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CHAPTER 1 Querying Postcolonial and Borderland Queer Theory Chicano/a Queer Mappings In Brown: The Last Discovery of America, literary agent provocateur Richard Rodriguez renders visible his experiences as queer and Chicano in a soidenti fied post-Protestant/Catholic postcolonial Americas. In his trademark fast-paced and highly stylized journalese mode, Rodriguez textures an identity he variously dubs as brown and “third man” (125) that occupies “the passing lane in American demographics” (125). In his creative autobiographical reinvention, he appears as a shape-shifter of sorts who inhabits the slipstreams of a third space that is neither black nor white but queer “Catholic Indian Spaniard” (35). The Rodriguez of Brown is a Chicano queer subject who is both of the past (pre-Columbian/colonial) and of a future (postcolonial) that points to new ways of seeing ethnic and sexual relationalities. Rodriguez’s creative texturing of a “bifocal” (his term) precolonial/postcolonial –visioning, Chicano, queer subjectivity mirrors much of the theoretical work being done in Chicano/a, Latino/a, and postcolonial queer theory today, which results from the hard-won battles of yesteryear’s postcolonial gay/lesbian and feminist Chicano/a, Latino/a scholars and creative artists. In the 1980s a critical mass of queer Chicano/a artists and intellectuals such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Luis Alfaro, Francisco X. Alarcón, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Angie Chabram, Cherríe Moraga, Michael Nava, John Rechy, and Sheila Ortiz Taylor, to name a few, forced open the gates to an otherwise generally homophobic raza-nationalist (late-1960s and 1970s) political movement. In their creative and intellectual work such figures complicated representations of the Chicano/a experience and exploded an erstwhile Us/Them binary opposition: Anglo vs. brown, male vs. female, queer vs. straight. This shift is best exemplified by the publication of Moraga and Anzaldúa’s edited This Bridge Called My Back in 1981, the production of Moraga’s first play (“Giving 01-T3393 6/22/05 1:56 PM Page 21 Up the Ghost”) in 1984, and the Chicano/a studies near-immediate canonizing of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera after its appearance in 1987.1 As testament to their importance in redirecting the flow of Chicano/a studies, all three texts remain in print today. This new wave of Chicana feminist and queer poetry , fiction, and creative nonfiction sought to destabilize binary paradigms such as white vs. brown, straight vs. queer, and the United States vs. Mexico. In their imaginatively recontoured Aztlán, women were no longer imprisoned within patriarchally inscribed cultural spaces (brown and white), nor were queer individuals cast from the Chicano/a fold. Aztlán was reconfigured as a borderland space inclusive of atravesados (see Anzaldúa) where the wounds inflicted by patriarchal oppression could heal, then reopen to embrace all subjects . It was a space where the memory of colonial violence and racialized inequality and domination would not be forgotten in the postcolonial moment. The creative queering of Aztlán identified a hybrid and queer inclusive space and, arguably, acted as the springboard for the 1990s remapping of a Chicano/a critical terrain. That decade witnessed more formal recognition of this space as “Borderland” Chicano/a studies inclusive of queer and feminist subjectivities. Indicative of this are Norma Alarcón’s essay “Conjugating Subjects : The Heteroglossia of Essence & Resistance” in Alfred Arteaga’s An Other Tongue (1994) and later the “mestiza consciousness” formulations of Sonia Saldívar-Hull in Feminism on the Border (2000). Borderland studies radically exploded the Chicano/a critical purview. In Border Matters (1997), José Saldívar explores a host of Chicano/a cultural phenomena—from Arturo Islas ’s novels to the parodic performances of El Vez to rock en español—as sites of borderland reinhabitation and expressive of hybrid subjectivities. This is also the time when we begin to see the solidification of the critical interface of Chicano/a studies with British postcolonial cultural studies. In José Saldívar’s introduction to Border Matters, many such critics, Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall among them, are referred to as influences. Since then, a great number of important self-identified postcolonial borderland scholarly works have appeared on the critical horizon. I think here, for instance, of Raúl Villa’s Barrio-Logos, Arturo J. Aldama’s Disrupting Savagism (along with De-Colonial Voices, edited with Naomi Quiñonez, and his edited volume Violence and the Body), Catrióna Rueda Esquibel’s With a Machete...

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