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Latino voices from the infinite city: Raquel Gutiérrez and Rubén Martínez

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Latino voices from the infinite city: Raquel Gutiérrez and Rubén Martínez

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LATINO VOICES FROM THE INFINITE CITY:
RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ AND RUBÉN MARTÍNEZ

By

Ana Luisa González

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM: THE ARTS)

December 2015 for Fall graduates

Copyright 2015 Ana Luisa González

ii

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Laura Castañeda for her support and patient. I would also like to
thank Sasha Anawalt for her constant enthusiasm from the beginning of this
journey, and Josh Kun for his pertinent feedback about Latino culture and his
suggestions when I was embarking in this project. Thanks as well to Raquel
Gutiérrez and Rubén Martínez for letting me spent their time answering my
questions. A “thank you” to Sophie Rachmuhl, who shared their thoughts and
helpful suggestions. And finally, my deepest gratitude to my friends who read my
work: Phoenix Tso and Vanessa Wilson.

iii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii
Abstract iv
Latino Voices From The Infinite City: Raquel Gutiérrez And Rubén Martínez 1
Contemporary queer Latino writing in LA 7
Re-imagine the infinite city 9
Raquel Gutiérrez between range and possibility
Rubén Martínez: between the outsiders and the insiders 17
References 23

iv

Abstract

Latino writers in Los Angeles tend to be overlooked despite the fact they have a long
historical presence within the city. While some editors have excluded the work of Latino
authors from the Los Angeles literary canons, others have advocated for the importance
of their narratives. Two contemporary queer Latino writers in Los Angeles, Rubén
Martínez and Raquel Gutiérrez, show the relevance of portraying segregated immigrant
communities in order to transcend the hegemonic discourses of gender, race, ethnicity
and sexual orientation.

1

Latino Voices From The Infinite City:
Raquel Gutiérrez And Rubén Martínez

Latino writers in Los Angeles have a long historical presence within the city. Yet critics
and readers alike often have ignored their literary works even though the Los Angeles-
Long Beach metropolitan area is home to the nation’s largest Latino population with 5.8
million people.

Other literary epicenters, like New York, also tend to overlook authors who are not
straight, white, and often male. The New York Times’ list of the top 17 books for the
summer of 2015 does not include any author of color, for example. That sparked a
Twitter campaign in May 2015 called We Need Diverse Books to push U.S. editors and
critics to review and publish more diverse authors.

Reading lists can be too white and the fact that some editors are not including Latino
writers and other minority authors can be problematic. There are exceptions, of course.
Take Mexican-American Juan Felipe Herrera, who was named the nation’s new poet
laureate. He’s the first Latino to ever hold that position. But that tends to be the
exception, not the rule. Ignacio López-Calvo, a professor of Latin American literature at
University of California, Merced, says in general Latino authors have been ignored not
because of the literary or aesthetic quality of their work, but because of their ethnicity.

David Fine’s own book, Imagining Los Angeles: a city fiction (2000), just mentioned
Oscar Zeta Acosta and Luis Valdez as the only two Latino writers in a volume of the

2

history of the fiction about Los Angeles from 1880 to 1990’s. Even David Ulin, a literary
critic for The Los Angeles Times and editor of Writing Los Angeles: A Literary
Anthology (2002) just included Rubén Martínez as the only Latino writer in the literature
anthology about Los Angeles.

Fine’s critical volume dedicated to Los Angeles literature as well as Ulin’s anthology
represents LA’s literary canon. Yet, not including enough Latino authors raises the
question of whether Latinos and other minorities are reflected in the fiction and the
narratives of Los Angeles.

Likewise, selecting some literary works and excluding certain Los Angeles authors,
specifically writers of color, raises the question of how editors exercise political power in
excluding their stories. As the English professor at New York University, John Guillory,
wrote about the implications of creating a literary canon “the process of canonical
selection is always also a process of social exclusion, specifically the exclusion of
female, black, ethic, or working class authors from the literary canon.”
1
Therefore,
editors and critics can subordinate minorities and make dominant certain representations,
by ignoring their literary contributions that reflect the stories of certain communities.

