line:84% alternative to older and contentious history of Black 00:09:14.270 --> 00:09:17.143 align:middle line:84% poetry in Latin America, variously anthologized 00:09:17.143 --> 00:09:18.935 align:middle line:84% as poesía negra, negrita, negroide, mulata, 00:09:18.935 --> 00:09:23.690 align:middle line:90% afroantillana, so on-- 00:09:23.690 --> 00:09:28.070 align:middle line:84% many of whose exponents were or passed as white. 00:09:28.070 --> 00:09:30.860 align:middle line:84% And yet again, this idea-- is it the poetry 00:09:30.860 --> 00:09:34.340 align:middle line:84% of the lived experience of Blackness as in Fanon, 00:09:34.340 --> 00:09:36.080 align:middle line:90% or this collecting, right? 00:09:36.080 --> 00:09:43.392 align:middle line:84% Of Afro-identified things, from the perspective of the outside. 00:09:43.392 --> 00:09:45.350 align:middle line:84% That said, if there is a resounding queer voice 00:09:45.350 --> 00:09:48.500 align:middle line:84% in the Manteca anthology of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe founder, 00:09:48.500 --> 00:09:51.410 align:middle line:84% Miguel Algarín, of his poems included in the anthology 00:09:51.410 --> 00:09:54.380 align:middle line:84% I'm most interested in, HIV, 1990s poem, 00:09:54.380 --> 00:09:58.250 align:middle line:84% which seems like an outlier alongside '70s poems like Salsa 00:09:58.250 --> 00:10:00.830 align:middle line:84% Ballet and Angelitos Negros and Mongo Affair, 00:10:00.830 --> 00:10:03.950 align:middle line:84% which more forcefully articulate an Afro-Latino perspective 00:10:03.950 --> 00:10:06.890 align:middle line:84% attuned to this revivalist Nuyorican poetics. 00:10:06.890 --> 00:10:11.030 align:middle line:84% It's a kind of masculinist ever, so HIV, in the poem, 00:10:11.030 --> 00:10:14.450 align:middle line:84% Algarín calls it a mature masculinity that comes with, 00:10:14.450 --> 00:10:17.370 align:middle line:84% quote, "the responsibility to do the work of building verbs, 00:10:17.370 --> 00:10:21.380 align:middle line:84% adjectives, and nouns for mortality and its subsequent 00:10:21.380 --> 00:10:24.170 align:middle line:90% eternal breaking of concrete." 00:10:24.170 --> 00:10:27.167 align:middle line:90% Let's take a look at this. 00:10:27.167 --> 00:10:29.750 align:middle line:84% Here Algarín seems to be moving apparently away from Nuyorican 00:10:29.750 --> 00:10:31.580 align:middle line:84% aesthetics he defined in terms of, quote, 00:10:31.580 --> 00:10:33.247 align:middle line:84% "the debris of the ghettos," and, quote, 00:10:33.247 --> 00:10:35.120 align:middle line:84% "the stresses of living in tar and cement. 00:10:35.120 --> 00:10:38.150 align:middle line:84% he who are not rooted in love and confrontation with death 00:10:38.150 --> 00:10:42.050 align:middle line:84% can break through the concrete of empire. 00:10:42.050 --> 00:10:44.510 align:middle line:84% And think of this pun here, revel at ion, 00:10:44.510 --> 00:10:46.425 align:middle line:90% playing with Revelation, right? 00:10:46.425 --> 00:10:48.800 align:middle line:84% So one of the things that's happening here is, of course, 00:10:48.800 --> 00:10:51.265 align:middle line:84% a poetics of discovery between teller and listener, 00:10:51.265 --> 00:10:53.390 align:middle line:84% which is essential to how Algarín thinks about what 00:10:53.390 --> 00:10:56.480 align:middle line:84% happened at the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe in the 70s, 00:10:56.480 --> 00:10:59.030 align:middle line:84% that sharing as a kind of psychic healing that's also 00:10:59.030 --> 00:11:01.790 align:middle line:84% a political healing for colonized subjects. 00:11:01.790 --> 00:11:03.830 align:middle line:84% Revelation can be negative, too, though, 00:11:03.830 --> 00:11:07.430 align:middle line:84% as in revealing HIV status, and Algarín plays on the possible 00:11:07.430 --> 00:11:10.290 align:middle line:84% or negative charge of revelation with the clever pun revel 00:11:10.290 --> 00:11:10.970 align:middle line:90% at ion. 00:11:10.970 --> 00:11:13.580 align:middle line:84% Think of ions as particles that can be both positively 00:11:13.580 --> 00:11:14.960 align:middle line:90% or negatively charged. 