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Queer nightlife networks and the art of Rafa Esparza, Sebastian Hernandez, and Gabriela Ruiz

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Queer nightlife networks and the art of Rafa Esparza, Sebastian Hernandez, and Gabriela Ruiz

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Content Copyright 2020 Joseph D. Valencia

Queer Nightlife Networks and the Art of Rafa Esparza, Sebastian Hernandez, and Gabriela Ruiz

by

Joseph Daniel Valencia

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

May 2020

ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Queer Nightlife Networks and the Art of Rafa Esparza, Sebastian Hernandez, and Gabriela
Ruiz” grew from friendships and collaborations that have bourgeoned inside and outside of
nightlife contexts, public spaces, private residences, and museums and galleries over the past few
years, notably manifesting in the exhibition Liberate the Bar! Queer Nightlife, Activism, and
Spacemaking that I co-curated with my dear friend Paulina Lara in 2018. Getting closer to
Paulina, Gabby, Rafa, and Sebastian through this exhibition and other modes left a profound
impact on me and motivated me to continue to think about and articulate language around queer
of color artistic networks. I thank each of them for their friendship, generosity, and collaboration.
At USC, I would like to acknowledge my thesis advisors for their invaluable feedback:
Amelia Jones, who served as my Chair and whose excitement about my thesis got me more
excited to sit down and write it; Nao Bustamante, who provided generous insights as an artist
and cultural leader within queer performance networks; and Karen Tongson, whose questions at
the start of my thesis motivated me to better articulate my framework. Laura Isabel Serna could
have served on my committee if we had met sooner. I thank her for including me in her seminar
on Latina/o/x media and for her illuminating contributions to this final thesis. Andy Campbell,
Karen Moss, Jorge N. Leal, Jenny Lin, and Juan Morales also provided mentorship and counsel.
My deepest gratitude goes to my family for their enduring love and support as well as
those who nourished my mind and spirit in so many ways during these intense two years as a
graduate student and arts professional: Alexis, Ana, Bianca, Carlo, Casey, Dani, Diane, Dulcito,
Eve, Frank, Javier, Jennifer, Joanna, Johnny, Jose, Jiyoon, Kari, Linda, los, noé, Pablo, Paige,
Paulina, Paulson, Pilar, Rebeca, Rose, Rubén, Sonia, Teresita, Tolu, and Victor. Thank you.
And finally, to Mark, Chico, and Orangie – my babies. Thank you, always.

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii

List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ iv

Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1

Case Study 1: Escandalos Angeles ............................................................................................... 11

Case Study 2: Nostra Fiesta .......................................................................................................... 17

Case Study 3: YOU ....................................................................................................................... 23

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 27

Appendix with Figures .................................................................................................................. 30

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 41

iv
LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1 Exhibition view, Rafa Esparza: de la Calle, Institute of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles, June 15, 2018, photo by Joseph Valencia…………………….30

Fig. 2 Newspaper clippings detailing police raids and liquor license threats,
c. 1950s, ONE Subject Files Collection, Los Angeles (Calif.)-Bar raids
1900-2012. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries,
photo by Joseph Valencia …………………….…………………….……………30

Fig. 3 Boycott Studio One! Protest Handout, c. 1970s, ONE Subject Files
Collection, Studio One (disco:West Hollywood, Calif.) 1900-2012.
ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries,
photo by Joseph Valencia ………….…………………….………………………31

Fig. 4 Mustache Mondays flyer, date unknown, design by Josh Peace ...………………32

Fig. 5 TV monitor with Cyclona imagery, Chico Bar, July 13, 2018,
photo by Amina Cruz .………….…………………….…………………….……32

Fig. 6 Gabriela Ruiz performing at Chico Bar, July 13, 2018,
photo by Amina Cruz ..………….…………………….…………………….……33

Fig. 7 Sebastian Hernandez performing at Chico Bar, July 13, 2018,
photo by Amina Cruz .………….…………………….…………………….……33

Fig. 8 Cutting into the Cyclona cake, Chico Bar, July 13, 2018,
photo by Amina Cruz..………….…………………….…………………….……34

Fig. 9 Rafa Esparza and Gabriela Ruiz, Nostra Fiesta, The New Jalisco Bar,
Los Angeles, July 11, 2019, photo by Joseph Valencia …………………………34

Fig. 10 Exhibition view, “Liberate the Bar! Queer Nightlife, Activism,
and Spacemaking,” on view at ONE Gallery, West Hollywood,
June 28, 2019 – October 20, 2019, photo by Monica Orozco ..………….………35

Fig. 11 Juan Gabriel performer, The New Jalisco Bar, Los Angeles,
October 13, 2019, photo by Joseph Valencia ……………………………………36

v
Fig. 12 Paulina Lara, Gabriela Ruiz, and Rafa Esparza provide remarks on
the Nostra Fiesta mural project, The New Jalisco Bar, Los Angeles,
October 13, 2019, photo by Joseph Valencia ……………………………………37

Fig. 13 Sidewalk view of My Cathedral exhibition by Alex Donis, 1997,
Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco, photographer unknown ..……………………38

Fig. 14 Manuel Paul, Por Vida, 2015, Galería de la Raza, San Francisco,
photographer unknown …………………….…………………….………………38

Fig. 15 Costume finalists take the stage at YOU, La Cita Bar, Los Angeles,
October 16, 2019, photo by Joseph Valencia …………………….……………...39

Fig. 16 YOU digital flyer, June 12, 2019, design by Sebastian Hernandez ……………...39

Fig. 17 YOU + Pistil digital flyer, Ace Hotel, August 28, 2019,
design by Sebastian Hernandez ..………….…………………….……………….40

Fig. 18 YOU + Frieze Los Angeles digital flyer, El Dorado, February 11, 2020,
design by Sebastian Hernandez ...……………………….…………………….…40

vi
ABSTRACT

This thesis positions queer nightlife as a central vehicle in the lives and practices of a network of
artists and cultural producers working in Los Angeles over the past decade. It asks (and seeks to
answer) the questions: How has nightlife provided a generative space for art, performance, and
community building in LA? And how does centering nightlife in the study of contemporary art
and cultural production rupture existing art historical and curatorial approaches to queer of color
collaborative artistic practices? I closely analyze three case studies drawn from urban subcultural
queer nightlife contexts—particularly the bars and public spaces of downtown and East Los
Angeles—to underscore the radical and sophisticated ways by which artists and cultural
producers co-create art, community, informal learning, visibility, and opportunity for themselves
and their collaborators. The artists discussed include Rafa Esparza, Sebastian Hernandez, and
Gabriela Ruiz, but membership in this network extends beyond these three agents to include
family, friends, artists, designers, DJs, composers, performers, bar owners, curators, and other art
and nightlife participants. Utilizing the scholarship of Luis Aponte-Parés, Macarena Gómez-
Barris, and José Esteban Muñoz, and others, this thesis also considers the world-making potential
of art and performance through and from nightlife, as well as queer and ancestral ways of being,
to emphasize the relationships among queer of color histories, social and urban spaces, and the
bodies that sustain them.

1
INTRODUCTION

Look at the history of queer [art and] performance. Much of it was
not considered art for a really long time, in part because it emerged
in community spaces and gay bars. Spaces that were, we might
say, breaking-off spaces rather than bridging spaces. You can’t
understand [their] qualities without understanding the communities
from which [they] emerge.
1

—Jennifer Doyle

On April 22, 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) opened
Rafa Esparza: de la Calle, an exhibition of art, fashion, performance, and nightlife culture
encompassed in Esparza’s hand-made adobe brick slabs which covered the gallery’s floor and
walls [Fig 1].
2
Hosted in the ICA LA’s project space, the exhibition was billed as a work in
progress, a simple yet dynamic presentation that would shift over time as Esparza and a group of
friends and artistic collaborators would utilize the gallery as a showroom, workroom, and studio
for their practices.
3
Collaborators included fashion designers Victor Barragán, Joshua Castillo,
Tanya Melendez, and Oscar Olima, and artists Fabian Guerrero, Sebastian Hernandez,

1
“Bridging and Breaking: Roundtable with Erin Christovale, Jennifer Doyle, Anne Ellegood, Rafa Esparza, Naima
J. Keith, and Lauren Mackler.” in Made in L.A. 2018., edited by Erin Christovale and Anne Ellegood, (Los Angeles:
Hammer Museum, University of California, 2018), 111.
2
Carmen Hermo, “Through Collaborative Work, Centering Queer, Brown Folks, rafa esparza Looks to Destabilize
Artistic Authority,” ARTnews, January 14, 2020, available online at: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/rafa-
esparza-artist-shaping-art-2020s-1202675032; accessed January 14, 2020.
3
Nicholas Slayton, “At ICALA, Rafa Esparza Is Messing with the Artistic Process,” DT News, May 9, 2018,
available online at: http://www.ladowntownnews.com/arts_and_entertainment/at-icala-rafa-esparza-is-messing-with-
the-artistic-process/article_906b3960-521a-11e8-b938-478b75f71bf8.html; accessed December 12, 2019.

