Always a little anticlimactic after
that beautiful introduction.
Thank you so much, Carmen, for the generous reading.
Thank you, Hannah.
Thank you, Becka, board members, audience, and especially
Prageeta for imagining this.
In the Afro-Latino Reader, editors Miriam Jiménez Román
and Juan Flores argue for the fact of Afro-Latinidad,
a phrase they borrow from Frantz Fanon's essay,
The Fact of Blackness.
Fanon does not mean fact in the sense of indisputable evidence,
but rather as Blackness as lived.
"L'expérience vécue."
Right?
Which gets wearily translated into fact.
His essay begins with the speaker narrating
his own objectification.
Dirty n-word, or simply, Look.
A Negro.
And proceeds to flesh out a radical consciousness
in and against racist colonial histories and realities.
That consciousness is central to many of the poems Jiménez Román
and Flores include in the Reader.
Victor Hernández Cruz's African Things, 1971.
Tato Laviera's "The Salsa of Bethesda Fountain," 1979.
And these poems-- the fact of Afro-Latinidad
is not just about archiving or recuperating African Things
in a Latino context, but about a performative poetic that
interrupts both non-Black Latino and non-Latino Black, time
and space.
Quote, "and permit me to say these words in Afro-Spanish."
Laviera.
And quote, "How do Latin Boogaloo sound like you?"
Cruz.
There was a productive tension between
Afro-Latinidad's interrupted politics of the lived thing
and the politics of queer utopian potentiality developed
by José Esteban Muñoz.
Including utopia, Muñoz counters,
white queer theorists of radical negativity
and anti-relationality, such as Lee Edelman,
by claiming queerness as a potentiality.
As a quote, "Certain mode of non-being that
is eminent, a thing that is present,
but not actually existing in the present tense."
How do we read queerness as--
You want me to shrink it so it fits?
Now you tell me.
OK.
Well, it's a little off-center.
OK.
I'm in my flow here.
Keep going.
Yeah, cool.
So how do you read these de-centered queerness
as potentiality in and against the fact of Afro-Latinidad?
Like so much of performance study,
Muñoz seeks to de-center the archive,
proposing an ephemeral archive attuned to a broader conception
of evidence and developing a critique of how hegemonic
archives perpetuate the marginality or outright
invisibility of queer subjects, especially pre-Stonewall.
Yet, what of the counter archive is theorized by scholars
of Black visual culture, such as Ian Baucom,
and of counter-archival politics as central to Afro-Latinidad,
that at least as far back as the work of Afro-Puerto Rican
writer and collector, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg,
who in his essay, The Negro Digs Up His Past,
famously proposes the quote, "Dust of Digging,"
as a counter-archival challenge to a racist textonomies
alongside and against Muñoz on utopia.
How do we read for an unbecoming Afro-Latinidad?
And I'm referring here to Antonio Lopez's book
Unbecoming Blackness, which you can ask me about later.
Muñoz's Cruising Utopia tends to locate Blackness,
not in the Afro-Cuban as in Lopez's book or Afro-Latino,
but in the points of contact between his project of queer
futurity and the Black radical tradition as theorized by works
like Fred Moten's In The Break, and folks might know
the chapter on Amiri Baraka's play, The Toilet,
in Muñoz's book.
It's a beautiful chapter.
Muñoz describes his queer futurity as resembling
the Black radical tradition in how it operates in a quote,
"relational and collective modality of endurance
and support."
Muñoz's reading of Baraka's play stresses its queer dimension
and also queers Baraka through an irreverent approach
to the archive attuned to the ephemeral.
So there's chisme-- gossip about Baraka
and in effect, that becomes an opportunity
to queer Baraka and deploy him, right, for a project that
affirms, as he puts it, the way in which,
the quote, "interracial and the queer co-animate each other."
End quote, the fragmented gesture
that signals an endurance slash support.
As beautiful as this reading is, I am struck by the distance
between Muñoz's relational reading of Blackness
and queerness supporting each other and queer Afro-Latino
poetics that might consider queerness and Afro-Latinidad
as strategically complicating and challenging each other.
One way
Afro-Latinidad can challenge the queer utopian
is by confronting queer potentiality
with the materiality of Afro-Latino bodies.
I might have skipped one there, but--
and so we could think about writing pre-Stonewall queer
histories with Afro-Latino contra archival histories
and practices from Schomburg to the present day.
