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Racial ambivalence in literatures of the Americas: mixed-race subjects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

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Racial ambivalence in literatures of the Americas: mixed-race subjects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

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RACIAL AMBIVALENCE IN LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS:

MIXED-RACE SUBJECTS IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES

by

Nathan Martinez Pogar

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2017

ii

And she said that she hoped I would learn to tell the difference between the two: love and hate.
To this day, I have tried to tell the difference between the two, and I cannot, because often they
wear so much the same face.

—Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother

iii

Dedication

A
Mi abuela,
Rosario Lucía Martinez (1930-2006)

Y mi abuelo,
Richard José Martinez (1937-2012)

And to my grandparents,
Ernestine Margaret Helen Pogar (1927-2012)
and
John Pogar (1913-1999)

And to my parents,
Diane Elizabeth Martinez-Pogar
and
John Andrew Pogar

And always to my love,
Donald L. Jolly, Jr.

iv

Acknowledgments
Although the work of a literary and performance critic is done in a solitary fashion, I was
never alone while writing this dissertation. Anytime I had a question, concern, or quandary, and
always when I needed feedback, John Carlos Rowe was there to respond in a timely manner,
often within 24 hours when I wrote him a shorter email. The scope and breadth of his
knowledge and expertise and his ability to see the big picture (sometimes when I could not,
obsessively focused on details as I was wont to be) was an enormous benefit to me and this
project. John was all that I could have asked for in an advisor and a chair. Jack Halberstam was
always a good source of information when I needed to expand my engagement with gender and
sexuality studies. More than his work, he provided a model of a queer academic to which I
aspire: disciplined, rigorous, and full of character. The feedback he provided on my article on
John Rechy helped me improve the piece for publication in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano
Studies. Elda María Román was quite generous with her time, which is exceptional given that I
never had the opportunity to take a seminar with her. She came to USC just at the right time and
was the perfect addition to my committee as a Chicanx and Latinx literary and cultural studies
scholar. I remain grateful that she agreed to work with me without knowing much about my
project—for I had very little idea at the time what my project was then and would be now.
Macarena Gómez-Barris offered a keen and perceptive critical gaze on my work from outside the
discipline of literary studies. More than that, she was a powerful queer of color academic ally
for me to have in ASE, which quickly became, after my first year at USC, my second home
department. Although she may not remember it now, the understanding and compassion she
offered me at a particularly trying moment during her seminar allowed me to finish my work.
And finally, last but not least, Kara Keeling has saved me at the eleventh hour by signing on to
v

my committee as the outside member. Her seminar was one of the most useful ones I took at
USC (Kara introduced me to Glissant, whose work is the basis of my third chapter), but I never
expected that, to my great benefit, she would be on my committee.
As far as my peers are concerned, the four other members of my original cohort in the
critical track in English have been and are some of the best friends I have ever made. Cecilia
Caballero taught me about the meaning and importance of community and collectives. No one
but Ceci loves The X-Files as much as I do. Fellow X-Phile and believer in miracles, she opened
up her family to me when I so very much missed my own. Viola Lasmana is, like me, an
Aquarian (we almost always celebrate our birthdays together), and perhaps this explains why we
have so much in common. Aside from being the kindest person in our department, she gave me
an example of a scholar who knows how to network with other scholars across disciplines. Gray
Fisher has ever been “my partner in too many crimes,” as Hunter S. Thompson wrote of Oscar
Zeta Acosta. He also championed Deleuze and Guattari at a time when I was deeply skeptical of
them; of course, I turned from a skeptic into a believer, in large part because of conversations I
had with Gray. And Megan Herrold, though I never see her as much as I would like, is the only
person I know willing to discuss The Canon with me when I am so inclined, an urge I still get
from time to time after having been forced to take four semesters of British literature, a semester
of Shakespeare, and a semester of Chaucer in college.
Though Lisa Lee is not in my cohort, she might as well have been. I look forward to the
time when her novel is published and I can buy it and she can sign my copy. I am grateful that
she introduced me to Justin Torres’s We the Animals, one of my favorite Latino queer novels.
Like Ceci, Lisa is a fierce academic mother. If they can survive grad school as mothers, then I
believe Ceci and Lisa can survive anything. Emily Raymundo is one of my dearest friends in
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ASE. We initially bonded as mixed-race people interested in queer sexualities, but we grew to
expand and deepen our friendship beyond that initial bond. Other students in ASE, some of
whom have gone on to achieve great success, were friends to me as I navigated the terrain of
grad school: Umayyah Cable, Sophia Azeb, and Jess Lovaas. Flora Ruiz always made sure that
all the forms I handed in to her got their signatures and were submitted on time. Her knowledge
of the sometimes arcane rules of the Graduate School was instrumental in allowing me to defend
when I wanted to.
The professors in the English Department at the University of Colorado at Colorado
Springs, where I completed my undergraduate studies, were great mentors to me and have
continued to be so. I especially thank Daniel Worden for the help he offered me with my first
attempted publication (it was finally rejected after two rounds of revision, but the experience
proved useful when I was later published), and Lesley Ginsberg, who continues to take me out to
lunch at Marigold’s whenever I am back in Colorado Springs. Lesley, a Romanticist, knows that
I have the heart of a Romantic, that Moby-Dick is my favorite novel, and that I have something
of Captain Ahab in me. Three friends I made while at UCCS deserve special mention here.
Nozomi Saito has a love of literature and the literary that I have found in few other people, and
our conversations about our favorite writers can go on for hours, sometimes long past midnight.
Although years can go by without seeing each other, we pick up right where we leave off each
time. Jonathan Reynolds and Jamie May are the only people in Pueblo whom I like to visit.
Jonathan has boundless confidence in my abilities, and Jamie recognizes the importance of being
a good pedagogue.
The last part of these acknowledgments is reserved for those people whom I love most.
My Oma, Ernestine Margaret Helen Pogar, and my grandfather, Richard José Martinez, passed
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away early in my career as a graduate student. I miss them both and think of them every day
when I see their photographs. Both of them wanted to see me succeed and achieve my
aspirations, and it is with a certain sadness that I finish without them here with me. My Mother,
Diane Elizabeth Martinez-Pogar, has always been my guardian angel. Her assiduous care and
devotion has allowed me to develop into a conscientious scholar. She has never failed me in a
time of need. My father, John Andrew Pogar, has always demonstrated interested in and concern
for my career and my success. I know that I can always call him up and talk to him for an hour
or more on the phone if he is available. His guidance in matters both big and small always
proves helpful. My brother, Noah John Pogar, is a busy man as a first grade teacher and a father,
but whenever we get a chance to talk, he always expresses his support of and pride in me. Stella
Elizabeth Pogar, my niece, is bigger every time I see her, but always she remains the most
beautiful baby in the world. She brings joy not only to me, but to all around her, and she
reminds me that there is indeed a future, and we must prepare it for her so that she can take it up
one day.
The last person I want to acknowledge is the person who has seen me through this project
from beginning to end, the person who patiently waited for me until I finished my dissertation
and my PhD, my fiancé: Donald L. Jolly, Jr. I cannot count the days when Donald came home
from work to find me typing at my desk, the dishes unwashed in the sink, and he offered to make
dinner and wash the dishes even though he had been working in the office for eight hours. I
remember Donald saying that someone told him that if you can stay with a person until after
they’ve written their dissertation, you can stay with them through anything. Well, here we are:
I’m finished with the dissertation and we’re ready to commit to each other in a more official way
(although, we never needed anything to be “legal” to show our commitment to each other before,
viii

but with the way things are going now…). As I worked on this dissertation and brought it to
completion, Donald was my muse, though I am not sure if he knows it.

ix

Table of Contents
Epigraph ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgments iv
Abstract x
Introduction:
Racial Ambivalence in Mixed-Race Literature 1

Chapter 1: “Exiled Doubly”:
John Rechy’s Shifting Performances and Deployment of Mestizaje 33

Chapter 2: Fragile Masculinities and Mulatez:
Afro-Latino Queerness 70

Chapter 3: Revisiting Glissant from the Eighties:
Thirty Years of Antillean Discourse on Creolization 111

Chapter 4: A Chicana Mestiza in Paris:
Transnational Decolonial Icon, Affects, and Triangulation in
Josefina López’s Hungry Woman 152

Conclusion:
Repurposing Racial Ambivalence in Pop Music 190

Bibliography 197

x

Abstract
Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American literature is replete with
mixed-race characters who assume the tragic roles that distinctly American tropes demanded.
After the civil rights movement and the various ethnonationalist movements of the sixties, ethnic
writers in the Americas carved out new literary spaces for mixed-race characters to fully attain a
complex psychology inflected by the fragmentation of the postmodern condition. This
dissertation examines texts and performance by Chicana/o, Afro-Latino, and French Antillean
writers whose mixed-race characters exhibit a profound ambivalence toward the various ethnic
communities, cultures, and literary traditions that they claim or that claim them. As Chicana/os,
Afro-Latinos, and French Antillean Creoles, the characters in my archive performatively embody
mestizaje, mulatez, or creolization. Moreover, the characters’ queerness or feminism accentuates
their racial ambivalence, estranging them from one or more of the milieus they inhabit and
generating psychic fissures that lead to such affects and states as alienation, depression, rage, or
madness. Far from pathologizing mixed-race subjects experiencing these psychic states,
postmodern and contemporary ethnic writers avow the resistant potential of such affects in their
texts and performance.
In a somewhat unorthodox fashion, my project follows the thread of resistance woven in
the texts and argues that racial ambivalence produces characters who challenge, in sometimes
major but more often minor ways, the racism, imperialism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia,
and/or homonormativity that they must face as racialized and gendered or racialized and queered
subjects. Ambivalence is a psychoanalytic term that necessitates my use of psychoanalysis as an
analytic. I engage with Frantz Fanon’s writings on black alienation and anticolonial rage, Emma
Pérez’s theorization of the Oedipal-conquest-triangle, Antonio Viego’s reworking of Lacanian
xi

psychoanalysis, and David Eng’s concept of racial castration. Often I depart from
psychoanalysis and develop a critical framework indebted to women of color feminisms and
queer of color critique, which allows me to wed psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity to a racial
politics of resistance.
My first chapter, “‘Exiled Doubly’: John Rechy’s Shifting Performances and Deployment
of Mestizaje,” redefines the contours of mestizaje by reading John Rechy’s memoir, About My
Life and the Kept Woman (2008), to argue that the author passed for white in Jim Crow Texas
and straight as a male hustler to gain access to milieus denied to most Chicano gay men. This act
of dual passing, however, caused Rechy to feel “exiled doubly” from the Chicano, Anglo, and
gay male communities he moved between but never fully claimed. His subversive performance
of mestizaje enabled him to unyoke mestizaje from Chicano nationalist and neonationalist
deployments that try to authenticate Chicana/os’ indigenous ancestry and legitimate their claims
to Aztlán. Rechy demonstrates that mestizaje can be defined at the level of the individual and
does not always need to be a community-based identity formation.
Further examining Latino queer men, my second chapter, “Fragile Masculinity and
Mulatez: Afro-Latino Queerness,” reads fiction and memoir by Afro-Latino authors whose
protagonists have sex with other men. These Afro-Latino authors deploy a postmodern or
contemporary mulatez, or “mulatto-ness,” to avow their black identities in face of antiblack
racism in their Latino families and communities. However, when Piri Thomas describes a
homosexual experience in his memoir, Down These Mean Streets (1967), and Junot Díaz’s
narrator, Yunior de las Casas, relates his sexual experiences with his best friend in the short story
“Drown,” both Afro-Latinos disavow queer desire and reject a legible gay or queer identity.
Such a disavowal stands as a critique of the white middle-class homonormative imperative for
xii

poor working-class Afro-Latino men who have sex with men to identify as queers in Anglo-
American terms. Finally, I read Justin Torres’s novel We the Animals (2011) to demonstrate that
the narrator’s proximity to whiteness—he is the son of a white mother and an Afro-Puerto Rican
father—generates a racial ambivalence in his psyche that is accentuated when he is outed as gay
by his poor working-class family, who institutionalize him at the novel’s conclusion.
Moving from the hispanophone Caribbean diaspora to the French Antilles, my third
chapter, “Revisiting Glissant from the Eighties: Thirty Years of Antillean Discourse on
Creolization,” mines the novels and theory of Martinican poet, playwright, novelist, and
theoretician Édouard Glissant for the alienation, rage, and madness of Martinican Creoles.
Glissant argues that the colonization and departmentalization of Martinique produces a collective
alienation in Martinican Creoles, but in his novel La case du commandeur (1981), translated as
The Overseer’s Cabin (2011) by Betsy Wing, the Creole woman Mycéa feels an intense
ambivalence toward her community. On the one hand, she has mastered both Creole and French;
but on the other, she experiences a feminist rage at the men in her community for their
complicity with Martinique’s departmentalization. Mycéa is bearer of a counter-narrative to the
colonization and departmentalization of Martinique, one that drives her to madness and eventual
institutionalization. However, if the novel’s conclusion seems pessimistic, I argue that Glissant’s
rhizomatic narrative—in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense—has resistant potential.
Continuing my exploration of those who resist French imperialism, my fourth chapter
triangulates Mexico, the US, and France in “A Chicana Mestiza in Paris: Transnational
Decolonial Icon, Affects, and Triangulation in Josefina López’s Hungry Woman.” Canela
Guerrero, the protagonist of Josefina López’s play Hungry Woman (2013), is pitted against two
racist and xenophobic nation-states as she navigates her way first as a naturalized US citizen
xiii

from Mexico and later as a Mexicana/Chicana living in Paris. Canela is both drawn to French
culture and critical of it, just as she experiences ambivalence toward her Mexican culture
because she feels constrained by its misogynist traditions. Following Canela and embodying her
mestiza ambivalence is La Calaca Flaca, the “skinny skeleton” icon of Mexican tradition, who
figures as a decolonial icon while Canela lives in Paris. Embodying the affects of depression and
rage, Canela learns to channel her negative psychic energies into a commitment to her adopted
community of Boyle Heights, where she returns to challenge racism, xenophobia, and misogyny
at the play’s conclusion, illustrating that racial ambivalence can be repurposed to forge
communal solidarity.
Together, the texts and performance I examine trace the contours of mestizaje, mulatez,
and creolization as they are born from transnational encounters between colonial and imperial
powers and the subjugated peoples who oppose them, albeit ambivalently. This racial
ambivalence proves to be highly generative and resistant to racial, class, sexual, gender, and/or
homonormative domination, which offers a quite different narrative from that of the tragic
mixed-race figure. Refunctioning racial ambivalence allows my project to move past still
ongoing debates about racial, gender, and sexual essentialism and articulate a transnational
theorization of mixed-race performativity not confined by the borders of the nation.

1

Introduction:
Racial Ambivalence in Mixed-Race Literature

The flesh is the site from which arise dreams and nightmares, the elixirs and poisons of hatred
and desire for both self and other. Those hatreds and desires have manifested themselves in
myriad ways across the temporal and geographic expanses of the Americas both North and
South.

—Rafael Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture

The problem of how “cultural identity” is consolidated and written through and against other
discourses of nations, states, languages, and bodies, however, remains open to contradictory
impulses and practices of erasure.

—Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Acknowledging differences does not compel one to be involved in the dialectics of their totality.

—Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

At least one significant literary event of 2016 brought national attention to mixed-race
subjects: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction. Narrated by a nameless Communist sleeper agent born to a Vietnamese mother who was
sexually exploited by a French colonial priest, The Sympathizer traces one mixed-race subject’s
tortuous (and torturous) navigations through racial, ethnic, and national identity in both Vietnam
and the US after the fall of Saigon. The mole is ordered to follow a pro-American South
Vietnamese general and his troops to the US, where they somewhat ridiculously attempt to
devise a strategy to return to Vietnam and rekindle the war against the Communists. One of the
few American novels to examine the Vietnam War from the perspective of the Vietnamese, The
Sympathizer lets none of the actors in the Vietnam War go unscathed from its mordant critique.
The narrator himself is morally ambiguous, and yet the reader is endeared to him by his honesty
(the novel is written as one long confession) and his deep ambivalence toward the various actors
in the in the Vietnam War. On one hand, the narrator boasts that none of his countrymen “could
2

discuss, like I, baseball standings, the awfulness of Jane Fonda, or the merits of the Rolling
Stones versus the Beatles. If an American closed his eyes to hear me speak, he would think I
was one of his kind” (6), and he laments that upon leaving Vietnam for the US, he “had no room
for Elvis or Dylan, Faulkner or Twain” in his luggage (13).
1
Yet, on the other hand, the narrator
states that “[i]f my confession reveals anything, isn’t it that I’m anti-American?” (307). Caught
between his love of the popular music and literature of the imperialist nation that invaded his
country and his deep-seated hatred of that same nation, the unnamed narrator suffers from both
sides for his mixed-racial heritage and occupies a painfully liminal position.
That as late as 2015, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was published in which a mixed-race
protagonist feels acute alienation from the various national and ethnic communities through
which he moves testifies to my dissertation’s central argument that mixed-race subjects in the
post-World War II period to the present experience racial ambivalence. Sigmund Freud theorizes
ambivalence in Totem and Taboo (1913).
2
Borrowing from Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler
and writing specifically about the obsessional neurosis to touch objects and its conscious
prohibition arising from an unconscious repression, Freud says:

1
The reader should notice that all four of these artists, popular and literary, are those that would be
imported to a nation, like Vietnam, invaded by the imperialist United States. Yet, these artists are not absorbed
wholesale into the (literary) imagination of either the narrator or his creator, Nguyen. “Elvis [and] Dylan, Faulkner
[and] Twain” undergo transculturation in The Sympathizer, which “describe[s] how subordinated or marginal groups
select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (Pratt 6). The literary
genealogies that the mixed-race writers in my archive claim also undergo transculturation, although the writers are
never explicit in how this act is performed.
2
One may question why I deploy Freudian psychoanalysis in my study of mixed-race subjects. I answer by
citing José Esteban Muñoz, who, in “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and
the Depressive Position” (2006), draws on Hortense Spillers’s reworking of psychoanalytic models of subjectivity to
account for the psychic injury of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Muñoz writes, “Thus for Spillers, the
psychoanalytical protocol is laden with an emancipatory potentiality in that it helps one combat a certain muteness
that social logics like homophobia, racism, and sexism would project onto the minoritarian subject. This move to
identify the radical impulse in developmental theories aims to recast the theories outside the parameters of
positivism and enact their political performativity for circuits of belonging that do not conform to a crypto-
universalism associated with the universal white subject” (678). Psychoanalysis, even Freudian psychoanalysis, can
be recalibrated to address the psychology of mixed-race subjects, as I demonstrate below.
3

The principle characteristic of the psychological constellation which becomes fixed in
this way is what might be described as the subject’s ambivalent attitude towards a single
object, or rather towards one act in connection with that object. […] The conflict between
these two currents cannot be promptly settled because—there is no other way of putting
it—they are localized in the subject’s mind in such a manner that they cannot come up
against each other. (38)
The ambivalence I examine in the mixed-race psyche is directed not so much at objects or acts
but rather at the multiple cultures, communities, traditions, and literary genealogies that mixed-
race subjects claim and/or reject, or that claim them. Like Freud’s reworking of ambivalence,
the “conflict between these two currents”—the simultaneous attachment to and rejection of the
mixed-race subject’s ethnic cultures and communities—is never resolved. Such an unresolvable
psychic conflict is what generates the alienation, rage, depression, and madness that mixed-race
subjects experience. Yet far from debilitating or paralyzing them, the affects and psychic states
of alienation, rage, depression, and madness galvanize the mixed-race subjects in the memoirs,
fiction, and play I read to make critiques against exclusionary ethnonationalism, colonization,
misogyny, and/or homophobia; or, in the case of the Afro-Latinos in Chapter 2, against white
homonormativity and the white middle-class demand to be legible as self-identifying gay or
queer male subjects.
Ambivalence in the colonized subject is one of Frantz Fanon’s chief investigations in his
psychological study of colonization, Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Fanon writes specifically
about Martinicans, who are a mixed-race people, and I read Fanon as a Creole subject. However,
Fanon universalized his argument by applying it to all colonized subjects, writing that “our
findings are valid for the French Antilles; we are well aware, however, that this same behavior
4

can be found in any race subjected to colonization” (9). Although I hesitate to universalize my
own claims about mixed-race subjects by applying them to all mixed-race peoples around the
globe, I do forge connections between mixed-race subjects living in the US-Mexico borderlands
and the hispanophone and francophone Caribbean and their descendants living in the US. Fanon
is useful to my project because he offers a critique of Eurocentric ethnopsychoanalysis and
repurposes Freud’s (and Lacan’s and other French psychoanalysts’) claims by racially inflecting
them.
When writing about mixed-race subjects, one must foreground the family and its racial
configurations. For this reason, psychoanalytic critics of color such as Fanon, Emma Pérez,
Antonio Viego, Anne Anlin Cheng, and David Eng open up apertures through which to study the
mixed-race subject’s psyche and therefore undergird my theoretical framework. Psychoanalytic
critics of color from the Americas are more useful to my project than European psychoanalysts
such as Freud and Lacan because the former center racialized subjects in their work where the
latter only consider gender difference as the definitive formative (and traumatic) experience of
subjectivity.
3
Fanon points out that “[p]sychoanalysis—and this can never be stressed enough—
sets out to understand a given behavior within a specific group represented by the family” (120).
But what if the family is mixed race and the child at the center must navigate his sexual identity
against the background of one parent’s experience with racism, colorism, and colonization and
another parent’s differently sexed and raced body? If the “family is an institution, precursor of a
much wider institution: i.e., the social group or nation” (127), as Fanon rightly argues, then we
must recognize that the family standing in for the nation is a white family, causing a subject who

3
It can be said that Freud overdetermined gender as constitutive of subjects while failing to consider other
markers of identity such as race, ethnicity, and class. This is slightly curious considering he was one of Europe’s
Others as a Jew. Needless to say, it was left to other psychoanalysts in Europe to examine the racialized
unconscious, and many of them are trenchantly challenged by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks for their
Eurocentrism and racist theorizations of colonized peoples.
5

is a person of color to experience alienation from those figures and institutions that represent,
abstractly or concretely, authority over him or her.
4

The alienation of which Fanon so forcefully and lyrically writes is accentuated in mixed-
race subjects, who feel themselves both drawn to and distanced from two or more ethnic
communities and cultures. This is usually taken to mean that mixed-race subjects are exemplars
of postmodern fragmentation. Yet, as Homi K. Bhabha argues in The Location of Culture
(1994), “Fanon’s sense of social contingency and indeterminacy, made from the perspective of a
postcolonial time-lag, is not a celebration of fragmentation, bricolage, pastiche or the
‘simulacrum.’ It is a vision of social contradiction and cultural difference—as the disjunctive
space of modernity” (238), where mixed-race subjects embody fully realized racial identities.
Indeed, although Nguyen’s narrator in The Sympathizer is half Vietnamese and half French, a
“Eurasian” (19), in other words, his Vietnamese mother tells him, “Remember, you’re not half of
anything, you’re twice of everything” (290). Thus, the mixed-race subject is no longer viewed,
from this perspective, as a fragmented and incomplete subject, but one that is imbued with
plenitude.
Rather than being seen as “hybrids,” I posit mixed-race subjects as moving between
instead of occupying a state in-between. In this regard, I agree with Deleuze and Guattari, who
write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) that the “middle is by no means an average; on the
contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable
relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a

4
The normative whiteness of the family at the center of psychoanalysis is perhaps another reason Fanon
claims that the Oedipus complex is not found in colonized black peoples. Fanon writes, “Whether you like it or not
the Oedipus complex is far from being a black complex. It could be argued, as Malinowski does argue, that the
matriarchal regime is the only reason for its absence” (130). Fanon’s quick dismissal of the possibility of black
subjects experiencing the Oedipus complex seems to ignore the psychosexual dynamics of the mixed-race family,
something that Emma Pérez theorizes in her work as she considers how whiteness and mestizaje inflect the family.
6

transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end
that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle” (25). The Deleuzian-Guattarian
“transversal movement” eliminates the either/or positionality and instead offers a new relation to
both/and. I challenge Homi Bhabha’s claim that the “interstitial passage between fixed
identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without
an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (4). Such an assertion is an all too facile extolment of
“cultural hybridity” and ignores the painful experiences of being mixed race while failing to
consider that hybridity does not necessarily abolish hierarchies, racial or otherwise.
5

Furthermore, Bhabha’s “hybridity” runs the risk of universalizing or homogenizing the
postcolonial experience (as Fanon does at times), whereas the authors and characters in my
project demonstrate an ambivalent relation to their communities and traditions that renders them
products of a highly specific colonial(ist) and imperial(ist) legacy. Rather than embodying
“hybridity,” I argue that mixed-race subjects deploy their mixed-racial identities to achieve
certain positionalities while foreclosing others in what constitutes a Deleuzian-Guattarian
“transversal movement.” Ethnoracial configurations that describe racial and cultural mixing in
the Americas, such as mestizaje, mulatez, and creolization, offer modes of relationality in which
moving between positions is a key survival tactic.
6

5
I should note, however, that another scholar who positions his work within critical mixed-race studies
offers a more generous account of Bhabha’s conceptualization of hybridity. Tavia Nyong’o, in The Amalgamation
Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009), argues that Bhabha “associates hybridity with motion
and movement,” for hybridity is “less a socially instantiated thing than a process, less a noun than a verb” (12). I
find Nyong’o’s reading of Bhabha to be too charitable, and in fact I argue that Édouard Glissant was writing about
creolization as a process well over a decade before Bhabha published his work on hybridity. Given that Bhabha is
so familiar with Fanon’s oeuvre, it is strange that he does not engage with Glissant, who theorizes the postcolonial
condition in ways that anticipate Bhabha’s work from the 1990s. The English translations of Glissant’s work,
though, may have delayed Bhabha’s introduction to Glissant.
6
Chela Sandoval writes in Methodology of the Oppressed that what she calls “differential consciousness”
requires “enough grace to recognize alliance with others committed to egalitarian social relations and race, gender,
sex, class, and social justice, when these other readings of power call for alternative oppositional stands. Within the
realm of differential social movement, ideological differences and their oppositional forms of consciousness, unlike
7

Why Mestizaje and Creolization Now?
The question arises: Why turn to mestizaje, mulatez (which is a specific Afro-Caribbean
response to mestizaje), and creolization now, when Chicana/o Studies, Latina/o Studies, and
Caribbean Studies seem to be moving past those terms? An online article in the New York Daily
News from 23 June 2016 titled “Mixed race becomes second-fastest growing racial group in U.S.
behind Asian population” declared that the “melting pot is really cooking!” Stephen Rex Brown
went on to say that the “number of people who claimed two or more races grew by 3.1% to 6.6
million between July 2014 and July 2015,” which is taken as evidence that the US is more
quickly becoming the “melting pot” of assimilationists’ dreams and white nationalists’
nightmares. So, perhaps, it seems that we not entirely done with mestizaje, mulatez, and
creolization if racial mixing and cultural blending are being brought to the fore of debates about
race and identity and racial inequality. If the terms themselves are not and never have been used
on the US Census, then the issues they raise are being conspicuously addressed, although they
are packaged in different language.
Mestizaje (more so than mulatez or creolization) has been critiqued by Chicana scholars
who fault it for its homogenization of the Chicana/o community. In Mestizo Nations: Culture,
Race, and Conformity in Latin American Literature (2002), Juan E. De Castro argues that
“mestizaje” is a “word which, while literally meaning ‘miscegenation,’ can be understood as
proposing the creation of a homogeneous culture or race out of Amerindian, African, and
European (Spanish or Portuguese) elements” (2002, xiii). Although De Castro is specifically
writing about how mestizaje came to consolidate nationalism in the literatures of South America,

their incarnations under hegemonic feminist comprehension, are understood as tactics—not as strategies” (60, italics
added).
8

his argument holds up for the literature of the Chicano nationalist period.
7
In The Revolutionary
Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (2003), María Josefina Saldaña-
Portillo leverages a sustained critique against mestizaje, writing it off entirely, for “we can no
longer uncritically celebrate mestizaje in Chicana/o and other social formations as a positionality
of radical, postmodern hybridity but must recognize it as a racial ideology with its own
developmentalist history, one that has underwritten revolutionary movements in North and South
America prior to the age of development” (12). While I agree the mestizaje cannot be extoled as
a “positionality of radical, postmodern hybridity” due to its all-too-frequent problematic
homogenization of the Chicana/o community, the writers in my project who deploy mestizaje do
so while psychically feeling an ambivalence that urges them to critique homogenized community
formations. The gay mestizo alienated from the Chicano community, such as John Rechy
describes in his memoir, or the mestiza feminist who escapes her Mexican family and the
conservative political climate of the US to spend time in an imperialist Paris, such as Canela
Guerrero does in Josefina López’s play Hungry Woman (2013), forgo the developmentalist logic
of mestizaje and embody postnationalist, or even antinationalist, identities.
8

The racial ambivalence that the mestizo, mestiza, and Creole characters in my project
experience enables them to make critiques against the communities through which they move but
to which they never fully belong. Miranda Joseph’s critique of community in Against the
Romance of Community (2002) is helpful to consider here. She writes that “many feminist and
poststructuralist theorists writing in the 1980s and 1990s described identity political communities

7
One need only read Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles’s epic Yo Soy Joaquín/I am Joaquín (1967) for an explicit
claiming of indigenous, Spanish, and mestizo identities used to interpellate the Chicano nationalist subject and bring
him into the fold of movimiento politics.
8
Ellie D. Hernández makes the case for gender and sexuality as offering the most successful critiques
against nationalism: “While traditional elements of nationhood or of belonging, in the case of national minorities,
still exist in ethnic, race, and class structures, I conclude that gender and sexuality offer more varied responses to the
idea of the dissolution of the nation than any other identity process. I thus argue that gender and sexuality are
categories that arose in response to exclusion from the nation” (1).
9

as disciplinary and exclusionary”; yet, “[d]espite this persistent scholarly critique, a celebratory
discourse of community relentlessly returns” (viii). Joseph links the “celebratory discourse of
community” to the practices of capitalist consumption, but her point that invocations of
community discipline and exclude subjects is also made by writers like John Rechy and Piri
Thomas in their memoirs and Josefina López in her plays. The mixed-race subject is in the
peculiar position of often being excluded from the communities that generated him or her, which
necessitates a consideration of community-based and individualist identities.
Liberal individualism has long been the target of Leftist academics for its part in
perpetuating a specifically American myth of personal choice, self-determination, and class
ascendancy. In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism (2015),
political scientist Sharon R. Krause reminds us that “[h]uman agency is an assemblage of the
communicative exchanges, background meanings, social interpretations, personal intentions,
self-understandings, and even bodily encounters through which one’s identity finds affirmation
in one’s deeds” (10). Her argument is useful when thinking through the identity practices of the
mixed-race subjects I examine, whose actions are often limited, sometimes severely, or scripted
by social codes and mores beyond their control. Yet, their behaviors and deployments of
mestizaje, mulatez, and creolization do enable them to exercise a certain amount of self-
determination, though they lead to feelings of alienation or extreme psychic states of depression,
rage, or madness. Krause points out that the problem with liberal individualism is that it
“sometimes is mistaken for a theory of personal sovereignty” (13). The mixed-race subjects in
my archive, as racialized, gendered, and sexualized Others, do not achieve the “personal
sovereignty” enjoyed by those with more privilege, despite the seemingly individualist positions
they sometimes assume.
10

There is a certain tendency in discussions of political theory to oppose a specifically
Anglo-American liberal individualism to collectivist and communitarian political ideologies. In
The Myth of Liberal Individualism (1999), political theorist Colin Bird “asks whether, and on
what terms, it makes sense to classify liberal values as ‘individualist’ (rather than ‘collectivist’)
in the first instance” (1). Bird further argues that the “idea of individualism imputes to the liberal
tradition a false sense of unity” (3). I cite political theory here to countervail any claim that the
mixed-race subjects in my project subscribe to a unified doctrine of a hegemonic Anglo-
American liberal individualism, as it is generally (mis)understood by its critics, by experiencing
an acute alienation from the various communities through which they move. Their Deleuzian-
Guattarian “transversal movement” between ethnic, racial, class-based, gender, and sexual
communities dismantles the binary of individualist/collectivist identitarian positions rather than
upholds and calcifies it. David J. Vázquez, writing on Latina/o memoir and autobiographical
fiction in general and specifically on Piri Thomas’s memoir Down These Mean Streets (1967), a
text I close read in Chapter 2, “reflect[s] on the tension […] between hyperindividualism and
communal belonging” in literary works by Latina/os (66). Vázquez posits that Latina/o authors
use “narrative strategies to unpack the tension in [their] work between liberal individualism and
self-reliance on the one hand and communal affirmation on the other” (68). There is never any
simple dichotomizing of liberal individualism and collectivist/communitarian belonging in the
mixed-race literature I read. Rather, we should note the mixed-race subjects’ various tactics and
emplotment of competing and contradictory positions in order to survive exclusion from
communities that are nationalist, misogynist, and/or homophobic.
If mestizaje forged exclusionary (and often violent) nationalist communities, then
creolization has produced a collective alienation felt throughout its national community. For
11

Martinican Creoles, this collective alienation is the result of two factors: Martinique’s continued
economic dependence on France, and its cultural dependence on the metropole as revealed by
Martinicans’ linguistic isolation. Édouard Glissant argues that the “ambiguity of the relationship
of French to Creole would disappear and that each Martinican would have access to the
sociocultural means of using French without a sense of alienation, of speaking Creole without
feeling confined by its limitations” only by “such a complete change in structures” that he
considered impossible at the time of writing Caribbean Discourse (1981) (167). About thirty
years earlier in Black Skin, Whites Masks, Fanon had declared that the “problem we shall tackle
in this chapter is as follows: the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the
whiter he gets—i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being. […] You can see what
we are driving at: there is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language” (2). Fanon
means, of course, that there is an extraordinary power in possessing a colonial language if one is
a colonized subject. Yet, for Martinican Creoles, there is no way of possessing French without
experiencing the attendant alienation of using the colonizer’s language.
It is for this reason that Caliban, who hides out in Prospero’s library in Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, became a postcolonial icon in the twentieth century.
9
After Prospero and his daughter
Miranda vituperate Caliban, the enslaved native of the island says to them:
You taught me language, and my profit on ’t
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language! (1.2.437-39)

As for Caliban, writing in an imperial or colonial language can often feel like cursing the
imperialist or colonizer for some of the mixed-race writers in my archive, notably Glissant, Junot
Díaz, and Josefina López, who write in a colonial or imperial language that is not their native

9
For more on Caliban as a postcolonial figure for black and East Indian Creoles who claim an indigenous
Caribbean identity, see Shona N. Jackson’s Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (2012),
in particular Chapter 2: “Labor for Being: Making Caliban Work.”
12

tongue. For these writers, there is always a feeling of alienation both from the ethnic
communities in which they were born and raised and the dominant culture in whose language
they choose to write. In The Transit of Empire (2011), Jodi Byrd points to Caliban’s deployment
by diverse groups ranging from Latin American intellectuals to African diasporic writers of the
Caribbean to US critics who hold him up as the father of American literature, arguing that
“[w]henever another scholar or writer asserts a new meaning for Caliban and the play, the echoes
of previous claims remain, even as Caliban is refigured and recast as a postcolonial hero” (61).
Most mestizo and mestiza writers in the US create literature in English and most Creole writers
from the French Antilles employ a Caribbean-inflected French in their writing, which evinces the
extent to which transnationalism and a global readership have transformed the way ethnic writers
negotiate their racial, ethnic, and national identities in their work.
10
Mixed-race subjects, who
already feel caught between two or more worlds, are among the first to explore psyches fissured
by such constant back-and-forth (“transversal,” as Deleuze and Guattari would call it)
movement.
The Psychology of Mixed-Race Subjects
If 2016 was an important year for mixed-race subjects in American literature, then 2006
was a watershed moment for studies of mixed-race subjects in Chicana/o and Latina/o literature.
In that year was published Rafael Pérez-Torres’s Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano
Culture and Alicia Arrizón’s Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Both
studies insert themselves in debates about the “hybrid subject” and her/his contested position in

10
To invoke again Deleuze and Guattari, we can consider mestizo, mestiza, and French Creole writers as
forging a “minor literature,” which “doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority
constructs within a major language” (Kafka,16). Deleuze and Guattari compare Kafka’s “Prague German[,] [which]
is a deterritorialized language, appropriate for strange and minor uses” to “what blacks in America today are able to
do with the English language” (17). I would extend Deleuze and Guattari’s argument to say that what Kafka
achieved by writing in his Prague German is what Chicana/os and Afro-Latinos in the US accomplish by writing in
English and what Antillean Creoles achieve by writing in French.
13

postmodernism (although Arrizón’s study has much more historical breadth, for she examines
literature produced in colonial Cuba and the colonial Philippines). Pérez-Torres writes that the
“productive ambivalence of mestizaje undoes on a cultural level the distinction between self and
other” (34), but he does not address the psyche of mestizos and mestizas alienated from their
own communities and from the dominant Anglo (in John Rechy’s case) or US and French (in
Canela Guerrero’s case) communities through which they move precariously and uneasily. This
“productive ambivalence,” which is surely a nod to Gloria Anzaldúa, enables the mixed-race
subject to identify with that which would ordinarily exclude him or her.
11

Emma Pérez was one of the first Chicana critics to utilize psychoanalysis to theorize the
psyches of mixed-race (half-Chicana/o, half-white) subjects.
12
Her essay “Sexuality and
Discourse: Notes from a Chicana Survivor” draws from French feminist theory and Freudian and
Lacanian psychoanalysis to examine subjects who are products of interracial marriages. Coining
the “Oedipus-conquest-complex,” Pérez argues that as “an adult, the Chicano male is perceived
as the powerless son of the white Oedipal father who makes laws in his language. […] Within a
racist society, the mestizo male is a castrated man in relation to the white-male-colonizer father”
(168).
13
She points out that the “conquest triangle dictates the sexual politics of miscegenation in
the twentieth century” (168-69), and then describes the psychosexual dynamics of families with a

11
In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa writes that the “ambivalence
from the clash of voices results in mental and emotional states of perplexity. Internal strife results in insecurity and
indecisiveness. The mestiza’s dual or multiple personality is plagued by psychic restlessness” (100). Anzaldúa’s
“new mestiza” is often held up as a paradigmatic figure of postmodern hybridity and mestizaje. I, however, invoke
her here not to use Borderlands/La Frontera as a monolithic text but to indicate what sort of mixed-race subjects I
examine, that is, those whose ambivalence generates psychic fissures and “insecurity and indecisiveness.”
12
In Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire (2010), Sandra K. Soto points out Antonio
Viego’s role in noting how Emma Pérez “must be credited for being one of the only Chican@ Studies scholars of
subjectivity to employ psychoanalytic theory” (7).
13
One can see Pérez’s debt to both Freud, in her configuration of mixed-race Oedipal conflict, and Lacan,
in her insistence on the mestiza/o’s psychology being determined by language and its “laws.” For a reading of how
Pérez draws on specifically Lacanian psycholinguistic theories of subjectivity in her historiography and her Chicana
lesbian novel Gulf Dreams (1996), see Antonio Viego’s Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies
(2007), in particular Chapter 6: “Emma Pérez Dreams the Breach: Rubbing Chicano History and Historicism ’til It
Bleeds.”
14

Chicana mother, a white father, and mixed-race children; and families with a Chicano father, a
white mother, and mixed-race children. According to Pérez, Chicana/os who marry white people
enable social, if not economic, ascendancy for their mixed-race children; however, what is often
lost is the racialization that the parent of color has experienced.
The lost racialization of mixed-race subjects sometimes makes them experience
melancholia. Drawing on Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Anne Anlin
Cheng in The Melancholy of Race (2001) maintains that melancholia is “pathological; it is
interminable in nature and refuses substitution (that is, the melancholic cannot ‘get over’ loss.)
The melancholic is, one might say, psychically stuck” (8). Mixed-race subjects who pass for
white, as John Rechy does, or who feel themselves pitted against their differently raced parents,
as Piri Thomas does, become melancholic because they are “psychically stuck” in their racial
ambivalence. There is no way to resolve the contradictions and self-contradictions of their
psychic states and racial embodiment. These mixed-race subjects must rely on constantly
mutable performances of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality to reinvent themselves.
14

Although the various positionalities of the mixed-race subject enable certain identitarian moves,
others are foreclosed, for “[i]dentity may be something that is used strategically in order to
pursue specific social aims” (17), as José Quiroga reminds us in Tropics of Desire: Interventions
from Queer Latino America (2000).
Yet, the mixed-race performativity that I suggest is not an endless play of postmodern
hybrid identities, as earlier critics might have imagined. The mixed-race subjects in my

14
As Rafael Pérez-Torres reminds us, “The mestiza body as a body-in-becoming represents not the passive
inheritor of a disempowered past, forever severed from the utopian possibility of some always-evasive authenticity
or authority. Rather, the mestiza body moves—aware of the power dynamics in which it functions—in a constantly
negotiated process forging new relational identities. As empowering as this process may prove, implicit is an
awareness of loss as well” (216-17). Pérez-Torres is one of the few critics working on mestizaje who foreground
loss in mestizo and mestiza subjects. For more on mestizaje and melancholia, see Pérez-Torres’s Chapter 6:
“Narrative and Loss” in Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture. I fault Pérez-Torres, however, for not
engaging with psychoanalytic models in his consideration of loss in the mestizo or mestiza subject, as I do.
15

dissertation experience—I should say suffer—alienation, rage, depression, and even madness (in
the case of Mycéa from Glissant’s novel The Overseer’s Cabin [1981]). There is no
romanticizing the psychic pain these mixed-race subjects experience, but I do argue that such
pain is not entirely crippling or paralyzing. The affects and psychic states of alienation, rage,
depression, and madness prove resistant to absorption, assimilation, incorporation, and
cooptation into normative social codes of being and embodiment. Such an argument is what José
Esteban Muñoz offers in “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of
Race, and the Depressive Position” (2006). Muñoz argues that a specifically Latina(/o)
depressive position is “a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color
and other minoritarian subjects who don’t feel quite right within the protocols of normative
affect and comportment” (676). Furthermore, he argues that “[f]eeling brown in my analysis is
descriptive of the ways in which minoritarian affect is always, no matter what its register,
partially illegible in relation to the normative affect performed by normative citizen subjects”
(679). In other words, when Latinas embody a depressive position—or, in my work, when
mixed-race subjects experience alienation, rage, and/or madness—they resist incorporation into a
normative psychic register that is defined and measured by whiteness.
15
My project, therefore,
transports me into the realm of negative feelings.
Queer theory has been most sensitively attuned to the suite of negative feelings that
nonnormative subjects embody. Writing specifically about modernist fiction in the British and
US canons written by and about gay men and lesbians, Heather Love in Feeling Backward: Loss

15
Muñoz is quick to clarify that “[a]ffect is not meant to be a simple placeholder for identity in my work.
Indeed, it is supposed to be something altogether different; it is, instead, supposed to be descriptive of the receptors
we use to hear each other and the frequencies on which certain subalterns speak and are heard or, more importantly,
felt” (677). In borrowing Muñoz’s methodological approach to study mixed-race subjectivity, I use affect not to
stand in for identity but rather to register its fissures, contradictions, and paradoxes, to reveal the aporia of mixed-
race subjectivity.
16

and the Politics of Queer History (2007) maintains that “[f]eelings of isolation, ambivalence,
shame, and loneliness turn up not only in blistering works by the avant-garde or in maudlin
accounts of homosexual tragedy: they are also legible in tales of triumph and fulfillment” (167 n.
6). Many of the mixed-race subjects in my archive are queer, and although Love’s work does
not account for race insofar as the queers in her project define their whiteness against nonwhite
Others, I still find it useful to consider the negative feelings of mixed-race subjects, queer or
not.
16
Love argues compellingly that queer literary critics perform certain acceptable (meaning,
of course, by-now dominant) readings of queers in literature “in order to rescue or save them,”
but “[t]exts or figures that refuse to be redeemed disrupt not only the progress narrative of queer
history but also our sense of queer identity in the present” (8). Like Love, I do not set out to
“rescue or save” the mixed-race subjects in my project. Rather, my aim is to refunction the
racial ambivalence they feel, and the concomitant negative psychic states and affects they
embody, to reveal the resistant potentiality of such negative feelings. I fully recognize that being
mixed race in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries often leads one performing such identities
to experience great pain and suffering, but mixed-race subjects are not necessarily debilitated by
their pain or suffering. Their psychic discomfort, even agony, can prevent them from being
coopted into the state’s process of normalizing, disciplining, and containing all racially and
sexually nonnormative subjects. Although I do not want to overdetermine the narratives of
mixed-race identities as tragedy, my contention that the mixed-race psyche bears the discomfort
of a fissuring ambivalence necessitates a brief treatment of that most notoriously stereotypical of
tropes of the mixed-race figure, the “tragic mulatto/a.”

16
I take issue with Heather Love’s engagement with past queer writers like Radclyffe Hall and Willa
Cather, both of whom defined their white queer masculine identities against nonwhite Others: Jews (in Hall’s case)
and African Americans (in Cather’s case). The queers in my archive do not have the ability, or the desire, to
identify with white nationalism, as Radclyffe Hall did, or to write racist historical fiction as Willa Cather did with
her novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940).
17

The Trope of the “Tragic Mulatto/a”
The “tragic mulatto/a” is a trope that reached the zenith of its popularity in the mid-
nineteenth to the early twentieth century. I periodize my archive of mixed-race literature after
the beginning of the civil rights era (although John Rechy’s and Piri Thomas’s memoirs describe
their coming of age during World War II) largely to avoid having to contend with the figure of
the “tragic mulatto/a.” Yet, he/she still haunts the texts I examine, for the “tragic mulatto/a” is “a
determinist concept that can exert such power over writers that it has been hard, perhaps
impossible, for them not to use it” (228), as Werner Sollors claims in Neither Black Nor White
Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (1997). The Chicana/o mestiza/o,
Afro-Latino, and French Antillean Creole writers and playwrights whose work I examine self-
consciously respond to the trope of the “tragic mulatto/a” by investing their mixed-race
characters with the historical baggage of racial mixing. Ralina L. Joseph, in Transcending
Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (2013), describes
how
[s]ome representations equate mixed-race with pain: the multiracial individual is mired in
the confusion and problems imagined to be inherent in the racial mixture of black and
white. These images […] feature a twenty-first-century twist on the old stereotype of the
“tragic mulatto,” a phrase coined by the poet and literary scholar Sterling Brown in 1933
to connote the character who represents the problem of race mixing, and who is
inevitably ruined because she or he is a person “without a race.” (1-2)
The mixed-race characters in my archive are never people “without a race,” but their mixed-
racial heritage is the cause, though certainly not the only one, of their pain and suffering.

