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The Plush View: Makeshift Sexualities and Laura Aguilar’s Forbidden Archives

/ Macarena Gómez-Barris

During the 1980s and 1990s, Chicana photographer Laura Aguilar made two extraordinary series of black- and-white portraits that document the richness and heterogeneity of Latina queer life in Los Angeles: the Latina Lesbians series (1985–91), which included hand- written text by the photographed subject below the image, and the Plush Pony series (1992), photographed at a lesbian bar in the Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno. Both featured members of Latina communities portrayed within makeshift sites, either in a studio built within a bar or in an intimate setting of the subject’s own choosing. As a scholar of memory and representa- tion, I am particularly drawn to these two series as they provide archival inroads into the social connectivity and complexity that was Latina, Chicana, immigrant, and queer Los Angeles during the Reagan era of moral conservatism and the AIDS crisis. Both series express the living documention of queer brown networks, with female subjects at the center of Aguilar’s portraiture of pleasure, pride, and friendship. While this view of queer social life may seem distant, especially given the present-day ossification of late commodity capitalism in relation to LGBT identities and the re-entrenchment of liberal identity politics, Aguilar’s focus on the pro- visionality of queer connectivity also feels strangely prescient. By peering into the underlayers of dominant urban history, Aguilar offers an intimate and queer view of affiliations, a way to understand the past as not bound to normative institutions, historical memory, or the steady march of LGBT liberal rights.

Focusing on a range of lesbian, female, and gender- queer subjects, Aguilar’s photographs present a network of connections between friends, lovers, and strangers. Aguilar expresses the urgency of precarious and vibrant relations, radiating a “plush view” of Latina queer sociality. The plush view references the relational matrix of the Plush Pony bar. It also portrays lo prohibido, or forbidden sexualities, by attending to queer possibilities within Latina, Chicana, and immigrant communities where sensuality, caring, and connectivity become the organizing texture of provisional relations. The plush view highlights how we might read and attend to lo cuir in Chicana urban cultural production,1 specifically by noting the difficulty of collecting its material culture. To approximate the provisional networks of the sexu- alities, archives, and imaginaries at play in Axis Mundo, a plush view describes the affective density of Aguilar’s images. By pulling together its fragments and exhib- iting the materiality of brown and queer Los Angeles, both Aguilar’s social documentation and C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz’s curatorial project assemble communities of cultural production that arose during politically charged decades, a crucial view for our times.

Makeshifting within the Colonial Matrix

Laura Aguilar was born in the San Gabriel Valley in 1959 and, although she took courses and studied photography at both East Los Angeles College and the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, she describes herself as a largely self-taught photographer whose work has circu- lated at the edges of the art market and gallery system. The daughter of a Mexican immigrant mother and Irish father, Aguilar found herself negating much of her early Catholic training that upheld patriarchal norms while sanctifying the female body as virginal. Largely through challenging the merits of portraiture, she repositioned dominant representations of gender, the body, sexuality, race, and class. Growing up in Chicanx and immigrant worlds in Los Angeles gave Aguilar a multiply situated viewpoint on Latina identity,2 and her lesbian positionality offered her opportunities for creative intervention into the cultural and political landscape. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Aguilar worked collaboratively with feminist and lesbian

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ALaura Aguilar, Plush Pony #15, 1992. Gelatin silver print, 14 � 11 in. (35.6 � 27.9 cm). Courtesy Laura Aguilar

Cultural studies scholar Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano attends to the symbolic importance of representation by discussing Aguilar’s nude portraiture as a model for queer embodiment within a racialized and gendered normatively sorted world.7 As an antidote to this, Aguilar shifts the gestures and gaze of the camera toward a meaning system with different conditions of possibility. Finnish scholar and artist Asta Kuusinen states, “What we witness in Aguilar’s photographs is a shift of focus from the aesthetics of prescriptive identity politics, which tend to act upon differences of all types, toward the production of radical inter- subjectivity.”8 In other words, Aguilar’s plush view is both about queer looking, a vantage point where brown bodies and non-normative sexual identities can be seen for their engagement in sensuous pleasure as a mode of defining community, as well as queer being, based upon radical intersubjectivity rather than net- works of commodified exchange.

As I will discuss, what makes the Latina Lesbians and Plush Pony series different from hegemonic rep- resentations of women of color in dominant media is their tracking away from the usual binaries of private/

public, subject/viewer, and individual auteur/com- munity. By expressing a socially immersive point of view within a Latina cultural milieu, Aguilar breaks down the inside/outside of the queer communities and Latina subjects she documents, whether within the Plush Pony bar or within the living rooms of the Latina lesbians.

