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Performing Queer Latinidad

Dance, Sexuality, Politics

The University of Michigan Press

LATINA/O QUEER PERFORMANCE

A Critical Travelogue

WE ARE RAIN OR SHINE ... COME ON BY ... WE'RE HERE!

— Orgullo en Acción

Queer Latinidad in Public

It is an overcast summer morning on June 13, 2009, as I prepare to attend Orgullo en Acción's Fourth Annual Latina/o LGBTQQ Pride Picnic at Chicago's Humboldt Park. The clouds look menacing and last night's heavy downpour makes me hesitant about attending the outdoor event. I am about to give up and stay in for the day. A message pops up on my Facebook screen: "We are rain or shine ... come on by ... we're here!" I am hailed by this statement of resilience by a group eager to celebrate their queer latinidad despite the possibility of inclement weather or broader societal obstacles that render the simple act of gathering in a public place a heroic feat. The very phrasing of the pronouncement "we are rain or shine," as opposed to "we are here rain or shine," showcases the social and cultural dynamics central to this book. Queer Latinas/ os at the picnic "are" or "become" a collective by "being here" in public and participating in acts of performance that range from the social to the theatrical. The simple, and I would speculate purposeful, slippage of the Internet communiqué advances a theory of performance's world-making powers by collapsing the idea of "being" Latina/o and queer with the practice of "being there" at the site of Latina/o queer public enactments. And it is precisely my interest and investment in performances of queer latinidad that beckons me to this event in a city I am still getting to know and with a group of strangers who find pleasure in performing their Latina/o queer selves as public interventions. I quickly ready for an afternoon of fellowship in Latina/o queer pride.

I arrive at Humboldt Park and walk west on Division Street to encounter a section of the picnic area demarcated by two giant rainbow flags. The flags echo the space-making practices performed by Puerto Ricans throughout the neighborhood. A historically working-class enclave in Chicago's near west side, Humboldt Park has been the symbolic, cultural, economic, and political center of Puerto Rican Chicago for over five decades. Since the early 1990s the community has organized against the westward push of gentrification as formerly low-income neighborhoods transform into hipster heavens for young up-and-coming mostly white middle-class families. The Puerto Rican flag is prominently displayed everywhere: on windows, murals, business awnings, T-shirts, baseball caps, and the monumental steel arches that cross the street as gateways into the Division Street business district, popularly referred to as Paseo Boricua or La División. This showcase of the Puerto Rican national icon marks territory for a community that struggles to maintain its sense of place in a fast-changing Chicago human landscape.

The Latina/o Pride Picnic extends the visual gestures of the neighborhood with proud rainbows that plant the flag of queerness upon a Puerto Rican urban geography. The stage itself displays banners advertising Latina/o queer organizations that sponsored the picnic: Orgullo en Acción, the Association for Latino Men in Action (ALMA), and Amigas Latinas. The use of rainbow flags and banners cites visual strategies typical of post-Stonewall gay and lesbian liberation movements. Flags from all Latin American countries, including Brazil and Puerto Rico, are planted on the ground in a sequence that travels from the edges of the platform stage onto the picnic area. This temporary public transformation of the Puerto Rican park into a pan-Latina/o space acknowledges the shifting demographics of neighborhoods like Humboldt Park itself, where Latinas/os of Mexican, Salvadoran, and Dominican descent represent an increasingly significant portion of the population.

This diverse group of queer Latinas/os and their allies use flags and performance to produce an alternative public event in Humboldt Park. The picnic site is just a few yards from a cruising site where Puerto Rican and other men in the neighborhood search for sexual encounters. The picnic's location may serve as recognition, even legitimization, of the queer routes created by the traffic of cruising men in the park. Nonetheless, the picnic as an event is markedly different from the more discreet act of having sex behind the bushes. Instead of the tacit nature of the men cruising, who do not necessarily affirm a queer identity in public or at home, the performances that take place at the picnic rely on explicit and at times spectacular displays of Latina/o queer sociality and aesthetics. The difference between these two ways of inhabiting the same site does not lessen the equally performative and public ritual of gay cruising. I recognize both of these activities — the dramaturgically amplified strategy of occupying the park with the explicit intent of staging an intervention, and the quotidian rituals of gay cruising — as performance. I will outline the broad spectrum of activity that enacts queer latinidad below.

