Imagine a Brown Queer: Inscribing Sexuality in Chicano/a-Latino/a Literary and Cultural Studies

In her 1993 essay "Imagine a Lesbian, a Black Lesbian," writer-activist Jewelle Gomez queries the infrequency of African American lesbian representation in the "literary arena." Gomez maintains—as does Barbara Smith before her in the pathbreaking 1977 essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism"—that literary culture plays a critical role for verifying black lesbian existence. For Smith, "Black women are still in a position to 'imagine,' discover, and verify Black lesbian literature because so little has been written from an avowedly lesbian perspective. The near nonexistence of Black lesbian literature [which other Black lesbians and I do deeply feel] has everything to do with the politics of our lives, the total suppression of identity that all Black women, lesbian or not, must face."¹ More than a decade and a half later, however, Gomez finds herself reiterating Smith's urgent declaration, foregrounding her predecessor's words so that they serve as the epigraph for her essay and the motivating force behind its title.

Gomez's essay has in turn animated my piece, as is evident by its title alone. Yet while the focus here is not specifically on lesbians or on the shared historical consignment to invisibility faced by Chicana/Latina and African American lesbians in literature (although that project is long overdue), the general concern is with imagining queer Chicano/a and Latino/a sexualities in literary and cultural production. Gomez understands "the art of critical writing" as a necessary component of literary representation; the recent books by Frederick Luis Aldama, Catrióna Rueda Esquibel, and David William Foster critically assess novels, poems, performance, and film and are texts that simultaneously investigate and record brown queer existence.²

Esquibel's study charts an exhaustive archive of Chicana/Latina lesbian literature while critically examining it from thematically interlocking perspectives. Esquibel's "starting point that Chicana lesbians are central to understanding Chicana/o communities, theories, and feminisms" dispels at the fore any assumption that sexuality—particularly lesbian sexuality—can only lead to cursory discussions that lack considerable weightiness (3). Given how "communities, theories, and feminisms" are more often than not contoured by heterosexual and heteronormative presumption, With Her Machete in Her Hand does more than place "the" essential Chicana lesbian center stage but instead vigilantly unveils how Chicana lesbians—in the fitting words of Hortense J. Spillers—"have had to be invented" for safeguarding these allegedly essential attributes.³ Esquibel's concept of "Chicana lesbian fictions" (also the title of the book's first chapter) appropriately captures the complexity of representational politics with which she grapples.

Noting how the "issue of visibility . . . is full of ambiguity," Esquibel understands that to locate Chicana lesbian sexuality one cannot simply turn to texts distinctly marked as lesbian. In fact, the "fictions" she requires for "reading Chicana lesbians" span three categories identified as "nonlesbian," "lesbian-friendly," and "lesbian." Illustrating the intertextual relationship between these categories, Esquibel excavates a compelling genealogy of lesbian representation from the intricate terrain of Chicana/Latina literary history. The result is a firm challenge to what qualifies as a lesbian text. Akin to Barbara Smith who, in "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," identifies Toni Morrison's Sula as a lesbian novel, Esquibel also grants Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street and Denise Chávez's The Last of the Menu Girls this status (while reading them alongside readily identifiable lesbian texts by Terri de la Peña and Emma Pérez, Margins and Gulf Dreams, respectively) "not because the characters (or their authors) self-consciously claim a lesbian identity, but because the texts, in...