10 pages paper. Queer, Lesbian.

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imprinted by bodies that traverse the region, just as bodies have been trans-

formed by the laws and customs in the regions we call borderlands. In the His-

tory of Sexuality, Michel Foucault challenges us to look closely at bodies and

how they are engraved and transformed through laws, customs, and moralities

imposed upon them through centuries.2 He is not as direct about coloniality,

but we can still borrow from a critique that exemplifies how land is imprinted

and policed by those traversing and claiming it as they would claim a body —

both becoming property for the colonizers. Native Americans became as much

the property of the Spanish as did the land that came to be known as the Span-

ish borderlands.

To unravel colonialist ideology, I put forth my notion of decolonizing his-

tory embedded in a theoretical construct that I name the decolonial imaginary.

This new category can help us rethink history in a way that makes agency

for those on the margins transformative. Colonial, for my purposes here,

can be defined simply as the rulers versus the ruled, without forgetting that

those colonized may also become like the rulers and assimilate into a colonial

mind-set. This colonial mind-set believes in a normative language, race,

culture, gender, class, and sexuality. The colonial imaginary is a way of think-

ing about national histories and identities that must be disputed if contradic-

tions are ever to be understood, much less resolved. When conceptualized in

certain ways, the naming of things already leaves something out, leaves some-

thing unsaid, leaves silences and gaps that must be uncovered. The history of

the United States has been circumscribed by an imagination steeped in un-

challenged notions. This means that even the most radical of histories are in-

fluenced by the very colonial imaginary against which they rebel.3 I argue that

the colonial imaginary still determines many of our efforts to revise the past,

to reinscribe the nation with fresh stories in which so many new voices unite

to carve new disidentities, to quote Deena González and José Esteban Munoz.4

If we are dividing the stories from our past into categories such as colonial re-

lations, postcolonial relations, and so on, then I propose a decolonial imagi-

nary as a rupturing space, the alternative to that which is written in history.5

How do we contest the past to revise it in a manner that tells more of our sto-

ries? In other words, how do we decolonize our history? To decolonize our his-

tory and our historical imaginations, 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.

In my own work, I have attempted to address colonial relations, of land and

bodies, particularly of women, particularly of Chicanas in the Southwest. I ar-

gue that a colonial imaginary hovers above us always as we interpret our past

and present. I argue that we must move into the decolonial imaginary to de-

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colonize all relations of power, whether gendered or sexual or racial or

classed.6

In my study of Chicanas, I’ve put forth the notion of the decolonial imaginary

as a means not only of finding women who have been so hidden from history,

but also as a way of honoring their agency, which is often lost. The premise that

Mexican women are passive wives who follow their men had to be contested.

Now, I’m asking, how is the decolonial imaginary useful for lesbian history

and queer studies? If we have inherited a colonial white heteronormative way

of seeing and knowing, then we must retrain ourselves to confront and re-

arrange a mind-set that privileges certain relationships. A colonial white het-

eronormative gaze, for example, will interpret widows only as heterosexual

women mourning husbands. In his book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color

and the Performance of Politics, Munoz argues that queers of color are left out

of representation in a space “colonized by the logics of white normativity and

heteronormativity.” For Munoz, disidentification is the third mode of dealing

with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a

structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy.7 For me,

disidentification is that strategy of survival that occurs within a decolonial

imaginary. In other words, the queer-of-color gaze is a gaze that sees, acts, rein-

terprets, and mocks all at once in order to survive and to reconstitute a world

where s /he is not seen by the white colonial heteronormative mind. As my

queer vaquera baby butch gazes upon the land that her family settled upon, she

is refashioning 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. She

will be erased by the white colonial heteronormative mind. And so, we will

make her up or locate documents to uncover a history of sexuality on the bor-

derlands that is hidden from the untrained eye.

