Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics by Ramón Rivera-Servera (review)

In Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics, Ramón Rivera-Servera traces acts of queer worldmaking by creating complex cartographies of queer Latina/o performances of sexuality and convivencia diaria (i.e., living/being together on a daily basis) in public spaces. In this mapping, Rivera-Servera engages with the ways queer bodies move in and about spaces of activism, street theatre, queer Latina/o dance clubs (through his own movement and migrations on the dance floor), and across queer Latino/a communities in the United States from the 1990s through the early 2000s. Performing Queer Latinidad is written in accessible language for scholars as well as artists and activists working in queer and Latina/o urban spaces. Rivera-Servera uses queer Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga’s “theory in the flesh,” and he invites us to relive these experiences with him on our own bodies. Not a single detail is missing when he recounts the various sites of ethnographic fieldwork and explorations. As his readers, we are invited to participate in these journeys with him.

This is the first single-authored monograph to discuss Latina/o queer dance across different spaces. The book opens with a “queer travelogue” that chronicles different spaces Rivera-Servera has inhabited as a queer Boricua (Puerto Rican) man in various cities in the United States. He is invested in a “critical triangulation” of Latinidad, queerness, and performance where an “expanded notion of community” is grounded in “a material history” (22). Rivera-Servera operates within a framework of queer Latinidad inclusive of multiple nationalities as a place to explore sites where this triangulation occurs. “Queer” is used here as an open analytic as he offers a personally political intervention into public spheres of queer material lives, or “navigation of life in heteronormative spaces” (27). He positions queerness and Latinidad hand-in-hand with migration because mobility and movement are often necessary components of queer lives for reasons of repression or oppression, safety, and belonging. The book offers a beautiful deployment of “social choreographies” (i.e., public sites where social maps are created) enacted by queer Latino/as in various cultural avenues. These social choreographies reach beyond dance to encompass other types of movement, allowing Rivera-Servera to stage the affective registers, or various emotional processes, of such politicized spaces. In chapter 1, we are positioned as readers to understand the cohabitation of politics and dance in forging queer Latina/o publics. In such negotiations as the dance floor, Rivera-Servera maintains what I believe to be his central thesis: “latinidad as a practice of identity or affect maintains and exploits the friction between the hegemonic and the radical” (196). In these moments of friction or tension between normalizing and radical forces, Rivera-Servera makes his mark.

Rivera-Servera next traces the history of Arthur Aviles (one of the foremost queer Latino dancer/choreographers in the United States) in Hunts Point, of the Bronx, New York City. Rivera-Servera first explains the history of Hunts Point as a site of prostitution, violence, drugs, and the attempt to sanitize the space with heteropatriarchal violence. Rivera-Servera understands “counterpublic” as Michael Warner understands it: “an alternative public aware of its counterstance” (63). Aviles made Hunts Point his home, using choreography, performances, and his studio space to create pan-ethnic Latina/o communities of convivencia diaria. Adapting classic stories like Cinderella and The Wizard of Oz into queer worlds, Aviles forged important counterpublic community gatherings in Hunts Point. The most compelling part of this chapter is the explication of a duet between Aviles and his real-life partner Charles Rice-Gonzalez. Rivera-Servera uses the specific example of Aviles and Gonzalez’s autobiographical performance choices to demonstrate how the public display of an intensely private experience generates community response. This gets at the friction of public-private constantly present in queer Latinidad that he also insists upon (93).

Rivera-Servera then discusses the work of the...