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92 5 Each of the narrative works in this chapter map out the insufficiencies of dominant spaces while simultaneously envisioning organic home spaces where queer Latina bodies, voices, and discourses are not marginal but central. When considered together, these characterizations of queer Latina desire posit a politics of home constituted of three distinct but interlocking modes of representation, which I classify as “coming home,” “being home,” and “complicating home.” I have found no need for or value in imposing a chronological or hierarchical order to this list, since none appears to exist within the texts. Instead, each mode offers a set of practices that frame the creative representation of home spaces. I ground the mode of being home in a politics of similitude—referred to earlier as familiar alterity. These representations may be viewed as separatist or radical—but in reality focus less on exclusivity than embracing shared differences from a dominant norm. The mode of coming home is especially useful to engage the comparatively drawn home spaces in de la Peña’s narrative work. In this author’s representations, queer Chicana desire is delineated against the foil of Anglo lesbian desire and creates a counterstance of safety and familiarity when measured against non-Chicana partners. In order to engage the filmic work in this chapter, the mode of complicating home allows filmmakers to pose creative challenges to wholly positive and inclusive portraits of home. Given the foundational influence of queer Chicana theorists Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga in the establishing of scholarly and poetic discourse on Complicating Community Terri de la Peña, Cristina Serna, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Ela Troyano, and Carmelita Tropicana Even when nostalgia looks like a two-minute commercial to attract tourism, there must be a way I can regain this unspeakable part of myself. Even when there’s no return, even when I will remain a partial stranger. Anywhere and everywhere. How can I go back? —Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Brincando el charco COMPLICATING COMMUNITY 93 queer Latina home spaces, it will be useful to look toward a key discursive trope in Chicana/o literary and political work, the mythical Chicana/o homeland of Aztlán. In a  collection of critical essays on Aztlán, only one of twelve contributors is female, this sole representative being. Anzaldúa. Luis Leal elucidates the principal signifying branches of Aztlán: “It represents the geographic region known as the Southwestern part of the United States, composed of the territory that Mexico ceded in  with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; second, and more important, Aztlán symbolized the spiritual union of the Chicanos, something that is carried within the heart, no matter where they may live or where they may find themselves” (Anaya and Lomelí ). This concept of homecoming posits both a physical and psychic space of origin and unity for Chicana/os. Released from a particular geographical site, Leal’s critical mapping of Aztlán elucidates the power of myth as discursive homecoming when a physical return is not possible. For Anzaldúa, though, a discussion of Aztlán is far from idyllic. Her discourse from the same collection stresses the unique pressures and dangers for female subjects along the U.S./Mexico border. The journey home—to Aztlán, across the border, into the lures of opportunity as well as the dissolutioned reality—is inherently problematic (Anaya and Lomelí ). Critics seem to draw a similar interpretation from Cherríe Moraga’s work with the concept of Aztlán. Mary Pat Brady concludes, “Linking Aztlán to erotic desire and wounding also indicates how differently Moraga figures the imagined homeland of the Mexica than do many of her contemporaries or, indeed, her predecessors” (–). In the following sections I will examine alternatives to traditional notions of an idealized homeland, such as that expressed by the Chicana/o conceptualization of Aztlán. These works bear witness to the scope of queer Chicana creativity as well as the distinct ways through which these discursive texts/tools serve to loosen and dismantle static notions of family, community, identity, and home, as well as to reassemble and reconceptualize these ideas as necessarily queer, brown, and female. Cristina Serna’s “tierras sagradas” At an on-campus lecture sponsored by a University of California Chicana/o student group in , a well-known and respected Chicano muralist attempted to articulate the role of “la Chicana” in the Chicano movement for an inquiring student seated among his audience. The silver-haired...

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