18

It must be acknowledged, too, that the “tragic mulatto/a” diverges from the figure of the
mestizo/a as he/she is embodied in Chicano/a and other Latino/a literature. In Mulattas and
Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850-2000 (2003), Suzanne Bost
points out that “[t]his figure of the tragic mulatto stands in direct contrast to contemporary
celebrations of multiculturalism, postmodern hybridity, and Latina/o mestizaje” (20), for
“[w]hile Mexican and Chicana/o histories feature mestizaje as a central component in defining
national identity, African-American identity has been built on greater racial polarization.
Mulatto identification thus represents racial transgression for both African-American and Anglo-
American identity” (21). Spanish conquistadores would marry the indigenous women they
colonized and give their surname to the mestizo children they fathered, but in the slavocracy of
the United States, slaveowners could not and did not marry the slave women they sexually
exploited, and their mixed-race children inherited their mothers’ slave status. Although there is a
trope of the “tragic mestizo” in Chicano literature (perhaps nowhere more famously depicted
than in Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez [1990]), the figure of the “tragic
mulatto/a” is much more overdetermined than any tropology of the mestizo/a in literature
produced in either English or Spanish.
17

The tragedies of racial exclusion, deracialization, and the accompanying extreme psychic
states of alienation, rage, depression, and madness do not, in the texts I read, lead to “[t]he
Mulatto suicide [as] the cultural given in American settings,” which also metes out such a fate to
“Quadroon and Octoroon lovers [who] survive only if they remove themselves to Europe with
their white suitors or spouses” (300); such are the fates of mixed-race African American

17
This is not to say that children of Spanish fathers and indigenous mothers were not considered inferior to
European colonizers. The casta paintings of colonial Mexico, or New Spain, meticulously recorded and ranked the
mixed-race children of interracial couples. Colorism and racism were still very much a part of daily life in colonial
Latin America, and they remain so today.
19

characters according to Werner Sollors in his article “‘Never Was Born’: The Mulatto, an
American Tragedy?” (1986). Sollors goes on to posit that the “themes of slavery and segregation
provided an ideal occasion for a tragic vision of America. In the revived polis of republicanism
there was a paradoxical emphasis on blood and clan (soon to be spelled with a “K”), in which
characters could easily be caught” (296-97). I revise Sollors’s argument to state that the themes
of colonization, genocide, rape, slavery, segregation, anti-immigrant policy, and continued
economic and cultural dependence on an imperial power provide the “tragic vision” of the US-
Mexico borderlands, the hispanophone Caribbean, and the French Antilles, in other words, of the
greater Americas. Whereas “tragic mulattoes/as” are so intriguing and, perhaps, even relatable to
white readers “because of their (nearly complete) whiteness” (Sollors, Neither Black Nor White
224), the mixed-race subjects in my archive resist assimilablity into whiteness and are often best
suited for critiquing the normativity of whiteness from a position of both inside and outside the
strictly policed boundaries of white subjectivity, however it is defined across the globe.
18

The Transnational Turn in Chicana/o Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Caribbean Studies
Over the past fifteen years, the transnational turn in American Studies has reshaped
scholars working in Chicana/o Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Caribbean Studies, forcing them to
consider how migration and the exchange of ideas, cultures, and capital have influenced
contemporary Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Caribbean subjects living in the US and elsewhere in the
Americas. For the purposes of my argument and my project, one of the most significant
contributions to studies of mixed-race subjects using a transnational framework is Alicia

18
My project departs from pre-World War II literature about mixed-race subjects in which they pass
successfully for white and assimilate into the white upper-middle class. Novels such as James Weldon Johnson’s
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912/1927) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) present characters of
black and white ancestry who acquire class ascendancy and successful mobility in cosmopolitan white milieus.
Johnson’s novel of passing is the less tragic of the two because his unnamed biracial narrator accepts the loss of his
African American identity in exchange for a white wife, white-passing children, and a lucrative job in New York.
Clare Kendry in Larsen’s Passing is the archetypal “tragic mulatta” figure who is punished for her successful
passing; at the novel’s conclusion, she either jumps or is pushed out of a window and falls to her death.
20

Arrizón’s Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Arguing that “[m]estizaje
may represent the illusionary notions of multiculturalism—both past and present,” she
nevertheless go on to claim that “mestizaje has been developed within the antiessentialist critique
of the ethnic, racial, and cultural conception of identity” (7). Arrizón traces this “antiessentialist
critique” from the US-Mexico borderlands to Cuba to the Philippines, revealing a transnational
articulation of mestizaje in various periods: the Chicano nationalist movement, a postnationalist
Chicana feminist critique of Chicano nationalism, Cuba and the Philippines as Spanish colonies,
and Cuba and the Philippines in the modern postcolonial era. Queering Mestizaje, however,
relies on the “interconnectedness [of queer and mestizaje] … [to suggest] a subjectivity that
exists in community, in process, diverse and multidetermined” (186). As I demonstrated earlier,
I push back against notions of community, however “diverse and multidetermined,” to examine
mestiza/o and other mixed-race subjects who feel alienated from community-based formations of
identity. I am more interested in the various kinds of violence that are enacted and justified in
the name of “community.”
A younger generation of Chicana scholars has begun to expose the violence perpetrated
against more vulnerable populations by the Mexican and Chicano people. Nicole M. Guidotti-
Hernández’s Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (2011)
is a transnational study of Mexico’s and Mexican America’s complicity in genocidal efforts
against indigenous peoples living in the US-Mexico borderlands. Guidotti-Hernández’s central
argument is that “Chicano nationalist and Chicana feminist scholarship have primarily and to a
degree understandably posited Mexican racial and even gendered identification as a refuge from
Anglo-American nationalist violence”; however, her “historical research demonstrates that this
was not always the case” (8). While I appreciate Guidotti-Hernández’s chipping away at the
21

nationalist and neonationalist currents running through Chicano and Chicana discourses, I fault
her for not considering how antinationalist Chicano subjects, like mixed-race hustler John Rechy,
subversively embody mestizaje. Arguing that a “chain of equivalence still persists: if Chicano,
then Mexican; if Mexican, then mestizo; if mestizo, then indigenous; if indigenous, then
resistant” (19), Guidotti-Hernández cannot conceive of a partly Anglo mestizo male sex worker,
such as Rechy, or a Mexicana/Chicana mestiza in Paris, such as Canela Guerrero, whose
ethnoracial and gender identities preclude them from belonging to nationalist or neonationalist
communities. Canela is a cosmopolitan Chicana whose global migrations and travels force her
to witness—and experience—imperialism from within “las entrañas del monstruo [the belly of
the beast].”
19

Caribbean studies, like Chicana/o studies and Latina/o studies—and like my own
project—has increasingly forged connections between intellectual currents generated within and
outside of its geopolitical area of study. In Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze:
Literature between Postcolonialism and Post-Continental Philosophy (2012), Lorna Burns traces
the influence of French poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze on such giants of Caribbean literature as
Édouard Glissant, Derek Walcott, and Wilson Harris. Burns writes that Caribbean writers are
“[f]aced with the historical legacies of colonialism and slavery, a new ‘vocabulary,’ and
resistance,” and that many of them “have echoed Césaire’s demand to move beyond the colonial
past in the articulation of a new, undetermined postcolonial identity (3).” She is quick to point
out, though, that such a new postcolonial identity makes a “very particular claim on
postcoloniality: calling for an understanding of the postcolonial moment as a specific relation to

19
This, of course, is José Martí’s famous phrase. Martí is perhaps apposite to consider here, since he was
exiled from Cuba and lived and worked in the US. Many colonized subjects, Canela being one, are forced to
migrate to and live and work in the imperial nation that displaced them. Chapter 4 illustrates how interracial and
interethnic alliances can be formed among displaced colonized subjects living in the metropole.
22

the colonial past which both preserves historical memory and moves beyond it” (3). In her
argument, Deleuze is a figure who has helped Caribbean writers to both “preserve historical
memory and move beyond it” with his “account of the imagination of the islands[,] [which]
reminds us is that it is not a matter of essential qualities but of processes” (4). This processual
configuration of contemporary Caribbean identity is formulated most forcefully in Glissant’s
conceptualization of creolization.
Although creolization has been theorized as a global and globalizing process, there are
some critics who contest its seemingly universalizing condition and its endless postmodern play,
indicating instead its specific historical origin. Charles Stewart, who edited the collection
Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory (2007), argues that in Caribbean Discourse,
Glissant “generalized the Caribbean experience of creolization as a globally occurring process.
All cultures absorb and continue to absorb influences from other cultures” (3). Yet, later critics
in the academy imposed creolization on utterly disparate racial mixtures and cultural blends,
seeming to forget Glissant’s commitment to French Antillean cultural and economic autonomy.
Citing Sidney Mintz, a leading figure in Caribbean anthropology and social history, Stewart
writes, “Today’s globalization does not bear comparison with the Caribbean where, ‘people …
subject to the original processes of creolization were—among things, and with their children—
manacled for life’” (4). In my own theorization of creolization, I remain committed to a
specifically Martinican deployment of the ethnoracial configuration, in particular its ability to
provide a counternarrative to the dominant narrative of Martinique’s history and that
counternarrative’s resistance to the French departmentalization of the island.
If, as Stewart maintains, “In contemporary theory it is not clear if the concept denotes
anything different from the apparently synonymous terms ‘syncretism’ and ‘hybridity’” (3), I
23

deploy creolization, as well as mestizaje and mulatez, over and against such by-now purely
celebratory postmodern terms as “syncretism” and “hybridity” to trouble the waters of racial
mixing and cultural blending. My project tarries in the interstices of racial ambivalence and its
concomitant states of mental discomfort and reveals the ways that alienation, rage, depression,
and madness can, under certain circumstances, enact decolonial critiques.
At a time when white nationalists hold the highest positions in the government of the
United States, it is necessary to trace what Emma Pérez in The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing
Chicanas into History (1999) calls “diasporic subjectivities” beyond their immigration to and
migration within the geopolitical borders of the US (78). Transnational projects in Chicana/o
studies and Latina/o studies must address circuits of exchange beyond those that occur from
Latin America to North America. In this sense, a play like Josefina López’s Hungry Woman
(2013), the subject of Chapter 4, and a novel like Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo; or, Puro Cuento
(2002) are texts that expand our understanding of transnational mestiza subjects and the various
positionalities they assume and occupy through time and space. With a president whose
campaign slogan was and main point of business is to “Make America Great Again,” it is
imperative that we remember how US citizens, including mestizas, become cosmopolitan
subjects and challenge the parochialism and isolationism of white nationalism. Dramatizing on
stage the trials and tribulations of Mexicana-turned-Chicana Canela Guerrero, who experiences
firsthand racism and xenophobia in two Western nation-states, the US and France, Hungry
Woman encourages Chicana/o studies scholars to consider how Chicana mestizaje
metamorphoses when not configured as a South-to-North latitudinal migration.
Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo, with its main narrator’s yearly migration to Mexico City
from Chicago with her mixed Mexican/Mexican American family, is a novel that challenges
24

unitary and essentialist notions of mestizaje as it is embodied in Mexico and the US. As Celaya
“Lala” Reyes drives across the US-Mexico border, she says, “As soon as we cross the bridge
everything switches to another language. Toc, says the light switch in this country, at home it
says click. Honk, say the cars at home, here they say tán-tán-tán. The scrip-scrape-scrip of high
heels across saltillo floor tiles” (17). The “language” switch from the US to Mexico is not
simply that of English to Spanish but the very sounds that machines and people make as
Mexicans go about their daily business. For a young Chicana mestiza like Lala, whose Mexican
father is of mixed Spanish and indigenous heritage and whose Mexican American mother is
reputedly of Yaqui descent, her diasporic subjectivity is defined by a transnationalism that
reverses the immigrant narrative of “crossing the border” from Mexico to become a naturalized
citizen of the US. Indeed, Sandra Cisneros herself is a diasporic Chicana as she now lives and
writes in Mexico and maintains dual US and Mexican citizenship.
20
Older forms of Chicana/o
studies relied on setting the scope of their scholarship within the geopolitical borders of the US,
which caused them to suffer from intellectual parochialism. However, as I have argued, more
recent monographs have exploded the disciplinary boundaries of older forms and positioned
Chicana/o studies and Latina/o studies within the transnational turn. My project on racial
ambivalence in mixed-race subjects extends and modifies this scholarship. The scope of my
project, spanning as it does three distinct and yet similar geopolitical areas, requires that I treat
different genres in my work, and a defense of my comparison of different genres is in order here.
The Politics of Genre
In my dissertation I examine memoirs, autobiographical fiction, non-autobiographical
fiction, and a play. One may believe that comparing such vastly different genres would lead to a

20
On the biographical page of Sandra Cisneros’s website, it states that she is a “dual citizen of the United
States and Mexico,” and that she “live[s] with many creatures, little and large, in central Mexico.” See
www.sandracisernos.com/bio.php.
25

different politics of criticism; however, in dramatizing mixed-race subjectivity in the text and on
the stage, the Chicana/o, Afro-Latino, and French Antillean Creole writers and playwrights I
examine remain committed to an oppositional politics and a politics of resistance. What each
writer and playwright is opposing and resisting differs based on her or his ethnoracial, national,
gender, sexual, and class identities; but suffice it to say that each author devotes herself or
himself to antiracist action and a decolonial praxis.
I examine memoir and autobiography with John Rechy’s About My Life and the Kept
Woman and Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets. Rather than succumbing to notions of
liberal individualist subject formation, as I have critiqued earlier, I believe that memoir and
autobiography open a privileged space for mixed-race subjects to “highlight their separation
from hegemonic norms by narrating a matrixed subject” (8), as David J. Vázquez states.
According to Vázquez, the “matrixed subject” is one embedded in many different discourses and
whose identity is intersectional; in other words, the Chicano mestizo hustler John Rechy and the
Afro-Puerto Rican Piri Thomas are subjects embedded in different discourses of class, race,
ethnicity, sexuality, and cultural nationalism or antinationalism. I position the memoirs of Rechy
and Thomas alongside more self-consciously “literary” forms such as the novel and the short
story because of the liberties memoirists take in fashioning the “self” in their autobiographical
work. Citing Linda Hutcheon (1989), Vázquez points out how “the ‘veracity’ required in
personal narratives is difficult to achieve for people who cannot represent themselves” (26),
thereby calling attention to the ways memoirists and autobiographers strategically weave fiction
into their first-person personal narratives. A postmodern Chicano writer as sophisticated as John
Rechy and a memoirist conscious of 1960s Boricua nationalism such as Piri Thomas emplot their
life experiences in a novelistic fashion in order to dramatize the complex identitarian terrain
26

mixed-race subjects traversed in the United States after World War II and during cultural
nationalist movements. As Vázquez argues, “The principles behind this editing [of memoirs and
autobiographies] usually conform to fiction” (26).
The fictionalization of memoir and autobiography allows me to close-read these texts in a
similar manner to the way I read autobiographical fiction by Junot Díaz and Justin Torres.
Although I am not conflating Díaz’s main narrator of his two collections of short stories and one
novel, Yunior de las Casas, with his creator, nor am I suggesting that the mixed-race narrator of
Torres’s We the Animals (2011), son of a Puerto Rican father and a white mother, is just a
literary stand-in for Torres, I do argue that there are elements of Díaz the author in his narrator
Yunior and elements of Torres the author in his nameless narrator, and these corresponding
components of identity are their antiracist critical charge. If we read, as I do, Díaz and Torres as
self-consciously antiracist Latino authors, then this antiracism finds itself into their fictional
subjects, who embody a politics of resistance, whether major or minor, to US imperialist
intervention in the hispanophone Caribbean and xenophobia and racial exclusion directed at
Latinos living the US.
Édouard Glissant, whose novels I examine in the third chapter, is in a different cadre. A
French Antillean writer whose global fame and recognition led to his being considered for the
Nobel Prize for Literature (ultimately, the committee gave it that year to Derek Walcott, a fellow
Afro-Antillean and a personal friend of Glissant’s), his novels are so slippery (“glissant” means
“slippery” in French) and playful in a postmodern way that it is necessary to read his theory
alongside his fiction to fathom his politics. I do precisely that, mining Caribbean Discourse
(1989) and Poetics of Relation (1997) while close-reading the novels The Overseer’s Cabin
(2011) and The Fourth Century (2001). Form in Glissant is predicated on his political
27

commitment to Martinican creolization, as Michèle Praeger reminds us in The Imaginary
Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary (2003) that Glissant “fashions a discourse […] that
ruptures the French language in its fundamental structure, its syntax, whose logic the French do
not question. This brutal and lyrical upheaval is the sine qua non of the expression of a Creole
culture, still unsure of itself. This fracturing of French language and logic shows how the Creole
culture forges, in the crevices, a place for itself” (173). Glissantian creolization requires that
form reflect the contradictions, complexities, and mixing of French Antillean identities.
Glissant’s forms remain supple enough to embody Creole subjectivity while also being firmly
opposed to French colonization and departmentalization of Martinique.
Theatre, out of all the genres I treat in this dissertation, is the one most invested in
forging community through the immediacy of performance and its effect on the audience
gathered in the theatre space. I end my dissertation with an examination of Josefina López’s
play Hungry Woman (2013) to demonstrate how mixed-race subjects, despite the ambivalence
fissuring their psyches, can build solidarity in interstitial/borderland spaces. My dissertation
traces how mixed-race subjects navigate their alienation and dislocation in memoir to
experiencing depression, rage, and madness in autobiographical and non-autobiographical fiction
and ends with a commitment to a collective politics of resistance in a play staged at a
community-based theatre in a largely Latinx neighborhood of Los Angeles. “To be a Chicana or
Chicano is to recognize the oppression, to try to understand it and to attempt to change it. That is
how Chicana/o theatre began and that is how it will continue” (192), argues Jorge Huerta in
Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth (2000). Josefina López, by housing CASA
0101, her theatre, in a largely Latinx neighborhood and producing plays by and about Latinxs,
continues the tradition of Chicano theatre begun with Luis Valdez and el Teatro Campesino in
28

the 1960s, but inflects it with a feminist politics to privilege Chicana and Latina subjects on stage
and in the theatre-making process. Such feminist autonomy in the world of the theatre is
achieveable only after the success of the movements launched and led by women of color, some
of whom, such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, laid the groundwork for what is now
called Critical Mixed Race Studies by centering the mixed-race subject in their theory,
autohistoria(-teoría), poetry, and plays.
21

Mixed-Race Subjects in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
I periodize my archive from after World War II to the contemporary moment in order to
move past the tropes of tragic mixed-race characters that dominated nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century literature. The first half of my dissertation is an examination of mixed-race
Latino men who are queer in the sense that they engage in sex with other men, rather than by
their self-identification. My first chapter, “‘Exiled Doubly’: John Rechy’s Shifting
Performances and Deployment of Mestizaje,” reads John Rechy’s memoir, About My Life and
the Kept Woman (2008), to trace his strategic deployment of mestizaje as he passed for white in
Jim Crow Texas. Born and raised in El Paso before the rise of the civil rights movement, the
young Rechy navigates his identity as the son of a father of Scottish descent and a Mexican
mother at a time when the division between Anglos and Mexicans was strictly enforced. His
phenotype allows him to pass for white, although he does so consciously—and subversively—in
order to expose the racist underpinnings of the white milieus through which he moves. This
generates in him considerable psychic discomfort and leads him to feel racial ambivalence both
toward the Anglo community that treats him as white and the Mexican American community that

21
According to AnaLouise Keating in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (2009), Anzaldúa coined the terms
autohistoria and autohistoria-teoría to “describe women-of-color interventions into and transformations of
traditional western autobiographical forms. […] Autohistoria focuses on the personal life story but, as the
autohistorian tells her own life story, she simultaneously tells the life story of others” (319).
29

views him as an outsider. When he is older, Rechy becomes a male hustler in urban spaces like
Los Angeles, where he passes as a straight man in order to satisfy the desires of the men who pay
him for sex. His position as a hustler and a Chicano passing for white disallows him from
feeling a sense of belonging to any one community. I argue that Rechy’s individual deployment
of mestizaje and his alienation from the various communities he moves between presents a
challenge to community-based deployments of mestizaje, particularly those of the Chicano
movement during the 1960s and 1970s, when Rechy was still hustling. Rechy’s embodiment of
mestizaje unyokes it from community-based formations and demonstrates that mestizaje can be
defined at the level of the individual.
In Chapter 2, “Fragile Masculinities and Mulatez: Afro-Latino Queerness,” I move from
the US-Mexico borderlands to treat diasporic subjects of the hispanophone Caribbean,
investigating the imbrication of mixed-race masculinity and homoerotism. Mulatez, or the racial
mixture of African and Spanish elements, is the ethnoracial configuration that the mixed-race
writers in this chapter avow. However, in embodying a masculinity inflected by mulatez, Yunior
de las Casas, Afro-Dominican writer Junot Díaz’s main narrator in his oeuvre, and Piri Thomas,
an Afro-Puerto Rican memoirist, simultaneously disavow any gay or queer male identity. Their
refusal to self-identify as “gay,” “bisexual,” or “queer” enacts a critique of white
homonormativity and specifically white gay male normativity by problematizing the white
middle-class demand to be legibly gay or queer subjects in a universalizing schema. I end the
chapter with a reading of Justin Torres’s novel We the Animals (2011). Torres’s nameless
narrator, a young proto-gay boy with a white mother and Afro-Puerto Rican father, finds himself
navigating the terrain of the mixed-race family along with his two older brothers. Eventually,
the narrator becomes a young adult and accepts his burgeoning gay sexuality as a mark of his
30

whiteness and class mobility and his primary sign of difference from his two brothers. In the
cultural and class ethos of his poor mixed-race family, a working-class Latino identity is
incompatible with that of a young gay man whose keen intelligence promises him upward class
mobility. The narrator’s ambivalence toward his mixed-race family and his own sexuality
complicates dominant white gay male narratives of homosexuality as the sole sign of difference
from the family.
Lingering in the Caribbean but moving to the French Antilles, Chapter 3, “Revisiting
Glissant from the Eighties: Thirty Years of Antillean Discourse on Creolization,” reads
Martinican poet, playwright, novelist, and theorist Édouard Glissant’s novels and essays on
creolization that would be his most influential work in the anglophone world. In particular, I
read his 1981 novel La case du commandeur, translated by Betsy Wing as The Overseer’s Cabin
(2011), to mine the racial ambivalence of Mycéa, a Martinican Creole woman who experiences
rage and madness. This rage, which I argue is both feminist and decolonial, is provoked by the
French departmentalization of Martinique and is directed at both France and her fellow
Martinicans, whom she believes are complicit in Martinique’s continued economic and cultural
dependence on France. Mycéa’s madness, which leads to her institutionalization, is generated by
her carrying a counternarrative to the dominant history of Martinique: a counternarrative of the
failed interracial alliance between the maroons, escaped slaves who fled into the hills, and the
indigenous peoples of the island. The text itself—which is a rhizomatic narrative in the
Deleuzian-Guattarian sense—rather than the failed alliance, is what offers a decolonial critique
against departmentalization. The feminist rage and madness Mycéa suffers, though it surely
debilitates her, is an index of how significant this counternarrative she carries is. Glissant is one
31

of the few novelists and theorists of his time who allowed madness its subversive quality in
Caribbean writing.
My fourth and final chapter, “A Chicana Mestiza in Paris: Transnational Decolonial Icon,
Affects, and Triangulation in Josefina López’s Hungry Woman,” returns to the US-Mexico
borderlands of Chapter 1, but triangulates Chicana mestizaje by considering its racialization and
gendering in Paris. Just as Mycéa is a colonized subject experiencing the legacy of French
imperialism, Canela Guerrero, the lead character in Josefina López’s play Hungry Woman
(2013), finds herself navigating the tortu(r)ous terrain of both US and French imperialism.
Canela is a Chicana in Boyle Heights who immigrated to the US without documents before
becoming a naturalized citizen. She calls off her wedding and spends several months in Paris
after George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. Canela’s racial and gender positionalities are formed
by her experiences of racism and xenophobia in both the US and France and the misogynist
practices and traditions of her Mexican family. Consequently, Canela is both drawn to Mexican
culture and critical of it, which is dramatized by her relationship with La Calaca Flaca, “the
skinny skeleton” icon of Mexican tradition who follows Canela to Paris and tempts Canela, with
both erotic gestures and food, to follow her into death. I argue that La Calaca Flaca is a
decolonial icon of Mexican mestiza origin that symbolizes Canela’s ambivalence toward her own
culture and family as well as figures a specifically Chicana mestiza resistance to the racist and
xenophobic practices of the US and French nation-states. Canela’s stay in France and her
participation in the Paris riots of 2005 prefigure her commitment to immigrant rights activism in
her adopted home of Boyle Heights. The decolonial triangulation between Mexico, the US, and
France stages a transnational encounter of Chicana mestizaje with cosmopolitan Western Europe.
32

The racial ambivalence felt by the characters in my project leads them to experience
alienation, rage, depression, and/or madness; yet, these extreme affects and psychic states carry a
powerful critical charge in them. Racial ambivalence and its attendant affects enable mixed-race
subjects to leverage decolonial, feminist, or queer critiques from within spaces that would
ordinarily be denied to many other colonized, female, or queer male subjects. It is for this reason
that I believe racial ambivalence in mixed-race subjects is worthy of consideration in this era of
overt white nationalism and expanding global neoliberalism.

33

Chapter 1: “Exiled Doubly”:
John Rechy’s Shifting Performances and Deployment of Mestizaje

… I was “la güera”—fair-skinned. Born with the features of my Chicana mother, but the skin of
my Anglo father, I had it made.

—Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years

“Passing” for white is a politically and psychologically charged act, oftentimes incurring
accusations of cultural betrayal by those who cannot pass and seen as confirmation of self-
loathing by white Americans. The light-skinned mixed-race subject was made one of the
dominant tropes of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American literature by white,
African American, and Mexican American writers. It was not until after the civil rights era and
the various ethnonationalist movements of the sixties that light-skinned mixed-race characters in
American literature were allowed to challenge the tragic fates meted out to them by writers of
previous generations. Although passing is considered an overdetermined trope in African
American literature, it was also a feature of Mexican American modernist texts, perhaps nowhere
more famously than in Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez (published in 1990 but
written in the 1930s). The mestizo in Mexican American modernist literature bears similarities
to the mulatto or mulatta of Harlem Renaissance fiction. In his memoir About My Life and the
Kept Woman (2008), John Rechy carves out a space for himself as a queer light-skinned mestizo
son of an Anglo father and a Mexican mother who passes for both white and straight without
succumbing to the tropology of the tragic mixed-race figure. Moreover, he writes about being
mixed race and doubly passing in such a way that resists and challenges the normative
configuration of mestizaje as authorized by Chicano nationalist discourse during the years of el
movimiento.
34

Mestizaje has been theorized as a destabilizing force in Chicana/o discourses that permits
fluid identities rather than rigid ethnoracial configurations. Often, however, what is overlooked
in discussions of mestizaje is the critical self-deployment that exists at the level of the individual
and not at the level of the community. Historically, mestizaje has been used in the Chicano
community at different times for different means, but these deployments are usually treated
within the context of Chicano nationalism, el movimiento politics, or Chicana feminism rather
than as the self-inventing and self-defining practices of individual subjects. Many subjects must
navigate the terrain of mixed-race identities and the multiple performances of self that such
identities both invite and necessitate. The individual self-deployment of mestizaje becomes
necessary as a Chicana or Chicano must rely on a fluid sense of self to negotiate treacherous
environments—as when passing becomes necessary—as well as to accentuate her or his
difference from an Anglocentric racial politics that would seek to elide it. The decision of how
to (re)present one’s mestizaje is always fraught with contradictions and ambivalence. Just as
individual mixed-race subjects shift their identities through time and space depending on the
spatiotemporal locations of their milieus, so too does mestizaje shift the possibilities and
limitations of experience when it is critically used to achieve a multiplicity of identity
formations—whether ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, or class-based—that are assumed to resist
exclusion in various social groups.
Mestizaje as I trace it operates less as a term of racial self-identification—as it is
explicitly deployed in literature produced during the rise of Chicano nationalism in the mid-
1960s to 1970s—and more as a description of racial dynamism that is both embodied corporeally
and experienced in the psyche. John Rechy, the mixed-race Chicano gay novelist whose specific
ethnic and racial mixture grants him access to, even as he simultaneously experiences a sense of
35

exclusion from, several social milieus, bears out and embodies the slippage and liminality of a
mestizo identity as he lives out the psychic, social, sexual, ethnic, racial, and class contradictions
of mestizaje. Rechy, who strategically deploys his mestizaje differently depending on his
spatiotemporal location, reinvents and redefines a queer mestizo identity by “passing” as white
and/or straight to subvert the dominant racist and heterosexist order that would ordinarily
exclude him as a Chicano gay man coming of age in the Jim Crow era. As a mixed-race Chicano
hustler who feels “exiled doubly” from both the Mexican and Anglo communities, John Rechy’s
memoir challenges understandings of mestizaje as an always ethnonationalist configuration or a
group identity formation tethered to static or essentialist racial ideologies. The racial
ambivalence that Rechy feels toward the Chicano community and the dominant Anglo
community in which he passes as white alters the discourse on mestizaje by exposing its psychic
fissures and uncertainties.
Redefining the Contours of Mestizaje
John Rechy’s 2008 memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman, describes his shifting
performances of mestizaje as he moves between milieus hostile to Chicanos and gay men.
Oftentimes, he writes about “passing” as white, middle-class, straight, or a combination of these,
which is enabled both by Rechy’s phenotype as the son of a father of Scottish descent and a
Mexican mother as well as his keen ability to sharply read his scene and invent a self that
satisfies the desires of the social world through which he moves. Rechy “passes” at key
moments in the text when he describes situations that necessitate it: an experience with Texas
border patrolmen during which his position teeters on violence, and his time spent hustling when
a brown-skinned “straight” hustler with blue eyes and a non-threatening ethnic and racial
difference satisfies the men who pay Rechy for sex. The stakes of Rechy’s shifting his
36

performances of mestizaje and passing successfully in these moments are, I will show, quite
high. At these times his self-deployment and reinvention of mestizaje is not motivated so much
by a psychic sense of difference as by the material conditions of living as a Chicano growing up
in perilous Jim Crow Texas, when segregation was enforced against “Mexicans.” Arguing that
Rechy’s strategic passing is a subversive embodiment of mestizaje, I will use Rechy to indicate
how mestizaje can be transformed at the level of the individual. I depart from critics who argue
that mestizaje is always understood as being critically defined by a nation or a group resisting
marginalization within the nation and instead offer a reading that invests the self (in this case,
John Rechy’s multiple selves) with the ability to deploy, perform, and reinvent mestizaje.
Several scholars have critiqued Chicana/o uses of mestizaje for putting indigeneity under
erasure and dehistoricizing and ossifying the Indian. I cite these scholars not because of my
argument’s engagement with indigeneity but because these same scholars contend that mestizaje
homogenizes the Chicano people under an ethnoracial configuration maintained by a community
configured as either nationalist or neonationalist. I call into question scholars who assert that
mestizaje homogenizes Chicana/os and that it always invokes community by arguing that John
Rechy critically redefines mestizaje through his individual deployment and shifting
performances of a queer mestizo identity. His performances as a queer mestizo hustler depart
from community-based configurations of mestizaje upheld during the reign of Chicano
nationalism. Theorizing mestizaje at the level of the individual allows me to read the
performative aspects of mestizaje, foregrounding its ability to both destabilize and de-
essentialize Chicano identity.
In her critique of nationalist and neonationalist deployments of mestizaje, which she sees
as having caused profound cultural and epistemic violence, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian
37

demands that Chicana/os “must break out of the prisonhouse of nationalism if we/they are to
engage our/their social intersected ethnicities ‘on the inside’” (270). She argues that mestizaje
has been essentialized and “presupposes a confluence, based on equal mixtures, with the Chicano
as the confluence and the other two, the Indians and the españoles, as the tributaries” (267).
Chabram-Dernesesian finds mestizaje to be an ethnoracial ideology incapable of describing the
present positionalities of Chicana/os because it has been used to inscribe a now static (and
exclusive) collective racial identity on the Chicana/o community. Writing contemporaneously
with Chabram-Dernersesian, queer theorist and performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz
argues that the “the Creole or the mestizo […] are paradigms that help account for the
complexities and impossibilities of identity, but, except for a certain degree of dependence on
institutional frames, what a subject can do from her or his position of hybridity is, basically,
open-ended” (79). Opposing Chabram-Dernersesian and other critics who critique Chicana/o
uses of mestizaje as essentialist and homogenizing, I am in agreement with Muñoz’s more
generous and optimistic reading of hybrids (and mestizos). I take John Rechy’s memoir to
explore the interstitial spaces of mestizaje wherein a mixed-race Chicano hustler may position
himself and perform a destabilizing and de-essentializing individual embodiment of mestizaje.
Recognizing his difference from other Mexicans and Chicanos in his hometown of El
Paso, Rechy describes early in his memoir the aporia of his existence:
From the beginning of my memories, I felt myself an outsider formed by
contradictions. I was poor but with inherited memories of gentility. Of “mixed
blood”—Mexican and Scottish—I was considered a guerro,
22
a Mexican who

22
Rechy’s pochismo, his spelling of the Spanish güero (here meaning fair-skinned) as “guerro,” reflects an
instance of linguistic mestizaje in which Spanish is mutated to give the word a valence it would not possess in its
more recognizable spelling. It is possible that Rechy was engaging in Spanish wordplay: guerro seems to collapse
38

didn’t look Mexican by entrenched standards. My complexion was fair; my hair
was almost blond in summer; my eyes were blue like my father’s, although I often
insisted they were green, like my mother’s. Though I was constantly told that I
was very good-looking, it was difficult for me to make friends—I didn’t want to
make friends—among other Mexican children in our neighborhood, who, at
times, stared at me. (38)
Much of this passage was anticipated in Rechy’s 1984 introduction to City of Night (1963), in
which he describes beginning an autobiographical novel in his mid-teenage years about “a half-
Mexican, half-Scottish boy, doubly exiled in many ways: by his ‘mixed’ blood (especially
significant in Texas), by his present poverty contrasted to his parents’ memories of wealth and
gentility; he was ‘popular’ only during school hours, after which he rushed home to secret
poverty” (3).
The introduction to City of Night illustrates that from a very early age Rechy has been
preoccupied with his feeling of being “doubly exiled” as a mixed-race Chicano of partly Anglo
descent. His racial and ethnic mixture—as well as his phenotype—make him an ethnic
chameleon who embodies a configuration of mestizaje largely left out of Chicano discourse.
Rather than forging solidary with other Chicana/os in the Mexican community of El Paso,
Rechy’s embodiment of mestizaje leads him to feel a profound sense of dislocation and
difference from other Chicana/os, thereby untethering mestizaje from essentialist discourses
sustaining it as a homogenizing force. His (dis)identification with mestizaje, which I (and he)
trace matrilineally through his Mexican mother, allows him mobility in and between worlds that
often remain hostile to each other.

the Spanish guerrero, meaning “warrior” in its noun form and “warlike,” “argumentative,” or “quarrelsome” in its
adjectival form, with güero, thereby accentuating Rechy’s bold outsider status, in which he takes a certain pride.
39

More recently, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández takes up Chabram-Dernersesian’s
argument of more than ten years before. She faults Chicana/os for reproducing and still
circulating narratives of mestizaje that are neonationalist in nature, arguing that “neonationalism
then becomes the structure of power in the field, shaping the intellectual production and
maintaining a particular kind of control over what is venerated as authentically Chicano and what
is ignored. Neonationalism is culturally understood as an unspoken ideology or idiom of
resistance that most often is articulated as ‘mestizo equals Indian’” (18). Such neonationalist
narratives of mestizaje that are used to generate a collective sense of identity for the Chicana/o
community do not characterize how an individual like John Rechy navigates his sense of ethnic
and racial identity. Rechy deploys his mestizaje against the “unspoken ideology” that reifies
mestizaje as “‘mestizo equals Indian,’” writing instead about his sense of dislocation as a blue-
eyed, light-skinned, mixed-race Chicano coming of age in Jim Crow Texas. In his deployment
of mestizaje, Rechy destabilizes both community-based and ethnonationalist configurations of
mestizaje that romanticize an ossified indigeneity. Further accentuating his sense of difference,
he writes, “My ambiguous identity as a guerro exiled me doubly. Other Mexican students were
cool. Among ‘rich Anglos’ who did not know I was Mexican, I felt like a trespasser” (50). His
status as a “trespasser” in the Anglo community affords him opportunities few other Chicanos at
the time had, and his identity as a güero makes him feel “exiled doubly” while disassociating
him from the nationalist movements in the 1960s trying to reclaim an indigenous ancestry.
Rechy’s “ambiguous identity” and his “trespasser” status engender racial ambivalence in his
psyche toward both the Mexican community he (dis)claims and the Anglo community in which
he passes.
40

Like Chabram-Dernersesian and heavily influencing the work of Guidotti-Hernández,
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo critiques mestizaje for reproducing the impulse to authenticate
indigenous origins for the Chicana/o community. In her argument, mestizaje is tethered to
community-bound cultural and discursive practices of legitimating claims to Aztlán. She writes
that “in mestizaje, we are reduced to searching for signs of our indigenous past and, more
significantly, for a collective political future in some inherent tie to the land” (413). This
“collective political future” is envisioned, according to Saldaña-Portillo, by a Chicana/o
community that deploys mestizaje in much the same way mestizo elites in Mexico deployed
mestizaje in their attempt to homogenize the Mexican population after the revolution. In other
words, for Saldaña-Portillo and other critics of her school like Chabram-Dernersesian and
Guidotti-Hernández, mestizaje can only ever be defined by a Chicana/o community bound to
collective nationalist or neonationalist narratives. Rechy’s individual embodiment of mestizaje
challenges community-based deployments of mestizaje that seek to homogenize a heterogeneous
Chicano population under nationalist or neonationalist narratives.
Responding to Saldaña-Portillo, Rafael Pérez-Torres offers a critique of comparing
Chicano deployments of mestizaje to Mexican national uses of mestizaje. He argues that is it
“important to draw a distinction between mestizaje in the context of Mexican and Chicano
identity formations …. The mestizo and mestiza body in Chicano critical discourse has helped
forge an identity that highlights the relational and political dynamics of Chicana/o identity
through the recognition of race and race mixture” (14-15). I agree with Pérez-Torres that
Chicano mestizaje needs to be considered separately and apart from Mexican nationalist
deployments of mestizaje. Like Pérez-Torres, I read Chicano mestizaje as a critical embodiment
of racial difference opposing an Anglocentric US subjectivity. As I will show, John Rechy
41

performs mestizaje differently at different times while undermining the nationalist impulses that
certain scholars argue have become inevitably entangled with community-based deployments of
mestizaje. Rechy reveals that mestizaje is not always defined at the level of the community
(however that community is configured) or by nationalist impulses but by the critical deployment
performed by the individual as well. My project demonstrates that mestizaje can be unyoked
from Chicano nationalism and that it could be done in the 1960s when John Rechy worked as a
queer mestizo hustler. I focus on the performative aspects of mestizaje as it is embodied by a
subversive queer mestizo, a move that is both de-essentializing and indebted to queer theory.
I turn now to Gloria Anzaldúa, who has shaped the intersection of mestizaje and queer
theory more seminally and more profoundly than anyone else. With the 1987 publication of
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa added to conceptualizations of the
multiplicity of identities and the simultaneous sense of belonging and exclusion in mestizaje a
feminist and queer sensibility, one that cannot be disregarded or neglected in any discussion of
mestizaje because it has been so firmly planted in the theoretical grounds of its discursive
deployment. For her, the borderlands are the homeland of the mestiza, as well as of “the squint-
eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half
dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (25).
Rechy is a Chicano writer whose body of work claims and interrogates the space of the “the
perverse,” “the queer,” and “the mongrel” or “the half-breed” and whose sense of exclusion
operates at many different levels due to his unique position within the many and diverse
communities he inhabits.
23
His mixed-race subjectivity foregrounds the contradictions of a

23
Anyone familiar with John Rechy’s oeuvre knows that his first novels have protagonists with white
fathers and Mexican mothers, which is why I say he claims “the mongrel” and “the half-breed” in his work. His
commitment in his oeuvre to depicting deviant sexualities of both men and women leads me to conclude that he
claims the space of “the queer” and “the perverse” as well.
42

mestizo identity and exposes the inherent slipperiness of mestizaje as an ethnoracial
configuration.
It seems appropriate to juxtapose Anzaldúa’s queer mestizaje with Rechy’s resistance to
the label “Chicano” and the concomitant tensions of the destabilizing mestizaje that he embodies
because both are queer writers who were born and raised in poor border towns in Texas.
24

Rechy’s early fiction is largely autobiographical, and his male protagonists were modeled, both
ethnically and sexually, on Rechy himself, who chronicles his experiences as a mixed-race
Chicano born to poor parents from Mexico in El Paso, Texas. I take Rechy, the Rechy of his
memoir, who reveals his experiences through the unreliable frame of memory,
25
to be a figure
whose liminality and alterity as a mixed-race hustler make him paradigmatic of the shifts
mestizaje has undergone since its promulgation as the unifying racial configuration during
Chicano nationalism and el movimiento in the 1960s.
A more recent scholar and critic who has written on the intersection of queerness and
mestizaje is Alicia Arrizón, whose Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance
examines how imperialism and transnationalism inflect mestizaje. She arrives at her definition
of queerness (which is, like mestizaje, a slippery identity formation) primarily through a reading
of Chicana feminist cultural producers, many of whom make lesbian sexuality a central analytic
of their writing, performance, and art. I find her helpful in my project of reading John Rechy as
a queer mestizo figure who challenges both the dominant strain of Anglocentric queerness in the
US and a conception of mestizaje that does not use queerness as a significant analytic in its

24
Anzaldúa writes, “In the 1960s, I read my first Chicano novel. It was City of Night by John Rechy, a gay
Texan, son of a Scottish father and a Mexican mother. For days I walked around in stunned amazement that a gay
Chicano could write and could get published” (81). Anzaldúa’s assessment of John Rechy in the 1960s as a “gay
Chicano” and City of Night as a “Chicano novel” is decades ahead of its time, since it took until the late 1980s and
early 1990s for Chicano critics to accord Rechy a place in the canon of Chicano literature. For further discussion of
the delayed acceptance of Rechy as a Chicano writer, see Frederick Luis Aldama (47-53).
25
A disclaimer that Rechy prefaces his memoir with is: “This is not what happened; it is what is
remembered. Its sequence is the sequence of recollection.”
43

ethnoracial configuration. Arrizón is invested in “‘mestiza-ing’ or ‘browning’ the queer body” in
her work (175), but she also argues that “as an ongoing conflict within the hybrid body, the
question of purity deconstructs the myth of ‘desired’ authenticity” (168). I understand her here
to be critiquing those scholars I cited earlier who assert that mestizaje is a community-based or
(neo-)nationalist configuration employed for the purpose of authenticating indigenous racial and
ethnic origins for the Chicano people. Instead, as a performance studies scholar, Arrizón situates
mestizaje as a de-essentializing performance, a critical move that I make. I will demonstrate that
Rechy’s early life requires him to self-deploy his mestizaje in such a way that his performance of
race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality secures his safe passage and his desirability in dangerous
social worlds, whether they are Jim Crow Texas or the largely white world of male hustlers and
the men who pay them, where Rechy made a living on the streets.
That mestizaje in most of its historical formations has been deployed in a
heteronormative manner is a critique made by Richard T. Rodríguez, who traces an archive of
Chicano nationalist manifestoes, essays, poems, and images that frame the discourse of Aztlán
around the Chicano family. Especially significant for my argument is that Rodríguez’s archival
work illustrates that “masculinity must always be achieved within a heterosexual and
reproductive kinship matrix, a sentiment that underscores most cultural nationalist narratives and
mimics the dominant political rhetoric on the family” (53). Chicano nationalists mapped a
heterosexist and masculinist mestizaje onto Aztlán and onto the normative Chicano family unit
and those who constituted it. However, Rodríguez’s alternative archive demonstrates that
Chicano gay poets, hip-hop artists, and visual artists embody a mestizaje that challenges the
heterosexism and masculinism of community-based articulations of Chicano nationalist
mestizaje.
44

Cultural nationalism, especially that which was espoused during the ethnic liberation
movements of the US during the 1960s and 1970s, either neglected to consider how gender and
sexuality intersect as identity models with ethnic models of community belonging, or it hostilely
configured nonnormative gender and sexuality as cultural betrayals. Ellie D. Hernández writes:
“While traditional elements of nationhood or of belonging, in the case of national minorities, still
exist in ethnic, race, and class structures, I conclude that gender and sexuality offer more varied
responses to the idea of the dissolution of the nation than any other identity process. I thus argue
that gender and sexuality are categories that arose in response to exclusion from the nation” (1).
Taking a cue from Hernández, I not only argue that John Rechy’s butch mestizo hustler posture
was a response to his sense of exclusion from Chicanismo in the 1960s, it registers his own
ambiguous and ambivalent feelings about the Chicano community and el movimiento. Living as
a butch mestizo hustler during the heyday of Chicano nationalism, Rechy thus embodied a
critique of the dominant cultural rhetoric of mestizaje. Mestizaje’s own historical ambiguity as
an identification leaves interstices for Rechy to assert his iconoclastic racial and sexual
performances of self. I intend to use Rechy’s representation of himself in his memoir to examine
queer mestizaje and the role of the queer mestizo in male hustling, a role that is both precarious
and fraught with ambivalence.
John Rechy’s Mixed-Race Queer Affinities
Near the beginning of his memoir, Rechy tells the reader that the “geographical proximity
had created in Texas a class of unique immigrants—men and women of education and means
who had fled Mexico during the revolution of 1910, when Porfirio Díaz, the president turned
dictator, was forced into exile …. That class of formerly privileged Mexican immigrants often
45

claimed ancestral lineage to ‘someone noble in Spain’” (2). He then reveals that both of his
parents, born in Mexico, belonged to this class. Furthermore, he states that
they grasped onto a societal hierarchy, disdaining those Mexicans of Indian
ancestry, a fact revealed, they staunchly claimed, by darker skin, by their
“chicanismos”—crude mannerisms, the designation “chicano” being relegated
then to a lower class of Mexicans—and by coarse down-tilted eyelashes. Not
until years later did I understand why my mother so diligently and gently guided
me, five or six years old at the time, to lie on her lap … as she curled my already
long curly eyelashes with a saliva-moistened finger. (2)
These recounted family narratives and practices point out the extent to which Rechy’s family
was invested in maintaining their distinction from the “lower class of Mexicans.” Such a class
and ethnic distinction was so tenuous precisely because Rechy’s family was impoverished by the
Mexican Revolution and clung tightly to the fantasy of Spanish heritage to retain their former
pride.
26
From his family, reduced to poverty by the revolution in Mexico, the young Rechy
inherits memories of wealth and status that he would not know growing up. The inherited
memories of privilege generate in him a sense of dislocation and exclusion from the poor
Mexicans among whom he was raised in El Paso, removing Rechy from the Chicano nationalist
sensibility in the 1960s, which tried to reclaim the indigenous roots of the Chicano people. His
parents, already out of place in the projects, are further indicative of mestizaje’s ethnic

