Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexulity, Politics by Ramón H. Rivera-Servera (review)

Performing Queer Latinidad argues that performance “played a critical role in the development of Latina/o queer public culture in the United States at the dusk of the twentieth and the dawn of the twenty-first centuries” (6). This interdisciplinary study examines “cultural centers, theaters, and dance clubs” in the United States, from 1996 to 2011, as “sites of arrival [where] marginalized communities, such as queer Latinas/os … participat[ed] in embodied experiences with others in the midst of travel to collectively devise strategies of being and being together” (29). In this book, queer latinidad is both a “utopian performative” (à la Jill Dolan) and an active counter-public in which home, hope, utopia, and friction are “theories in practice”—“situated forms of knowing that emerge from live embodied contexts” (18); it offers a critical approach that adds immensely to queer-of-color performance theory and criticism.

The author opens the first chapter with a brief recollection of his experience at the 2009 Orgullo en Acción’s Fourth Annual Latina/o LGBTQQ Pride Picnic in Chicago. He writes: “Queer Latinas/os at the picnic ‘are’ or ‘become’ a collective by ‘being here’ in public and participating in acts of performance that range from the social to the theatrical” (1). Claiming public space by “being and being here” in terms of queer Latina/o visibility is central to the author’s argument that “[h]ome, hope, utopia, and friction emerge as the contours of a collective affectivity born of an insistence on ‘being’ or rather ‘becoming’ a queer and Latina/o community in the practice of performance” (4). The author’s autoethnographic research method in this chapter grounds his analysis of the utopian potential of the site in a way that could have been more consistent throughout the book.

Rivera-Servera’s first case study, the communitybuilding and homemaking dance works of Arthur Aviles, begins with a discussion of the Hunts Point community in the South Bronx, and the negative depictions of the community in such documentaries as HBO’s 1996 Hookers at the Point. The author seamlessly lays out the socio-eco-political conditions of Mayor Rudi Giuliani’s campaign to “clean up” Manhattan, and that effort’s adverse effects on the economy, community, and reputation of the South Bronx as a haven for prostitutes, drug addicts, and gang violence. He effectively positions Aviles’s work as a counternarrative and invokes Michael Warner’s stranger relationality to explain how Aviles’s productions brought straight and queer Latina/o residents together to experience dance productions that queered and “Latinized” traditional white heteronormative narratives central to the “Disneyfication” of Times Square. One of the most poignant examples is Aviles’s appropriation and subversion of Disney through works such as Arturella (1996)—a dance based on the Cinderella story featuring a queer Latino lead. The author concludes that Aviles’s choreographed queer affirmations “are the necessary building blocks for a thriving and viable Latina/o queer future” (93) in Hunts Point.

The book shifts from homemaking in the South Bronx to hope as a theory in practice in the activism of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center’s Todos Somos Esperanza campaign in San Antonio, Texas, from 1997 to 2000. Rivera-Servera argues that the city council’s move to defund the center in 1997 resulted from the circulation of “ugly feelings” by right-wing activists opposing the center’s programs for Latina/o queer people. The author clearly identifies the Esperanza Center’s practice of hope in a series of performances including mock trials, public interviews, and street theatre performances. The author also argues, although less clearly, that Esperanza employed traditional Mexican cultural and religious practices in the campaign to allow for a dialogue between queer and straight Latinas/os, while also responding to the city’s complicated history of Anglo–Mexican encounters and the appropriation of Mexican culture for tourism in the...