2
Young Joon Kwak, Dorian Ulises Lopez, noé olivas, and Gabriela Ruiz, among others, who
collectively produced and staged new drawings, paintings, sculptures, garments, accessories,
and performances throughout the exhibition’s run. Their creative output provided an intimate
glimpse into a topology of diverse but similarly-minded artist’s practices, emphasizing intricate
intersections among nightlife, art-making, performance, and fashion design in Los Angeles.
de la Calle shed light on a queer of color network of artists and cultural producers
working in dialogue with one another. This network, comprised of individuals who draw upon
shared artistic and cultural experiences as creative Angelenos working in and from the city, has
been active over the past decade within art, fashion, and nightlife underground circuits. As an
exhibition, de la Calle is just one of a recent suite of gallery, museum, and public art projects
since 2014 centered on Esparza’s artistic practice, but it is the first to attempt to structure its
framework beyond Esparza as its sole author, instead gesturing to the notion of him as a member
of an artistic community whose practices come from, and perhaps make most sense outside of,
something other than the mainstream art world. While de la Calle did not mark this outright, nor
did it attempt to historicize or situate these practices within a legacy of art, performance, or
nightlife in the city, the exhibition left the door open for how we might begin to consider, or
reconsider, our relationship to this group of artists and cultural producers.
4

4
de la Calle culminated with a guerrilla parade-like procession through Los Callejones/Santee Alley in downtown
Los Angeles that was promoted only via word of mouth. If we consider it outside its art institution origination, the
performance could have easily been its own case study in this thesis: one that emphasizes the network’s connection
to this historic shopping site for the purchase of various elements of their nightlife looks; the important ways in
which Esparza and other members of this queer nightlife network co-created the performance for themselves and
specific members of their queer and/or cultural communities, in this case the workers and shoppers of this working-
class, predominately Latina/o/x, stronghold in the city; and the immense interest in the performance by the art world
and people on social media, where those not involved wondered how and/or why they were not included. See
Carolina Miranda, “Why artist Rafa Esparza led a surreal art parade through the heart of L.A.'s fashion district,” Los
Angeles Times, June 25, 2018, available online at: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-
rafa-esparza-ica-la-20180625-story.html; accessed December 16, 2019.
For more about Esparza’s channeling or reframing of art and exhibition opportunities for other artists, collaborators,
or friends, and the politics of this artistic strategy, see Hannah E. Grossman, “Performative Futurity: Transmuting

3
This thesis seeks to pick up where de la Calle started, or rather, to tell its story, not in art
world terms but actually “from the streets” and through the urban works of the artists themselves.
In this thesis, I position queer nightlife as a central vehicle in the lives and practices of this
artistic network and seek to answer the following questions: How has nightlife provided a
generative space for art, performance, and community building in LA? And how does centering
nightlife in the study of contemporary art and cultural production rupture existing art historical
and curatorial approaches to queer collaborative artistic practices?
Through the analysis of three case studies drawn from urban subcultural queer nightlife
contexts—Escandalos Angeles, a performance by Sebastian Hernandez and Gabriela Ruiz at
Chico Bar in Montebello, CA; Nostra Fiesta, a mural by Rafa Esparza, Gabriela Ruiz, and
friends at the New Jalisco Bar in downtown Los Angeles; and YOU, a recurring queer and
transgender people of color (QTPOC) party directed by Hernandez and launched at La Cita Bar
in downtown Los Angeles—this thesis reveals the radical and sophisticated ways by which
artists and cultural producers in Los Angeles co-create art, community, informal learning,
visibility, and opportunity for themselves and their collaborators.
Above all else, I argue that nightlife has served as an incubator for members of this
network to come together, express themselves, and generate a sense of joy and freedom from the
struggles of every life. The critical site of the bar, club, or underground party is where survival
and play intersect, and it is in these places where queer and ancestral ways of being are most
active and visible.
5

the Canon Through the Work of Rafa Esparza,” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, 2017.
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll40/id/465072.
5
Social media is an additional platform where the queer network discussed herein connects, gains visibility, and
creates opportunities for one another. For more information on internet-based collectivity and mobilization, see
Ulrich Dolata and Jan-Felix Schrape. Collectivity and Power on the Internet: A Sociological Perspective (New
York, NY: Springer International Publishing, 2018).

4
METHODOLOGY

“Queer Nightlife Networks and the Art of Rafa Esparza, Sebastian Hernandez, and
Gabriela Ruiz” crosses through the disciplines of art history, cultural studies, performance
studies, and other fields to open up what art historian and theorist Amelia Jones has called “new
models for thinking about how visual and embodied cultural expressions come to mean” but also
to emphasize alternative frameworks for understanding collective ways of moving, being, and
creating.
6
I assert that art history alone cannot tell the story of Esparza, Hernandez, and Ruiz’s
creative output, and I recognize how the field’s investments in centering individual achievements
and linear narratives can be limiting.
7
For example, due to his visibility through various
performances, exhibitions, and public art projects, Esparza has consistently received solo
requests and invitations by arts organizations, but in an effort to center his community, he has
often elected to invite collaborators to reshape the otherwise individual-centric structure of each
project. While Esparza’s collaborative efforts have resulted in dynamic and community-driven
projects, they nevertheless commonly started with a personal invitation that he pushed back upon
and adjusted to his and his collaborator’s own terms.
8
The art historical and curatorial focus on

6
Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, (Bristol, England: Intellect,
2012), 12. My thinking here is also informed by the artists themselves, as well as the work of cultural critic
Macarena Gómez-Barris and Chicana feminist Emma Pérez, who have each challenged hegemonic (genealogical
and normative) approaches to queer of color histories, arguing that they reproduce models of “sameness” and erase
queer and ancestral ways of being. See Emma Pérez. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), xiii; and Macarena Gómez-Barris. “How Cuir is Queer
Recognition? A Manifesto from the Sexual Underground” in Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents
in the Americas, ed. Macarena Gómez-Barris (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 56.
7
In many regards, this practice has been modeled after Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, who relied
heavily on individual authorship and biography to tell the story of Renaissance art in The Lives of the Artists (1550).
This now-classic text set the ideological and structural foundation for art historical scholarship that has continued
today. See Giorgio Vasari, “Preface to Part Three” in The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and
Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 277-83.
8
This has been the case for Esparza’s exhibitions at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions (LACE), Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (ICA LA), and the Hammer and Whitney biennials,
among others. For the biennials, Esparza’s collaborations are especially significant given the large-scale of the
exhibition format. See Martha Rosler’s contributions to Tim Griffin, “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-

5
the individual (drawn from European tradition) can be useful to develop a deeper understanding
of a specific artist, their biography, and their practice, but it must be challenged as the prevalent
model for it has sidelined and misunderstood both the individual and collaborative practices of
women, people of color, and queer people.
9
Furthermore, for Esparza, Hernandez, Ruiz, and
others, who understand themselves in relation to hemispheric, ancestral, and collective bonds, it
is imperative to examine and contextualize their work through these same lenses, crossing out of
art history and into other sets of knowledge (or into the physical places of the bar, backyard, or
streets themselves) to reveal how these artists influence, collaborate, and co-create with one
another.
Terminology is also a place where I have made intentional decisions, prioritizing certain
terms over others, and recognizing their shift in relevancy over time. While much of the artists
and histories discussed herein have historically been referred to as Mexican American, Chicano,
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender, I have instead elected to use the terms Latina/o/x,
queer, and queers of color (where appropriate) as more inclusive containers for the racialized,
radical, and non-normative subjects of this thesis.
10
I recognize the heterogeneity of the network
of people discussed herein and gravitate to “queers of color” as an opportunity to name a
coalition of individuals formed across racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identifications, and in

Scale Exhibition. Roundtable Discussion with James Meyer, Francesco Bonami, Catherine David, Okwui Enwezor,
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Martha Rosler, and Yinka Shonibare,” ARTFORUM 42, no. 3 (Nov 2003): 152-163.
9
This work is of course already being done, notably through the publication series at Duke University Press,
Manchester University Press, NYU Press, and University of Minnesota Press, including Walter D. Mignolo and
Catherine E. Walsh’s On Decoloniality, Amelia Jones and Marsha Meskimmon’s Rethinking Art’s Histories, and
José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini’s Sexual Futures, among others.
10
Latina/o/x is intentionally used instead of the gender-inclusive and swiftly-adopted “Latinx.” The forward slash
between the letters a, o, and x for the masculine terms “Latino” and “Chicano” honors 1990s and 2000s feminist
advocacy within ethnic studies circles to utilize “a/o” and ushers it to the contemporary moment. Esparza and
Hernandez have vocalized preference of “brown” as identification, however, I have limited my usage of the term as
I consider their practices in dialogue with broader Latina/o/x communities. Sebastian Hernandez, personal
communication with author, October 30, 2018.