The Archive and Plush Viewing

Many writers have attended to the problem of the archive, informing us of how to subvert its demands.9 Two scholars, in particular, help distinguish the queer brown archive: Catriona Rueda Esquibel queers the Chicana archive by considering a body of specifical- ly lesbian work with its own genealogies,10 and José Esteban Muñoz builds upon the work of philosopher Ernst Bloch to express the possibility of utopic poten- tial, namely that queerness, and brown queerness in particular, is “not yet here.”11 In relation to the work of these authors, Laura Aguilar’s portraits both queer and brown the archive by not merely acting as a repository and image collection of a bygone past but by portraying sensibilities and affective communities through particular forms of queer embodiment.

The image of a Chicana butch enveloping a Chicana queer femme in the Plush Pony series exudes joy. The subjects appear to be a couple. Their faces touch in a three-quarter-length tightly cropped portrait that bears the hallmarks of pachuca style. The queer femme’s hair is done in a signature updo while the butch dons a pompadour, made famous by pachucos and pachucas in the 1940s and in the styles that recir- culated in Chicano communities during the 1970s and 1980s.12 The embrace is strong, powerful, and indicates their mutual respect and love. Such resignification of pachuca/o styles to signify gender and sexual non-con- formity while queering romantic expectation is a signa- ture expression of what Aguilar’s plush view captures. The experience of intersubjective and social immersion, the plush view of non-commodified and intimate circuits of exchange, is examined through localized geogra- phies and the documenting of intimate, even domestic spaces and the non-normativity of a queer duo.

To inhabit such intimate views during the early 1990s, Aguilar made several visits to the Plush Pony, the lesbian bar in the El Sereno neighborhood in Los

organizations in Los Angeles, including VIVA, a coalition of queer Latinx artists involved with rais- ing AIDS awareness, and GLLU (Gays and Lesbians Latinos Unidos), an advocacy group for the LGBT Latinx community. Her work with artists and activist organi- zations continued when Aguilar traveled to Mexico City in the early 1990s as part of a transnational alliance that participated in feminist dialogues and collabora- tive exhibitions. These experiences enriched a sense of being within and working alongside, rather than apart from, the growing networks of LGBT communi- ties, intimacies, and political dialogues.

On a hot July day in 2015, while sitting in front of shelves that stored her work, Aguilar discussed the auto- biographical dimension of her practice, considering her second-generation status and lesbian identification as central to her photographic vision. She also suggested that her auditory dyslexia opened the door to photo- graphy, a visual medium that became her preferred method of communication. In positioning her work, Aguilar understands her marginality, but not as radical otherness. Instead, she demarcates a space for self-rep- resentation that has been essential to her method throughout her career, a plush view that appears repeat- edly in bodies of work produced over four decades.3

For instance, the important and beautiful self- portrait titled In Sandy’s Room (1989) is a black-and-white photograph of the artist unclothed, leaning back in an

armchair before an open window. In it, Aguilar inserts her queer body and subjectivity into the focal point of the frame. Against the historical arc of male and Eurocentric representation that has left queer-identified women of color not only out of the visual plane but also out of art circuits of production, exhibition, and exchange,4 Aguilar forces open a decolonial view. With this image, she interrupts a normalized heterosexual viewing of female bodies and the capitalist exchanges that are predicated upon them by featuring self-authorized pleasure, adding another dimension to a plush view that sees and senses otherwise.

For women of color and queer women of color, artists such as Aguilar activate the capacity to disidentify— to invoke scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s terminology5— from monetized systems of representation that are central to artistic autonomy and the ability to make visible another way of seeing brown queer lives. Will Work for #4 (1993) is a self-portrait of the artist holding a cardboard announcement that reads “Artist Will Work for Axcess [sic]” while standing in front of a wall with bronze uppercase letters that spell out GALLERY. By foregrounding the artist’s perspective, this artwork confronts the colonial and modern systems of repre- sentation and speaks directly to a system of institu- tionalized racism, homophobia, and misogyny that regularly excludes queer women of color artists from dominant networks of commodified exchange.6

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Laura Aguilar, Will Work for #4, 1993. Gelatin silver print, 16 � 10 in. (25.4 � 40.64 cm). Courtesy of Laura Aguilar

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Laura Aguilar, In Sandy’s Room, 1989. Gelatin silver print, 16 � 20 in. (40.6 � 50.8 cm) or 42 � 52 in. (106.7 � 132.1 cm). Courtesy of Laura Aguilar

night. The resulting images display a range of butch/ femme couples, gay men, gender-queer bodies, and combinations thereof in trio groupings that enable the viewer to imagine the social texture and community that formed immigrant and queer Latinidad in Los Angeles at the time.