At the picnic, drag queens and kings, poets, dancers, singers, and community organizers take to the stage to assertively perform their carefully crafted numbers. The choices in performance genre vary from Mexican pop ballads to club music and from formal gowns and crowns to hip-hop attire. The audience is equally diverse, and during the brief period I spend at the event I meet gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender folk from all over the Latina/o diaspora. Queer latinidad is palpable, even if temporarily, as an affective tie among friends, family members, and even strangers who chose to travel to this site for the single motive of experiencing, celebrating, and feeling a community in pleasure.

The Latina/o Pride Picnic pursues the collective effort of performance practice to instantiate pan-Latina/o queer social networks. It provides atemporary shared space in hopes that the encounters experienced over the course of a few hours might yield longer relationships with potentially political implications. Latina/o and queer agendas circulate in these events shaped by the increasing threat of development and gentrification and the hypermasculine heteronormativity of Puerto Rican resistance to it. For the six hours this event lasts, this section of Humboldt Park is transformed into a pleasure-filled intersection of Latina/o queer subjects who "become" a collective by the sheer act of "being" and performing "here" together "rain or shine."

Home, hope, utopia, and friction emerge as the contours of a collective affectivity born of an insistence on "being" or rather "becoming" a queer and Latina/o community in the practice of performance. The efficacy of this event relies on the emotional optimism that instituting community often requires. Affirmations such as "we are" and "we're here" insist on the hopeful utopianism that performance might model ways of being in place with others despite the frictions intimated by "rain or shine," a statement that opens to the possibilities and contingencies of a social encounter where not all variables can be determined a priori. The statement, as much as the event itself, are invitations "to be" or "to be there" by "coming by." We are invited to show up to the park as a practice of becoming a "we" in the "here" of the event. That is, performance transforms the park into a home to queer latinidad through the embodied spatiality of the event. Occupying public space together in the practice of performance constitutes an effort that requires both an investment in the possible, what might become of the exchange promised by the event, and a realization that pursuing that possibility entails as many pleasures as it invokes risks.

In Performing Queer Latinidad I chart Latina/o cultural affinities or latinidad in queer spaces. I do so by attending to the ways gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and other nonnormative sex practitioners of Latin American descent with greatly differing cultures, histories of migration or annexation to the United States, and contemporary living conditions encounter each other and build social, cultural, and political bonds. Through examining a variety of performance case studies ranging from concert dance and street protest performances to the choreographic strategies deployed by dancers at nightclubs, this book documents the emergence of a Latina/o queer public in the United States.

In this book I argue that performance played a critical role in the development of Latina/o queer public culture in the United States at the dusk of the twentieth and the dawn of the twenty-first centuries. The fifteen-year period of cultural activity covered in this book (1996–2011) saw the simultaneous dramatic increases in the Latina/o population in the United States and their presence in the national public sphere and challenges to and surveillance of the public spaces where latinidad could circulate. I contend that at a time when latinidad ascended to the national public sphere in mainstream commercial and political venues and when Latina/o public space was increasingly threatened by the redevelopment of urban centers and a revived anti-immigrant campaign, queer Latinas/os recurred to performance to claim spaces and ways of being that allowed their queerness and latinidad to coexist. Performing Queer Latinidad demonstrates how the social events of performance and its attendant aesthetic communication strategies served as critical sites and tactics for creating and sustaining queer latinidad.

The goals of this book are as much historical as they are theoretical. I am as invested in documenting the remarkable cultural activity of queer Latinas/os who coalesced in the publicity of performance during the 1990s and early 2000s as I am in arguing for the critical praxis this cultural activity constitutes as conceptualizations of and interventions in the social and political realms of the United States. For these reasons, I attend to the political economies that these particular performances emerge from and engage, the strategies of communication they model, and the theories of identity, community, and citizenship these practices articulate. The various case studies that comprise Performing Queer Latinidad — in New York, Texas, and Arizona — provide evidence of the national spread of the material conditions and representational politics that queer Latinas/os encountered and intervened in during this period. While full coverage of the Latina/o queer national map would prove impossible, I engage a wide range of work and locations in order to position queer latinidad properly as a national phenomenon. The book is divided into two parts: one focused on arts organizations and the other on social dance clubs. I attend to the dance work of choreographer Arthur Aviles in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx (chapter 2), the art and activism collective at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas (chapter 3), and dance clubs in Rochester, New York City, Austin, San Antonio, and Phoenix (chapters 4 and 5). Each of the case studies focuses on specific critical aspects of queer Latina/o life across the nation: from the difficulty of finding and instituting places to live and be together (chapter 2), and the struggle to defend Latina/o queer public culture from attacks by religious moralists or commodifiers of Latina/o culture (chapter 3), to the politics of cohabitation inside the social realm of Latina/o queer performance (chapters 4 and 5).