00:11:14.960 --> 00:11:18.020 align:middle line:84% At the same time, the pun extends Algarín's projective 00:11:18.020 --> 00:11:20.990 align:middle line:84% and post-post-[? Burroughsian ?] neo-futurist poetics 00:11:20.990 --> 00:11:23.720 align:middle line:84% of chemical and organismal decay and becoming, 00:11:23.720 --> 00:11:26.180 align:middle line:84% while connecting it with telling tales of survival 00:11:26.180 --> 00:11:27.260 align:middle line:90% in the diaspora. 00:11:27.260 --> 00:11:29.480 align:middle line:90% The next line's another pun. 00:11:29.480 --> 00:11:32.780 align:middle line:84% Rebel at I on a course to regret erections. 00:11:32.780 --> 00:11:35.990 align:middle line:84% As the poem unfolds into a meditation on the quote, 00:11:35.990 --> 00:11:37.790 align:middle line:90% "unsafe body." 00:11:37.790 --> 00:11:41.000 align:middle line:84% The poem outs Algarín as HIV-positive but also opens up 00:11:41.000 --> 00:11:44.060 align:middle line:84% the politics of HIV, perhaps hinting at the pleasures 00:11:44.060 --> 00:11:45.140 align:middle line:90% of risky sex. 00:11:45.140 --> 00:11:48.447 align:middle line:84% Quote, "unsafe revved elations," goes the third pun. 00:11:48.447 --> 00:11:50.780 align:middle line:84% To blur the boundaries between the positive and negative 00:11:50.780 --> 00:11:52.587 align:middle line:90% senses of revelation. 00:11:52.587 --> 00:11:54.170 align:middle line:84% Beyond revealing one's status, though, 00:11:54.170 --> 00:11:56.960 align:middle line:84% what happens if we open the poem's politics of revelation 00:11:56.960 --> 00:12:00.020 align:middle line:84% to Nuyorican poetics and understands revealing secrets 00:12:00.020 --> 00:12:02.540 align:middle line:84% and truths through art as part of a survival 00:12:02.540 --> 00:12:05.180 align:middle line:84% strategy for colonized and racialized bodies, 00:12:05.180 --> 00:12:10.040 align:middle line:84% always already targeted for destruction. 00:12:10.040 --> 00:12:16.130 align:middle line:84% And one of the implications of reading this poem in such a way 00:12:16.130 --> 00:12:20.160 align:middle line:84% might be rethinking the politics of the archive. 00:12:20.160 --> 00:12:26.600 align:middle line:84% So here is a clip of Algarín reading the next section of HIV 00:12:26.600 --> 00:12:30.230 align:middle line:84% on the 1995 Love and Sex episode of the PBS series, 00:12:30.230 --> 00:12:32.510 align:middle line:90% The United States of Poetry. 00:12:32.510 --> 00:12:36.750 align:middle line:90% And we can have a laugh at that. 00:12:36.750 --> 00:12:42.020 align:middle line:84% If I were to show you how to continue moving on to that, 00:12:42.020 --> 00:12:43.720 align:middle line:90% I would kiss you. 00:12:43.720 --> 00:12:47.620 align:middle line:84% I wouldn't have mixed the fluids in my body with you. 00:12:47.620 --> 00:12:51.940 align:middle line:84% The salvation cannot bear the live weight of your sharing 00:12:51.940 --> 00:12:52.920 align:middle line:90% liquids with me. 00:12:52.920 --> 00:12:55.980 align:middle line:90% 00:12:55.980 --> 00:12:59.360 align:middle line:90% [INTERPOSING VOICES] 00:12:59.360 --> 00:13:00.350 align:middle line:90% Hang up the picture. 00:13:00.350 --> 00:13:00.950 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:13:00.950 --> 00:13:05.520 align:middle line:84% Sometimes I refuse orders to drive my hands 00:13:05.520 --> 00:13:08.670 align:middle line:90% to open your thick thighs-- 00:13:08.670 --> 00:13:13.560 align:middle line:84% sometimes posing [INTERPOSING VOICES] 00:13:13.560 --> 00:13:14.060 align:middle line:90% That's OK. 00:13:14.060 --> 00:13:19.230 align:middle line:84% I mean I-- basically the bad thing here 00:13:19.230 --> 00:13:22.080 align:middle line:84% is first the cheesy music, which maybe you couldn't hear, 00:13:22.080 --> 00:13:26.190 align:middle line:84% but then the random white-looking woman's body 00:13:26.190 --> 00:13:27.300 align:middle line:90% in the background, right? 