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168 5 dancing reggaetón with cowboy boots Frictive Encounters in Queer Latinidad No fancy drinks, electronica or twinky go-go boys. At Club Zarape, the standard swill is a can of Tecate beer with a lime wedge and salt packet on top. . . . these men, and some leatherbooted women, are here to dance the night away to salsa and rock en español and, of course, norteño, vaquero cowboy music. Big belt buckle to big belt buckle. —Phoenix New Times1 Where other LGBT establishments around the Valley proudly fly the rainbow flag, Karamba lights it up with neon and adds sparkle and swagger into its after-hours mix. . . . The expansive dance floor is almost always packed with bodies, whether it’s boys dancing with boys, gals getting down with other gals, and various other combinations. Although the crowd here is Latino-heavy, it gets downright ethnically diverse during frenzied weekend events, when folks of every race and sexual orientation dance until dawn. —Phoenix New Times2 In this chapter we travel to Phoenix, Arizona, the second fastest growing metropolitan area in the United States next to Las Vegas, Nevada, during the first decade of the twenty-first century. I focus on the Latina/o queer club scene in the city between 2004 and 2007, a time of explosive economic transformation and growth in the metropolitan area. This was also a period when the story of Latina/o ascendancy seemed to have taken hold in Phoenix’s mainstream public sphere despite the anti-immigrant sentiments that characterized the state as a whole. I trace the narrative of Latina/o middle-class arrival as it was negotiated in the specific queer contexts of the club scene. However, I also position the club as a criti- dancing reggaetón with cowboy boots 169 cal site of interclass exchanges that question and at times challenge the monolithic expectations of an aspirational middle-class identity as the goal of a Latina/o politics of mainstreaming. Lastly, I look at the introduction of reggaetón, a Puerto Rican popular music genre highly influenced by Jamaican dance hall and hip-hop, into the primarily Mexican Latina/o queer clubs of the city around 2005.I document how the arrival of this musical culture to the southwestern United States enabled sites of possibility for queer Latinas/os who found in this music an explicit playfulness with sexuality in the content of the lyrics and the choreographies that accompanied the heavy percussive line characteristic of the genre. In doing so, I attend to the ways in which Puerto Rican culture contradicted the expectations of class upheld in mainstreaming narratives of Latina/o queer culture. The intraethnic and interclass negotiations that queer latinidad entails are of primary concern to this chapter. The chapter identifies friction as a theory in practice of queer latinidad. During the period covered in t his chapter, the Phoenix metro region enjoyed a co nsistent population growth rate of near 25 percent from 2000 un til the burst of the housing market bubble and the economic meltdown it prompted in 2007.3 As the city grew, the aesthetics of a Mexican-influenced modern look, along with a similar appropriation of Native American culture and aesthetics, circulated as evidence of the growing “sophistication” of the southwestern metropolis. NouvelleMexican cuisine menus, resort architecture, and the promotional rhetoric of the tourism industry showcased an emphasis in regional specificity while purportedly upgrading to metropolitan standards of luxury. This is also the time of reggaetón’s rise. In 2004 Latina/o popular culture was entering what was then heralded as the music industry’s second wave of the Latin Explosion. This new spin on Latina/o arrival into the national, a pattern that as I mentioned at the opening of this book has repeated with now expected frequency, was ushered by the rise of reggaetón and other hip-hop-influenced acts like Daddy Yankee and Calle 13 into the U.S. mainstream.4 At a time when many questioned the success of the Latin music market following disappointing sophomore releases by the pantheon of stars of the 1999 popular culture phenomenon, reggaetón became a beacon of hope for music entrepreneurs intent on riding the wave of the explosion by announcing its second coming to the rhythmic base-line of hip-hop.5 By 2005 reggaetón was heard everywhere in the Phoenix valley, including the Latina/o queer dance club.6 The rising influence of Latina/o culture...

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