At every turn I argue that performance became an important vehicle for queer Latinas/os who negotiated what anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo has termed the "new landscapes of inequality" or the "immense social suffering" occasioned by neoliberal economics and policies in the United States. Each of the cities I visit in this study experienced significant changes in its economic, political, and cultural landscapes between the 1990s and early 2000s. After a period of national urban renewal begun in the mid-1960s when these cities attempted to delay rapid suburbanization and the violence of civil rights turmoil with architectural facelifts halted with the early 1980s recession, cities entered a period of degentrification or the devaluation of gentrified property built in expectation of growth. By the 1990s, following within the national trend, all of them struggled with diminishing sources of revenue, strategic adjustments and development programs geared toward addressing income shortages, and a growing dependency on competitively attracting investments by pitching their assets to investors. At the same time, each of these cities saw the growth and diversification of the Latina/o population. These new conditions encountered very particular local contexts as each locale negotiated histories of economic, political, social, and cultural relations that shaped the ascendancy of latinidad and its potential queering in a myriad of different ways. My reference to the "new" or "recent" nature of these arrangements and inequalities is not meant to suggest a detachment from history. In fact, history governs my understanding of the theoretical and practical innovations Latina/o queer performance introduces throughout this book.

As I write in the year 2011, the temporal specificity of this study focuses my analysis in what we may term the recent past. However, I argue that there are important connections to earlier historical precedents in the social and cultural phenomena that I attend to in this book. I take heed from performance scholar David Román's observations that "contemporary performance is itself already embedded in a historical archive of past performances." For example, my interpretation of the 2010 Latina/o Pride Picnic at Humboldt Park above can only account for the significance of the event as intervention when placed in perspective relative to the history of economic and political struggle of the Puerto Rican and Latina/o communities in Chicago. It also must consider their employed strategies and aesthetics for engagement, the heteronormativity of antigentrification activism in the neighborhood, and the historical marginalization of queers from the broader public articulation of Latina/o community and family. The recurrence to the flags as a space-claiming strategy relies on the significance of ethno-national iconographies as repertoires of resistance to assimilation in the transmigrated context of the U.S. city. The onstage presentations are equally in conversation with Latina/o and queer performance traditions from popular music to cabaret performance.

These past performance histories, however, need not always be explicitly acknowledged or valued by participants, both performers and audiences, in order for their enactments to offer significant pleasures and effects in the very moment they unravel. Many participants in Orgullo en Acción event and the performance sites I visit throughout this book present a keen awareness of history. However, not all participants in the event are motivated in their participation by a knowledge of or emphasis on these historical contexts. In some instances it could be argued that the pleasure of being among peers during the elsewhere in time and space created by the event as performance constitutes a conscious escape from the very contexts that structure my critical analysis and evaluation of the picnic. That is, the communicative force of the performance event, while depending on an assumed familiarity with the historically significant signs and symbols employed, may be also garnered from the social situation it constitutes in the present. Performance's value, I suggest, relies as much on its historical reach as it does on its investment in the present as deeply embodied and social experience.

While I reach back from the recent past to earlier historical contexts and performances, I also contend that the approaches to engaging queer latinidad modeled in this study offer useful entry points to the analysis of Latina/o queer and other cultural practices beyond the particular period and locations of the book's frame. The material, representational, and affective economies articulated below and addressed throughout this book as constituting aspects of queer latinidad are likely to remain critical components of how Latina/o queers and other groups institute community at other times and in other places. However, I do not mean this model to be prescriptive of a predictable futurity for queer latinidad. Instead I offer approximations to the study of this constantly evolving public culture that attends to the emergence of Latinas/os into an increasingly influential economic and political collective while accounting for the disappointing patterns of recent history. In this sense, the public circulation of aspirations and expectations about Latinas/os and the backlashes it prompted from conservative nationalism in the United States during the 1980s, were repeated with refined and reinforced precision in the 1990s, and then again in the early 2000s. Similar patterns have characterized the emergence and circulation of queer subjectivities in the United States.

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Excerpted from Performing Queer Latinidad by Ramón H. Rivera-Servera. Copyright © 2012 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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