00:13:27.300 --> 00:13:30.540 align:middle line:84% So the liberal ends of the series had to drown out 00:13:30.540 --> 00:13:33.300 align:middle line:84% the quavering power and the irony of Algarín's reading 00:13:33.300 --> 00:13:35.780 align:middle line:84% with, of course, cheesy, dramatic music while framing 00:13:35.780 --> 00:13:38.280 align:middle line:84% his reading against the backdrop of a sleeping white-looking 00:13:38.280 --> 00:13:41.760 align:middle line:84% woman's body, thus erasing the queer and Afro-Latino desire 00:13:41.760 --> 00:13:44.190 align:middle line:84% that structures Algarín's poems at the time. 00:13:44.190 --> 00:13:46.000 align:middle line:84% And consider a poem such as, quote-- 00:13:46.000 --> 00:13:48.960 align:middle line:84% this is the best title ever, "Nuyorican Angel Papo-- 00:13:48.960 --> 00:13:54.090 align:middle line:84% The Bisexual Super Macho," also included in Manteca. 00:13:54.090 --> 00:13:56.430 align:middle line:84% To counter the liberal whitewash of this clip, 00:13:56.430 --> 00:13:59.190 align:middle line:84% I would need a counter archive of queer Afro-Latino 00:13:59.190 --> 00:14:01.200 align:middle line:84% performance, yet in its absence, I 00:14:01.200 --> 00:14:03.780 align:middle line:84% would begin by invoking my own ephemeral archive. 00:14:03.780 --> 00:14:06.990 align:middle line:84% My memories of hearing Algarín read and perform this poem over 00:14:06.990 --> 00:14:10.380 align:middle line:84% the years in all its dirty beauty, his stories, 00:14:10.380 --> 00:14:13.530 align:middle line:84% his gossip, everything he shared in my presence, 00:14:13.530 --> 00:14:15.810 align:middle line:84% the haunting and the healing, the transformative, 00:14:15.810 --> 00:14:19.260 align:middle line:84% and the inappropriate, the funny and the freaky, the disarming, 00:14:19.260 --> 00:14:21.780 align:middle line:90% and the disgusting. 00:14:21.780 --> 00:14:22.680 align:middle line:90% It's punk rock. 00:14:22.680 --> 00:14:25.140 align:middle line:90% Number two-- not quite. 00:14:25.140 --> 00:14:29.310 align:middle line:84% In his book, Queer Ricans, Lawrence La Fountain-Strokes 00:14:29.310 --> 00:14:31.920 align:middle line:84% emphasizes how San Francisco writer and performer Erika 00:14:31.920 --> 00:14:35.610 align:middle line:84% Lopez's comic book, Lap Dancing For Mommy-- second best 00:14:35.610 --> 00:14:38.820 align:middle line:84% title ever, 1997, quote, "elaborates 00:14:38.820 --> 00:14:42.570 align:middle line:84% on what could be identified" as quote, "not quite identities." 00:14:42.570 --> 00:14:45.360 align:middle line:84% Not quite Puerto Rican, not quite African-American, 00:14:45.360 --> 00:14:47.670 align:middle line:84% not quite white American, not quite lesbian, 00:14:47.670 --> 00:14:49.050 align:middle line:90% not quite a Spanish speaker-- 00:14:49.050 --> 00:14:51.480 align:middle line:84% that make her identity difficult for herself 00:14:51.480 --> 00:14:53.160 align:middle line:90% and for others to grasp." 00:14:53.160 --> 00:14:54.600 align:middle line:90% End quote. 00:14:54.600 --> 00:14:57.180 align:middle line:84% Following La Fountain-Strokes, I would extend the list 00:14:57.180 --> 00:14:59.430 align:middle line:84% to include the genre of her works 00:14:59.430 --> 00:15:02.010 align:middle line:84% as they tend toward the indeterminate-- not quite 00:15:02.010 --> 00:15:04.620 align:middle line:84% novel, not quite comic, not quite memoir, not quite 00:15:04.620 --> 00:15:05.850 align:middle line:90% performance text. 00:15:05.850 --> 00:15:09.690 align:middle line:84% La Fountain-Strokes thoughtfully connects Lopez to other queer 00:15:09.690 --> 00:15:10.620 align:middle line:90% Rican women artists-- 00:15:10.620 --> 00:15:12.600 align:middle line:84% Rose Troche, Frances Negron-Muntaner-- 00:15:12.600 --> 00:15:15.420 align:middle line:84% using visual media in ways aligned with feminist critiques 00:15:15.420 --> 00:15:17.220 align:middle line:84% of regimes of visual representation, 00:15:17.220 --> 00:15:20.430 align:middle line:84% but also in exploratory and experimental ways. 00:15:20.430 --> 00:15:23.910 align:middle line:84% And here's one of my favorite passages from Lopez's novel, 00:15:23.910 --> 00:15:26.400 align:middle line:90% Flaming Iguanas, 1997. 