And yet it is quite paradoxical when most of Los Angeles literature has been a “migrant
fiction,”
2
Fine wrote in 2000. He argued that in the past few decades, immigration from

1
Guillory, John. Cultural capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. University of Chicago Press,
2013, 7.
2
Fine, David M. Imagining Los Angeles: a city in fiction. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press,
2000, vii-viii

3

Latin America and Asia as well as the other regions of the globe reflected a strong
presence of a vital multicultural, multiethnic fiction in Los Angeles.
3
Until recent times,
at least, some of the fiction has been the work of the native-born Angelenos.
4

Los Angeles literature tends to ignore key contributions by Latinas and Latinos, wrote
López-Calvo in 2011
5
. He argues that the way in which “Latino literature has been
silenced in anthologies of Los Angeles literature is replicated, for example, in the absence
of Latinos in public sculptures in California and the U.S., or their correspondence relative
absence from U.S. film and television."

Latino literature has been around a long time ago. López-Calvo says that some experts
believe Latino literature in California started with Naufragios by Spanish explorer Alvar
Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca in the Sixteenth Century. Others believe that the Spanish
language literature started in Southern California in 1850, when El Clamor Público and
other local newspapers began to publish poems and fiction about Los Angeles.
6
Still,
others believe that one of the first Chicano literary texts was Las Aventuras de Don
Chipotle o Cuando los Pericos Mamen –The Adventures of Don Chipotle or When
Parrots Suckle, which was first published in the Spanish-language Angelino newspaper
El Heraldo de Mexico in 1928
7
.

3
Fine, Imagining Los Angeles, 6-7
4
Fine, Imagining Los Angeles, 6-7
5
López-Calvo, Ignacio. Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety.
Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press, 2011.
6
López-Calvo, Ignacio. "The Spanish-Language Crónica in Los Angeles: Francisco P. Ramírez and
Ricardo Flores Magón." Journal of Spanish Language Media 1 (2008): 125.
7
López-Calvo, Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction 16-17.

4

There are many theories about when Latino literature started in California. But it is
equally important to explore the works of more contemporary Latino authors in Southern
California literary publications to see how they documented the stories of their
communities, which are often silenced in the mainstream literary epicenters of Los
Angeles.

The Latino writing scene has remained alive a long time despite the city’s failure to
acknowledge its literary production. However, Sophie Rachmuhl, a English professor at
France’s Bordeaux Montaigne University, has chronicled the Latino poetry scene in one
of the chapters of her last book A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of Poetry Scene, Los
Angeles, 1950-1990, which was reviewed by Los Angeles Review of Books, in May
2015.

Rachmuhl, who started to explore the poetry scene in the 1980’s when she arrived as a
visiting professor to UCLA, says the first Chicano poetry anthology Two Hundred and
One: Homenaje a la ciudad de Los Angeles/ The Latino experience in Los Angeles was a
landmark for Los Angeles Latino authors in 1982. It brought together the work of
Manzanar Gamboa, a renowned Chicano poet, Luis Rodríguez, the current poet laureate
in Los Angeles, and Marisela Norte, a Mexican-American poet who is still active with
public poetry performances.

5

Other publications and magazines like ChismArte Magazine, a Los Angeles-based
Chicano arts and literary publication from the 1970s and early 1980s, Con Safos 1968,
created by a group of Chicano veterans from the Vietnam war, the bilingual gay and
lesbian publication rara avis 1978, represented a giant step forward for the Latino and
Chicano literature. Most of writers who participated in these publications were excluded
from other publishing circles. All these publications represented a forum for Chicanos to
present their work but also raised consciousness about political issues among Chicano
communities, says Naomi Quiñonez, an Assistant Professor of Chicano Literature at San
Francisco State University. However, none of these publications lasted for long because
of economics, says Quiñonez.

More recent anthologies that incorporated a broad array of ethnically identified poets and
writers include Invocation L.A,.: Urban Multicultural Poetry 1989, which focused in the
multhientic poets of Los Angeles and included Anglo as well as Latino voices. So did
other such as Grand Passion: The poetry of Los Angeles and beyond 1995, that
incorporated poets such as Marisela Norte, Ramon Garcia, Max Benavides and Gil
Cuadros.

In the early 2000’s Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California 2002, included
a variety of Chicano and Latino authors from California and more recently Latinos in
Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, that brings
contemporary fiction authors edited by Daniel Olivas in 2008.

6

But still there is failure of major mainstream U.S. publishing houses to represent more
Chicano and other Latino writers. Olivas says that smaller presses such Arte Publico,
Bilingual Review, Cinco Puntos, Tia Chucha Press, University of Arizona Press,
University of Oklahoma press, and the University of Wisconsin, are publishing important
books by Latino authors.

