Transmogrifying Guadalupes, Transmogrifying Selves: The Queer Inhumanist Aesthetics of Gloria Anzaldúa's Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro

Altered by a storm and subsequently repaired by an arborist with a saw, a Monterey cypress tree takes the shape of the Virgen de Guadalupe off the coast of California. Or perhaps this is the Virgen de Guadalupe herself taking the shape of a tree. This miraculous scene of the divine in the ordinary takes place in GLORIA ANZALDÚA'S posthumously published dissertation, Light in the Dark ⁄ Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015). In this work she intended for publication but couldn't complete in time due to her passing in 2004, the queer Chicana anthologist, writer, and activist recounts witnessing this Guadalupe tree:

I suddenly saw her coming out of the hollowed trunk: It was la Virgen de Guadalupe, head tilted, arms extended, halo spread all around. From a distance, the bright live tans and browns of the raw newly cut wood and dangling trunk fibers looked like the folds of her robe. … But once I saw la Virgen emerging from the tree, my imagination picks her out every time I walk toward her, no matter how age, storm, or sea alters the cypress's trunk.¹

The description becomes even trickier in determining if, upon subsequent visits, the tree is La Virgen de Guadalupe, or if she emerges from it, animatedly inhuman. Regardless of how the tree's shape ages or alters, Anzaldúa bears witness to the Virgen de Guadalupe each time she encounters the arboreal entity. This Guadalupe tree is both divinity and tree in Anzaldúa's phrasing, and parsing distinctions of form, matter, and species becomes difficult. Later on, further difficulty arises when Anzaldúa herself transforms into the tree, both becoming one, human and nonhuman at the same time. Such slippages in imagery and form reveal how perceiving the world is a shifting, transmaterial, and embodied experience in Anzaldúa's unfinished dissertation manuscript.

Like her other published and unpublished writings she produced in her decades-long career, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro merges the theoretical, spiritual, Catholic, and Indigenous iconography with the autobiographical. These dissertation chapters range from reflections on 9/11 and U.S. imperialism, diaristic ruminations on the labor-intensive work of drafting a piece of writing, narrating a visit to a 1992 museum exhibition on Aztec culture, and other expository chapters touching on her ideas about healing and composing identities. Anzaldúa worked on Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro for well over a decade, producing various outlines and drafts, and there are many iterations of the project that scholar AnaLouise Keating pieced together and published after Anzaldúa's death. The scene of the tree as Guadalupe and the Guadalupe as tree is not unusual as Anzaldúa's onto-epistemic aesthetic practice generally makes these assemblages quotidian, part of the very fabric of reality and consciousness. Yet Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro is a unique contribution to her oeuvre, critical thought, and autobiographical writing because the manuscript draws particular attention to scenes of unwieldly, indeterminate, and shapeshifting transformations of being-knowing, and instances depicting the pleasures and intimacies of human and nonhuman becomings. This uniquely multispecies, transmaterial aesthetic, coupled with the unfinished quality of Light in the Dark ⁄ Luz en lo oscuro, advances what I am identifying as a queer inhumanist transmogrificatory aesthetic.

Queer inhumanist transmogrificatory aesthetics is a useful framework with which to track the uncanniness of multispecies, transmaterial becomings in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro, which challenge colonial paradigms and liberal humanist logics. How does, for instance, a Guadalupe tree on a cliff shape our reality, or the potentiality for other realities? How does such an unusual transmogrifying entity in Anzaldúa's critical-creative autobiographic writing animate another kind of ethico-political sensibility that is not dependent on settler coloniality and capitalist imperatives? The Guadalupe tree she references across Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro, for example, is a queerly inhuman anticolonial entity that proffers ways of...