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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2019
In 2009, Residente, the lead singer of a well-known Latinx music group and newly appointed international ambassador for the Latino Commission on AIDS, likened Latinxs in the US to HIV/AIDS. Taking this fertile equivalence as a conceptual point of departure, this article tracks the pitfalls and possibilities of aligning these two positions, touching on the performativity of disgust, the transmission of brown affect, and economies of racialization and deracination via the exchange of viral matter. Building upon the reparative labour of critical mestizaje, which came to the fore of Latinx studies in the 1980s, I reimagine the potentiality of a “viral mestizaje,” a form of relatedness that allows for networks of intimacy, multiplicity, and reproduction that extend beyond heternormative coupling. What is at stake in the positioning of Latinxs as “just like AIDS”? What are the possibilities and problems of analogy?
1 Anon., “HUGE: The Fight against HIV in Latino Communities Gets a New Ally,” posted 12 May 2009 at www.blabbeando.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/huge-fight-against-hiv-in-latino.html, accessed 16 Feb. 2015, emphasis mine.
2 Vasconcelos, José, “Mestizaje” (1925), in José Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race, ed. Stavans, Ilan (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 45–90Google Scholar. Although “the immune system” is rarely cited as a factor enabling mestizo/a hardiness and durability, the notion of genetic diversity and the mythicization of acquired immunity (itself a corrective reaction to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century public-health diatribes, which cast mixed blood as weak and inefficacious due to the genetic residue of “lazy” indigenous ancestors) surfaces in post-1980s Latinx discourse and cultural representations of Latinx societies in the US. In the larger project that this article is drawn from, I chart the immune system as a racialized and aggrandized vessel of Latinx resistance and identity, thinking about the subsequent impact that HIV/AIDS could have on this narrative. I contend that Chicano cultural producers, in particular, approached HIV/AIDS as a brutal repudiation of ingrained mestizo/a immunity and as another historical challenge (akin to the viral epidemics unleashed by Spanish colonization) girding an indigenous knack for survival.
3 Sandoval, Chéla, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 59Google Scholar, emphasis mine.
4 The Chicano grassroots movement for social change (known as el Movimiento), which predominantly flourished in the US Southwest in the late 1960s and the 1970s, advocated shared blood as the basis for homosocial solidarity. In the epic poem “I am Joaquín,” Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, the foremost poet of the movement, imagines blood as a productive substance, linking the protagonist, Joaquín, to both the conquistador Hernan Cortés and the conquered Indian people: “I am Joaquín, / Who bleeds in many ways. / The altars of Moctezuma / I stained a bloody red. / My back of Indian slavery / Was stripped crimson.” Gonzales, Rodolfo, “I Am Joaquín: An Epic Poem” (1967), in Vázquez, Francisco H., ed., Latino/a Thought: Culture, Politics, and Society, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 15–30, 19Google Scholar.
5 Lippard, Lucy R., Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 151Google Scholar.
6 Bennett, Jeffrey A., Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 37Google Scholar.
7 Carroll, Victoria, “Deforming and Transforming: Towards a Theory of ‘Viral Mestizaje’ in Chicano Literature,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Studies, 10, 3 (2016), 323–40Google Scholar.
8 Ibid., 326, added emphasis.
9 Lugones, María, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little Field Publishers Inc, 2003), 123Google Scholar.
10 Dean, Tim, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Alarcón, Norma, “Conjugating Subjects in the Age of Multiculturalism,” in Gordon, Avery F. and Newfield, Christopher, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 127–48, 127Google Scholar.
12 Sandoval, 62.
13 Ahmed, Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 92Google Scholar. Teresa Brennan takes this even further, positioning “affect” as an agent that works by entering and infecting a new host. She writes, “the transmission of affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject. The ‘atmosphere’ or environment literally gets into the individual.” Brennan, Teresa, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1Google Scholar.
14 Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London and New York: Routledge, 2011; first published 1993), 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, original emphasis.
15 Ahmed, 92–93.
16 Ibid., 45.
17 Ahmed, Sara, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 79, 22, 2 (Summer 2004), 117-39, 120-1Google Scholar.
18 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 46.
19 Jean-Paul Sartre quoted in Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1980), 38Google Scholar.
20 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 90, original emphasis.
21 Ibid., 91.
22 See Sontag, Susan, AIDS and Its Metaphors (London: Penguin, 1989)Google Scholar.
23 Douglas Crimp, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism” (1987), in Crimp, , Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 27–42, 28Google Scholar.
24 Gilman, Sander L., “AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease,” in Crimp, Douglas, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 87–107Google Scholar.
25 Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, in Crimp, AIDS, 197–222, 211–12, original emphasis.
26 Edelman, Lee, “The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and ‘AIDS’,” in Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 79–92Google Scholar.
27 Simon Watney, “The Spectacle of AIDS,” in Crimp, AIDS, 71–86, 74, emphasis mine.
28 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 44, emphasis mine.