The literary magazine “Huizache,” was founded in 2010 by the Mexican-American writer
Dagoberto Gilb and the Centro Victoria for Mexican Literature, at the University of
Houston in Victoria. It has featured writers including Sandra Cisneros, Juan Felipe
Herrera, Sherman Alexie, Gary Soto, Rubén Martínez and Raquel Gutiérrez. Gilb, an
Austin-based short story writer and novelist, wrote "there is not one nationally recognized
Latino magazine in the country, so we decided to create a magazine that wants to focus
on Latino and Chicano writers from the West.”
But getting mainstream presses to publish Latino authors is tough. Corina Martínez, the
CEO of the website The Latino Author, says that “the big five published houses in the
East Coast-based don’t publish more Latinos authors, because they think that a lot of
Latinos do not buy books.” She adds that most Latino authors write about their
experiences as immigrants, and that doesn’t fit with their idea of what sells.
8

However, Latinos readers are larger than common assumed. Adult Hispanics read an
average of seven books every year, according to a Pew Research Center report
9
,

8
From an interview with Corina Martínez, June, 2015
9
Zichuhr, Kathrin and Rainie, Lee “E-reading rises as Device Ownership Jump.” Pew Research Center,
Washington, D.C. (January 10, 2014). http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-
media//Files/Reports/2014/PIP_E-reading_011614.pdf accessed on June 10, 2015.

7

compared to 12 books read every year by white Anglo Americans. The Hispanic market,
both for English and Spanish titles, also continues to grow. Latinos in the USA will
purchase over $500 million in books in both English and Spanish in 2015 according to
Kirk Whisler, who founded the non-profit Latino Literacy Now (LLN).

Contemporary queer Latino writing in LA

Along queer Latino contemporary writing in Los Angeles two authors that speak out
about Latinos, gays, and immigrants in LA are Rubén Martínez and Raquel Gutiérrez.
Their work highlights a sense of place and crosses borders of class, ethnicity and
language barriers.

But what is queer Latino writing? Generally it is the work by lesbian, transgender, gay,
bisexual, and gender queer people of Latin American ancestry living in the United
States.
10
Many writers can write about immigrant communities and their struggles within
the city, but just a few can disrupt and somehow transcend the borders of class,
ethnicities, gender and sexuality.

Martínez, a native Angeleno, a son and grandson of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants,
is one of these voices. What is fundamental about this author is how he negotiates the
tensions of Anglo, gay, straight, immigrants and subcultures within the city.

10
Lima, Lázaro, and Felice Picano, eds. Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing. Univ of Wisconsin Press,
2011. 28

8

Martínez has published within the literary establishment, reaching out far beyond the
Latino community. His works includes Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant
Trail, Dessert America: A Journey Across Our Most Divided Landscape, and The Other
Side.

As a LA Weekly reporter, back in the 90's, Martínez reported from Central America,
Mexico City and Los Angeles. In his literary essay titled “My Father’s House,” he
revisited memories of the Silver Lake neighborhood that shaped his voice and inspired
him to take on an activist voice advocating for the life of Latino communities.

Another example is Gutiérrez, an emerging queer Latina poet, a first generation Mexican-
Salvadoran and American, who is breaking through outside of the LA literary
establishment. She sparks a dialog between the LA queer Latino subcultures in West
Hollywood, Echo Park and Vernon, in her last poetry anthology, Breaking up with Los
Angeles.

Gutiérrez, who is outside of the mainstream literary world, advocates for other forms of
publication like her “chapbooks,” which are small collections of writing, generally no
more than 40 pages long, that get attention through social media and self-promotion.
Gutiérrez use this chapbook to showcase her literary works, but also as a way to
transcend the institution of the literary houses and establishing presses.

9

Marcela Landres, an editorial consultant and former editor with Simon & Schuster, says
that there are few Latino self-publishing success stories, because “most self-published
writers don’t hone their craft, build a platform, invest in a thorough edit of the
manuscript, hire a professional cover designer, or properly promote their books.”
11

Despite the fact that some editors are not optimistic about alternative ways of crafting a
self published book, Gutiérrez with her “chapbook” has gained readers in Australia,
London and Hawaii by shipping each of her four poetry books herself — White Woo
(2014), Breaking up with Los Angeles (2014), Ayotzinapa (2015), and Running in place
(2015). Throughout Gutierrez’s book, she experiences Los Angeles from the perspective
of a queer person and beyond the Latino niche.