Aguilar’s photographs from the Plush Pony present a vibrant and heterogeneous set of encounters and subjects that cannot be fixed into particular categories, but instead represent a range of sexualities and Latina networks of affinities. These relations and affinities are captured in an infinite collection of details, such as the heavy eye makeup, hairpins, and tattoos of a Chicana femme, the white rolled-up T-shirts and black muscle shirts and faded jeans of a gender-queer Chicano butch, and the flexing friendship/love arrangements of three or four subjects crowding together for their collective portrait. In these multiple fashionings and compositions, there is no prescriptive signification of love, romance, affinity, or friendship. The photographs instead collectively make visible a working-class and queer relationality with a makeshift sensibility.

Given that lesbian bars are often provisional and temporary spaces at the mercy of global urban trends toward gentrification and surveillance, the makeshift aspect of the series makes it all the more remarkable. Despite the hostile anti-immigrant and homophobic political conditions of the early 1990s, and the Plush Pony’s eventual disappearance, Aguilar’s photography makes visible important moments of pleasure, commu- nity, and friendship. Finally, given the hyper-surveillance of immigrant queer spaces, these photographs signify an extraordinary project of documenting queer pleasure and sociality within this frame of constant examination. The plush view here is about the required trust on the part of the queer female subjects to have their image taken in such a space, which will then circulate beyond the bar. By enabling a plush view of the bar and its patrons that resides outside the logic of the state’s normalizing gaze, or the logic of heterosexual desire, Aguilar shows the contingency of queer relations and transitional immigrant nightlife.

The makeshift studio, as the provisional space where the Plush Pony series was shot, allows me to stage the distinctions between the plush view and the normative archive. Social documentary photography tends to capture its subjects in order to draw attention to particular social issues and thereby accumulate witnesses for the annals of historical memory. The brown queer archive, however, has an entirely different condition of possibility precisely because displacement, dislocation, movement across borders and spaces, fragmentation, and its “uncollected” quality necessarily define it as provisional. Thus, the makeshift studio is

Angeles located on 5261 Alhambra Avenue. The bar dates back perhaps to the late 1960s and showed up in a number of guides to gay bars in L.A.; it was most likely eviscerated by gentrification during the first decade of the 2000s.13 This space of lively conviviality drew Latina immigrants and Chicanas from around Southern California, some of whom parked several blocks away in order to avoid surveillance by overly zealous police patrolling the neighborhood. In this “forbidden space” that was under the constant dual watch of plainclothes police and heterosexual men who were drawn by their sexual desire for lesbians, Aguilar organized a space for herself from which to record a community in the mak- ing. Because of her introverted character, Aguilar noted that she found it difficult to strike up conversations, but as she succinctly put it, “I used my camera as a way to approach people, and as a way to get over my hesita- tion.” She further explained, “I was nervous at first to talk to the women in the bar. They seemed tough and were enjoying the social scene. Once folks knew that I was taking pictures of their friends, then everyone wanted to have a portrait taken.”14 In Aguilar’s hands,

photography was not merely about shooting pictures of marginalized subjects, as would be usual in conven- tional narratives. The camera provided Aguilar with a mediated instrument of sociality to make relational con- nections visible, producing familiarity between her and “her subjects” over the course of several photo sessions, part of the intersubjective method of a plush view.

Rather than a conventional photography studio, Aguilar worked in a makeshift setup at the back of the bar designed to imitate a more formal portrait photog raphy setting. Unassisted, she shot dozens of Plush Pony regulars, couples, and groups, some of whom later became her longterm friends. In exchange, Aguilar offered her subjects a free five-by-eight- inch print of their finished portrait. For most of the sessions, only a few images were taken. In this sense, the traditional length of a studio sit and its requisite equipment was also turned into makeshift time. Indeed, the entire enterprise of the series was put into flux by the provisional conditions of the ad-hoc studio, the small space in which she worked, and the nature of shooting portraits in a bar late at

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Laura Aguilar, (top) Plush Pony #13, 1992; (bottom) Plush Pony #12, 1992. Gelatin silver prints, 14 � 11 in. (35.6 � 27.9 cm) each. Courtesy of Laura Aguilar

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Laura Aguilar, Plush Pony #6, 1992. Gelatin silver print, 11 � 14 in. (27.9 � 35.6 cm). Courtesy of Laura Aguilar

replicated at the level of institutional collection and circulation of Aguilar’s work.15

The artist has spoken about the difficulties of amassing her work in one place, as her own home has neither sufficient space nor the physical conditions necessary to properly house a collection of her work, a condition that women of color, and especially queer women of color artists, face as part of the larger mate- rial, racial, and gendered inequality in art world circu- lation.16 Thus, Aguilar’s use of a makeshift approach to art-making, deployed at the Plush Pony, parallels the particular fragility that so many images of and by queer women of color often face when confronting the dominant insitutions of display and collection. Aguilar addresses these multiple issues of materiality in the Plush Pony series.