6
resistance to racism, classism, hetero-patriarchy, cultural assimilation, and gay normativity.
11

“Queers of color” is also not limited to Latina/o/x or LGBTQ individuals, opening up and
making space for the ways in which African Americans, Asian Americans, indigenous peoples,
and heterosexual allies can also hold membership within this coalition and be active
collaborative shapers of community within and beyond nightlife.
Each case study in this thesis is articulated from a point of view that calls upon varying
degrees of first-hand or second-hand knowledge. Through memory, storytelling, interviews, and
formal analysis I write about these nightlife moments and extrapolate meaning across
disciplinary fields and local, regional, national, and international contexts.
12
If I attended and/or
contributed to a nightlife moment, as in the case of the Nostra Fiesta mural at the New Jalisco
Bar, I write from a first person point a view and supplement my account with informal
interviews from friends and other participants. This type of conscious/unconscious oral history of
sorts became part of my methodology long before I had even recognized it as such. For YOU, a
recurring series of parties, I write almost exclusively about the events that I physically attended
and supplement my writings with knowledge drawn from conversations with Hernandez, other
members within this network, as well as from the party’s official Instagram page. Social media
also factored into my interpretation of Escandalos Angeles at Chico, as I did not physically

11
My usage of “queer” does not apply to white (and well-off) cisgender homo-normative men and women, who
have pushed the term away from its queerness. Additionally, I align myself with David Getsy’s assertion that “while
‘queer’ draws its politics and affective force from the history of non-normative, gay, lesbian and bisexual
communities, it is not equivalent to these categories nor is it an identity.” Being and moving queerly is much more
expansive and generative than its conflation with sexuality. See David Getsy, Queer (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 2016), 15.
12
This approach exercises a node of performativity in interpretation, as described by scholars and theorists Amelia
Jones and Andrew Stephenson, where an element of performance is embedded in the act of ascribing meaning and
value for art and performance, ultimately contributing to a more dynamic and contingent interpretation. See Amelia
Jones and Andrew Stephenson, Performing the Body/Performing the Text (London, England: Routledge, 1999); and
Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York and
London: Routledge, 2012).

7
attend the event but instead watched a large portion of the performance on Instagram live, in
addition to reviewing photo documentation and interviewing participants involved. I write not in
an effort to create an ethnographic or voyeuristic account of queer of color art and performance
in nightlife, but instead to consider these individuals and their collaborative works from the
perspective of a friend, supporter, and collaborator who aligns themselves with the aesthetics,
traditions, and politics of the group.
I also recognize the ephemeral nature of art and performance in nightlife, and of queer
nightlife itself, as a driving force for this thesis. These moments are not always documented, or
in some cases documented in fragments through individual efforts or on social media, and so I
view it as a necessary task for anyone involved to attempt to analyze, historicize, and articulate
language around these moments and the individuals who create them. Similar to Esparza’s
consistent efforts to destabilize individual authorship, I do not seek to position myself as an
expert on this group, or as the singular voice to consider, understand, or appreciate their work.
13

Just as the dance floors of nightlife exemplify so clearly, there can never be just one story, one
experience, or one interpretation of what takes place in or around queer nightlife. My voice, and
my body, is just one of many, pulsating with its own experiences, points of view, and needs. As
nightlife scholar Fiona Buckland writes, it is in queer nightlife where we all come together,
through sonic energy and kinetic connection, and it is here where our lifeworlds can be created,
articulated, embodied, performed, expressed, and contested.
14

13
Although my art historical, curatorial, and pedagogical work consistently centers women, queer people, and
people of color (particularly Latina/o/x populations), I reject the notion that I am an expert on these areas. I view
notions of expertise or specialization as a colonial gesture, one that assumes that one can know all about something
and wield power over it. I am much more invested in sharing power and in fostering a collective voice than elevating
my own. This thinking is informed, in part, by conversations with friend and collaborator Bianca M. Morán as well
as curator Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, who served as 2018-2019 Visiting Lecturer at USC Roski School of Art and Design.
14
Fiona Buckland, Impossible Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 3.

8

LA NIGHTLIFE CONTEXTS

To trace the histories and circuits of queer of color space-making, community-building,
and art-making in and beyond nightlife is a challenging task, and certainly a project in and of
itself, but for the purposes of this thesis it is both strategic and illuminating to employ what
performance scholar and theorist Meiling Cheng has identified as a “multicentric” understanding
of place, recognizing how the cultures (and subcultures) of each neighborhood, city, and county
within a diverse region such as Southern California contribute to a kaleidoscopic view that
challenges any master narrative formation.
15
This multicentricity also troubles the impulse to
place queers of color within an urban/suburban binary, pushing us to revise our sense of where
we might locate queer of color art-making, sociality, politics, and desire, and how groups might
traverse across both urban and suburban contexts.
16

Los Angeles’ queer nightlife circuits—its bars, nightclubs, underground parties, and post-
partying escapades—offer a lot to think about in terms of residents’ relationship and access to
the city’s public space.
17
For the Chicano generation of the 1960s and 1970s, access around the

15
Meiling Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art (Berkeley: UC Press), 67-68.
16
This has certainly been my experience as someone raised in a Mexican enclave in Orange County, CA, but who
works, studies, socializes, and builds community within Los Angeles’s eastside and downtown areas. To learn
more about queer sociality and the urban/suburban binary for queers of color in Southern California, see
Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
For a transnational account, with chapters on California, see Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne Marie Bouthillette, and
Yolanda Retter, Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1997).
17
While many public places have served as sites for sociality and leisure, including restaurants, cafes, parks, public
events, and the streets themselves, this thesis hones in on queer nightlife as the site where sociality and leisure meet
activism, community-building, and art-making to carve new space in the city. For a fantastic placemaking account of
a single restaurant (which later became a nightclub due to gentrification and change of ownership), see Natalia
Molina, “The Importance of Place and Place-Makers in the Life of a Los Angeles Community: What Gentrification
Erases from Echo Park,” Southern California Quarterly 97, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 69-111. On the boulevard, see
Carribean Fragoza, “Cruising Down SoCal's Boulevards: Streets as Spaces for Celebration and Cultural Resistance,”
KCET Artbound, February 24, 2017, available online: https://www.kcet.org/shows/ artbound/cruising-on-socals-
boulevards-the-streets-as-spaces-for-celebration-and-cultural; accessed December 9, 2019.

9
city was limited, and policed, especially for those who resided in East Los Angeles.
18
Over time,
queers of color would carve their own paths outside of their siloed communities, regardless of
the risk of harassment or exclusion, with many piling in and making their own spaces within
nightlife.
19
These venues should not be romanticized, though, as their collective history is
fraught, from the criminalization of gay bar clients and owners in the early 1950s to de-facto
discrimination practices of dress-codes and admission policies aimed at preventing people of
color from entering the doors [Fig. 2 & Fig. 3]. The 1970s and onward saw the rise of culturally-
specific nightlife networks across the city, with each network contributing to the city’s
multicentric nightlife landscape and percolating into music, theater, film, and art worlds.
20

For the Los Angeles queer of color network considered in this thesis, it is important to
highlight a very particular set of nightlife venues and histories, and the people who have
contributed them, to set the context for the importance of queer nightlife for this group of artists
and cultural producers. In many ways, this collaborative nightlife network was born and nurtured
through the life and work of the late Ignacio “Nacho” Nava Jr., co-founder of the nightlife

18
I am using “Chicano” in this context to point to a generation of young people in the 1960s and 1970s who self-
identified with the term and built a collective civil rights and arts movement based on the identification. To learn
more about this approach and its parameters, see Mario T. García, The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the
Movement (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015).
19
This quest for social and sexual freedom highlights the ways young queers of color since the 1960s, including
Latina/o/x folks, have challenged demarcated urban space. For more on this process, see Richard T. Rodríguez, “The
Architectures of Latino Sexuality.” Social Text 33, no. 2 (June 2015): 83-98. For Chicano spacemaking in LA, see
Anthony F. Macias, Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-
1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). For a personal account from a Chicano perspective, see James Rojas,
“From the Eastside to Hollywood: Chicano Queer Trailblazers in 1970s L.A.,” KCET LOST L.A., September 2,
2016, available online at: https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/from-the-eastside-to-hollywood-chicano-queer-
trailblazers-in-1970s-la; accessed December 16, 2019.
Rojas also contributed to an interactive digital feature on the importance of music—particularly disco—for queer
communities in Southern California. See Joseph Daniel Valencia, “My SoCal Mixtape: Influential Chicanos Made
Playlists Using the Songs That Shaped Their Youth,” KCET Artbound, February 22, 2017, available online at:
https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/a-southern-california-mixtape; accessed December 16, 2019.
20
Queer communities that performance artist Ron Athey circulated in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, which
included friends such as Vaginal Davis and Jennifer Doyle (whose remarks opens this thesis), were mostly linked to
punk movements in Silver Lake/Echo Park and on the edges of downtown. Amelia Jones, personal communication,
January 27, 2020.