Re-imagine the infinite city
Raquel Gutiérrez between range and possibility

On a clear, cold day in January, Gutiérrez arrives at a coffee shop in Oakland, California.
She wears a purple sweater and a brown jacket. The city is far from her native Los
Angeles, which she called the landscape of possibility “LA it is so infinite, and you
never know what are you going to encounter, said Gutiérrez. So [LA] is for me an
industrial landscape, a landscape of palm trees, of a rolling hills, of freeways of concrete,
of Latino rescuache, you know, with beautiful brightly colored storefronts and houses.”

11
From an interview with Marcela Landres, June, 2015.

10

Gutiérrez, a queer Latina writer, moved to the Bay Area two years ago. She felt
imprisoned by her Los Angeles identity. As she continues to search for a place in the Bay
Area’s arts and literary scene, the City of Angeles still motivates her as a writer.
In 2014 Gutiérrez published a poetry book about Los Angeles as a way to re-member and
re-imagine the city throughout her poetry. Living in Oakland led her to think about LA in
various dimensions including her relationship with the place, gender, representations and
the ethnic and political consciousness within the city.

Gutierrez has a vexed relationship with Los Angeles. While the city can be inspiring, it
also produces a lot of rage and angry feelings. She describes an ongoing struggle with
visibility faced by Latino queer authors in LA. “This chapbook is an angry book because
being a Latino queer writer implies many battles around visibility,” she says. “Not being
seen really produces a lot of rage, because as a brown person, as a queer brown person
[of] alternative gender representation, being made invisible has happened in various
institutional contexts.”

The lack of visibility along the different institutions belongs to a dual minority: as Latina
and as a queer person. As Lilian Faderman wrote in her book Gay L.A: A History Of
Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, And Lipstick Lesbians, “Not only have gays of color
had to struggle with battles that are particular to their parent communities but also they
have felt that participation in white dominate institutions and events was too much like

11

“an excursion into whiteness.”
12

Paradoxically, experiencing racial discriminations in various institutional spaces –the
institution of schools, the institution of race, of whiteness, of artistic organization, of
cultural institution– lead her to became a creative person. She says, “The structure logic
around racial hierarchies and economic hierarchies is a creative motor, an engine.”
13

Working as a cultural organizer, Gutiérrez has to commute every day from Oakland to
San Francisco. After a long day of interviews and a meeting with Emerging Arts
Professionals in San Francisco, she arrived to a home divided into three sections: a
kitchen, a studio and a big room in the back. As we enter her kitchen, she recalls the time
spent writing her chapbook “Breaking up with Los Angeles. “I really was breaking up
with a nostalgia of being centered in idealism, in this thing that was better in the past that
is better that what you are doing in the present, which is kind of, you know, it takes away
some of your agencies as a creative person.”
14

Gutiérrez, 38, was the standout in a working class family. She grew up in South East LA
and as a first generation Mexican-Salvadoran-American she was the first in her family to
attend college. She studied journalism. In her early 20’s, she moved to New York to
obtain a Master’s degree in performance studies from New York University. Upon her
return to Los Angeles, she became a cultural organizer that created artist-community

12

Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay L.A: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and
lipstick lesbians. New York: Basic Books, 2006. 281.
13

From an interview with Raquel Gutiérrez, January, 2015.

14

From an interview with Raquel Gutiérrez, January, 2015.

12

partnerships for institutional and community-based organizations. Throughout her
journey as a performer, arts speaker, and curator, she has written poetry and critical art
essays.

Since she was in her late 20s, Gutiérrez has been very active in the LA queer Latino
scene. About 10 years ago, she co-founded Butchlalis de Panochtilan, a Los Angeles
performance group of Latino queer people that experimented with gender identities and
subverted the usual roles of men and women. She wrote and performed plays directed by
Luis Alfaro, such as The Barber of East L.A., whose narrative chronicles the Chicano
Moratorium against the Vietnam War and the rise of the gay civil rights movement.
Since then she has been working with the Latino community in various arts
organizations.

Now living in Oakland, one of the most progressive cities in California, Gutiérrez
acknowledges LA’s role as a creative space for her writing. However, she says “LA is a
kind of a dystopian place, there is no possibility of utopia there and that is why creativity
happened,” says Gutiérrez, “[…] you have to be very committed to surviving and thriving
in a place that is kind of ruthless.”
15

Breaking up with Los Angeles renders the tension among queer white, Latino, brown, and
queer communities in LA neighborhoods.
I’m at a club
called La Plaza

15

From an interview with Raquel Gutiérez, January, 2015.

