Brown on Brown

Contents

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pp. v-

Acknowledgments

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pp. vii-

I wish to acknowledge the many conversations with queer Chicano/a writers such as Luis Alfaro, Francisco X. Alarc�n, Michael Nava, Ricardo Bracho, and Cherr�e Moraga; they have shed much light on how their creative acts reframe reality in ways that engage their various audiences anew. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues who have provided extremely insightful readings ...

INTRODUCTION. Narrative, Sexuality,Race, and the Self

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pp. 1-20

My subject here is sex, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and the self. Notwithstanding its multifaceted difficulties and complexities, I see it as a joyous, lively, complex, frequently surprising, and altogether gratifyingly controversial topic. One that has been treated in literature, cinema, and the arts from every angle of vision and from all ideological perspectives and yet remains as ...

CHAPTER 1. Querying Postcolonial and Borderland Queer Theory

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pp. 21-46

In Brown: The Last Discovery of America, literary agent provocateur Richard Rodriguez renders visible his experiences as queer and Chicano in a so-identified post-Protestant /Catholic postcolonial Americas. In his trademark fast-paced and highly stylized journalese mode, Rodriguez textures an identity he variously dubs as brown and “third man” (125) that occupies “the passing ...

CHAPTER 2. John Rechy’s Bending of Brown and White Canons

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pp. 47-72

In 1963 John Rechy published his runaway bestseller City of Night, introducing the American critics and readers alike to a fictionalized American demimonde. As guide into America’s cities at night, Rechy invented the unnamed, biracial (Mexican /Scottish) and bisexual protagonist from the bordertown El Paso. Since City of Night, Rechy has introduced his readers to dozens of other ...

CHAPTER 3. Arturo Islas’s and Richard Rodriguez’s Ethnosexual Re-architexturing of Metropolitan Space

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pp. 73-88

In La Mollie and the King of Tears and Days of Obligation respectively, novelist Arturo Islas and journalist Richard Rodriguez pen homographic texts that queer the contemporary Chicano/a and mainstream U.S. textual landscape. Islas and Rodriguez create first-person narrating subjects—a smooth-talking pachuco, Louie Mendoza, for Islas and a hesitantly vulnerable yet penetratingly ...

CHAPTER 4. Ana Castillo’s and Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s Bent Chicana Textualities

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pp. 89-113

U.S.-dwelling Chicana authors have come into their belle lettres own. Since the 1980s, names like Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Ch�vez, Sandra Cisneros, Lucha Corpi, Pat Mora, Cecile Pineda, Mary Helen Ponce, and Helena Mar�a Viramontes, to mention a few, have become regular sights at mainstream bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble across the country ...

CHAPTER 5. Edward J. Olmos’s Postcolonial Penalizings of the Film-Image Repertoire

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pp. 114-136

In March of 1992, Chicano actor Edward James Olmos released his directorial debut, American Me. In this film, Olmos opened cinemagoers’ eyes to the multilayered terrain—psychological, sexual, social—in his creative representation of a Chicano youth turned gangbanger in East L.A. As the film unfolds, Olmos (as director and as the story’s protagonist) begins to break new ...

CONCLUSION. Re-visioning Chicano/a Bodies and Texts

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pp. 137-148

In this concluding chapter, I want to return to several issues raised (directly and indirectly) throughout Brown on Brown. As I’ve already discussed at some length in Chapter 1, there are some critical entanglements that inform much of U.S. (borderland and postcolonial queer) cultural and literary studies today. There is the conflation of the fiction of narrative with the facts of our everyday ...

Notes

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pp. 149-157

Works Cited

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pp. 159-168

Index

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pp. 169-176