Latina Lesbians

There is a sensitivity to the kinds of gender and sexual worlds Aguilar inhabits and the place-making that her photographs render. The Latina Lesbians series focuses on female-bodied subjects who are working- and middle-class Latinas from the United States and Puerto Rico as well as from multiple Latin American nations, including Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. Aguilar locates a density of connection that can only be elaborated through place- making, a sense of the other, and a perceptual logic that expresses the gestures, postures, and individual expressions of social connections.

For the series, Aguilar foregrounds those Latina lesbian immigrants and Chicanas that she either knew or came to know over the course of the project. At the same time, she was also expanding her participa- tion within LGBT organizations like VIVA and GLLU.17 Therefore “friends of friends” appear within the series, producing a queer relational mapping. In approxi- mately a dozen portraits, Aguilar photographed her subjects in the clothes and settings in which they felt most comfortable, whether in front of their personal libraries, wearing gym clothes and standing on a small trampoline, or in more masculine attire that reveals a gender fluidity. The makeshift intimacy captured in her portrait photographs is part of a larger arc of developing relations with members of communities, a practice that developed into an important tool for

photographing her subjects for the Latina Lesbians series. Mirroring the method she employed in the Plush Pony series, Aguilar used the camera to create social intimacy. She developed a specific methodology for the Latina Lesbians series that involved asking her subjects to provide handwritten statements describing their personal histories and aspirations in narrative form, which are presented below the portrait photograph. Aguilar offers: “At first I didn’t know these people well. But then I asked them to choose a back- drop that most represented something about them and what was important to them.”18

A photograph of Carla shows her in a black leather jacket, and the caption below reads, “My mother encour- aged me to be a court reporter . . . I became a lawyer,” and is signed “Carla Barboza Esq.” Barboza’s quote could be read as a document of aspirational achievement, where Latina professions are delimited by the gendered and classed horizons of working-class “constraints.” However, another way to understand Aguilar’s frame is by considering the assertive frontality of Barboza in the photograph, suggesting her fierce and unstoppable character. Such images go beyond an “empowerment” model of self-affirmation and instead offer a character-

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Laura Aguilar, Carla, 1986. From the Latina Lesbians series, 1985–91. Gelatin silver print, 14 � 11 in. (35.6 � 27.9 cm). ONE Archives at the USC Libraries

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Laura Aguilar, Lydia, 1988. From the Latina Lesbians series, 1985–91. Gelatin silver print, 14 � 11 in. (35.6 � 27.9 cm). ONE Archives at the USC Libraries

driven portrait of queer Latinidad as reversing a hetero- pa triarchal order by centering strong queer female figures.

In another image, a subject identified as Joy is dressed in jeans, a rolled-up jacket, and a white T-shirt with a triangle and has short hair. Under the image, she writes, “My motivation comes from within. This is where my heritage as a woman and Latina lives. It reminds me always of how far I have come, and how far I still have to go.” Joy’s signature is below, along with the year, 1987. Noteworthy here is that, since the Latina Lesbians series, Joy transitioned from identification as female to male, leading Aguilar to suggest that one of the reasons she no longer exhibits that portrait is because she does not feel comfortable retrospectively representing “women” and “Lesbians” for those subjects whose gender identities have shifted. For the contem porary viewer well versed in the proliferation and explosion of gender identifications, the importance of making visible a range of lesbian subjects during the 1980s and 1990s may seem like a past-tense impetus. However, Aguilar’s plush view not only attends to the provisional dimension of brown queer lives but also allows for a fixity of self-definitions, making it difficult to reframe or differently narrate “for others” their self- representation. The narrative caption that produces the important story of Latina Lesbians is made salient by the fact that these sexualities too are makeshift, in motion, flexible, and undergoing constant change according to queer modes of being and shifting. Being accountable to community members in this way, and to the project of unfolding that produces the category “Latina Lesbians,” is one way in which Aguilar’s archive

is a living social document in which the sense of gender/ sex identification is in constant tension and flux rather than a static artifact of a buried past. The Latina Lesbians series, then, is a moving archive that con- stantly reor ganizes categories like genderqueer, butch, and trans, proliferating the homogeneity of a category like “Latina Lesbian,” to cite one instance within the larger arc of the series.

