2019 | “Everytime” by Britney Spears has haunted me since my friend Sebastian chose it as the opening number for their workshop presentation of Hypanthium, an ensemble multimedia performance that is, at its heart, a portrait of an artist as a young themme.22 In late January I was preparing to attend the work’s full-length debut, curious to see how the Hypanthium had evolved since its workshop presentation last summer. Britney’s baby piano and little girl howl opens a short three-minute film shot by rafa (one of Sebastian’s longtime collaborators) portraying Sebastian, scantily clad, running in a disoriented manner up and down the 4th Street bridge where Boyle Heights leads into downtown. The song is mashed up against a bit of spoken word from a pair of distinct sources—a poem colliding aurally with a broadcast news headline about Trump. It’s a cacophony signaling a meditation on queer, brown precarity—or what it means for femme-identified Sebastian to live in a time of complete uncertainty. The film offers Sebastian wrapped in pink cellophane ribbons, careening against the early evening canvas in high, hot-pink heels, with leather straps winding around their muscular calves like a fashionable gladiator when the song opens.
The camera pans eastward and westward toward a setting sun over a downtown skyline. Sebastian balances on the edge of the 4th Street bridge overlooking the Los Angeles river, averting the specter of societal disaster on the streets of downtown, forecasting a new Los Angeles we struggle to recognize, both they and the city awash in the magical hour’s heavenly light.
The song and the brown subjectivity under duress that it animates feel like a message from the queer future that, in these dangerous conditions, feels further and further away.
Prepping a trip to Los Angeles from Tucson has conjured the piano pop ballad back to me as I’ve been thinking about Sebastian’s oeuvre. I’m obsessing—why this song?
Sebastian’s from my hometown of Huntington Park, a municipality seven miles south of downtown Los Angeles, a place that invites its inhabitants to lose their softness in exchange for survival. Sebastian is tough—that queen who can do everything you can do but backward, wearing patent leather high heel boots and Dickies. Their candy-colored ribbons, intimidatingly thorny long-stemmed roses, and Madein-China, disposable, brightly hued plastics have helped shape their court in the various performance works I’ve caught them doing in venues such as the Human Resources Gallery in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Seeing Sebastian perform their first top billed performance at one of the most respected venues in town made my heart swell with pride. But tethering Sebastian’s brand of femme furious performance art to the deceptively cloying vulnerability of Britney’s ballad gave me pause until I listened again. And again. And I am flooded with the memory of the theater darkening and the familiar sight of a Los Angeles cityscape and Sebastian’s blurry figure brought to life by the Britney selection, and seeing them again. And again. I feel invited into a dream realm permeated with a femme vulnerability, pulsating inside the creative walls—an artistic hypanthium, if you will—that hold Sebastian’s own performative nectaries.
I suddenly feel the optics adjust in myself when I see them back up again on the theater’s screen.
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In 2004, when the song was released, I still hadn’t figured out how queer artists of color could take back what was stolen by Britney’s predecessors. I loved Madonna even as she snatched my soul. But gleaning the cultural nuances of gendered performativity thanks to a degreed dalliance with performance studies means I’m listening now with new ears. Maybe it’s queer aging or having assimilated those queer brown butch life lessons that has given me the gift of middle-aged lesbian longevity. It’s why I am now able to heed the song’s unabashed call for softness and forgiveness, delivered through Spears’s seductive yet exhausted girl-on-the-verge whisper. While it may have been Britney’s rebuttal to her ex Justin Timberlake’s indicting “Cry Me a River,” for me it’s a baby themme anthem for a mean ol’ butch daddy queering the lyrics to Joni Mitchell’s “Carey.” A mean ol’ daddy who’s losing interest in being mean these days, opting for moving and grooving to club queens, crooning over four-four house beats, and slowing down enough to let the ballad set the pace.
Whether it’s the dance floor at Chico’s in Montebello or Mustache Mondays in downtown, I’ve shared many a dance or a knowing glance with Sebastian, who’s twirled me elegantly into the twilight of our respective nightlives. I’ve learned how to move better—how to glide, wring, and dab my body to the music, take up space elegantly for once. How to float accordingly, to surrender my toxic masculinities as the anchors that hinders my growth, my curiosity of self. I have forgone the trappings of the binary—the dreariness of plaid, the explanatory impulses of patriarchal masculinity, a reluctance toward intimacy. Instead, I have rediscovered reinvention and have made it a new rite of passage back into my softer parts. Sebastian models those passages with aplomb and without apology. I have received those blessings from Sebastian. What I have given them in return—well, that verdict is still out. All I know is that I have been making space in my wings for them, a young, queer, femme-identified gender renegade who models the finer points of extending ourselves out to one another, may softness be our code.