10
recurring party Mustache Mondays, who ignited downtown Los Angeles with his cultural
leadership and contributions to the city’s queer underground and experimental club scene, and
who brought together a constellation of creative, like-minded individuals who contributed to the
party and each other’s livelihoods and artistic practices [Fig. 4]. Nava frequented a variety of
queer nightlife venues in Los Angeles, from Arena Nightclub and Circus Disco in Hollywood, to
Latina/o/x-centric venues such as the Mayan, Plaza, Tempo, and The New Jalisco Bar. He
experienced and observed how each nightlife venue contributed something unique to the city’s
queer of color landscape, and in September 2007, Nava, alongside Danny Gonzalez, Josh Peace,
Dino Dinco, and friends established Mustache Mondays in downtown.
21
Mustache was the
group’s take on queer nightlife done right, operating in opposition to the stuffy and
predominately white, gay, and male venues of Hollywood and West Hollywood, and over the
course of a decade, the recurring party pushed nightlife boundaries with its diverse and legendary
lineup of DJs, music performances, lighting and set designs, performance art, flyers, and
merchandise, all contributing to providing space for so many different members of the city’s
queer and transgender communities to come together.
22

Mustache was a place for artistic experimentation and queer community-building.
Throughout its ten-year run, Esparza, Hernandez, and Ruiz would be pulled into some aspect of
Mustache programs and operations, from working the door to performing as a featured artist to
helping design flyers and/or promote one of the nights online. Nava’s visionary work provided a

21
I am indebted to Paulina Lara who, through her own life and through the course of conducting research for our
Liberate the Bar! Queer Nightlife, Activism, and Spacemaking exhibition, shared with me so many different
nightlife stories about Nava, his friends, collaborators, and mentees, and the late-night places where they partied.
22
In a retrospective article for Red Bull Music Academy, Marke B. writes: “Mustache launched during a moment of
creative ferment in American queer nightlife when a growing population of clubgoers was reacting against the
homogenized pop-house sounds and cookie-cutter corporate feel of the clubs and culture at large… [Mustache had
a] mission to diversify gay nightlife.” See Marke B., “Celebrating Ten Years of Mustache Mondays, LA’s
Iconoclastic Party,” Redbull Music Academy Daily, October 20, 2017, available online at:
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/10/mustache-mondays; accessed December 6, 2018.

11
consistent platform for Esparza, Hernandez, and Ruiz, and so many others, to experiment
creatively while also fostering the type of community that allowed for these experimentations to
debut within a welcoming and generative environment. Furthermore, Nava’s investment in those
around him extended well beyond these critical nightlife moments, spilling over into the
everyday of working and socializing, establishing an ethos of care and support that would
become central to the networks of people who knew and worked with him. For those who knew
him, there is without a doubt a sense of commitment to his legacy and the continuation of his
work through the collective efforts that he led by his own example. And so, for this network, I
understand collaboration and collectivity (staying together and working together) as powerful
modes that build upon ancestral behaviors of survival while simultaneously operating as an
homage to Nava—to process his loss and to continue to express creativity and joy as disparate
pieces that form the whole.
23

ESCANDALOS ANGELES

I take us back to the summer of 2018, on the Eastside, at a bar located on the corner of
Beverly and Garfield in Montebello. The façade of this small but mighty nightclub is spray-
painted black and adorned with the word CHICO in bright gold capital letters. This Friday night
is a special occasion, as artists Sebastian Hernandez and Gabriela Ruiz are scheduled to debut a
new performance as part of the queer film and event series Dirty Looks: On Location. The
organizers of this event series collaborated with local artists, performers, bar owners, curators,

23
My intention here is to acknowledge Nava and Mustache as critical influences in this study of this queer nightlife
network, its relationships, and creative outputs, but I write with sensitivity and care, and also love, especially for
Paulina Lara, my amiga who I have known for many years and whose side I have been by for the past year as she
has experienced and processed the loss of her beloved Nacho.

12
and scholars to uncover and showcase the multiple people, places, and histories that have formed
the region’s queer cultural landscape.
24
For this event, Escandalos Angeles, Hernandez and Ruiz
would pay homage to performance artist Robert Legorreta and the East Los Angeles barrios that
birthed his “Cyclona” persona.
25

The walls of this small and crowded venue are lined with booths and tables (and the bar),
and, for this event, the television monitors that hang on each side of the venue’s back wall
broadcasted images of Legorreta fashioned in his signature “Cyclona” garb—a gorgeous hand-
made gown, a whitened face, elaborate eye makeup, and a red-lipsticked mouth [Fig. 5]. Born in
El Paso in 1952 and raised in East Los Angeles, the artist is most known for his public
interventions taking place when he was a student in the 1960s at the local campuses of Garfield
High School and California State University, Los Angeles and throughout the streets that weaved
through Whittier Boulevard. These interventions, whether individually or collectively enacted,
often sought to disrupt the close-minded character of the city’s Chicano public sphere.
26

At the event and through its digital and printed promotional materials, Legorreta was
positioned as a vanguard of the performance world, both inside and outside of Latina/o/x
contexts. Suzanne Lacy and Jennifer Flores Sternad have emphasized this vanguardism in their
essay on the history of Southern California performance, noting that although the Legorreta’s
“in-your-face” strategy was typical for those working in performance, the artist’s public

24
See Bradford Nordeen, Dirty Looks: On Location (Los Angeles: Dirty Looks Inc., 2018).
25
See the Facebook event page https://www.facebook.com/events/1018083285025116/; The event title, Escandalos
Angeles, is a portmanteau of the Spanish words Escandalosa (scandalous) and Los Ángeles (LA) and also references
a direct connection to Legorreta who used that term to describe himself and his work. See footnote annotations #34
and #52 in Robb Hernandez, Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde. (New York,
NY: New York University Press, 2019), 271-272.
26
My use of Chicano here specifically evokes gender and same-sex exclusion and discrimination present within East
Los Angeles during this time. On this point see Jennifer Flores Sternad, “Cyclona and Early Chicano Performance
Art: An Interview with Robert Legorreta,” GLQ 12, no. 3 (June 2006): 477. For a deeper historical account Robert
“Cyclona” Legorreta’s life, activism, artistic practice, and archives, see Robb Hernandez, The Fire of Life: The
Robert Legorreta-Cyclona Collection (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2009).

13
interventions during the late 1960s marked a shift from private to public audiences that would
not be explored by other artists in the region until well into the 1970s.
27

Taking from their community knowledge and collective research of the artist, Ruiz and
Hernandez sought to pay homage to Legorreta by developing a performance that employed non-
normative gender roles and desire and “in-your-face” sensibility, while also critiquing the
government rhetoric around Mexican and Central American immigrants that was increasingly
prominent during the summer.
28
The performance opened with an audio track and the voice of
Donald Trump echoed through the bar: “These aren’t people. These are animals.” The audio was
taken from a May 2018 White House meeting with local Californian leaders who had opposed
the rise of sanctuary city policies being implemented across their state.
29
Ruiz entered the space,
sat down, and listened to the track [Fig. 6]. She wore a white muscle shirt with khaki pants,
channeling what cultural theorist Richard T. Rodríguez has called a “queer homeboy aesthetic,”
a rearticulation of Chicano working-class masculinity: bold, dominant, and taking up space.
30

With her legs spread apart and her arms behind her head, Ruiz listened to the audio track and

27
See Jennifer Flores Sternad, “Cyclona and Early Chicano Performance Art,” 475; and Jennifer Flores Sternad and
Suzanne Lacy, “Voices, Variations, and Deviations: From the LACE Archive of Southern California Performance
Art” in Live Art in LA: Performances in Southern California, 1970-1983, ed. Peggy Phelan (New York and London:
Routledge, 2012), 90.
28
In preparation for the event/performance, the artists conducted research within the Cyclona archival collections
available at the ONE Archives at USC Libraries, the largest repository of LGBTQ materials in the world. Gabriela
Ruiz, interviewed by the author on December 1, 2018. It must also be stated that although Legorreta is still very
much alive, he was not sought out or invited to participate in this performance program, and in some respects, the
event gave the impression that he was actually deceased. Nao Bustamante, who had attended the event, had
questioned, in a hysteric frenzy with a fellow performance artist a few days prior to the event, “What if Cyclona just
shows up and performs and ruins the party!? That would be so amazing!” To Bustamante’s disappointment,
Legorreta did not intervene, nor did he show up at all. Nao Bustamante, interviewed by the author on February 25,
2020. I hope to pursue a future investigation of what this performance means in the absence of Legorreta.
29
Gregory Korte and Alan Gomez, “Trump ramps up rhetoric on undocumented immigrants: ‘These aren't people.
These are animals,’” USA Today, May 16, 2018, available online at:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/05/16/trump-immigrants-animals-mexico-democrats-sanctuary-
cities/617252002/; accessed December 1, 2018.
30
Richard T. Rodríguez, “Queering the Homeboy Aesthetic,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 31, no. 2 (Fall
2006): 127-137.