Both the Plush Pony and Latina Lesbians series acutely express Aguilar’s documentary project and approach to community engagement as a spatially organized visual practice. As film scholar and curator Chon A. Noriega observes, she brings to light “social groups and identities that remain invisible in main- stream culture: Latina lesbians, black couples, obese people et al.” Importantly, he notes, “she cooperates with her subjects so that her work is not about power differentials between photographer and subject as is often, if implicitly, the case with . . . the social documen- tary tradition.”19 This “bringing to light” is not merely about making visible what dominant canons, histories, or aesthetics cannot. It is also about expressing through what I have elsewhere called a decolonial queer eye,20 or a mode of seeing that allows for the hetero- geneity of social life otherwise.

Scholar Emma Pérez’s work on The Decolonial Imaginary is key to my insights here,21 and even more pertinent in relation to understanding Aguilar’s impor- tance with these series as well as the overall curatorial project of Axis Mundo. Let me elaborate. Of the many contributions that Pérez makes, one that is particu- larly significant challenges the narration of Chicano

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Laura Aguilar, Three Eagles Flying, 1990. Gelatin silver print, 24 � 60 in. (61 � 152.4 cm). Courtesy of Laura Aguilar

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Laura Aguilar, Yolanda, 1987. From the Latina Lesbians series, 1985–91. Gelatin silver print, 14 � 11 in. (35.6 � 27.9 cm). Courtesy of Laura Aguilar

Downtown Los Angeles behind him—without familiar visual cues or tropes of Latinidad, Gamboa renders masculinity as unreadable to hegemonic framings, and functioning with its own internal codes and affiliative potentials. In the collected writings of his reflections, Gamboa’s relation to non-normative mas- culinity is made clear; he raises the specter of queer disappearance in a memorable dedication to the lives of artists Mundo Meza, Teddy Sandoval, Jack Vargas, and Gerardo Velázquez.30

Through Gamboa’s photography and Aguilar’s photographic practices, we can begin to approximate the meaning of documenting life otherwise, showing the importance of brown queer lives that have been dis- possessed from the archive. Scholar Matt Richardson’s book The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution foregrounds some of the questions that are the heart of what it means to reckon with the AIDS crisis for Latinx queer communities, in proximity, in relation, being touched by, and endur- ing the sick and dying body. Writing on black queer archives, Richardson describes a permanent affect of mourning for “those who have physically passed on from this material plane of existence, and the figura- tively dead who have never been recognized as fully human to begin with, the dispossessed and disremem- bered.”31 Even though this functions differently for

histories of black people from that of brown people in the United States, to be undocumented in particular canons is to be dispossessed of particular forms of memory. In this sense, significant presence here is not only to celebrate effervescent world-making but also to render the violent epistemes of de-worlding that followed the loss of so many queer friends, relatives, and allies.

Scholar Stacy Macias’s work on queer Chicana Los Angeles develops a specific reading practice that apprehends the forbidden or “bad” subjects of these archives.32 For her these forbidden subjects, or what I’m calling the subjects of forbidden archives, are either not normative enough to be respected in Chicana/o studies, or too queer for brown archives—calling us to investigate the moment of their exclusion rather than to reconstitute their moral structure or retrieve their radical nature. In his work on brown feeling, José Esteban Muñoz described the specific structure of the depressive position of the Latina that we may be encoun- tering in Aguilar’s work. Working through psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theorization of interjection that Muñoz details, he describes the depressive position as one with a specific aesthetic and political practice of feeling brown or “brown feeling.” While Aguilar focuses on the structural depressive position of the Latina, she does so through mobilizing a different set of affects in these two series. The series point to webs of erotic and friend- ship communities that pop into life. When I see the Latina Lesbians series, I am struck by the sheer frontal force of the photographs that seem to argue from the position of a brown, female, queer presence.

Toward a Conclusion

Queer brown networks are not easy to uncover, but they exude a particular archival force. For me, the potential of forbidden archives, like Aguilar’s practice, became apparent when on a research trip with C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz to the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center in August 2014. In early re- search for Axis Mundo, we requested from the archivist, Michael R. Stone, several boxes of material, including box five of the Fire of Life: The Roberto Legoretta- Cyclona Collection (1962–2002). At this point, the exhi- bition was long off and for me this was an exploratory trip about how I might consider the longer geneaology

historio graphy by proliferating its uni-linear approach to history (though in the case of the exhibition one could potentially specify Chicanx queer history). By using Michel Foucault’s genealogical method, Pérez is able to challenge the framing of patriarchal Chicano nationalism that produces a model of “sameness” and erases the differences embedded within what she refers to as a colonial imaginary.22

