For Prof Josef Woodson

I begin with a passage from my novel in progress titled Forgetting the Alamo, Or Blood Memory. I write fiction not only because I have a passion for literature, but also because I am frustrated with history's texts and archives. I've always wanted to find in the archives a queer vaquera from the mid- nineteenth century whose adventures include fighting Anglo squatters and seducing willing senoritas. Impatience led me to create a tejana baby butch, named Micaela Campos, who must avenge her father's death at the battle of San Jacinto, just a month after the fall of the Alamo:

By dusk she came upon the ranch and the land that her father had settled. Eleven sitios. Nearly forty-nine thousand acres. A lot of land for a young boy whose people had inched their way up the valley two centuries prior, moving slowly at first from the central valley then north each time the rivers shifted, each time they shifted further north to boundless prairies crossing rivers and streams. Monclova had been home for awhile, two hundred years felt like plenty of time, so they picked up and moved north crossing el Rio Bravo, traveled some more, and stopped and settled in for what they thought would be another two hundred. They came in groups. Tlascaletecas and Otomi with the Spanish and the Spanish with the Mexicans and the Mexicans with 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

I began with this passage in order to inscribe a gaze on the borderlands that is geographic and spatial, mobile and impermanent. 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. In the History 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 bodyboth 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 Spanish borderlands.

To unravel colonialist ideology, I put forth my notion of decolonizing history 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 thinking about national histories and identities that must be disputed if contradictions are ever to be understood, much less resolved. When conceptualized in certain ways, the naming of things already leaves something out, leaves something unsaid, leaves silences and gaps that must be uncovered. The history of the United States has been circumscribed by an imagination steeped in unchallenged notions. This means that even the most radical of histories are influenced 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 Gonzalez and Jose Esteban Munoz.4 If we are dividing the stories from our past into categories such as colonial relations, postcolonial relations, and so on, then I propose a decolonial imaginary 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 stories? In other words, how do we decolonize our history? To decolonize our history and our historical imaginations, we must uncover the voices from the past that honor multiple experiences, instead of falling prey to that which is easyallowing 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 argue 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 decolonize 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 rearrange a mind-set that privileges certain relationships. A colonial white heteronormative 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, reinterprets, 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 borderlands that is hidden from the untrained eye.

How do we train the eye to see with a decolonial queer gaze that disidentifies 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 disidentify is to look beyond white colonial heteronormativity to interpret documents 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 Vicinus, George Chauncy Jr., Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline D. Davis, Lillian Faderman, Randolph Trumbach, Lisa Duggan, and John Howard uncover queer histories in the United States and Britain while the Southwest borderlands is quite nearly untouched.8 Historical studies that focus upon Chicanas/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 Gonzalez, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820-1880; Ramon Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846; and Antonia Castaneda, "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 corridas-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 defined? 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/Juarez 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 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 coincidence 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 refers 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 historical coincidence that the classifications of homosexual and heterosexual appeared 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 antiimmigrant 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 anything 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 heteronormative gaze looking across a river to see racial and sexual impurities. Throughout the 1880s, 1890s, and even as late as the 19005, Mexicans crossed from Juarez to El Paso and back again with ease. Not until 1917 did a law impose requirements on those crossing a political border. A head tax of eight dollars 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 heteronormative way of seeing and knowing that fused race with sex? Further investigation will illustrate that the ideologies constructed around race and sex were linked to justify who was undesirable as a citizen in the United States. Immoral 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 Gonzalez unearthed the lives of widows, or women who lived alone during the nineteenth century.15 Gonzalez was already 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 Chavez 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 Anzaldua, 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 Borderlands" in the early twentieth century by University of California historian Herbert Eugene Bolton.18 Studies by queer cultural critics and theoreticians influenced by Anzaldua's work continue to proliferate. Creative writers have also been theorizing the borderlands and its deviant, non- normative population for the last few decades. In her historical novel, El Paso border writer Alicia 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 another woman. Many of Gaspar de Alba's short stories are reflections of the border twin cities El Paso and Juarez. 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 corridas 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 construct 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 conducted research on El Paso/Juarez, 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 included 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, Juarez 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. UTEPs 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 tejanas lived and roamed the "wild West" and probably knew how to handle a 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 uncovered. 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 imaginary 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 different 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 arguing for decolonial gendered history to take us into our future studies with perspectives that do not deny, dismiss, or negate what is unfamiliar, but instead honors the differences between and among us.