13

She’s still alive and holding it down
on La Brea
Cross street
Melrose in Hollywood
Maybe you know it?”
Tonight
There is so much jotería here
Naturally you sometimes forget
The women of invention, rehearsing
Lyrics, songs of betrayal, the kind you hear
Paquita wail in the songs that have made
Her the grand dame
Of vengeance
Doors open
Here comes the
Narco power.
Narco power.
Narco power.
Narco power.
16

Gutiérrez shows us a particular vibe of West Hollywood that she calls the “gayborhood’’
of Los Angeles that historically has been known as the “gay mecca.” Since the 1980’s
West Hollywood was, for gay people, particularly for gay men, a “party town”
17
. An
estimated of 40 percent of its residents were gay and it became the nation’s first gay
majority government. Yet gays of color had to struggle against white gay racisms in
white gay venues because “it was considered real déclassé to go to bed with a
Mexican.”
18

Even today, Gutiérrez confesses that Latinos, black queers and Philippine queers are
often fetishized in negative ways in West Hollywood. This tendency of racial
discrimination in white gay venues in West Hollywood encouraged the growth of clubs

16
Gutiérrez, Raquel. Breaking up with Los Angeles. Oakland: Econo Text, 2014
17
Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay L.A: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and
lipstick lesbians. New York: Basic Books, 2006, 276
18
Ibid. 281-281

14

for gay people of color in Silver Lake. Since the late 1970’s, its bohemian ambiance drew
larger numbers of gays into the district
19
and it became as a small “queer gay enclave.”

In the 1990’s Gutiérrez lived in Echo Park, one of the epicenters of Latino communities.
She describes Echo Park and Silver Lake as spaces where “brown queer people went to
live, went to party, went to hang out, went to find friendships, went to do activism, went
to find sex.”
20
Across these neighborhoods she experienced multi-ethnic layers that were
complex and embraced a variety of immigrants and sexual orientations.

Racial tension is everywhere in Gutiérrez’s work. She confesses that Breaking up with
Los Angeles tries to explore existential details about being queer in Los Angeles and that
kind of queerness is centered in communities like Echo Park, Silver Lake and Lincoln
Heights.
21

Along the following lines, Gutiérrez explores how queer persons are marginalized in LA
but at the same time find community in specific neighborhoods in LA. “Silverlake
Boulevard and Duane Street/I used to see Ben and Chuleta,/She the gray rescue/giver of
good chase as the sun/crept over Hollywood’s hills/we were the pitbull people.”
22
Here
Gutiérrez addresses an experience in Los Angeles that is fundamental to understanding
how she explores a sense of place and segregation within the city.

19
Ibid. 298-299

20
Ibid., 290-291
21
From an interview with Raquel Gutiérez, January, 2015.
22
Gutiérrez, Raquel. Breaking up with Los Angeles. Oakland: Econo Text, 2014.

15

As Faderman documented in Gay L.A, Los Angeles is made up largely of areas that are
segregated by ethnicity, class or sexuality. And yet a number of groups and organizations
for lesbian and gay men of color emerged in the 1980’s. Such groups helped queer
Latinos define their identity but also to think of themselves as a community.
23
In fact,
Gutiérrez was part of VIVA an organization of Gay and Lesbians Latinos artists and that
lead her to co-found Tongues as a project of VIVA, to advocate for queer Latino
communities.

Gutiérrez renders a place of possibility: “the good things:/telling white people to no
speak Spanish to me/ having everyone at Homeboy Industries know me by name/I want
to stay/ Easy Los Angeles far-reaching/ like toxic gas.”
24
Gutiérrez draws some of her
life’s most fraught experiences with critical irony as the following line. Everyone in Los
Angeles/ Has a loose relationship with time and / Whiteness.”
25

Gutiérrez’ relationship with time and whiteness seems like an obsession – almost a toxic
rage– in her poetry. She relates with the city in ambivalent ways, in which the space
oppresses her identity but at the same time it allows her to express herself in creative
ways that echo in her poetry.
scatter me in the mouth of Los Angeles
her stomach the desert
her ass the sea
her shoulders the mountains
and her womb the east Los Angeles freeway interchange
for the brought me of California

23
Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay L.A: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and
lipstick lesbians. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
24
Gutiérrez, Breaking up with Los Angeles, 15
25
Gutiérrez, Breaking up with Los Angeles, 19

16

while the 101 took to me to where it was possible
impossible on the 10 during rush hour
and the 60 carried my broken teenage heart home.
26

On one hand, Gutierrez’s romanticizes and fantasizes a vision of LA, but on the other
hand, she paints a landscape that has an obscure and ruthless vibe. Gutiérrez gives us
a glimpse into the life of a queer person. She says, “Poetry is a small holder. A place of
my psychic messes, that helps me to get rid of deep feelings.” She explores deep and dark
emotions that take place in queer Latino neighborhoods but also renders the complex
realities these communities along different neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

In Breaking up with Los Angeles, Gutiérrez is able to map out a space of possibility and
resistance against the institutional hierarchies in her writing. As an activist in Latino
queer communities in LA, her poetry somehow helps her to transcend the borders of
class, ethnicities, gender and sexuality. In other words, Los Angeles shaped her point of
view and her voice as a writer and as a queer Latino to draw a landscape of possibility.

