Imagining LatinX Intimacies. Edward A. Chamberlain
be imagined, produced, and set in place.
The Castro District gayborhood in the city of San Francisco, California.
In the eyes of critics today, the physical absence of LGBTQ and Latinx populations is a telling marker of the ways that bias, privilege, and power frequently collude, making spatial creation difficult. In terms of numbers, the US Census Bureau provides some insight into Latinx spaces during the late 1990s. The bureau published a report explaining how approximately 5.8% of all US businesses in 1997 were owned by Hispanics.[24] Most likely, the bureau’s study is likely underreporting the exact number because many smaller businesses go unnoticed, yet it also speaks to the small number of brown peoples that felt comfortable going on the record in a predominantly white nation that has scrutinized Latinx peoples and their presence within US communities. In contrast, for many Latinx communities, local Latinx businesses bring people together and function as sites for sharing information; however, the census officials anonymize the data so assessing these enterprises remains difficult. Further, there is no official census data for LGBTQ businesses during the 1990s, though the number is conjectured to be low, and this dearth can be attributed to the persistent homophobia of the 1990s. Latinx-owned businesses grew considerably in the years following the 1990s, showing a desire to create more Latinx-friendly spaces that would provide support to communities imperiled by prejudices.
Recognizing the desire for more Latinx-friendly spaces is an important step toward the “browning” of public spaces, including LGBTQ bars and similar sites, which would enable queer Latinx peoples to have a greater number of life-sustaining spaces. Historically, US capitalists have constructed environments that are noninclusive toward both of the aforesaid communities, and as a result, Latinx queer peoples have taken to frequenting landscapes beyond urban terrains and suburban sprawls. As shown by the researchers Catriona Sandilands, Laura Pulido, and Juan Carlos Galeano, a multitude of queer and Latinx peoples celebrate and defend their connections to the natural world through a myriad of methods that are based in both the logics of reality and more imaginative terms.[25] Nevertheless, in her study of environmentally related movements, the geographer Pulido articulates that “from the perspective of marginalized communities, environmental problems reflect and may intensify, larger existing inequalities and uneven power relations.”[26] As a response to such uneven conditions, Latinx queer peoples such as Anzaldúa have developed an assortment of environmentally conscious commentaries and spaces that have served as a courageous reclaiming of land as well as a means to contest inequalities.[27]
By using inventive spatial strategies, queer Latinx peoples have created a means of making real-life spaces as well as imaginary ones that allow for the celebration and development of queer Latinx desires and passions. For those seeking a space to freely express themselves, these sites may be seen as offering a type of “oasis where shared identities and experiences thrive,” though they are by no means utopian in nature or easily generalizable.[28] The multiform aspect of LGBTQ spaces can be seen in how a great many sites serve as sanctuaries for LGBTQ identities, social practices, and thought. Among the many instances of LGBTQ spaces, the more commonly known sites include bars, bathhouses, bookstores, cruises, gayborhoods, parades, resorts, websites, and sociopolitical organizations such as the now nonoperational National Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization (LLEGÓ), which closed its doors in 2004. Then in some more progressive neighborhoods such as the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, many people endeavor to create a more queer-friendly dynamic through programs that foster a “safe zone” through sticker campaigns and decorative projects like rainbow crosswalks.[29] Such queer spatial experiences also have been shape-shifting and on the move due to the way people hold LGBTQ gatherings in a range of spaces throughout the year such as in the case of supper clubs that move from one person’s house to another, and academic conferences that move from one city to another each year. Comparably, in the case of many youth spaces, as we see in the case of the young adult novel The Mariposa Club from the prolific Mexican American writer Rigoberto González, some Latinx LGBTQ youths gather with friends across whatever spaces are available and offer a modicum of privacy including the local schoolyard and neighboring homes. Such privacies are sought as many sites continue to be unwelcoming to young Latinx peoples. Because many US spaces continue to uphold white-centric and homophobic views as the norm, there continues to be a need for compassionate and egalitarian spaces that foster inclusivity.
A rainbow crosswalk in the Capitol Hill gayborhood of Seattle, Washington.
Imagining Latinx Intimacies aims to expand our concepts of queer social spaces by considering lesser-studied queer Latinx sites such as after-school programs, poetic scenes, and small towns that support queer and Latinx self-development. Already in the prior decade, a slew of studies of space have theorized the sociopolitical impact of public spaces like cityscapes and barrios. In turn, this dynamic creates a rather metronormative theory of belonging, community, and identity. In recent years however, there has been a move to focus on understudied locales like interstices (the blending of the public and private), rural areas, suburban places, evolving regions as well as locales that fall outside of binaristic thinking altogether such as transgender spatial experiences.[30] This book falls within the latter set and explores how spatial experiences such as intimate spaces are laced with problematic assumptions about migrants, Latinx peoples, and people of color. The problematic thinking of nationalism and xenophobia came to a head during the Cold War and thereafter played a role in the way that Latinx queers were perceived in the late twentieth century and beyond. Kristin L. Matthews tells that the era of the Cold War from 1945 to 1991 was a turbulent time of “struggle in postwar America” where people tried to “delineate the good American.”[31] For a bevy of critics in the 1980s and 1990s, the “good American” was by no means seen as LGBTQ, let alone Latinx. Ensconced in the fearful rhetoric of AIDSphobia and offensive terms like “illegal alien,” queer Latinx peoples were pushed to the peripheries of the public dialogue and spaces even before the discussion began.[32] Resulting from this situation, many queer communities and Latinx peoples resisted such ideals because they demand a rigid conformity and inhibit creativity. Unsurprisingly, the mix of characters and creators examined in this study are unconcerned with assimilating to dominant standards, being proper, or developing what may be perceived as a “normal” connection to the nation-state.
The creative work considered here fosters distinctive messages, though Imagining Latinx Intimacies offers the viewpoint that a set of queer Latinx creators comparably capture and raise up intimate social relations of Latinx queers by emphasizing people’s connections to spaces. This emphasis comes through in the imagery and stories of Latinx queer figures. Their imagery and stories are powerful indicators of the degree to which queer Latinx peoples face (un)belonging, exclusion, and a sense of otherness across the United States. In response, the imagery and stories explored in this book exemplify the critical approach that bell hooks calls “talking back,” where people of color respond to the dominant culture’s mechanisms of power and normativity in poetic and inspiring discourse.[33] This book contends that artists’ sophisticated portrayals of intimate life offer us strategies for resisting exclusionary and oppressive structures. These strategies are born out of the hybridity and queer experiences of people who migrate across or connect multiple cultures. For this reason, Imagining Latinx Intimacies builds on the concept of hybrid space, a critical concept that has been theorized by Adriana de Souza e Silva and Sarah Whatmore. Although Whatmore and de Souza e Silva discuss this notion in contexts other than Latinx studies, this lens is helpful for explaining how social spaces such as intimate sites often involve a mix of cultures, experiences, and languages. Through this optic, I explain how artists portray hybrid spatiality in chatrooms, landscapes, and youth spaces—the very scenes that should offer a means to nurture emotional and psychological well-being, yet is jeopardized by homophobic, racist, and xenophobic acts. This kind of study grants what Anzaldúa calls “a path of conocimiento”—a means to develop knowledge and solve problems such as biases and exclusionary mechanisms that have infiltrated nearly all aspects of our daily lives.[34] Although this path-making takes