26
Debra Castillo, interviewing Rechy, asks him about what he sees as queer theory’s potential in tearing
the veil from the normalizing constructs of whiteness and heterosexuality, to which Rechy responds with a lengthy
answer about identificatory labels that he uses to apply to himself as a writer who is both Chicano and gay. After
justifying his use of the words “homosexual” and “gay” (and remaining critical of the word “queer”), Rechy goes on
to talk about his use of the word “Chicano” to describe himself as a writer, saying, “(‘Chicano’ is another word I use
but have difficulty with because in my childhood it was a term ‘Mexicans’—that’s what we called ourselves—used
to demean other Mexicans, a class distinction)” (114). In the pre-1960s period before political consciousness
resulted in the founding of the United Farm Workers, Chicano nationalism, and el movimiento, “Chicano” was a
pejorative epithet in Rechy’s Mexican and Mexican American milieu, causing Rechy to disidentify with “Chicano”
as an identificatory label and accentuating the liminality of his performance as a mestizo of partly Anglo descent.
46

destabilization as they form an interracial Mexican marriage that gains a different sort of
legibility north of the border and that therefore racializes Rechy in a liminal manner.
The figure of the father looms large in Rechy’s memoir (and in his semi-autobiographical
fiction from the 1960s) not only because of his choleric temperament but also because of his
unassimilability into Mexican immigrant society in the US. Roberto Sixto Rechy was the son of
a “famous and prestigious doctor” from Scotland to Porfirio Díaz and was considered Anglo by
many of the Mexicans living in El Paso. In one of his many memories of his mercurial father,
Rechy recalls the truant officer of his youth “backing away from the short, red-faced Scotsman’s
fists” (4), casting his father in the role of a pugnacious Scotsman with a violent temper. As
formative as his Scottish father is on the young Rechy’s class anxieties and his ethnicized sense
of self, his Mexican mother is a far more powerful influence who becomes the object of his filial
devotion and affection. Notable is her phenotype because it is not one commonly associated
with mestizas: His great-aunt told the young Rechy that his mother as a young woman had
“green eyes (‘like emeralds’), brownish hair (‘lighter in the sun’), a flawless fair complexion
(‘like buttermilk’), and long eyelashes (‘curled, of course, of course’)” (31). One can imagine
how, as privileged people growing up in pre-revolutionary Mexico, both Roberto Sixto Rechy
and Guadalupe Flores Rechy would desire to retain their previous ethnic and class status after
becoming impoverished immigrants in the poor border town of El Paso—however impossible
that desire in a segregated city in Jim Crow Texas.
Queer tejana Gloria Anzaldúa, on whom I have more to say in Chapter 3, offers up
psychic unrest and alienation for Chicana/os, particularly those living in the US-Mexico
borderlands like Rechy, as conditions that produce the new mestiza consciousness which she is
most famed for theorizing. She writes that a “voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for
47

psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity—we don’t identify with the Anglo-American
cultural values and we don’t totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy
of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness” (85). This “psychological
conflict” and “alienation” is found in Rechy’s memoir when he openly discusses the times he
passes as white—both involuntarily and voluntarily—in Jim Crow Texas, where segregation was
enforced against “Mexicans” at various levels. If we take up Anzaldúa’s “synergy of …
Mexicanness [and] Angloness,” then what becomes of a subject like Rechy who literally bears
the traces of both a Mexican identity and an Anglo identity inscribed on his body? What are the
psychic investments in image and racialized memory that Rechy makes as a young man
navigating his way through racism, segregation, and class conflict? Using John Rechy, I will
trace the shifting contours of mestizaje as they operate in his life, demonstrating the critical
performance of mestizaje at the level of the individual and its attendant possibilities and
limitations.
In his memoir John Rechy describes two experiences of involuntarily passing in
Balmorhea, Texas, the first of which illustrates how mestizaje opens up psychic fissures in
Chicanos who are deracinated by virtue of their Anglo features, and the second of which reveals
Rechy’s affinity with his mother and the resulting isolation he feels as a “trespasser” (to use
Rechy’s own word) in white society.
27
Upon purchasing his ticket to see a movie at a theater in
Balmorhea while on a trip with two white college friends, Rechy is told by the man selling
tickets, “‘Now you city boys be sure to sit on the left side, ya heah? Right side’s for spics,
Saturday afternoon’s spic day’” (110). The young John Rechy is confronted with a dilemma in
the movie theater: Should he expose himself as a “Mexican” by sitting on the right side with the

27
Both of these experiences are sketched out in Rechy’s “El Paso del Norte,” which José David Saldívar
calls his “autoethnographic essay” that details “his racial oppression in white supremacist Texas” (108, 110).
48

Mexicans, or should he pass as white and sit with his white friends, thereby incurring a feeling of
ethnic betrayal? He ultimately chooses to sit with the Mexicans, but moves to sit with the white
people “only to avoid a scene that would involve my friends, just that. To have done otherwise
would have created turmoil in the hall” (113). Even when attempting to assert his ethnic
identity, Rechy is here forced back into the closet of whiteness and deracination in order to
prevent further trouble with the ticket seller, who accosts him loudly after he chooses his seat on
the ‘wrong’ side of the movie theater. Rafael Pérez-Torres points that out that after the
annexation of Mexico, “legally, Mexican Americans were considered white" (9), and goes on to
argue that the “mixed blessing of de facto and uneven discrimination has granted the mestizo
body an ambiguous role in processes of Chicana/o identification throughout history and across
the nation” (11). In this scene we see how Rechy’s phenotype—and the company with whom he
chooses to move—positions him, or, rather, forces him, to choose between which side of the
literal Mexican/Anglo divide he must identify. Even as Rechy’s mestizo identity makes a claim
on him and his ethnicized sense of self, the legal measures used to keep Mexicans and Anglos as
discrete populations generate a labile self that moves uneasily through a racially exclusive realm.
This ambiguous and ambivalent identification engenders a series of psychic conflicts in the
memoir that speak to the nature of mestizaje’s tensions and shifts.
The second instance in which Rechy involuntarily passes in Balmorhea, Texas, offers
him an opportunity to assert his ethnic identity and deploy his mestizaje, and he grasps hold of
this opportunity while tracing his racialization—in its very revelation—back to his Mexican
mother. While Rechy and two white college friends stay at the ranch of a wealthy aunt of one of
the friends, she sits down with them to dinner but refuses to eat until after her new hired help, a
young Mexican woman, leaves the room. Rechy presses the aunt on why she cannot eat, and she
49

confesses, “‘I love their food, but I can’t eat when they’re in the room with me, and that’s the
Lord’s truth’” (115), to which Rechy replies that he should not be there. The aunt, defending
herself against accusations of bigotry, becomes perplexed in the extreme when Rechy says, “‘If
you can’t eat when Mexicans are in the room with you, ma’am, then I don’t want to be here to
ruin your dinner,’” after which he delays the revelation “‘that my mother is Mexican, Miz
Crawford’” (115). Here Rechy deploys his mestizaje and disallows his friend’s aunt to impose
an Anglo identity on him, positioning himself in the role of the “Mexican” and allying himself
with the aunt’s hired help, thereby disrupting the Anglocentric racialized relations between host,
guests, and servants.
The young Chicano’s deracination occurring at the hands of a racist white Texan is
unremarkable, but the force of identifying himself as a racialized subject through his
matrilineage exposes the psychic investments that have cathected to his mother’s Mexicanness.
The young Rechy displays mourning of his buried racialization, which indicates a specifically
(bi)racial melancholia. Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race traces the mourning, grief,
and melancholia that racialized subjects in the US experience, and her contention that self-
identification is a fantasy that constitutes a self-invented genealogy is helpful to consider in these
moments of Rechy’s passing. Cheng draws from Lisa Lowe’s argument about the “partly
invented” quality of Asian American culture by writing, “To arrive at that ‘partly invented’
seems to involve a different set of inquiries than a question of negotiating either strategic self-
positioning or false homogenization and has much more to do with the problematics of
surrounding self-identification, the desire for such fiction, and the longing for the alibi of a
genealogy not always available” (27, emphasis added). This genealogy is “not always
available” for Rechy because the deracination he experiences cannot be inscribed on the identity
50

of his Scottish father, who is unmistakably white, or his Mexican mother, whose name and
whose refusal to speak anything other than Spanish mark her as Mexican. Therefore, Rechy
partly invents his own genealogy by queering his affinities to both sides of his mixed-race
family. His phenotype, which allows racist white Texans to read him as Anglo, results in
Rechy’s disidentifying with his legibly Mexican mother while simultaneously tracing his
racialization back to her.
The queer Mexican matrilineage that Rechy partly invents for himself in the pages of his
memoir accounts for the queer sensibility reflected in his aestheticization of the figure of Our
Lady of Guadalupe, after whom his mother was named and whose feast day was celebrated in
the Rechy family in lieu of his mother’s actual birthday. Rechy briefly recounts attending only
one day of the nine consecutive days his mother attends church to pray the rosary in the Roman
Catholic novena. Developing a desire at a very early age to be considered attractive and
beautiful, as a boy he goes to the Immaculate Conception Church in El Paso and prays to the
Blessed Mary to “‘make me handsome again’” (48).
28
What occurs while Rechy prays to the
Holy Mother beneath her statue is nothing less than a moment of queer aesthetic sensibility: “Her
face was gorgeous, soulful and strong at the same time. Her eyes were brilliant, her features
perfect, sublime, gleaming marbles of whatever color filtered through the stained-glass windows.
Although her body was clothed in shimmering azure, she was surely well shaped; the folds of her
dress indicated wonderful curves—I forced myself not to imagine lifting her skirt” (47-48). The
protogay child, Johnny Rechy, finds in Mary, in Guadalupe, his mother’s namesake, a patroness
for his idealization of beauty and a guardian of his own attractiveness who can ensure that one

28
Rechy’s novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez contains within it a remarkable scene of the
eponymous heroine praying to a statue of the Virgin Mary in a Catholic church on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
See Rechy (193-99). Later, she imagines Our Lady appearing to her in what constitutes a visitation at the
conclusion of the novel. It is apparent that Our Lady of Guadalupe was and is for Rechy an avatar of Mexican hope
and (aesthetic) beauty.
51

day he will draw to himself the desire of countless others, especially the white men who pay him
for sex and cruise him later when he becomes an adult. Alicia Arrizón reminds us that “the
Virgin of Guadalupe [is] the divine mother of cultural mestizaje for Mexicans and Chicano
communities” (170-71). In tracing his matrilineage through his mother, Guadalupe Flores
Rechy, and the Virgin of Guadalupe, Rechy at a young age deploys his queer mestizaje.
What intrigues me most about the family dynamics in Rechy’s memoir is how the
relationship he bears to his violently temperamental Scottish father only partially occludes the
affection for him that he develops at an early age. His filial affection persists, however vaguely
felt, throughout Rechy’s life even if his father’s violent rages are the dark clouds that dominate
the sky of Rechy’s memories of him. A salient moment in the memoir, a memory that Rechy has
of his father, is when the author recalls only partially fondly a time when his father would set
him on his lap while playing a game of dominoes with his friends and say, “‘Give me a
thousand.’” When Rechy was six, he was passed around by his father and his father’s friends
from man to man, each one giving him some money: “Fondling me, [my father’s] hand—I
nuzzled against him, feeling warmth, moments, seconds … Then he gave me a penny or even a
nickel […] [and] he would pass me on to the laps of the other men at the table, one after the
other, holding me, squeezing me, laughing, their hands on me. They each gave me a penny or
nickel” (166). Although Rechy later questions the formative power of that moment and even the
reliability of the memory of that moment—“How easy to extend [the sex hunt in Griffith Park] to
the gray men (they existed only as shadows now) to whom he passed me around for pennies.
Too obvious, too easy” (323)—I would like to suggest that a paternal haunting is occurring.
Even if Rechy the author denies a direct correlation between the literal payment his father and
52

his father’s friends gave the six-year-old Rechy in return for his allowing them to fondle him,
Rechy the hustler seeks his white father as he hunts sex with other men.
Tomás Almaguer, answering a critical response to his seminal essay, “Chicano Men: A
Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior,” writes, “I believe that aspects of male
homosexual desire, and the relentless pursuit of other men, are deeply implicated in our desire
for bonding and connectedness to our fathers. ‘Looking for Papi’ has always been a part of this
homosexual desire, no matter how much we choose to deny or close our eyes to this reality”
(172). In Rechy’s case, looking for his Scottish father—rather than his mestizo Papi—may be an
apt way of describing his years spent hustling and sex-hunting in the largely white gay male
milieu of 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles. Rechy deploys his mestizaje in the sex hunt, which
becomes his search for his deceased father, by accentuating a non-threatening ethnic and racial
difference from the white men he attracts (I will speak more on this later).
As a liminal subject and a mestizo who is of both Mexican and Anglo descent, John
Rechy could be said to disidentify with his Mexican mother and his Scottish father. His
racialized body and ethnoracial identification are differently marked by both parents in ways that
make one parental disidentification illegible without the other. “Like melancholia,” writes José
Esteban Muñoz, “disidentification is an ambivalent structure of feeling that works to retain the
problematic object and tap into the energies that are produced by contradictions and
ambivalences” (71). Mestizaje, particularly the way that Rechy embodies it, generates
contradictions and racial ambivalences that produce the kind of energies Muñoz sees as helpful
in self-identification for subjects who resist white normativity and heteronormativity. Rechy, in
his fiction but most pronouncedly in his memoir, exhibits these double or dual disidentifications
with both his Anglo father and Mexican mother such that sometimes they seem to sustain each
53

other but more often seem to antagonize each other. His own identity cannot be divorced from—
precisely because it is haunted by—the complex negotiations taken by the young Rechy as a
mixed-race Chicano who under certain circumstances passes as white in his hometown of El
Paso and in hyperurban spaces.
Racial passing activates a constellation of (dis)identificatory practices for a gay man
whose parents are of two different races. Gay male identity has been theorized in such a way to
suggest that the Oedipal drama constituting the formative years of the subject’s life is
complicated by the gay male subject’s psychic investment in his own image, a cathexis that was
first proposed by Freud in his early writings on male homosexuality.
29
Without either supporting
or challenging this claim about male homosexuals made in early psychoanalysis, I propose that
an overdetermined reading of Rechy’s body of fiction as an endorsement of gay male narcissism
misses key family dynamics set up by the haunting memories his characters have of their absent
white fathers and their overbearing Mexican mothers. Too much has been made of gay
narcissism in Rechy’s work—indeed, Rechy himself has welcomed these readings in
interviews
30
—without attending to the Oedipal drama of the mixed-race family.
The Oedipus complex, it seems, bears out different psychic conflicts when it is racialized
and when the family at its center is a mixed-race one. Perhaps it is the imbrication of mixed-race
Oedipal tensions (or what Emma Pérez calls the “Oedipal-conquest-complex”) and Freudian gay
male narcissism that defines Rechy’s triangulated relationship with his Scottish-Mexican father

29
See Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), in which he writes: “[The male
homosexual] finds the objects of his love along the path of narcissism, as we say; for Narcissus, according to the
Greek legend, was a youth who preferred his own reflection to everything else and who was changed into the lovely
flower of that name” (463).
30
In an interview by Steve Lafreniere published in VICE magazine and included in the 50
th
-anniversary
edition of City of Night, the interviewer states, “One of my favorite things in your work is your refusal to attack the
idea of narcissism. There’s a lot of that in the worlds you’ve written about, but there’s a kind of narcissism that is
aware of itself. My good friend is very much that way. He’s one of the kindest people in the world, and then he
makes homemade self-porn movies to sort of worship himself. You would love this guy” (489). John Rechy
responds, “That’s great. I think that narcissism makes great human beings” (489).
54

and Mexican mestiza mother. Pérez writes that “within a racist society, the mestizo male is a
castrated man in relation to the white-male-colonizer father” (168), which foregrounds the
tensions the young Rechy experiences with his pugnacious Scottish father. Writing specifically
about Asian American masculinity and David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly, David Eng
argues that “castration is always a racial castration” (5), and just as the Asian American male is
Orientalized by the white man as feminine, weak, and submissive, so is Rechy as the mestizo
queer son feminized and emasculated by his irascible Scottish father. Yet, if Rechy is castrated
and feminized by his Scottish father, then he also acquires some privilege from being his son, as
Pérez points out that “skin color … plays an important factor for half-breeds. The lighter the
skin, the more possible it is to pass through doors of power and privilege. Of course, skin color
gradations do not just apply to half-breeds, but when one has the white skin and the white name
of a white father and a mestiza for a mother, then one is likely to have access to more power in a
racist society” (183-84 n. 32). In his moments of racial passing Rechy experiences a devout
loyalty to his Mexican mother and reserves a sustained critical detachment from his volatile
Scottish father, thereby engendering a mixed-race Oedipal conflict in his psyche. These psychic
attachments to and conflicts about his mixed-race family produce his racial ambivalence toward
the Chicano and Anglo communities, since he is positioned in them both by virtue of his heritage
and phenotype.
John Rechy’s phenotype permits in his memoir a social mobility to which the author
himself is not blind, who said in an interview with Lambda Book Report, “It is naïve to claim
that appearances don’t matter. Many of the experiences I have had had been possible by the fact
of genetics, what made me look the way I do. Alter appearance, and you redefine the
possibilities of experience” (4). In his fiction and in his memoir, Rechy chooses to deploy his
55

mestizo phenotype differently at different times, including when he decides to “pass” as white,
investing mestizaje with a critical self-construction at the level of individual invention.
The Passing Mestizo and the Critical Self-Deployment of Mestizaje
Many writers and theorists use mestizaje to combat the hegemony of whiteness in the US
by critically deploying mestizaje as a metaphor and affect that resists deracination and
incorporation into Anglocentric structures of knowledge. I now turn to a discussion of “passing”
in Rechy’s memoir because I believe that his ability to pass as both white and straight
problematizes how theorists have written about mestizaje in general and queer mestizaje in
particular. Passing demonstrates how an individual can redefine the social parameters of
mestizaje by his iconoclastic performances. Furthermore, I believe Rechy’s passing as white and
straight constitutes a subversive embodiment of mestizaje that grants him access to social scenes
from which he would otherwise be excluded, making him both the “trespasser” among Anglos
quoted earlier and a “literary saboteur” in the white publishing industry.
31
As a mixed-race
Chicano, Rechy embodies and so lives out the contradictions, tensions, and paradoxes of
Mexican-Anglo relations and intimacies. He lives out these contradictions, tensions, and
paradoxes in such a way that traces the shifting contours of mestizaje as he moves along,
between, and through lines of ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality. Anzaldúa states that “the
Borderlands are physically present where people of different races occupy the same territory,
where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals
shrinks with intimacy” (19). Mexican-Anglo intimacies in the borderlands are fraught with
violence, but in the case of John Rechy, they also generate a psychic sense of dislocation and a
chameleonic ability to change one’s appearance.

31
Rechy answers a question about Chicano writers in the interview with Debra Castillo and says that they
may identify themselves “overtly as a ‘Chicano writer’ or ‘infiltrating,’ becoming a literary saboteur. For me, the
latter is more challenging and, finally, the most effective” (122).
56

The dichotomy of the Mexican and Anglo in the US Southwest is one that a mestizo like
John Rechy acutely experiences, but rather than experience it solely from the always endangered
position of the Mexican American, he finds that his mestizaje enables him a slippage of
identity—and a precarious positionality—that once quite literally saved his life. As a young
man, Rechy climbs up Mount Cristo Rey at the Texas-Mexico border, and witnesses a Mexican
family trying to cross the river to get to the US. Two border patrolmen mounted on horses round
up the family of five and push them into a vehicle, driving off with them in the desert. The
young Rechy tries to cross the river after descending the mountain, only to find the same two
border patrolmen waiting for him. He speaks English to them, at which one of the patrolmen
says, “‘He speaks English good! … Where’d ya learn—? … Thought you was a wetback,
sonny’” (150). Rechy identifies himself as “American,” and the two border patrolmen trade
racist jokes about his appearance, illustrating the precarity of any Chicano who at all bears
phenotypic traces of a mestizo identity: “‘Shouldn’t go around wadin’ ’cross the river without a
shirt, buddy, all sunburned and everything’” (150). Finally, one of the patrolmen says to him,
“‘Well, you better say your prayers tonight that we recognized you as white, cause we coulda
shot you if you’da run’” (151). In this moment, Rechy’s phenotype, which is ambiguous enough
for border patrol to read him as “white” (although, it was his brown or “sunburned” skin that
marks him as bearing the bodily trace of a Mexican American identity), grants him the chance to
cross the river without the kind of aggressive physical harassment and murderous policies
implemented by border patrol on those whose phenotype mark them as more legibly “Mexican.”
Rechy’s self-identification as an “American” in the face of murderous Texas border patrolmen is
a way of self-deploying his mestizaje to undermine the racial purist view of American citizenship
57

as a mark and form of whiteness. He is both a US citizen and a mestizo, but he only survives the
incident because he is read as white.
In American fiction, “passing” has been narrativized as a key trope of African American
literature and literature featuring African American characters, but it has less commonly been the
sustained subject of discourse in studies of Chicana and Chicano literature, although phenotypic
variety in the Chicano people is often treated in texts by Chicana/o writers. Before becoming
politicized, Cherríe Moraga, who, similar to Rechy, has a father of Anglo descent and mother of
Mexican descent, admits that she passed as white, writing that it was from her mother’s “desire
to protect her children from poverty and illiteracy that we became ‘anglocized’; the more
effectively we could pass in the white world, the better guaranteed our future” (43). Chicana/os
who could pass for white and who came of age before el movimiento of the 1960s were forced to
negotiate a treacherous terrain that offered on the one hand a way out of white supremacist
segregation, which incurred a feeling of betrayal, and on the other hand a steadfast commitment
to family and community that would permanently mark them as second-class citizens. John
Rechy’s situation as a light-skinned, blue-eyed Chicano living in Jim Crow El Paso can be better
appreciated when one is allowed to see how he deployed his mestizaje and his phenotype
differently at different times in his life depending on the spatiotemporal location of the milieu
and his own desire for mobility there.
Critics have noted that in John Rechy’s early autobiographical fiction, the narrators or
protagonists have white fathers and Mexican mothers, like Rechy himself. The question of
passing has only arisen, however, when scholars write about his first novel, City of Night,
published in 1963. The novel is narrated by an unnamed hustler who only briefly speaks of his
volatile white father and his adoring and stifling Mexican mother before leaving his hometown
58

of El Paso to hustle in the largely white underground culture of gay male sex workers in urban
centers during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Karen Christian writes that “Rechy’s Chicano
narrator infiltrates the Anglocentric gay community and avoids discrimination by passing as a
nonethnic white. Within the gay community, he achieves the hustler’s position of power by
denying his desire for other men—by passing as straight” (50). This dual act of passing as both
white and straight affords the narrator (many of whose experiences are fictionalized events of
real-life occurrences Rechy recounts in About My Life and the Kept Woman) a sense of security,
however tenuous, that he would otherwise not have if he were legible as a Chicano gay man.
Judith Butler’s reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing proposes a way to think about narratives
involving mixed-race queer subjects who pass as white and straight. She asks, “How might we
understand homosexuality and miscegenation to converge at and as the constitutive outside of a
normative sexuality that is at once the regulation of a racially pure reproduction?” (123).
Butler’s question suggests that racialized sexuality for mixed-race queers is complicated by the
US imperative to maintain strictly defined and policed categories for race, which simultaneously
regulates the mixed-race queer’s sexuality. As both mixed race and queer, John Rechy becomes
doubly nonnormative in the social worlds through which he moves undectected. As Rechy
himself notes, this is particularly an issue in Texas, where Jim Crow was enforced and the fear of
miscegenation was as pronounced as it was in other Southern states. His decision to pass as
white and/or straight is made possible by his highly individualized deployment of mestizaje,
which contests nationalist deployments of mestizaje made in the 1960s.
When the issue of passing is taken up in Chicana/o literary criticism, it is usually for the
purpose of establishing the mestizo over and against the Indian. In his article “Caballeros and
Indians: Mexican American Whiteness, Hegemonic Mestizaje, and Ambivalent Indigeneity in
59

Proto-Chicana/o Autobiographical Discourse, 1858-2008,” B. V. Olguín argues that Américo
Paredes’s George Washington Gómez engages with the tropology of both the “Pocho” and the
“tragic mestizo” in proto-Chicano literature. Olguín cements Guálinto’s passing as a white
American at the end of the novel: “Earlier described as light-skinned, Guálinto’s masculinist
white desire is not only articulated as sexualized and biological through his marriage to a white
wife, but is also figured as anti-indigenous” (36). In contrast to Olguín’s claims about Guálinto,
John Rechy’s performances of mestizaje—even when they allow him to pass as white—are not a
disavowal of indigeneity but rather a challenge to essentialist claims about what constitutes
racialized sexuality for Chicano gay men. I argue that Rechy’s passing as white subverts both
Chicano nationalist and neonationalist ideologies about mestizaje in which indigeneity is first
and foremost claimed. By passing he critically redefines mestizaje at the level of the individual,
transforming it into a destabilizing and subversive ethnoracial configuration that enables him to
undermine the racist Anglo community from within it.
After City of Night, Rechy would write novels that call more attention to his queer male
protagonists as mixed-race or biracial Chicanos. In his second novel, Numbers (1967), the
protagonist takes on the name Johnny Rio, although “(‘Rio’ is not actually his last name—it’s
not even his mother’s maiden name, although hers is really Mexican. He assumed the name in
Los Angeles because, especially in a world where no last names are given, it sounded
romantic—like a gypsy’s)” (18). The protagonist of Rechy’s third novel, This Day’s Death
(1969), is named Jim Girard. He struggles with his stifling, dying Mexican mother who speaks
“Spanish, the only language she understands” (17), and he feels haunted by his “austere and
stern” father, whose “French face stares at Jim” from a photograph after his father is long
deceased (18). The free play with names in his early texts echoes Rechy’s alteration of his own
60

name from Juan Francisco Flores Rechy to John Rechy, which indicates what Cherríe Moraga
calls the “bicultural mind” and what Walter D. Mignolo, following Moraga’s lead, calls the
“bilanguaging mind.”
32
Writing about the “bicultural mind,” Moraga calls herself a “mixed-
blood Mexican, la mestiza’s mestiza” (113), gesturing to a double sense of difference that Rechy
acutely experiences as a mixed-race Chicano hustler.
John Rechy discloses to his readers in About My Life and the Kept Woman that his birth
name reflects the hybridity of his ethnic background that the name under which he publishes
does not. Chicano identity, and therefore mestizaje, is bound intimately to names and the site of
the name as the signifier which reveals the extent to which Spanish colonialism survives in
nation-states that have long since become independent from Spanish rule.
33
It is common, for
instance, for Chicanos to have English first names and Spanish last names, a result of the
hybridization of contemporary Mexican American identity. Rechy’s birth name, however, seems
to invert this commonplace hybridization with its Spanish first name, Juan, and the Scottish last
name, Rechy, also making it easier for one kindergarten teacher to further Anglicize Rechy’s
name by changing it from “Juan” to “Johnny” in what amounts to an attempt to deracinate the
young Chicano boy. As a kindergartener, Rechy, who only spoke Spanish at home, responds to
the word “one” in counting games as though it were the Anglo teacher’s poor pronunciation of
his name, Juan, standing up whenever he hears it, thinking that he is being called. Rechy writes

32
Pursuing Cherríe Moraga’s concept of the “bicultural mind” from her book The Last Generation, Walter
D. Mignolo writes in that the “‘bicultural mind’ (in my terminology the ‘bilanguaging mind’) is the ‘mind’ inscribed
in and produced by colonial conditions, although diverse colonial legacies engender dissimilar ‘bicultural minds’”
(267). For John Rechy, the bicultural/bilanguaging mind is one attuned to the legacy and inheritance bequeathed by
a father of Scottish descent and a Mexican mother, as well as living in a place where such biculturalism is
understood fully neither by the Anglos nor the Mexicans among whom he lives.
33
Alicia Arrizón’s contribution to studies of mestizaje penetratingly examines the forces of colonialism and
imperialism in postcolonial sites and the way that identity is shaped by historical legacies and encounters. Queering
Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance investigates not only mestizaje in the US, but in the “Hispanic
Caribbean, and the Philippines,” all three sites sharing a “history of Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism that
have brought them into profound contact with one another” (3). She goes on to articulate the “historical
transformation and cultural memory across Spanish postcolonial sites” that announces mestizaje as a dominant
cultural paradigm for understanding postcolonial identity in these locations (3).
61

that the teacher, irritated with him for mistaking English for Spanish, says, “‘I’m going to call
you Johnny…. You look much more like a Johnny than a Juan. Doesn’t he, children?’ she asked
those who understood English,” who respond, “‘Yes, yes!’” (65). Rechy’s Anglo features enable
an easier transition from Juan Rechy to Johnny Rechy, and, later, to John Rechy; it is at this
point, where an ambiguously mestizo phenotype meets Anglo naming, that passing becomes a
viable option for a Chicano who feels the strain of what Moraga calls the “bicultural mind” and
what Walter Mignolo calls the “bilanguaging mind.”
34
The “bicultural mind,” which Moraga
presents as being inflected by her understanding of herself as one of the “light-skinned breeds
[who] are like chameleons, those lagartijas with the capacity to change the color of their skins”
(116), and the “bilanguaging mind” are both representative of the growing number of subjects in
the US who, like John Rechy in his memoir, must navigate the territory between and among
different ethnic groups, different races, different nations, and different languages—all of which
many Chicano mestizos and Chicana mestizas living now in the US must do daily. Rechy’s role-
playing and performances of self reveal mestizaje’s shifting dynamics through time and space
and how its deployment alters positionality and the ethnic, racial, and sexual legibility such
various positionalities engender.
The Mestizo Hustler and His Multiple Roles
Contributing to Rechy’s sense of double exile is his estrangement from the Anglocentric
gay male community through which he moves.
35
Rechy learns to assume identities that make

34
Pursuing Moraga’s concept of the “bicultural mind” from her book The Last Generation, Mignolo writes
in that the “‘bicultural mind’ (in my terminology the ‘bilanguaging mind’) is the ‘mind’ inscribed in and produced
by colonial conditions, although diverse colonial legacies engender dissimilar ‘bicultural minds’” (267). For John
Rechy, the bicultural/bilanguaging mind is one attuned to the legacy and inheritance bequeathed by a father of
Scottish descent and a Mexican mother, as well as living in a place where such biculturalism is understood fully
neither by the Anglos nor the Mexicans whom he lives among.
35
Just as Rechy is ambivalent about the Chicano community, so, too, is he ambivalent about the Euro-
American gay male community in which he passes as white. Aesthetically, Rechy at times employs narrative
techniques and a prose style that is clearly influenced by queer white writers. Ellie D. Hernández states that Rechy
62

him desirable trade in the world of male hustling. On the streets he becomes adept at reading the
men he encounters, and he deploys his mestizo phenotype and his masculine posture in the
service of heightening his marketability. If mestizaje is an unfixed ethnoracial configuration
both because it is hybrid and also because it has served different ends for different political
purposes, then one can witness mestizaje taking on a destabilizing force at the level of individual
self-deployment when Rechy writes about his easy access to sex in the gay male world.
Although not explicitly stated in his memoir, Rechy elsewhere has written about his
mestizo phenotype and the way it increases his marketability as a male hustler or as a gay man
cruising for sex. In his 1977 nonfiction book The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary, Rechy
introduces the readers to a character named Jim who cruises for sex in Los Angeles over the
course of three days and who attends to his body almost ritualistically in order to heighten his
desirability to other men. One need not assume that Jim is just a stand-in for John Rechy,
36
but it
is telling that he writes very early in the book: “Because of a mixture of Anglo and Latin bloods,
his skin quickly converts the sun’s rays into tan; the tan turns his eyes bluer; long-lashed eyes
which almost compromise the rugged good looks of his face, framed by dark hair” (23). As we
know from About My Life and the Kept Woman, Rechy is particularly concerned with his blue
eyes and long lashes, which mark him as having Anglo features; and his tan skin, a mark of his

“emulated queer writers from the Beat generation” (162). By this she (and other critics) means to draw comparison
to the prose style and narrative form of City of Night and Jack Keroauc’s On the Road. Rechy himself admits that he
has been influenced by queer white writers, as he provides in the in the1984 introduction to City of Night a long list
of the writers he read while in college, among whom he includes Herman Melville, André Gide, Djuna Barnes,
Tennessee Williams, Marcel Proust, Truman Capote, Henry James, and Gertrude Stein. It is obvious that Rechy’s
writing reflects his absorption of queer white writers in the European and Euro-American canons. In fact, he
mentions no U.S. writers of color in that list, and includes Federico García Lorca as the only Spanish-language
writer.
36
David J. Vásquez, writing about John Rechy’s early autobiographical fiction and nonfiction, asserts that
“many of his protagonists are born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican or Chicana mothers and violent Scottish fathers.
Also, like the author, they frequently assume thinly veiled identities that correspond to Rechy’s multiple aliases”
(109). There is ample evidence, including interviews by Rechy, that support the argument that Rechy’s early work
is autobiographical, but we must also remember that creative writing always takes liberties with presentations of
self, making it impossible to declare Rechy’s work to be a straight record of actual experiences.
63

Chicano identity, works to draw men to him who consider sunbathing on the beach or in Griffith
Park (both places that Jim cruises) to be a leisure activity that defines gay male sex culture in
1960s and 1970s Los Angeles. David J. Vázquez contends that because “Jim’s ancestry includes
‘Anglo and Latin[o] bloods,’ his brown skin facilitates his success in the arena of sexual
promiscuity” (114).
37
Jim, and perhaps Rechy, rely on their blue eyes, long lashes, dark hair, and
tan (or brown) skin—which are indicative of a mixed-race subject, not only mestizo, but Anglo
as well—to attract the numbers they desire. Mestizaje here is complicated not only by
positioning a phenotypic Angloness alongside Mexicanness, but also by its investment in
maintaining a certain masculinity whose position is so fragile because of its necessity for male
sex work.
The work of male hustling requires the trade to pose as a straight man, and John Rechy’s
early fiction as well as his memoir present the biracial Chicano gay men in their pages as doubly
liminal subjects who feel at some remove from both the white world they move in and the world
of men who pay for sex. Queer mestizos who remain unassimilable within normative gender and
racial schemas—like mestizo hustlers—are subjects with the potential to further disrupt any sort
of fixity that may attach itself to mestizaje as it becomes normalized through its use in Chicano
discourse.
38
For their further destabilizing force and their being unassimilable into

37
It is helpful here to consider José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of brown affect, or “feeling brown,” as a
way to understand the kind of mestizaje that John Rechy performs. It is not so much Rechy’s skin color or the literal
brownness of his skin that marks him as Chicano, but rather his affective structure of writing, which is easily legible
in both his characterization and his prose style, that taps into the psychic and literary energy of mestizaje. Muñoz
opposes brown affect to white affect by reading the white affective register as “minimalist to the point of emotional
impoverishment …. Rather than say that Latina/o affect is too much, I want to suggest that the presence of Latina/o
affect puts a great deal of pressure on the affective base of whiteness, insofar as it instructs us in a reading of the
affect of whiteness as underdeveloped and impoverished” (207). Rechy’s affective brownness, or his affective
mestizaje, is his opposition to white hegemonic structures of feeling, whether at the level of the psyche, the body, or
literary prose style.
38
One may argue that “queer” is also in some ways becoming normalized in the academy, but it may be
helpful to consider “queer” and “mestizaje” as both theoretical constructs and discursive deployments with the
ability to resist their normalization in and through academic discourse by their very slipperiness and destabilization
of identity, which is what I am suggesting through my main line of argumentation.
64

homonormativity, queer mestizo hustlers deserve more consideration in Chicano studies. The
gender Rechy assumes as a hustler is overlaid not only by his embodiment of an Anglo-Mexican
mestizaje (blue eyes, long lashes, dark hair, tan or brown skin), but also by his performance of
“straightness.” His butch “straight” posture is a rigid role in a community where all roles are
self-conscious performances on the streets. These self-conscious roles operate within the
nonnormative regime of male sex work and the men who pay for it.
The performance of “straightness” Rechy undertakes resists the normalizing impulse in
the gender schema because it exposes the fragility of gender performance by displaying its
reliance on scripted words and acts. Any deviation from these scripted words and acts can cause
the transaction in sex work to fall apart. It also delimits the queer mestizaje that Rechy is able to
embody by forcing him into a more rigid role if he is to be a successful hustler. One time while
hustling in downtown Los Angeles, Rechy is propositioned by a man in a bar who asks him once
they are outside:
“You’re not queer, are you?”
The question did not surprise me. Even more assertively than along Times
Square, where “straightness” was assumed without declaration, playing
“straight”—“trade” for sale—was demanded of hustlers. I had heard rigid
variations from potential clients: “I don’t want you to touch me, you understand?”
… “You’re not gay, right?” … “I’m not looking for a queer.” It was a time that
demanded deception.
I answered the man I was with: “No, man, shit, I’m not a fucking queer,
man, shit.” (236)
65

After an unsuccessful sexual transaction (Rechy cannot maintain his erection and achieve orgasm
with his client), he forcefully takes all the money in the man’s wallet because he does not want to
pay Rechy, who becomes fierce and threatening in his demand to be paid all of the man’s money.
The man says to Rechy as he leaves the room: “‘You son of a bitch! You’re not foolin’ anyone,
none of you guys are, you’re all as queer as I am!’” Rechy thinks, “As I stepped into the lurid
streets, I felt like crying. I thought, I’m me again” (237-38). The “me” that Rechy identifies
after his failed sex transaction indicates a certain discomfort in the performance he has just
completed—that of the street hustler who must prove his toughness and his “straightness,” and
who must get the money he is promised, even by threat and force. For all Rechy’s tough
demeanor and his pains taken to achieve the “deception” for which not only the men who pay
him for sex but he himself depends on to live the life of the streets, there occur moments when
the performance is not successful, when his feeling of being “exiled doubly” is too great, and
Rechy experiences fissures in the veneer of the self he has created.
Karen Christian writes that “hustlers devote their energies to erasing all traces of
anything that might be construed as femininity. They are constantly performing in order to fulfill
a preconceived role within the gay subculture. Tantamount to successful performance is a
specific combination of costume, stance, and refusal to express desire that has come to represent
masculinity within this homoerotic space” (48). As a hustler, Rechy would have felt his
masculinity undermined by failing to get the promised amount of money from the client; he
breaks from the script when he cannot fulfill his end of the deal, and then experiences rage that
leads him to rob his client. The client, however, delivers the words that Rechy does not want to
hear—that his act as a straight hustler is merely a performance, one that he failed at in that
encounter. Once secure in the anonymity of the streets, Rechy feels he no longer has to act the
66

part and thinks, “I’m me, again.” The stakes of Rechy’s performance as a butch mestizo hustler
are high: When he fails to successfully perform, he risks rejection by the men who pay him for
sex, which results in a feeling of self-alienation that only subsides once he returns to the streets.
His shifting performances of queer mestizaje do not allow John Rechy to deploy it as
freely as hybrid subjects are often imagined to do. As Sandra K. Soto points out, “Racialized
sexuality is not a frozen commodity but queerly flexible. I hasten to add, however, that it is not
so flexible as to be free floating” (32). Although Rechy in his memoir can rely on his blue eyes
and brown skin to draw men who will pay him for sex, his self-deployment of queer mestizaje is
circumscribed by gender roles and sexual performances he cannot always control. Soto reminds
us that racialized sexuality is not a “frozen commodity”; in Rechy’s memoir the brown-skinned,
mixed-race male body becomes both an object of sexual desire and a commodity for white men,
but it is only a desirable commodity when certain conditions are met. These conditions are the
roles that a “straight” male hustler must perform, which Rechy is adept at performing. Though
Rechy fails to perform the role of butch hustler in the above instance, his other performances of
race, ethnicity, and sexuality largely guarantee his security as he moves through the hostile
milieus I have described.
Conclusion
My work on John Rechy has explored the performative aspects of mestizaje, unmooring
race and ethnicity in Chicana/o studies from essentialist arguments informed by nationalist and
neonationalist discourses. Arguing that Rechy’s deployment and shifting performances of
mestizaje demand that we look at how individual subjects critically redefine and reinvent
mestizaje for themselves, I have shown the limits of always yoking mestizaje to community-
based configurations, whether they are nationalist or neonationalist in nature. If mestizaje is a
67

performance and is not always used to invoke community or call it into being, then we can move
past debates about whether or not it continues to homogenize or essentialize Chicana/o (or
Indian) identity and instead turn our attention to other questions. We can ask: How do
Chicana/os navigate their experiences in an increasingly multicultural and transnational US
landscape? What alliances between Chicana/os and other groups of people of color are being
formed, and how are they sustained? We can further examine the experiences of biracial and
mixed-race Chicana/os who are not part white or Anglo. My work puts Chicano studies in
conversation with critical mixed race studies.
My own interest in John Rechy as a mixed-race Chicano of partly Scottish descent is
grounded in a desire to show that Anglo-Chicano intimacies in the US Southwest are far more
complicated than they are usually made out to be. Writing about an essay by Rosaura Sánchez,
Sandra K. Soto states that there are “important Chican@-based reasons why the binaristic
Chican@-Anglo frameworks used to examine the linguistic, cultural, and political lives of
Chican@s are no longer propitious” (123). The Anglo-Chicano divide, particularly as it is
configured in Texas, which has a distinct history from the other states in the US Southwest as a
Southern Jim Crow state, is an inadequate paradigm for understanding why Rechy passed as
white when he was a younger man. As I have shown, at times Rechy passed involuntarily, like
the time he traced his mestizaje back to his Mexican mother at the house of his white friend’s
aunt; at other times passing as white saved his life, as it did with his encounter with violent
Texas border patrolmen. The decision to pass depends on Rechy’s desire for mobility in the
social scene through which he moves. I claim that passing is one of the ways Rechy shifts his
performance of mestizaje, and it is a performance that destabilizes fixed notions of what
mestizaje is and how it should be embodied. Rechy subversively embodies mestizaje by
68

demonstrating he is just as much a mestizo when passing as white as when he is not, but when he
passes he figures himself as the “trespasser” and “literary saboteur” who gains access to the
Anglo world and exposes its racist and normative structures and underpinnings. Furthermore,
Rechy’s passing as a straight hustler to attract men who paid him for sex is a deployment of
mestizaje as a form of racialized sexuality. If Rechy undermines the Anglo-Chicano binary by
passing as white, then he also calls into question the gay-straight dichotomy by revealing that
“straightness” is a performance, a performance that, if done unsuccessfully, can have
repercussions for the person performing it and the audience for whom it is performed.
Ultimately, I contend that John Rechy problematizes the argument that mestizaje is
defined by a Chicana/o community seeking to authenticate and legitimate its indigenous
ancestry, which is the argument that scholars like María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo and Nicole M.
Guidotti-Hernández make about mestizaje. The way that Rechy critically redefines the social
parameters of mestizaje by expanding the limited number of experiences available to a Chicano
gay man before the rise of Chicano nationalism indicates that mestizaje can be transformed by
the individual as well. In this case, Rechy is an individual with no investment in Chicano
nationalism or authenticating his indigenous ancestry, as he already felt “exiled doubly” from
both Mexicans and Anglos in his youth. The nationalist sensibility that Angie Chabram-
Dernersesian, Saldaña-Portillo, and Guidotti-Hernández find running through the current of
mestizaje is absent from Rechy’s shifting performances as a queer mestizo hustler in the 1950s
and 1960s. Rafael Pérez-Torres asks if mestizaje is a “critical category-under-construction” (44),
and I would answer that those individuals who consciously deploy mestizaje do so in order to
foreclose certain identities while constructing other, new, and perhaps subversive identities.
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John Rechy deploys mestizaje in a de-essentializing manner to foreclose a Chicano
nationalist identity while making available various identities that allow him to infiltrate the
Anglo and gay male communities. His memoir reveals that Rechy retains racial ambivalence
toward the Chicano community as well as toward the dominant Anglo community. It is this
racial ambivalence that allowed him to deploy mestizaje in inventive and subversive ways even
when it was at its most stable as the dominant ethnoracial configuration during the height of
Chicano nationalism. If we can now agree that both Chicano nationalism and neonationalism
have caused cultural and epistemic violence not only to Chicana/os but to other communities of
color as well, then studies of Chicana/os like Rechy invite use to reconsider the possibilities that
were open during nationalist and neonationalist periods but which have remain unexplored.
Rechy’s shifting performances of mestizaje ask us to survey what experiences become available
to Chicana/os when they deploy mestizaje not for the purpose of forging community solidarity or
seeking group affiliation but rather to undermine a stable and fixed sense of self and ethnoracial
identity. Individual performances of mestizaje will continue to further transform and destabilize
Chicano identity, suggesting that the Chicana/o community is strengthened rather than weakened
by difference.

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Chapter 2: Fragile Masculinities and Mulatez:
Afro-Latino Queerness

Sexual pleasure between two men was a conspiracy, something that happened in the shadows or
in plain daylight, but always forbidden; a look, a wink, a gesture, a sign, was enough to start the
sequence that resulted in such full enjoyment.

—Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls

Sex between two Latino men is a “conspiracy” and “forbidden” in Caribbean nations that
have suffered regimes of homophobic and racist dictators, but it is no less forbidden in an
imperialist nation such as the US where codes of racial and sexual purity condemn sex between
two men of racially mixed ancestry as pathological, if not dangerous. I return to the subject of
the Latino queer male with which I opened in Chapter 1, again examining queer mixed-race
Latinos who do not explicitly avow a gay male identity, despite their coming of age in the post-
Stonewall period when gay identities are hypervisible as the sexual deviants and AIDS-prone
bodies of the Reagan era. Instead, the Afro-Dominican Yunior de las Casas in Junot Díaz’s
Drown (1996) encodes his queerness by engaging in sex acts with another Dominican American
male and disavowing homosexuality as a self-identification, whereas Justin Torres’s nameless
young narrator in We the Animals (2011), the son of an Afro-Puerto Rican father and a white
mother, comes to be legible as a gay man only after his first time having sex with a man and
being outed by his family, who discovers his diary of homoerotic fantasies. In both cases, their
racial ambivalence is heightened by their queerness and their dis/avowals of racial and sexual
difference.
In Chapter 1 I traced the contours of mestizaje in the US-Mexico borderlands and
demonstrated how one mixed-race queer subject, John Rechy, experiences ambivalence toward
the Chicano, Anglo, and white gay male communities. Rechy’s queer alienation enables certain
positions (such as passing for white and/or straight), while disenabling others (such as precluding
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a Chicano nationalist politics in his life and work). Now I head to the hispanophone islands of
the New World, where European colonizers first encountered the indigenous peoples of this
hemisphere—further fecund territory for examining mixed-race subjects. I begin with an avowal
of blackness in Junot Díaz’s Dominican Republic, which is considered the originary site of
blackness in the New World because the first African slaves in chains were brought there.
39
I
will then skip islands and trace diasporic mixed-race Puerto Rican subjectivity in New York City
with Piri Thomas’s memoir, Down These Streets (1967) and move from an urban space to
postindustrial upstate New York with Justin Torres’s novel.
40

Dominicano and boricua subjects are often marked by blackness in a way that Chicano
mestizo identities are usually not; therefore, blackness becomes the central mark of racial
difference in caribeño subjects and their descendants.
41
While mestizaje is figured as the
cultural and racial mixture of indigenous and Spanish elements, caribeño subjects are more
frequently the product of African and Spanish ancestry, culture, and traditions. Upon arriving in
the US, the question then becomes: How do Afro-Latinos position themselves in a society that
for centuries has seen only black and white and whose codes of racial purity dictate that anyone
descended from African slaves identify as black? This question never resolves itself with a
simple answer; yet, the Afro-Latino characters in the works I examine do ultimately embrace
black identities, though ones inflected by their ambivalence toward the very institutions and

39
Silvio Torres-Saillant calls the Dominican Republic “the land that originated blackness in the Americas”
(140).
40
I identify Piri Thomas as Puerto Rican although David J. Vázquez calls him the “product of a mixed-race
Cuban father and a light-skinned Puerto Rican mother” because Thomas casts himself as a Puerto Rican, Nuyorican,
or boricua subject living in Spanish Harlem (65). I acknowledge that most critics pay little attention to the blending
of hispanophone Caribbean ethnicities that mark Thomas’s identity, but Thomas seems to be more interested in
claiming his Puerto Rican heritage than a cubano identity. His family dynamics, which I examine later in the
chapter, enable Thomas to trace his blackness to his father while avowing his mother’s Puerto Rican identity.
41
Frances Negrón-Muntaner calls attention to the use of the term boricua as the “indigenous name many
Puerto Ricans call themselves in a nativist gesture to indicate the end of colonial subordination and the beginning of
a still politically undefined new era” (xiii).
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imperatives that demand they identify in Anglo-American racial terms. The Afro-Latinos in this
chapter, who embody a fragile masculinity, demonstrate that mulatez is just as fragile as their
embodiment of gender due to the alienation they feel as mixed-race men who have sex with men.
Yet, their dis/avowals of a gay identity allow them to critique white gay male normativity, or
what some scholars call homonormativity, by refusing or problematizing the white middle-class
demand to be legible gay subjects as an identitarian mode of being.
42

Afro-Latino queerness allows mixed-race men who have sex with men to imagine other
ways of living as racially mixed and queer, and even if these positions seem more like failures
than empowering identitarian strategies, it is important to keep in mind Jack Halberstam’s
argument that the “queer body and queer social worlds become evidence of [a certain kind of]
failure, while heterosexuality is rooted in a logic of achievement, fulfillment, and success(ion)”
(94). Queerness as an act and a set of behaviors rather than a political identity provides the
opportunity for Afro-Latino queer men to, as Homi K. Bhabha writes, “focus on those moments
or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences” (1). Cultural
differences for Afro-Latino queers are often predicated on a vexed and vexing relationship to
Euro-American homosexuality, and this is nowhere foregrounded so explicitly as when Afro-
Latino writers deploy mulatez in their memoir and fiction.
Mulatez as an Afro-Latino Aesthetic
Mexican philosopher and educator José Vasconcelos reached a large Latin American
audience with his 1925 essay La raza cósmica and found a readership in the modernist literary
coteries of the hispanophone Caribbean. However, Vasconcelos’s theories about racial mixing,
which foreground the Spanish and indigenous elements of the Latin American people and

42
For a good definition—one that is useful to my argument in this chapter—of homonormativity as it
operates in our current moment, see Lisa Duggan’s “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of
Neoliberalism.”
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culture, did not resonate so much with Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican writers, artists, and
intellectuals, who knew their national populations to be marked more by blackness than
indigeneity.
43
As a response to the Latin American modernist celebration of racial mixing, the
hispanophone Caribbean developed their own distinct theories and aesthetics embodying the
concern with the mixed-race (mulatto or mulatta) subject: mulatez or mulataje. Mulatez
“dramatized racial contact, confrontation, and interpenetration between blacks and whites” (47),
Marilyn Grace Miller writes, warning us that mulatez “should not be considered an exact parallel
to Vasconcelos-style mestizaje or to the development of other black literatures in the Americas”
(50).
44
Caribbean blackness must be seen as separate and distinct from blackness in other parts
of Latin America because of its predominance as the mark of racial difference in the Caribbean
islands, whose indigenous populations were exterminated, or nearly exterminated, by Spanish
conquistadores. Mexico and many other continental Latin American nations have large
indigenous populations that are currently engaged in struggles for sovereignty and autonomy;
however, with the disappearance of the Native populations and the rise and fall of plantation
economies on the Caribbean islands, the descendants of African slaves comprise a greater

43
Vasconcelos opens The Cosmic Race by praising the Americas for “includ[ing] some of the most ancient
regions in the world” (7). He goes on to claim, with no evidence to back his argument, that the “architectural ruins
of legendary Mayans, Quechuas, and Toltecs are testimony of civilized life previous to the oldest foundations of
towns in the Orient and Europe” (7). Although we can now deride Vasconcelos for his rewriting of history and
cultural anthropology, my larger point is that his celebration of the indigenous civilizations of the Americas entirely
occludes the history of black peoples in the New World and their historical, cultural, and literary contributions to the
Western hemisphere and the world at large. In post-revolutionary modernist Mexico, it was the indio who
represented the tragic yet noble resistance to Spanish colonization, whereas the descendants of African slaves were
entirely neglected or despised in the national imaginary.
44
In this regard literatures extoling blackness in the hispanophone Caribbean depart from African
American and French Antillean literatures. During the heyday of mulatez in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and
Puerto Rico, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and other Harlem Renaissance poets were publishing blues-inspired
poetry, and Aimé Césaire was publishing some of his most famous négritude writings. Just as Mexican nationalist
mestizaje demonstrated a profound ambivalence toward the indigenous peoples of Mexico, mulatez in the Twenties
and Thirties revealed ambiguity about the status of the mulatto and mulatta as a unifying figure in Caribbean
nationalist discourses. Unlike in mulatez poetry, the mulatto and mulatta in Harlem Renaissance literature did not
come to stand in as a figure who embodies and either attempts or fails to resolve the contradictions of the entire
nation. Harlem Renaissance writers who centered the mulatto or mulatta in their fictional landscapes were
responding to a racist history of Anglo-American writers who created the trope of the tragic mulatto or tragic
mulatta, a literary history and trope that did not exist in the Caribbean.
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percentage of Caribbean national populations than they do in most other Latin American
nations.
45

Alicia Arrizón translates mulatez as “mulatto-ness” to underscore the centrality of the
mixed-race figure in the literature of the period (84); however, she points out that the mulata was
much more important as a figure in Spanish Caribbean literature than the mulato, because the
female mixed-race subject stood in for the nation.
46
While mestizaje “refers to the blending of
the indigenous and Hispanic worlds (or other European cultures), in the Latin American cultural
context, mulatez is the marker of the black-hybrid body” (Arrizón 85). Miller states that the
“notion of mulatez as an aesthetic movement reached its zenith in Spanish America between
1920 and 1940, a period simultaneous with the production of several key negrismo texts” (54),
including novels, poetry, and songs in Spanish by Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Venezuelans,
and Colombians, and négritude writing by black French Antilleans. Whereas mulatez for
Caribbeans in the Twenties and Thirties served to project a utopian landscape onto the body of
the mulata, who figured as the metaphor for national unity, contemporary Latino American
writers of Caribbean descent who invoke mulatez do so to articulate racial difference from white
America. I argue that Afro-Latino writers in the US refunction mulatez from the modernis

45
In Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic, Ernesto Sagás provides demographics for the ethnic and
racial makeup of the Spanish Caribbean islands: “The population of Cuba is 51 percent mulatto, 37 percent white,
11 percent black, and 1 percent Chinese; the Dominican Republic is 73 percent mulatto, 16 percent white, and 11
percent black; and Puerto Rico is 55 percent white, 40 percent mulatto and 5 percent black” (141 n. 2).
46
Arrizón points out that “[h]istorically, the term [mulata/o] has been used to refer to a mixed-blood
individual, the product of miscegenation between a black woman and a white man” (84). The racialized and
gendered dynamics of the plantation encouraged white slave owners to rape their black female slaves and beget
mixed-race children, most of whom lived their lives as slaves. However, since my Afro-Latino characters are
products of late twentieth-century interracial marriage, the more common union is a black man coupled with a white
woman. In this chapter, the Afro-Latino men who engage in sex acts with other men have Afro-Latino fathers and
white or lighter-skinned Latina mothers.
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period to embrace a black identity in the US that acknowledges their racially mixed ancestry as a
product of Spanish colonialism and US imperialism in the Caribbean.
47

As I have already suggested, one must take caution not to compare modernist uses of
mulatez to those of contemporary Afro-Latino writers, but I hope to make a distinction between
their very different deployments and the purposes they serve in the Latino American literary
imaginary. Miller notes that Caribbean deployments of mulatez lead “some readers [to] worry
that an ideal of racial harmony is envisioned which minimizes racial tensions and inequities
based on race” (59). US writers of Caribbean descent, such as Piri Thomas in his memoir Down
These Mean Streets (1967), Junot Díaz in his short story collection Drown (1996), and Justin
Torres in his novel We the Animals (2011), use mulatez to accentuate their characters’ racial
ambivalence toward white America and their own Latino communities. Their Afro-Latino
characters engage in sex with other men and experience very different psychic responses to it:
the young Piri finds it necessary to assure himself of his heterosexuality, Yunior suffers from
homosexual panic and distances himself from his best friend, and Torres’s nameless narrator
achieves affirmation of his burgeoning gay identity but is institutionalized immediately
afterward. Despite their disparate responses to sex with other men, I read all three characters—
the young Piri, Yunior, and the nameless narrator of We the Animals—as Afro-Latino queer men
because I am using “queer” as an adjective that describes sex acts rather than a noun that
stabilizes sexual identities.
48
Although she queers mulatez in her work, Arrizón limits her

47
In calling the period of literary production in the Caribbean from the 1920 to 1940 “modernist,” I am not
suggesting that it is part of the Latin American movement known as modernismo, which began in the late nineteenth
century and has different literary antecedents. I call mulatez a modernist literary trope because it was transnational
in the sense that many nations in the Americas were self-consciously fashioning and voicing black identities in their
poetry and literature. Modernists had a certain preoccupation with blackness, although most of the Anglo-American
modernists ventriloquized black characters in a vernacular that essentializes them.
48
In Tendencies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick probably best describes the various uses to which “queer” can be
put: “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning
when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify
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analysis to recovering black female agency, which is usually performed by turning the
heterosexual and heterosexist male writers’ discourse back on itself and wresting from it an
autonomous black female and feminist voice. Her claim that the “black woman’s presence is the
subject of history, one whose sense of confidence embodies the collective self” foregrounds a
feminist solidarity that I find lacking among the individual queer Afro-Latinos populating the
texts I read (111). Piri, Yunior, and Torres’s narrator feel estranged from their families and
alienated from their communities as a result of their racial difference and, what so many critics
ignore, their queerness.
Dominican Mulatez in the Contemporary United States
The Dominican Republic is a fertile geopolitical area with which to open a discussion of
blackness because of its shared island space with Haiti and its historical and contemporary
disavowals of blackness. Unlike most other Latin American nations, people of African descent
in the Dominican Republic form the vast majority of the population. “Blacks and mulattos make
up nearly 90 percent of the contemporary Dominican population,” writes Silvio Torres-Saillaint,
but “[s]ome commentators would contend, in effect, that Dominicans have, for the most part,
denied their blackness” (126). The historical reasons for such a denial of Dominican blackness
stretch back to its struggle for independence from Spain and its occupation by Haitian forces in
the nineteenth century; however, many historians argue that under dictator Rafael Leónidas
Trujillo Molina and the engineers of his regime, antiblackness reached its apogee as it became
official state policy.
49
Historian April J. Mayes argues that the “architects of antiblack, anti-

monolithically” (8). I realize that since Sedgwick published “Queer and Now” in 1993, “queer” has been
normalized not only by its popularity in the academy but by its use as a self-designated identity for lesbians, gay
men, bisexuals, and transgender people; however, I cling to “queer” as Sedgwick did in her work from the nineties:
as a slippery term that defies easy definition.
49
For a good historical overview of the origins of blackness in the Dominican Republic to more
contemporary understandings of Afro-Dominican identity on the island and in the US, see Silvio Torres-Saillant’s
“The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity.”
77

Haitian hispanidad in the 1930s and 1940s in effect transformed a racist conceptualization of the
Dominican nation […] held by a small group of intellectual and bureaucratic elites into an
ideology that has since permeated Dominican society and culture” (2). For this reason, Yunior
de las Casas’s affirmation of a black identity once he immigrates to the US constitutes a
refunctioning of mulatez and an act of bold defiance in the face of antiblackness directed at him
from two racist nation-states founded on African slave labor.
The transnational circuit of blackness between the Dominican Republic and the US is one
of Díaz’s most abiding concerns in his oeuvre, since he develops it in Drown and returns to it in
his two subsequent books, his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and his
second short story collection This Is How You Lose Her (2012). Drown opens with the story
“Ysrael,” and no sooner than three pages into it does Yunior tell the reader that his older brother
Rafa derides him for his phenotype with an elaborate series of racist jokes: “Most of them had to
do with my complexion, my hair, the size of the my lips. It’s the Haitian, he’d say to his
buddies. Hey Señor Haitian, Mami found you on the border and only took you in because she
felt sorry for you” (5). Even within the mixed-race family, as I am reading la familia de las
Casas, the different phenotypes of individual family members leads to racism and colorism
between members of the family. Such familial racism and colorism can lead—as it does in
Yunior’s case—to psychic injury and feelings of alienation and estrangement from one’s own
family. Few critics have commented on Yunior’s racialization at the hands of his mixed-race
family. Although David Cowart recognizes that Díaz “touches often on the mixed ethnicity of
his characters” (200), he maintains that “[a]gainst this kind of racism, the betrayal within or by
one’s own, one cannot prevail” (201). I ultimately take a more optimistic (though cautious)
position and argue that Yunior’s familial betrayals—and his betrayals of others, which will be
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relevant below—mold his psychic, racial, class, and sexual identities in such ways to make him
resistant to assimilation in the US. Rafa’s treatment of Yunior as black, as Haitian, in the
Dominican Republic augurs his racialization as black in the US, for, as Danny Méndez writes,
“[i]dentity processes begun in the Dominican Republic prefigure Dominican identities and the
communities in the diaspora” (5). Mulatez on the island transmogrifies after its coordinates
change, and its ideological underpinnings shift from a project seeking national unity through,
with, and on the mulata body to self-awareness of racial difference from white America and
resistance to assimilability.
Yunior continues to racialize himself as black once he immigrates to the US, and
although he encodes his blackness through descriptions of his phenotype, he also reveals his
ambivalence toward the racist practices of others—his family, his potential dates, xenophobes—
which demand him to regulate or normalize his blackness. In another story from Drown, “How
to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” a young Yunior offers his advice about
how to shift one’s racial and class identity when speaking to girls of different races—if that one
is an Afro-Dominican boy like Yunior. Written in the second person, the narrator, whose
phenotype matches Yunior’s, tells the reader to “[h]ide the pictures of yourself with an Afro”
(143), and “[r]un a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that
runs easily through your hair is Africa” (145). These acts are understandable once Yunior
confesses that the “white ones are the ones you want most” (145), and “you love her hair […] her
skin, her lips […] more than you love your own” (147). Danny Méndez argues that “Yunior’s
association of an Afro with rejection is indicative of the racial perceptions and categorizations
that mold and are molded by Dominican attitudes,” and his “‘hiding’ of the picture with the Afro
is the symbolic equivalent of ‘hair straitening’” (133). At the time Yunior is narrating this
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seven-page story, he is in the eighth grade, far from the adult male who will come to fully avow
a black identity in the US; but suffice it to say for now that a young teenaged Yunior’s awareness
of the desirability of white women in a racist and heterosexist sexual economy stands as a latent
critique of his own desire for “whitegirls,” a critique the adult Yunior will affirm even as he
recognizes his own complicity in heterosexual Latino misogyny.
Dominicano Misogyny
Dominican antiblackness cannot be divorced from masculinity because the Trujillato
modeled a rigid hypermasculinity that relied on antihaitianismo to project an image of the male
subject rid of all trace of blackness and ready to answer the military dictator’s call for violence
and sexual prowess. Although Yunior comes to embrace his blackness, his need to seek sex with
dozens of women even when he is in a monogamous relationship reveals that he is invested in an
image of hypermasculinity as defined by Trujillo and his regime. Yunior famously opens the
short story “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” from This Is How You Lose Her by telling the reader
how many women he has had sex with while engaged to his fiancée: “She could have caught you
with one sucia, she could have caught you with two, but as you’re a totally batshit cuero who
didn’t ever empty his e-mail trash can, she caught you with fifty! Sure, over a six-year period,
but still. Fifty fucking girls? Goddamn” (179). The narrator’s misogyny is evident from his
calling the women with whom he cheated on his fiancée “sucias,” which literally means “dirty
women,” but in this context could mean “nasty girls.”
50
Rather than fully accepting his part in
destroying his relationship with his fiancée, Yunior places some of the blame on the fifty “nasty
girls” who had sex with him in that six-year period. Danny Méndez asserts that Yunior fulfills

50
In “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic,” Deborah R. Vargas writes that “[l]o sucio
smells like a splendid surplus always weary of the heteronormative temporality of love as defined by guarantees,
for-sures, and forevers” (723). In this sense, Yunior deploys lo sucio as a queer analytic by calling the dozens of
women with whom he has casual sex “sucias,” although my critique of his misogyny and hypermasculinity still
stands.
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the role of the Dominican tíguere, which was an “image [that] was semiofficially diffused
throughout the island during the Trujillo regime. […] ‘Un tigre’ refers to the kind of cunning
working-class urban male who, through his wits and cojones (testicles), understands the art of
social mobility” (127). The tíguere also enjoys easy access to sex with women, something that
Trujillo himself had as a dictator who claimed whatever female bodies he desired.
51

Yunior’s blatant misogyny still leaves open the question of whether or not Díaz’s work
can properly be described or read as feminist. Maja Horn contends that it is “noxious […] how
Díaz’s narrative is read by mainstream media, as a progress narrative leading toward greater
‘feminism’” (137). In Horn’s critique, US critics read Díaz’s work as feminist because he
demonstrates the Dominican male’s investment in maintaining his hypermasculine image at the
expense of women, but such a reading ignores the misogynist practices of the US and its
mandate to be seen as a world power liberating women around the globe from the shackles of
backwards non-Western traditions. While it is not the purpose of this chapter to definitively
establish whether or not Díaz’s oeuvre can be said to be feminist or misogynist, I must
acknowledge that Díaz’s protagonists (both Yunior and Oscar from The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao) and Piri Thomas in his memoir occlude female subjectivity in their work.
52
It seems
that the mixed-race queer(ed) male subject generally does not destabilize an androcentric
Weltanschauung. In Chapter 3 I read Édouard Glissant’s novel The Overseer’s Cabin as a text

51
Maja Horn challenges notions that Trujillo was solely responsible for the shaping of modern Dominican
masculinity. In Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature, she writes, “Indeed, the
premise of this book is not to offer a denunciation of Dominican masculinity as ‘a bad barbaric tradition’ that calls
for proper ‘modern’ schooling. Rather, this study suggests how modern Dominican gender mores have been and
continue to be shaped also through the interaction with ‘modern’ outside powers and their underlying patriarchal
conceptions” (13).
52
One could argue that Junot Díaz attempts to correct the overriding male positionality in his work by
allowing Oscar’s sister, Lola, to narrate a few sections in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and by writing
short stories from the point of view of Dominican women, but these attempts do little to center female subjectivity in
his oeuvre. Piri Thomas, who only wrote from his own subject position, does even less to consider female agency in
his work, marking him and his memoirs as products of 1960s masculinist nationalist and civil rights movements.
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that centers the Creole madwomen as a figure who leverages critiques against misogyny,
colonization, and French departmentalization; and in Chapter 4 I examine Josefina López’s play
Hungry Woman for its dramatization of Mexicana/Chicana mestiza feminism in a transnational
context. This chapter, however, does not move beyond the confines of mixed-race queer male
subjectivity. Rather than expanding the subject position of Afro-Latinas in his fiction, Junot
Díaz is more invested in consciously deploying mixed-race blackness, or mulatez, to invoke a
specifically black literary genealogy and attempt to forge solidarity with other black peoples not
from the hispanophone Caribbean.
The Fashioning of a Black Literary Genealogy
Junot Díaz’s critique of Dominican antihaitianismo becomes more forceful with his
novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, published eleven years after his short story
collection Drown. In his novel Díaz is committed to revealing the ways that antihaitianismo “is
directed not only toward Haiti and Haitians, but also toward Afro-Caribbean members of
Dominican society,” which “denies dark-skinned citizens, and the poor generally, their own
sociocultural space and intimidates them from making demands or otherwise participating in
politics” (Sagás 4). In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, General Trujillo’s intimidation
tactics during his reign in the Dominican Republic constitute nothing less than a horror story in
what would otherwise be a novel of one straight Dominican American nerd boy’s quest to find
love and lose his virginity. Although the hero of the story is Oscar de León, and the
multigenerational family narrative flashes back to the lives of his mother, Hypatia Belicia
Cabral, and grandfather, Abelard Luis Cabral, Yunior is the main narrator and anchors the text in
a powerful intertextual critique of Dominican antiblackness and antihaitianismo.
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Much like Jorge Luis Borges in his short fiction from the 1940s and Sandra Cisneros in
her 2002 novel Caramelo; or, Puro Cuento, Díaz employs footnotes to lend historical gravity
and erudition to his already densely allusive text. One footnote in particular seems appropriate to
dwell on because of its intertextuality and invocation of transnational Caribbean blackness: “My
shout-out to Jack Kirby aside, it’s hard as a Third Worlder not to feel a certain amount of affinity
for Uatu the Watcher; he resides in the hidden Blue Area of the Moon and we DarkZoners reside
(to quote Glissant) on “la face cachée de la Terre” (Earth’s hidden face)” (92). Díaz’s citation of
Glissant’s Le discours antillais (in the original French) in a footnote of his novel marks the text
as a specifically Afro-Dominican discursive production through its intertextual imbrication of
French Antillean discourse with the articulation of Yunior’s mixed-race black Dominican
American identity.
53
Although Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse is a thorough investigation of
Martinican identity, Díaz conjures the presence of Haiti through his citation of Glissant, who
holds up Haiti as the nation with the first successful slave revolution in the New World, thereby
allying black Dominicans to their Haitian neighbors and leveraging a critique against
antihaitianismo. Citing Glissant works to forge a specifically black literary genealogy that
rejects the hispanicization of Latin(o) American literature.
If Díaz allies himself to Haitians, Martinicans, and other Afro-Antilleans in his novel, he
also deploys a transnational mulatez in his second short story collection, This Is How You Lose
Her. The main narrator of these stories about love and infidelity in straight cisgender Latino
relationships, Yunior de las Casas, is still ever conscious of his African ancestry and his mixed-

53
I am not sure if Junot Díaz read Le discours antillais in French, but J. Michael Dash’s introduction to
Caribbean Discourse provides the French phrase and nearly identical English translation that Díaz cites and uses: “It
is precisely such ‘totalizing’ and hierarchical master texts that relegate the Caribbean to the noncreative,
nonhistorical periphery—‘la face cachée de la Terre’ (the earth’s hidden face)” (xxx). It is likely and even probable
that Díaz read Dash’s translation and introduction to Glissant’s text. Moreover, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao is a novelistic exercise in rejecting the “‘totalizing’ and hierarchical master texts” of the Western literary
tradition and crafts a fragmented and fractured narrative (told by two narrators) in such a way that Glissant himself
would appreciate. Glissant is evidently a Caribbean writer whose theory and fiction influenced Díaz’s own writing.
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race family’s investment in eliminating its traces in his phenotype. In “Invierno,” a story about
the de las Casas family’s adjustment to the frigid winters of New Jersey and Yunior’s father’s
hostility and antagonism toward his younger son and namesake, Yunior compares his hair to that
of his older brother: “While Rafa’s hair was straight and glided through a comb like a Caribbean
grandparent’s dream, my hair still had enough of the African to condemn me to endless
combings and out-of-this-world haircuts” (130). The reader familiar with Díaz’s oeuvre knows
that Rafa has teased Yunior on the island for his dark skin, thick lips, and hair texture; but now
his father attempts to erase Yunior’s black identity: “It’s better to shave it all off,” he tells his
son, and then he orders the barber to “Shave it” (132). Yunior’s response to the imminent loss of
his hair—and his black identity—is to tell the reader, “I was sick to my stomach; I didn’t want
him to shave it but what could I have said to my father? I didn’t have the words” (132). The
young Afro-Dominican faces a triple loss: the loss of his hair, the loss of one of the marks and
signs of his black identity in the US, and the loss of his words. But if the newly arrived
immigrant feels the pressure to assimilate and be absorbed into white America, he does not so
easily give up his Afro-Dominican identity once his father is no longer present to regulate and
elide his young son’s blackness.
Glissant informs Díaz’s novel (not just in the footnote but in its centering of mixed-race
Afro-Antillean subjectivity), but African American science fiction writer, literary critic, and
queer theorist Samuel R. Delany figures as a black queer icon in Díaz’s story “Nilda.” Yunior
tells the reader, “I was fourteen and reading Dhalgren for the second time; I had an IQ that
would have broken you in two but I would have traded it in for a halfway decent face in a
second” (31), thus positioning himself in the discourse of science fiction written by African
American queers. Like the footnote invoking Glissant, the allusion to Samuel Delany is casual
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and can be easily overlooked, allowing its importance to Díaz’s project to be minimized, but
such casual allusions constitute deployments of Yunior’s transnational mulatez and his avowal of
blackness in the face of the mandate to assimilate. Dhalgren is often noted for its complexity,
postmodern literary techniques, and ambitious scope (as one could say is true of Díaz’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel), which is one reason Yunior boasts about his high IQ; but I am more
interested in Yunior’s claiming of a black text that features explicit gay sex. Yunior himself
engages in sex acts with another man, and he responds with an ambivalence that at first may
appear to have much more to do with sex and gender than race, but as these three categories
constellate to form Yunior’s identity, racial ambivalence ineluctably marks his mixed-race
psyche.
Afro-Dominican Disavowals of Homosexuality
The subject of sex between Afro-Dominican men touches on race, ethnicity, class,
gender, sex, and sexuality in ways both direct and oblique. No identitarian claims can be taken
for granted when one examines the nature of how and under what conditions sex between Afro-
Dominican men takes place, for although certain aspects of these men’s complex identities are
easily legible, others are often rendered invisible through silence or compulsory behavior.
54

Junot Díaz’s eponymous short story from Drown is one of his most frequently cited stories, and
numerous critics have analyzed it as one of the few and most explicit literary accounts of sex acts
between Dominican men. I read “Drown” as an examination not only of ambivalence toward
homosexual sex, but of racial and class ambivalence evinced by the narrator’s anxieties
surrounding upward class mobility and cultural betrayal.

54
Here I am of course alluding to Adrienne Rich’s concept of “compulsory heterosexuality,” which she
defines as a “political institution” (35), but also to other forms of compulsory behavior, such as scripted
performances of racialized and classed masculinity for men of color.
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Critics do not agree on who the narrator of “Drown” is, with several literary critics
arguing that Yunior tells the story because he is the dominant narrative voice of Drown (and
Díaz’s later work), and others contesting that claim and positing an unnamed narrator whose
biographical details differ from Yunior’s. Danny Méndez, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, and A.
Robert Lee unambiguously claim Yunior as the narrator of “Drown,” whereas Dorothy Stringer
maintains that the “narrator’s namelessness plausibly denies that he is the same person as the
autobiographical and exuberantly heterosexual Yunior” (121). David Cowart states that “the
stories in Drown commonly concern the experiences of a single viewpoint individual (who
usually narrates)” (192), and the “tonally undifferentiated voices may, after all, mask a single
narrator” (204); but he does not unequivocally settle the question of who the narrator is. While I
entertain the possibility that the narrator of “Drown,” who is never called by his name in the
story, may not be Yunior, I find no reason why the “exuberantly heterosexual” Yunior cannot
engage in sex acts with another man and then disavow homosexuality as an identity. Too often
critics read Yunior as an “autobiographical” stand-in for Díaz himself—much like they read John
Rechy’s protagonists in his early fiction—but it is best to keep in mind that we are treating
fiction and not autobiography or memoir. Yunior is not to be conflated with his creator, Junot
Díaz.
For the purposes of my argument, I hold Yunior to be the narrator of “Drown” and read
his disavowal of homosexuality as an index of his ambivalence and anxieties about race and
class. Yunior opens the story by revealing that a character named Beto is home: “He’s a pato
now but two years ago we were friends,” when “his heavy voice […] made you think of uncles
or grandfathers” (91). “Pato,” whose lexical definition is “duck,” is Spanish slang for “faggot,”
but shortly after designating Beto as gay, Yunior renders him familiar, or, rather, familial, by
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comparing his voice to that of “uncles or grandfathers.” There is something almost avuncular or
grandfatherly about Beto’s voice that persists in Yunior’s memory of him, which is evidence that
the latter still has affection for his former friend. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay titled “Tales
of the Avunculate” asks us to consider uncles (and aunts) as familial figures who are capable of
“representing nonconforming or nonreproductive sexualities to children” (Tendencies, 63). If
this is the case for Yunior, then Beto’s avuncular voice may be further confirmation of his
queerness and an indication that his “queer tutelage” (52), to borrow again from Sedgwick, has
shaped Yunior’s understanding of homosexuality even if he resorts to homophobic epithets in
order to deny it.
55

Later Yunior reveals that he has engaged in sex acts with Beto, but his quick and easy
rejection of a gay identity affirms his fragile masculinity and its need for distance from Yunior’s
queer past. After describing his and his friends’ homophobic abuse of gay men at “the fag bar,
which never seems to close” (103), there is a break in the text and Yunior starts a new section
with the admission of his sexual relationship with Beto: “Twice. That’s it” (103). Although
Díaz’s prose style throughout the stories in Drown and Yunior’s narrative voice generally is
spare and at times Hemingwayesque, Díaz’s use of three words in two sentences signals a shift
not only in the narrative but in Yunior’s consciousness. Yunior then describes his first sexual
experience with Beto:
We were an hour into the new movie, some vaina that looked like it had been filmed in
the apartment next door, when he reached into my shorts. What the fuck are you doing? I

55
One must remember how the hero of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao received his name: Yunior
told Oscar that he “couldn’t believe how much he looked like that fat homo Oscar Wilde,” to which responds
Melvin, one of Oscar’s antagonists, “Oscar Wao, quién es Oscar Wao, and that was it, all of us started calling him
that” (180). Oscar de Léon’s queerness—which does not signify homosexuality but rather his Afro-Dominican
nerdiness, fatness, lack of sexual prowess, and desperate attempts to lose his virginity—is filtered through the
historical figure of Wilde. It is evident that Oscar Wilde haunts Yunior’s narrative voice, even in his seeming
commitment to exploring Dominican male masculinity and misogyny.
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asked, but he didn’t stop. His hand was dry. I kept my eyes on the television, too scared
to watch. I came right away, smearing the plastic sofa covers. My legs started shaking
and suddenly I wanted out. He didn’t say anything to me as I left, just sat there watching
the screen. (104)
The experience of two straight men watching pornography together is generally considered a
homosocial act that borders on the homoerotic, but Beto’s masturbating Yunior transgresses the
homosocial and places both men in the realm of homosexual acts, though not of gay identities.
That Yunior “came right away” signifies that his penis was already erect during the hour the two
men were watching the pornographic film, and he required little stimulation from Beto to
achieve orgasm. Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui contends that Yunior “continues watching the porn
movie to create for himself an ‘excuse’ that his hard-on and orgasm were the result of the
heterosexual porn movie—and not of being fondled by another man” (206), but I argue that it is
the experience of watching heterosexual pornography with his best friend that turns Yunior on
and allows him to come so quickly.
If Yunior’s first sexual experience with a man is not initiated by him and is seemingly
unwelcome, his second time having sex with Beto cannot so easily be relegated to the accidental.
After admitting that he is “terrified that [he] would end up abnormal, a fucking pato” (104),
Yunior nevertheless goes to the pool where he and Beto break in after hours and swim, where he
meets Beto, justifying his seeking him out by saying that “he was my best friend and back then
that mattered to me more than anything” (104). Once in the swimming pool, Yunior tells the
reader that Beto “put his hand on my shoulder, my pulse a code under his palm” (105); such a
code, whose signal is the fast beating of Yunior’s heart, is read as his desire to have more sex
with Beto, since after Beto invites Yunior back to his parents’ apartment, he readily accepts and
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goes. Their second time having sex is more intimate than the first: Yunior says, “We sat in front
of his television, in our towels, his hands bracing against my abdomen and thighs. I’ll stop if
you want, he said and I didn’t respond. After I was done, he laid his head in my lap” (105). The
queer intimacy between the two men is registered by Beto’s laying “his head in [Yunior’s] lap”
after performing oral fellatio on him. Sifuentes-Jáuregui argues that the “first time that the boys
did ‘it’ may have been ‘accidental,’ but Yunior’s second time, in the name of friendship, reveals
a paradigm. Yunior’s repeat experience happens to completion without him saying a word. This
seems to suggest that homosexual encounters can happen as long as they are not discussed”
(207). As long as both men neither recognize nor confirm their homoerotic desire for each other,
then Yunior feels his fragile masculinity is preserved and unimpeachable; but when a neighbor
opens his hallway door loudly and threatens to witness their queer intimacy, Yunior immediately
disavows his homosexual acts and his queer friend by saying, “Fuck this, and get[s] [his] clothes
on” (106), leaving Beto for the second-to-last time.
The last interaction Yunior has with Beto is when he sees him off to college, which
constitutes Beto’s escape from the New Jersey barrio in which he feels trapped, and Beto leaves
Yunior with a gift that he cannot open for fear of its confirmation of his homoerotic desire.
Yunior narrates his final experience with Beto: “You can’t be anywhere forever, was what Beto
used to say, what he said to me the day I went to see him off. He handed me a gift, a book, and
after he was gone I threw it away, didn’t even bother to open it and read what he’d written”
(107). The book’s inscription is not only textual evidence of Yunior’s sexual relationship with
Beto but more importantly registers what Yunior fears is the inscription of homosexuality on his
body or identity. As Lee Edelman argues, homosexuals were “subjected to a cultural imperative
that viewed them as inherently textual—as bodies that might well bear a ‘hallmark’ that could,
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and must, be read” (6).
56
The textual body of “the homosexual” affords even greater legibility—
because of its greater visibility—when his body is marked by race and class, as Beto’s is. If, as
Edelman continues, “the homosexual subject is represented as being, even more than as
inhabiting, a body that always demands to be read, a body on which his ‘sexuality’ is always
already inscribed” (10), then Beto’s body is read as queer, as gay, as that of a “pato” by Yunior
precisely because it is more legible by being racialized as Dominican and classed as poor.
However, we cannot forget that Beto is upwardly mobile because he is going off to college and
his racial difference is, if we heed Yunior’s cues, not the same as Yunior’s Afro-Dominican
identity.
Yunior’s psychic uncertainty manifests itself as more than just gender and sexual
ambivalence and registers a palpable racial ambivalence when we consider how he describes his
anxieties surrounding Beto’s racial difference and upward mobility and his perceived betrayal of
the barrio ethos to which both men once ascribed. Although Beto says of his father that “[t]he
nigger’s got arthritis” (98), which suggests an Afro-Dominican identity similar to that of Yunior,
who also uses the epithet “nigger” to describe other Afro-Dominicans, his phenotype may be
closer to that of a Dominican of Spanish descent, since Yunior describes “his body pale and
flabby under the water” of the swimming pool (105). The reader knows from earlier stories in
Drown that Yunior has dark skin and is called “the Haitian” by his brother Rafa (5), so Beto’s
“pale” skin, which is significant enough for Yunior to remark upon, can be read as Yunior’s

56
Lee Edelman coins the word “homographesis” to “name a nexus of concerns at the core of any
theoretical discussion of homosexuality in relation to, and as a product of, writing or textuality, [which] literally
incorporates within its structure—and figuratively incorporates by referring back to the body—the notion of
‘graphesis,’ which was broached in an issue of Yale French Studies edited by Marie-Rose Logan” (9). Although
Edelman’s work examines cultural products only in the European or Euro-American canons—with the sole
exception of James Baldwin’s oeuvre—he is helpful here to think through the concatenation of textual inscription
and the belief and fear that “the homosexual” carried a mark, sign, or inscription of his sexual identity on his body.
Yunior seems to fear that his opening the book Beto gives him and reading its inscription will correspond to an
inscription of homosexuality on his own body or identity.
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racial ambivalence toward his best friend, who does not embody an Afro-Dominican identity,
though he arguably avows one from the way he refers to his father. The difference in their
phenotypes is not the only reason Yunior feels ambivalent about his friend’s queer sexuality.
Beto’s going off to college enables him to escape the New Jersey barrio in which both men live
and generates anxiety in Yunior’s psyche. Early in “Drown,” Yunior narrates a conversation
between himself and Beto: “I don’t know how you can do it, [Beto] said. I would just find me a
job anywhere and go” (91), to which Yunior responds, “Yeah, I said. I wasn’t like him. I had
another year to go in high school, no promises elsewhere” (92). Beto’s escape from the barrio—
his upward class and social mobility—can be seen as betraying the lower-class Dominican
homosocial bonds the two men forged together while shoplifting together as a pastime. Yunior’s
panicked reaction to Beto’s queer sexuality is entangled in his fear and rejection of Beto’s
proximity to whiteness.
Beto’s proximity to whiteness is also perceived by Yunior to be worldliness, which is a
sign and mark of specifically gay male sexuality. Yunior says that Beto “knew a lot of folks I
didn’t—a messed-up black kid from Madison Park, two brothers who were into that N.Y. club
scene, who spent money on platform shoes and leather backpacks” (102). The “N.Y. club
scene,” one that requires participants to buy “platform shoes and leather backpacks,” is
indicative of a queer club scene, maybe a Goth or leather gay community. Initially, Beto’s
travels outside his and Yunior’s New Jersey barrio do not bother the latter, but after their sexual
relationship, Yunior retroactively reads Beto’s excursions through urban and cosmopolitan New
York as further confirmation of his queerness and his betrayal of their racialized and classed
homosocial bond. That Yunior is blind to his own treachery—turning his back on his best friend
because their shared queer intimacy threatens Yunior’s fragile Afro-Dominican masculinity—
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can be read as a trenchant critique of homophobia and “homosexual panic” among poor working-
class Dominican immigrant men.
57

The tension between commitment to one’s Dominican male community and the desire for
embodying the tíguere type generates in Yunior the racial ambivalence that ultimately causes
him to break off his friendship with Beto. Carlos Ulises Decena interviews Dominican
immigrant men who have sex with other men and finds that many of them work to “achieve
relative masculine normativity” (6), and “[f]or them, surviving and being respected was more
important than any sense of community they may have felt toward one another” (16). “Relative
masculine normativity” confines the Dominican queer male subject by forcing him to engage in
acts that have been scripted for him by social mores and cultural codes. When one is Afro-
Latino, like Yunior is, one’s psychic investment in one’s image is further restricted by the racial
codes of dominant white American society and those of the Latino culture in which one lives.
Yunior in “Drown” is figured as a queer character who cannot accept his queerness, and
as such bears a certain affinity with the queer modernist subjects of Heather Love’s book Feeling
Backward. While acknowledging that “same-sex desire is not as impossible as it used to be,”
Love argues that consequently “the survival of feelings such as shame, isolation, and self-hatred
into the post-Stonewall era is often the occasion for further feelings of shame” (4). It seems that
Yunior cannot bear his shame at having queer sex and the further shame of rejecting a politically
viable queer identity, and he therefore rejects both Beto and the gift he gives him, which is not
only the inscribed book but Beto’s making available for Yunior the performance of a Latino

57
In Epistemology of the Closet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes about specifically literary invocations of
“homosexual panic,” but she points out that it was initially used as a “defense strategy that is commonly used to
prevent conviction or to lighten sentencing of gay-bashers […]. Judicially, a ‘homosexual panic’ defense for a
person (typically a man) accused of antigay violence implies that his responsibility for the crime was diminished by
a pathological psychological condition, perhaps brought on by an unwanted sexual advance from the man whom he
then attacked” (19). Although Yunior never attacks Beto, he and his friends Danny and Alex do stop at “the fag
bar” to “point [Alex’s] plastic pistol at them, just to see if they’ll run or shit their pants” (Díaz 103). Yunior’s
homophobia and threatening gay men can be seen as constituting his homosexual panic.
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queer identity. Furthermore, Love maintains that “[a]lthough there are crucial differences
between life before gay liberation and life after, feelings of shame, secrecy, and self-hatred are
still with us” (20), which casts the current demand to reject these negative feelings as a
normalizing impulse in LGBT communities. Post-Stonewall subjects like Yunior may also
experience “shame, secrecy, and self-hatred” because the progress narrative of queer sexualities
has been normalized by and within the white population of the US and less so or sometimes not
at all within certain poor communities of color, whose racial and class differences relegate them
to the “prehistorical past” Love examines in Feeling Backward (168). If British and Anglo-
American modernist subjects could not “accept,” for lack of a better word, their own queer
identities as politically viable, how much less so can a poor working-class Dominican male
immigrant like Yunior? In Yunior’s devotion to the Dominican working-class ethos of the
barrio, he cannot imagine himself being both a working-class Afro-Latino and a self-avowed gay
man or queer. Later, I demonstrate that Justin Torres’s narrator and his mixed-race brothers in
We the Animals also feel the two identities, one racial and the other sexual, to be incompatible.
The failure of Afro-Latino men who have sex with men to identify as “gay” or “queer” is a
critique of white gay male normativity specifically and white homonormativity in general
because it demonstrates the psychic cost of the white queer community’s expectation that queers
of color be as legible in their sexuality as middle-class white queers and to identify in the same
middle-class Anglo-American labels they use.
Mixed-race queer subjects must contend with racism from both within and outside of the
various ethnic communities to which they belong in addition to the homophobia of these
communities and, in the case of Yunior and Piri Thomas, in themselves. Oftentimes Latino
communities are as antiblack as white America, something that the young Afro-Puerto Rican Piri
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experiences acutely growing up in New York before the civil rights movement. Shifting now to
mixed-race Puerto Rican subjects, I examine afrolatinidad as the result of interracial marriage
and Afro-Puerto Rican queerness as the ambivalent response to the racial and sexual dynamics of
mixed-race Latino families.
Afro-Puerto Rican Encodings of Ambivalence and Shame
I traced the racial and sexual dynamics of the mixed-race Mexican/American family in
John Rechy’s memoir, and read his hostility toward and resentment of his Scottish father and
loyalty toward and affection for his Mexican mother within the Oedipal-conquest-triangle
schematized by Emma Pérez. The dynamics of the mixed-race Latino family shift when the
father is a Puerto Rican of African ancestry and the mother is a Puerto Rican of Spanish heritage,
particularly when the son is read as black not only by members of his family but by schoolmates,
potential employers, and US Southerners. Piri Thomas’s memoir Down These Mean Streets,
published in 1967 during the height of black nationalism and two years before African American
and Puerto Rican students protested for and effectively won free admissions at the City College
of New York, positions a young Piri moving between and among many social milieus: his home
neighborhood of Spanish Harlem, white New York, African American New York, and the Deep
South.
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Unlike Rechy who is a Chicano mestizo, Piri bears the mark of his African ancestry,
inherited from his father, and he cannot pass for white: everywhere he is read by others as black.
His attempts to confront antiblack racism within his own Puerto Rican community and the