29 HIV/AIDS was initially known as gay-related immune deficiency (GRID). In late 1982 the term was changed to AIDS. In And the Band Played On (1987), Randy Shilts's infamous account of the early years of the American HIV/AIDS crisis, the “reckless promiscuity” of gay Canadian airline steward Gaëtan Dugas (aka patient zero) and the sexual immoderation of gay men during the 1976 US bicentennial celebration in New York are encoded as the origin of and catalyst for the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s.
30 Wald, Priscilla, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 38Google Scholar.
31 Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3rd edn (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007; first published 1987), 99Google Scholar, emphasis added.
32 Martínez, María Elena, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 243Google Scholar.
33 In California, right-wing politician Lyndon La Rouche even introduced a 1986 ballot measure – Proposition 64 – calling for mandatory HIV testing (which was defeated, 71% to 29%) and raised the possibility of HIV quarantine camps. In March of the same year, conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. published a New York Times article suggesting that all “AIDS carriers” should be tattooed on the upper arm or buttocks (depending on whether they had acquired HIV through needle use or homosexual intercourse) to alert others to their serostatus.
34 I have made this point before, more explicitly, in relation to Alejandro Morales's 1992 novel The Rag Doll Plagues, which considers the current HIV/AIDS pandemic as another iteration of the diseases and moral panics attending the colonization of Mexico. I claim that “in both historical moments, blood-mixing is met with fear and suspicion, maligned as a product of interracial desire and as a facilitator of disease.” Carroll, “Deforming and Transforming,” 324.
35 Pérez-Torres, Rafael, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 51Google Scholar.
36 Nancy, Jean-Luc, “Cut Throat Sun,” in Arteaga, Alfred, ed., An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 113–24, 123Google Scholar.
37 See Arrizón, Alicia, Queering Mestzaje: Transculturation and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tuhkanen, Mikko, “Mestiza Metaphysics,” in McCallum, Ellen Lee and Tuhkanen, Mikko, eds., Queer Times, Queer Becomings (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011), 259–94Google Scholar; Medina, Néstor, Mestizaje: (Re)Mapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism (New York: Orbis Books, 2009)Google Scholar; Delgadillo, Theresa, Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Bost, Suzanne, Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
38 It is worth noting that “familia” is already a contested structure in Latinx studies. As Cherríe Moraga asserts, “Familia is cross-generational bonding, deep emotional ties between opposite sexes, and within our sex. It is sexuality, which involves, but is not limited to, intercourse or orgasm. It springs forth from touch, constant and daily … It is finding familia among friends where blood ties are formed through suffering and celebration shared.” See Moraga, Cherríe, Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó por Sus Labios 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000; first published 1983), 102–3Google Scholar
39 Anzaldúa, 106–7, emphasis mine.
40 Puar, Jasbir K., “Prognosis Time: Towards a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility and Capacity,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 19, 2 (July 2009), 161–72, 168CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 These myriad encounters and negotiations are captured in the poetry and autobiographical prose of gay Cuban-American doctor and writer Rafael Campo. Through his work on San Francisco's AIDS wards in the early 1990s he is forced to confront the interrelatedness of racism, homophobia, colonialism and US imperialism. See Campo, Rafael, The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Campo, , The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry (New York: Norton, 1997)Google Scholar.
42 Rodriguez, Richard, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (New York: Penguin, 2002), xiGoogle Scholar.
43 Richard Rodriguez, “Brown: An Erotic History of the Americas,” Humanities Lecture Series, University of California Santa Barbara, 23 Sept. 2002.
44 Rodriguez, Richard, “Brown: The Erotic History of America: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez,” Metropole, 16 (March 2003), 68–80, 70Google Scholar.
45 Indeed, at the beginning of his book Days of Obligation, Rodriguez outlines his interpretation of “mestizo”: “Mestizo in Mexican Spanish means mixed, confused. Clotted with Indian, thinned by Spanish spume.” Rodriguez's description is highly suggestive, tacitly linking mestizo heritage with the exploited Indian mother (“clot” signifying blood and stasis) by the conquering European father (“spume” connoting a spurting forth, a burst of aggressive agency accompanying ejaculation), a process of whitening encapsulated in the thinning of Indian blood with Spanish semen. See Rodriguez, Richard, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (New York: Penguin, 1992), 2Google Scholar.
46 Rodriguez, Brown, 133.
47 Pérez, Hiram, A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015), 14Google Scholar.
48 Ibid., 6.
49 Ibid., 2.
50 Muñoz, José Esteban, “‘Chico, what does it feel like to be a problem?’ The Transmission of Brownness,” in Flores, Juan and Rosaldo, Renato, eds., The Companion to Latina/o Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 441–51, 444Google Scholar.