How do we train the eye to see with a decolonial queer gaze that disidenti-

fies from the normative in order to survive? The history of sexuality on and in

the borderlands looks heteronormative to many historians who scrutinize

marriage records, divorce records, and even court cases on adultery. To dis-

identify is to look beyond white colonial heteronormativity to interpret docu-

ments differently.

Historians have explored race, class, gender, ethnicity, and nation, region;

however, sexuality, and more specifically, queer history, has only recently

joined the ranks of serious scrutiny. Generally, historians of sexuality in the

United States and Europe have offered key books and articles that examine the

lives of women and men in New York, Buffalo, London, San Francisco, and

even the South. For example, historians like Martin Duberman, Martha Vici-

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nus, George Chauncy Jr., Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline D. Davis, Lil-

lian Faderman, Randolph Trumbach, Lisa Duggan, and John Howard uncover

queer histories in the United States and Britain while the Southwest border-

lands is quite nearly untouched.8 Historical studies that focus upon Chi-

canas /os and Mexicans of the Southwest primarily highlight immigrant and

labor studies, social histories of communities, and biographies of heroes or

heroines. The study of gender and sexuality, however, are central in works by

Deena González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish Mexican Women of Santa Fe,

1820 – 1880; Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away:

Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500 – 1846; and Antonia Cas-

taneda, “Sexual Violence in the Politics and Policies of Conquest: Amerindian

Women and the Spanish Conquest of Alta California.” 9 Queer histories of the

Southwest and of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands are that much more marginal;

however, there are as many questions as there are sources for interrogation.

Cultural and literary texts, newspapers, police records, widows’ wills, court

dockets, medical records, texts by sexologists, religious tracts, as well as corri-

dos — all of these and more must be reinterpreted with a decolonial queer gaze

so we may interrogate representations of sexual deviants and track ideologies

about sex and sexuality.

We must begin by asking, For whom and by whom has sexuality been de-

fined? Who was having sex with whom when laws began to police the practice

of sex? Foucault contends that discourses of sex and sexuality, specifically the

history of those discourses in Europe, were transformed from somewhat more

libratory in the eighteenth century to far more repressive in the nineteenth

century. Victorian England made a space in which deviant sexualities could be

repressed on the one hand and could proliferate on the other.10 The mixed

scheme of moralities spread through the Western world, and the borderlands

between Mexico and the United States were no exception, particularly after the

U.S.-Mexico War of 1846 – 48, when droves of white Anglo Saxon Protestants

brought with them a white colonial heteronormative ideology. Sexuality, then,

cannot be defined without attention to epochs and centuries, each of which

imprinted borderland queers in its own way. Racialized sexualities on the

geographic border we know as El Paso del Norte has its own underpinning,

however.

An examination of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries on the

border of El Paso/Juárez offers one window into twenty-first-century lesbian

and queer identities. (I use each term of identity cautiously, given that each

identity is charged with its own politics and history. While “queer” has for

many become the overarching identity for all who are nonheteronormative,

“lesbian” is sustained as the self-identity for women who choose to be with

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other women — physically, psychically, and politically.) The late-nineteenth

and early-twentieth centuries are key for a couple of reasons. One reason is

that the late-nineteenth century is encoded with Victorian values of repressive

sexuality. Sex acts became policed in ways they had not been before. In her

book Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in

American Culture, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that “it is not historical coin-

cidence that the classification of bodies as either homosexual or heterosexual

emerged at the same time that the United States was aggressively constructing

and policing the boundaries between black and white bodies.” 11 Somerville re-

fers to the 1896 Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, which established a

“separate but equal clause” that legalized the segregation of blacks from whites.

I would further note that in the Southwest, in these geographic borderlands,

Plessy v. Ferguson sanctioned the segregation of brown from white.