00:15:26.400 --> 00:15:27.540 align:middle line:90% Quote, 00:15:27.540 --> 00:15:29.310 align:middle line:90% "Future child, that's me. 00:15:29.310 --> 00:15:30.120 align:middle line:90% Hello! 00:15:30.120 --> 00:15:31.650 align:middle line:90% It's nice to meet you. 00:15:31.650 --> 00:15:34.920 align:middle line:84% I don't feel white, gay, bisexual, black, 00:15:34.920 --> 00:15:37.530 align:middle line:84% or like a broken hearted Puerto Rican in West Side Story, 00:15:37.530 --> 00:15:39.730 align:middle line:84% but sometimes I feel like all of them. 00:15:39.730 --> 00:15:42.300 align:middle line:84% Sometimes I feel so white I want to speak in twang, 00:15:42.300 --> 00:15:45.480 align:middle line:84% belong to the KKK, experience the brotherhood, 00:15:45.480 --> 00:15:47.910 align:middle line:90% and simplicity of opinions. 00:15:47.910 --> 00:15:49.950 align:middle line:84% Sometimes I want to feel so heterosexual-- 00:15:49.950 --> 00:15:51.960 align:middle line:84% hit the headboard to the point of concussion 00:15:51.960 --> 00:15:55.110 align:middle line:84% and have my crotch smell like bad sperm the morning after. 00:15:55.110 --> 00:15:58.020 align:middle line:84% I want the kid, the folding stroller-- please 00:15:58.020 --> 00:16:01.050 align:middle line:84% let me stand forever in a line with my expensive offspring 00:16:01.050 --> 00:16:02.400 align:middle line:90% at Disney World. 00:16:02.400 --> 00:16:04.290 align:middle line:84% Sometimes I want to be so Black-- 00:16:04.290 --> 00:16:06.240 align:middle line:90% my hair and skinny long braids-- 00:16:06.240 --> 00:16:09.150 align:middle line:84% that Black guys nod and say, hey, sister! 00:16:09.150 --> 00:16:10.950 align:middle line:84% when they pass me by in the street. 00:16:10.950 --> 00:16:13.650 align:middle line:84% I want the story, the rhythms, the myths, 00:16:13.650 --> 00:16:16.080 align:middle line:90% that come with the color. 00:16:16.080 --> 00:16:19.110 align:middle line:84% Sometimes I want to live with my hand inside of a woman 00:16:19.110 --> 00:16:21.660 align:middle line:84% so I can hear her heartbeat, wake up with her smell all 00:16:21.660 --> 00:16:23.790 align:middle line:84% over me in the morning, and still feel as clean 00:16:23.790 --> 00:16:25.553 align:middle line:90% as I did the morning before. 00:16:25.553 --> 00:16:26.970 align:middle line:84% I want to talk about her childhood 00:16:26.970 --> 00:16:29.230 align:middle line:84% until I go insane from pretending I didn't 00:16:29.230 --> 00:16:31.560 align:middle line:90% stop listening four hours ago. 00:16:31.560 --> 00:16:33.790 align:middle line:84% Other times, I wish I was born speaking Spanish 00:16:33.790 --> 00:16:37.320 align:middle line:84% so I could sound like I look without curly hair apologies. 00:16:37.320 --> 00:16:40.590 align:middle line:84% But I try all that, and I quit, and I try again. 00:16:40.590 --> 00:16:44.070 align:middle line:84% Really, I want to get this individualistic thing down." 00:16:44.070 --> 00:16:45.420 align:middle line:90% End quote. 00:16:45.420 --> 00:16:48.300 align:middle line:84% I am struck by how this passage unpacks the problematic logic 00:16:48.300 --> 00:16:50.040 align:middle line:90% of identity and thingness. 00:16:50.040 --> 00:16:53.280 align:middle line:84% Sometimes identity is all about things we can commodify-- 00:16:53.280 --> 00:16:56.790 align:middle line:84% braids, Disney World-- but sometimes it is about 00:16:56.790 --> 00:16:59.700 align:middle line:84% as an unquantifiable as the twang and simplicity 00:16:59.700 --> 00:17:02.070 align:middle line:84% of whiteness, whose appeal is all about what cannot be 00:17:02.070 --> 00:17:04.290 align:middle line:84% measured except, perhaps, negatively. 