Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza (review)

How do we account for the voice of another subject after the crisis of testimonio as genre, and after Spivak's interrogation of the impossibility to represent subalternity? How is this question complicated by the colonial condition of the subaltern's and critic's voices in the context of an American academy that has declared the exhaustion of difference as a useful tool for analysis? These are some of the central questions of this new book by Cruz-Malavé, based on a series of interviews conducted in 1994-1996 by the author, after being prompted by Juan Rivera with the interest of clearing his name and of offering his own version of his involvement with visual artist Keith Haring.

This book is composed of an introduction and five chapters. The introduction explains the general background for the interview, as well as the painful process of producing a testimonio that cannot capture the voice of the other. The second chapter is a series of conversations between Juan Rivera and Cruz-Malavé in which Juanito traces the discovery of his sexual identity in Connecticut, his flight to New York city, his survival as a hustler in the sex trade on 42nd Street, and his involvement and break up with Haring. Chapter three provides a recontextualization of the life and work of Keith Haring that redefines the link between his aesthetics of identification and his contact with youth Latino and Black street cultures. The main contention of this chapter is that, contrary to the account provided by John Gruen in Keith Haring: The Authorized Biography, ethnic minorities and street subcultures were linked to Haring's exploration of his otherness as a gay man from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, who developed his art once he arrived to New York city in 1978. Juan's recollection of Haring's life seems to be more in line with the account provided by the artists himself in his journals.

The fourth chapter revisits the question of testimonio from two new angles: the representation of queer Latino voices, and the articulation of a testimonial subjectivity through a feeling of shame and inadequacy to represent an entire community. Cruz-Malavé reflects about the mixed reception of his testimonial project by enthusiastic writers and cautious academics, and includes a brief section about his experience as a Puerto Rican migrant who arrived to New York city in 1969. After a reconsideration of the trope of shame as formative of the colonial identity and the testimonial voice, Cruz-Malavé identifies a way to overcome the shame that paralyzed him for ten years and decides to contact Juan, and publish his testimonio. The last two chapters function as detailed glosses of the places, the people and the terms that are relevant to understand gay, Latino and artistic subcultures in New York city (Chapter five), as well as some general comments on the use of Spanglish in Juan's speech.

Among the contributions of this book is the review of the crisis of the testimonio to propose an alternative way to represent "other" voices that continue to be consistently excluded from mainstream discourses in American culture. The second contribution of this study is the exploration of the intersections between Latino, queer, and colonial conditions in the subjectivation not only of Rivera and Haring, but also of Cruz-Malavé as critic himself. More than identifying a locus of enunciation, this book suggests that there is a point of investment or identification that informs the way in which these accounts of difference are conceived as part of a critical intervention in the modes of knowledge production.

There are several questions that remain unanswered after reading Queer Latino Testimonio. This book is not an easy read, perhaps on purpose. First, the format of the book is somewhat odd: two chapters bear the same title ("Listening Speaks I and II"), in the interview Juan does not answer many of the questions posed by Cruz-Malavé, and finally, almost half of the book is composed of glosses, definitions and...