On the other hand, centering queerness
can challenge the fact of Afro-Latinidad
by highlighting the marginalization
and/or silencing of queer voices in Afro-Latino context,
and by stressing the performativity and potentiality
of racialized bodies.
To stage these tensions is to open up political spaces
and the terms are not just theoretical.
They are also institutional.
And think of it.
As rich as Latino studies, I should say, has been as a field
over the past 15 years, I can't think
of a single major figure in that field that
identifies as Afro-Latino.
Present company included, right?
So we could think about the project, Cruising Utopia,
and be struck at the White Angloness
of Muñoz's pre-Stonewall investments.
A lot of like Frank O'Hara, Andy Warhol, Jim Schuyler, right?
And I would throw out just maybe one name.
What would we do with, say, Lorca?
Do we think about that trajectory and think about Poet
in New York, so Lorca as a poet was cruising
utopia in a certain way.
Lorca's influence on gay queer Latino subjects, somewhat
complicatedly, because what?
Lorca spent like, a year in New York and that's it?
And so in Spain in any case, right?
But then also his influence on Baraka, on the project
of Afro-surrealism, right?
Cante Jondo and Duende and so on,
and strains of Afro-surrealism, and also
thinking about that Lorca as an influence on Baraka's play.
Its [INAUDIBLE] centric politics.
Its blurring of beauty and violence and its insistence
on the revolutionary power of objection-- maybe
as a blueprint for The Toilet.
And then, of course, we get the problem the other way, right?
This is from Ana M. Lara's essay in the Afro-Latino
Reader, Uncovering Mirrors: Afro-Latina Lesbian Subjects.
Quote, "I'd always been taught to understand my gender
and sexuality as something specifically heterosexual
and predetermined by the fact of my Latina-ness."
So the air quotes there on that fact.
And quote, "if we are to engage Afro-Latina lesbian subjects,
we must be willing to engage what does not yet exist.
Focusing on the essay, Lara is looking for Afro-Latina lesbian
subjects and finds none, right?
So we could think about the-- finds eight, I should say,
but none that is attuned to the project she is developing.
So the tensions between the Afro-Latino and the queer,
also to the limitations of both Schomburg's digging
and Muñoz's cruising, right, as archival projects.
And so I propose maybe we think about the intersections
of the two.
Maybe crigging or druising, right?
So having heard enough-- that's really bad.
Having shared enough theory, let me just share with you three
moments of what I'm calling queer Afro-Latino poetics,
a very exploratory term that seeks to put pressure on its
constituent parts and thus on assumptions that
the wholeness--
Muñoz-- or the given-ness--
Jiménez Román and Flores--
about queerness and Afro-Latinidad,
and number one, revelation.
One of the most surprising things about Melissa
Castillo-Garsow's groundbreaking Manteca,
an anthology about Afro-Latin@ poets,
published this year by Arte Público,
is a relative paucity of queer content.
I say surprising because Manteca is a corrective
in so many other ways.
Its gender parity, its inclusion of younger
and performance-oriented poets as well as
poets writing in Spanish, making room for poets
from backgrounds historically underrepresented
in Latino poetry.
Dominicans, Afro-Mexicans, Panamanians-- Lorenzo Thomas
in there, which is really cool.
The minimal queer content is also surprising given that one
might argue that Castillo-Garsow queers the Afro-Latin@
by boldly refusing to define the term,
and by insisting on the @ sign from the Afro-Latin@,
and pronouncing it like that Portuguese "ou", right?
to signal non-binary and diasporic roots and routes.
I would echo Castillo-Garsow's insistence
on that @ sign while also insisting
on its queer performativity.
Folks may know Juana María Rodríguez's classic book,
Queer Latinidad, which is a book that introduced that @ sign,
right?
That then gets picked up, so there
is a kind of epistemology, right, from both queer
and Afro-Latino studies of that non-binary @.
For Castillo-Garsow, that @ also embodies the subject-centered
alternative to older and contentious history of Black
poetry in Latin America, variously anthologized
as poesía negra, negrita, negroide, mulata,
afroantillana, so on--
many of whose exponents were or passed as white.
And yet again, this idea-- is it the poetry
of the lived experience of Blackness as in Fanon,
or this collecting, right?
Of Afro-identified things, from the perspective of the outside.