00:17:04.290 --> 00:17:05.940 align:middle line:90% Think of the one drop rule. 00:17:05.940 --> 00:17:07.950 align:middle line:84% Significantly, the subtitle of Flaming Iguanas 00:17:07.950 --> 00:17:10.890 align:middle line:84% is, quote, "an all-illustrated, all-girl road novel 00:17:10.890 --> 00:17:14.430 align:middle line:84% thing," which I read as a self-ironizing acknowledgment 00:17:14.430 --> 00:17:17.220 align:middle line:84% of the book's genre and formal indeterminacy. 00:17:17.220 --> 00:17:18.660 align:middle line:90% Its not quiteness. 00:17:18.660 --> 00:17:21.869 align:middle line:84% It is what the poet Kazim Ali calls "genre queer," 00:17:21.869 --> 00:17:24.359 align:middle line:84% but also in the context of the global commodification 00:17:24.359 --> 00:17:26.609 align:middle line:90% of identities in the 1990s. 00:17:26.609 --> 00:17:30.060 align:middle line:84% Muñoz finds utopia in Frank O'Hara's Having a Coke With 00:17:30.060 --> 00:17:33.900 align:middle line:84% You, precisely in an affect that can transmute the global 00:17:33.900 --> 00:17:37.650 align:middle line:84% hegemony of Coke into an alternative potentiality. 00:17:37.650 --> 00:17:39.900 align:middle line:84% Yet the quote, "future child" here 00:17:39.900 --> 00:17:42.510 align:middle line:84% owes her queer futurity to television commercials 00:17:42.510 --> 00:17:44.490 align:middle line:84% that constitute her fantasmically 00:17:44.490 --> 00:17:46.050 align:middle line:90% as a racialized subject. 00:17:46.050 --> 00:17:49.530 align:middle line:84% Quote, "They say I'm a child of an AT & T commercial, 00:17:49.530 --> 00:17:51.960 align:middle line:84% cafe au lait telephone commercial future where 00:17:51.960 --> 00:17:54.030 align:middle line:84% your nose is not flat enough to offend 00:17:54.030 --> 00:17:57.115 align:middle line:84% and not pointy enough to cut the glass ceiling." 00:17:57.115 --> 00:17:58.740 align:middle line:84% The book repeatedly invokes whiteness-- 00:17:58.740 --> 00:18:01.800 align:middle line:84% whether in the desire to wear, quote, "white cotton dresses, 00:18:01.800 --> 00:18:03.530 align:middle line:84% the smell of a lover's white sheets, 00:18:03.530 --> 00:18:06.200 align:middle line:84% the restrained whiteness of Canadian men." 00:18:06.200 --> 00:18:08.330 align:middle line:84% Queer Afro-Latinidades here seems partly 00:18:08.330 --> 00:18:10.220 align:middle line:84% about an intimate distance from whiteness 00:18:10.220 --> 00:18:13.520 align:middle line:84% performed at times somewhere between cathexis and parody. 00:18:13.520 --> 00:18:14.780 align:middle line:90% Witness the book's cover-- 00:18:14.780 --> 00:18:29.250 align:middle line:90% 00:18:29.250 --> 00:18:32.490 align:middle line:84% So Carmen Miranda-ish brown woman in her frilly, 00:18:32.490 --> 00:18:35.490 align:middle line:84% colorful clothes hop in a white motorcycle, with the titular 00:18:35.490 --> 00:18:38.520 align:middle line:84% iguana itself, which changes color according to its mood 00:18:38.520 --> 00:18:40.650 align:middle line:84% and environment, and whose flaming evokes 00:18:40.650 --> 00:18:43.050 align:middle line:84% both queer performativity and quote, 00:18:43.050 --> 00:18:45.570 align:middle line:90% "South American flamboyance." 00:18:45.570 --> 00:18:50.280 align:middle line:84% And then there's the page itself as you might notice. 00:18:50.280 --> 00:18:54.000 align:middle line:84% The brown-backed paper that reinforces the book's Bay Area 00:18:54.000 --> 00:18:56.220 align:middle line:90% DIY punk feminist poetics. 00:18:56.220 --> 00:18:58.290 align:middle line:84% When juxtaposed against the dark font 00:18:58.290 --> 00:19:00.810 align:middle line:84% and elegantly crude black and white drawings 00:19:00.810 --> 00:19:03.450 align:middle line:84% works as a riff on the simultaneous performativity 00:19:03.450 --> 00:19:05.550 align:middle line:90% and materiality of brownness. 00:19:05.550 --> 00:19:07.050 align:middle line:90% And what the heck is brownness? 