14
became possessed by its sound and message. She began to demonstrate animalistic behaviors,
including aggressive facial expressions, grunting, and growling.
Hernandez jumped into the space with an equally dynamic response to the audio [Fig. 7].
Serving as Ruiz’s femme counterpart, Hernandez wore a navy tube top and black mini skirt with
a long silver chain belt. For the next few minutes, the artists would circle each other and attack
one another, wreaking havoc throughout the bar. This chaos and subversion of traditional
Chicano gender roles overlaid with important aspects of Legorreta’s work, as the artist insistently
rejected the characterization of himself or his Cyclona persona as male, female, masculine, or
feminine.
31

Music played throughout the performance, with each song dictating Hernandez’s and
Ruiz’s movements. “San Cha started playing and Sebastian tried to seduce me,” recalled Ruiz.
32

The music of the Chicana songstress evoked drama and love and had ceased the duo’s
animalistic behaviors.
33
The performance then became a love story and an elaborate courtship, as
Hernandez danced around Ruiz and offered her orange foods such as cheeto puffs (another blow
to Donald Trump) in an effort to seduce her. Once Hernandez had successfully seduced Ruiz, the
chaotic performance had ended with a cutting of a beautiful pink sheet cake—one that read
CYCLONA POR VIDA (CYCLONA FOR LIFE) [Fig. 8].
34

31
Jennifer Flores Sternad, “Cyclona and Early Chicano Performance Art,” 478. On the queering of dominant culture
through dance, and the pleasure of this subversion, see Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, “Choreographies of Resistance:
Latino Queer Dance and the Utopian Performative” in Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, eds. Michael Hames-
Garcia and Ernesto Javier Martínez, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 275.
32
Gabriela Ruiz, interviewed by the author on December 1, 2018.
33
San Cha is also a friend and collaborator within this network, notably beginning her career in queer nightlife drag
and performance scenes in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, before settling in Los Angeles to work exclusively as a
singer-songwriter and performer. See Stephanie Mendez, “San Cha, The Fierce Latinx Musician Anchoring Herself
in Rancheras and Identity,” She Shred Magazine, November 7, 2018, available online at:
https://sheshredsmag.com/san-cha; accessed January 22, 2020.
34
Sheet cake is a staple in American working-class and middle-class celebratory occasions, particularly for
communities of color, due to the cake’s cheap price and widespread availability at local supermarkets and bakeries.

15
As a performance, Escandalos Angeles reveals artistic strategies of collaboration and site-
responsivity that are central to Hernandez, Ruiz, and others to produce new work. This
thoughtful consideration of a particular site’s location, history, and contemporary significance
has served as a foundation for many art and performance works.
35
This performance is deeply
informed by its context: Club sCUM night at Club Chico. Founded in 1991, the Montebello bar
is noted for its long-standing role as a gathering site for Chicano homeboys. Chico has been
recognized as a historic space for “men desiring men who adopt the homeboy aesthetic, as well
as for those who seek it out for pleasure.”
36
Today the bar has changed in some regards. It now
bills itself as “The Best Latino Gay Bar in Los Angeles,” expanding beyond its “homo-
homeboy” clientele to cater to the broader Latina/o/x community in and beyond Los Angeles.
Since 2016, the bar has become the home of Club sCUM, a monthly “punk/camp/trash/rock en
Español night” (to use the words of performance art curator Dino Dinco), providing space for a
new clientele who might have never felt welcome within the bar back in the day.
37
This
dichotomy of past and present Chico, of homeboys and punks, form pillars of inspiration for
Hernandez and Ruiz’s performance via Ruiz’s clothing, their sCUM audience, as well as through
the evocation of Legorreta who had moved through proto-punk and cholo scenes of the 1960s
and 1970s inside and outside of nightlife.
38

35
Esparza also develops work with this strategy in mind. “I'm always thinking about history,” Esparza once stated.
“As I walk through the city, I'm always imaging the many changes the landscape has undergone and attempting to
imagine what the landscape looked like before all of these different migrations happened.” Read more: “Bridging
and Breaking: Roundtable with Erin Christovale, Jennifer Doyle, Anne Ellegood, Rafa Esparza, Naima J. Keith, and
Lauren Mackler,” 96.
36
Richard T. Rodríguez, “Queering the Homeboy Aesthetic,” 131.
37
Dino Dinco, “Loving and Partying at Chico: ‘The Best Latino Gay Bar’ in Montebello,” KCET Artbound,
February 15, 2017, available online at: https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/history-behind-chico-latino-gay-bar-
montebello-los-angeles; accessed November 29, 2018.
38
Legorreta moved through different scenes with the help of sophisticated modes of self-fashioning. At times he
was enmeshed in proto-punk and glitter queer scenes, and other times he infiltrated various gay and straight bars to
seduce and tease cholos. This thread of seduction also links Hernandez and Ruiz’s performance with Legorreta. On
Legorreta and “proto-punk” see Jennifer Flores Sternad and Suzanne Lacy, “Voices, Variations, and Deviations,”
96; On Legorreta and “glitter queer” see Jennifer Flores Sternad, “Cyclona and Early Chicano Performance Art,”

16
The performance also reveals the artists’ investment in knowledge sharing and artistic
and ancestral commemoration. Through performance, Hernandez and Ruiz transform their
nightlife context to an environment that can consider gaps and losses of knowledge within queer
communities of color, particularly the way that a figure such as Legorreta could be improperly
historicized and/or might be fading away from the public imaginary.
39
By invoking the
performance practice of Legorreta, Hernandez and Ruiz not only aligned themselves with the
vanguard artist but also re-centered his legacy for a twenty-first century queer of color
audience.
40
The performance’s queer bending of time, stepping out of Western and hetero-
patriarchal linearity to bring Legorreta’s past performances to the present moment, signals that
the present is not enough for queers of color, that it can be altered and collapsed through art and
queer and ancestral ways of being, and that these modes can be utilized to raise awareness about
an issue or to commemorate someone.
41
In its most radical sense, the knowledge sharing and
commemoration in Escandalos Angeles operates as a counter memory-making process against
the hegemonic canon. Amidst the backdrop of gentrification and the shifting landscapes of

485; On “teasing cholos” see 481 of the same text. “At the time I had long hair so I wasn’t using wigs. I would
actually go into the Sweetheart Bar dressed as a female and dance with the drunks, and I would tease all the cholos
and the gang members and all these crazy guys who were stoned out of their brains. I had the wildest, craziest time.”
39
As previously mentioned, Legorreta’s archives are held at both UCLA and USC repositories. He and his archives
have been the subject of important scholarship by Hernandez as well as through curatorial endeavors by C. Ondine
Chavoya, David Evas Frantz, and Rita Gonzalez, whose texts are included in the bibliography of this thesis.
40
Coincidently, Legorreta employed this very performance strategy, only in his case it was decades prior and for a
dear friend: Edmundo “Mundo” Meza at the first-anniversary celebration of VIVA! Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists
of Los Angeles, an artist coalition and nonprofit committed to increasing queer Latina/o/x representation in art,
performance, and activist circuits in Los Angeles. While there are differences between these artists and their
evocations—Meza’s life and artistic contribution at the time risked near erasure from the historical record, compared
to Legorreta, whose archives are preserved by and available for viewing at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research
Center and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries—the performance of remembrance enacted by
Legorreta, Hernandez, and Ruiz across time and space further elucidates how knowledge sharing and the honoring
of artistic and ancestral lineages is a key strategy for queer of color culture and creative expression. On Legorreta’s
performance, see Robb Hernandez. “Mundos Alternos - Alien Skins” YouTube video, 13:56. Posted May 2019,
available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=7s&v=qbG7v75RZJM; accessed December 10, 2019.
41
On queering “straight” time, see José Esteban Muñoz, “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face
of Gay Pragmatism” in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, eds. George E.
Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 457-458.

17
Los Angeles, the rolling back of federal protections for queer and transgender individuals, and
the increased negative rhetoric and criminalization against Latina/o/x individuals across the
United States since Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the celebration of queer of color
working-class cultural heritage and legacy was a radical act—one tied to survival where artists
and participants could move forward with a present relationship to the past.

NOSTRA FIESTA

When you drive or walk up South Main Street in downtown Los Angeles you will pass
by a bright pink storefront mural on your left-hand side between Third and Second Street. This
mural by Rafa Esparza, Gabriela Ruiz, and friends marks the location of the New Jalisco Bar,
a nightlife institution with a deep history in the city spanning generations of familial ownership
and a series of name revisions. Jalisco is one of the longest-standing Latina/o/x bars in the city
and over its lifespan it has become recognized among its clientele as a stronghold for those
seeking to enjoy Spanish-speaking drag queens, sexy male dancers, endless beer buckets, and no
cover charge.
42
Esparza, Ruiz, and friends have frequented the dive bar for years, finding solace
and community within its first-generation Latina/o/x and immigrant-centric environment.
43

It was April 2019 and Paulina Lara and I had been moving quickly to organize our
Liberate the Bar! Queer Nightlife, Activism, and Spacemaking exhibition in collaboration with

42
For example, see the brief writeup “The New Jalisco Bar,” Travel Gay, October 19, 2018, available online at:
https://www.travelgay.com/venue/the-new-jalisco-bar; accessed May 9, 2019.
43
Jalisco’s clientele is notably different from those who have historically frequented Chico Bar (the bar mentioned
in the first case study of this thesis). First-generation Latina/o/x frequenters, many Spanish-speaking, form the core
of Jalisco’s base, while Latina/o/x Angelenos who are more assimilated, including cholo clients, have found their
home at Chico. In recent years, Chico has broadened its appealed to a more general Latina/o/x audience, and this has
only extended since hosting Club sCUM on the last Friday of each month. It is also notable that Esparza, Hernandez,
and Ruiz, and members of their queer nightlife network, frequent both Jalisco and Chico, a detail that I attribute to
their heterogeneous cultural identifications and investments in their city’s queer nightlife landscape.

