Concerning an Antique Picture Hidden in a Collection of Latino Plays

As part of my attempt to kick the upcoming year in the ass, I am going to begin writing every day, perhaps in this blog, perhaps on my larger material. But my friends who are far better and more successful at the art of writing than myself insist, rightly so, that you gotta clear out a lot of crap before you get to the good stuff. It has certainly been true for me: it was only after a month of writing mostly crap that my first one-man show finally started coming out, and this time around I don't have a year of editing before my next big show. I need to write, and fast, and I need to write about a subject I am not terribly comfortable about: my race.

Here's the thing: I worry that I cannot write about my race, because I am not really OF my race.

Now, on the one hand, I know this is a ridiculous thing. I know that I am Latino. I have grown up knowing that I am Mexican-American, Chicano, Hispanic, Latino, whatever you want to call it. I am Latino and, for that matter, I am proud. Nevertheless, I often look around at a lot of representations of Latino culture and say, "You know what? That's not me. Some of that is; I recognize some of it. But it's not me. I did not grow up in a barrio; the neighborhood was predominantly white and suburban. I was not raised with any kind of deference to religion, particularly not The Virgin Mary. I was surrounded by machismo, yes, but it was never violent and, for the most part, I rejected it wholeheartedly. I see things that are supposed to depict Latino life, and the life it depicts is not my own.

So does that mean I am not Latino?

I actually went through this with my sexuality, in much greater desperation and with fantastic results. For much of my life, I took a look at the most predominant depictions of gay men and said, "That's not me. I'm not thin, and I'm not hairless, and I'm not athletic, and I am not manly, nor am I truly queeny in the more traditional senses of the word (according to a number of friends of mine, I am feminine in a very lesbian kind of way), and I am, despite appearances, not white." I was really getting freaked out and worried that I was the only member of my particular species of alien when I found the radical queer communities ensconced in the Appalachian woods, and had the Bee-Girl-in-the-No-Rain-video moment where I found my field of bee people, some of whom sucked my dick! It was the moment when I finally realized I was not just queer in my head, but queer in my heart. It was beautiful, and in the two years since I have kept having experiences that remind me that I may be a very particular kind of queer, but I am not alone, and I don't have to change.

I have not had that experience yet with my own Latinidad. It is, of course, different. The stakes are not so high: I do not need to be a fully self-actualized Latino to get laid. Or, you know, date or whatever. Also, I always felt justified in my feelings of alienation from the mainstream gay world: what I was alienated from was the sizeism, racism, misogyny and commodification of the gaystream, and what I found was something raw, radical, earthy and a hell of a lot more fun. I don't feel the same sense when I think about my relationship to my Latinidad: I worry that my sense of alienation comes from assimilation, classism, and internalized racism. And knowing me, I am probably right.

Funnily enough, I am more than happy to reject depictions of Latinos in mainstream gay culture. We . . . okay, every idiomatic expression I can think of for how Latinos are treated in a lot of gay media has all the wrong sorts of connotations: "We get fucked over." "We get the short end of the stick." "We get a raw deal." Yep, none of those are going to work. Let's just stick with the details: in everything from Love! Valour! Compassion! to Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss to Will and Grace to Milk, Latinos are turbo-sluts that come in two flavors: evil or stupid. And I may be a turbo-slut des temps en temps, but I am quite intelligent and, for the most part, a good person. Then there's the Philadelphia: the white man's devoted lover. It's not as bad, but as a recent viewing of I Love You, Philip Morris reminded me (SPOILER ALERT), the devoted Latino lovers tend to pop up around narratives of death, as Rodrigo Santoro, in the aforementioned film, plays Jim Carrey's lover who dies of AIDS. I could happily spend an entire hour, on-stage or off, bitching about my problems with the way that gay Latinos get represented.

But that's not what I want to do. Bitching about obvious racism is rarely useful. It's far more interesting, and much more difficult, to go after the hidden racism, the things that have been part of our field of vision so long that we forget about them, like buildings we pass on our way to work or class but never, ever enter. Racism becomes like the fields of Tuscany, fields that have been human constructs for so long that we assume it is what that part of the world is SUPPOSED to look like, and much like those Tuscan fields, there is sometimes beauty, the moments when a racial stereotype is wrenched from the grasp of the oppressor and transformed into a sign of strength, or twisted into a mockery of the oppressor himself. Is that beauty worth the cost? Can we ever separate the truth from what we expect or assume to be true? As an academic, I know the answer to that second question. As an artist, I have to leave it open in order to break through it.