00:19:07.050 --> 00:19:10.110 align:middle line:84% And finally there are those slashes that sometimes function 00:19:10.110 --> 00:19:12.240 align:middle line:84% as commas or sentence or paragraph breaks, 00:19:12.240 --> 00:19:14.520 align:middle line:84% but other times seem more ornamental, 00:19:14.520 --> 00:19:16.560 align:middle line:84% inflecting a reading, yet also inciting 00:19:16.560 --> 00:19:20.670 align:middle line:84% us to read for poetic breath as it did in so much 60s poetry. 00:19:20.670 --> 00:19:22.590 align:middle line:84% The slashes signal the violence and cuts 00:19:22.590 --> 00:19:25.950 align:middle line:84% of a subject formation in queer Afro-Latino context, 00:19:25.950 --> 00:19:28.530 align:middle line:84% even as they also suggest the contemporary fragmenting 00:19:28.530 --> 00:19:29.550 align:middle line:90% of identities. 00:19:29.550 --> 00:19:31.230 align:middle line:90% Think Latinx. 00:19:31.230 --> 00:19:34.030 align:middle line:84% Latino, Latina, Latinette, and so on. 00:19:34.030 --> 00:19:37.680 align:middle line:84% Beyond any desire for a Muñozian utopian whole. 00:19:37.680 --> 00:19:39.210 align:middle line:84% The quote I just discussed appears 00:19:39.210 --> 00:19:41.430 align:middle line:84% as we see under the word bullshit framed 00:19:41.430 --> 00:19:44.260 align:middle line:84% by two figures with outstretched hands, 00:19:44.260 --> 00:19:46.260 align:middle line:84% as if to suggest that reaching for the wholeness 00:19:46.260 --> 00:19:48.780 align:middle line:84% of a queer Afro-Latina identity is BS, 00:19:48.780 --> 00:19:51.270 align:middle line:84% but also that BS in the way of racist, classist, 00:19:51.270 --> 00:19:53.970 align:middle line:84% and nationalist advertisements, for instance, must 00:19:53.970 --> 00:19:56.820 align:middle line:84% be constitutive of a queer Afro-Latina subject. 00:19:56.820 --> 00:19:58.350 align:middle line:90% There is no other way. 00:19:58.350 --> 00:20:00.360 align:middle line:90% No outside those trappings. 00:20:00.360 --> 00:20:02.040 align:middle line:84% And I cannot help but contrast this, 00:20:02.040 --> 00:20:04.680 align:middle line:84% from Muñoz's reading of the hands that hold the betrayed 00:20:04.680 --> 00:20:06.450 align:middle line:90% lover in the toilet. 00:20:06.450 --> 00:20:08.490 align:middle line:90% Think about these hands here. 00:20:08.490 --> 00:20:10.170 align:middle line:84% The stuttering slash of the declaration 00:20:10.170 --> 00:20:12.870 align:middle line:84% that immediately precedes the quote, I-- 00:20:12.870 --> 00:20:15.300 align:middle line:84% I am a girl who feels too American for love 00:20:15.300 --> 00:20:17.820 align:middle line:84% as a performance of a sentimented identity. 00:20:17.820 --> 00:20:20.310 align:middle line:84% I I. And also an affirmation of the ways 00:20:20.310 --> 00:20:22.530 align:middle line:84% American girlhood is still predicated 00:20:22.530 --> 00:20:25.920 align:middle line:84% on the subalterity of Blackness, queerness, and Latinidad. 00:20:25.920 --> 00:20:28.500 align:middle line:84% That's also a critique, but an opportunity 00:20:28.500 --> 00:20:31.980 align:middle line:84% as Queer Afro-Latinidad might be constituted negatively 00:20:31.980 --> 00:20:36.300 align:middle line:84% out of the slashes and shards of all that is not quite American. 00:20:36.300 --> 00:20:39.240 align:middle line:90% And lastly, Salsa Boy. 00:20:39.240 --> 00:20:42.480 align:middle line:84% A different proximity haunts Charles Rice-González's play, 00:20:42.480 --> 00:20:45.360 align:middle line:84% I just love Andy Gibb-- third best title ever-- 00:20:45.360 --> 00:20:48.900 align:middle line:84% included in E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón Rivera-Servera's 2016 00:20:48.900 --> 00:20:52.050 align:middle line:84% edited volume, Blacktino Queer Performance. 