18
ONE Archives at the USC Libraries and the ONE Archives Foundation. Lara and I had spent
nearly all summer together meeting with artists and community members, conducting archival
research, and coordinating exhibition logistics. Many times, at the end of a busy workday, we
would go out to have a drink to relax and celebrate our progress. Lara especially loved visiting
Jalisco, and on one trip to the bar, she was asked by the owners if she had known of any artists
who might want to repaint the bar’s exterior. Lara had been at the bar that night with Ruiz and
had mentioned to the owners that Ruiz was in fact an artist. Interested in learning more, the
owners asked if Lara and Ruiz could share their ideas for a possible paint job. The duo promised
to return to the bar with a formal proposal, and, over the course of a few nights, Lara and Ruiz
connected with Esparza to outline a design proposal, budget, and timeline in dialogue with
Jalisco.
44

Lara returned to the bar and proposed to the owners that Esparza and Ruiz not complete a
simple paint job, but instead produce a mural. The project would be completed in two days with
supplies paid by the bar. “The owners said yes—I sold it to them,” Lara sent me via text
message.
45
Upon gaining the bar’s approval, Lara, Esparza, and Ruiz rallied their friends and
loved ones to get started on the mural. Everyone had a role: Lara served as a broker of sorts,
liaising with bar management, ensuring supplies and scaffolding were acquired, and managing
inquiries from the public; while Esparza and Ruiz came together to implement their design.
The mural had been nearly finished when I visited them around noon on May 4, 2019,
their second day of painting. My boyfriend Mark and I had brought water and chips to the group
and checked in to see how we could support them. The team had borrowed a scaffold from artist
and friend Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., but it was a bit unstable, requiring someone to keep hold of its

44
Paulina Lara, text message correspondence with author, March 28, 2020.
45
Paulina Lara, text message correspondence with author, April 24, 2019.

19
base anytime the artists were using it.
46
We traded shifts with other friends to support Esparza’s
weight as he completed the final touches on the mural. We all looked up and watched Esparza as
he painted the arm hair and chest hair on the portrait of Nacho Nava located on the far-left side
of the mural. As Esparza completed this final portrait of the mural, everyone present reflected on
Nava—a friend, mentor, and nightlife leader who was gone too soon.
The final mural, Nostra Fiesta, features nine figures rendered against a bright pink
background, surrounded by beers, music notes, and decorations, and who collectively form a
joyful ballroom scene [Fig. 9]. Elements of the mural’s composition reference a print by
Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada (1851-1913) that commemorated the 1901 incident of El
baile de los cuarenta y uno

in Mexico City, where 41 men were illegally raided, brutalized, and
detained by the police for their alleged homosexuality. This early twentieth century scandal
catapulted LGBT discourse in the media for the first time in Mexican history and is now
recognized as a seed to the country’s modern-day LGBT rights movement.
47
Esparza and Ruiz
borrow central elements of Posada’s composition, including a dancing duo of men wearing a suit
and gown, while remixing it to include lesbian veteranas and local Los Angeles figures such as
Nava and the drag impersonators of Juan Gabriel and Celia Cruz.
48
The mural was unveiled the
evening of May 5, 2019, with a small group of artists and friends present to celebrate Esparza,

46
Gonzalez is a Los Angeles contemporary artist and muralist whose father is a commercial sign painter. Here,
Esparza, Ruiz, and Lara pulled from their networks to locate the resources they needed to complete their project.
On Gonzalez’s practice, see Alex Khatchadouria, “Finding Art in the Everyday: Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s Paintings
Depict a Localized Perception of His Surroundings,” Amadeus, July 30, 2019, available online at:
http://amadeusmag.com/blog/finding-art-everyday-alfonso-gonzalez-jr; accessed March 28, 2020.
47
For an historical account, see Miguel Ángel Barrón Gavito, “El baile de los 41: la representación de lo afeminado
en la prensa porfiriana.” Historia y grafía, no. 34 (June 1, 2010): 47–73; for its impact today, see Alberto Najar,
“¿Por qué en México el número 41 se asocia con la homosexualidad y sólo ahora se conocen detalles secretos de su
origen?” BBC Mundo, January 11, 2017, available online at: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-
38563731; accessed May 9, 2019.
48
For more on the remix as employed as an artistic and political strategy, see Sandra de Loza’s Mural Remix
exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as examined in Karen Mary Davalos, Chicana/o Remix: Art
and Errata Since the Sixties (New York: New York University Press, 2017); and Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo,
and Pilar Tompkins Rivas. L.A. Xicano (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011).

20
Ruiz, Lara, and their collective achievement. People gathered outside to talk about the
collaboration, appreciate the mural’s composition, and consider their own relationship to Jalisco.
As the night continued, visitors moved inside the long rectangular bar to partake in its regularly
scheduled programming of Latina/o/x drag performance.
Five months later, on October 13, 2019, Lara and I would host an informal talk on the
sidewalk in front of Jalisco with Esparza and Ruiz to discuss the mural in dialogue with our
Liberate the Bar! Queer Nightlife, Activism, and Spacemaking exhibition. The artists had created
a gallery-specific installation inspired by Nostra Fiesta, and had recalled the story behind the
mural’s conception, and the various elements of its composition [Fig. 10]. Lara and I facilitated
the conversation and highlighted the importance of the mural and its place within the city. As
curators, we discussed how Lara’s leadership and contributions to Nostra Fiesta modeled a type
of culturally relevant and responsive curating that operates as a form of activism. Here, Lara’s
curatorial activism translated to the spotlighting of hyper-local and ephemeral histories, while
simultaneously marking them as important and necessary to public discourse.
49
We would once
again enter the bar after holding sidewalk conversations in front of the mural, only this time the
Sunday night programming was tailored to the mural, its history, and its contributors and friends
in mind. The bar owners had scheduled a Juan Gabriel impersonator to perform, Gabriel being
one of Nava’s favorite musicians and performers; and the impersonator presented a set of the
musician’s most iconic songs [Fig. 11]. Later in the evening, the bar hosts invited Lara, Ruiz,
and Esparza to the dancefloor to address the crowd and share additional remarks of gratitude to
the bar owners for allowing them to create something so very special for a nightlife venue of
equal significance to the group [Fig. 12].

49
See Maura Reilly, “What Is Curatorial Activism?” ARTnews, November 7, 2017, available online at:
http://www.artnews.com/2017/11/07/what-is-curatorial-activism; accessed May 9, 2019.

21
Nostra Fiesta is a remarkable artistic effort that exemplifies the ethos of this queer
nightlife network. The mural and its production tell the story of a group of friends who used their
skills, practices, and relationships to come together and produce something of value not only to
themselves, but also to the bar owners, returning clients, and the art and nightlife community
more broadly. Esparza, Ruiz, and Lara utilized their public urban platform to foreground local
and transnational histories while celebrating the individuals and venues that have breathed life
into the city. Like many murals, Nostra Fiesta is imbued with a pedagogical spirit, as its
composition calls attention to early LGBTQ history in Mexico, where many of the bar’s clients
share cultural roots, while simultaneously honoring and recognizing local legend and friend
Nacho Nava as a frequent visitor who had brought Esparza, Ruiz, and Lara to the bar, and as a
leader in the city’s underground nightlife circuits.
The mural’s explicitly queer iconography also makes it significant. As Nostra Fiesta
came to be, Esparza and Lara reflected on the history of muralism in Los Angeles, recognizing
the dearth of queer representation in this medium.
50
While muralism in Los Angeles has played
an important role in serving as a vehicle for public teaching, participation, and visibility for
communities of color, it has not always been the case that LGBTQ figures and iconography have
been included or centered in mural compositions. For Chicano Movement muralism in particular,
a combination of male bravado, homophobia, heteronormativity, and general cultural resistance
to queerness has played a role in effectively censoring or preventing queer iconography from
being created or sustained over time.
51

50
Paulina Lara, personal communication with author, July 10, 2019.
51
Chicana feminist Cherie Moraga writes about this homophobia and cultural resistance, asserting that true
liberation in El Movimiento is one that includes the embrace of all its people, including its jotería (queers).
See Cherie Moraga, “Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe.” In Queer Cultures eds. Deborah Carlin
and Jennifer DiGrazia (New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004), 225.

22
In his book chapter “The Iconoclasts of Queer Aztlán,” public humanist Robb Hernandez
documented and reflected on key examples since the 1990s of public resistance and outright
violence toward public art projects that have centered queer of color iconographic imagery.
These include Alex Donis’ My Cathedral (1997), a site-specific installation that debuted in the
street-facing windows of Galería de la Raza in San Francisco’s Mission district, a neighborhood
historically home to the city’s Latina/o/x populations [Fig. 13]. Here, the artist’s same-sex
compositions of kisses between religious and cultural figures such as Mary Magdalene and
La Virgen de Guadalupe, Jesus Christ and Lord Rama, and Che Guevara and Cesar Chavez were
met with waves of confusion, protest, and vandalism. Nearly twenty years later at the same
gallery, artist Manuel Paul (on behalf of the Maricón Collective) would create Por Vida (2015),
a street mural depicting a transgender Chicano flanked by two same-sex couples in a warm
embrace [Fig. 14]. This explicitly queer mural would be defaced three times over the course of
its first summer in the city, revealing the ways in which queer visual artists’ desires to see
themselves reflected within the public sphere has been challenged by members of their own
community as well as by members of the public at large.
52
While both examples took place in
San Francisco, they nevertheless illustrate a shared struggle for queer of color artistic visibility
that has also permeated throughout the Los Angeles public sphere.
53
Like their San Francisco
counterparts, the artists of Nostra Fiesta queered public art (mural) traditions, producing what

52
To learn more about these public art projects and their controversies, see Robb Hernandez, Archiving and
Epidemic, 43-45.
53
Interestingly enough, Netflix’s new comedy-drama series Gentefied (2020), created by Marvin Lemus and
Linda Yvette Chávez details a fictional Boyle Heights mural that is protested against for its queer iconography.
Learn more in Michael Cuby, “Seen: Gentefied Tackles Gentrification with Humor and Authenticity,” them.,
February 21, 2020, available online at: https://www.them.us/story/gentefied-gentrification-netflix; accessed
March 1, 2020.