That said, if there is a resounding queer voice
in the Manteca anthology of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe founder,
Miguel Algarín, of his poems included in the anthology
I'm most interested in, HIV, 1990s poem,
which seems like an outlier alongside '70s poems like Salsa
Ballet and Angelitos Negros and Mongo Affair,
which more forcefully articulate an Afro-Latino perspective
attuned to this revivalist Nuyorican poetics.
It's a kind of masculinist ever, so HIV, in the poem,
Algarín calls it a mature masculinity that comes with,
quote, "the responsibility to do the work of building verbs,
adjectives, and nouns for mortality and its subsequent
eternal breaking of concrete."
Let's take a look at this.
Here Algarín seems to be moving apparently away from Nuyorican
aesthetics he defined in terms of, quote,
"the debris of the ghettos," and, quote,
"the stresses of living in tar and cement.
he who are not rooted in love and confrontation with death
can break through the concrete of empire.
And think of this pun here, revel at ion,
playing with Revelation, right?
So one of the things that's happening here is, of course,
a poetics of discovery between teller and listener,
which is essential to how Algarín thinks about what
happened at the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe in the 70s,
that sharing as a kind of psychic healing that's also
a political healing for colonized subjects.
Revelation can be negative, too, though,
as in revealing HIV status, and Algarín plays on the possible
or negative charge of revelation with the clever pun revel
at ion.
Think of ions as particles that can be both positively
or negatively charged.
At the same time, the pun extends Algarín's projective
and post-post-[? Burroughsian ?] neo-futurist poetics
of chemical and organismal decay and becoming,
while connecting it with telling tales of survival
in the diaspora.
The next line's another pun.
Rebel at I on a course to regret erections.
As the poem unfolds into a meditation on the quote,
"unsafe body."
The poem outs Algarín as HIV-positive but also opens up
the politics of HIV, perhaps hinting at the pleasures
of risky sex.
Quote, "unsafe revved elations," goes the third pun.
To blur the boundaries between the positive and negative
senses of revelation.
Beyond revealing one's status, though,
what happens if we open the poem's politics of revelation
to Nuyorican poetics and understands revealing secrets
and truths through art as part of a survival
strategy for colonized and racialized bodies,
always already targeted for destruction.
And one of the implications of reading this poem in such a way
might be rethinking the politics of the archive.
So here is a clip of Algarín reading the next section of HIV
on the 1995 Love and Sex episode of the PBS series,
The United States of Poetry.
And we can have a laugh at that.
If I were to show you how to continue moving on to that,
I would kiss you.
I wouldn't have mixed the fluids in my body with you.
The salvation cannot bear the live weight of your sharing
liquids with me.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Hang up the picture.
OK.
Sometimes I refuse orders to drive my hands
to open your thick thighs--
sometimes posing [INTERPOSING VOICES]
That's OK.
I mean I-- basically the bad thing here
is first the cheesy music, which maybe you couldn't hear,
but then the random white-looking woman's body
in the background, right?
So the liberal ends of the series had to drown out
the quavering power and the irony of Algarín's reading
with, of course, cheesy, dramatic music while framing
his reading against the backdrop of a sleeping white-looking
woman's body, thus erasing the queer and Afro-Latino desire
that structures Algarín's poems at the time.
And consider a poem such as, quote--
this is the best title ever, "Nuyorican Angel Papo--
The Bisexual Super Macho," also included in Manteca.
To counter the liberal whitewash of this clip,
I would need a counter archive of queer Afro-Latino
performance, yet in its absence, I
would begin by invoking my own ephemeral archive.
My memories of hearing Algarín read and perform this poem over
the years in all its dirty beauty, his stories,
his gossip, everything he shared in my presence,
the haunting and the healing, the transformative,
and the inappropriate, the funny and the freaky, the disarming,
and the disgusting.
It's punk rock.
Number two-- not quite.
In his book, Queer Ricans, Lawrence La Fountain-Strokes
emphasizes how San Francisco writer and performer Erika
Lopez's comic book, Lap Dancing For Mommy-- second best
title ever, 1997, quote, "elaborates
on what could be identified" as quote, "not quite identities."
Not quite Puerto Rican, not quite African-American,
not quite white American, not quite lesbian,
not quite a Spanish speaker--
that make her identity difficult for herself
and for others to grasp."
End quote.
Following La Fountain-Strokes, I would extend the list
to include the genre of her works
as they tend toward the indeterminate-- not quite
novel, not quite comic, not quite memoir, not quite
performance text.