Moreover, I would take her premise and argue further that it is not histori-

cal coincidence that the classifications of homosexual and heterosexual ap-

peared at the same time that the United States began aggressively policing the

borders between the United States and Mexico. The change from the Texas

Rangers, who policed Indian and Mexican territory in the nineteenth century,

to the Border Patrol, created in 1924 to police the border between the United

States and Mexico, occurred at the moment when a new form of anti-Mexican

sentiment emerged throughout the nation. The sentiment was linked to anti-

immigrant acts that would become laws against non-Northern-Europeans. As

the borders in Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico were pushed

against by too many Mexicans crossing the Rio Bravo, trekking back and forth

through land they had crossed for centuries and paying little attention to any-

thing but rising river banks, the borders become more and more closed and

only opened up when a labor shortage demanded cheap laborers. Meanwhile,

a brown race was legislated against from fear that it could potentially infect the

purportedly pure, white race in the United States. Eugenicists and sexologists,

according to Somerville, worked hand in hand.12 Consequently, the border

was closed as a result of scientific racism clouded by a white colonial hetero-

normative gaze looking across a river to see racial and sexual impurities.

Throughout the 1880s, 1890s, and even as late as the 1900s, Mexicans crossed

from Juárez to El Paso and back again with ease. Not until 1917 did a law im-

pose requirements on those crossing a political border. A head tax of eight dol-

lars per person and the ability to read restricted the crossings.13 I would ask,

How did the emergent and rigid policing of the border between the United

States and Mexico in the early twentieth century reinforce a white colonial het-

eronormative way of seeing and knowing that fused race with sex? Further in-

vestigation will illustrate that the ideologies constructed around race and sex

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were linked to justify who was undesirable as a citizen in the United States. Im-

moral and deviant behavior included anything that was not a heterosexual

marriage between a woman and man. In the El Paso of 1891, adultery could

lead to the arrest of both man and woman. Of course, someone would have to

file a complaint to have them arrested, usually an unhappy third party. The

courts listened and adjudicated many cases of adultery in which Mexican

women and men were thrown into jail because they “unlawfully live together

and have carnal intercourse” outside of marriage.14

Another way of tackling primary research for an “invisible” group is to

study the category of “deviance” and how deviant behavior has become a

politicized queer identity in the twenty-first century. It is not a coincidence

that Chicana lesbian historian Deena González unearthed the lives of widows,

or women who lived alone during the nineteenth century.15 González was al-

ready thinking outside and beyond a heteronormative interpretation when she

perused nineteenth-century documents.

Oral interviews and ethnography are the methods available to those who do

not want to ferret through pre-twentieth-century tracts to find queer histories.

For the late twentieth century, activist-scholar Yolanda Retter has conducted

extensive research on the lesbian communities of Los Angeles from the 1970s

through to the 1990s, relying on oral interviews, as did Kennedy and Davis.

Chicana lesbian historian Yolanda Chávez Leyva has also conducted a series of

oral interviews on the lives of Chicana lesbian activists in Tucson, Arizona.

Sociologist Deborah Vargas has interrogated queer audience responses to

tejana singer/performer Selena and the drag artists posing as Selena. Theorist

and historian Maylei Blackwell has interviewed a Chicana feminist activist

from the 1970s who was ostracized from the Chicano movement because she

was a feminist, meaning a lesbian to many homophobic Chicanos in the early

movement.16

Chicana lesbian cultural critics Luz Calvo, Catriona Esquibel, Sandra Soto,

Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, and others continue to problemetize how we think

of queers in, on, and of many borders.17 The border reyna, Gloria Anzaldúa,

could not have known the impact her book of poetry and essays would have on

the field called borderlands, which was initially coined the “Spanish Border-

lands” in the early twentieth century by University of California historian Her-

bert Eugene Bolton.18 Studies by queer cultural critics and theoreticians

influenced by Anzaldúa’s work continue to proliferate. Creative writers have

also been theorizing the borderlands and its deviant, non-normative popula-

tion for the last few decades. In her historical novel, El Paso border writer Ali-

cia Gaspar de Alba’s queering of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz has caused

consternation among those who cannot imagine a nun having sex with an-

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other woman. Many of Gaspar de Alba’s short stories are reflections of the bor-