58
For a good reading of the interracial struggle between African Americans and Puerto Ricans for free
admissions at CCNY, see Roderick A. Ferguson’s “The Racial Genealogy of Excellence” in The Reorder of Things:
The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (76-109). Ferguson is particularly adept at
contextualizing the movement within its queer history, noting that “June Jordan would become a faculty member at
City College. Her colleagues—Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Christian, Addison Gayle Jr., David Henderson, Audre
Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Mina Shaughnessy—would go on to become luminaries in their own right” (77). I find it
relevant to point out a queer genealogy of resistance within a historic site of African American and Puerto Rican
interracialism because Piri’s own Afro-Puerto Rican subjectivity is, I later argue, marked by queer and racial shame.
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dominant white world lead to frustration, despair, heroin addiction, crime, and, finally,
imprisonment for shooting and wounding a cop during a failed attempt at robbery.
Like Rechy’s father, Piri’s father is prone to use physical violence against his children
when disciplining them, only Piri feels the weight of his father’s violence is directed more
forcefully at him and not at his siblings. Early in his memoir, a young Piri questions this
seemingly disproportionate use of disciplining violence against him: “How come when we all get
hit for doing something wrong, I feel it the hardest? Maybe ’cause I’m the biggest, huh? Or
maybe it’s ’cause I’m the darkest in this family” (22). Within the hierarchizing structure of the
mixed-race family, the son with the darkest skin is the object of physical force that is justified as
discipline and punishment, but which really is an index of colorism and antiblack racism in the
Latino community. In the case of Piri’s father, this violence directed at his dark-skinned son
may have something to do with self-hatred and the shame of being dark-skinned, for Piri tells the
reader: “I look like Poppa, I thought, we really favor each other. I wondered if it was too mean
to hate your brothers a little for looking white like Momma. I felt my hair—thick, black, and
wiry. Mentally I compared my hair with my brothers’ hair” (121). Piri here sees himself in his
father—they “really favor each other”—because both share a black phenotype, whereas Piri’s
brothers look “white” like their mother. Piri’s mother’s proximity to whiteness must be
contextualized within the history of Spanish colonization of Puerto Rico and continued US
imperialist efforts to keep the island a US territory. Although Piri reads her as “white,” she is
likely a mestiza with phenotypically Spanish features. His interracial parentage engenders in Piri
a racial ambivalence as he negotiates his Afro-Puerto Rican identity among the different social
milieus that are hostile to those bearing traces of their African ancestry.
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In an attempt to learn more about his place in the US as an Afro-Puerto Rican, Piri signs
up with the National Maritime Union and persuades his African American friend, Brew, to sign
up with him so that they can be shipped down South. Piri’s experiences in the Jim Crow South
help to define his relationship to his blackness, but they do not resolve his racial ambivalence
toward his mixed identity and the black population that would claim him and the white—or
“paddy”—people with whom he still feels some sense of belonging. After telling Brew that
“‘everybody knows paddies are prejudiced against Negroes—and Negroes want to be prejudiced
right back’” (180), Piri describes the push and pull he feels between the two races: “I still can’t
help feeling both paddy and Negro. The weight feels even on both sides even if both sides
wanna feel uneven. Goddammit, I wish I could be like one of those lizards that change colors.
When I’d be with Negroes, I’d be a stone Negro, and with paddies, I’d be a stone paddy” (180).
The “paddies” with whom Piri feels a sense of belonging are light-skinned Puerto Ricans and
other Latina/os—like his mother, who attempts to mitigate the mutual hostility between Piri and
his black father—not Euro-Americans whose racism is directed at both black people and
Latina/os.
Although Piri wants to fully embrace his black identity, he feels that he cannot do so
without denying his racially mixed identity and his latinidad. David J. Vázquez asserts that Piri
Thomas “consistently aligns himself with blacks in the United States” (68), but he is still torn
between two competing roles: “one that would allow the hero to disavow his African ancestry
through the affirmation of Puerto Rican cultural identification, and another that would compel
him to assume an African American identity based on biological notions of race that erase the
distinctiveness of the Afro-Puerto Rican experience” (Santiago-Díaz and Rodríguez 13). His
racial ambivalence generates a critique against both “paddies” and “Negroes,” but it also leads
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Piri to feel sexual shame that evinces itself as homophobia and a disavowal of homosexuality as
a corrupting influence on the Afro-Puerto Rican masculine subject who must bear the “burden of
representation” (35), as Nahem Yousaf argues Piri Thomas does in and through Down These
Mean Streets.
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Like Yunior in “Drown,” Piri has sex with another Latino, but unlike Yunior’s
homosexual experience, it is not with his best friend but a Latina drag queen named Concha. At
the suggestion of a friend, Piri and a group of teenage boys go to the “‘faggots’ pad and cop
some bread’” (55), and find Antonia and Concha, “two faggots [who] were boys in their
twenties; [and] La Vieja—‘the old Lady’—[who] was maybe thirty or forty” (56). The teenaged
Piri feels disgust and repulsion toward the Latina drag queens, but after being offered alcohol
and marijuana and experiencing the effects of both, he loses and regains consciousness to find
Concha opening his pants to gain access to his penis. Thomas writes, “I tried to stop my pee-
pee’s growth, but it grew independently. If I didn’t like the scene, my pee-pee did. I couldn’t
move” (61). Thomas finds an excuse for his erection by blaming his arousal at the hands of a
“faggot” on his penis rather than his own homoerotic desire. Thomas narrates, with elisions,
Concha’s performing oral fellatio on him: “I felt the roughness of his tongue as it both scared
and pleased me. I like broads, I like muchachas, I like girls, I chanted inside me. I felt funny,
like getting dizzy and weak and lazy. I felt myself lurching and straining. I felt like I wanted to
yell. Then I heard slurping sounds and it was all over” (61). That Piri must insist on his

59
The quote is worth citing in its entirety because it compares Drown to Down These Mean Streets,
although its argument does not consider the racially mixed identities of Yunior and Piri as factors that shape the
psychic experiences, lived embodiments, and mixed-race performativity of the texts’ narrators: “Although Diaz’s
[sic] Drown (1996) recalls Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets (1967), the differences are more significant.
Diaz [sic] refuses teleology and the burden of representation” (Yousaf 35). The “teleology” of Thomas’s memoir
may be more historical than textual, if we are to consider its publication in the late sixties as part of the
ethnonationalist sentiment of the time. The “burden of representation” is particularly an issue of the civil rights era,
when one considers the leading male figures of the time—Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and
César Chávez—as masculine icons of racialized heteronormativity.
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heterosexuality and disavow all homosexual desire while receiving oral sex from a man is
evidence of his “homosexual panic” and testifies to his fragile masculinity. The gender
ambiguity of Concha, who embodies femininity though she is male-bodied and called “faggot”
by Piri and his friends, threatens the heterosexual matrix by dismantling the gender binary and
calling into question what is “homosexual sex” and what is “heterosexual sex.”
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The young
Piri’s ambivalence toward his sexual act with another man may be read as shame.
If shame has been read as constitutive to gay male identity, it has also been theorized as
formative on the making of modern Puerto Rican identity in the US. Although Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick argues that shame is a constitutive element of gay or queer male sexuality, she also
makes a larger argument regarding its centrality to identity formation in general: “The forms
taken by shame are not distinct ‘toxic’ parts of a group or individual identity that can be excised;
they are instead integral to and residual in the processes by which identity itself is formed”
(Touching Feeling, 63). Theorizations such as Sedgwick’s have allowed critics working on race
and Puerto Rican identity, such as Frances Negrón-Muntaner, to argue that “modern Puerto
Rican ethnic and national identity has been historically narrated or performed by tropes of shame
and displays of pride” (xiii). The young Piri’s shame—as related by the adult memoirist Piri
Thomas—of his experience of receiving oral sex from a Latina drag queen is registered by his
psychic and physiological reactions to homosexual sex: Piri feels both “scared and pleased” and
also feels “funny, like getting dizzy and weak and lazy.” David J. Vázquez maintains that Piri
Thomas the memoirist “must deflect [the teenage] Piri’s sexual pleasure in order to maintain an
‘active’ position for his protagonist” (79), noting that “his denial of consensual homosexual sex

60
I read Concha, Antonia, and La Vieja as drag queens when they may also be considered early iterations
of what is now known as transgender identity. Since a modern transgender female identity would not have been
available to them in this time period (roughly the 1940s) and they are called “faggots” by Piri and his friends, I have
chosen to read their subversive gender performativity as gay male drag rather than as an embodiment of transgender
identity; however, critics may challenge this reading.
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is revealing” (80). His ambivalence toward homosexual sex cannot be divorced his racial
ambivalence because both depend on his need to perform a normative racialized masculinity.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, Piri’s normative racialized masculinity is undermined
by his having sex with a loca (faggot) who challenges his Afro-Puerto Rican heterosexual
masculinity. Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui writes about Piri’s fears of castration, for he “is now
witnessing his manhood being swallowed up by Concha—ironically, the name ‘Concha’ is short
for Concepción, it also means ‘shell’ and sometimes it is a derogatory word for ‘vagina.’ Hence,
this represents a kind of castration” (203). This calls to mind David Eng’s argument about racial
castration and homosexuality: “the formation of the normative Freudian (male) ego depends on
the elimination of homosexuality. Desire for the father must be transformed into a desexualized
identification with him” (11-12). Piri is an Afro-Puerto Rican male whose manhood is devoured
by a loca whom we can see as the feminized Other and not a black man; therefore, Piri must
entirely disavow homosexuality to identify with his black father and consolidate his normative
Afro-Latino heterosexual masculinity. The mixed-race family plays a prominent role in Justin
Torres’s We the Animals, but in this slim novel, the seven-year-old narrator is a proto-gay son of
an Afro-Puerto Rican father and a white mother working and living in upstate New York. Rather
than disavowing a gay male identity, the narrator comes to embrace it after seeing his own Afro-
Puerto Rican identity reflected in his father’s image and experiencing an ambivalent assimilative
tendency.
Queer Mulatez
When hispanophone Caribbean male writers conjured the mixed-race subject, it was
usually female—la mulata—and her sexual desires were projected onto a heterosexual matrix
that submitted her body and sexuality to the heterosexist gaze of her creators. What happens,
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then, when the mixed-race Afro-Caribbean subject is not female but a diasporic male whose
body and sexuality resist the heteronormative policing of desire and return a gaze full of queer
longing and (self-)recognition? If the mulata’s body “is the muse of inspiration, an icon that
asserts [the] search for national identity” in Caribbean nations such as Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, and the US territory of Puerto Rico (Arrizón 98), then what do we make of a US-born
mixed-race Afro-Puerto Rican boy whose sexuality comes to be legible as gay after intervention
from his family and whose identity fractures rather unifies? Justin Torres deploys a queer
mulatez in assigning his proto-gay narrator a contested position within his mixed-race family by
aligning him with his Afro-Puerto Rican father’s racial difference and his white mother’s sexual
difference. Queer mulatez in We the Animals explodes the heterosexist order of the family and
reconfigures the Oedipal arrangement by racializing and sexualizing the mixed-race gay son in
ways that encode his difference through ambivalence toward and desire for both whiteness and
afrolatinidad.
Like John Rechy and Piri Thomas in their memoirs, the seven-year-old narrator of We the
Animals describes his father as a man prone to use violence against those he most loves, but
instead of having Rechy’s blue-eyed Scottish father who is read as Anglo by Mexicans, the
young narrator’s father is a Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem whose phenotype is legible as
black. The narrator describes his Paps as having “had all the muscles and the will. He was on
his way to becoming indestructible” (20), which is perhaps a common image of one’s father for a
seven-year-boy; but the narrator is uncannily attentive to his Paps’s racial markers of difference.
The son notices his father’s “kinky hairs spreading across his chest” (45), and he is able to “grab
a fistful of his Afro” (46); later he sees from his father’s “silhouetted mustache and close-
cropped Afro that it was him” (101), allowing the son to identify his Paps by the latter’s racial
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markers. Paps—and his mixed-race sons, who embody so much of his ethnoracial identity—is
not only identified by his black Afro-Puerto Rican phenotype but also by his predilection for
Latin music.
One of the most salient vignettes in the novel is one aptly titled “Heritage,” which is
placed very early in the novel and features Paps listening to Puerto Rican music with his three
sons. The narrator says that Paps “turned up the volume on the stereo and it was mambo, it was
Tito Puente” (8), after which Paps tells his mixed-race sons to “‘shake it like you’re white’” (10).
The boys dance like robots, and Paps tells them, “‘You ain’t white […]. Now shake it like a
Puerto Rican’” (10). The three brothers then “mamboed as best [they] could, trying to be smooth
and serious and to feel the beat in [their] feet and beyond the beat to feel the rhythm” (10), but
Paps is not satisfied by their performance of Puerto Ricanness and says: “‘Mutts […]. You ain’t
white and you ain’t Puerto Rican. Watch how a purebred dances, watch how we dance in the
ghetto.’ Every word was shouted over the music, so it was hard to tell if he was mad or just
making fun” (10). As he dances, his sons watch him, and the narrator says, “[We] kept pulling
our eyes up to his face, to his broad nose and dark, half-shut eyes and his pursed lips, which
snarled and smiled both” (10). The father is again racialized as an Afro-Puerto Rican through his
skill at dancing to the specifically Afro-influenced music of New York-born Puerto Rican
drummer and bandleader Tito Puento. Here the father’s attachment to Tito Puente, his music,
and the mambo constitute a sonic marker of his race and an epistemology of music as he tries to
teach his sons their “heritage.”
The brothers, however, are neither white nor Puerto Rican in Paps’s eyes, thus
positioning them in a liminal space where their failed performances of whiteness and Puerto
Ricanness preclude them from becoming fully realized racial subjects. Paps, unwilling to allow
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his sons to remain assimilated by virtue of their proximity to whiteness and lack of knowledge of
Puerto Rican culture, continues to dance for them, thereby instructing them:
“This is your heritage,” he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own
childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and
projects in Red Hook, […] as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto
Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to
drink, his head back, still dancing, still stepping and snapping perfectly in time. (10-11)
The epistemology of music that Paps pedagogically enacts for his sons is especially significant
considering that Tito Puento was, like Paps, a Puerto Rican born in New York City’s Spanish
Harlem. Steven Loza writes, “Ernest Anthony ‘Tito’ Puente was born on April 20, 1923, at
Harlem Hospital and raised in the East Harlem neighborhood known as both Spanish Harlem and
El Barrio. His parents, Ernest and Ercilla, had migrated to New York from Puerto Rico, already
a US ‘possession’ following the Spanish-American War of 1898” (1). Paps’s identification with
Tito Puente and his music marks him as a diasporic subject, doubly so since he is of African
descent and his family at one point lived on the island of Puerto Rico.
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The father’s
employment of an epistemology of music to trace his and his sons’ Afro-Puerto Ricanness is
echoed in a later scene with the narrator in which his dancing foregrounds his relationship to
queer mulatez.
In the last vignette of the novel told from the perspective of the narrator when he is seven
years old, Paps takes him on a job that requires him to drive farther upstate New York, and he
takes his son to see Niagara Falls. Paps leaves the narrator at a “little museum of curiosities”

61
Tito Puente is also a figure who represents the interethnic and interracial project that is Latin music:
“[D]uring the thirties,” writes Steven Loza, “Latin music in the United States ha[d] developed as a reflection of its
intercultural matrix. […] Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Latinos began to interact with African American and
white jazz musicians more than ever before in either the United States or Latin America. The other apex of this
convergence was the multicultural complex and the human, industrial environment of New York City” (222).
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with five dollars and tells him that he will return in an hour after delivering a package (99).
After waiting for his father several hours, the narrator watches a projector play an old film of
Niagara Falls and he pretends to be “a mer-boy prince” and “danced a special underwater
dance,” “spinning on [his] toes and looking down at [his] body” as he “wiggled [his] hips against
the current” (100). When Paps returns, he watches his son’s effeminate dance, and the narrator
recognizes him “from his silhouetted mustache and close-cropped Afro, […] and [he] knew too
that he had been standing there, watching [him], for some time” (101). Finally, the vignette
concludes with Paps and the narrator getting back in the truck and driving home and Paps saying
to his son, “‘I was thinking how pretty you were […]. Now, isn’t that an odd thing for a father to
think about his son? But that’s what it was. I was standing there, watching you dance and twirl
and move like that, and I was thinking to myself, Goddamn, I got me a pretty one’” (102). The
Afro-Puerto Rican father confirms the desirability of his mixed-race proto-gay son by
acknowledging how “pretty” he is: His son’s queerness, which is also inflected by his mulatez,
gains recognition from its source.
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One may say that the father’s desire for his son is itself a
form of Afro-Latino queer narcissism that short circuits Oedipal energies. If Paps is the one to
announce the narrator’s queerness, then the family outs him as a gay male subject in what
amounts to a discursive maneuver that Foucault would have privileged.

62
Regarding the two competing schemas or what she calls “scripts” of blackness in Puerto Rico, Isar P.
Godreau writes that “[w]hile the schema of modern blackness tends to be gendered as male and young, the folkloric
script tends to be gendered as female and old; one is aggressive, the other hospitable; one materialistic, the other
spiritual; one tends to be urban, the other coastal” (18). Although the narrator is a young male and can be seen at
times as “aggressive,” he is neither an urbanite nor cosmopolitan but rather a subject existing in a liminal space
between the postindustrial suburbs and rural areas in upstate New York with his mixed-race family, which is
pronouncedly out of place there. On the racialized queering of the suburbs, Karen Tongson writes in Relocations
that “[q]ueer urbanites as well as their normative counterparts have contributed to the latter-day suburban migrations
of communities of color from more traditional, ethnic urban enclaves deeper into suburbia” (11), which holds true
just as much for New York as it does for Los Angeles, the urban/suburban subject of Tongson’s book.
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Afro-Latino Ambivalence and Outing
The last few vignettes of We the Animals are narrated from the perspective of a teenaged
protagonist in his more mature voice. As the novel builds to the climactic scene of the narrator’s
outing, which constitutes his final break with his poor mixed-race family, the protagonist reveals
his ambivalence toward his older brothers and the poor Afro-Latino masculinity they embody.
During the last night narrated in the book, the protagonist is wandering the snow-fallen streets of
upstate New York with his older brothers, pondering for the first time the condition of their
being mixed race: “Who knows this mutt life, this race mixing? Who knows Paps?” (104). He
considers his and his brothers’ racial difference from their white peers: “All these other boys, the
white trash out here, they have legacies, decades upon decades of poverty and violence and
bloodlines they can trace like a scar; and these are their creeks, their hills, their goodness. Their
grandfathers poured the cement of this loading dock. And downstate, in Brooklyn, the Puerto
Ricans have language, they have language” (104). The “white trash,” though impoverished like
the narrator and his family, have claims to upstate New York because of their grandfathers’
labor, whereas the narrator, his brothers, and their father are diasporic subjects whose ancestors
immigrated first from the island of Puerto Rico and later transplanted from Brooklyn.
If the narrator feels his racial difference from the poor white boys among whom he grew
up, he also feels a difference from his brothers that is illustrated by his embodiment of a
nonnormative sexuality: “See how I made them uneasy. They smelled my difference—my
sharp, sad, pansy scent. They believed I would know a world larger than their own. They hated
me for my good grades, for my white ways. All at once they were disgusted, and jealous, and
deeply protective, and deeply proud” (105). The narrator calls attention to his “difference,”
which is read by his brothers as his “sharp, sad, pansy scent,” a clear reference to his effeminacy
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and burgeoning gay sexuality. Yet, his sexual difference is no less a racial difference, for his
brothers also detect his “white ways,” a sign of which are his “good grades,” or his trajectory to
becoming assimilated into the white middle class through his academic talent. Like Yunior, the
narrator and his brothers see queer male sexuality as assimilative and perhaps akin to cultural
betrayal; however, the narrator avows his queerness rather than rejects it as Yunior does. Queer
assimilation, particularly one that is achieved through one’s mixed-racial heritage, is a narrative
strategy practiced by Mexican American gay memoirist and essayist Richard Rodriguez, who
describes himself as a “queer Indian Catholic” in Brown: The Last Discovery of America (137).
Just as Cristina Beltrán is “interested in [Rodriguez’s] ability to provide readers with an affective
account of his own queer experience that simultaneously resists the logic of racial or gay pride”
(47), Justin Torres’s teenage narrator articulates his racialized sexuality as the imbrication of his
gay effeminacy and his proximity to whiteness, a linkage that does not elicit a feeling of pride
but rather one of ambivalence and alienation, if not shame.
This ambivalence and alienation only becomes accentuated as the night wears on and his
brothers read him—and I do mean read in the sense used by gay men of color—as a gay man
whose queer sexuality positions him always between and never decisively within the white world
and the mixed-race milieu of the family. After seeing a litter of kittens and making a joke about
incest (a comment on the insularity of their own mixed-race family) and the runt, the narrator
says that his brothers “were sniggering at me, the fay, the runt of our litter” (107), his use of
“fay” signifying not only fairy and hence queer or gay, but an abbreviation of ofay, one of the
few strongly derogatory words African Americans use against white people. In so nominating
himself “the fay,” the narrator deploys his Afro-Puerto Rican mulatez by using a traditionally
African American pejorative racial epithet, thereby demonstrating not pride but rather a
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racialized queer shame in his fagginess and whiteness. The narrator admits that “[s]ecretly,
outside of the family, I cultivated a facility with language and a bitter spite. I kept a journal—in
it, I sharpened insults against all of them, my folks, my brothers. […] [T]hey hinted that I would
have an easier time in this world than they had, than my brothers would ever have, and I hated
them for that” (109). If Rodriguez “characterize[s] loneliness, alienation, and shame as forms of
melancholic pleasure” (Beltrán 40), then the narrator enjoys a “melancholic pleasure” by
“cultivat[ing] a facility with language” and “sharpen[ing] insults” against his mixed-race family.
He thinks before leaving his brothers for the night, “Maybe there was no other boy like me,
anywhere” (Torres 112), which presages his outing by his family and his final break from them.
The narrator later that night consummates his homoerotic desire for the first time, thus
confirming his gay identity, and is outed by his family, though not for the gay sex that he has.
After leaving his brothers (who will “lose themselves tonight; they’ll search for [him] in the
whiteness; they’ll drown” [114]), he goes to the men’s room of a bus station to cruise, and is met
by one older man, who takes him into his bus and says, “‘I’ll make you. I’ll make you’” (115).
Although the narrator predicts that his brothers will search for him “in the whiteness”—which is
both the snow and his upward social and class mobility alongside his gay sexuality—he
importantly “wanted to see [his] black curls peeking out from under [his] ski cap” (115), which
suggests that even in the moments of his being “made” as a gay male subject, he is still thinking
about his racial difference from the man who is “making” him. The narrator, who embraces his
gay male identity after his first homosexual experience by screaming, “‘I’m made!’” after it is
consummated (115), returns home to find his mother, father, and brothers gathered in the front
room with his journal sitting in his mother’s lap. The narrator describes the journal: “In bold and
explicit language I had written fantasies about the men I met at the bus station, about what I
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wanted done to me. I had written a catalog of imagined perversions, a violent pornography with
myself at the center, with myself obliterated” (116). There are two theorizations of specifically
gay male subjectivity that converge here in the discovery of the narrator’s erotic diary by his
family: one is Bersanian and the other is Foucauldian.
Leo Bersani’s notion of “self-shattering” is invoked by the narrator’s imagining himself
“obliterated” in a “violent pornography with [himself] at the center”;
63
but the Foucauldian
nature of a teenager’s diary of “imagined perversions” interests me more here. It is only after his
family discovers a written account, not of acts he has committed, but of act he imagines himself
committing, that the narrator is outed as a gay man. Michel Foucault famously writes that the
“nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood
[….] Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality” (43, italics
added). In many ways, one could consider We the Animals itself the document that describes the
“childhood” of the homosexual and everything that goes “into his total composition” that is
affected by his sexuality, including his mixed-race identity, lower class status, and upbringing in
postindustrial upstate New York. Yet, Justin Torres critiques the very mechanisms Foucault
does in his oeuvre by subjecting normalizing discourse to the kind of analytical gaze meant for
the (gay) subject himself. As the novel concludes with the narrator’s family institutionalizing
him for his homoerotic desires (they do not know he has had his first homosexual encounter the
night before), the reader becomes witness to how institutions contain subjects whose behavior is
considered deviant.

63
Leo Bersani somewhat notoriously concludes “Is the Rectum a Grave?” by writing that the “self is a
practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence. If sexuality is socially
dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance
that drives them apart, it could also be thought of as our primary hygienic practice of nonviolence. […] Male
homosexuality advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so
doing it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a mode of ascesis” (30). One could argue that the
narrator wants to shatter himself and “lose sight” of himself because of the guilt and shame he feels for his ability to
ascend—or, rather, the promise his ability affords him of ascending—to a higher class than his mixed-race brothers.
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The last vignette, titled “Zookeeping,” metaphorizes the institutionalized narrator in a zoo
surrounded by animals: “These days, I sleep with peacocks, lions, on a bed of leaves. I’ve lost
my pack. I dream of standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life—no hot muzzles,
no fangs, no claws, no obscene plumage—strolling gaily, with an upright air” (125). We the
Animals concludes as a tale of one young mixed-race gay man who has “lost [his] pack”—his
mixed-race family—and must navigate the cruel twists and turns of the terrain of racial, ethnic,
class, gender, and sexual identity alone. He is institutionalized not for madness, as is a character
analyzed in my next chapter on Glissant’s fiction and theory, but rather for his deviant erotic
imagination (as recorded in his diary), which is considered pathological by his family. The
working-class mixed-race family conceives male homosexuality as something foreign to its
structure. The narrator of We the Animals is animalized for his sexuality, which, to borrow from
Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, is tethered to a “[m]adness [that] had become a thing to
look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality
from which man had long since been suppressed” (70). If Yunior and Piri remain secure in their
working-class Afro-Latino barrio ethos, it is because they disavow a legible “gay,” “bisexual,” or
“queer” identity. One can easily see what becomes of a poor Afro-Latino who embraces or even
attempts to embrace a gay identity: in the case of Torres’s narrator, he is rendered bestial and
mad and confined to a psychiatric institution. Due to the threat of being cast out from their
ethnic communities and disowned by their families, many poor Afro-Latino men who have sex
with men choose to seek and have sex on “the down low” and live publicly as heterosexual men.
Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui “mark[s] the site where silence intervenes around certain sexual
practices, [and] read[s] Yunior’s and Piri’s sexual adventures as simply being on the ‘down low.’
They would not be considered self-hating homosexuals exactly” (208). Self-hating or not, the
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racial ambivalence felt by Yunior, Piri, and Torres’s narrator can be taken as a critique of the
white middle-class imperative to self-identify as “gay” or “queer” when to do so is dangerous.
Conclusion
Afro-Latino subjects who are queered by virtue of the sex acts they engage in feel a
double sense of alienation: from the antiblack communities in which they live and among which
they move, and from their own sense of fragile masculinity and their loyalty to their racialized
working-class cultural ethos. Their racial ambivalence, then, is inextricable from their
ambivalence toward sex, gender, and sexuality, which manifests itself as shame. While Yunior
and the young Piri suffer the shame that so often attends one’s initial experiences of homosexual
sex, the narrator of Justin Torres’s novel feels shame from his proximity to whiteness, which is
marked, at least among his poor mixed-race brothers, by his effeminacy and his confirmed entry
into the world of gay male sex. Yunior disavows homosexuality for the same reason the teenage
narrator of We the Animals embraces it: homosexuality is considered a betrayal of the poor
working-class Afro-Latino masculinity embodied by young men like Yunior, Beto, Piri, and
Torres’s narrator’s brothers. It is inconceivable in the Weltanschauung of those like Piri
Thomas, Yunior, and Torres’s narrator’s brothers to be able to both claim a gay identity and
embody Afro-Latino masculinity.
Queerness often alienates racialized subjects from their ethnic communities, who read
queerness as foreign, an imposition from white colonial discourses that dominate and continue to
dominate (Afro-)Latino populations. Little wonder, then, that Afro-Latino men who have sex
with men feel they must reject a stable gay identity in order to retain membership in their poor
Latino communities. William J. Spurlin, writing specifically about Eldridge Cleaver’s and other
black nationalists’ rejection of homosexuality as essentially antiblack, argues that “regardless of
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the race of the penetrator in gay male sex relations […] Cleaver and others in the United States
Black Power movement in the 1960s saw homosexuality among blacks as a form of ideological
penetration by whites, that is, as introduced into black culture from without and inherently
foreign to it” (227). Although I agree with Spurlin that such a position is both homophobic and
fallacious, I argue that Afro-Latinos like Yunior and Piri foreclose the possibility of identifying
as “gay,” “bisexual,” or “queer” but in so doing enable a critique of white middle-class queers
who, in a move bespeaking their own racism and classism, demand that all people who engage in
sex with people of the same sex openly and proudly identify as “gay,” “bisexual,” or “queer.”
Carlos Ulises Decena maintains that it “is not hypocritical to navigate or work through the
contradictions of living in and through various identities, positionalities, and commitments. But
it is totalitarian to demand one choice versus another, or to suture moral imperatives to
identities” (7). To expect Afro-Latino queer men, who must face antiblack racism and often
xenophobia and classism, to somehow be gifted with a heightened sensitivity to the way
homophobia constrains their own identity practices is to expect too much; although, a
contemporary writer such as Junot Díaz certainly has more awareness of the issue than a
nationalist-era writer such as Piri Thomas had.
If the racial ambivalence experienced by Afro-Latinos who embody mulatez generates
any critical position, it is one illustrative of the sense that white gay male normativity and
middle-class homonormativity constrain identities just as much as ethnicized and class-based
homophobia does. Jack Halberstam reminds us that “failure can exploit the unpredictability of
ideology and its indeterminate qualities” (88). If this is so, then the failure of mixed-race queer
subjects—such as Yunior, Piri, and Torres’s narrator—to become fully racialized or to embrace
homosexuality “exploit[s] the unpredictability” of the ideology of mulatez and white gay male
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normativity. Modernist deployments of mulatez homogenized the mixed-race black subject as
much as white gay male normativity has attempted to homogenize the queer male community as
white and middle-class. Exploiting the ideology of mulatez and repurposing it in a postmodern
or contemporary context, Piri Thomas and Junot Díaz offer mixed-race subjects who are less
stabilized than modernist characterizations, while Justin Torres works mulatez in a queerly
inflected way into his aesthetic by placing it in tension with the optics of a dominant white gay
male effeminacy.
64

What I hope to leave the reader with is the idea that, as Lionel Cantú argued in his study
of Latino men who have sex with men, the “‘Latino experience’ is far more complex than a
universalizing notion can capture” (161). Afro-Latinos in the US are doubly diasporic subjects
whose sense of difference can be compared, with obvious differences, to that of John Rechy,
who passed as white in the Anglo world and as straight in the world of men who pay men for
sex. With Afro-Latinos, though, one must keep in mind W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double-
consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (2), and
consider their positionalities as both black and Latino, as diasporic and citizens, and perhaps as
both queer and masculine. My next chapter lingers in the Caribbean islands among mixed-race
black peoples, but I move from the hispanophone Caribbean to the French Antilles, where
Édouard Glissant writes a counternarrative to the French colonization and departmentalization of
Martinique. Glissant makes a Creole woman the bearer of that counternarrative, causing her to
experience decolonial feminist rage and eventually descend into madness.

64
Jack Halberstam writes, “This particular ethos of resignation to failure, to lack of progress and a
particular form of darkness, a negativity really […] can be called a queer aesthetic” (96). Could the failure to
achieve a legible mixed-race Latino gay identity also be called a specifically Latino queer aesthetic? If John Rechy
and Justin Torres create characters who are mixed race but alienated from their Latino heritage because they are gay,
then perhaps we can conclude that their aesthetic of failure is a Latino queer aesthetic.
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Chapter 3: Revisiting Glissant from the Eighties:
Thirty Years of Antillean Discourse on Creolization

Writing, free in its beginnings, is finally the bond which links the writer to a History which is
itself in chains: society stamps upon him the unmistakable signs of art so as to draw him along
the more inescapably in its own process of alienation.

—Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero

The present moment calls for scholars to revisit the 1980s after nearly thirty years of
anglophone academic discourses examining creolization in the Antilles because we are currently
witnessing strident demands for “diversity” from both within and outside the academy. In the
face of a growing movement in the U.S. that draws attention to biracial and other mixed-race
Americans who demand being recognized as such, it seems particularly apposite to return to a
key global figure who theorized racial mixing and cultural blending: Édouard Glissant. I am
interested in Glissant mainly for his complex and contradictory positions on how mixed-race and
mixed-cultural people should negotiate the push and pull between their individual subjectivities
and their relationships to their communities. Much of the existing scholarship on Glissant
concludes that his work calls for a commitment to the Martinican and Antillean communities,
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but I arrive at a reading that is less bound to community-positive images in his work.
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Glissant’s abiding interest in creolization challenges the suturing of the individual mixed-race
subject’s identity to the Martinican Creole community and allows him to examine extreme

65
In an online article published in The Caribbean Review of Books, J. Michael Dash writes about his choice
of “Caribbean” over Antillean in his translation of Glissant’s Le discours antillais. He says that the book “was not,
however, a book just about France’s overseas departments in the Americas. It was about the entire region, and its
relation to the hemisphere. So the title in English is Caribbean Discourse (1989).” I choose to translate antillais as
“Antillean” because I insist on the specificity of the French Antilles and Martinique in this chapter. My third
chapter examines racial mixing and cultural blending, as well as assimilation, which is facilitated by the two former
actions, in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean—specifically, through Dominicans leaving the island and moving to the
U.S. and mixed-race men of Puerto Rican descent living in New York.
66
See Beverley Ormerod’s “Discourse and Dispossession: Edouard Glissant’s Image of Contemporary
Martinique” in Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 27 no. 4, a special issue on francophone Caribbean literature, for her
position on Glissant’s commitment to community in his work from the early 1980s. She writes of Glissant,
“Conscious of an absence of national solidarity in Martinique, he nonetheless states his desire to create a work of art
in which history and literature would join together to form […] a novel where the destiny of the individual would be
subordinate to his involvement in the destiny of his society” (5-6).
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psychic states. Racial ambivalence, as I theorize it in Glissant’s work, generates contradictions
and paradoxes in the psyche that lead to alienation, rage, and madness, all states that, in hitherto
unexplored ways, have the potential to be resistant to neocolonialism.
Although he is known in the U.S. primarily for his theoretical writings translated as
Caribbean Discourse (1989) and Poetics of Relation (1997), Glissant’s fiction written and
published in the same period (and only translated into English recently) tease out the thematic
material of his essays with more play and ambiguity. In particular, I examine a novel published
in the same year as Le discours antillais (1981), La case du commandeur, translated into English
and published as The Overseer’s Cabin (2011). The fictional Martinique of The Overseer’s
Cabin allows Glissant to portray the alienated Creole psyche he dissects in Caribbean Discourse,
but he does so while constructing a counter-narrative that both critiques the Martinican
community and reveals its necessity. I also briefly examine a novel Glissant published in 1964
as Le quatrième siècle, and translated as The Fourth Century.
67
I have chosen these four
works—two collections of essays and two novels—because they all embody an aesthetics of
alienation and/or a counter-narrative. Additionally, the three works I engage most significantly
in this chapter were written and published between 1980 and 1990, the decade during which the
U.S. academy began to reconfigure ethnic studies programs and the various canons of ethnic

67
A note on the translations I use: J. Michael Dash published selections of Glissant’s most mammoth
theoretical work, Le discours antillais (1981), as Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1989). His translation of
the title is somewhat controversial because antillais is French for “Antillean,” not “Caribbean.” I use Betsy Wing’s
Poetics of Relation (1997), which is a fairly literal translation of Glissant’s Poétique de la relation (1990). Dash and
other critics have translated Poétique de la relation as “cross-cultural poetics.” Her translation of La case du
commandeur (1981) as The Overseer’s Cabin (2011) is also fairly accurate. Some scholars, such as Barbara J.
Webb in Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction, translate the title as The Overseer’s Hut, but most scholars
working with the French original have translated the title as Wing has. Commandeur is defined by Glissant in the
glossary to Caribbean Discourse as “the foreman directly in charge of the agricultural workers” (263). Le
quatrième siècle (1964) is translated as The Fourth Century (2001) by Betsy Wing, whose translation of the title is
literal.
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literature because women of color feminisms altered the discourses of alterity.
68
No scholar has
argued that Glissant was a feminist, and neither will I, but his female characters in his fiction
take on a complexity and embody ambivalence in ways that Glissant’s theory never grants
women. By limiting my scope to four works, I hone in on Glissant’s uses of racial ambivalence
to illustrate the ambiguous role community plays for the mixed-race and mixed-cultural
individual attempting to shape it.
Community in Glissant’s non-theoretical work from the 1980s is not the origin of racial
ambivalence but accentuates it, and this heightened racial ambivalence is what in turn enables
counter-narratives to be crafted. Although these counter-narratives are generally found by critics
to indicate pessimism, the alienation they aestheticize proves more resistant than the thematic
material they textually embody.
69
My treatment of Glissant’s fiction in this chapter further
develops my argument that mixed-race and mixed-cultural subjects experience racial
ambivalence that undermines dominant community configurations of racial solidarity. Glissant’s
character Marie Celat, also called Mycéa, is a Creole woman whose racial ambivalence toward
her community in Martinique leads her first to alienation and then to madness, psychic states
which become resistant when they allow Glissant to forge a counter-narrative.
Métissage, Creolization, and Rhizomatic Thinking
Before mining Glissant’s texts for their ambivalences and ambiguities, I must first parse
out the terms that Glissant uses to address the contradictions of mixed-race and mixed-cultural
subjects in the French Antilles. The ethnoracial configuration that he deploys, métissage, carries

68
My fourth chapter, on Chicana playwright Josefina López and her theatre in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles,
CASA 0101, engages substantially with women of color feminisms from the 1980s and early 1990s. Although the
play by López I will examine was produced in 2013, the playwright’s first works for the stage were produced in the
late Eighties and early Nineties, and she is one of the most significant figures in the growing Chicana feminist
theatre movement.
69
Lincoln Z. Shlensky asserts that “Glissant’s early novels and essays, up to and including Le discours
antillais, ground themselves in a narrative of social failure and paralysis that his later texts, beginning with Poétique
de la Relation, amend …” (356).
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its own historical and ideological baggage and already did so by the time Glissant began to
reshape it in his work produced during the 1970s and 1980s. It is unnecessary for me to provide
here a lengthy discussion of the pre-1980s uses of the term métissage; at any rate, there are other
studies more attuned to historical uses of métissage that can provide a detailed overview of
them.
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My intent is to trace how scholars have responded to the ways that Glissant deploys
métissage in his project of defining mixed-race identities and cultural mixing in a rapidly
globalizing context. I must point out that within the world of francophone studies, there is a
critical debate about the translation of Glissant’s “métissage” as “creolization” when Glissant
does not use the French word “créolisation” in his text. In Autobiographical Voices: Race,
Gender, Self-Portraiture Françoise Lionnet writes that “Dash translates métissage [in Caribbean
Discourse] by the word ‘creolization’ which is perfectly acceptable when dealing with cultural
mixing but not appropriate when referring to the racial context” (4 n. 6). Betsy Wing, in her
translation of Poetics of Relation, retains métissage whenever Glissant uses it in Poétique de la
relation, writing that “Creolization works but limits métissage to a cultural context. For Glissant
métissage moves from a narrow range of racial intermixing to become a relational practice
affirming the multiplicity and diversity of its components” (214 n. 3). Although métissage is “a
word whose primary use describes the racial intermixing within a colony and its contemporary
aftermath,” Glissant deploys it to “affirm the multiplicity and diversity of beings in Relation”
(Wing xviii), thereby theorizing métissage as a transnational racial phenomenon. The nuances of
métissage and creolization should be noted especially when these terms are put to use in
aesthetic projects that engage, register, and trace the racial politics of the French Antilles.

70
Pascale de Souza and H. Adlai Murdoch’s introduction to the special issue of Journal of Caribbean
Literatures “Migrations and Métissages,” which is titled “Caribbean Textuality and the Metaphors of Métissage,”
offers a concise study of the ways the term “métissage” has been employed in French Caribbean literature and
history.
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One cannot write about racial mixing and cultural blending in Martinique without
addressing how Glissant takes up métissage and its cultural process, creolization, to circumvent
what he and other critics have seen as the reactionary politics and aesthetics of the négritude
movement, which had its heyday in the French Caribbean in the 1930s. Françoise Lionnet points
out that “[n]egritude has borne the brunt of much criticism because of the essentialistic racial
ideology implicit in the term,” but she goes to say that Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar
Senghor, two of the movement’s founding figures, “have argued that the criticism was based in a
reductive appropriation of the concept of negritude, which came to be interpreted as a purely
reactive gesture against white supremacy” (15). Later Lionnet writes that négritude has been
“attacked by Fanon and others for its totalizing (and essentialist) approach to ‘blackness,’ which
does not take into account the historical and cultural differences among peoples” (72).
71
Some
readings of the négritude movement characterize its founders as seeking to define blackness in
relation to Africa, positing Africa as the homeland for all black peoples. Whether or not that
reading does justice to the négritude movement is not the question to answer here; rather, I focus
on how Glissant’s work claims the space of the Antilles as the place of origin for Martinicans.
Glissant resists négritude and originary blackness and puts métissage to work by
creolizing the Antilles and theorizing its proliferation of mutable and liminal identities. He
writes, “The idea of creolization demonstrates that henceforth it is no longer valid to glorify
‘unique’ origins that the race safeguards and prolongs …. To assert peoples are creolized, that
creolization has value, is to deconstruct in this way the category of ‘creolized’ that is considered

71
Lionnet continues her analysis of Fanon’s critique of négritude: “As Fanon reminds us, negritude’s
emphasis on searching for a homeland and for the ‘identity’ of the black soul partakes of a mythical desire for a
plenitude that is always already lost for all those who are ‘homeless’ by virtue of the colonialist diaspora of the last
three hundred years” (72). One should remember that Fanon and Glissant are Martinicans of the same generation;
Fanon was born just three years before Glissant. Césaire, however, was an older literary figure who in different
ways influenced both men.
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as halfway between two ‘pure’ extremes” (Caribbean Discourse, 140). In a deconstructive move
that de-essentializes creolization, Glissant critiques the overdetermined hybrid model of the
French Antillean métis as half black and half white. Glissant’s Creoles do not divide themselves
by measuring how African, how French they are; creolization is not a matter of biology for
Glissant, but a process of intercultural contact. For Lionnet, métissage is a “form of bricolage, in
the sense used by Claude Lévi-Strauss, but as an aesthetic concept it encompasses far more: it
brings together biology and history, anthropology and philosophy, linguistics and literature” (8).
Lionnet’s aestheticization of métissage and her deployment of an ethnoracial configuration as a
methodology inform my later reading of Glissant’s aestheticization of alienation, a textual
maneuver that he is able to make only because creolization is an ambivalent psychic process.
Neither is creolization the facile celebration of an inherently mixed-race people, an all-
too easy umbrella term that universalizes hybridity. Glissant is quick to distance himself from
positing ethnoracial models that can be taken up in the name of literary and political movements,
as he witnessed the way négritude ossified over time.
72
He seems to caution against purely
celebratory models of racial and cultural mixing by stating that “[c]reolization as an idea is not
primarily the glorification of the composite nature of a people: indeed, no people has been spared
the cross-cultural process”
73
(Caribbean Discourse, 140). Purely celebratory models of racial
mixing somewhat shallowly elevate mixed-race peoples and their cultures to a utopian position

72
Glissant provides a more generous account of négritude in Caribbean Discourse while still distancing
himself from the Martinican writer who influenced him the most, Aimé Césaire, writing that the “thrust of negritude
among Caribbean intellectuals was a response perhaps to the need, by relating to a common origin, to rediscover
unity (equilibrium) beyond dispersion” (5). In other words, the African Diaspora created a longing for a “common
origin,” and, I would say, transnational community, among black people in the French Antilles. Glissant’s
ambivalent response to négritude augurs his treatment of community in his fiction of the 1980s.
73
Lorna Burns argues in Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze that “what Deleuze’s account of
the imagination of the islands reminds us is that it is not a matter of essential qualities but of processes” (4).
Glissant, on whose relationship to the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari I have more to say in a bit, would agree with
the Deleuzian position that processes define human subjects rather than essences. I would add to this statement that
Glissant maintains that communities—ethnic and national—are defined by the processes that shape them rather than
by any essential characteristics assumed to be held responsible for their collective attributes.
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while ignoring the psychic trauma that colonialism and slavery have produced. Acknowledging
their debt to Glissant, Ernest Pépin and Raphaël Confiant write about French Antillean Creoles
as a “hybrid people whose face is blurred by our ongoing métissage; a deported people whose
mind is chiseled by multiple alienations; a people in gestation whose journey is lost in tortuous
combinations” (96-97). As I will show, the “multiple alienations” experienced by French
Antillean Creoles is fully explored in all four of Glissant’s work I read in this chapter. The texts
I read below engage with a “creole postcoloniality … [within which] lies the articulative
framework of an identitarian strategy that is both ambivalent and differential,” and these texts
embody “notions of Caribbeanness and creoleness [that] form the discursive core of a strategy of
creative hybridity that sought to articulate identity through the exploration of pluralism,
ambiguity, and instability” (Murdoch 3). Creolization more than hybridizes subjects; it generates
psychic states such as ambivalence and fissures the unity of psychic coherence in mixed-race and
mixed-cultural subjects—mental states and processes that are often painful to experience.
The ambivalences, ambiguities, and instabilities that generate the alienation(s) felt by
Creoles in Martinique are direct results of the history of genocide, slavery, colonization, and
departmentalization of the island. Any engagement with Glissant demands that the scholar
acknowledges the Caribbean region as an archipelago, where European colonizers first
encountered what would become known to the imperialist West as the “New World.” It is for
this reason that the Caribbean has become paradigmatic of the processes that have engendered
the Americas as they exist today. Cuban novelist and theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo makes this
claim in The Repeating Island when he writes, “For it is certain that the Caribbean basin,
although it includes the first American lands to be explored, conquered, and colonized by
Europe, is still, especially in the discourse of the social sciences, one of the least known regions
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of the modern world” (1). Although Benítez-Rojo and Glissant argue that the Caribbean is
paradigmatic of the hemispheric American condition
74
—Glissant writes that the Caribbean Sea
“is the estuary of the Americas” (Caribbean Discourse, 139)—it is still shrouded in mystery to
those who exoticize the islands and scrutinize them with a neo-imperial Western gaze. For this
reason I will be reading Glissant as turning the Western gaze back on itself and using
poststructuralist discourses to analyze how creolization has transformed not only the Caribbean
but the West through the process of transculturation.
Turning poststructuralist discourse against the Western gaze, or, more specifically,
against the French neocolonial domination of Martinique that continues to this day, is a project
that Glissant takes up in problematic ways. I cite Benítez-Rojo above because he, too, relies on
poststructuralist discourses in The Repeating Island as much as Glissant does in Poetics of
Relation. Both Caribbean theoreticians anticipate in their work archipelagic thought, which
Lorna Burns ascribes to the Deleuzian-Guattarian strain of thinking in their essays, writing that
“[i]n the image of the Caribbean, archipelagic thought enacts Relation and errantry: connecting
disparate and rhizomatic points, creating unforeseeable lines of relation or becoming” (7). One
of the most famous and frequently cited passages in Glissant’s Poetics of Relation explicitly
alludes to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: “Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
criticized notions of the root and, even perhaps, notions of being rooted. […] In opposition to
this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system …. Rhizomatic thought is the principle
behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a
relationship with the Other” (11). The rhizome is a convenient spatial metaphor for the

74
I later question this argument when I read a scene in The Overseer’s Cabin of a failed interracial alliance
between a maroon and the indigenous peoples of Martinique. The extermination of the Native peoples in the
Caribbean islands has made it impossible to posit the Caribbean condition as paradigmatic of the American
hemispheric situation, since indigenous peoples in North, Central, and South America continue to struggle for
sovereignty in the face of settler colonial nation-states that exercise cultural and biological genocide against them.
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archipelagic centrifugal and centripetal forces of the Caribbean, which spreads and opens
outward to the Americas and which served as the port of entry to what would become to
Europeans the “New World.”
75
In in online article titled “Homme du tout-monde,” J. Michael
Dash writes that the Caribbean is “essentially archipelagic, in that the meaning of a single island
could not be grasped without a sense of the whole. Place did not exist without space, nor an
object without its horizon. So the significance of any entity within the archipelago was always in
its field of relations.” Glissant’s rhizomatic thinking, then, heralds archipelagic thinking.
But the rhizome is not only meant as a spatial metaphor: Glissant’s engagement with
Deleuzian-Guattarian thinking is not superficial, and Glissant develops his own form of
rhizomatic thinking to serve his needs as a theoretician of métissage, creolization, cross-cultural
contact, and Relation. Glissant is well aware that rhizomatic thinking leads to a psychic and
spatiotemporal place where “[t]he world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even
dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always
supplementary dimension to that of its object” (Deleuze and Guattari 6). This place where there
can be no dichotomies, where both ambivalence and overdetermination dominate the psyche,
could easily be said to be the condition of postmodernity. I, however, tease out “ambivalence or
overdetermination,” which can function as a Freudian or psychoanalytic dichotomy, and argue
that Glissant’s writing, especially his fiction, embodies both. Racial ambivalence fractures the
psyches of Glissant’s Creole characters in his novels, but there is always the threat of
overdetermining their roles and their relationships to their communities because they carry the
weight of hundreds of years of Martinican history. For this reason, Glissant takes it upon himself

75
Glissant includes a “Table of the Diaspora” as an appendix to Caribbean Discourse. There are three
columns, for “Continental America,” “The Caribbean,” and “Africa.” Using arrows to show the circulation of
people, literary and political movements, music, and ideas between these three geographical spaces, Glissant
demonstrates that the Caribbean both draws energies to it and sends them outward to the continental America and
Africa.
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to forge counter-narratives to challenge the “missed opportunities” of Martinican history
(Caribbean Discourse, 87).
In addition to Caribbean writers and French poststructuralist theorists, the one
anglophone writer with whom Glissant carried on a sustained intertextual relationship was U.S.
Southern writer and Nobel Laureate William Faulkner, the only writer to whom he devoted a
full-length study: Faulkner, Mississippi (1995).
76
In his introduction to The Collected Poems of
Édouard Glissant, Jeff Humphries astutely observes:
Two aspects of Faulkner’s work are particularly important to Glissant: miscegenation and
the consistent deconstruction of legitimacy and linear filiation …. [D]espite nostalgic and
ever (tragically) repeated efforts to define themselves in terms of European artifice,
Faulkner’s characters are always subsumed in a vegetal morass where impurity
(miscegenation, métissage, relation) always prevails and no binarism
(legimate/illegitimate, artifice/nature) can survive. (xx)
The failure of strictly policed and regulated racial and cultural binaries to prevent the great tragic
downfall of a Southern aristocratic family—as happens in Absalom, Absalom!, Glissant’s
favorite novel by Faulkner—enacts the rhizomatic thinking of Deleuze and Guattari in terms of
its spatialization of racial mixing and cultural blending and its concomitant “antigenealogy” (A
Thousand Plateaus, 11, 21).