I don’t bother to mention any of this over an extended Thanksgiving break in Los Angeles when I catch up with Sebastian, who has just started rehearsals for the January show. I reckon Sebastian has better things to obsess over as I pick them up at their family’s house, situated on one of the few one-way streets in Huntington Park, a police car parked across the street a few houses away, lights on but no one in sight. The one-ways have long been the inconvenience meant to disrupt the underground economies that are the block-byblock gang rivalries. They dot the peripheries around Pacific Boulevard, the main drag in Huntington Park affectionately named “Little Tijuana” (or Little TJ). Pacific Boulevard always hits the news when Mexico wins a match in the World Cup or when the Lakers take home the championship. Little do people know it’s the premier, one-stop shop for quinceañeras and brides-to-be on a budget, as well as trans femmes and club kids. Los callejones, but make it fashion.23
Sebastian quickly opens the passenger side of my old 4Runner and slides into the seat, giving me a quick peck on the cheek. They’re wearing a dark oversized denim jacket, black jeans, and work boots—a Southeast L.A. camouflage. We are essentially twinning, except Sebastian has glass-cutting cheekbones and a tightly coiffed mustache sitting pretty on their full lips. Our body types give away clearly that they’re the dancer and I’m the writer. Yet we are two brown queers performing two very distinct types of fragile masculinity, easily broken should either one of us decide to resist its various commodifications, or just turn down the wrong corner.
They lead me through a Huntington Park that is as much theirs as it is mine, as they still live there and I lived there as a toddler and sporadically for the last fourteen years, having moved away finally in 2016 for Tucson. Sebastian doesn’t drive and urges me to go against my cocksure shortcuts through Huntington Park’s warehouse corridor. What’s the tea? I deadpan as I take all of Vernon Avenue to Central, shaving ten minutes off our commute to downtown. Sebastian narrates their new romantic entanglement for me, but this time the crush has a career implication. That’s how I confirm Sebastian’s on the verge of blowing up. These are great problems that test discipline against desire, I tell them. They roll their eyes. We find Kojak parking for a semi-quick bowl of pho before a reading I’m participating in to celebrate our friend Nikki’s new novel. I spill my tea to Sebastian—my ex and I have been mutually creeping on one another via the social media platform du jour. This would be normalized, except Sebastian reminds me I’m over forty and thus what the fuck am I doing? I tell them my ex just left her rebound relationship and moved back to Tucson. Sebastian puts the hurt on me. This career queer is not going to come back for your ass. Ouch.
You and my mom are the meanest Sagittarians I know, I say as I slurp my beef pho, a wounded silence setting in, and I remember how hard it sometimes is to be with family.
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Born in Los Angeles to immigrants from the state of Mexico, Sebastian came into movement as a family affair—their parents and siblings all danced traditional Aztec folklórico, a dance project often realized on Catholic and national holidays, an Indigenous response for a people still reeling from colonization’s persistent toll, a dance to remind us that indigeneity often reveals itself through joyful movement, through community performances. Sunrise ceremonies take place every Thanksgiving, for example, when Aztec danzantes greet the darkened sky with an offering of mourning, a set of choreographed dances timed with the rise of the morning sun.
As part of their performance art, Sebastian’s danzante work has shaped collaborative performances they have done with rafa. In 2014, the two performed no water under the bridge under the 4th Street Viaduct in East Los Angeles. Sebastian donned their danzante garb, with feathers and glittered vestments made to look like animal pelts, and took their seemingly inexhaustible turn with durational performance while rafa initiated a series of movements in response to Sebastian’s choreography. The work is a blood ritual for young brown men lost to urban violence. The two artists describe the iconic viaduct on 4th Street and Lorena in Boyle Heights as a site in which “popular films, such as Mi Familia, Blood in Blood Out, and Colors, have explored the intersection of history, violence, gang culture, the industrial prison complex, and Chicanidad. These films have helped construct internationally recognized identities/stereotypes of Latinos/as living in Los Angeles.” Both rafa and Sebastian have long reckoned with these stereotypes, grinding them into a wearable material that conjures the burden of a Chicano identity, a Chicano gender, slipping from its post in the East Los Angeles context that grounded them, where they have imagined the “space between their selfidentifications and projected identities from an unknown public gaze.” The performance lasted more than two hours.
Durational performance as a practice has instilled in Sebastian a palpable discipline that resonates with audiences that grow larger with each new presentation of their work, especially since 2018, when they performed their own solo compositions in both Los Angeles and San Antonio. But durational performance as a device also warrants attention for the performance of masculinity that has exhausted Sebastian into new realizations about how their gender complicates both interior and material realities as an artist living and making work for a gender-conscious and laudatory Los Angeles while living in gender-prohibitive Huntington Park. A Huntington Park that demands its denizens to ride its buses to work each day, to amble down its crosswalks toward and away from one another in gender costumes that adhere to the sex one is assigned at birth—whether that birth was in California or Mexico or Guatemala. Sebastian is, in many ways, asking us what we are enduring when we put on a gender that makes each one of us both legible and invisible to each other.