00:20:52.050 --> 00:20:54.370 align:middle line:84% In the play, Carlos, an Afro-Puerto Rican man 00:20:54.370 --> 00:20:57.660 align:middle line:84% in his late 30s and Roy, an Afro-Puerto Rican teenage boy, 00:20:57.660 --> 00:21:00.510 align:middle line:84% bond over their complicated relationships with lighter 00:21:00.510 --> 00:21:05.430 align:middle line:84% skinned men and over 70s pop star and pinup idol Andy Gibb. 00:21:05.430 --> 00:21:08.550 align:middle line:84% Roy adores Andy Gibb while Carlos claims not to, 00:21:08.550 --> 00:21:10.110 align:middle line:84% although as the play progresses, we 00:21:10.110 --> 00:21:13.080 align:middle line:84% learn Carlos was, perhaps, an Andy Gibb lover once 00:21:13.080 --> 00:21:15.900 align:middle line:84% upon a time, and that Roy may, in fact, inhabit 00:21:15.900 --> 00:21:18.390 align:middle line:84% an area somewhere between Carlos's dreams 00:21:18.390 --> 00:21:21.900 align:middle line:84% and his desires and the two may be one in the same. 00:21:21.900 --> 00:21:25.680 align:middle line:84% As Roy gets Carlos to own up to his repressed Andy Gibb love, 00:21:25.680 --> 00:21:28.320 align:middle line:84% we learn of Carlos' desire for his light-skinned college 00:21:28.320 --> 00:21:30.990 align:middle line:84% friend, Pedro, and of Roy's fixation 00:21:30.990 --> 00:21:33.900 align:middle line:84% with an also light-skinned Salsa Boy. 00:21:33.900 --> 00:21:38.040 align:middle line:84% As Roy describes Salsa Boy, Carlos exclaims, "wait! 00:21:38.040 --> 00:21:43.950 align:middle line:84% I remember that boy," and adds, "I don't know him, 00:21:43.950 --> 00:21:46.620 align:middle line:84% but I remember a young, skinny guy with blondish tight curly 00:21:46.620 --> 00:21:50.215 align:middle line:84% hair listening to salsa music on a portable eight-track player. 00:21:50.215 --> 00:21:51.840 align:middle line:84% I thought he was a white boy, but there 00:21:51.840 --> 00:21:54.540 align:middle line:84% weren't many white people living in the projects, much less ones 00:21:54.540 --> 00:21:55.912 align:middle line:90% who listen to salsa. 00:21:55.912 --> 00:21:57.870 align:middle line:84% I can see him sitting in front of the building. 00:21:57.870 --> 00:21:59.790 align:middle line:84% And then Carlos and Roy, both recalling 00:21:59.790 --> 00:22:01.890 align:middle line:84% the image of the salsa boy wearing 00:22:01.890 --> 00:22:04.950 align:middle line:84% pro-Keds and a light blue t-shirt and red bell bottom 00:22:04.950 --> 00:22:05.730 align:middle line:90% pants. 00:22:05.730 --> 00:22:07.368 align:middle line:90% And Carlos said, "he was cute. 00:22:07.368 --> 00:22:09.660 align:middle line:84% He lived in the first building on the top of the hill." 00:22:09.660 --> 00:22:12.330 align:middle line:90% Roy-- "that's where I live." 00:22:12.330 --> 00:22:13.830 align:middle line:84% For Carlos and Roy, identification 00:22:13.830 --> 00:22:16.620 align:middle line:84% is mediated through whiteness underscores the fact 00:22:16.620 --> 00:22:18.150 align:middle line:90% of their Afro-Latinidad. 00:22:18.150 --> 00:22:20.250 align:middle line:84% Salsa Boy is a diasporic Puerto Rican 00:22:20.250 --> 00:22:22.410 align:middle line:84% living in the projects of the South Bronx-- 00:22:22.410 --> 00:22:24.870 align:middle line:84% historically and still racialized demographic that 00:22:24.870 --> 00:22:27.690 align:middle line:84% cannot be more removed from hegemonic whiteness. 00:22:27.690 --> 00:22:30.210 align:middle line:84% But the play's Queer Afro-Latino politics 00:22:30.210 --> 00:22:33.270 align:middle line:84% reads Roy's desire for Salsa Boy in and against Carlos' 00:22:33.270 --> 00:22:36.750 align:middle line:84% desire for Pedro and their shared desire for Andy Gibb. 00:22:36.750 --> 00:22:38.760 align:middle line:84% Whiteness here is about a privilege circulation 00:22:38.760 --> 00:22:42.600 align:middle line:84% that is tied to being desired to a surplus, to the exotic 00:22:42.600 --> 00:22:44.850 align:middle line:90% in the sense of outside, -exo. 00:22:44.850 --> 00:22:47.645 align:middle line:84% Just as Andy Gibb was exotic in the late 70s, 00:22:47.645 --> 00:22:49.740 align:middle line:84% and it's mentioned the play he was Australian. 