der twin cities El Paso and Juárez. Other border queer writers, like John Rechy

and Arturo Islas, also from El Paso, construct powerful narratives in which

their protagonists confront heteronormative sexuality.19

Historical research on and of borderland queers is not as abundant. Part of

the problem is that the queer gaze has only recently become sanctioned. Queer

history, after all, is a new, growing field. Despite the practice of queering our

daily lives, academic institutions and disciplines have discouraged that “oh so

disturbing” queer gaze. Our epistemological shift, however, has already begun

to challenge rhetoric and ideologies about racialized sexualities. To queer the

border is to look at the usual documents with another critical eye, a nonwhite,

noncolonial, nonheteronormative eye. A decolonial queer gaze would permit

scholars to interrogate medical texts, newspapers, court records, wills, novels,

and corridos with that fresh critical eye. Graduate students at the University of

Texas at El Paso (UTEP) are scrutinizing some of these records in order to con-

struct the queer history of the border. In the History Department, I offered for

the first time a graduate seminar on “Gender and Sexuality on the Border,” in

which queer history was explored. In the seminar, graduate students con-

ducted research on El Paso/Juárez, tracking gay, lesbian, and queer histories

through the centuries. Because the majority of historical studies on gender and

sexuality ignore the geographic border between the United States and Mexico,

these graduate students and I realized that it is difficult to assess how to pursue

research on queers in this region. We also concluded that “queer” history in-

cluded anyone who was considered “deviant,” therefore we expanded whom

we studied and how we conducted our studies. We found ourselves “queering”

the documents. This was a daunting task; however, the students were creative

as they challenged white heteronormative sexualities in studies that explored,

for example, Juárez transvestites in their work place, prostitution in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lesbian oral histories of the El Paso

community, gay and lesbian activists of El Paso, and Mexican American

women’s agency in the colonias of El Paso. Some of these studies are ongoing.

UTEP’s Ph.D. program in Borderlands History, the only one of its kind in the

nation, is regionally specific to the United States and Mexico, and therefore is

drawing students of color who are Chicana/o and Mexican nationals. A core

faculty in the department is training students whose research interests include

gender/sexuality/race /ethnicity in the borderlands, the Mexican Revolution,

histories of Colonial Mexico, the Southwest, Latin America and Spain, as well

as comparative world borders.

But what about the gaps and silences? I know that nineteenth-century te-

janas lived and roamed the “wild West” and probably knew how to handle a

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six-shooter and ride a horse, and I’m sure there were those who passed as men

and those who loved women. As much as I would love to stumble upon diaries,

journals, and letters written by queer vaqueras of the nineteenth century, I

must challenge my own desire for the usual archival material and the usual way

of seeing, as well as honor that which women scholars before me have uncov-

ered. While I’ll not always find the voices of the subaltern, the women, the

queers of color, I will have access to a world of documents rich with ideologies

that enforce white, colonial heteronormativity. A white heteronormative imag-

inary has defined how researchers and historians as well as cultural critics have

chosen to ignore or negate the populations who are on the margins, outside of

normative behavior, outside of twentieth-century nuclear white heterosexual

family systems. I am arguing for a decolonial queer gaze that allows for differ-

ent possibilities and interpretations of what exists in the gaps and silences but

is often not seen or heard. I am arguing for decolonial queer interpretations

that obligate us to see and hear beyond a heteronormative imaginary. I am ar-

guing for decolonial gendered history to take us into our future studies with

perspectives that do not deny, dismiss, or negate what is unfamiliar, but in-

stead honors the differences between and among us.

notes

1. Emma Pérez, Forgetting the Alamo, Or Blood Memory, forthcoming.

2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York:

Pantheon, 1978).

3. Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 5 –7.

4. Deena González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish Mexican Women of Santa Fe,

1820 – 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and José Esteban Munoz,

Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, 1999).

5. Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary, 6.

6. Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary.