In this sense, Aguilar’s body of work can be read as an important expression and even extension of Chicana and Latina feminisms, where identity, collab- oration, and a feminist/queer imaginary become key to finding spaces to “get inside” and away from normative prohibitions. If we think about portrai- ture through Aguilar’s aesthetics, then we might also work to uncover the layers of subject work that emerge in the images. In queer theorist Luz Calvo’s meditation on Aguilar’s well-known Three Eagles Flying (1990), a self-portrait that complicates Mexican and “American” identity, Calvo briefly discusses how Aguilar’s lesbian identity becomes part of the explicit fabric of the broader work.23 In this triptych image, Aguilar presents herself bare-breasted against a black backdrop with her face covered by a Mexican flag and her lower body wrapped by the U.S. flag. A thick rope coils around her neck, binds her hands, and ties around her hips. She is flanked on the left by the unfolded flag of the United States, on the right by the Mexican. Here the decolonial eye is how Aguilar manages to interpolate her own sources of identifica- tions, even as she proliferates visual language. In this way, as writer Patricia Valladolid describes, Aguilar’s photographs are an extension of such Chicana fem- inist and queer writers as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, and Emma Pérez by raising the issues of iden- tity, community, and sexuality.24 Aguilar’s work also sits alongside that of Chicana feminist artists, such as Yreina D. Cervantez, Alma López, and Laura Molina, who have reclaimed space within dominant formula- tions of gender, sex, and normative conventions.

The necessary if obvious statement regarding Aguilar’s photographs is that they must be read within the context of Chicana feminist cultural production and the queer communities recorded. Aguilar’s social documentation is deeply rooted in collectivities while also expressing the directionality of social life.25 As writer Daniel Perez argues, the 1990s represented a time of such public visibility, where Chicana feminist

artists, through self and collective aesthetics, could dis-identify from racialized gender as system of con- straint.26 Aguilar’s portrait work during the 1980s and 1990s ruptures with the objectifying and racializing “outsider” and exclusionary perspective of hegemonic representation, and instead offers the intimate view of belonging within queer brown socialities.

Archival Unbonding

Laura Aguilar’s portraiture allows me to ponder the unbinding of normative scripts that construct the brown queer archive and its ability to puncture not only the frame, as in Roland Barthes’s punctum, but the very temporality of the present that longs for the political overlap and cross-pollination of outlets, formats, and sources of inspiration at the core of 1980s and 1990s Chicanx cultural production and aesthetics in Los Angeles.

Harry Gamboa Jr.’s portrait work in the series Chicano Male Unbonded (1991–ongoing) delivers an important parallel view to Aguilar’s practice in its mapping of Chicanx and queer spatio-temporal complexity. In 1991 Gamboa described driving on the freeway while listening to a radio program whose host said, “Be on the lookout for a Chicano male. He is prob- ably armed and dangerous to society.”27 His affective response to the heightened rhetoric was immediate consternation for the “Chicano men who had played a role in influencing [his life] in an atmosphere of ethnic intolerance and racial hatred.”28 To counter such representations, Gamboa originally made portraits of twenty-five men who he knew intimately as friends, collaborators, and relatives, many of whom were queer. In his collected writings, Urban Exile, Gamboa recounts how he composed a list of one hundred men whose overlapping circles of sociality provided a relational map of Chicano Los Angeles, including artists Jack Vargas and Gerardo Velázquez who were photographed before dying from HIV/AIDS and whose work is included in Axis Mundo [see page 345]. Unlike the criminalizing and pathol ogizing that pervaded national discourse, Gamboa’s renderings of Chicano masculinity reverse stereotypical portrayals.29 Shot at night in urban settings—Vargas’s portrait shows him in front of the Los Angeles Central Library, where he worked, and Velázquez appears with the towers of

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Laura Aguilar’s Lydia (1988) on the cover of GLLU’s newsletter Unidad (February/March 1989). ONE Archives at the USC Libraries

challenge normative genres of documentation. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Daniel Marshall, Kevin P. Murphy, and Zeb Tortorici, “Queering Archives: Historical Unravelings,” Radical History Review, no. 120 (Fall 2014).

10. See Catriona Rueda Esquibel, With her Machete in Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). Though Rueda Esquibel’s important study largely focuses on Chicana lesbian literature and fiction, her assembling of a Chicana queer archive resonates with my arguments.

11. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009).

12. See Catherine Ramírez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), for a detailed analysis of how pachuca fashion circulated as body politics in Los Angeles and the broader Southwest region. See, also, Michelle Habell- Pallán’s essay, “The Style Council: Asco, Music, and ‘Punk Chola’ Aesthetics, 1980–84,” in Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987, ed. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez, 336–45 (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art / Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art / Ostfildern: Hatje Kantz, 2011).

