Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing

Introduction: Genealogies of Queer Latino Writing

3 Introduction Genealogies of Queer Latino Writing   “American” Historical Memory, or How to Write against Oblivion Latinos represent the largest “minority” group in the nation but they are the least represented in the nation’s institutions and the most disenfranchised in the public sphere.1 Yet the diverse groups we today refer to as “Latinos,” or people of Latin American ancestry living in the United States, have been in this country long before its founding after independence from Britain in 1776. The Spanish and Portuguese settlement and eventual colonization of the Americas from 1492 onward should make this assertion commonplace, but “American” historical memory has relegated this fact to historic oblivion for too long. When we consider, for example, that after the United States–Mexico War (1846–48), the country gained almost half of Mexico’s northern territories including modern-day Arizona, California, Utah, and Nevada and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, as well as Mexico’s claim to Texas— which had been under U.S. occupation since 1836—we can begin to better understand both the literal and the symbolic violence enacted against Latinos by our national forgettings. And the annexation of Mexican territories tells only part of the story. With the incorporation 4 of former Spanish dominions such as modern-day Florida and much of the states in the Gulf of Mexico region—not to mention the eventual colonization of Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898—we are left with a literary historical lacuna that yet has to be fully accounted for. Put more prosaically , we would do well to remember that many Latinos did not come as immigrants or migrants to the United States but rather “the United States came to them in the form of colonial enterprises.”2 Yet how is it that American literary and cultural history has been unable to register this important incorporation of a people, their cultural history, and the literature that charts this cultural expression? Why do Latinos continue to be represented as a “foreign” imposition on the greater national largesse and as immigrants who are sacking the national treasure trove of economic generosity while refusing to assimilate? Indeed, the consolidation of the contiguous United States only occurred after the end of the United States–Mexico War with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Mexicans living in the newly consolidated United States, along with various nationals from the Americas, found themselves in a quandary as they were classed as foreigners in places they had inhabited even before Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821. Despite the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that guaranteed the full rights of U.S. citizenship to Mexicans who remained in the newly consolidated territories—among many other provisions—they were increasingly treated as second-class citizens. For example, less than three years after the signing of the treaty, in the politically significant state of California, Latinos were dealt a deathblow to their political power with the passage of the Land Claims Act of 1851 that unwittingly led to the loss of lands that had been in their families for generations. Even when the original Spanish and Mexican land grants were translated for the courts from Spanish to English, the act made it possible for litigants to continue to appeal their cases to the point that only the wealthy could prevail after costly court battles. Indeed, even if Latinos won the right in the courts to keep the lands that had belonged to them prior to the United States–Mexico War from the encroachment of Anglo-American squatters, many lost them to compensate the lawyers who had defended them when they could not pay their legal fees. Additionally, poll-tax laws further disenfranchised Latinos after losing their lands since one had to be at least a landowner and in many instances functionally literate to vote. Not surprisingly, Latinos increasingly began to be racialized as “black” to the point that by the end of the Civil War (1861–65) the term “Mexican” became a racial  5 signifier for “negro” rather than a term of national origin or ancestral affiliation.3 The political disenfranchisement of Latinos after 1848 was also integrally tied to language. In California, for example, the state constitution was amended through an 1855 act that negated the constitutional requirement that had ensured laws would be translated into Spanish. That same year a state...