23
scholar and theorist Luis Aponte-Parés has called Latina/o/x “queerscapes,” new landscapes
whose explicitly queer iconography contributes to a reterritorialization of urban public space.
54

At the time of this thesis publication, Nostra Fiesta has officially reached its one-year
anniversary. It is a blessing to report that there have been no incidents with the mural in terms of
vandalism or complaints. The mural’s height, coupled with Esparza, Ruiz, and Lara’s
longstanding relationships with Jalisco, built upon years of visits, have secured the mural’s spot
as a vibrant welcome sign for the bar that will be guarded by bar owners, bar regulars, and the
artists and friends involved for many years to come.
55

YOU

Marge Simpson, a sexy luchador, and a woman dressed as a disco ball stand among
others on an elevated platform surrounded by a lively crowd of people cheering for them
[Fig. 15]. These are the costume contest finalists for Halloween night at YOU—a monthly queer
and transgender people of color (QTPOC) dance party established and directed by Sebastian
Hernandez. As I stand at the end of the bar’s large and crowded dancefloor with friends, we
quickly discuss who we want to win the contest. “Marge! Luchador!! Disco ball!!!” Our voices

54
My use of “explicitly queer” marks the ways that Esparza and Ruiz’s mural visualizes their own queer and
cultural identifications. This does not, however, intend to undermine generations of artists before Esparza and Ruiz
who have created murals or public art interventions with a queer bend. See Hernandez’s tracings of queer Chicano
murals and other public interventions during the 1960s and 1970s in Robb Hernandez, Archival Body/Archival
Space: Queer Remains of the Chicano Avant-Garde in Los Angeles, 1969-2009 (PhD. diss., University of Maryland,
College Park, 2011). On reterritorialization through queerscapes and the use of this terminology, see Luis Aponte-
Parés, “Outside/In: Crossing Queer and Latino Boundaries.” In Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York, eds.
Agustín Laó-Montes and Arlene Dávila (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 368.
55
Since The New Jalisco Bar’s mural reveal last year, the bar and so many other nightlife venues have seen
unprecedented temporary closures due to the COVID-19 outbreak, forcing many non-essential establishments and
workers to self-quarantine to flatten the curve of spreading the deadly virus. Coronavirus has disproportionately
impacted Latina/o/x and African American families and workers, who have been either been forced to continue
working in precarious conditions or lost their jobs entirely without a secured financial back-up plan. Our resiliency,
survival skills, and creativity in unprecedented times continues to be tested and enacted.

24
come together as we scream to collectively choose on a winner. Hernandez uses the DJ’s
microphone to calm the crowd and moderate the voice levels serving as votes. It seems that we
are aligned with the others in the crowd, as Marge, luchador, and disco ball make it to the top
three. I yell at the top of my lungs for luchador to win, but to my dismay, Hernandez declares
disco ball the winner. It is midnight and the night is still very young. With the costume contest
over, we drink and dance to eclectic and genre-bending DJ sets by BAE BAE (Kumi James),
PACHUCO (Andrew Jaramillo), and LATEX LUCIFER, while also showing love to and support
for Hernandez.
Since its launch at La Cita on June 12, 2019, Hernandez has organized impressive line-
ups of DJs including Asmara, Mia Carucci, Helikonia, and Morenxxx, as well as fashion
designers, social media influencers, and artists from within Hernandez’s circle, who have served
as the party’s hosts and/or co-organizers [Fig. 16]. Hernandez also contributes as DJ on some
nights, reviving their performance moniker born from Mustache, BROWNSKINHAZEL, for
their DJ debut.
While YOU deviates from the previous case studies in that it is not a single artwork or
performance, I highlight its importance within the context of queer nightlife networks, and
consider the organization, promotion, operations, and partying therein as an extension of
Hernandez and their artistic practice.
56
It is through YOU that Hernandez can bring together
family, friends, artists, designers, DJs, dancers, composers, performers, and members of the
general public in dialogue with one another within this nightlife context. Here, Hernandez plays
a role in activating what performance scholar and theorist José Esteban Muñoz identified as the

56
In a future text, whether a separate project or extension of this thesis, I am interested in writing about the visuality
of YOU vis-à-vis the digital flyers from each iteration of the party. These are designed by Hernandez and incorporate
a range of cultural, vernacular, and art historical references, further emphasizing links among nightlife, visual arts,
performance, and other modes of cultural production.

25
“transformative power” of nightlife for queers and people of color.
57
For Muñoz, nightlife, and
the art, performances, and sociality taking place within, can operate as sites of becoming both for
performers and attendees, where they can imagine, temporally and physically, who and where
they can and want to be in the present and future.
58

YOU is an opportunity for Hernandez to facilitate the same generative nightlife context
that has kept them alive and thriving in the city. And as mentioned in the introduction of this
thesis, queer nightlife, and the Mustache series in particular, has served as a safe space and
platform for Hernandez, a place where, through performance and sociality, Hernandez has been
able to experiment creatively but also process and survive the violence and devaluation of their
everyday life.
59
This is in line with thinking set forth by critic and theorist Joshua Chambers-
Letson who, echoing Muñoz, asserts that parties or social spaces in general can serve as sites of
refuge (“to catch one’s breath when you can’t breathe”), as well as serve as catalysts for
revolutionary planning and futuristic world-making.
60
World-making, as a process, does not
suggest the creation of a geopolitical or bordered culture but rather the production of a moment
or space of “creative, expressive, and transformative possibilities.”
61
As an organizer of nightlife
situations, Hernandez taps into this world-making apparatus to develop art and performances,

57
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009),
108.
58
Ibid., 100.
59
In a video feature, Hernandez says: “I live in an oppressive society in which I have had to fight for my existence. I
know that if I am dancing, I am alive, and for me movement is happiness.”

See Be You, episode 10, “Finding
Liberation in Art with Sebastian Hernandez,” directed by Jazmin Garcia, written by Sebastian Hernandez, published
December 7, 2018, on BESE, accessed December 7, 2018. https://www.bese.com/be-you-Sebastián-hernandez/
60
Joshua Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York: NYU Press, 2018), xi.
See also José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 195.
61
Fiona Buckland, Impossible Dance, 4.

26
build communality, visibility, and a sense of self, while spring-boarding into other underground
and mainstream art, design, and performance settings and opportunities.
62

When asked about YOU in relation to the legacy of Mustache and other parties and
nightlife venues in Los Angeles, Hernandez expressed that the party came about, in part, as a
means to mourn and process the loss of Mustache co-founder Nacho Nava.
63
Through partying
and coming together, Hernandez as well as Esparza, Ruiz, Lara, and others, could collectively
express joy, sadness, and communality, especially at a place such as La Cita, which had served
as an early home for Mustache. Hernandez has even called upon several individuals from the
“Mustache Family,” those who performed and gained visibility through Nava’s weekly party, to
contribute to YOU as DJs, drag performers, artists, and hosts. In this way, the party has served as
just one conduit in the complex ritual of personal and collective mourning.
64
The party is by no
means the be-all-and-end-all of the group’s mourning of Nava—as the group has come together
for a number of more formal occasions including Nava’s birthday and anniversary of passing—
but it is one of the more public-facing rituals, albeit indirectly.
Since starting at La Cita, YOU has morphed and found homes at other venues. On
one occasion, Hernandez used their platform as events producer to host a public talk at the Ace
Hotel, which was followed by a dance party celebration on the downtown venue’s rooftop bar

62
Since 2016, Hernandez has exhibited their work and performed at venues across Los Angeles, including Angels
Gate Cultural Center; Club sCUM; Commonwealth and Council; Human Resources Los Angeles;
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Los Angeles County Museum
of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Mustache Mondays; NAVEL; ONE Gallery, West Hollywood;
and downtown’s Roy and Edna Disney Cal Arts Theatre (REDCAT), among many others.
63
“Artist/Curator Talk with Sebastian Hernandez & Dulce Soledad Ibarra.” Event as part of Liberate the Bar! Queer
Nightlife, Activism, and Spacemaking exhibition, ONE Gallery, West Hollywood, September 15, 2019.
64
If one of YOU’s objectives is to help keep the memory of Nava alive, the party’s recurring format works to
sustain Nava’s memory over time as the party continues to be staged. A similar phenomenon occurred with the
passing of José Esteban Muñoz. See Joshua Chambers-Letson, After the Party, xxi; and Fiona Buckland, Impossible
Dance, 19-20. As Chambers-Letson notes, writing on Muñoz’s passing: “[Parties] were a way of bringing you back
to us…” and where a “plurality of broken people who [were] trying to keep each other alive” could be established.