26

Gutiérrez, Breaking up with Los Angeles, 13

17

Rubén Martínez: between the outsiders and the insiders

In a tiny little Korean restaurant in Oakland, Martínez is reading the menu until he asked
the waitress to turn down the music for a second time. At 53, the author of Desert
America: Boom and Bust in the New West, Crossing over: A Mexican Family on the
Migrant Trail, The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond and
various literary essays, is talkative, spry, and openly bisexual.

Martínez has written along various genres: nonfiction chronicles, creative non-fiction,
literary essay, criticism, poetry and journalism. He is also a musician and a theatre
performer. And he started his career as an autodidact poet and worked as a journalist for
different newspapers, including the LA Weekly. Besides his creative work, Martínez is
the Fletcher Jones Chair of Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University.
Last year, Martínez published the literary essay “My Father’s House” in the magazine
Huizache, where he brings us a memory of Silver Lake that leads us into a journey of
intersections of multiples identities -- transvestites, gay, immigrants, Latinos, Anglos, and
straight people. In this text, he inquired about racial, ethnic, and gender representation in
order to transgress hegemonic discourses along these lines.

“My literary home is Silver Lake and I never got tired writing about it,” he says
27
. Born
in Los Angeles and raised in Silver Lake by Salvadoran mother and Mexican, he
considers himself a “border writer” who embraces the voice of three lands: the U.S., to

27

From an interview with Rubén Martínez, January, 2015.

18

Mexico and El Salvador. In The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, he
mentioned how he bridges communities between these lands as he wrote: “So this year
it’ll be in Mexico City, the center of my universe: equidistant from San Salvador and Los
Angeles, the cities/families that blur into each other for me like double vision… I need
my cities, my families to be one.”
28

In his life, both Spanish and English have coexisted without suppressing his past that his
immigrant parents brought from Mexico and El Salvador. And yet, his identity is
attached to a particular city, a neighborhood, Silver Lake, that seems to combines both
identities and cultures.

Martinez’s grandparents moved to Silver Lake in the 1940s. At that time, this
neighborhood was full of immigrants. By the late 1960’s, Silver Lake was an alternative
place, “… it was gay and a lesbian area, a bohemian and a creative place with a lot of
writers, artists and musicians.” In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Silver Lake emerged
as a gay center because its cheap rents attracted many gays from West Hollywood. The
real state agents started the trend “West Hollywood is moving West,” according to Gay
L.A: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and lipstick lesbians.

Yet the working class community did not appear to welcome them [the gay community].
Federman wrote in the same book Gay L.A that a Salvadoran mother admitted to a Los
Angeles Times reporter, “I tell my children to be careful because they have to play in the

28

Martínez, Rubén. The Other side. Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond. London: Vintage,
1993, 145-146.

19

street. I tell them to watch out for two things – cars and gays.”
29
Gay people were deeply
troubling because Latino saw them as a threat of gentrification.

Three generations of his family lived in Silver Lake: his grandparents, parents and even
his wife and twin daughters. Their grandparents made a living back in the 1960’s when
they ran a Mexican restaurant called La Ronda that was sold and ended up as a Mexican
transvestite club called Le Bar. “For many years, I used to go [there] all the time because
it had the L.A’s greatest Mexican transvestites club,” he says.

Gender and immigrant identity are crucial frameworks in Martinez's essay for exploring
the political and socio-cultural realities of those communities in Silver Lake. In
particular, he delves into the power of representing segregated communities in order to
subvert hegemonic “white” discourses of race and gender. As he says, most of my work
renders or represents a place: the human relations, the human geography, and the social
structures.
And yet, the liberal neighborhood was controlled by the LAPD. “In Silver Lake, there
were also social economical tensions. The LAPD has a long history of antagonized
communities of color and working class communities. And I saw that growing up, brown
kids getting arrested,” he says.