13. See the discussion about gay girl bars in Los Angeles, and the Plush Pony in particular, in Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books, 2006). The Plush Pony is listed in the following bar guides found at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries: Barfly West (1973); Gaia’s Guide (1977 and 1983); The Timely Gay Bar Guide (1970); and In Touch (1973). The Lesbian News included the Plush Pony’s “Boogie Nights” listings in their December 2003, August 2004, and October 2004 issues. It is unclear when the bar officially closed. The blog “Lost Womyn’s Space” says the bar was open possibly in 2008; however, it was surely closed by September 2010. Accessed January 15, 2017, http://lostwomynsspace. blogspot.com/2011/05/plush-pony.html. Thank you to the staff at ONE Archives for this partial timeline of the bar’s existence.

14. Laura Aguilar, personal communication with the author, July 11, 2015.

15. Laura Aguilar’s papers and photographs reside at Stanford University. However, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center is providing temporary housing for her work and supporting the digitization of Aguilar’s photographs in anticipation of her 2017 retrospective.

16. While this is especially true for women of color artists, the system of reward and recognition within the art world disad- vantages many artists who do not acquire access to particular notions of stature and art celebrity.

17. Aguilar’s portrait from the Latina Lesbians series of Lydia Otero, the eighth president of GLLU, was used on the cover of the group’s newsletter Unidad (February/March 1989). In this issue, it is also noted that GLLU’s People of Color Committee awarded Aguilar a small grant to continue the Latina Lesbians series. Thanks to David Evans Frantz for finding this for me in the collections at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

18. Aguilar, communication.

19. Chon A. Noriega, “Laura Aguilar: Clothed Unclothed: Challenging Normative Conceptions of the Body,” UCLA Center for the Study of Women Newsletter, May 2008.

20. See Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2017), especially the introduction and chapter five. See, also, Sarita Echavez See, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), for a discussion of how artists have considered the com- plex aftermath of U.S. colonialism in the Phillippines.

21. Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), is a key text for my thinking on decolonial queer archives.

22. This similar impulse to proliferate histories, identities, categories, subjectivities, and their operations in representation and in cultural politics is at work in Laura Aguilar’s decolonial eye and the impetus behind Chavoya’s and Frantz’s curation that produces a “third space” of archival inhabitance for brown queer communities.

23. See Luz Calvo, “Embodied at the Shrine of Cultural Disjuncture,” in Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation, ed. Angela Y. Davis and Neferti X. M. Tadiar (New York and London: Palgrave McMillan, 2005).

24. See Patricia Valladolid, “The Private and the Public in the Photography of Laura Aguilar,” UCLA Center for the Study of Women Newsletter, May 2008.

25. My approach here emphasizes the social, however it builds upon Amelia Jones’s analysis of Aguilar’s self-portraits. Jones’s idea is that the self-portrait provides a performative medium from which to express changing contexts. In particular, she understands the interpretive quality of subject formation that is available within Aguilar’s self-portraiture, where the photograph mediates as a technology of self-representation. See Amelia Jones, “The ‘Eternal Return’: Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment,” Signs 27, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 947–78.

26. See Daniel Perez, “Chicana Aesthetics: A View of Unconcealed Alterities and Affirmations of Chicana Identity through Laura Aguilar’s Photographic Images,” article 22, LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University 2, no. 1 (2013).

27. See Harry Gamboa Jr. and Chon A. Noriega, Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 105.

28. Ibid.

29. C. Ondine Chavoya, “Social Unwest: An Interview with Harry Gamboa Jr.,” Wide Angle 20, no. 3 (1998): 55–78.

30. Gamboa, Urban Exile, 104–6.

31. On the point about afterlives, see, especially, the intro- duction to Matt Richardson, The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016).

32. See Stacy Macias, “Forbidden Femininities: Reimagining the Cultural Politics of Queerly Racialized Femininity in Queer Theory and Chican/o Studies” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011).

33. This multidirectionality is also available in terms of the female queer labor of AIDS bodies and AIDS prevention work done, for instance, in ACT UP/LA, Clean Needles Now, and VIVA in Los Angeles. Many of the members of VIVA were also docu- mented by Aguilar’s camera, even as this backdrop is not narrated context for the images. I point here, then, to the multifold erasures that do not surface aesthetic and social movements in relation to each other.

of Aguilar’s photographic production. Within this box, however, was the stunning incarnation of a composite of politics, fashion, cultural innovation, and militancy that remains for me the origin place for this essay, and enlivens my term “forbidden archives,” or archivos prohibidos.

In one particular folder in the box, I pulled out a collaged scrapbook page held within a plastic sleeve. It included an image of Robert Legorreta as Cyclona, dressed in makeshift gender-bending costume with makeup by Mundo Meza and photographed against a beautiful blue-sky backdrop. This image was collaged against articles about early Brown Beret social move- ments and student walkouts at East L.A. high schools during the Chicano Moratorium. The flip from images of queer performances on one side to articles of political movements on the other is suggestive of the multidirec- tionality of the archive.33 This archive is one of forbidden subjects, subjects that do not “capitulate to the terms of racialized propriety or queer intelligibility,” as Performance Studies scholar Matt Richardson put it in relation to queer blackness. In relation to image work, the importance of non-normative modes of represen- tating Latinx feminine subjects is apparent in Aguilar’s provisional collections.

The elisions, invisibilities, and incompleteness of the Chicanx and Latinx archive can be read from Aguilar’s work. More importantly, through her lens we understand the representational histories of brown- ness, and the exclusions of brown people from queer histories—the forbidden and the taboo, the disappeared and reconnected again through the collecting, inter- viewing, and massive emotional, intellectual, and archi- val labor necessary to present this in exhibition format. And it is through Aguilar’s eye that we also become privy to a plush view that illuminates brown queer life in all its pleasures, connections, and provisional possibil- ities. The plush view anchors a present-future imagina- tion of worlds otherwise that shows us how to live and love differently.

1. By using this term in Spanish, I am pointing to a set of discus- sions about the degree to which the term queer can travel out- side of Anglo-American and Euro-American contexts, especially for Latinx and Latin American non-normative sexual formations. See, especially, Resentir lo “queer” en América Latina, ed. Diego

Falconi Trávez, Santiago Castellanos, and María Amelia Vitieri (Madrid: Egales, 2013). In relation to Latinidad, lo cuir could be defined as an aesthetic and sensual set of non-normative modes of affiliation and contingencies that show up in a wide range of cultural production, such as within Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.

2. I use the non-binary term Chicanx and Latinx throughout the essay, rather than the recent convention of Chicana/o and Latina/o. With the x, I invoke the more capacious mark for multiple genders that replaces the binary “a/o.” The x marks the space beyond the assignation of biological female and male.

3. In contrast to grounding Aguilar’s work within Latina social worlds and a queer episteme, art historian Diana Emery Hulick describes how “the circumstances of [Aguilar’s] life are reflect- ed overtly in her art.” Hulick writes: “Aguilar is large, lesbian, and Chicana, acutely aware of her separateness, yet comfort- able enough with herself to present us with a personal vision that is both intimate and authoritative.” Diana Emery Hulick, “Laura Aguilar,” Latin American Art 5, no. 3 (1993): 52–54. This quote was included in the Guide to the Laura Aguilar Papers and Photographs, M829, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA. Hulick’s use of auto- biographical information constrains a fuller comprehension of Aguilar’s plush view, objectifying rather than apprehending the networks she portrays in order to promote easy (or reductive) categorization. Further, the interpolation of Aguilar as “acutely aware of her separateness” obfuscates the political elements and visual labor of Aguilar’s oeuvre as anathema to an objectify- ing and distancing standpoint. In other words, where Aguilar’s visuality offers supple and multidirectional access points to subject-making, Hulick forces social distinctions.

4. It is telling that an artist of Laura Aguilar’s stature, with more than thirty years of practice, is only now having her first major retrospective: Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, Vincent Price Art Museum, September 16, 2017–February 10, 2018, part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. See Eva Recinos, “For 30 Years, East L.A. Photographer Laura Aguilar Has Been Doing Something Daring,” LA Weekly, October 25, 2016, accessed January 17, 2017, http:// www.laweekly.com/arts/for-30-years-east-la-photographer- laura-aguilar-has-been-doing-something-daring-7532618.

5. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). In this classic text, Muñoz considers disidentification as an important means by which to move away from dominant ideologies in order to fashion queer worlds. The author especially calls attention to queer of color performances and modes of living and being.

6. See Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: NYU Press, 2014) for a discussion of the Latina femme racialized gendered body as the site of mediation and exclusion from gay commodification.

7. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, “Laying it Bare: The Queer/Colored Body in Photography by Laura Aguilar,” in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998), 277–305.

8. Asta Kuusinen, “Shooting from the Wild Zone: A Study of the Chicana Art Photographers Laura Aguilar, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, Delilah Montoya, and Kathy Vargas” (PhD diss., University of Helsinki, May 2006), 163.

9. As Jacques Derrida notes about the archive, its contents are organized by social and political forces that dissect and exclude heterogeneous experiences from the official historical record. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Books, 1995). In relation to the queer archive, as Ann Cvetkovich shows through queer cultural production, and Daniel Marshall, Kevin P. Murphy, and Zeb Tortorici recently also consider, it is formed in complex tension with gender, sexual, and knowledge formations that

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