27
and pool [Fig. 17]. In December 2019, Hernandez moved the party away from La Cita and into
El Dorado, a smaller upscale venue located just two blocks away, and on February 11, 2020,
Hernandez collaborated with Performance Space New York, Commonwealth & Council, and a
dynamic roster of artists and performers (including Esparza, Ron Athey, and Vander Von Odd)
to host a VIP iteration of party on the occasion of the Frieze Los Angeles art fair [Fig. 18]. These
adjustments reveal the malleability of the party format, emphasizing its capacity to accommodate
the interests and needs of both Hernandez and their attendees. Above all else, YOU gestures to a
queer futurity, one that is continually in progress, as the end of the night for each monthly
iteration is not the end of it all, but rather a recharging site and point of departure for new and
continued beginnings.
65

CONCLUSION

The [art and] performance work I do was really born out of
responding to being shunned or excluded from a community.
And so, creating these spaces where we could view something
and experience something together has been the vehicle that
inspires me to want to continue to make work outside of
museums.
66

— Rafa Esparza

65
This is one of the central points in Joshua Chambers-Letson’s After the Party. See also José Esteban Muñoz,
“Queerness as Horizon,” 454.
66
“Bridging and Breaking: Roundtable with Erin Christovale, Jennifer Doyle, Anne Ellegood, Rafa Esparza, Naima
J. Keith, and Lauren Mackler,” 104.

28
[At Mustache], you [would] pay your ten or fifteen-dollar ticket to
go hear music and dance all night. But then in the middle of it you
have a great fucking performance artist who will just perform in
the middle of the night. You don’t have to go to a museum to
experience [that].
67

— Gabriela Ruiz

Queer club culture and nightlife has been a formative part of my
art-making for over a decade and has impacted what it looks like
today … I am interested in seeing how my party will impact the
next generation of art-making in Los Angeles.
68

— Sebastian Hernandez

Sometimes queer nightlife is about dancing. Other times it is about drinking and
socializing, or even fighting. But in the right context with the right people, queer nightlife is
much more. It is the place where one enacts the practice towards liberation.
69
As this thesis lays
out, for Esparza, Hernandez, Ruiz, and their friends and collaborators, queer nightlife is the site
where survival and play intersect, where the practice toward liberation is enacted, and where
opportunities to co-create art, community, and new potentialities are made.

67
Samanta Helou Hernandez, “Gabriela Ruiz Is Young, Subversive and Forging Her Own Way in the Art World,”
KCET Artbound, January 29, 2019, available online at: https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/gabriela-ruiz-is-
young-subversive-and-forging-her-own-way-in-the-art-world; accessed May 9, 2019.
68
Sebastian Hernandez, personal communication with the author on September 17, 2019.
69
David Román, “Dance Liberation” in Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, eds. Michael Hames-Garcia and
Ernesto Javier Martínez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 292.

29
Centering nightlife in the study of contemporary art and cultural production does indeed
rupture existing art historical and curatorial approaches to queer of color collaborative artistic
practices. It charts a new way of thinking about artists beyond their artistic output, a way of
thinking that makes room for them to exist and be recognized as individuals, friends, mentors,
family members, and members of a community. Distinctions between studio time and clubbing
are not generative for this group of artists, as many times the clubs are their studios, their places
to experiment and create work, as well as their places to relax, experience joy, or even lose
control. Moreover, whether performing at a bar, painting a mural on the bar’s exterior, working
the door, or partying inside, it is Esparza, Hernandez, and Ruiz’s engagement with
queer nightlife that reveals their individual and shared history, culture, politics, artistic practices,
and ways of being. Their praxes of working in connection to others emphasizes a direction for
art-making and being that traverses inside and outside nightlife, the art world, and everyday life.
It is cognizant of the past and gestures towards the future but is firmly rooted in making the
present a viable and nurturing place for them to live and thrive.

30
APPENDIX WITH FIGURES

Fig. 1: Exhibition view, Rafa Esparza: de la Calle, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
June 15, 2018, photo by Joseph Valencia

Fig. 2: Newspaper clippings detailing police raids and liquor license threats, c. 1950s, ONE
Subject Files Collection, Los Angeles (Calif.)--Bar raids 1900-2012. ONE National Gay &
Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries, photo by Joseph Valencia

31

Fig. 3: Boycott Studio One! Protest Handout, c. 1970s, ONE Subject Files Collection, Studio
One (disco:West Hollywood, Calif.) 1900-2012. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC
Libraries, photo by Joseph Valencia

32

Fig. 4: Mustache Mondays flyer, date unknown, design by Josh Peace.

Fig. 5: TV monitor with Cyclona imagery, Chico Bar, July 13, 2018, photo by Amina Cruz.

33

Fig. 6: Gabriela Ruiz performing at Chico Bar, July 13, 2018, photo by Amina Cruz.

Fig. 7: Sebastian Hernandez performing at Chico Bar, July 13, 2018, photo by Amina Cruz.

34

Fig. 8: Cutting into the Cyclona cake, Chico Bar, July 13, 2018, photo by Amina Cruz.

Fig. 9: Rafa Esparza and Gabriela Ruiz, Nostra Fiesta, The New Jalisco Bar, Los Angeles, July
11, 2019, photo by Joseph Valencia.

35

Fig. 10: Exhibition view, “Liberate the Bar! Queer Nightlife, Activism, and Spacemaking,” on
view at ONE Gallery, West Hollywood, June 28, 2019 – October 20, 2019, photo by Monica
Orozco. Rafa Esparza and Gabriela Ruiz’s gallery installation, right, replicates elements of the
New Jalisco Bar’s interior, as well as showcases the duo’s exterior mural within the embedded
TV monitor. The work on the left is by Dulce Soledad Ibarra.

36

Fig. 11: Juan Gabriel performer, The New Jalisco Bar, Los Angeles, October 13, 2019, photo by
Joseph Valencia.

37

Fig. 12: Paulina Lara, Gabriela Ruiz, and Rafa Esparza provide remarks on the Nostra Fiesta
mural project, The New Jalisco Bar, Los Angeles, October 13, 2019, photo by Joseph Valencia.

38

Fig. 13: Sidewalk view of My Cathedral exhibition by Alex Donis, 1997, Galeria de la Raza, San
Francisco, photographer unknown.

Fig. 14: Manuel Paul, Por Vida, 2015, Galería de la Raza, San Francisco, photographer
unknown.

39

Fig. 15: Costume finalists take the stage at YOU, La Cita Bar, Los Angeles, October 16, 2019,
photo by Joseph Valencia.

Fig. 16: YOU digital flyer, June 12, 2019, design by Sebastian Hernandez.

40

Fig. 17: YOU + Pistil digital flyer, Ace Hotel, August 28, 2019, design by Sebastian Hernandez.

Fig. 18: YOU + Frieze Los Angeles digital flyer, El Dorado, February 11, 2020, design by
Sebastian Hernandez.

41
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis positions queer nightlife as a central vehicle in the lives and practices of a network of artists and cultural producers working in Los Angeles over the past decade. It asks (and seeks to answer) the questions: How has nightlife provided a generative space for art, performance, and community building in LA? And how does centering nightlife in the study of contemporary art and cultural production rupture existing art historical and curatorial approaches to queer of color collaborative artistic practices? I closely analyze three case studies drawn from urban subcultural queer nightlife contexts—particularly the bars and public spaces of downtown and East Los Angeles—to underscore the radical and sophisticated ways by which artists and cultural producers co-create art, community, informal learning, visibility, and opportunity for themselves and their collaborators. The artists discussed include Rafa Esparza, Sebastian Hernandez, and Gabriela Ruiz, but membership in this network extends beyond these three agents to include family, friends, artists, designers, DJs, composers, performers, bar owners, curators, and other art and nightlife participants. Utilizing the scholarship of Luis Aponte-Parés, Macarena Gómez-Barris, and José Esteban Muñoz, and others, this thesis also considers the world-making potential of art and performance through and from nightlife, as well as queer and ancestral ways of being, to emphasize the relationships among queer of color histories, social and urban spaces, and the bodies that sustain them.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Valencia, Joseph Daniel (author)

Core Title Queer nightlife networks and the art of Rafa Esparza, Sebastian Hernandez, and Gabriela Ruiz

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Publication Date 05/07/2020

Defense Date 05/05/2020

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

Tag Alex Donis,Celia Cruz,Chicano art,Chico Bar,contemporary art,curating,Dirty Looks: On Location,Escandalos Angeles,Gabriela Ruiz,Gay bars,Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,Juan Gabriel,La Cita Bar,Latinx art,Los Angeles,Manuel Paul,Maricón Collective,museums,Mustache Mondays,Nacho Nava,nightlife,Nostra Fiesta,OAI-PMH Harvest,ONE Archives,Paulina Lara,performance art,politics of hope,queer community,queer of color critique,queer undergrounds,queerscapes,Rafa Esparza,Sebastian Hernandez,spacemaking,Survival,The New Jalisco Bar,urban space,YOU

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jones, Amelia (committee chair), Bustamante, Nao (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email jdvalenc@usc.edu,joedvalencia@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-298917

Unique identifier UC11664322

Identifier etd-ValenciaJo-8443.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-298917 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ValenciaJo-8443.pdf

Dmrecord 298917

Document Type Thesis

Rights Valencia, Joseph Daniel

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