Silver Lake was a decidedly “mixed” neighborhood in every sense. Working and
middle class. When I was growing up there were still remains of the “Okies” that
flooded Southern California during the Depression and remained poor long after
it. Brown and Jewish and several shades of white and Chinese and Japanese, gay

29

Faderman and Timmons., Gay L.A, 298-299.

20

and straight, the believers and the communist. Yes, there was gay bashing and the
LAPD made sure to rough up the Mexican kids to let them know where the
borders were (north of Sunset was mostly white and middle class, south was more
brown and working class). I got spit on by a white hippie one time walking home
from school, was stopped by the cops with my backpack suspiciously full of
books. But for the most part, I was at home in a world of difference.
30

Despite the tensions and clear divide in the community between working class and gay
people, Martínez’s experiences in this neighborhood blurred the lines along immigrant
communities, gay, straight and Anglo. He traveled along the rich intersections of queer,
immigrants from Central America, working class, middle class and the artists’
communities. In the following lines, Martínez shows us how a variegated modes of
transit, arrivals and departure of these communities in Silver Lake.

“We cross practically every social border that would divide the country in the “culture
wars” to come. Nationally, language, class, race, gender, even sexual orientation.”
31

Martínez highlights how he transgresses social stereotypes and goes beyond the barriers
of language, race and sexuality. Silver Lake somehow projected and negotiated the
infinite possibilities of being outside of the hegemonic discourses. It was a place “where
people really could cross the borders.”

But being a Latino writer doesn’t seem that easy when he tries to cross the borders of
class and ethnicity in an Anglo world. To the question of how he has traveling the
spectrum between the Latino and Anglo world, he answers, “It is not always easier to

30

Martínez, Rubén Hilb, Dagoberto “My Father’s House” http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/tale-two-hoods-
rap-silver-lake, (October 25, 2014).

31

Martínez, Rubén, Hilb, Dagoberto “My Father’s House” http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/tale-two
hoods-rap-silver-lake, (October 25, 2014).

21

cross the border as a writer because there is audiences and markets.” Despite the fact that
he has written most of his work in English, he has always kept in mind the voices of the
immigrant communities that weren’t represented enough in cultural spaces.

Despite the struggles, Martínez considers himself an activist by writing about Latino
communities in English to reach a wider audience. In fact, he said that he was writing for
an audience that was mostly white, that was either not informed or badly informed about
the reality of the those communities.

When Martínez was a younger writer, he wanted to write everything in both languages.
However, he stepped away from writing in Spanish because Anglo and Latino audiences
are not interested in the same things.

What is most fascinating is how the author embodies a middle point among these
communities. He moves along as an outsider and as an insider. Martínez recalls when he
was in high school in Silver Lake “I was outside with the insiders and outside with the
outsiders. Which is why I’m a writer.”
32

In fact, he says that as a young poet and journalist, “I was constantly crossing the border
because of my subjectivity. I grew up as a son and grandson of immigrants from Mexico
and from El Salvador and I felt that it was a responsibility to represent those
communities,” says, Martínez. López-Calvo from UC Merced says that Martínez is a

32
Martínez, Rubén, Hilb, Dagoberto “My Father’s House” http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/tale-two-
hoods-rap-silver-lake, (October 25, 2014).

22

remarkable writer because he engages with the community, from that community who
was part of by making them visible the problems of those communities in L.A

And yet Los Angeles today is not the same place as when he was growing up. He says
that “in many ways [the city] has been completely transformed, since I was a child. I
grew up in a city that was, even though Silver Lake was mixed, the city was very
provincial, very segregated very racist.” The Los Angeles Times was a terribly racist
newspaper. And I don’t see that lately. I was the first Latino journalist at the LA Weekly.
I was the first brown person there. Things are very different.”
As Los Angeles has grown and developed, its cultural literary production is constantly
shifting. Two LA Latino –US born authors are writing about LA with both an outsider
and insider perspective. Gutiérrez and Martínez are writers that cross the borders of class,
race, gender and even sexual orientation through their writing as way to re-imagine the
city geographically and in its social diversity.