Nevertheless, I have been an academic for the past few months (more on that later) and so I have begun with research. I am in Philadelphia right now, and on the way back from the SEPTA station and the grocery store I found a used bookstore and, being me, headed right in. I am never, ever one to pass up a used bookstore. Sure enough, I found things I wanted, including plays by Rick Najera and Cherrie Moraga. I figured that if I couldn't come up with my own material, I could steal from--excuse me, be inspired by . . . no, no I was right the first time, steal from--them.

It was while reading Rick Najera's work that I felt that familiar feeling creep over me, the feeling that this text was somehow calling me out for not being Latino enough. I wasn't a macho. My parents grew up working class themselves, but by the time I came around they were both fit snugly into the middle and were aiming for the upper. My friend growing up were the usual blend of predominantly white with a sprinkling of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American faces that you see in middle class neighborhoods, although being in Texas the Latino were easily the largest minority. I have never worked in a restaurant. I am not an immigrant. My parents aren't immigrants. My grandparents weren't immigrants; you have to go back to my great-grandparents on my mother's side to find family crossing the Rio Grande, whereas my father's family crossed the Rio Grande while both sides were still New Spain. Also, I use words like "whereas." The only accent I have ever displayed is a gay accent, and no, I am not fluent in Spanish, merely proficient. None of these things make me any less Latino, but they certainly make feel like a honky.

Then there's the counter impulse: the desire to assert that my family isn't like that, that someone else is getting things wrong, that any Latino writer who assumes that they speak for all Latinos is some combination of cavalier, presumptuous, stupid and cruel. The big time I feel this is whenever Latino writers talk about men hitting their wives, and how mothers of sons perpetuate this cycle of violence against women. Rick Najera does this, as does Gloria Anzaldua, and it really pisses me off. Now, I am not trying to say that there aren't a lot of Latino men who beat their wives. What I am saying is that not ALL Latino men or mothers do this. As a matter of fact, if any men in my mother's family had ever raised their hands to a woman, their own mothers would have been the first to rip them to pieces. The one time my father got really mad at me was when he heard me call a girl a jerk. This was in 8th grade, and I was totally being facetious, but my father was NOT having it. That's the respect for women that I was taught, and while Najera only mentions the phenomenon of women forgiving their sons for beating their wives in one monologue, Anzaldua, if I recall correctly, really takes some time in Borderlands/La Frontera to claim that this is an inherent part of Chicano border culture, which is the culture my mother grew up in. This pisses the bejesus out of me, because a lot of unwitting non-Latino students read that book in college and think that she's right, because this is the first exposure that they've had to border culture. I love Anzaldua's work, but that's always the part that makes me want to scream and yell and not do ANYTHING violent, thank you very much.

It was with these thoughts in mind that I found the picture.

The picture was hidden in the pages, perhaps as a bookmark or perhaps kept there in order to prevent it from being damaged. It was a black-and-white portrait of a young black woman; the style of photograph and the clothing suggested that this was the early 20th Century. This was obviously a valuable photograph to someone at some point, and it was an incredible surprise to find it in this book. Obviously, the photo most likely belonged to the last owner, but was this a family member or simply a photo they had found at a flea market and decided they liked. Was this woman's descendant reading this book, and if so for a class or for pleasure, and seeing as Rick Najera is not well-known outside Latino circles, did this mean that this woman's descendent was Latino? Did that mean this woman was Latina?

Because that's the tricky part: it's hard to tell from a photograph if someone is a Latino or not. It's not a race: it's a confluence of races and cultures that has come to both define itself and be defined as a race. This woman was a dark-skinned member of the African diaspora, but that describes a significant portion of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and a number of other Latin American countries. She could also easily have been Mexican, Chilean, or from any of the other Latin American countries that did not have large African slave populations. Even if a name had been written on the back of the photo, it would only have given hints, not answers. A Latina can erase her racial heritage by taking her husband's name and anglicizing her first name, while there are plenty of Lindas, Marias, and Dianas in the world that can sound Latina if they take a Latino husband's name. Had this woman been wearing an outfit that read as Latin, that might have given another clue, but even so it could have been a costume. As is this woman rested in between the pages, maybe Latina, maybe not.

This is the tricky part, and the problem I face: like gayness, Latinidad must be cued and recognized and can be hidden. I could give myself a French, Italian, Greek, Jewish or even just a plain old Anglo last name and no one would suspect, because those are all things people have assumed I am. I'm not going to, anymore than I'm going to try to change my voice and mannerisms and marry a woman, but I could. And while I am always happy to put on a pair of fishnets and a whole lot of body glitter to make sure people know what team I bat for, I don't really know how I can shout my Latinidad from the rooftops without it feeling somehow forced, or fake. Actually, let me rephrase that: I am more than happy to do that, but then this little voice pipes up inside my head: "Oh yeah? Prove it."

I'm working on it, little voice. I'm working on it.