76
Many critics have pointed out the necessarily complicated relationship Glissant must have with Faulkner,
as Faulkner is a descendant of slave owners in the U.S. South and writes from their perspective in his novels. Celia
Britton contends that in Glissant’s “reading of the novels of William Faulkner … he notes that the black characters
are only ever represented from the outside; they are given no interior monologue, and their actions do not even seem
coherent (IP, 169-70). But this, he argues, is precisely why the portrayals are valuable. […] [T]hey are evidence of
the author’s honesty in recognizing the limits of his own understanding and ‘dramatically taking on board the
Other’s opacity to oneself’ (169)” (20-21). Later I shall analyze an instance in which Glissant acknowledges his
own limitations in understanding the Other due to the Other’s alienation and refusal to communicate with words.
From this experience, Glissant learns that alienation and even madness constitute a type of his theorized opacity.
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As Glissant forges his own genealogy, he claims a space for himself in Martinican,
French Caribbean, and American literary, theoretical, and political history. The writers to whom
Glissant responds are altered by reading them through Glissant. The works of Césaire (and other
négritude writers), Fanon, Deleuze and Guattari, Benítez-Rojo, and Faulkner are transformed by
Glissant’s explicit and implicit engagement with them in texts such as Caribbean Discourse and
Poetics of Relation. In an essay titled “Kafka and His Precursors,” Jorge Luis Borges writes:
“The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of
the past, as it will modify the future” (201).
77
Such a temporality of discursivity suggests that
Glissant’s precursors, whether Martinican, French, or Anglo-American, can never again be read
without the awareness that Glissant reacts to their work in some way, at times extending it, at
other times subverting it, or, perhaps, in a characteristically Glissantian move, both extending
and subverting it at once. Glissant registers his racial ambivalence by challenging fellow
Martinicans like Césaire and Fanon, expanding the theoretical premises of French
poststructuralists like Deleuze and Guattari, and sharing an affinity with while remaining critical
of Anglo-American modernist Faulkner. In so doing, Glissant practices a form of cultural
métissage by synthesizing the work of previous writers and theorists and producing a different,
more subversive aesthetic and critical ethnoracial theory.
From what has been argued thus far, it can be seen that Glissant’s literary and theoretical
influences and his poststructuralist/Caribbean contemporaries are all male, begging the question
of what female Caribbean theorists and writers think about his work, which tends to be
phallogocentric and at times entirely occludes the female/feminist perspective. Jamaican writer

77
Citing Borges, an Argentine writer, in the context of Glissant’s forging Martinican and French
genealogies is particularly appropriate considering that Glissant writes about Borges in Caribbean Discourse. See
“Concerning Borges: Inquiries” (77-78). I should add, however, that Glissant is far more critical of Borges’s work
than he is laudatory: He sees in Borges a “capacity for appropriation” and a “mental relocation” that Glissant
decisively opposes in his theoretical and literary work published during the period I am examining (78).
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and critic Sylvia Wynter writes specifically about Glissant’s pre-1990 work (almost the same
periodization of his work in this chapter):
Another theme is that of the psychic disorder and cultural malaise, both caused by the
nihilated (néantisé) sense of identity of the population groups of the Antilles who, finding
themselves subordinated to the universal Word of Man and to the specific view of the
past which its Word demands, are also necessarily subordinated to the empirics of the
global relation which the behavior-regulating signals of this Word and its story (history)
necessarily bring into being. (639)
Wynter, like Glissant, is an Afro-Caribbean writer and theorist who has mastered Western
modernist and poststructuralist discourses and then employs them in the service of forging an
intellectual genealogy critical of the Western universalizing impulse. I cite her here because the
“universal Word of Man” and the “specific view of the past which its Word demands” signify
her critique of grounding theory and narrative in an androcentric Weltanschauung. The “Word of
Man” is a universalizing project born out of the Enlightenment, which not only relegates non-
Europeans to the realm of irrationality and lack of reason but women as well.
Although Wynter does not explicitly critique Glissant’s gender politics in her 1989 article
“Beyond the Word of Man,” she does address Glissant’s theorization of feminism as a
specifically Western construct. Glissant’s Antilleanity (or antillanité) is meant to constitute the
“new terrain and perspective [that] was to define the Antillean educated elite, opening them/us
onto the possibility of a new intellectual front, outside the orthodox ‘fronts’ of Marxism, liberal
nationalism, and feminism” (640). Here Wynter includes feminism as an orthodox front
alongside Marxism and nationalism, later writing that “[t]hese ‘fronts’ are essentially part of
what Glissant calls the ‘universel généralisé.’ […] One can speak here of a universal
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proletarianism and genderism on the model of Glissant’s analysis of universal humanism …”
(647 n. 17). Wynter argues that Glissant theorizes feminism as a Western construct from which
Antillean intellectuals must break free in order to create their own culturally specific modes of
resistance, which is confirmed by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, another Afro-Caribbean female
theorist, in Thiefing Sugar, who points out that in Poétique de la relation “Glissant proclaims
feminism a luxury indulged in by Western women” (235 n. 51).
78
While Glissant opposes
feminism as a universalizing gender construct, his female character Marie Celat, otherwise
known as Mycéa, experiences alienation and embodies madness, both of which constitute a
critique of and resistance to the misogyny of the Martinican community and its neocolonial
economic and cultural dependence on France.
Alienation and the Community
Early in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon, a Martinican born three years before
Glissant, famously states that “[w]e shall see that the alienation of the black man is not an
individual question” (xv). Glissant fully takes up this position in Caribbean Discourse and The
Overseer’s Cabin by examining the alienated condition of his fellow Martinicans as a people
under mental and economic siege by neocolonial France. Not too long after making his
argument that individual alienation cannot be considered apart from the alienation of all
colonized black people, Fanon goes on to assert that the “educated black man, slave of the myth
of the spontaneous and cosmic Negro, feels at some point in time that his race no longer
understands him. Or that he no longer understands his race” (xviii). Such is the case for Marie

78
Glissant writes in a(n) (in)famous footnote to Poetics of Relation: “This is why, perhaps, at least this is
what I think, the women of Martinique and in many colonized countries have a tendency in their socialization to
disregard feminism and to pass directly to various conquests of power, both social and political. Feminism is, also,
the luxury by means of which women in the West through their struggles transform their ancient pseudopower, their
spiritual counterforce into real equality” (60). It is evident here that Glissant finds feminism to be a Western
concept unnecessary and useless—a “luxury”—in the Antilles where he believes more direct “conquests of power,
both social and political,” are needed. Glissant seems to entirely ignore the more direct acts of confrontation that
feminism both called for and enabled in the U.S.
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Celat in Glissant’s novel The Overseer’s Cabin, a woman whose mastery of both French and
Creole incites the envy of the unnamed male narrator and his clique, and whose education
alienates her from her father.
Marie Celat, daughter of Pythagore Celat and Cinna Chimène, a foundling, is educated at
a school and outperforms her classmates, which elicits the distrust of her peers, teacher, and
family. Mycéa masters both the demotic and the colonial language, and she “savagely reviled
the boys who were jealous of her success and who couldn’t figure out how she could knock you
down in Creole and yet produce that abrasively accurate French” (33). As a mixed-race subject,
Mycéa experiences the push and pull between the language of her community, Creole, and the
language of the colonial power, France; yet, she ultimately chooses to make both discourses her
own, exhibiting the racial ambivalence she feels toward both her community and the colonial
power.
Freudian psychoanalysis finds that subjects retain ambivalence toward objects that they
first hate and later come to love, or that they later develop hostility and aggression toward
objects they first love. Although Freud limited his purview to intersubjective relations, I argue
that mixed-race subjects retain ambivalence toward the dominant culture attempting to assimilate
them as well as their ethnic community, which sustains them in the face of homogenization and
assimilation. In The Ego and the Id Freud states: “Now, clinical observation shows not only that
love is with unexpected regularity accompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in
human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in a number of
circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate” (647). The Fanonian argument is that
Martinicans are taught to love the French language and culture, but Mycéa never seems to learn
French out of love, but rather to further distance herself from her peers and family. Mycéa’s
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mastery of French elicits distrust from her community because it places her in a dominant
position over her peers, an especially troubling situation for the male narrator, who represents the
communal narrative voice with his use of “we.”
79
It is “[a]s if spoken French (writing it) formed
a secret tool, a lever in disguise for a work that was not to be mentioned in public” (33). The
secrecy of speaking and writing French underscores both the fear of and desire to be like the
metropolitan power that Glissant sees in the Martinican people. French can only be a “secret
tool” and a “lever in disguise” if there is a fear of using it accompanied by a desire to develop
fluency in it—a relationship to French that Glissant believes is indicative of the Martinican
people’s relationship to France itself.
In an essay titled “Reversion and Diversion” in Caribbean Discourse, Glissant writes
about the Martinican’s discovery of his own alienation only by way of diverting his attention
from it: “Here is a fine example of the concealment, in Martinique itself, of alienation: one must
look for it elsewhere in order to be aware of it. Then the individual enters the anguished world,
not of the unfortunate psyche, but really that of psychic torture” (23). Glissant is usually thought
by critics to include himself in his comment on the diversionary and reversionary displacements
that Martinicans undergo in order to find themselves.
80
Mycéa, though she never once leaves
Martinique in The Overseer’s Cabin, nevertheless is subject to the psychic displacements that a
mixed-race subject experiences, which generate the racial ambivalence she feels toward her

79
Each section of The Overseer’s Cabin is narrated by a single narrator, presumably male (if the reader can
judge by the masculinizing narrative voice and the androcentric point of view) that uses the first-person plural, “we,”
to speak as a member of the community. This narrative technique, about which I have more to say later, underscores
the alienation certain characters, like Mycéa, experience from their communities, which contributes to these
characters’ frustration and isolation.
80
Many critics argue that Glissant felt a sense of belonging to and dislocation from the colonizing power,
France. In her obituary for Glissant published in The Guardian on 13 February 2011 after Glissant’s death ten days
earlier, scholar Celia Britton writes that Glissant’s first collection of essays, Soleil de la conscience (translated into
English as The Sun of Consciousness), which he published in 1956, “expressed his ambiguous feeling of both
belonging and not belonging to France.” It is precisely the ambiguity of belonging and not belonging to two or more
cultures and literary genealogies that makes for racial ambivalence in mixed-race and mixed-cultural authors like
Glissant and the mixed-race and mixed-cultural characters they write in their fiction, like Mycéa in The Overseer’s
Cabin.
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community, a community that at times sustains her and most other times treats her as an outsider.
Her outsider status is attributed largely to Mycéa’s role as the repository of collective memory, a
role that Glissant gives her so that he can craft a counter-narrative to the dominant master
narrative imposed on Martinique by the colonizing power.
Martinique, similar to other islands in the Lesser Antilles, has had its indigenous
population exterminated and its black population robbed of its cultural roots by the traumas of
slavery. I have already said that Glissant rejected essentialist uses of négritude that tried to
discover in the African ancestry of black French Antilleans an origin story. Glissant’s attraction
to the Deleuzian-Guattarian rhizome is that the “rhizome is an antigenealogy” (A Thousand
Plateaus, 11, 21), and in rhizomatic thinking and writing “one can never posit a dualism or a
dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad” (9). The Overseer’s Cabin
and Mycéa’s role in it enact the “antigenealogy” that Deleuze and Guattari extol by offering a
counter-narrative to the master narrative of colonial history without resorting to an origin story or
myth. Poetics of Relation opens with a harrowing and evocative description of Africans being
carried in a slave ship over the Middle Passage, and Glissant claims that “[p]eoples who have
been to the abyss do not brag of being chosen. They do not believe they are giving birth to any
modern force. They live Relation and clear the way for it, to the extent that the oblivion of the
abyss comes to them and that, consequently, their memory intensifies” (8). Mycéa, as the
repository of cultural memory, intensifies the remembrance of her and her people’s traumatic
history by encountering the abyss, which leads to her eventual madness in the novel. Such an
intensification of memory never, I will show, concludes with an authentication of origins; rather,
counter-narrative allows Glissant to aesthetically break away from forms that legitimate
authenticity and any notion of purity.
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Glissant in his fiction does not permit his Martinican Creole characters to be
dichotomized, as archetypes and tropes in fiction usually are. In one of the sections of the novel
that extends the narrative into the previous century to narrate the lives of her ancestors, Mycéa is
revealed to be the descendant of Euloge Alfonsine, the overseer of the title. “‘Born a slave,’ he
turned his rage against those who shared this Gehenna” (69), leaving it impossible to, in Deleuze
and Guattari’s words, “posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good
and the bad.” The narrator of this section of The Overseer’s Cabin tells the reader that Euloge
“despised people like himself. So he got in the habit of giving orders on behalf of the whites”
(69), which characterizes the overseer, Euloge, a great-great grandfather of Marie Celat, as
alienating himself from his fellow slaves by positioning himself as superior to them. Although I
do not argue that Mycéa performs a role similar to Euloge, she is heiress to his alienated and
alienating position within the black community. As a slave, Euloge is alienated from his own
history, and his method of attempting to control his neurotic relationship to his past is to fully
embrace the master narrative of his French colonizers. Euloge’s daughter, Adoline Alfonsine,
who will become Marie Celat’s great-grandmother, is born in the year of the abolition of slavery
in the French Empire—1848—but Euloge refuses to recognize his daughter as a free black: “And
to make it perfectly clear that he was not in favor of all this fuss about abolition, he let it be
known everywhere that Adoline was born the day before the proclamation, which we believed to
be trustworthy despite the fact that we would have been unable to say just when the date was,
which the new day” (70). The “new day” in Martinique is indistinguishable from slavery
because the békés still have control of the land, and almost nothing changes in the lives of the
black population in the immediate aftermath of abolition.
81
Michèle Praeger argues that the

81
In Caribbean Discourse Glissant performs a deconstructive reading of the document that declared the
abolition of slavery in Martinique, a proclamation from Louis Thomas Husson, the provisional director of the
128

“Antillean people are thus dispossessed of the making of their own history. This is what Euloge
[…] understands when the proclamation is pasted on the door of his cabin” (39).
Euloge’s relationship to his history, or, as Glissant calls it, his “nonhistory” (Caribbean
Discourse, 62), results from his alienated Creole psyche’s attempt to grasp hold of a master
narrative imposed on him in the absence of his power to narrate himself. It is the French
Antilles’s “nonhistory” that perverts Martinicans’ relationships to themselves, each other, and
their country. In Caribbean Discourse Glissant muses on what he calls “history as neurosis,”
writing:
Would it be ridiculous to consider our lived history as a steadily advancing neurosis? To
see the Slave Trade as a traumatic shock, our relocation (in the new land) as a repressive
phase, slavery as the period of latency, “emancipation” in 1848 as reactivation, our
everyday fantasies as symptoms, and even our horror of “returning to those things of the
past” as a possible manifestation of the neurotic’s fear of his past? (65-66)
If Euloge tries to embrace a history that France forces upon him first as a slave and later as an
emancipated colonized subject, then his descendant Mycéa responds several generations later by
confronting the “horror of ‘returning to those things of the past’” and by facing the “traumatic
shock” of slavery in her role as the repository of collective memory. Valérie Loichot,
performing what she calls a “feminist intervention” with her reading of Glissant’s novel La case
du commandeur (39), writes that the “function of the original non-mother and of the women
characters of Case [The Overseer’s Cabin] coincide …. They become suitable transmitters not

interior for the French Republic, dated 31 March 1848. Glissant concludes his deconstructive reading of the text by
saying that the proclamation “ought to have been studied in Martinican schools, criticized by political parties,
analyzed by cultural authorities. This text from the ‘past’ is disturbingly contemporary. We can only tear ourselves
away from derision by staring directly into it” (37). According to Glissant, the text proclaiming the abolition of
slavery in Martinique is “disturbingly contemporary” because the promise of abolition never developed into
economic and cultural dependence for Martinique, which became an overseas department of France in 1946.
Remembering that Le discours antillais was published in the same year as La case du commandeur, we can trace
Glissant’s preoccupation with the failure of abolition to lead to present autonomy for Martinique.
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through actual mothering, but by shedding light on the past” (43). What Loichot calls the female
characters’ “shedding light on the past” is, I argue, Glissant’s use of Mycéa to construct a
counter-narrative to the French colonial master narrative of Martinique, a textual maneuver that
combats the “nonhistory” of French Antilleans generally and Martinicans specifically.
Madness and Counter-Narrative: A Reckoning with Martinique’s History
The counter-narrative that Glissant constructs by positioning Mycéa as the inheritor to the
intricate web of narratives woven through The Overseer’s Cabin grants her access to the
collective memory that Glissant argues is denied to most Martinicans. The “dislocation of the
continuum,” asserts Glissant in Caribbean Discourse, “and the inability of the collective
consciousness to absorb it all” produce the “nonhistory” from which Martinicans suffer (62).
Cut off from their history by dislocation along with the failure, through shock, of the collective
consciousness to receive and transmit Martinique’s history, Glissant maintains that Martinicans
are destined for continued cultural domination by France—unless a counter-narrative can be
provided. This counter-narrative is, naturally, provided by Glissant himself, and is generated in
part by Mycéa’s racial ambivalence toward her community and the alienation and madness she
suffers. Mycéa alone seems to be able to access the betrayals and self-betrayals of Martinican
history, the different ideologies and resistances of the maroons versus the enslaved, and the
threads of a story that no one but her is able to weave together through the successive
generations of her lineage.
The combination of education and intuition marks Mycéa’s character, and she is able to
utilize both of these abilities to access the history of Martinique that her family (her ancestors)
and her community are unable to retrieve. Her father, Pythagore, believes that knowledge of the
past resides in books, and he treats official written accounts with both respect and awe, but
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Mycéa, who can read, knows that “the books incessantly lied to the great advantage of the people
who produced them” (22). For Pythagore, who is functionally illiterate, and for the Martinican
community collectively speaking, “[k]nowledge, therefore, remained in the books; the Congo
and Guinea were still unexplored, the Negro race still at the bottom of the scale of Beauty” (23-
24). Official written records pervert the history of Martinique (and the history of all countries
where black people live), and relegate black people to “the bottom of the scale,” not just of
beauty, but of cultural and economic autonomy. Michèle Praeger contends that “Caribbean
cultures can be called postmodern, since the grand narrative, in this case the narrative of
discovery and appropriation, never fooled the Caribbean people” (50). I argue that the
Martinican community in The Overseer’s Cabin is trapped in its “nonhistory,” because it cannot
create a counter-narrative to the grand narrative, that is, until Mycéa, as the outcast alienated
Creole madwoman, retrieves their collective history.
Mycéa’s retrieval of Martinique’s history depends on her separation from the community
and on her ambivalence toward it, an ambivalence that is in part generated by her position as a
woman in an androcentric and misogynistic milieu. The male narrator of “In Two Places at
Once,” from the third and final section of novel, “First Animal,” reveals that Mycéa considers
the men of her generation to be “naïve,” and she says to them, “‘You’re still planning to remake
the world,’ […] Marie Celat would sometimes flare up, surprising us even though we too were
quickly set on fire by any burning issue” (146). Glissant, through Mycéa, here critiques the
notion that the world—and history—is made or “rema[d]e” by men and men alone, and that
women have no power to shape their cultural milieu and mold history. Such an androcentric and
misogynistic view of the limit of women’s abilities and power results in Mycéa’s rage, which is
an early symptom of her impending madness. The male narrator tells the reader, “If we were
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alarmed by her fits of anger it was because we thought that sort of fieriness was the prerogative
of boys” (147). Audre Lorde, in her essay “The Uses of Anger,” writes, “Anger is loaded with
information and energy,” and “anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our
vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification” that allows black
women to identify “who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our
genuine enemies” (127). Such uses of anger are how Mycéa employs her rage.
If Mycéa feels herself at a great remove from her male peers, whose misogyny is enough
to make her feel rage about their small assessment of her intellectual worth, then she is no more
apt to find camaraderie with her female counterparts. The unnamed male narrator describes
Mycéa:
She just told us: I’m a girl right down to the bottoms of my feet. Her girlfriends laughed;
like all the women of our country they had long ago learned to let men do the talking.
Marie Celat didn’t leave the talking to anyone. So she thought that we, boys and girls
both, were naïve: that is, though she seldom bombarded us with skeptical smiles or
discouraging remarks, she took some distance from our enthusiasm; she was no less
elated than anyone else, but occasionally more distant and always more careful, not with
words but with action. (147)
The “action in the service of our vision and our future” that is, according to Audre Lorde,
activated by black women’s anger, is developed by Mycéa. In response to her male peers’ belief
that she does not have the right to “fieriness” that men alone possess, Marie Celat considers
everyone in her community, male and female alike, naïve. Her “skeptical smiles” and
“discouraging remarks,” along with her “distance” from the community, express her racial
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ambivalence, which only becomes more accentuated as her character becomes the Creole
madwoman.
As the Creole madwoman in The Overseer’s Cabin, Mycéa is inserted into (and proceeds
from) a long line of Creole madwomen in the Caribbean.
82
Her great-grandmother, Adoline
Alfonsine, the daughter of the overseer Euloge, goes mad after a hurricane tears through the
island: “It’s no surprise that after this hurricane (called the hurricane of the miracle mirror)
Adoline seemed to fall apart” (82), one of the narrators tells us; and later, “More than a century
flowing into decline, she was a century filling itself with its own fallen verdure” (84). Mycéa’s
reason for succumbing to madness, however, is not the same as that of her ancestors or literary
antecedents. Her role as the repository of collective memory and bearer of her people’s story
leads her into the territory of the irrational as she seeks a counter-narrative, and that is why
“Marie Celat was seeking. She went through fits of absence, moments of madness” (170). J.
Michael Dash states that “[w]hat makes La case du commandeur different from Glissant’s earlier
work is the figure of Mycéa, who is very different from any of the major protagonists
encountered before in his works. Hers is a split personality. Caught between ceci and cela [this
and that] day and night, the autocensure of the present and the irresistible power of the past, she
incarnates a creatively fissured mind not unlike the creative fissure of the Lézarde river in the
Martiniquan landscape” (128). The split, or schizophrenic, mind of Marie Celat enables her to
trace a past that is buried deep in the collective psyche of Martinicans and excavate a counter-
narrative that has been forgotten, one that is the antidote to the “nonhistory” of Martinique.

82
In the anglophone literary tradition, Bertha Mason from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and
Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) are the most famous and readily available examples.
Of course, it is important to note that both of these Creole madwomen are white Creoles, literally from the French
word créole, meaning “a descendant of white settlers who is born in the colonies” (OED online).
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Anatolie Celat, Mycéa’s great-great-grandfather and the founder of the Celat line, tells
the story of a mysterious ancestor known only as Odono, giving a different piece of the story to
each of his various female lovers and the mothers of his thirty-five children. It is the story of
Odono that continues to haunt the Celats, and weaving this narrative together is what drives
Mycéa to madness. After the death of her younger son, whom she names Odono, Mycéa begins
“asking everyone: Have you seen Odono? And some of us could tell that it was not her youngest
son she was looking for but rather the first in a lineage that stopped short and never developed,
someone who arrived as an adult ever so long ago in this country, someone whose trace, except
for a few tormented people—of whom she was one, everyone had lost” (195-96). This lost
“trace,” this “lineage that stopped short and never developed,” is what Mycéa carries within her
and embodies. The counter-narrative that begins with Odono and ends with Mycéa’s madness,
institutionalization, and release is what she gives form to and what resists the grand master
narrative of Martinican colonization and departmentalization. The figure of Odono, who is an
African slave wrenched from his land and people, is a reminder of the transatlantic voyage and
the triangulation of Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. As a reminder of the transatlantic voyage
and this triangulation, Odono’s significance lies in his ability to awaken the collective memory
of the Martinican people, whose “nonhistory” produces an amnesia that results in their cultural
and economic dependence on France.
The counter-narrative that Mycéa constructs indexes her racial ambivalence toward her
community, and the most extreme result of this racial ambivalence is Mycéa’s
institutionalization after she is rejected as a functional member of her community. Celia Britton
writes that it is because she “refuses to conform to the collective amnesia of those around her
[that] as a result they find her uncomfortably odd and disturbing” (125), and she argues that it “is
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the violent collision of the personal and the historical that consummates [Mycéa’s] separation
from other people and leads to her forcible hospitalization” (128). The narrator of the novel’s
final chapter, aptly titled “Rock of Opacity,”
83
says that the community “turned against her
unanimously, concluding that, with ideas like that madness is just around the corner. […]
Complaints piled up in the offices. People dreaded finding themselves stripped bare, everyone
gradually deprived of the frenzied peel that hid the buried truths we denied” (197). The
community turns against Mycéa because it fears that the counter-narrative she embodies reveals
the history of self-betrayals that Martinicans have historically committed against themselves, as
well as the self-betrayals they continue to commit as they remain culturally and economically
dependent on France.
This counter-narrative of self-betrayals that Mycéa weaves together, the “buried truths
[Martinicans] denied,” positions her as the figure who contests not only French domination but
Martinicans’ surrender to this domination and their refusal to collectively resist it.
84
In their
introduction to Considering Counter-Narratives Michael Bamberg and Molly Andrews write that
“[c]ounter-narratives only make sense in relation to something else, that which they are
countering. The very name identifies it as a positional category, in tension with another
category. But what is dominant and what is resistant are not, of course, static questions, but
rather are forever shifting placements” (x). While I am not denying that Mycéa’s counter-

83
“Opacity” is a term put to use to especially great theoretical effect in Poetics of Relation. The “Rock of
Opacity” to which Glissant refers in The Overseer’s Cabin is Diamond Rock, a rock formation off the coast of
Martinique that is of historical importance to the island.
84
Critics have made the argument that Glissant identifies himself with Mycéa and considers himself the
figure who raises the awareness and consciousness of his fellow Martinicans. Glissant explicitly renders his self-
identification with Mycéa by titling a chapter in his novel Tout-monde, “Mycéa, c’est moi,” which means “I am
Mycéa.” Valérie Loichot points out that “[t]his claim’s obvious subtext is Flaubert’s famous ‘Madame Bovary,
c’est moi,’ where the author ironically blurs the lines between himself and his character” (216 n. 49). Beverley
Ormerod writes that Glissant is “concerned with promoting the birth of national feeling: with the urgent necessity
for all West Indians to cease to look outside the Caribbean for salvation, and particularly with the need for
Martinicans and Guadeloupeans to turn not to France, but to their own islands for the realization of their identity”
(5-6).
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narrative is resistant to the dominant grand master narrative of the colonizing metropole, I also
assert that Mycéa is resisting the position of a Martinican community that univocally capitulates
to their country’s heteronomy. The first half of The Overseer’s Cabin stretches backward in time
to trace the four preceding generations of the Celat family before Marie Celat, while halfway
through the novel is a section titled “The Center of Time,” after which the remainder of the text
narrates Mycéa’s life in the present until her institutionalization and release in 1978. The middle
section, “The Center of Time,” contains the counter-narrative that Mycéa bears and embodies: a
history of marronnage in which maroons attempt—and fail—to ally themselves with the
indigenous peoples of Martinique before they are exterminated.
Glissant constructs a narrative of marronnage that foregrounds the potential solidarity
between the maroons and the Caribs and Arawaks who fled to the hills so that that former were
not enslaved and the later would not be eradicated. In The Overseer’s Cabin Glissant takes up
the issue of interracialism between black and indigenous peoples when he writes of a male
maroon who names himself Aa, after the first letter in the white man’s language, who allies
himself with the indigenous peoples in Martinique. The narrator of “Burnt-over Memories,” a
chapter in “The Center of Time,” says about Aa: “The whites didn’t know that in addition to the
stolen koutlas he had bows and arrows; the last surviving Caribs had taught him how to make
them, and he was now heir to the Arawaks’ patience and the Caribs’ passion” (114). As heir to
the exalted qualities of the indigenous peoples of Martinique, Aa is a maroon who carries on the
tradition of indigenous resistance to colonial genocide. Michèle Praeger argues that Aa
“befriends the Arawaks and the Caraib Indians, who despise the Africans for having accepted
slavery,” and shortly thereafter asks, “Who is the first maroon? Longoué? One of the Odono
brothers? The Arawaks or the Caraib Indians? The true origins are constantly deferred” (43).
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Marronnage here is figured as an interracial effort at colonial resistance whose origin cannot be
traced back to one particular individual or ethnic/racial group; in this sense, marronnage is a true
product of creolization.
However, Glissant’s counter-narrative does not legitimate a facile celebration of
interracial solidarity between maroons and Caribs and Arawaks; rather, it narrates the self-
betrayals that he believes have plagued Martinique from the time of slavery to the present. The
narrator of the middle section tells us in a later chapter titled “Acts of War” that “Aa was
captured after one of his own men betrayed him. One of the catastrophes of this country is that,
from time to time, people unpredictably choose the master’s approval rather than the word of
people like themselves” (137). Betrayal of one’s own people, which amounts to self-betrayal, is
a legacy of colonial domination.
85
After his capture Aa is tortured by the colonizers, but he feels
himself defeated not because he is captured but because he “learned about the old Indian chiefs
standing up and commanding their people to take the path to this cliff, [and] he’d decided once
and for all that what he had to say no longer mattered” (138). During his torture Aa can
visualize—or perhaps he is having a vision of—“the old Indian chiefs’ people moving toward the
cliff,” and Aa “found one thing unbearable: he couldn’t bear the idea that these forest people
were now extinct. [He] [b]ellow[s] his rage because he could neither help them nor die with
them” (139). Aa’s rage is born of the failure of the interracial alliance between maroons and the
Caribs and Arawaks to prove resistant to the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the island. In
his pride Aa feels despair that he is not able to die with the indigenous peoples as they have

85
The misogynistic trope of Doña Marina, or La Malinche, and her selling out her people, the Aztecs, to
Hernán Cortés by being his translator and lover is an overdetermined narrative in Mexican and Chicana/o
discourses. Although I am not comparing these two narratives, because La Malinche has served the purposes of
Mexican and Chicano misogyny, it is important to note that colonialism has generated such narratives of betrayal.
In the case of La Malinche, she has been reclaimed by Chicana feminists as the mother of Chicana mestizas. No
such (feminist) reclamation is available in Glissant’s tale of betrayal in The Overseer’s Cabin.
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decided to kill themselves, and he is killed by his torturers by having a firebrand stuck in his
mouth because he will not cease vociferously narrating the story of Odono—the story that
torments the Celat family.
It is important here to foreground this failure of black and indigenous solidarity as one of
the “missed opportunities” of Martinican history that Glissant discusses in Caribbean Discourse
(87). Equally important is to now examine Glissant’s politics regarding the indigenous
populations of the Caribbean islands and whether or not he considers them elements in the
process of creolization in the French Antilles. We need to turn to the glossary of Caribbean
Discourse to seek out Glissant’s sustained theoretical engagement with Native peoples and,
because we are speaking of indigeneity, Latin America, where in many nations Native peoples
have not been exterminated as they have in the Caribbean islands and they struggle for
sovereignty in the face of a settler colonial state. In the glossary there is an entry for “Arawaks,
Caribs” that reads: “The first inhabitants of the islands. All massacred. A few thousand
relocated on the island of Dominica (q.v.). During the period of formation of the Martinican
elite, it was good form for Martinicans living in France to have it thought that they were
descendants of a Carib chief. Which implied that they were not as African as they appeared”
(261). Although here Glissant implies that miscegenation or métissage occurred between the
black and indigenous populations of Martinique, he nevertheless critiques those Martinicans who
trace their lineage to a “Carib chief” for the sake of making themselves less black rather than
acknowledging a true relationship between black and indigenous peoples in Martinique. If
Glissant considers the “few thousand” indigenous Martinicans who “relocated on the island of
Dominica” as maroons, he does not make it explicit in the entry.
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The glossary to Caribbean Discourse abounds in other seemingly insignificant but
intellectually titillating entries that gesture to indigeneity, especially as it is ethnically and
racially configured in Latin America. In a glossary entry for “(the other) America,” Glissant
traces a patrilineage of Latin American and indigenous revolutionaries: “The America of Juarez,
Bolivar, and Martí. The America of Neruda. But especially that of the Indian peoples. The
notion of the Other America (as formulated by José Martí) is a countervailing force to Anglo-
Saxon America. But the Other America is not ‘Latin’; one can imagine that this term will
gradually disappear” (260). If Glissant’s “Other America” is “especially that of the Indian
peoples,” then a reader may justly wonder why his theory relegates indigenous peoples to the
glossary or to footnotes, and why they are figures driven to suicide in his fiction. In Creole
Indigeneity, Shona Jackson isolates the problem as the exclusion of indigenous peoples on the
basis that “Indigenous Peoples are largely considered extinct in the Greater and Lesser Antilles”
(15). Most scholars treat them as “having disappeared entirely from some islands in the colonial
period” or as “constituting too small and often too isolated a population” to treat them in “literary
and other cultural analyses” (Jackson 15). Jackson calls for scholars to “address the ways in
which, in the Caribbean and even in settler states like the United States that fit the dominant
model, those brought in as forced labor (racialized capital) now contribute to the
disenfranchisement of Indigenous Peoples” (3). While I am not arguing that Glissant is
disenfranchising indigenous peoples in his theory and fiction, I am claiming that the “missed
opportunity” may be that the theorist himself cannot make connections between métissage or
creolization and mestizaje in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands.
86
I intend to forge such

86
J. Michael Dash takes the title of his study The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World
Context from Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, which he translated. However, aside from engaging with a few
canonical writers from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean—José Martí, Alejo Carpentier, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and
Roberto Fernández Retamar, all of whom are Cuban—Dash does not consider the transnational and archipelagic
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connections in the next chapter, which tethers feminism and queerness to racial ambivalence in
mixed-race people of Spanish-speaking Caribbean descent. (And needless to say, the term
“Latin [America/n]” is not disappearing, even gradually, nor will it anytime soon.) What makes
my larger argument about racial ambivalence coherent is that mestizo gay men (such as John
Rechy), Afro-Latino gay men (such as narrator of We the Animals), and Creole women (such as
Mycéa) feel torn between their desire to accentuate their outsider status and their commitment to
their communities, which never wholly claim them.
Mycéa’s outsider status is an extreme case because she is eventually institutionalized for
madness near the conclusion of The Overseer’s Cabin. Molly Andrews writes, “Often people
who construct personal stories which go against the social grain, do so with a consciousness of
being a member of an outside group” (1). Although Mycéa constructs a counter-narrative that is
not personal but rather familial, communal, and even national in its scope and implications, she
nevertheless experiences the psychic displacement—and ambivalence—of a member of an
outside group, which could be the status of the Celat family, as she is alone in her determination
and ability to narrate a discomfiting history of her people with which they prefer not to reckon.
Mycéa illuminates some of the most unsavory aspects of Martinique’s history, but she does so in
an attempt to incite resistance to France. Earlier I read Mycéa’s “skeptical smiles” as registering
her distance from the community (The Overseer’s Cabin, 147), and Barbara J. Webb maintains
that “Mycéa stands out among her peers because of her remoteness and her skepticism about
political theorizing” (120). Glissant, through Mycéa, proposes that “political theorizing” on its
own is not enough to end Martinique’s cultural and economic dependence on France. The
Overseer’s Cabin is a text that aesthetically embodies the opacity Glissant’s theory calls for and

cross-alliances between Spanish-speaking Caribbeans and francophone and anglophone Caribbeans. In other words,
Dash replicates Glissant’s “missed opportunity” by failing to compare and contrast creolization and mestizaje in
various Caribbean islands with dissimilar colonial histories.
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takes it one step further: the aesthetic itself is alienating and proves resistant to an imperialist
universalizing impulse.
Toward an Aesthetics of Alienation
Before proceeding to examine how Glissant forges an aesthetics of alienation, it is
necessary for me as a point of comparison to address an earlier novel by the author that emplots a
hitherto untold history of Martinique in a straightforward and linear manner, quite unlike the
rhizomatic narrative technique he would use in his later fiction. The Fourth Century “roots” the
male maroons, whereas the characters in The Overseer’s Cabin, especially Mycéa, embody a
very slippery and liminal marronnage. The maroon who founds the Longoué line “without his
rootstock easily took root” (101), and his son, Melchior Longoué, is the “thick, heavy root taking
hold in the land” (150). It is important to note that The Fourth Century is Glissant’s second
novel and was published 16 years before Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, which
first theorized the rhizome as an “antigenealogy” (11, 21). The disorientation the reader feels as
she reads the spiraling narrative of The Overseer’s Cabin mimics the alienation experienced by
Mycéa as she attempts to give form to the pieces of the story she inherits from her ancestors.
The search for origins in The Overseer’s Cabin proves futile because the counter-
narrative is not meant to be an origin story; rather, it generates an aesthetic that proves resistant
to colonial master narratives and official accounts of European history. This aesthetic embodies
the alienation and madness that Mycéa experiences: The narrative is told out of order and
reaches backward and forward as it tunnels in and out of multiple characters’ stories recounted
by a single male member of the community present at that time who uses the first person plural,
“we.” The structure of the novel is rhizomatic in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense. The novel,
like the rhizome, is a “stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up
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speed in the middle” (A Thousand Plateaus, 25)—quite literally, since the middle section is titled
“The Center of Time” and relates events occurring during the early slavery period in Martinique.
As examples of texts embodying the rhizomatic aesthetic, Deleuze and Guattari list “William
[S.] Burroughs’s cut-up method” (6), his novel Naked Lunch, and “Joyce’s words, accurately
described as having ‘multiple roots,’ [that] shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language,
only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge” (6), which likely refers to his
novel Finnegans Wake. Additionally, “Nietzsche’s aphorisms [which] shatter the linear unity of
knowledge” are also mentioned (6). I note these here because Glissant’s novel The Overseer’s
Cabin also develops the rhizomatic structures and thinking that Deleuze and Guattari notice and
extol in other novelists and philosophers.
87
Of course, Glissant’s rhizomatic aesthetic was not
mature until later in his career, and certainly not in the 1960s, when he was writing The Fourth
Century.
In many ways Glissant continues his counter-narrative project in The Overseer’s Cabin
from The Fourth Century, which features the same characters that Glissant returns to time and
again in his oeuvre. If I and other critics make feminist interventions in reading The Overseer’s
Cabin—without ever granting Glissant a position as a feminist—then The Fourth Century does
not admit any feminist interventions because of its concern with forging a specifically male
genealogy of resistance. Papa Longoué, an aging quimboiseur (French Antillean Creole
medicine man) transmits his counter-narrative to Mathieu Béluse, a distant relative young
enough to be his grandson. Although Mathieu “knew that the quimboiseur would be put off by
logic and clarity” (7), he nevertheless tries to “penetrate all the old man’s onomatopoeia and
reluctance and uncertainty to make the story advance and give some order to events” (22).