Both authors embody the voice of a hybrid generation that brings together gay/queer and
immigrant communities that are silenced and segregated within the city. As Lezama
Lima writes in the introduction of Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing, “Queer Latino
aesthetic can help us to map out a space of resistance to those regimens not just to oppose
but creativity to construct to re imagine to literally remember, and to envision a different
kind of national culture that more closely resembles its unrealized democratic
aspiration.”
33

33

Lima, Lázaro, and Felice Picano, eds. Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing. Univ of Wisconsin Press,
2011, 22

23

These two authors show how Los Angeles itself generates particular modes of creativity
in terms fiction and non-fiction in order to portrayed immigrant communities. Martínez
and Gutiérrez trace a hybrid perspective that speaks out about the social tensions, but at
the same time their work can jump and subvert borders among communities. These
Latino-US writers in Los Angeles have been able to make connections among the divides
of different communities. They both highlight a characteristic about Los Angeles fiction
and non-fiction that renders a place as infinite in its possibilities of being.

References
Clinton, Michèlle T., Sesshu Foster, and Naomi Quiñonez, eds. Invocation LA: Urban
Multicultural Poetry. West End Pr, 1989.
Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay LA: A history of sexual outlaws, power
politics, and lipstick lesbians. Basic Books, 2006.

Fine, David. Imagining Los Angeles, A City in Fiction, Reno: University of Nevada
Press: 2000
Guillory, John. Cultural capital: The problem of literary canon formation. University of
Chicago Press, 2013.
Gutiérrez, Raquel. Breaking up with Los Angeles. Oakland: Econo Text, 2014
Harper Webb Charles . ed "Grand passion: The poets of Los Angeles and beyond-
Lummis, S, Webb, CH." (1997)
Heide, Rick, ed. Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California. Santa Clara
University, 2002.

24

Lima, Lázaro, and Felice Picano, eds. Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing. Univ of
Wisconsin Press, 2011.
López-Calvo, Ignacio. Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction The Cultural Production
of Social Anxiety, Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press, 2011.
−−−. "The Spanish-Language Crónica in Los Angeles: Francisco P. Ramírez and
Ricardo Flores Magón." Journal of Spanish Language Media 1 (2008): 125.
Martínez Rubén. (writer). Interview with the author, Oackland, CA, January 5, 2015.
Martínez, Rubén and Gilb, Dagoberto “A Tale of Two ’Hoods: A Rap on Silver Lake”.
Los Angeles Review of Books. Oct, 2014. Accessed May 5, 2015.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/tale-two-hoods-rap-silver-lake, (October 25,
2014).

−−−. “My Father’s House”. Huizache. The Magazine of Latino Literature. Dec. 2014:
110. Print
−−−. The Other side. Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond. London:
Vintage, 1993
McNamara, Kevin R., 1958. 2010. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los
Angeles. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press
Murphet, Julian. 2001. Literature and race in Los Angeles. Cambridge, U.K. ;New York:
Cambridge University Press
Olivas, Daniel. Things we do not talk about. Exploring Latino/a Literature Through
essays and Interviews. San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 2014.
−−−.Latinos in Lotusland:An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature.
Tempe: Bilingual Press, 2008.

25

Rachmuhl, Sophie. (author). Interview with the author, Los Angeles, CA, June 9, 2014.
Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher form of politics: The rise of a poetry scene, Los Angeles,
1950-1990. Los Angeles: Otis Collegue of Art and Design, 2015.
Ulin, David L. ed. Writing Los Angeles. A Literary Anthology. The Library of America.
2002
Zichuhr, Kathrin and Rainie, Lee “E-reading rises as Device Ownership Jump”.” Pew
Research Center, Washington, D.C. (January 10, 2014).
http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media//Files/Reports/2014/PIP_E-
reading_011614.pdf accessed on June 10, 2015.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Latino writers in Los Angeles tend to be overlooked despite the fact they have a long historical presence within the city. While some editors have excluded the work of Latino authors from the Los Angeles literary canons, others have advocated for the importance of their narratives. Two contemporary queer Latino writers in Los Angeles, Rubén Martínez and Raquel Gutiérrez, show the relevance of portraying segregated immigrant communities in order to transcend the hegemonic discourses of gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

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Asset Metadata

Creator González, Ana Luisa (author)

Core Title Latino voices from the infinite city: Raquel Gutiérrez and Rubén Martínez

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 08/27/2015

Defense Date 08/26/2015

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

Tag Ethnicity,immigrant,Latino,OAI-PMH Harvest,queer,segregated

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Castañeda, Laura (committee chair), Anawalt, Sasha (committee member), Kun, Joshua (committee member)

Creator Email analgonz@usc.edu,analuisagonz@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-171963

Unique identifier UC11274346

Identifier etd-GonzlezAna-3853.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-171963 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-GonzlezAna-3853.pdf

Dmrecord 171963

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights González, Ana Luisa; Gonzalez, Ana Luisa

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

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