Red and White and Pink All Over: Vacilada, Indian Identity, and Todd Downing's Queer Response to Modernity

Todd Downing, Oklahoma Choctaw and closeted gay man, wrote detective fiction set in Mexico to explore traits in his racial and sexual identity—specifically, his fascination with violent death and white men—that were at odds with his pacifism and promotion of Native American culture. Downing reconciled these contradictions in the mestizo notion of vacilada, the tragicomic acceptance of what we cannot change. Exacerbating his anxiety was the coercive heteronormativity of modernity. Downing's response conforms to neither a modernist nor New Modernist outlook, sharing traits with both.