00:22:49.740 --> 00:22:51.450 align:middle line:84% He was a special kind of whiteness 00:22:51.450 --> 00:22:54.030 align:middle line:84% that he shared with William Newton-John, his brothers 00:22:54.030 --> 00:22:55.620 align:middle line:90% in the Bee Gees, right? 00:22:55.620 --> 00:22:57.390 align:middle line:84% Similarly, Salsa Boy's desirability 00:22:57.390 --> 00:22:59.940 align:middle line:84% is about his light skin as a peripheral in the Nuyorican 00:22:59.940 --> 00:23:00.920 align:middle line:90% subject. 00:23:00.920 --> 00:23:04.020 align:middle line:84% Roy, at one point, tells Carlos, quote, "you're dark-skinned 00:23:04.020 --> 00:23:06.960 align:middle line:84% and Pedro's a blanquito," in turn denotes class 00:23:06.960 --> 00:23:09.630 align:middle line:84% privilege in Puerto Rico, but that here 00:23:09.630 --> 00:23:12.510 align:middle line:84% seems tied to an interrogation about Latinidad's proximity 00:23:12.510 --> 00:23:15.630 align:middle line:84% to whiteness, even in the context of group racialization 00:23:15.630 --> 00:23:19.140 align:middle line:84% and class oppression, and also of the desiring subject's 00:23:19.140 --> 00:23:22.020 align:middle line:90% proximity to that proximity. 00:23:22.020 --> 00:23:23.910 align:middle line:84% An Afro-Latino reading of the play 00:23:23.910 --> 00:23:25.680 align:middle line:84% might stress how Roy and Carlos end up 00:23:25.680 --> 00:23:27.510 align:middle line:84% identifying with each other and rejecting 00:23:27.510 --> 00:23:30.000 align:middle line:84% the false consciousness of fetishizing whiteness. 00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:33.090 align:middle line:84% Quote, "let's not buy into the world's negative view of us 00:23:33.090 --> 00:23:34.410 align:middle line:90% negritos." 00:23:34.410 --> 00:23:35.460 align:middle line:90% End quote. 00:23:35.460 --> 00:23:38.100 align:middle line:84% Especially in as much as they share the Afro-Latino spaces 00:23:38.100 --> 00:23:39.210 align:middle line:90% of the South Bronx. 00:23:39.210 --> 00:23:42.300 align:middle line:84% Quote, "we walk the same streets, ride the same subways, 00:23:42.300 --> 00:23:44.490 align:middle line:84% we still live in the same neighborhood." 00:23:44.490 --> 00:23:46.560 align:middle line:84% Conversely, a queer utopian meeting 00:23:46.560 --> 00:23:48.660 align:middle line:84% might claim effective force in the play's 00:23:48.660 --> 00:23:50.910 align:middle line:84% performative recovery of pop culture 00:23:50.910 --> 00:23:52.950 align:middle line:84% and the essence of its subversion 00:23:52.950 --> 00:23:54.900 align:middle line:90% of the logic of racial fetish. 00:23:54.900 --> 00:23:57.870 align:middle line:90% It ends, of course, with Gibbs-- 00:23:57.870 --> 00:23:59.760 align:middle line:84% I just want to be your everything-- 00:23:59.760 --> 00:24:03.330 align:middle line:84% an anthem of utopian wholeness, and with a spotlight 00:24:03.330 --> 00:24:05.670 align:middle line:90% on an image of Erik Estrada-- 00:24:05.670 --> 00:24:07.440 align:middle line:84% a Nuyorican off the CHiPs, right? 00:24:07.440 --> 00:24:08.910 align:middle line:84% A Nuyorican actor who crossed over 00:24:08.910 --> 00:24:11.040 align:middle line:84% from the streets of East Harlem and embodies 00:24:11.040 --> 00:24:13.440 align:middle line:84% an ambivalent relationship to whiteness. 00:24:13.440 --> 00:24:17.760 align:middle line:84% From a queer Latino perspective, or Afro-body queer-- 00:24:17.760 --> 00:24:19.870 align:middle line:90% ask me about that later. 00:24:19.870 --> 00:24:22.860 align:middle line:84% We might reflect on how the play documents the embodied fact 00:24:22.860 --> 00:24:25.380 align:middle line:84% of living as Jiménez Román and Flores beautifully put it 00:24:25.380 --> 00:24:27.090 align:middle line:84% in their analysis of Schomburg, quote, 00:24:27.090 --> 00:24:30.330 align:middle line:84% "a precarious existence on the color line." 00:24:30.330 --> 00:24:34.380 align:middle line:84% At the same time, we can follow Muñoz in reclaiming the utopian 00:24:34.380 --> 00:24:37.190 align:middle line:90% potentiality of desire.