7. Munoz, Disidentifications, xii, 11.

8. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds., Hidden from

History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New American Library, 1989);

George Chauncey Jr., Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay

Male World: 1890 – 1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy

and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Com-

munity (New York: Routledge University Press, 1993); Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and

Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America (New York:

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Columbia University Press, 1991); Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution:

Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, (Chicago: Chicago

University Press, 1998); Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American

Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); and John Howard, Men Like That:

A Southern Queer History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999). Also worth not-

ing is the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project compiled by Liz Stevens and

Estelle B. Freedman, which was produced as a video, She Even Chewed Tobacco (New

York History Project, 1983). Susan Lee Johnson refers to one of the more prominent les-

bians featured in the pictorial collection, a mixed-race Mexican-Anglo woman, Elvira

Virginia Mugarrieta, also known as “Babe Bean,” and Jack Garland, born in Stockton,

California, in 1870. See Susan Lee Johnson, “ ‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’: The Signifi-

cance of Gender,” in A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American

West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 255 –78.

9. González, Refusing the Favor; Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn

Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500 – 1846 (Stan-

ford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Antonia Castañeda, “Sexual Violence in the

Politics and Policies of Conquest: Amerindian Women and the Spanish Conquest of

Alta California,” in Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed.

Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1993), 15 – 33.

10. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 – 4.

11. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homo-

sexuality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 3.

12. Sommerville, Queering the Color Line, 31.

13. For fundamental background to the history of the Southwest, the making of the

U.S.-Mexico border, and subsequent immigration laws, refer to Rodolfo Acuna, Occu-

pied America: A History of Chicanos, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Juan

Gómez-Quinones, Roots of Chicano Politics, 1600 – 1940 (Albuquerque: University of

New Mexico Press, 1994); David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans,

Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1995); and Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth

Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

14. El Paso County Court Records, 1881– 1920, The State of Texas v. Guadalupe Vega

and Margarita R. Pérez, adultery, April 17, 1841, 887, University of Texas, El Paso Spe-

cial Collections.

15. Deena González, “The Widowed Women of Santa Fe: Assessments on the Lives

of an Unmarried Population, 1850 – 1880,” in On Their Own: Widows and Widowhood

in the American Southwest, 1848 – 1939, ed. Arlene Scadron (Champaign: University of

Illinois Press, 1989).

16. Yolanda Retter, “On the Side of Angels: Lesbian Activism in Los Angeles, 1970 –

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90” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1999); Yolanda Chávez Leyva, “Listening

to the Silences in Latina/Chicana Lesbian History,” in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla

Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998); Deborah Vargas, “Cruzando Fronteras:

Selena, Tejano Public Culture and the Politics of Cross-Over” (paper presented at the

annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Washington, D.C., Octo-

ber 1997); and Maylei Blackwell, “Contested Histories and Retrofitted Memory: Chi-

cana Feminist Subjectivities between and beyond Nationalist Imaginaries —An Oral

History of the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc” (paper presented as qualifying essay, History of

Consciousness: University of California, Santa Cruz, May 1997).

17. Luz Calvo, “Postcolonial Queer Fantasies” (Ph.D. diss., University of California,

Santa Cruz, 2000); Catriona Esquibel, With Her Machete in Her Hand (Austin: Uni-

versity of Texas Press, forthcoming); Sandra Soto, “Sexing Aztlán: Subjectivity, Desire

and the Challenge of Racialized Sexuality in Chicana/o Literature” (Ph.D. diss., Uni-

versity of Texas, Austin, 2001); and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, The Wounded Heart:

Writing on Cherrie Moraga (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

18. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:

Spinsters /Aunt Lute, 1987); and Herbert Eugene Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A

Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921).

19. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Sor Juana’s Second Dream: A Novel (Albuquerque: Uni-

versity of New Mexico Press, 1999); Alicia Gaspar de Alba, The Mystery of Survival and

Other Stories (Arizona: Bilingual Press, 1993); John Rechy, City of Night (New York:

Grove Press, 1963); and Arturo Islas, No (New York: Avon Books, 1991).

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