51 Rodriguez's claim in a 2002 interview with Suzy Hansen that “we are, all of us, in our various colors, our various hues, melting into each other and creating a brown nation” certainly suggests a dilution of the potential for “brown” to signify a radically oppositional stance (brown is now an identity up for grabs by all Americans) whilst simultaneously negating the importance of maintaining racial specificity and embodied politics. See Suzy Hansen, “The Browning of America,” Salon, 27 April 2002, at www.salon.com/2002/04/27/rodriguez_6. Any hint that “brown” may be historically situated and contingent has been skilfully obscured in Rodriguez's account. As Ilan Stavans observes, for Rodriguez “America is about to become América – everyone in it a Hispanic, if not physically, at least metaphorically.” Stavans, Ilan, A Critic's Journey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 35Google Scholar.
52 Muñoz, José Esteban, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs),” Theatre Journal, 52 (2000), 67–79, 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 Muñoz, José Esteban, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3Google Scholar.
54 Ibid., x.
55 Muñoz, José Esteban, “Feeling Brown, Felling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs, 31, 3 (Spring 2006), 675–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 Amber Jamilla Musser argues in her recent book Sensual Excess that brown may well embody spectacular excess in an age tethered to and enacted through composed performances of white affect; indeed we should acknowledge that “some people circulate as highly charged affective objects, while simultaneously being positioned outside the parameters of normative sexuality and subjectivity.” See Musser, Amber Jamilla, Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Thinking with, rather than against, Hortense Spiller's theory of pornotroping, Musser claims a brown jouissance that ties the production of the self to the social as well as the personal. In other words, brown jouissance – another way of feeling brown, a “yes” of subject formation – luxuriates in a liquid fleshiness without dismissing the reduction of enslaved black bodies (which Musser deliberate positions in relation to brownness) to mere flesh.
57 Valle, Victor and Torres, Rodolfo D., “The Idea of Mestizaje and the ‘Race’ Problematic: Racialized Media Discourse in a Post-Fordist Landscape,” in Darder, Antonia, ed., Culture and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1995), 139–54, 141Google Scholar.
58 This is not to say that cultural producers have not touched on the biological effects of HIV/AIDS and its potential to distort racial markers. For example, gay Mexican-American writer Gil Cuadros discusses his negotiation of HIV treatments and their effects on his skin colour. In the short story “Hands” he declares, “my face discolors from all the medications I take.” See Gil Cuadros, “Hands,” TranscEND AIDS: Work by Los Angeles Artists with HIV/AIDS, 1–17 Dec. 1995, 16. In the autobiographical article “The Emigrants,” which chronicles his lifelong friendship with photographer Laura Aguilar, he writes, “Laura wanted to work on her tan, to achieve a darkness only Latina women could accomplish. I, on the other hand, [could not]. AZT reacts badly to the sun.” See Cuadros, “The Emigrants,” Frontiers, 19 June 1992, 90.
59 See Weeks, Jeffrey, “Post-modern AIDS?” in Boffin, Tessa and Gupta, Sunil, eds., Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1990), 133–41Google Scholar; Edelman, “The Plague of Discourse.”
60 Yingling, Thomas E., AIDS and the National Body (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 15Google Scholar.
61 Irvine, Kevin, “Letter from an Innocent Victim,” Diseased Pariah News, 6 (1992), 21–22, 21Google Scholar.
62 Aguilar, Pedro Bustos, “Sexilio,” in Corpus, ed. Cortez, Jaime, 1, 1 (Spring 2003), 47–52, 47Google Scholar.
63 Aguilar, Pedro Bustos, “Nueva Flor de Canela,” in Cortez, Jaime, ed., Virgins, Guerrillas & Locas: Gay Latinos Writing about Love (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1999), 183–94, 189–90Google Scholar.
64 Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982; first published 1980), 1Google Scholar.
65 Ibid., 2.
66 Julia Kristeva, interview with Baruch, Elaine Hoffman, “Feminism and Psychoanalysis,” in Guberman, Ross Mitchell, ed., Julia Kristeva, Interviews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 113–21, 118Google Scholar, emphasis mine.
67 For an interesting discussion of abjection as it relates specifically to Latinos with HIV/AIDS see Sandoval-Sánchez, Alberto, “Politicizing Abjection: In the Manner of a Prologue for the Articulation of AIDS Latino Queer Identities,” American Literary History, 17, 3 (Fall 2005), 542–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 Ed Cohen and Livingston, Julie, “AIDS,” Social Text 100, 27, 3 (Fall 2009), 39–42, 40Google Scholar.
69 Two examples come to mind. In their play Quinceañera (1998), written to mark the first 15 years of the American HIV/AIDS crisis, Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and Alberto Antonio Araiza reimagine the sixteenth-century invasion of the Aztec empire by Hernán Cortés and the subsequent genocide of indigenous peoples as a moment of HIV transmission in a gay club in the late twentieth century. In “My Aztlan: White Place,” a short story taken from City of God (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1994), Gil Cuadros figures his gay Chicano narrator's infection with HIV as a way to sever his allegiance to his homophobic dark-skinned family and create new kinship bonds with his white lover.
70 Bustos Aguilar, “Nueva Flor de Canela,” 193.
71 Ibid., 192.