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Beloved Jotoranos
- University of Wisconsin Press
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131 Rig o berto González Iwill refer to my lit er ary fore fathers as ante pa sa dos, ac knowl edg ing the cul tural con nec tion of our shared Mex i can (south of the bor der) and Chi cano (north of the bor der) her i tage. But I’d like to take it a step fur ther, and rec og nize an other im por tant com mo nal ity: our queer iden tity. I will refer to my lit er ary fore fathers, then, as jot o ra nos—my vet e ran gay god par ents. These are the peo ple who came be fore and who fought first, who braved the pub lic stages and weathered the stormy au di ences so that my own jour ney would be a lit tle less ter rify ing and a lot more re ward ing. In the era where terms such as “post-racial” and “post-gay” are eras ing and dis re spect ing the scars and stretch marks of our ancestors’ pasts, I felt es pe cially com pelled to thank these in cred ible teach ers, men tors, and role mod els, through the act of love I learned from them. The seven thumb nail por traits that fol low are only glimpses into the queer Chi cano con scious ness that has fueled my pas sion for the ar tistry and ac ti vism of lan guage. With out it, there would be no me. Or rather, there would be a dif fer ent me, less ful filled and less skilled than the per son who, through the works of these be loved jot o ra nos, has learned the pain of re mem ber ing, the pleas ure of read ing, and the re spon sibil ity of writ ing. Be loved Jot o ra nos Rigoberto González 132 Ar turo Islas Ar turo Islas died one day after Valentine’s Day in 1991, al most a year after the re lease of his sec ond novel, Mi grant Souls. News of his death was a par tic u larly dis ap point ing mo ment for me be cause I had re solved to at tend Stan ford University’s grad u ate pro gram just to work with him. I was only a jun ior at the Uni ver sity of Cal i for nia, River side, but I al ready had as pi ra tions to be come a writer. I had been read ing Chi cano lit er a ture vo ra ciously, and one of the books that had moved me had been The Rain God (1984). The se quel to the Angel fam ily saga, it had just been re leased to wide ac claim, and I spent the next twelve months fan ta siz ing about tell ing Islas all about me. You see, the other thing I knew about him was that he was gay. A gay Chi cano writer. Who knew there were two of us? Mi guel Chico, the col lege stu dent who was hid ing from his fam ily by mov ing away, was some one I could re late to. I under stood his bit ter ness over his in vis ibil ity, his dis may with the fam ily dra mas, and his heart break at the death of Uncle Felix, a cau tion ary tale of the dan gers of homo sex u al ity. And though Mi guel Chico took a step back from the pri mary plot lines of Mi grant Souls, he was still there, ob serv ing from a dis tance and try ing to find a pur pose for all of the knowl edge he had ac quired in school. I knew Mi guel Chico’s af flic tion, a mel an choly that comes from lone li ness and iso la tion, from breath ing the same stale air in side the closet. When I found out that Islas had died from com pli ca tions re lated to AIDS I was dev as tated. This was not the nar ra tive I wanted to fol low— de feated by the very sex u al ity that was al ready mak ing us foreign ers in our com mu nities. This was not sup posed to be Mi guel Chico’s fate. Cer tainly not mine...