87
Glissant himself points out other novelists whose work epitomizes the rhizomatic structure and aesthetic,
including that of James Joyce, whose “Finnegan’s Wake [sic] was an écho-monde that was prophetic and
consequently absolute (without admission into the real)” (Poetics of Relation, 93).
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Mathieu continually challenges Papa Longoué as he narrates the story of their intertwining
family lines, questioning his knowledge of the past. In response, the quimboiseur at one point
says that he narrates the story linearly “‘[o]n the assumption you only wanted the logical
sequence, events one after the other’” (67). Michèle Praeger asserts that Longoué, the maroon
founder, and Mathieu “believe that history is progressive and linear and that it can be changed
and molded according to the will of a few strong men” (41). In other words, Mathieu embodies
the masculine imperative of historical and narrative order,
88
something that Mycéa, as the
alienated Creole madwoman, never does, since Glissant defies narrative order and logic by his
nonlinear sequencing of chapters in The Overseer’s Cabin. Mathieu’s masculinized “logic,”
“clarity,” and “order” in The Fourth Century is absent from The Overseer’s Cabin, despite the
latter’s being narrated by several unnamed male members of the Creole community.
Papa Longoué is the descendant of the male maroon who founds the Longoué line,
allowing Glissant to idealize male marronnage in The Fourth Century. Although Mycéa appears
toward the end of that novel, her character and her family line are relegated to the margins
because they are descended from a female maroon, Liberté Longoué (niece of Melchior), and
Liberté “founded the family of Celats that would stubbornly persist far away from everyone or
rather would merge with the mass” (154). In The Overseer’s Cabin, Glissant revises the family
history of the Celats by stretching backward and forward in time to narrate six generations of
their family, ending the novel with Marie Celat’s descent into madness, the death of her two
sons, and her institutionalization and release. Bringing the Celats and Mycéa from the margins

88
Michèle Praeger also points out that in a much later novel by Glissant, Mahagony (1987), Mathieu
“rebels against his creator and accuses him of having portrayed him, in Le Quatrième Siècle, as a traditional
historian, an archivist, impatient with Papa Longoué’s nonlinear, digressive, opaque way of creating history” (46).
Glissant is exceptional as a writer for continually revising his characters in his oeuvre. As I am only treating here
the works by Glissant that have been translated into English, I am not performing a reading of Mahagony, which is
one of the many novels by Glissant that has not been translated into English.
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to the center of the text allows Glissant to generate a counter-narrative unavailable to a writer
heroicizing male marronnage. Mycéa embodies collective memory as a female cultural
repository in a way that Stéfanise Béluse in The Fourth Century, mother to quimboiseur Papa
Longoué, cannot, for she is “not the person (a woman) required for transmitting the knowledge”
(209). Clearly, Glissant revised his own beliefs about the role of women in Martinican society in
the 17 years between the publication of The Fourth Century and The Overseer’s Cabin.
Marronnage in the two novels I read offers a counter-narrative that revises the history of
colonization and present day departmentalization of Martinique by emplotting a mode of
resistance available to decolonial French Antillean writers like Glissant. Although marronnage
is shown to be unavailable as a contemporary mode of resistance to global capitalist
neocolonialism, it nevertheless allows Glissant (and other French Antillean writers) to trace a
previously unexamined but fertile genealogy of resistance. The Fourth Century concludes by
stating that the “Longoués had run dry,” but there is yet “the irrefutable evidence of the old days,
the source of a revived past” that reminds the Martinican people of what could have been and
what might be (293). Additionally, the narrator tells us that the “Longoués who had run dry
were buried in everyone” (293), indicating that the legacy of marronnage lives on, a latent mode
of resistance requiring a conscious collective effort to (re)awaken it. Sylvia Wynter writes that
“[o]nly the Maroon in his or her mountain retreats, as exemplified by the Longoué family in
Glissant’s fiction, remained to remind of what that ancestral mode of being, of subjectivity, had
originally been” (643-44).
I argue that it is not only the Longoué family but Mycéa in The Overseer’s Cabin who
remind Martinicans of this “ancestral mode of being” and these alternative subjectivities that
have been repressed by official historical accounts of Martinique. Peter Hallward writes of the
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first-person plural narrative voices of The Overseer’s Cabin that the “community of this we is a
community defined by the collective repression of any meaningful introspection” (93). Though
the price Mycéa pays for her “meaningful introspection” is madness, she offers the Martinican
people a counter-narrative whose full fecundity is yet to be realized. The counter-narratives of
marronnage that Glissant emplots in his fiction offer readers—and potential writers—the
availability of new counter-narratives that have yet to be written, and these unwritten counter-
narratives may be critical of the ways that Glissant occludes indigeneity and feminism in his
fiction and theory. I agree with Michèle Praeger that Glissant “writes for the happy few and for
the readers to come” (174). Glissant expects his future readers to take up his counter-narrative
project and refine, revise, and extend it as a mode of resistance to neocolonialism. For this
reason, Glissant continually refined and revised his aesthetic over the years to calculate it toward
the alienation of the reader, thus embodying his theorization of opacity, taken up more explicitly
in his later work.
Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, published nine years after Caribbean Discourse and The
Overseer’s Cabin, is more hopeful than his previous theoretical and fictional work because it
offers a vision of alienation (and madness) that is not pathological but meaningful and
subversive. There are two sections in Poetics of Relation that describe (although Glissant
himself would oppose the act of description) a madman in Martinique who refuses to use speech
to communicate and instead interacts with Glissant with only a gesture. In Caribbean Discourse
Glissant speaks of the “everyday delirium” of the “street scene” in Martinique (195), but his
discussion of this delirium tends to cast it as a form of collective psychosis. Nine years later he
shifts his position and finds subversive potential in the alienation of a madman in Martinique
who compels his attention. Poetics of Relation introduces a “ghostly young man” whose
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“tireless wandering traced a frontier between the land and water,” and he “refused to speak and
no longer admitted the possibility of any language” (122). Fascinated by him, Glissant one day
tries to “establish some system of relation with this walker that was not based on words” (122),
which results in the madman’s “gesture”:
perhaps the utmost he was capable of expressing: “I understand what you are attempting to
undertake. You are trying to find out why I walk like this—not-here. I accept your trying.
But look around and see if it’s worth explaining. Are you, yourself, worth my explaining this
to you? So, let’s leave it at that. We have gone as far as we can together.” I was
inordinately proud to have gotten this answer. (123)
This madman who communicates with a gesture only makes it known to Glissant that he
understands that Glissant asks for an explanation of his behavior, but he refuses to give one to
him. In other words, the madman deploys an extreme form of Glissantian opacity: as an Other—
Michel Foucault makes a case for the othering of those with mental disorders in Madness and
Civilization—he disallows Glissant from demanding an explanation of him and a justification for
his behavior.
89

Far from feeling disappointed or defeated in his attempt to understand the madman,
Glissant later comes to appreciate the madman’s use of opacity, and he even comes to hold him
up as a paradigmatic example of opacity: “As for those of us who follow him, if we can put it
that way (but we do know the rhythm of his passages; we are able to anticipate them), we are
beginning to accept the fact that he is more resistant than we and more lasting than our endless
palaver” (208). Such an appreciation for madness seems to be Deleuzian-Guattarian, as they
write in Anti-Oedipus: “A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on

89
Foucault writes in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason that “madness is
immediately perceived as difference,” which results in the confinement of the mad for “the suppression of the
difference” (116), thereby establishing the mad as Europe’s internal Others (alongside, I would argue, Jews).
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the analyst’s couch” (2). Glissant makes the madman out for a walk on the beach in Martinique
a more resistant model than the neurotic Martinicans he renders as zombies in Caribbean
Discourse.
90
The madman, who feels alienated and whose madness alienates others from him, is
not pathologized but described as “more resistant” than even Glissant himself. Celia M. Britton,
whose Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory makes a case for Glissant’s construction of
linguistic models resistant to colonialism and imperialism, writes that “Glissant’s initially
surprising idea that a relationship of not only respect, but also solidarity and affection, is possible
and better without ‘understanding’ the other has wide implications for literature as for social
existence” (20). Glissant’s inability to understand the madman actually enables a relationship of
respect between the two rather than precludes it. Britton is right to argue that Glissant’s
endorsement of opacity has “wide implications for literature” because it bears upon Glissant’s
own theory and how his audience is to engage with it.
An aesthetic that purposefully alienates the reader, which is what Glissant achieves to
great effect in his novels, poetry, and even theory, disallows the kind of facile reading that does
epistemic and cultural violence to the text and the text’s author. Glissant’s aesthetics of
alienation preserves his writing from cultural appropriation and the kind of universalist
interpretations to which so many shallow uses of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” in the
classroom often fall prey. Socially, acknowledging one’s inability to fully understand the other
respects difference by refusing to render it in terms that are incompatible with the other’s culture
and individual subjectivity. The madman is able to offer a resistant gesture because creolization,
as theorized by Glissant, is an ambivalent psychic process that shores up the historical weight of
cultures that from their earliest beginnings have been subjected to repression. Calling Glissant’s

90
In Caribbean Discourse Glissant writes, “Just as the Martinican seems to be simply passing through his
world, a happy zombi, so our dead seem to us to be hardly more than confirmed zombis” (59).
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analysis of the madman walking on the beach “poetically mysterious,” Lincoln Z. Shlensky
argues that “in refusing to represent through the available modes of discourse, the marcheur
[walker] evokes a possibility that the even deeply self-alienated gestures, like the most
marginalized culture or language, may become recognized as traces of what remains dissociated
but always historically potential” (363-64). In other words, the mad beach walker and his
gestural communication with Glissant are indicative of Glissant’s later revaluation of the
fecundity of an alienated discourse and aesthetic.
In addition to being a theoretician, Glissant is a poet, playwright, and novelist, and his
theory is both influenced by his education in the academy and resistant to it through his
formation of a complex aesthetic that is more literary than academic. His deployment of opacity,
then, is different from poststructuralist European and Euro-American academic prose that is
deliberately abstruse, arcane, and recondite. Rather, Glissant creates an aesthetics of alienation
that encodes alienation and ambivalence in the literary style, thereby circumventing attempts to
separate the theory and the poetry in his work. The last section of Poetics of Relation is titled
“The Burning Beach,” and it is a prose poem about the Martinican beach from which Diamond
Rock, formed by volcanic activity, can be seen. It is here where Glissant sees the madman again,
and he closes the book with:
Call the keepers of silence with their feet in the river. Call the river that used to spill over the
rocks. —As for myself, I have listened to the pulse of these hot spots. I have bathed there
beside friends, attentive to the volcano’s drums. We have stood bent against the wind
without falling. One lone bay; whatever name it had evaporated. Also endeavouring to point
out this blue tinge to everything … —Its sun strolls by, in the savanna’s silver shuddering
and the ocre [sic] smell of the hounded earth. (209)
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This prose poem, so different from the more academic sections of the book, serves as a fitting
conclusion to Glissant’s argument that opacity protects subjects from universalist absorption and
appropriation. The “keepers of silence” could be those who deploy opacity, including Glissant
himself, and their attachment to the natural geography of Martinique is their refusal to grant
access to outsiders. The “keepers of silence” could also be those like the madman, who walk
alienated along the island, preserving their identity from appropriation by the dominant culture
by planting “their feet in the river,” the waters that nourish Martinicans.
The poetic element of Glissant’s theory, as well as that of his novels, resists transparency
and stylizes a discourse that enables a decolonial politics. Glissant writes that transparency “no
longer seems like the bottom of the mirror in which Western humanity reflected the world in its
own image. There is opacity now at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by
populations […] with an insistent presence that we are incapable of not experiencing” (Poetics of
Relation, 111). In “Édouard Glissant’s Creolized World Vision” H. Adlai Murdoch asserts that
Glissantian transparency “is implicitly linked to, inter alia, colonialist and universalist practices
that literally absorbed and transformed the other through sanctioned acts of appropriation and
assimilation, acts predicated on hierarchies of difference conflated with national power … ”
(883). If transparency enables colonialist appropriation and assimilation, then opacity resists the
absorption of the other into the universalized self.
Yet Glissant’s aesthetic, whether it is his rhizomatic narrative structure or his deployment
of opacity or his aesthetics of alienation, cannot be reduced to a politics that is mapped onto the
aesthetic as in a cultural nationalist paradigm. One of the reasons Glissant distanced himself
from négritude is because he saw how its cultural politics rigidified over time into something
approximating essentialism. Jeff Humphries argues that “[a]mong Caribbean writers, Glissant’s
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thought is unique for its rejection of any simple or static concept of the relation between
literature and politics, poetry and ideology” (xiii). It is Glissant’s profound ambivalence, found
in his theory but also embodied in his fictive characters, that I find compelling because of its
figuration of fissured psyches for mixed-race and mixed-cultural people. Near the conclusion of
Mythologies in the essay titled “Myth Today,” Roland Barthes writes: “It seems that this is a
difficulty pertaining to our times: there is as yet only one possible choice, and this choice can
bear only on two equally extreme methods: either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to
history, and ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable,
irreducible, and, in this case, poetize” (158). Of these two choices, positing a permeable history
and ideologizing it, or offering an impenetrable and irreducible reality and poeti(ci)zing it,
Glissant clearly chooses the latter and employs an aesthetics of alienation.
Conclusion
Édouard Glissant is a writer whose ever-shifting voice(s) offers the readers of his theory,
novels, and poetry an aesthetic method to combat the universalizing absorption and appropriation
of imperialist nations like France and the United States. Speaking of her own theoretical voices
in Pedagogies of Crossing, M. Jacqui Alexander writes that “Audre Lorde would have us believe
that [a] shift in voice is that of the poet bringing faint yet decipherable whispers of freedom, a
conjunction of the aesthetic of creation, the beauty of the Sacred and the flight of imagination”
(16). As he shifts his voice between his theory and his fiction, his theory and his poetry, and
between one novel and another, Glissant’s protean aesthetic calls for the economic and cultural
freedom of Martinicans and other French Antilleans; it calls for the freedom of all peoples living
under neocolonial rule.
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More than anything, Glissant shows his readers that racial ambivalence is not a defeatist
mental state but one charged with psychic energy that can activate resistance. How this
resistance is embodied depends on the individual’s status within her or his community. Mycéa in
The Overseer’s Cabin inherits the “multiple alienations” Pépin and Confiant assert that all
Creoles, as hybrids, experience; but her alienation is accentuated by her status as an outsider to
the Creole community that fears and distrusts her because of her education, intuition, and ability
to make sense of the treacherous history of Martinique. The counter-narrative that she weaves
together from the disparate strands of narrative her ancestors possess grants her the position of
truth-teller in her community: Mycéa reveals the ways in which Martinicans are complicit in
their own subjugation. It is because she “denounced the mothers who smothered their children
and the brothers who brand their brothers like mules on a plantation” that the community decides
that Mycéa’s madness warrants her institutionalization in the psychiatric hospital on the island
(197). Mycéa’s racial ambivalence toward her community allows her to see that “we had always
killed our children; mothers smothered them at birth; brothers sold their brothers,” which was
“more than people around her could put up with” (196). Literally, slavery gave black
Martinicans so few options that many mothers did choose to kill their babies to prevent them
from growing up in slavery, and Mycéa’s own great-great-grandfather, Euloge Alfonsine, was an
overseer who did little better than brand his brothers as mules. Yet, Mycéa means to call
Martinicans out on their continued and contemporary self-betrayals, including their failure to
slough off their cultural and economic dependence on France.
If the pessimism of The Overseer’s Cabin, which ends with the narrator’s meditation on
where the individual fits in the collectivity—“We put these unconnected selves together with
such impatience […] bent on keeping the troubled part of each body contained inside the hard
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darkness of us” (209)—seems to be Glissant’s coming to terms with the failures of national
solidarity in Martinique, it also signals a hope and desire for individuals to lead the way to the
coalescence of a collective effort. Characters like Mycéa and writers like Glissant awaken the
national consciousness of those who listen to them and read them, even if at first their
communities are put off by the individual’s indictment of the community’s collusion in its state
of dependence. What Mycéa understands through her madness and Glissant realizes by the
gestural communication of the mad walker on the beach, is that extreme psychic states have the
potential to fully deploy the opacity that protects colonized populations from being incorporated
into universalist discourses of Enlightenment and progress, which contain them in roles scripted
for them by the colonizers. Glissant’s power to tap into the potential of ambivalence and
madness and to develop an aesthetic that requires the reader to respond to the alienation felt by
his characters expands the scope of literary possibility. The zombified Creole psyche in
Glissant’s oeuvre is awakened by the ambivalence, alienation, and madness experienced by those
most sensitive mixed-race and mixed-cultural people in Martinique—it is for this reason that
now, after Glissant has been translated into English for thirty years, we must revisit him.
If Glissant’s Creole madwoman is a subject that invites a pessimistic reading of mixed-
race identities, then Josefina López’s Mexicana/Chicana mestiza in Paris, the subject of my next
and final chapter, is a more hopeful way to end my dissertation. Challenging Mexican misogyny
in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, and French imperialism and xenophobia in Paris, López’s
mestiza is able to maintain her affiliation with her ethnic community and is galvanized by her
depression and feminist rage to take concrete political action, an act Mycéa never achieves.

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Chapter 4: A Chicana Mestiza in Paris:
Transnational Decolonial Icon, Affects, and Triangulation in Josefina López’s Hungry Woman

Alienated from her mother culture, “alien” in the dominant culture, the woman of color does not
feel safe within the inner life of her Self. Petrified, she can’t respond, her face caught between
los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits.

—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

I trace the migrations and peregrinations of a subject not often appearing on the US stage,
nor, I would conjecture, although I have little beyond conjecture to support it, appearing on the
stage in performance spaces in any nation-state: a Chicana mestiza in Paris. The US has
romanticized Paris as an ultra-cosmopolitan space that defines aesthetic, artistic, literary,
culinary, and sartorial taste for a Western, if not global, population; in short, the US has and
continues to turn to Paris as a site that defines certain key cultural aspects of modernity. While
Paris has historically served as a haven for US expatriate artists, writers, intellectuals, musicians,
and performers—notably black and white—very seldom does it operate as a privileged site of
transnational intellectual and artistic communities for US citizens of Mexican or Latin American
descent. Thus I turn to Josefina López’s play Hungry Woman for its engagement with
transnational triangulations of latinidad between Latin America, the US, and Paris.
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Hungry
Woman’s protagonist, Canela Guerrero, is pitted against two racist and xenophobic nation-states,
both Western and both seeking to eradicate racial difference in their imperialist orderings of an
economy that exploits that racial difference, using it as the foundation upon which to build and
sustain a neocolonial project. Set in Los Angeles and Paris and haunted by a Mexican cultural
figure, Hungry Woman is also a period piece in some ways as it examines George W. Bush’s
legacy from the standpoint of eight years later.

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The title of Josefina López’s play pays homage to fellow Chicana writer Cherríe Moraga’s play The
Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea. Moraga’s retelling of the Medea myth through a queer Chicana mestiza who
murders her son positions mestizaje as an ethnoracial identity that authenticates claims to Aztlán. I have more to say
about López’s own deployment of Aztlán in Hungry Woman later in this chapter.
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I attended a performance of Hungry Woman, directed by Corky Dominguez, at CASA
0101 Theatre in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights on 29 June 2013.
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In a
gesture to multiplicity, Hungry Woman featured a protean ensemble cast of twelve actors playing
thirty-one different roles. Each actor played several roles with the exception of Rachel
González, who played Canela Guerrero, the protagonist and heroine, and Linda López, who
played Canela’s mother.
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The cast was predominantly Latina/o (judging from names,
phenotype, and Spanish fluency—although none of these permits me to positively identify the
actors as Latina/o), and thus reflects the community-based project of the theatre space at which
the play was staged.
Gendering the Chicana Mestiza Body
Canela is a Mexicana/Chicana who, before the start of the play, has migrated from
México with her family to work as an undocumented farmworker picking grapes. In scenes I
later analyze, she has flashbacks to moments in her life when she runs from La Migra in the
always perilous borderlands. “La mojada, la mujer indocumentada,” writes Gloria Anzaldúa, “is
doubly threatened in this country. Not only does she have to contend with sexual violence, but
like all women, she is prey to a sense of physical helplessness. As a refugee, she leaves the
familiar and safe homeground to venture into unknown and possibly dangerous terrain” (34-35).
Although undocumented as a girl, Canela at some point becomes a naturalized citizen of the

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The text of the play that I quote from in this chapter is a third draft dated 4 September 2013. There are
some minor differences between the play that I saw staged on June 29
th
and the third draft of the play from which I
will be citing.
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In note 51 of “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” Bertolt Brecht writes: “To alienate an individual in this
way, as being ‘this particular individual’ and ‘this particular individual at this particular moment’, is only possible if
there are no illusions that the player is identical with the character and the performance with the actual event” (195).
Hungry Woman disallows the illusion of the actors being identical with the characters by featuring twelve actors
playing thirty-one different roles. The only two actors who played one role were Rachel González, who played
Canela and was onstage at all times, and Linda López, who played Canela’s mother. Such casting allowed the
audience to cement their identification with Canela and experience her alienation from family in Boyle Heights and
friends and strangers in Paris. The audience was able to bond with Canela as it could with none of the other thirty
characters or eleven actors playing them.
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United States, and at the start of the play she is a first-generation Mexican American woman
employed as a journalist. The decolonial triangulation of the play depends on Canela’s subject
position as a Mexicana who becomes Chicana through a politicization that occurs by means of
migration, latitudinal and transatlantic travel, and naturalized citizenship. The gendering of the
protagonist as Mexicana and Chicana significantly inflects this decolonial triangulation by
laying bare the constraints imposed on a female subject who crosses borders and oceans and
dramatizing how a woman may embody feminist rage as a response to such constraints.
Josefina López opens up Hungry Woman by acknowledging the domestic space that is
normatively allotted to women in Mexican culture and then racializing Canela as a mestiza with
a traditionally domestic Mexican mother. Canela speaks to the audience, saying, “Call me
Canela. That’s Spanish for Cinnamon, but don’t call me Cinnamon; that’s a stripper’s name.
[…] My mother named me Canela because she loved to make buñuelos and add lots of sugar
and cinnamon to them. […] So by adding cinnamon to a buñuelo she would make it even
browner. With my name she spiced it up and made me brown” (1-2). Identifying as “brown,” a
racial marker of her mestiza identity, Canela’s monologue calls for a “brown” actress to play the
part, and in keeping with this demand, Rachel González embodied a mestiza phenotype and
fulfilled the role. Some performance studies scholars argue that Chicana theatre, especially that
of Josefina López, is an inherently mixed-race or mestiza project and aesthetic.
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In Latina
Performance: Traversing the Stage, Alicia Arrizón maintains that the “contradictions embedded
in colonialism shape the creative contributions of Latina artists, writers, and performers. Their

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My decision to call Josefina López’s theatre “Chicana” is informed by the work of Argentine feminist
philosopher María Lugones, who writes in “Purity, Impurity, and Separation”: “Chicano is the name for the curdled
or mestizo person. I will name the dual personality Mexican/American, with no hyphen in the name, to signify that
if the split were successful, there would be no possibility of dwelling or living on the hyphen” (134). At times I will
refer to Canela Guerrero as a Mexican/American to demonstrate that she is both a Mexicana and a naturalized US
citizen from México. Most often, however, I will refer to her as Chicana.
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work is now and always has been the result of a theatrical mestizaje which represents the
ongoing conflict inherent in the merger of two worlds: Europe and America” (1). Hungry
Woman moves the audience beyond the Europe/America or Spanish/Indigenous divide to
triangulate México, the US, and France. The play as an object of Chicana theatre is a mestiza
project in which Canela bears out the liminality and slippages of a mixed-race identity.
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“In a
performance of intercultural mediation in which the utterance is split between two or more
cultures,” Arrizón adds, “the subject is inevitably divided between at least two or more cultures,
the subject is inevitably divided between at least two worlds and two languages” (xxii). This
subject, the Chicana, who is “[c]aught between the First and Third Worlds” (Arrizón xxii), is
represented on the US stage by a mestiza body.
In dominant US theatre, which normatively depicts white characters for a white middle-
class audience, the mestiza body is usually not represented on the stage and must find its place in
Chicana and Latina theatre.
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Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach position
the mestiza body as a definitive marker of identity in the face of marginalization by the dominant
aesthetic and political practices of US theatre: “Far more personal is the use of the body itself as
the marker and, hence, the prop, a utilization that occurs at the moment when our horizon of

95
What I call a mixed-race or mestiza theatre is similar to what Elizabeth C. Ramírez, drawing from
Richard Schechner, refers to as “intercultural” theatre. She writes that Chicana theatre “falls more along the lines of
the ‘intercultural’ view of performance that Richard Schechner offers as an ideal term; namely, the confrontation
and ruptures between cultures and difference, at the marginality institutionalized in geopolitical terms by the border
between the sovereign states of México and the United States” (104). Josefina López takes intercultural theatre one
step further by placing the Chicana in the cosmopolitan European capital of Paris during a time when French
colonialism became more apparent to those living in the US because of the Paris riots of 2005.
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Josefina López’s biggest success and most famous and popular play, Real Women Have Curves, centers
on five Mexican/American women, four of whom are considered “overweight” and one who is considered extremely
thin and unhealthy. No other play has done so much to (re)present the mestiza body in a way that forces the
audience to see its dual marginalization and regulation by US racial codes and immigration laws. Ana, the only
character who speaks directly to the audience (as Canela does in Hungry Woman), has “feminist ideas” that “she
clearly believes strongly in, but these ideas seem alien, and alienating, to the other women” (Launius 21). The
feminist mestiza, then, can be said to espouse ideas that are considered “alien” or foreign to her Mexican/American
community and family, as Gloria Anzaldúa points out in Borderlands/La Frontera. This is also the case, as will be
seen, for Canela in Hungry Woman.
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expectations is confirmed by what we visually see, and usually a racialized and ethnic body is
the only determinant for a Latina/o identity” (35). They argue, moreover, that “[u]ndisputably,
in these representations, the mestiza/o becomes the racialized ethnic body par excellence and is
now enlisted utopically to represent all Latinas/os” (35). While I recognize that the mestiza/o
body is “enlisted utopically” to represent all Latina/o subjects, with a noticeable absence of
black, indigenous, and Asian Latina/os, I believe that it is still necessary to foreground mestiza/o
bodies in Chicana/o theatre if only because mainstream US theatre still has not caught up with
the practices of ethnic theatre and community-based theatre and renders mestiza/o bodies
invisible on the stage in most mainstream commercial plays. Canela’s mestizaje is not only
registered by her “brown” body and Spanish first and last name, but also by her double who
shadows her throughout the play, La Calaca Flaca.
La Calaca Flaca as Mestiza Decolonial Icon
If there is one figure from Hungry Woman that most represents a mestiza decolonial
aesthetic, it is the figure of La Calaca Flaca, the personified figure of death in Mexican culture
and tradition, who pursues and tempts Canela throughout the play as she is troubled more and
more by her sense of despair. La Calaca Flaca belongs to that part of Mexican culture that is
most resistant and less susceptible to the Hispanicization of México by Hispanophile Mexican
elites like José Vasconcelos.
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I read La Calaca Flaca as belonging to a México that is mestizo in
the sense that the indigenous is not fully eradicated by the Spanish colonial order in favor of a
Europeanization that would make the Mexican population more easily assimilable into the global

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In her critique of Borderlands/La Frontera, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández charges Anzaldúa with
“reappropriat[ing] (misread[ing]?) Vasconcelos’s la raza cósmica from the 1920s” by “theoriz[ing] a Chicana/o
ideological claim to self-determination, dignity, and civil rights through mestizaje instead of reading Vasconcelos
for the eugenicist that he was” (19). Although I have extended critical generosity to Anzaldúa elsewhere, I
recognize that her highly idiosyncratic reading of Vasconcelos misses or ignores his attempted and forced
Hispanicization of Mexican indigenous and black peoples.
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capitalist order. A serious engagement with her in performance as a decolonial gesture that
attempts to reckon with México’s indigenous past, present, and future—as well as the border and
drug wars whose death toll increases every year and renders those living in the borderlands in a
state of social death—is in order here.
La Calaca Flaca is a figure who makes her appearance on stage whenever Canela begins
to feel overwhelmed or crushed by the political order in the US (recall that George W. Bush was
just reelected before her flight to Paris) or France, or by her dissatisfaction as a Chicana who
feels pressure to marry a man her family believes can care for her. López describes La Calaca
Flaca in the first scene of Hungry Woman:
Spotlight on up stage right, on an elevated balcony, to reveal LA CALACA FLACA, a
POSADA inspired woman in an exotic dress representing death. (She will be present
throughout the play – constantly around CANELA as if watching her and guarding her.)
LA CALACA FLACA reaches out to CANELA with her arm. They look at each other to
acknowledge each other for a few seconds. (1)
La Calaca Flaca is a Mexican mestiza decolonial icon because López explicitly draws the
connection between her character and the work of Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada, who is
famous for his calaveras (artistic depictions of human skulls) and his political critique of the
Mexican elite during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. La Calaca Flaca’s “exotic dress” firmly
places her in an aesthetics of death described by Achille Mbembe in “Necropolitics”: “Death is
therefore the very principle of excess—an anti-economy. Hence the metaphor of luxury and of
the luxurious character of death” (15, italics in original). According to Mbembe, “To live under
late modern occupation is to experience a permanent condition of ‘being in pain,’” (39), and as a
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Chicana living in Boyle Heights, Canela is a woman living under “late modern occupation”; her
palpable pain is registered through her relationship to La Calaca Flaca.
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As Canela is haunted by La Calaca Flaca throughout the play, the audience becomes
spectators to death’s hold over a woman whose mounting despair, alienation, and ambivalence
nearly overwhelm her instincts for survival. Several times when La Calaca Flaca appeared on
stage, a chilling and haunting music with a death rattle played for the audience, further linking
her figure to the sonic quality of death. La Calaca Flaca tempted Canela with her death grapes,
painted white like her face, which was made out in the traditional manner of a white skull that is
a popular adornment painted on the face during el Día de los Muertos. Canela’s temptress and
seductress, La Calaca Flaca’s eroticization is highlighted by the diaphanous black clothing
revealing her body. Mary Mendoza, the actress who played La Calaca Flaca, visibly contrasted
her body with that of Rachel González, who represents a woman carrying more weight on her
and whose Mexican family has a history of diabetes. Mendoza was thin and accentuated her
sensual and even sexual embodiment of death through her gestures on stage, often reaching out
with tender caresses to sensually touch Canela, signifying her erotic relationship as Canela’s
temptress.
The doubling of Canela and La Calaca Flaca sexualizes and eroticizes both women in
different ways. This doubling effect is similar to that achieved by Luis Valdez in Zoot Suit, who
uses El Pachuco to follow, comment on, and mediate in the affairs of Henry Reyna, the zoot
suiter who is unfairly charged with murder in the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial in 1942 and

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Chicano historian Rodolfo Acuña posited the argument that Chicanos in the Southwest are a colonized
group within the nation in Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle toward Liberation, first published in 1972.
Emma Pérez acknowledges that “Chicano historians debated coloniality in the Southwest after 1848, many agreed,
and many found discrepancies with the internal colonial model. Regardless of the debates, however, the idea of an
America ‘occupied’ made a lasting imprint in the formation of Chicano history by naming a new discursive field”
(18).
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sentenced to life imprisonment in San Quentin Prison. Whereas in Luis Valdez’s iconic Chicano
play both El Pachuco and Henry Reyna don the famous zoot suit of the play’s title, in Hungry
Woman Canela is “curvaceous [and] tanned just like cinnamon” while La Calaca Flaca is made
out like the skeletal figure of death designed by Posada and represented all throughout México
and Mexican America (1). Canela’s “curvaceous” brown body promises plenitude, both because
she has ample curves and her name means “cinnamon,” which is used as a spice in the culinary
arts. She becomes an object of erotic desire not only for the men in the play (including
Armando, her fiancé, and Henry, the French translator from Great Britain with whom Canela has
a fleeting sexual relationship while in Paris), but also for her double, who tempts Canela to eat
white death grapes and join her in death as her lover.
This gesture that La Calaca Flaca offers Canela is a decolonial gesture. “If we
understand ‘gesture’ as a ‘a [sic] movement of the body or limbs that expresses or emphasizes an
idea, sentiment, or attitude,’ we narrow down the meaning of ‘decolonial gesture,’” Walter D.
Mignolo writes in “Looking for the Meaning of ‘Decolonial Gesture,’”: “it is a body movement
which carries a decolonial sentiment or/and a decolonial intention; a movement that points
toward something in relation to something already constituted that the addressed of the gesture or
whomever sees the gesture, recognizes in relation to the ‘colonial gesture.’” The recognized
relation to the “colonial gesture” is apparent in La Calaca Flaca’s mestizaje, in her origin as a
figure that unites pre-Cortesian and revolutionary Mexican symbolism and imagery. The
“decolonial gesture” exists in Canela’s refusal to eat La Calaca Flaca’s death grapes, her
resistance to the necropower of both the US-Mexico borderlands and French colonialism.
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As a

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Achille Mbembe argues that necropower characterizes the military state in the US-Mexico borderlands,
where “[d]aily life is militarized. Freedom is given to local military commanders to use their discretion as to when
and whom to shoot. Movement between the territorial cells requires formal permits. Local civil institutions are
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mestiza decolonial icon, La Calaca Flaca bears similarities to the fastest-growing religious icon
in México and Mexican America, la Santa Muerte.
A folk saint whose cult is banned by the Roman Catholic Church and condemned by the
Mexican nation-state, Santa Muerte is an object of devotion for millions of Mexicans (and many
Central Americans) living on both sides of the border.
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She is unique among saints, according
to R. Andrew Chesnut, because “for most devotees she is the personification of death itself and
not of a deceased human being” (6), and it “is obvious that the hollow stare of the skeleton saint
is the gaze of death” (7). Although Canela’s cousin, Luna, is dead at the start of the play, and the
first scene is set at Luna’s funeral, where Canela becomes involved in a melodramatic argument
with her chismosa (gossipy) aunts and cousins, La Calaca Flaca figures death and not the ghost
of Luna, who makes a brief appearance at the very end of Act One. My reading of La Calaca
Flaca as a mestiza decolonial icon is in keeping with the belief that Santa Muerte owes her
origins to the pre-Cortesian indigenous nations living in México. Chesnut asks, “Is the Pretty
Girl a mestiza (of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry), as some devotees claim, or is she
essentially Aztec, as many others assert?” (20-21).
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Other scholars of Latin American religion,
like Pamela Bastante and Brenton Dickieson, argue that Santa Muerte “possesses a degree of

systematically destroyed. The besieged population is deprived of their means of income. Invisible killing is added
to outright executions” (30).
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Los Angeles is particularly fecund territory for the cult of Santa Muerte. R. Andrew Chesnut calls Los
Angeles “[h]ome to the largest Mexican immigrant population in the country” and “the American Mecca of the cult
of the skeleton saint” (10). I point this out to draw attention to the folk religious and folk iconographic importance
of Los Angeles to the Chicana feminist imaginary, particularly to that of a playwright like Josefina López, whose
adopted home after immigrating from México is Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles.
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Among the theories of origin Andrew Chesnut includes in his book on Santa Muerte is one that
maintains that she “originated as Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec goddess of death who along with her husband
Mictlantecuhtli ruled over the underworld, Mictlan. Like the Bony Lady, the deathly couple was typically
represented as skeletons or human bodies with skulls for heads” (28). Chesnut also adds that “one of the most
prominent cult leaders in Morelia agreed that the White Girl is of indigenous heritage but claimed she was
Purépecha, the major indigenous group in the state of Michoacán who were never conquered by the neighboring
Aztecs” (28). Yet another theory is that Spanish clergy influenced the indigenous groups of México when using the
figure of La Parca (the female counterpart to the Grim Reaper) in didactic religious rituals (30-31).

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adaptability; in other words, she possesses a hybrid identity, much like most Mexicans who are
from both European and indigenous descent” (437). If Santa Muerte is an adaptable and hybrid
figure, then La Calaca Flaca also “possesses a degree of adaptability” and a “hybrid identity” in
her dual function as Canela’s temptress and her guardian.
Canela’s relationship with La Calaca Flaca is marked by a profound ambivalence: on one
hand, La Calaca Flaca comforts Canela when she feels racial, gendered, and/or political despair;
on the other hand, she tempts her to join Luna in death by committing suicide. Her dual function
becomes clear when Canela describes the time she was picking grapes with her Mexican family
and had to run from La Migra (INS). Canela “accidently buries the knife in her hand” and
begins to bleed (27); however, there is no time for her to tend to her wound as the family must
hide in a “run-down shack” (27), where Canela feels the hunger that has plagued her throughout
her life. She says, “After an hour of waiting in silence I got hungry and took my bunch of
grapes, soiled by my blood and tears, and I ate one grape seasoned with the salt of my tears and
blood and it was delicious” (27). Such an act symbolizes Canela’s pain generated by racism,
xenophobia, and misogyny being turned inward and internalized, becoming the hunger that
drives her to eat and sometimes drink without sating her appetite. Canela says after narrating her
memory of running from La Migra, “I wanted someone to hold me …”; and La Calaca Flaca
says to her, “I will hold you … I’ll take care of you. You don’t gain weight ever and the pain is
gone forever … Come with me …” (28). At this point in the production La Calaca Flaca offered
Canela the white death grapes, which Canela rejected, thereby constituting a decolonial gesture
of refusal.
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La Calaca Flaca becomes an epistemological sign of the intimate knowledge with death
that those who reside in the US-Mexico borderlands possess.
102
Although La Calaca Flaca is a
temptress who tries unsuccessfully to induce Canela to join her in death, she is also a more
playful figure whose eroticization suggests that she guards and protects Canela just as much as
she tempts her to suicide. Shortly after beckoning Canela to join her after Canela narrates her
memory of eating the grapes seasoned with her own blood, there is a quick transition to another
scene in which Canela and La Calaca Flaca wake up next to each other in bed in Paris. La
Calaca Flaca tries to persuade Canela to stay in bed with her, almost as though she were her
lover loath to have Canela leave their space of intimacy, but Canela insists on getting up.
CANELA: If I don’t get out of bed you won’t go away.
LA CALACA FLACA: But I can also be a source of inspiration.
CANELA: Oh, really?
LA CALACA FLACA: Why do you think Frida Kahlo painted so well? Because I was
always around. (29)
If La Calaca Flaca is a Mexican mestiza figure of death, then she is no less a “source of
inspiration” for Mexicana/Chicana artists and writers like Frida Kahlo and Canela Guerrero, who
is a journalist dedicated to writing politically engaged anti-xenophobic journalism. Bastante and
Dickieson rightfully claim that the “fluidity and diversity of names and designations
demonstrates both ambivalence and ambiguity in Santa Muerte’s identity. She is light and
darkness, power and weakness, majesty and humility” (437-38). One could say that there is an

102
As a Mexican/American epistemological sign, she is not to be dismissed, for, as Anibal Quijano argues,
“it would be almost ridiculous at these levels of historical research to attribute to non-European cultures a mythic-
magical mentality, for example, as a defining trait in opposition to rationality and science as characteristics in
Europe” (543). La Calaca Flaca is not so much a figure of a “mythic-magical mentality” as she is an embodiment of
the very palpable necropolitical order of the US-Mexico borderlands, which dictates and justifies the death of all
brown bodies rendered dispensable and disposable by the state.
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ambivalence and ambiguity in La Calaca Flaca’s characterization in Hungry Woman: She is
temptress and guardian, seductress and protector, and death personified and feminist source of
inspiration.
Perhaps more so than la Santa Muerte, who for so many Mexicans, Chicanxs, and Central
Americans symbolizes the necropolitics of the borderlands, La Calaca Flaca is indebted to one of
three major Chicana feminist cultural icons of resistance, la Llorona. Although not originally a
figure of resistance, Chicana feminists like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga reclaimed la
Llorona as a cultural symbol who bears the betrayals of the Mexican masculinist culture,
particularly those of misogyny and homophobia. Canela is avowedly heterosexual, but she
certainly has borne the brunt of misogyny in her traditional Mexican family, and La Calaca Flaca
as la Llorona embodies the self-treachery to which Mexicanas/Chicanas often succumb as the
objects of machismo and masculinist abuse. Anzaldúa reminds us that “[l]a gente Chicana tiene
tres madres. All three are mediators: Guadalupe, the virgin mother who has not abandoned us,
la Chingada (Malinche), the raped mother whom we have abandoned, and la Llorona, the
mother who seeks her lost children and is a combination of the other two” (52). If La Calaca
Flaca is a descendant of la Llorona (and la Malinche, the Indigenous woman accused of selling
her people out to Hernán Cortés), then she is an ambiguous mestiza icon who makes visible
Canela’s own ambivalence accentuated by her Mexicana/Chicana feminism. As the imbrication
of la Santa Muerte, la Llorona, and la Malinche, La Calaca Flaca is the protective shadow on
which Canela projects her ambivalence toward her own Mexican family and culture and that
which she also feels toward French culture and the cosmopolitan space of Paris.

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Staging Mestiza Ambivalence
At the start of the play, Canela calls off her wedding to her fiancé, a doctor, and then
decides to use the tickets for their honeymoon to go to Paris in January 2005. The romance of
Paris is an undeniable element of not only Canela’s imagination, but also in the larger world of
the play, which is principally filtered through Canela’s memory because she speaks to the
audience in extended soliloquys while narrating her experiences. From the moment Canela finds
herself in Paris, we get a vision of the City of Light that both is and is not US-centric, both is and
is not romantic. Paris in the play is the hub of cosmopolitanism that a US audience might
recognize, but it quickly turns into a world of disorder and chaos for not only Canela but those
she encounters there who eke out their existence in the margins of an imperialist Western nation-
state. The erasure of Europe’s Others in the play transforms Canela’s formerly romanticized
vision of Paris. By situating the play in Paris with this particular cast of characters, López enacts
a critique of Eurocentrism by exposing France’s racism and xenophobia and linking its anti-
immigrant policies to those of the US, a political and aesthetic move only made permissible by
Canela’s subject position as a naturalized citizen in her adopted community of Boyle Heights.
Canela’s alienation in Boyle Heights and Paris is engendered by a series of encounters
with Mexicanas/Chicanas, Europeans, and people of color that leave her with a feeling of
ambivalence about the dramatized event. With her own family and friends, it is Canela’s
feminism that heightens this feeling of ambivalence by marking her desires, erotic and otherwise,
as deviant from those of the traditional Mexican family. Her outsider status in the Guerrero
family only becomes more apparent to Canela once she is in Paris alone, where the racist,
xenophobic, and imperialist regime exacerbates her despair and rage and enables her transition
into a more self-aware and self-caring Chicana feminist once she returns home to Boyle Heights.
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During a flashback to eighteen years earlier, when she was twelve years old, Canela remembers a
time that she and her mother were cooking the kitchen, and she laments that her mother never
cooked for her.
CANELA: Why does it still hurt that my mother never cooked for me? Why does my
mother’s kitchen always remind me of hunger? I was hungry for her love and affection
and encouragement. I was hungry for a life not promised to me the second I was
sentenced a girl. I was hungry for an adventure forbidden to me as a Mexican woman. I
was hungry for a world where women like me could be seen as creators and not just
pieces of meat. (24)
Canela’s “hunger” here is an affect that registers her profound ambivalence toward her Mexican
family and culture. While she recognizes that her immigrant family, following Mexican
tradition, withholds from her “love and affection and encouragement,” a certain kind of “life not
promised” to her, and any kind of “adventure,” she nevertheless hungers for “a world” where she
can have all these things and yet maintain ties to her Mexican family and culture.
Although neither Canela as a character nor Hungry Woman as a dramatic text or
theatrical production is queer, I want to suggest that her “hunger” for “a world where women like
me could be seen as creators and not just pieces of meat” is an affect close to the affect of hope
that José Esteban Muñoz theorizes in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
Muñoz describes “indeterminacy” in German philosopher Ernst Bloch as “speak[ing] to a critical
process that is attuned to what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes as potentiality.
Hope along with its other, fear, are affective structures that can be described as anticipatory” (3).
Canela’s hunger is anticipatory—and hopeful—in its demand that the world for which she
hungers exist for her and other women like her. Invoking the anticipatory here also functions to
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conjure futurity, a futurity that Muñoz offers to “combat the force of political pessimism” that
dominates the mood of the moment (4).
103
In Cruising Utopia, “hope as a critical methodology
can be best described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision” (4). The “backward
glance” of Hungry Woman is the “Posada-inspired woman” and mestiza decolonial icon La
Calaca Flaca, who synthesizes México’s pre-Cortesian past and revolutionary period, while the
“future vision” that is enacted is the immigrant rights march that Canela attends with her mother
at the play’s conclusion (which I will discuss later). Though orientated toward the affect of
hope, the affect of hunger embodied by Canela onstage is calculated to give the audience some
sense of the alienation a strong-willed, educated, feminist Mexicana/Chicana journalist desiring
autonomy feels in a conservative and traditional Mexican immigrant family.
104

The Mexican/Chicano or Latino family is a privileged site of ethnic and psychic
formation in US Latina/o theatre, and it is a recurring motif in plays by and about Chicana/os and
Latina/os. Much of Canela’s ambivalence is already developed before she leaves for Paris, in
part because she must confront her Mexican family’s attempt to regulate and police her
relationship with her ex-fiancé. David Román writes that the “family serves as a representational
shorthand for tradition, spirituality, and communal solidarity. It also, as a result, discourages any
form of individualism” (118). Hungry Woman starts in medias res with a flashback to Luna’s
funeral, where Canela has already reached the realization that her family discourages her

103
Muñoz’s words, written for the introduction to Cruising Utopia, were published in 2009, during the
Left’s political despair after eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, which in part produces Canela’s feelings
of despair. However, Muñoz’s call for hope as “both a critical affect and a methodology” seems even more salient
now as we face Donald Trump’s presidency for the next four years (4).
104
Although not entirely useful because of its focus on European absurdist theatre and French avant-gardist
novels, Alys Moody’s work on what she terms Samuel Beckett’s “‘aesthetics of hunger’—an aesthetics that takes its
structure from hunger” (55), is interesting to consider here. Moody writes that Beckett’s “aesthetics of hunger”
“provides both a corrective to a conceptualisation of aesthetics that has for centuries been founded on a metaphor of
taste, and a new aesthetic mode founded on a schema of experiential starvation” (57). Canela’s hunger in the above
cited passage can be said to be founded on a “schema of experiential starvation,” since Canela hungers for more than
just food, and, indeed, her deepest and most unsatisfied hunger is a desire for a greater scope of experience that is
normatively denied Mexicanas/Chicanas.
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individualism. Canela’s mother says to her at Luna’s funeral: “I heard that you broke off your
engagement with Armando. What’s really going on? Your sister told me she thinks you’re
depressed. I think you should get on medication. You are not thinking straight. He’s a doctor
and he loves you! Do you know how hard it is to get a good man in Los Angeles? Es una
locura! (It’s madness)” (3). López deploys the trope of the overbearing Mexican mother who
involves herself in the affairs of her children in order to provide a backdrop for Canela’s
alienation and the ambivalence she feels toward her family and traditional Mexican culture.
Writing again about the preponderance of the Latino family in Latino-identified theatre, David
Román argues that the “family remains so deep rooted in the Latino psyche that its force cannot
be constrained, regardless of one’s own position within it” (118). The influence of the family is
borne out “[l]ike any other ideological framework,” and “the preservation of the family as a
system of normativity is ensured by its continued reinscription” (118). The Latino family is
reinscribed precisely at those moments when it is needed for survival.
The challenge Canela faces in Paris to acquire a carte de séjour that allows her to stay for
an extended period echoes Canela and her Mexican family’s struggle to work and live in the US
as undocumented farmworkers. I return now to one of the many flashback sequences in the play,
when Canela reenacts a memory from her time as a young girl working the fields with her
undocumented family. These are salient moments in the play because they are the only times the
audience sees Canela playing herself as a child, and it is the most poignant embodied
performance of being haunted by the very palpable danger of living in a nation-state that finds
the undocumented to be expendable (here I think of Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life” and the homo
sacer, although I do not want to overstate the connection). On the stage the audience saw
Canela, her mother, her father, her brother, and her younger and older sisters on their knees
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picking fruit quickly with their hands—a gesture and the speed of which is indicative of the
capitalist impulse to demand faster production—when one of the male farmworkers starts
yelling, “¡La Migra!” (27). At that, the family tried to force their picked fruit into their gunny
sacks and run and hide behind a raked white platform with as much celerity as they could
manage. Though in many scenes the Guerrero family appears to be dysfunctional, it is difficult
to dismiss it or write it off completely because of its necessity in the ethnic and psychic
formation of the children, as well as its source of continued support, however constraining that
support may be.
Canela’s need to narrate such flashbacks, however traumatic, to the audience reveals that
she is a “psychoanalytic subject in language,” as Antonio Viego reads the Chicana subjects in
Emma Pérez’s The Decolonial Imaginary. Viego argues that for Pérez the “Chicano subject’s
freedom and liberation is secured through the ethical psychoanalytic insistence that the Chicano
subject in language is incalculable, indeterminate, and can therefore never, as a rule, be fully
transcribed in historicist analyses” (166).
105
I therefore argue that Canela’s mestiza ambivalence
toward her Mexican family and culture as well as that which she feels toward Paris and French
culture are, in addition to being produced by her social conditions, psycholinguistically generated
in the world of Hungry Woman. A journalist by profession like Canela, who says, “I’ve always
said if I couldn’t write anymore, I wouldn’t want to live” (12), has an identity both historically
and linguistically conditioned by forces that threaten her ego’s stability, and we would be remiss
to ignore the psycholinguistic conditions of her subject formation solely in favor of the historical

105
The “psychoanalytic subject in language” for whom Emma Pérez opens up “interpretive space” is more
properly labeled Chicana rather than Chicano, since The Decolonial Imaginary examines Mexicanas and Chicanas
who write themselves into a history and language that is dominated by men.
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ones.
106
As this is a play, and Canela breaks the fourth wall so regularly to narrate her feelings,
experiences, and memories to the audience, I consider the linguistic conditions that have formed
Canela’s ambivalent psyche to be just as forceful as those historical conditions that affect her as
a Mexicana/Chicana pulled between two racist and xenophobic nation-states.
In dramatic theatre the audience is witness to at least two things: 1) a body that bears the
representation of a character in the play, and 2) the language that the embodied actor speaks as
one or more characters. In her monograph on Latina theatre, Embodying Difference: Scripting
Social Images of the Latina Body in Theatre, Linda Saborío argues that it “is precisely at the
intersection of the semiotics of the body and the semantics of language where an articulation of
difference emerges in the form of ambivalence. This ambivalence is at once both a site of
alliances and a site of resistance” (xii). Once activated by the misogyny of her Mexican family
and the racism and xenophobia of France, Canela’s mestiza ambivalence first becomes a site of
alliances and later develops into a site of resistance in Paris, where she is asked to cover the 2005
riots in the banlieues of the city. Initially she responds with rage, which I argue is a decolonial
affect, but later she disavows masculinist rage and turns her attention to self-care and the care of
her Mexican/American community.