La Fountain-Strokes thoughtfully connects Lopez to other queer
Rican women artists--
Rose Troche, Frances Negron-Muntaner--
using visual media in ways aligned with feminist critiques
of regimes of visual representation,
but also in exploratory and experimental ways.
And here's one of my favorite passages from Lopez's novel,
Flaming Iguanas, 1997.
Quote,
"Future child, that's me.
Hello!
It's nice to meet you.
I don't feel white, gay, bisexual, black,
or like a broken hearted Puerto Rican in West Side Story,
but sometimes I feel like all of them.
Sometimes I feel so white I want to speak in twang,
belong to the KKK, experience the brotherhood,
and simplicity of opinions.
Sometimes I want to feel so heterosexual--
hit the headboard to the point of concussion
and have my crotch smell like bad sperm the morning after.
I want the kid, the folding stroller-- please
let me stand forever in a line with my expensive offspring
at Disney World.
Sometimes I want to be so Black--
my hair and skinny long braids--
that Black guys nod and say, hey, sister!
when they pass me by in the street.
I want the story, the rhythms, the myths,
that come with the color.
Sometimes I want to live with my hand inside of a woman
so I can hear her heartbeat, wake up with her smell all
over me in the morning, and still feel as clean
as I did the morning before.
I want to talk about her childhood
until I go insane from pretending I didn't
stop listening four hours ago.
Other times, I wish I was born speaking Spanish
so I could sound like I look without curly hair apologies.
But I try all that, and I quit, and I try again.
Really, I want to get this individualistic thing down."
End quote.
I am struck by how this passage unpacks the problematic logic
of identity and thingness.
Sometimes identity is all about things we can commodify--
braids, Disney World-- but sometimes it is about
as an unquantifiable as the twang and simplicity
of whiteness, whose appeal is all about what cannot be
measured except, perhaps, negatively.
Think of the one drop rule.
Significantly, the subtitle of Flaming Iguanas
is, quote, "an all-illustrated, all-girl road novel
thing," which I read as a self-ironizing acknowledgment
of the book's genre and formal indeterminacy.
Its not quiteness.
It is what the poet Kazim Ali calls "genre queer,"
but also in the context of the global commodification
of identities in the 1990s.
Muñoz finds utopia in Frank O'Hara's Having a Coke With
You, precisely in an affect that can transmute the global
hegemony of Coke into an alternative potentiality.
Yet the quote, "future child" here
owes her queer futurity to television commercials
that constitute her fantasmically
as a racialized subject.
Quote, "They say I'm a child of an AT & T commercial,
cafe au lait telephone commercial future where
your nose is not flat enough to offend
and not pointy enough to cut the glass ceiling."
The book repeatedly invokes whiteness--
whether in the desire to wear, quote, "white cotton dresses,
the smell of a lover's white sheets,
the restrained whiteness of Canadian men."
Queer Afro-Latinidades here seems partly
about an intimate distance from whiteness
performed at times somewhere between cathexis and parody.
Witness the book's cover--
So Carmen Miranda-ish brown woman in her frilly,
colorful clothes hop in a white motorcycle, with the titular
iguana itself, which changes color according to its mood
and environment, and whose flaming evokes
both queer performativity and quote,
"South American flamboyance."
And then there's the page itself as you might notice.
The brown-backed paper that reinforces the book's Bay Area
DIY punk feminist poetics.
When juxtaposed against the dark font
and elegantly crude black and white drawings
works as a riff on the simultaneous performativity
and materiality of brownness.
And what the heck is brownness?
And finally there are those slashes that sometimes function
as commas or sentence or paragraph breaks,
but other times seem more ornamental,
inflecting a reading, yet also inciting
us to read for poetic breath as it did in so much 60s poetry.
The slashes signal the violence and cuts
of a subject formation in queer Afro-Latino context,
even as they also suggest the contemporary fragmenting
of identities.
Think Latinx.
Latino, Latina, Latinette, and so on.
Beyond any desire for a Muñozian utopian whole.
The quote I just discussed appears
as we see under the word bullshit framed
by two figures with outstretched hands,
as if to suggest that reaching for the wholeness
of a queer Afro-Latina identity is BS,
but also that BS in the way of racist, classist,
and nationalist advertisements, for instance, must
be constitutive of a queer Afro-Latina subject.
There is no other way.
No outside those trappings.
And I cannot help but contrast this,
from Muñoz's reading of the hands that hold the betrayed
lover in the toilet.
