10 pages paper. Queer, Lesbian.

Emma Perez, "Queering the Borderlands"

from her novel, Forgetting the Alamo, or Blood Memory:

"They came in groups. Tlascaletecas and Otomi with the Spanish and the Spanish with the Mexicans and the Mexicans with the Apache, mixing into a brown race journeying through land expansive with blood-red horizons, until they stopped and looked around and settled into what was already in their blood. Movement. Settlement and movement. Back and forth they trekked, rivers and streams blending and inter-breeding with tribes and making families and villages from beginning to end of deserts and plains and groves. Tribes of families and villages of mud-huts sank into the landscape where buried vessels and bones became the soil and the clay and the water."

1. the borderlands: the both imaginary and embodied geography of the southwest US and northern Mexico. Cf. Gloria Anzaldua. The "marginal" aspect for each side of the border is re-imagined, so that "borderlands" refers to both the geographies and the cultures which the border crosses. The experience of those marginalized, in this conception, becomes central, especially in terms of gender. Then again, "queer borderlands": cf. Cherrie Moraga; Anzaldua's borderlands re-thought specifically in terms of Chican@ gender and sexuality in addition to class, ethnicities, nationalities. 2. Perez is emphasizing a gaze that is geographic, spatial, apparently fixed in space; and yet also mobile, impermanent, changing. 3. drawing on Foucault: "the borderlands have been imprinted by bodies that traverse the region, just as bodies have been transformed by the laws and customs in the regions we call borderlands"; for Foucault, she writes, bodies are "engraved and transformed through laws, customs, and moralities"; but he does not directly address coloniality, in which Native Americans became the property of the colonizing Spanish, for example. 4. Decolonial thought. She does not refer to Walter Mignolo, whose work on "de- colonial studies" has been essential in differentiating the concerns of this field from those of "post-colonial studies." The issue is that we are not simply "after" colonization; we are still moving out of it. 5. She concentrates on an idea of "a decolonial imaginary." She thinks that this category "can help us rethink history in a way that makes agency for those on the margins transformative" (123). 6. For Perez, "the norm" is not simply a social construct that can be oppressive; it is a colonial construct, a "colonial imaginary," part of the way that empires establish themselves as "national" realities through symbolic systems. Even if we rebel against these "norms," the ways in which we re-imagine history in more radical ways means that they may depend on, and help re-invent, the colonial imaginaries which more radical histories are intended to upset. 7. She feels the need for a different kind of gaze, and space: "a rupturing space, the alternative to that which is written in history" (123).

8. "We must uncover the voices from the past that honor multiple experiences, instead of falling prey to that which is easy - allowing the white colonial heteronormative gaze to reconstruct and interpret our past" (123). 9. Her own history has been erased in this way. So in her novel Forgetting the Alamo, or Blood Memory, as her "queer vaquera baby butch gazes upon the land that her family settled upon, she is re-fashioning that space, re-establishing her relationship to that land as a tejana and as a queer who will no longer have rights to land and history. And so, we will make her up or locate documents to uncover a history of sexuality on the borderlands that is hidden from the untrained eye (124). 10. I think she mis-reads Foucault: I don't think that Foucault argued that laws regarding sexuality were more "liberatory" before the nineteenth century. They were perhaps not as extensive, certainly not as "networked" in terms of medical practices and law (as depicted in the film Proteus). 11. Sexual politics enfolded with racial politics (126), as we have seen elsewhere; but differently in different places. One important study of recent years (Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacies) shows the ways in which policing of Southeast Asian men's sexualities in California worked, as immigration from India, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia brought them into California's agricultural industries. 12. How to research "invisible" groups? In terms of logics of "deviance"? (127) 13. Oral interviews and ethnography? (127) 14. Reception studies of queer audience responses to popular cultural figures like Selena? 15. Histories of the Chicano movement as exclusive in terms of sex and gender rather than as minoritarian? 16. Or through art, literature, cultural re-imaginings? Re-imagining the 16th century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz as having queer or even lesbian desires, for instance, can help us construct narratives in which heteronormative sexuality can be confronted (128). 17. "A decolonial queer gaze would permit scholars to interrogate medical texts, newspapers, court records, wills, novels and corridos with that fresh critical eye" that would not reproduce the same colonial history yet again. 18. UTEP's Ph.D. program in "Borderlands History": institutional efforts 19. What about the gaps or silences? "I am arguing for a decolonial queer gaze that allows for different possibilities and interpretations of what exists in the gaps and silences but is often not seen or heard" (129), while honoring difference.

How might we apply some of these insights around spatiality and mobility, and inventing or reinventing a "rupturing space" to Mosquita y Mari?