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  • From Munchkinland to Nuyorico
  • Sandra K. Soto (bio)
Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. xxvii + 242 pp.

Scholarly attention to the mutually constitutive relations among sexuality, nation, diaspora, and racialization has generated some of the most vibrant and innovative queer theory over the past dozen years. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes’s Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora is an important and much- anticipated addition to this body of literature. It not only proves (queer) sexuality to be an important category of analysis in the study of the Puerto Rican diaspora, it places it front and center, and explains “how attitudes toward stigmatized forms of same-sex sexuality and gender variance provoke and affect migration” (ix). Queer Ricans also pushes at the normative bounds of migration studies by queering its key questions about transnational movement, modes of belonging, cultural loyalty, racialization, and assimilation.

With the level of commitment and zeal one would expect only of the avid collector, La Fountain-Stokes has assembled an expansive, interesting, and eclectic [End Page 441] archive for this project. He examines cultural material — some of it ephemeral and otherwise not easily accessible — produced between the 1960s and the 2010s by queer Puerto Ricans — all but one of whom was either born in or migrated to the United States. La Fountain-Stokes’s interdisciplinary dexterity — indeed his own queerness — is such that he moves expertly among and between literary genres, choreography, dance performances, performance art, film, and video in order “to trace, document, and analyze the links or relationship between queer identities and practices (understood in the most expansive ways) and Puerto Rican migration” (x).

Had La Fountain-Stokes limited his analysis to the relationship between queer sexualities and migration, his book would have offered valuable contributions to the existing literature. He goes much further, however, and is consistently attuned to the dynamic interplay between geographic context (how does living in Philadelphia influence the works of Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Luzma Umpierre, for instance), gender, racialization, and generation (relative to migration). This highly complex combination of factors allows La Fountain-Stokes to ask intelligent and fresh questions that open onto nuanced analyses. For instance, how does the racialized, homophobic violence directed against the unnamed protagonist in Luis Rafael Sánchez’s short story “¡Jum!” (1966) complicate our understandings about what motivates some Puerto Ricans to migrate to the United States? Does the main character’s ultimate annihilation before he can leave Puerto Rico stand in for Sánchez’s own fear of persecution? How (and why) does Sánchez combine the main character’s blackness and effeminacy to create a heightened sense of abjection? How might we interpret the fact that women participate as much as men in the vicious homophobia directed against that character? What are the political risks of representing Puerto Rico as the stifling place that can neither tolerate the main character’s queerness nor allow him to escape its borders? Taken as a foundational narrative, how does “¡Jum!” replay in various forms in more contemporary Puerto Rican literature?

That each of the five chapters explores so many key terms (geography, generation, gender, racialization, migration, sexuality) means that La Fountain-Stokes risks spreading himself too thin. But he pulls the project off beautifully, largely because of his clear love of the material and his genuine and generous openness to various fields and movements, including LGBT studies, queer theory, feminist theory, U.S. Third World feminism, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies. This intellectual promiscuity (in the best, queer, sense of that phrase) also results in rich intertextuality. That is, La Fountain-Stokes not only makes interesting connections between his primary authors/artists (Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, [End Page 442] Umpierre, Negrón-Muntaner, Rose Troche, Erika López, Arthur Avilés, and Elizabeth Marrero), he also brings into the conversation cotravelers ranging from the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda to the Chicana experimental writer Cherríe Moraga.

From a queer point of view, the final chapter, “Nuyorico and the Utopias of the Everyday,” is the most compelling. Doubling as the book’s conclusion, this chapter takes up the work...

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