Think about these hands here.
The stuttering slash of the declaration
that immediately precedes the quote, I--
I am a girl who feels too American for love
as a performance of a sentimented identity.
I I. And also an affirmation of the ways
American girlhood is still predicated
on the subalterity of Blackness, queerness, and Latinidad.
That's also a critique, but an opportunity
as Queer Afro-Latinidad might be constituted negatively
out of the slashes and shards of all that is not quite American.
And lastly, Salsa Boy.
A different proximity haunts Charles Rice-González's play,
I just love Andy Gibb-- third best title ever--
included in E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón Rivera-Servera's 2016
edited volume, Blacktino Queer Performance.
In the play, Carlos, an Afro-Puerto Rican man
in his late 30s and Roy, an Afro-Puerto Rican teenage boy,
bond over their complicated relationships with lighter
skinned men and over 70s pop star and pinup idol Andy Gibb.
Roy adores Andy Gibb while Carlos claims not to,
although as the play progresses, we
learn Carlos was, perhaps, an Andy Gibb lover once
upon a time, and that Roy may, in fact, inhabit
an area somewhere between Carlos's dreams
and his desires and the two may be one in the same.
As Roy gets Carlos to own up to his repressed Andy Gibb love,
we learn of Carlos' desire for his light-skinned college
friend, Pedro, and of Roy's fixation
with an also light-skinned Salsa Boy.
As Roy describes Salsa Boy, Carlos exclaims, "wait!
I remember that boy," and adds, "I don't know him,
but I remember a young, skinny guy with blondish tight curly
hair listening to salsa music on a portable eight-track player.
I thought he was a white boy, but there
weren't many white people living in the projects, much less ones
who listen to salsa.
I can see him sitting in front of the building.
And then Carlos and Roy, both recalling
the image of the salsa boy wearing
pro-Keds and a light blue t-shirt and red bell bottom
pants.
And Carlos said, "he was cute.
He lived in the first building on the top of the hill."
Roy-- "that's where I live."
For Carlos and Roy, identification
is mediated through whiteness underscores the fact
of their Afro-Latinidad.
Salsa Boy is a diasporic Puerto Rican
living in the projects of the South Bronx--
historically and still racialized demographic that
cannot be more removed from hegemonic whiteness.
But the play's Queer Afro-Latino politics
reads Roy's desire for Salsa Boy in and against Carlos'
desire for Pedro and their shared desire for Andy Gibb.
Whiteness here is about a privilege circulation
that is tied to being desired to a surplus, to the exotic
in the sense of outside, -exo.
Just as Andy Gibb was exotic in the late 70s,
and it's mentioned the play he was Australian.
He was a special kind of whiteness
that he shared with William Newton-John, his brothers
in the Bee Gees, right?
Similarly, Salsa Boy's desirability
is about his light skin as a peripheral in the Nuyorican
subject.
Roy, at one point, tells Carlos, quote, "you're dark-skinned
and Pedro's a blanquito," in turn denotes class
privilege in Puerto Rico, but that here
seems tied to an interrogation about Latinidad's proximity
to whiteness, even in the context of group racialization
and class oppression, and also of the desiring subject's
proximity to that proximity.
An Afro-Latino reading of the play
might stress how Roy and Carlos end up
identifying with each other and rejecting
the false consciousness of fetishizing whiteness.
Quote, "let's not buy into the world's negative view of us
negritos."
End quote.
Especially in as much as they share the Afro-Latino spaces
of the South Bronx.
Quote, "we walk the same streets, ride the same subways,
we still live in the same neighborhood."
Conversely, a queer utopian meeting
might claim effective force in the play's
performative recovery of pop culture
and the essence of its subversion
of the logic of racial fetish.
It ends, of course, with Gibbs--
I just want to be your everything--
an anthem of utopian wholeness, and with a spotlight
on an image of Erik Estrada--
a Nuyorican off the CHiPs, right?
A Nuyorican actor who crossed over
from the streets of East Harlem and embodies
an ambivalent relationship to whiteness.
From a queer Latino perspective, or Afro-body queer--
ask me about that later.
We might reflect on how the play documents the embodied fact
of living as Jiménez Román and Flores beautifully put it
in their analysis of Schomburg, quote,
"a precarious existence on the color line."
At the same time, we can follow Muñoz in reclaiming the utopian
potentiality of desire.