106
Furthermore, Antonio Viego claims that Emma Pérez draws on psychoanalytic theory to critique
Foucauldian historicist accounts of subjectivity that only consider “relations of power and knowledge.” He writes,
“Although her critique of traditional, increasingly moribund approaches in Chicano historiography is not a
straightforward psychoanalytic critique of historicism, it does still unambiguously betray a certain psychoanalytic
frustration and fatigue with a conceptualization of Chicano subjectivity as wholly reducible to an analysis of the
relations of power and knowledge in a particular historical formation that is, in her project’s term, determined by
coloniality” (178). According to Emma Pérez, the “decolonial imaginary” is “[e]ver-present,” and “it is that which
is between the subject and the object being reflected, splintering the object in a shattered mirror, where
kaleidoscopic identities are burst open and where the colonial self and the colonized other both become elements of
multiple, mobile categoric identities” (6-7). It is difficult, as Viego points out, not to see the influence of Lacan’s
“mirror phase” in Pérez’s description of the “decolonial imaginary.”
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Feminist Rage as a Transnational Decolonial Affect
While usually ascribed to a masculine suite of feelings, the transnational decolonial affect
of rage is stimulated by the racism and xenophobia France directs toward its Arab, North
African, and black (these are not mutually exclusive ethnic and racial categories) populations,
only some of whom are non-citizen subjects. Canela has two encounters with a young French
male citizen of Algerian descent, M.C. Momo, with whom she experiences firsthand the violent
reaction against the continuing legacy of France’s neocolonial and neo-imperialist projects that
erupted into the Paris riots of 2005. Although vowing to herself not to work in Paris while she
attempts to escape her life in the US, Canela receives a call from her editor, Gina, asking her to
write an article about the Paris riots for a US audience, whose interest, it seems, is piqued by the
disorder and chaos across the Atlantic. Canela, the kind of journalist who assumes the role of a
participant observer, takes to the streets of Paris’s banlieues and befriends M.C. Momo, who
guides her through streets as they riot together.
Hoping to find the answers to why black and Arab youth are rioting in the banlieues (the
suburbs of Paris known for their large black and Arab populations), Canela takes to the streets
and befriends two Algerian teenage boys who lead her to M. C. Momo, a “21[-year-old], good-
looking rapper wearing a hoodie” (35). Their dialogue enables an alliance—however temporary,
ephemeral, even—to be formed.
CANELA: So why are people doing this?
M. C. MOMO: I was born in France, my father was born in France, and my grandfather
was born in France, but we are not treated with the rights promised to us as French
citizens. We are treated like foreigners, raquaille, like scum. We don’t have any
opportunities and we’re constantly harassed by the police.
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CANELA: I’m Mexican-American. We are treated like the raquaille in the US.
M. C. MOMO: You are? Hmmm … The sun is setting; you want to join me?
CANELA: Yes. (35-36)
Canela’s eagerness to join in the rioting under cover of night bespeaks her desire to forge
interracial alliances in Paris, where for most of her visit she has been alone living in a small
chambre de bonne (maid’s chamber) and only seeing others during her cooking class. More than
believing that it is her job as a journalist to get at the heart of the matter, Canela goes one step
further and plans to participate in what she now considers to be a justified violent response from
Algerian and other Arab and North African youth.
Before going on to describe the rioting scene, however, I must provide a description of
the events that led to the riots in the Paris banlieues during 2005. I quote from length from
Cathy Lisa Schneider’s account because I think few people outside France know the extent and
type of death and injury received by the black and Arab boys who were pursued by French police
officers:
On October 27, 2005, outside Paris, three black and Arab teenage boys, Bouna, Zyad and
Muhittan, were chased into an electrical substation outside Paris. They had tried to avoid
an identity check point, and were pursued by officers with drawn stun guns. Cornered,
the boys scaled at an eight foot wall covered with barbed wire and cross and skull bones
warning of dangers of electricity. Once inside the boys clung to each other for 11
terrified minutes, weaving back and forth and looking for a way out. When the first boy
accidentally hit the generator, he and the second in line died instantly. The third,
Muhittan, was saved by the power surge. Severely burned, he retraced his steps, rescaled
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the wall and ran, crying hysterically, into the arms of Bouna’s unsuspecting older brother,
Siyakha. (8)
The police violence faced by black and Arab men in the banlieues of Paris is eerily similar to the
police brutality and violence faced by African Americans in the US, now and during the
twentieth century. Schneider is right to draw connections between the police brutality against
Arab, black, and North African youth in the Paris banlieues and the conditions that led to the
1965 race riots in New York (or any of the other major race riots that occurred in several urban
centers across the US in the Sixties).
107
Canela herself remembers the “glimpses of Los Angeles
in flames, smoke visible from a distance, looting, violence—the end of the world” (35), which
constitute her memories of the LA riots in 1992. As one who has lived through a riot (though it
would have been years ago when Canela was nine years old), she considers herself ready to
engage in a gesture of transnational decolonial rage.
The rioting scene is a notable one: The young Algerian M. C. Momo, played by Angel
Fajardo, and Canela were dressed in black sweatshirts and wearing black ski caps on their heads.
This is the only time in the play Canela was seen wearing this costume; the costuming was
simple and unelaborate and allowed for most of the actors to easily assume different roles and
enter and exit the stage with facility. As Canela and M. C. Momo hid behind the raked white
platforms that served as the versatile minimalist set, a recording of the sounds of a fire burning
and glass being broken could be heard by the audience. At one point, sirens started sounding,
and M. C. Momo guided Canela from one raked platform to another as they carefully weaved

107
Comparing the 1965 race riots in New York to those of Paris in 2005, Schneider writes: “Most urban
riots are provoked by police violence, particularly the killing of young minority males. Poverty, racism and
unemployment cause pain and misery. But it is the constant identity checks, the stops and frisks, the general
disrespect and brutal manner with which police address minority youth, and worst of all the utter impunity that
allows racist and sadistic officers to commit gross violations of human rights, that constantly and painfully remind
youth of their subordinate status. No factor is a more potent symbol of racial domination or instills the message of
subjugation more forcefully than police” (9).
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behind the set to avoid a confrontation with the Parisian police. In many ways, this is a
conventional way of staging a riot, but the starkness of the stage and the minimalism of the set
disallow the audience from granting its attention to anything but the two actors on the stage, the
Latina playing Canela, and the brown man playing the Algerian M. C. Momo, who, as they
together channel the rage and fear of a people displaced and dispossessed by hundreds of years
of colonization, embody the transnational decolonial affect of rage.
This rage, as a transnational decolonial affective response, is one that is gendered, but it
is gendered differently by the different bodies performing it, and the nuances of this gendering
require an understanding of both racialized masculinity and racialized femininity. Nicole M.
Guidotti-Hernández writes about a particular kind of woman-of-color rage as “an anger ascribed
to the relay of discrimination along gendered and racial lines that imparts to a person a feeling of
animosity that exceeds the parameters of normalized emotional responses to a given situation”
(69). I am considering Canela’s rage, which prompts her to partake in the violent riots with her
newfound Algerian male companion, as this kind of gendered and racial rage, an affect that
bridges the decolonial impulses of the masculinized Algerian youth and the transnational
decolonial impulse of a Mexicana/Chicana like Canela, who, in this moment, form a pair of
resistance fighters whose emotional response “exceeds the parameters of the normalized”
affective register. I again turn to Muñoz, who writes about the affect of brownness and its
relationship to excess in “Feeling Brown”: “The failure of Latino affect in relation to the
hegemonic protocols of North American affective comportment revolves around an
understanding of the Latina or Latino as affective excess” (206).
108
If the rage of these two

108
José Esteban Muñoz goes on to say that he does not want to “vie[w] racial or ethnic difference solely as
cultural,” but rather “aim to describe how race and ethnicity can be understood as ‘affective difference,’ by which I
mean the ways various historically coherent groups feel differently and navigate the material world on a different
emotional register” (207). For some ethnic and racial groups, racialized rage may be their chosen affect on their
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subjects, played by brown-bodied actors and representing what I consider in this context to be
brown-bodied characters, appears to be in any way an “affective excess,” one may argue with
Muñoz that their performance of rage is only excessive when compared to the emotionally
impoverished (and, in the world of the play, restrictive and oppressive) normative whiteness they
are challenging.
The violence of rioting is in keeping with some projects of decolonization, and since it is
with a young Algerian man Canela is rioting, it is apposite to cite Frantz Fanon, who, more than
any other writer, called for a violent and radical overturning of the racial and colonial order (in
French-occupied Algeria and elsewhere). In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes that
“[d]ecolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total
disorder” (2), thus mobilizing all the forces of a revolution to overturn the racial project of
colonization. At one point in the riot scene, Canela went so far as to throw an object through a
glass window, breaking it. The audience saw her make a gesture with her arm that signified the
act of throwing something, and then we heard the sound of glass breaking and a fire burning
more hotly and intensely. Her empathy for M. C. Momo, as well as her own rage from
experiencing the racism and xenophobia of the US compounded with her struggle to stay in Paris
when the French officials make it increasingly more difficult for her to stay there legally, drive
her to the point of destructive behavior, a kind of behavior that is so often masculinized.
Critics of Fanon point to his masculinist vision of rebellion and revolution, and it is
difficult not to see his project of decolonization as one that invites what is normatively defined as
masculine behavior. His asseveration that in “its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot
cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive

“emotional register” to help them navigate the racism and xenophobia to which they are daily subjected. Both
Canela, as a Mexicana/Chicana, and M. C. Momo, as a French citizen of Algerian descent, feel and embody brown
rage to resist their marginalization within the nation.
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confrontation between the two protagonists” is easily read as a masculinist manifesto of classic
male-to-male combat (3). To dismiss Fanon for his masculine posturing of the decolonizing act,
though, would be to miss a key opportunity for placing him in dialogue with the more radical
strains of woman of color feminism and Chicana feminism, some of which seems amenable to
the kind of disorder for which Fanon calls to establish a new and autonomous nation free from
dependence on the colonial power. It is not necessary for me to review the key feminists of color
who participated in nationalist projects in the Sixties, but here I would cite Cherríe Moraga, who,
as late as 1993, writes, “The nationalism I seek is one that decolonizes the brown and female
body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth” (150), which genders and racializes the
nationalist decolonization of Fanon into a Chicana feminist reordering of the body and the land,
both gendered female. Argentine feminist María Lugones is also helpful in considering Latina
rage, as she writes in “Hard-to-Handle Anger” that rage “is a second-level anger. It decries the
sense of the world that erases it precisely since that world of sense stands in the way of its
possibility. It recognizes this world’s walls. It pushes against them rather than making claims
within them” (111). This “sense of the world,” which seeks to silence and erase the anger
incurred from racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, must first be challenged by rage in order for
anger to be granted a fair hearing of its grievances. The violence of nationalisms in our current
late capitalist global economy is and should be roundly critiqued, but I would also offer a
generous reading of not nationalism but rather the impetus propelling the desire for these various
and at times competing nationalisms, whether they are Fanonian or Chicana feminist in nature.
Transnational Decolonial Triangulations
Hungry Woman effects a global latinidad by decentering the Américas as the privileged
site of the discourse of decoloniality and challenging the rhetoric of South-to-North im/migration
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by staging the formation of transnational feminist alliances among Latinas in Western Europe.
After Canela flies to Paris with the tickets she and her fiancé bought for their honeymoon, she
meets up with and stays with a Chicana friend, Rosemary, who tells her that she can legally only
stay for a short period in France without papers.
ROSEMARY: By the way, how long do you plan to stay? Technically you can only stay
in France for three months before you become a situacion-irregulier [sic] – sans-papiers
…
CANELA: What?
ROSEMARY: It’s a nice way of saying “wetback.” (11)
After the above dialogue, in which one Chicana deploys the term “wetback” to another Chicana
whose personal experience of im/migration allows her to anticipate the xenophobic abuse she
faces in Paris, Canela enrolls in Le Coq Rouge culinary arts school to acquire a carte de séjour
that enables her to stay in Paris for a period of one year.
After having enrolled in the cooking class and successfully acquired her carte de séjour,
Canela lives in a chambre de bonne at the top of a hotel vacated by Rosemary, who returns to the
US after her mother falls into a coma. Canela, however, is forced to use the elevators that the
hotel maids use because she is read by the hotel manager as a woman of color who is a non-
French citizen, and while waiting for the elevator to take her up to her room, she encounters
another woman who reads Canela as a Latina. The woman approaches Canela and begins to
speak to her in Spanish, and Canela, surprised to be hearing her first language in Paris, where she
has been struggling mightily with her French, answers her in Spanish. Although the actors spoke
in Spanish only briefly and then continued their conversation in English, I believe this is a
strategic move on López’s part, who chose at this moment in the play to make concessions for an
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English-speaking audience that cannot understand Spanish.
109
This Latina, named Mariana,
reveals herself to be an undocumented Colombian worker and mother who yearns for Colombia
and what she left behind but chooses to stay in Paris for her children, who she thinks will have “a
better life” in the French capital.
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What is staged for the audience is an encuentro (encounter) between two Latinas in Paris
speaking their mother tongue, Spanish, thereby requiring a discussion of translation, which is
posited in a feminist context by Sonia E. Alvarez in her introduction to the edited volume
Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas.
Describing themselves as “Translocas”—a play on translocal and loca, the Spanish word for
both “crazy” and “queer”—the collective of Latin/a Américan feminists who contributed to the
edited collection theorize their own translational activities across borders, nations, cultures,
languages, theories, and diasporas. Sonia E. Alvarez writes that “[b]ecause of our manifold
circuits, travels, and dis/mis-placements, Translocas are more than diasporic subjects; we are
necessarily translators. For starters, we have to translate ourselves across our differing locales of
attachment and commitment” (5). Canela is indeed a “Transloca” in her Mexicana/Chicana
translational practices and the locura (madness) to which they sometimes drive her as she lives
in Paris. In this encuentro with Mariana, the undocumented Colombian mother, both Latinas
find themselves justifying to each other their “different locales of attachment and commitment.”
For Mariana, her attachment is to her homeland, Colombia, but her commitment is to providing
“a better life” for her children in Paris; whereas Canela’s attachment is to her adopted

109
Hungry Woman was a truly polyglot performance, with Spanish and French spoken by some of the
actors. All of the French was translated by other characters, but the Spanish was not, in keeping with Josefina
López’s commitment to Boyle Heights and the Latinx population who resides there.
110
The text of the play that I cite from does not include the encounter or conversation with Mariana.
Josefina López removed this character from the script in her revisions dated 4 September 2013. I include this
character and scene in my analysis because they are central to my argument about transnational decolonial
triangulations in the play.
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community of Boyle Heights, but her commitment to feminist autonomy and desire for political
distance from George W. Bush’s presidency has led her away from her Mexican family in Los
Angeles to Paris.
Such an encuentro, or rather, its opposite, a desencuentro, is what Laura E. Pérez
compellingly argues that Chicanas/os (and Puerto Ricans) often experience with Latin
Americans in academic, literary, and artistic circles. She ascribes this to
those in Latin America who could pass as such and actually thought of themselves as
white, and who evidently continued to buy into a Eurocentric model of cultural progress
and experienced class or racialized privilege, [whereas] the US civil rights movements
taught us [Chicanas/os] not to be ashamed of being mestizo, that is, partly Indigenous or
African-diasporic, “mulato,” or of simple or humble social or economic origins, but
rather to be ashamed of trying to pass for “white” or non-Latino at the expense of those
who could not. (129)
It is evident throughout the play in her interactions with others and her journalistic work that
Canela is a politicized self-identified Chicana who celebrates her mestizaje and her “humble”
class origins. She is neither able nor desires to pass for white in Paris, where the manager of the
hotel she stays at compels her to use the elevator for the maids, and where another Latina easily
identifies her as a fellow Spanish speaker. In this moment of transnational Latina solidarity, we
witness a first-generation and formerly undocumented Mexican American woman make a brief
yet profound contact with an undocumented Colombian immigrant mother in one of the
transnational hubs of Western Europe, indicating that latinidad is not a failed model of racial
identification and solidarity, but only fails in the hands of Eurocentric and white-identified
heteronormative male Latin American intellectuals, whose longing for intellectual and artistic
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recognition from Europe comes at the expense of the poor, the indigenous, and the black in their
nations and the US.
In Hungry Woman Latinas forge alliances in Western Europe, demonstrating that
transatlantic movement is a circuit worthy of inquiry for scholars interested in tracing global
latinidad across geopolitical borders and nations, and theatre is a privileged art form that
dramatizes these encuentros and connections for an audience of both Latina/os and non-
Latina/os. If, as I have been arguing, Mexicana/Chicana theatre crafts a mestiza aesthetic that
plays on the hybridity of mestizaje and turns it into a performance and performative identity,
then theatre stages the ambivalent structures of transnational latinidad. Writing specifically
about the differences between mainstream theatre (Broadway) and regional theatre, Alberto
Sandoval-Sánchez argues in José, Can You See?: Latinos on and off Broadway that “in dominant
theater, Latinos/as lack agency and therefore subjectivity, [whereas] US Latino theater
enunciates a politics of representation, identity, and ethnicity where subjectivities in process are
hybrid, plural, porous, contradictory, bicultural, and bilingual” (10). I want to emphasize the
“contradictory” subjectivities “in process” here, which engender such ambivalent mestiza
psyches like that of Canela, who crosses the Atlantic to escape the powerful influence of her
Mexican family, her Mexican American fiancé, and the political repression of George W. Bush’s
presidency only to find other Latinas like herself and young Algerians and other Arabs and North
Africans who experience the racist and xenophobic policies of the neo-imperialist French nation-
state.
Finally, Canela returns to the US after graduating from her cooking class and earning a
diploma from Le Coq Rouge, and it is largely her personal experiences in France that empower
her to reject her fiancé’s second marriage proposal, embrace being a single thirty-year-old
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Chicana, and come to terms with her overbearing mother. Her time in France makes Canela
realize that her adopted community of Boyle Heights is her true home, and the US needs a
politicized Chicana like her to challenge its anti-immigrant policies. It seems that the Guerrero
family has a newfound respect for Canela after she cooks them a flawless and sophisticated meal
(something she has never been able to do before) for her thirtieth birthday, and even Canela’s
mother learns to accept her headstrong daughter as the woman that she herself could never be.
At Canela’s birthday dinner her mother suffers a diabetic shock and loses her sight, which results
in a greater bond cementing Canela and her mother. The final scene of the play is set at an
immigrants’ rights march in downtown Los Angeles, where Canela takes her blind mother in a
wheelchair, thereby achieving a politicization of the Mexican family. Canela’s mother asks,
“Where are we?” and Canela responds, “We are among friends” (70-71). After hearing the
marchers, Canela’s mother asks another question of her daughter, saying, “Why are people
shouting, ‘Today we march, tomorrow we vote?’” and Canela answers, “Because we’ve had
enough” (71). Though not an anticolonial revolt of a Fanonian nature, Canela’s participation in
an immigrants’ rights march is no less a political response and a method of combating the
(neo)colonial order of the US.
111
As Jacqueline M. Martinez reminds us, “There are, in short,
many ways to struggle successfully against oppression. To fail to recognize that fact is to in
some measure perpetuate oppression” (95). I suggest that Canela’s full politicization at the end
of the play can only occur after her participation in the Paris riots of 2005; in this way, Hungry

111
Fanon claims that to “blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the
grasp and imagination of every colonized subject. […] To destroy the colonial world means nothing less than
demolishing the colonist’s sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory” (6). Such a
violent overturning of the colonial order makes sense in the context of the Algerian War of Independence, but it
translates less well to a neocolonial order like the US in which the state has a military and police force that can
easily crush such opposition. A public demonstration like an immigrants’ rights march achieves visibility of an
oppositional stance and awareness of human rights violations without resorting to the kind of violence for which
Fanon calls.
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Woman stages a transnational decolonial triangulation between Latin America, the US, and
France.
Chicano theatre and performance scholar Jorge Huerta writes, “Unlike all of the other
Latina/o immigrants living in the United States, the Chicana/os have no desire to ‘go home’
because the United States is home. But their plays tell us that they do not want to forget Mexico,
her colors, her joy, her pain and her history” (183-84). Although Canela, like Josefina López,
became a Chicana after living in the United States as an undocumented immigrant from México
and acquiring citizenship as an adult, she expresses no desire to return to México, for it is no
longer her home. Canela’s home is her adopted community of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, and
she realizes a newfound appreciation for it only after spending several months as a noncitizen in
the cosmopolitan world of Paris. Having lived in three nations and twice crossed the Atlantic
Ocean, Canela achieves a sense of belonging in a politicized Latinx community where she can
live with a measure of Chicana feminist autonomy.
Community-Based Theatre in Aztlán
Canela’s newfound commitment to her Latinx community in Boyle Heights echoes
Josefina López’s own devotion to Boyle Heights, which is demonstrated through her
community-based theatre CASA 0101. An alternative to commercial theatre and the large non-
profit theatres that dominate cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago
are community-based theatres like CASA 0101, which was founded in 2000 by Josefina López,
who now serves as its artistic director. For its first eleven years, the theatre operated out of a
converted bridal shop on East 1
st
St., until it moved one block away in 2011 to its current
location. A ninety-nine seat theatre with an art gallery in its vestibule, CASA 0101 now provides
the neighborhood of Boyle Heights a space for theatre, film, art, and education. True to its
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intention to keep theatre affordable for Boyle Heights residents, tickets for shows are $15 for
residents of Boyle Heights and $19.99 for general admission. Josefina López has written about
her founding of CASA 0101 and said that she funded much of the theatre herself, but its
continued success is also attributable to support from local foundations, endowments, and
individual donors.
112
CASA 0101 is a vital community-based theatre for a neighborhood that has
historically been home to various immigrant communities in the twentieth century.
Boyle Heights is itself a significant site for transnational circuits of global migration, and
it seems fitting and proper that a play set in Boyle Heights and Paris during the reelection of
George W. Bush in 2004 and the riots in Paris’s banlieues in 2005 should be staged in a
neighborhood that has been an immigrant community for several decades. George J. Sánchez
reminds us that “[b]y 1940, the Jewish population of Boyle Heights totaled about 35,000, the
Mexican population about 15,000, and the Japanese population approximately 5,000, with
smaller numbers of Italians, Armenians, African Americans, and Russian Molokans” (635).
However, the population of Boyle Heights in recent years, according to the US Census, is about
94% Latino, which shows the striking changes in demographics as the population shifted
dramatically after the second half of the twentieth century.
For much of the twentieth century and up to the present moment, Boyle Heights has been
a center where what Jodi A. Byrd calls “arrivants” reside as part of the formation of the settler
colonial state. In work that attends to the dynamics of migrant and settler interactions, Jodi Byrd
examines the “arrivants—a term [she] borrow[s] from African Caribbean poet Kamau
Brathwaite to signify those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European
and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism around the globe—[and who] have functioned

112
Most of the information in this paragraph is taken from my performance review of Hungry Woman,
which appeared in the May 2014 issue of Theatre Journal. The information is also available from the website for
the theatre: www.casa0101.org.
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within and have resisted the historical project of the colonization of the ‘New World’” (xix).
The Jews, Japanese, and Mexicans constitute these arrivants in Boyle Heights who are forced to
the US through European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism—particularly, in the
case of the Jews, displacement through war, and the Mexicans, displacement through annexation
of territory—and Canela in the play figures as an arrivant of color who becomes more fully
politicized through her time in Paris. It makes sense, then, that CASA 0101 is a Latina/o-
identified theatre that produces plays and shows by and about Latinxs, often dealing with
im/migration, under the artistic direction of Josefina López. Im/migration plays a significant role
in Hungry Woman, cementing the identification of many Latinxs in the audience, who are
themselves immigrants or descended from immigrants, with Canela and her Mexican/American
family and friends.
I must emphasize that CASA 0101 is a Chicana- and Latina-identified theatre space, for
Josefina López’s Chicana feminist politics plays a key role in determining the plays and shows
produced and staged by CASA 0101. Latina theatre scholar Linda Saborío points out that the
“space of theatre presents a complex challenge to Latinas, given that theatrical productions occur
in public spaces that historically have been designated as male property, with few exceptions.
As participants in a public space, then, Latina dramatists most often find that they must be able
to maneuver their work in traditionally male-dominated discourses that are further compounded
by dominant social codes” (xiii-xiv). Since Josefina López is the founding artistic director of
CASA 0101, and continues to be the artistic director 16 years after its opening, her challenge to
“male-dominated discourses” is made as both a Chicana feminist playwright and a Chicana who
directs her own feminist-oriented theatre space.
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It is impossible to write about Chicana performance at a community-based theatre such as
CASA 0101 without invoking feminist conceptions of Aztlán. In my first chapter I argued that
John Rechy passes for white during the apogee of Chicano nationalism and in so doing
forecloses the possibility of embodying an ethnonationalist identity that authenticates an
indigenous claim to Aztlán. Such a move is understandable given his performance as a male
hustler and gay man cruising for sex in Los Angeles during the period. Returning now to the
subject of Aztlán, it is important to remember that Chicana feminists in the 1980s and 1990s
repurposed “the homeland” in Chicana discourses to gender the land feminine and make space
for the queer—something that was forbidden during the explicitly heterosexist and homophobic
Chicano nationalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Cherríe Moraga, in The Last Generation,
acknowledges that “Chicano Nationalism […] never accepted only gay men and lesbians among
its ranks,” and she theorizes a “Chicano homeland that could embrace all its people, including its
jotería” (147). Thus Aztlán transmogrifies through Moraga’s poetic touch into “Queer Aztlán”
(147), a more inclusive movement that remains critical of nationalism’s exclusionary politics.
Before Moraga published “Queer Aztlán: the Re-formation of Chicano Tribe” in 1993,
Gloria Anzaldúa opened Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza with her essay “The
Homeland, Aztlán.” It is evident that Chicana queer feminists could not leave behind “the
homeland” and the politics of ethnonationalism as easily as Rechy could two decades before. As
a self-identified mestiza who claims indigenous ancestry, Anzaldúa can write with certainty:
“This land was Mexican once, / was Indian always / and is. / And will be again” (25). Chicana
scholars have critiqued Moraga’s and Anzaldúa’s positions as Chicana feminists invested in a
queer ethnonationalism, pointing out that there yet remains an element of appropriation in their
deployment of the indigenous. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo writes in The Revolutionary
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Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development that the “appropriation of mestizaje by
Chicana/o nationalists in their attempt to fend off discriminatory practices in the United States
borrows heavily from the colonial register of Indian subalternization under Spanish colonialism
[…]. This appropriation continues to haunt even the antinationalism of contemporary queer
Aztlán” (15). Saldaña-Portillo’s ungenerous critique of Anzaldúa was made in the early 2000s,
before Anzaldúa died at 61 from diabetes and before the writing she was working on at the time
of her illness and death came to light. In “Speaking across the Divide,” an e-mail dialogue
published in its full form in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, Anzaldúa theorizes what it means to
claim indigenous ancestry as a Chicana and how coalitions can be formed between Natives and
Chicanas. Aware of the critiques leveraged against her deployments of mestizaje (like those
made by Saldaña-Portillo), Anzaldúa writes in her e-mail dialogue, “I fault Raza for ignoring the
underlying Indian aspect of mestizo identity, for not embracing the Indian in our mestizaje in
ways that don’t misuse the appropriation of lo Indio. Many of us are aware that we can’t
continue to claim indigenous origins and ignore what’s happening to indígenas in Mexico and in
the United States” (287). I cite Gloria Anzaldúa’s revised theories about mestizaje for two
reasons: 1) to fend off ungenerous critiques that have calcified her oeuvre by only reading
Borderlands/La Frontera and treating it as a monolithic text, and 2) to put Anzaldúa’s later
writings into conversation with Josefina López’s Hungry Woman.
In Hungry Woman, Canela Guerrero realizes her privilege as a naturalized citizen of the
United States who may travel with a passport to cosmopolitan Paris. She builds alliances,
however temporary, with rioting Arab youth and undocumented Latinas in France while
demonstrating commitment to her adopted homeland, the Aztlán of Boyle Heights and greater
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Los Angeles.
113
At the play’s conclusion, when she brings her mother, now in a wheelchair due
to her diabetes (a textual move that Anzaldúa would have especially appreciated) to an
immigrants’ rights march in downtown Los Angeles, Canela continues to forge solidarity with
the undocumented and “raquaille” of the US. López writes in the directions: “The Ensemble
carries signs saying ‘America, you need us. We clean up after you and take care of your
children, and soon we’ll take care of your parents too.’ ‘We feed you, America’” (70). Drawing
from the work of Elda María Román, who examines “status panic” in Chicana/o texts, I argue
that Canela (and Josefina López) do(es) not “equate ‘being bourgeois’ with betraying working-
class politicized solidarity, and thus betraying the working-class Mexican American community,
culturally and politically” (12), unlike many Chicana/os in narratives of middle-class Mexican
Americans. Quite the contrary, after attaining middle-class stability working as a journalist for a
US newspaper, Canela continues to fight for the rights of not only Mexican/Americans, but
undocumented immigrants, for whom she feels solicitude as a formerly undocumented
immigrant herself. For this reason, we must not see upward class mobility as necessarily a form
of cultural betrayal, but rather a position engendering racial ambivalence in a mestiza subject like
Canela and one that galvanizes her into political action.
Conclusion
Josefina López’s play Hungry Woman and her theatre CASA 0101 demonstrate the
transnational potential of community-based theatre. Though the play and the production were a

113
Another Chicana feminist iteration of Aztlán (one that is heterosexual rather than queer) that Josefina
López’s project is in conversation with is Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus. Viramontes’s
protagonist, Estrella, is a teenager who comes to occupy a position of strength, resistance, and hope at the novel’s
conclusion. Estrella is described “as an angel standing on the verge of faith. Like the chiming bells of the great
cathedrals, she believed her heart powerful enough to summon home all those who strayed” (176). Those “who
strayed” are the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who pick the fruit in California’s agricultural
industry and feed the Americans who ignore their existence if they do not desire to exclude them completely from
the nation, much the way that Canela and her family are ignored by Americans, then targeted by La Migra for being
undocumented farmworkers.
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Latina/o-identified project, through its emphasis on the interracial encounters and alliances that
can be forged outside of a US context, Hungry Woman is committed to a transnational politics of
decolonization. The US is decentered—though not entirely—as the privileged site of decolonial
articulation for Chicana subjects as Canela embodies her affects of hunger, hope, and rage in
Paris, staging her empathy for colonized subjects who live elsewhere than the Américas. Hungry
Woman dramatizes transatlantic movement in the context of Mexicana/Chicana “diasporic
subjectivities” (78), a term Emma Pérez deploys to offer a “conceptual framework that addresses
transgressive Chicano and Mexicano experiences in which culture is understood globally”
(xviii). Yet, in activing her affects of hunger, hope, and rage in Paris, Canela prepares herself for
her return to the US, to her adopted community of Boyle Heights, where she transforms her
hunger and rage into self-care and care for her Mexican/American community. In this way, if
there can be said to be a narrative teleology of the play, it is that Canela’s ambivalence and
alienation pave the way for her decolonial Chicana politics and the feminist autonomy she
achieves at the play’s conclusion.
Perhaps, then, Hungry Woman is a proper text and performance to end on, since out of all
the objects in my archive, it is the one with the most optimistic and hopeful ending. Whereas
John Rechy’s mixed-race Chicano ambivalence and his lifestyle as a hustler make it impossible
for him to commit himself to any one ethnic or sexual community, Justin Torres’s We the
Animals concludes with the institutionalization of the teenage mixed-race Latino gay narrator
who is pathologized for his homoerotic fantasies and desires, and Glissant’s The Overseer’s
Cabin reveals the resistant potential of Creole madness yet ends with Mycéa’s
institutionalization and Martinique’s departmentalization, Hungry Woman’s dramatization of
mestiza ambivalence in the US and Paris leads to a deepening of political investment in Canela’s
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immigrant community of Boyle Heights. José Esteban Muñoz’s call in 2009 for queer of color
hope as a “critical affect” in the face of white heteronormativity finds a certain (heterosexual)
echo and performance in Hungry Woman’s 2013 production at CASA 0101. It is clear that
Josefina López as a Chicana playwright and artistic director is dedicated to hope and providing
theatre for her community that offers the audience a hard-won battle for an optimism qualified
by the current situation of Mexicanxs, Chicanxs, and other Latinxs living in the US.
What I would like to leave the reader with is a sense that mixed-race ambivalence and its
attendant alienations are always a painful experience, but they can, under certain conditions and
with a good deal of psychic awareness, have the potential to produce identities resistant to
neocolonial and neo-imperial violence. It is only after Canela participates in the 2005 riots in
Paris’s banlieues with Arab, North African, and black male youths that she learns to channel her
rage into politicizing her Mexican family; and only after Canela comes to understand what drives
her literal and metaphorical hunger does she embrace her identity as a single thirty-year-old
Chicana, which influences her mother’s acceptance of her daughter’s feminist self-sufficiency.
Out of all the characters in my archive, Canela most seems to be able to reconcile her racial
ambivalence and synthesize the contradictory feelings she has—about her Mexican family and
culture, French culture and imperialism, and masculinist anticolonial rage—to fashion an identity
for herself that, though hybrid and unstable, allows her to find contentment. Speaking
specifically about Latina playwrights Milcha Sanchez-Scott, Josefina López, and Cherríe
Moraga, Elizabeth C. Ramírez writes, “For these women, a subjectivity in process seeks to resist
a positive, fixed identity. Specified gender roles explode in performance in profound ways”
(104). Not only does Canela’s gender role, but her ethnoracial and class roles “explode in
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performance,” thereby showcasing Josefina López’s ability to enunciate a decolonial mestiza
positionality in Hungry Woman at her Latina-identified theatre CASA 0101.

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Conclusion:
Repurposing Racial Ambivalence in Pop Music

The mixed-race figure, whether tragic or empowered, is one that finds herself in the
annals of pop culture. This suggests that twentieth- and twenty-first-century mixed-race writers
are not the only ones who feel compelled to write about racial mixing and cultural blending and
speak from the position of a mixed-race subject. On 6 February 2016, when Beyoncé dropped
the first single, “Formation,” from her visual album Lemonade (2016), it caused a sensation. The
accompanying music video, in which Beyoncé costumed herself in the garb of what could be
described as a postmodern Southern black priestess, affirmed her blackness and feminist
autonomy in the face of increasing police brutality directed at black people, especially Black
Lives Matter protesters. Many viewers and former Beyoncé fans were outraged when the
“Formation” music video ended with Beyoncé lying on top of a police car as it sank beneath a
flooded area, what might have meant to signify New Orleans flooded after Hurricane Katrina.
My interest in Beyoncé here is drawn more from the way she stylizes her ethnoracial identity in
“Formation” and less in her explicit critique of police brutality and antiblack racism, although
the latter are surely generated by the former. Beyoncé sings in the refrain to “Formation”:
My daddy Alabama
Momma Louisiana
You mix that Negro with that Creole
Make a Texas bama!
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In the introduction I stated that ethnoracial configurations such as “Creole,” “mestizo,”
and “mestiza” are no longer being used, but perhaps I spoke too soon. Here Beyoncé deploys
her mother’s Louisiana Creole identity, and thus Beyoncé’s own creolization, in order to affirm
her racial mixing and blending at the same time she leverages a feminist critique of antiblack

114
“Formation” was written and composed by Khalif Brown, Jordan Frost, Asheton Hogan, Mike WiLL
Made-It, Swae Lee, and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.
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racism and police brutality. “Creole,” as Beyoncé deploys it, means something different from
Glissant’s French Antillean-inflected theorization of the term. Carl A. Brasseaux states that
“[i]ndividuals who presently identify themselves as Creole are generally descendants of French-
speaking slaves who were emancipated during or immediately after the Civil War” (112).
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Thus, Beyoncé in no way erases or minimizes the painful experience of slavery to which her
mother’s (and her father’s) ancestors were subjected, but rather lays claim to a complex
ethnoracial configuration—one that is highly regionalist (she names the states in which she and
her parents were born and raised)—and deploys it to enact a decolonial critique. Within the
context of a white nationalist twenty-first century, Beyoncé’s celebrating of her parents’ union as
it produced her and her claiming of a Creole identity transgress the policed boundaries of race in
the deep South, for, as Jennifer Doyle reminds us, “what burns in American writing hotter than
cross-racial desire?” (14).
116
And by “hotter” we can understand that nothing incites more fear
and invites more fantasy among a white audience than interracial desire and its products.
“Creole” as an ethnoracial configuration and creolization as a process mark Beyoncé’s
various, and sometimes competing, positionalities throughout the rest of the song. Beyoncé,
aware of her own position as a light-skinned African American woman who traces her mixed-
race ancestry through her mother to the French colonization of Louisiana, draws attention to her
light skin in “Formation” in such a way as to suggest she has repurposed her ambivalence about
it. In the chorus, Beyoncé sings: “I see it, I want it, I stunt, yellow bone it.” “Yellow bone” is a

115
Brasseaux further traces the trajectory of a Black Creole cultural renaissance that occurred in the wake
of the civil rights movement: “This development [the assumption of a black Creole identity] has had profound
repercussions for the Creole cultural renaissance that began in the late 1980s. […] [T]he new black Creole
leadership was openly antagonistic toward their white counterparts, who were in the midst of their own cultural
revival” (113).
116
Doyle’s next question is: “What body most embodies the pleasures and dangers of becoming an object?”
(14). Beyoncé seems ready to accept the “pleasures and dangers of becoming an object” only because she exercises
so much control, despite being a black woman in a racist and misogynist entertainment industry, over her own
image.
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slang term used by African Americans to designate a black person whose skin is light. Although
the term is not always used in a pejorative sense, it was originally developed in the same period
as were other terms meant to distinguish certain types of African Americans from each other. In
a nation where colorism affects all dark-skinned people, African Americans called “yellow
bone” often have more privilege than darker-skinned African Americans, and thus may find it
easier to ascend to a higher social class than the dark-skinned members of their race. Beyoncé is
not troubled by those who point out her light skin and her class ascendancy (an ascendancy that
is denied to the vast majority of people living in the US, regardless of their race or skin color),
but instead chooses to “dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it / I twirl on them haters,” the
haters being, of course, those who oppose her feminist critique of police brutality and antiblack
racism. It may be said that Beyoncé uses the privilege she wrests from being light-skinned to
speak from a position of influence in order to disseminate her critique of racism and the pro-
black message of her music.
Such a politicization of an ethnoracial term like “Creole” in a pop song of the
contemporary moment seems far removed from another famous pop hit from 43 years before, a
song whose very title contains the racial pejorative epithet the lyrics describe living under:
Cher’s “Half-Breed.” Rising to the top of the pop charts in 1973, Cher’s hit, composed by Al
Capps with lyrics written by Mary Dean, narrativized the trope of the tragic mixed-race
character:
My father married a pure Cherokee
My mother’s people were ashamed of me
The Indians said that I was white by law
The white man always called me Indian squaw

Half-breed! That’s all I ever heard
Half-breed! How I learned to hate the word
Half-breed! She’s no good they warned
193

Both sides were against me since the day I was born.

Mitchell Morris points out that “[b]efore ‘Half-Breed’ even begins, we already know the song is
about the painful consequences of racial mixing” (157). Furthermore, Loving v. Virginia “was
handed down in 1967! Even in the early 1970s, ‘Half-Breed’ was an epithet that could carry
serious consequences” (158).
If Beyoncé proudly proclaims her mother’s, and, hence, her own, Creole heritage, then
the speaker of Cher’s song bemoans her “Half-Breed” status and the slur that is hurled at her by
white people and the Cherokee alike. Morris, however, believes that the “likelihood of this
thoroughgoing dual rejection is exaggerated” (162), and I argue that here, where the
exaggeration of exclusion from both ethnic communities verges on the too sentimental, “Half-
Breed” becomes queer camp. Remembering that Cher is considered a “diva” in the gay male
sense of the term and has been a gay icon since the start of her career in the mid-1960s, I
entertain a reading of “Half-Breed” that downplays the all-too-explicit tragedy of the lyrics and
instead activates the ability of queer camp to leverage critiques against normative methods of
interpretation, whether academic or everyday.
117
Although “Half-Breed” is not, like
“Formation,” an explicitly pro-black song that has been used as an anthem for African
Americans combatting racism and all other manner of social and political injustices at the hands
of the police and lawyers, judges, and politicians, it raises enough awareness of the
overdetermined trope of the tragic mixed-race figure that it serves, albeit comically, to
deconstruct that overdetermined trope. If “Half-Breed” did not or could not do this during its
reign on the pop chart in 1973, it was because the slur of the title still carried too much venom

117
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick includes “diva worship” on her famous list of the “many performative identity
vernaculars that seem most recognizably ‘flushed’ (to use James’s word) with shame consciousness and shame
creativity [which] do cluster intimately around lesbian and gay worldly spaces” (63). See “Shame, Theatricality,
and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity.
194

and invective to be campy. Forty-four years later, however, time has ensured its iconicity as a
product of queer camp.
118
In a crucial gesture, I suggest that the imbrication of mixed-race queer
identities (such as John Rechy and his characters and Justin Torres and his narrator) with camp
produces a critically mixed-race queer camp aesthetic. Cher’s “Half-Breed” can now be seen as
a campy song lyrically embodying the alienation of the tragic mixed-race figure, thereby drawing
attention to her ambiguous status and racial ambivalence toward both ethnic communities that
generated her.
Beyoncé’s “Formation,” on the other hand, galvanizes audiences to make critiques
against racism, injustice, and even colonization just as the extreme psychic states of alienation,
depression, rage, and madness enable mixed-race authors, playwrights, and their characters to
challenge entrenched systems of racial, class, national, sexual, gender, and homonormatively
queer exclusion. The difference between literary and theatre-based enactments of antiracist,
decolonial, feminist, antihomophobic, and anti-homonormative critiques and those critiques
made available by pop culture lies less in the substance of the critique and more in the population
by whom the critique is taken up, embodied, and practiced as a form of everyday resistance. As
a young mixed-race Chicano gay man attempting to make his way an as academic, I never
underestimate the ability of either pop culture or cultural products more traditionally classified as
“high art” to offer ways to reimagine our present and transmogrify our world into something

118
I did not talk about Cher’s own ethnic identity. Born Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPiere in El Centro,
California, in 1946, “her mother, born in Arkansas, had moved to California in the wake of the Okie migration
stream,” and she married an “Angeleno of Armenian extraction—hence the Sarkisian as well as the exotic ‘un-
white’ cast of Cher’s features” (148), writes Mitchell Morris. Cher’s half-Armenian, half-white identity is what
prompted songwriters to write songs such as “Half-Breed,” “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves,” and “Dark Lady” for her.
It would be hard to compare such an ethnic mixing—half Armenian and half white—to the mestizo, mestiza, Afro-
Latino, and Creole identities I traced through the pages of my dissertation. I acknowledge, however, that to be
Armenian American in the US entertainment industry the 1960s and 1970s was a different identity than it is in the
twenty-first century.
195

different.
119
As a self-identified “mestizo,” I agree with Rafael Pérez-Torres that “[m]estizo
subjects carry their body through globalized circuits of exchange. As part of this process, new
identities are forged, new relations founded, new epistemologies undertaken in an innovative and
inventive process creating new knowledge” (215). We are the bearers of that “new knowledge,”
and, like Mycéa, the carrier of the counter-narrative, we often suffer psychological discomfort.
I am no stranger to the pain of being mixed race, growing up between one side of a
family that not many generations ago lived in Austrian-occupied Ukraine and Nazi Germany,
and another side of a family that not many generations ago left Mexico to work as migrant
farmworkers in southern Colorado (with an ancestor who fled Spain as a Crypto-Jew and married
into a Catholic family, allowing her religion to die with her); and I know that migration both
across the Américas and across oceans defines the liminal identities of many US Americans like
me. Whether racial mixing and cultural blending becomes an overdetermined trope of US
literature from century to century, or finds its way somehow into the lyrics of pop songs that
become either iconic or anthemic, mixed-race subjects find our identities reflected back to us,
sometimes in mirrors that distort our image and other times in a clear crystal glass fashioned by
someone who knows us better. Ambivalence is surely a psychic structure that dominates many
human subjects, but my main argument is that it is accentuated in a racially inflected way in
mixed-race subjects. Although there are those who consider ambivalence a psychic state
unworthy of the militancy necessary to fight Trump, his administration, and his supporters, I
would remind them that all movements that homogenized their members failed to end the
struggle against racial, class, gender, and/or sexual oppression in part because dissent was
silenced. Racial ambivalence is good for nothing if not dissent in a time of necessary resistance.

119
Bob Dylan’s being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 testifies that pop culture can have a
powerful global influence and enact political critiques. It also further dismantles the binary of high art/low art.
196

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari remind us to “establish a logic of the
AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings” (25).
Although this conclusion does not nullify the ending, nor does it succeed in overthrowing
ontology (an enterprise about which I remain characteristically ambivalent), it is an invitation to
add an “AND” to the list of interventions this dissertation makes, an “AND” of pop culture at a
moment when the gravity of the project seemed perhaps too great to allow it to be sustainable. It
is important to keep in mind that mixed-race alienation, depression, rage, and certainly madness
have their lighter, if not comic, aspects, too.

197

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'L'autre chez nous': defining the national body in French literature, 1800-1848

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Creator Pogar, Nathan Martinez (author)

Core Title Racial ambivalence in literatures of the Americas: mixed-race subjects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 04/17/2017

Defense Date 03/07/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American Literature,mixed-race identity,OAI-PMH Harvest,racial ambivalence,twentieth-century literature,twenty-first-century literature

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), Gomez-Barris, Macarena (committee member), Keeling, Kara (committee member), Roman, Elda Maria (committee member)

Creator Email nathan.pogar@gmail.com,pogar@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-356095

Unique identifier UC11258268

Identifier etd-PogarNatha-5184.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-356095 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-PogarNatha-5184.pdf

Dmrecord 356095

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Pogar, Nathan Martinez

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA