10 pages paper. Queer, Lesbian.

Mosquita y Mari (Aurora Guerrero, 2011): Thinking through the film in relationship to a "decolonial imaginary" and as diagramming a "queer borderlands": queer poetic desire as both powers and as needs

I. Key scenes:

Yolanda and Mari begin to share each other's "powers" - inchoate powers or uses of the erotic in Lorde's sense? - with one another, and come to explore and establish "a rupturing space" in which to express their own feelings, desires, and memories: Chapter 3, 19:22.

Yoland and Mari "take off" as friends: Ch. 4, 29:28; etc.

Yolanda's friends' relentless heteronormativity: Chapter 3, 22:05

Yolanda's parents, the Olveras, exhausted.Chapter 4, 29:04.

Yolanda imagines herself otherwise, through memories of her parents that they have never really shared with her: Ch. 4, 33:22

Mari shows her understanding of "transactional" economies: Ch. 5, 42:38

Mari's precarious position undermines the strength of the girls' friendship; a "queer borderlands" - arguably seen most powerfully in their hangout, a "rupturing space " (Pérez, 123) where they without knowing it begin to challenge colonized and colonizing norms when they fashion it out of junk cars and shared experience - gives way again to the more rationalized and disciplined space of the streets where desire is subjugated, for instance, in the gendered division of labor that is sex work; the queer borderlands, the rupturing space where a decolonial gaze had been generated, allowing otherwise unarticulated desire and memory to become felt, is in turn "colonized" when Mari brings her john into her and Yolanda's sacred hangout, violating it forever.

II. Thinking of each character in terms of audiovisual narrative (which gives us our specific aesthetic experience of the work, which is a narrative, but a narrative presented in sound and image); as well as allegorically (what that aesthetic experience means applied to the larger world in which we live, especially, for us, given the context provided by Pérez).

IIA. Given the way the audiovisual narrative emphasizes specific characteristics for each girl and her backstory, we can observe that allegorically speaking, each girl has a kind of “power” that she can share with the other; in this way, each needs the other, and comes to desire the other; and each sharing of powers will have unknown risks because of the complex spaces and movements of the neighborhood in which they live, go to school, remember their and their families' pasts, and dream of their futures.

Mosquita:

Powers: She is a geometer: she gets good grades especially in this science of measuring and mapping space. Yolanda has "the gaze"; her talent for envisioning spatiality also suggests geometric space as that marked off by national borders; and in this space, she has plans for a path forward to college: that is, from her "space" she can see a future, a path of development.

Sharing: Yolanda will teach Mari how to succeed in rationalized spaces where “measure” is crucial, like school, and in the process, how to value her mind.

Risk: Sharing the power of her "geometric gaze" with Mari means taking an affective risk: forming a “desiring space” with Mari rather than simply occupying a rational space with her, Yolanda's resulting complicated feelings will impact her own performance in school. Yolanda risks losing her "point of view" and her "future vision." Of course, her parents will fear that she is losing her way in school because of a boy; later, her mother will seem to get a clue about what is actually going on.

Mari:

Powers: She shows up with headphones in the first scene; later she wears a T-shirt with headphones printed on it; and finally, after sharing music with Yolanda, a disillusioned Mari will throw away her cherished Disc-man CD player, not even pawning it. These characteristics suggest Mari's "sonic movement"; like musical sound, and whether on her bike or off it, Mari is good at moving through rationalized, regulated spaces that can otherwise be limiting; she can get around obstacles and find non-traditional paths and places (like jumping the fence leaving school or finding an entrance into the abandoned auto shop); and she is good, as a result, at being in her own body, at handling herself on the streets; along with her power of movement, she has memories of a broader, cross- national movement; finally, with her father gone, and her mom struggling to make rent, she will learn to understand the ways in which mobility in "transactional" economies can be valued, like working to make money for rent; or like taking money for sex.

Sharing: She will teach Mosquita to stand up straight, and to say "I" through the act of positioning her body for "the gaze." Mari teaches Yolanda “self-naming.” Also she teaches Yolanda how to express voice.

Risk: Mari's understanding of how to position herself for the "gaze" also means that she can see herself as a sexual object that can be bought; subjecting herself to objectification in a transactional economy means risking losing her voice, her ability to say "I am."

IIB. Each has "needs" that have to do with each girl's desire not quite conforming to the ways other see or hear them; each girl “others” the other in a generative way, leading to unexpected growth and learning, if not to “coupled-ness,” or to a sense of belonging per se, at home, or at school, to a sense of having a future, of belonging to one's own future destiny.

Mosquita:

Needs: space; she is trapped in a highly regulated, heteronormative spatiality: Yolanda has the gaze, and masters geometry, but her growing sense of her erotic self makes her feel that she is suffocated in the everyday spaces in which she lives. Everything begins to seem the same. There's no room outside the spaces of heteronormative family and friends; her parents have little idea of her emerging desires, and friends "alternative" activities don't offer her alternatives to express those desires either.

Even though Yolanda's parents are both present, they are too exhausted trying to improve their family's economic position, trying to protect Yolanda from the harsh transactional reality that at its most bare means the same kind of poverty they came to the US trying to escape.

Her parents can't even really afford to share their romantic memories of one another with Yolanda, in fear that she will "grow up too soon" (risk her educational future by becoming pregnant). Meanwhile, her friends' interest in partying with boys feels ultimately like a violation of the desire she has begun to experience in her time with Mari.

Mari:

Need: money; this in terms of a larger, heteronormative, gendered division of labor; body as site of and resource for transactional economies:

Mari can't keep her job flyering, and Pablo won't help her "move up" into his "grander" version of flyering that he calls "promotion." Especially with the loss of her father, she and her mother are both hindered in terms of a gendered division of labor, a gendered economy.

Her memories of her grandmother in Mexico show her a different way of overcoming such a gendered division of labor in a powerful, even magical (mythically matriarchal) way (hearing the wind blow between the feather of a flying bird's wing). But the space and transactions of Huntington Park don't correspond to this powerful lesson of memory.

III. Moving towards a thesis.

Mosquita y Mari as narrative of embodying spatiality and mobility in national- colonial space and in a queer Borderlands:

Mari:

"borderlands" mobility (sound, voice in the present; memory of the past); but national immobility (no documentation; she "divided in space" and in a sense divided from her memories; Yolanda helps her "spatialize" a "queer borderlands" and to move with the shared power it gives them both, but neither this respite of memory and desire nor going to school can help Mari make rent at this age; and she regretfully allows herself to be reduced to a transactional object that can be controlled, contained, re-inscribed into a "colonizing" project.

Mosquita:

national (or national-colonial) spatiality (green card, at least; plans for the future); but borderlands immobility (little access to the affective movements of desire or memory that Mari does seem to have, and which her parents are too scared or too "internally colonized" to share with her).

Bringing their powers and needs together in terms of a largely unplanned instance of what Lorde might have called "the uses of the erotic," Mosquita and Mari's willingness to see and hear one another, and to give vision and voice to one another, makes them capable of creating, for a short time, what Perez calls a "rupturing space" which in this film leads to an exhilarating sense of being able to move together in a musical way; and to be able to share touch with one another in an intimately musical way. Ultimately, though, that queer borderlands of their own erotic creation cannot be contained in its marginal form, and as it expands, it will come up against the very limits and forces that made it so transformative in the first place. Finally, it will dissipate, undone by the larger world it has already begun to impact. But the girls will remember, and as the final scene of the film suggests, will now see each other very differently - more fully human, with

more depth and insight - than they would be able to if they had never become intimate friends.

IV: In teams, create an abstract using Perez to propose your version of a paper topic on Mosquita y Mari.