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Artists like Marina Abramović and Tehching Hsieh are the avatars of performance art for our contemporary moment. So present is performance art in the cultural imaginary that I can see The Simpsons dragging into the town of Springfield Abramović’s notorious performative, eye-gazy, soul-charging persona from The Artist Is Present. And why not? The animated series recently featured America’s favorite dysfunctional family driving through another art center, Marfa, Texas. But what is performance art exactly? I have never been able to define it with any single, precise description. Many performance artists define their genre through action and a sense of the temporal and temporary, rather than through a permanent artistic gesture that starts and then finishes. But there is more to that. For Abramović, performance “is the moment when the performer with his own idea steps into his own mental, physical construction [of that idea] in front of the audience.” For Abramović the blood and knife are real, whereas in theater they are not. For fans and scholars of performance art, we hope that there can be documentation of the performance—from photos and objets d’art to full video documentation that provide access to the history of performance art, but the performance itself resides in the space of ephemerality and is reanimated through engagements with the archive. But sometimes we are actually there, in the audience, getting our minds blown by witnessing the utmost distillation of liveness. Being there to see it as it was meant to be seen is key. And as someone who has seen her fair share of performance art, and has spent time poring over texts and theories about the range of expressions present in the form, I hover over the space of the durational. The durational as it lives and exists in the repetition of movements, Sebastian’s movements, is speaking to me about what it means to wear our bodies in the street, on the stage, in our bedrooms. It is the durational embedded in performance art that allows for a porous exhibition and examination of endurance, the body utilizing all it has to make visible an attempt toward a psychological mastery over pain, solitude, exhaustion, and fear. It is in the durational that the artist gives us—their witnesses—an embodied representation of the ways we all endure the spectrum of difficult feelings customized to and for our material realities.
In some ways this is how I would define trauma. The obsessive rehearsal of the initial wound and refusal to release the concomitant humiliations that endure hauntologically. We need this pain to live. It becomes the story that holds attention. I have often sought a replication of such punishments. It keeps others attached to me. I wouldn’t recognize myself outside of such imbrication. These are the familiar contours that comfort me. And rehearsing these scripts make them just legible enough for those who want to protect me, bear witness, or offer presence.
Abramović and Hsieh both have centered their own bodies in work that demanded a range of punishing acts spanning hours, days, weeks, and years. Art must be Beautiful, Artist must be Beautiful is one of Abramović’s typical early performances, in which the artist takes a brush and violently runs it through her long hair while reciting that “art must be beautiful” for almost an hour on video. Hsieh has performed each of his works for one year at a time. His best known, One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece), featured him living inside a wooden cage for a year before moving to different yearlong endeavors that cemented his place as a master of durational art. Another of these yearlong performances, Time Clock Piece (One Year Performance 1980–1981), featured Hsieh punching a time clock every hour for a year.24 The durational elements of their respective bodies of work have defined an important form of performance art for Los Angeles artists in recent years.
Since 2001, Los Angeles with its cheaper-than-New-York rents, has become an underground center of durational art, with artists arriving from the East Coast, mingling with the locally born and bred, and together raising sufficiently passable resources to make new work on their own terms and in their own artist-run venues. These collaborations lead to artists connecting with curators who present their work in such venues as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Hollywood, which often serves as the stepping-stone to larger museum venues, such as the Hammer Museum in Westwood. Artists like rafa have animated endurance work with new contextual framing around race, immigration status, violence, and homophobia—issues that have brought about a cross-sector (and cross-pollination) of audiences that go beyond Los Angeles counties. Rafa and collaborators like Sebastian, San Cha, and Gabriela Ruiz have made names for themselves while enabling the city itself to hold a new place in the annals (as well as the imaginary) of contemporary art.
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I finally got the chance to work with Sebastian a couple of years ago on an exhibition I co-curated for a small community gallery in San Pedro, California, on the Los Angeles harbor. The exhibition was called Coastal/Border. According to my catalog essay (that no one read) Coastal/Border was:
an experiment grounded in a critical recovery of minoritarian narratives reperformed by the six artists invited to create, through a range of decolonializing impulses that look at the histories that contribute to the contemporary issues that we can read into the landscape as it is taken apart. To say the minimal, these performances will expose how transnational material realities have impacted communities of color situated in close and conceptual proximities to the Port of Los Angeles. To say it at maximal level, however, is why we arrive to the Coastal/Border. It is here where we gather around the state-making tensions that undergird this exhibition of performance. In various forms and configurations, we have spent the last two years calling into question the tendencies to call on the colonial mythologies unique to Coastal California as both historical shorthanded and shortchanged amnesia evidenced in the spatial politics of Fort MacArthur and Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro, the harbor city of Los Angeles County.
I was proud of the exhibition but, most of all, grateful that it gave me a chance to finally get to know Sebastian. I’ve found in my life—coming in and out of the various doors and rooms that art has housed me in—that it’s always these collaborative opportunities that allow me to really know a person. With Sebastian, I got a sense of their desire to bridge the myriad endurances of everyday life. As two brown queers—adult children of mainly monolingual immigrants—we mirror each other’s psychological portraits to some degree. We see each other’s psychic excess which, to put it plainly, is just us being ourselves. No code-switching to appease the spatial contexts that hold us. We are in mutual appreciation of each other’s trauma and our demystification of that trauma. We are father and daughter, mother and son. We are rough and elegant at the same time. We harness our psychological leaks in order to spill them over the borders that attempt to hold those excesses—inside our bodies, sometimes our barrios, sometimes both in strangely interchangeable ways.
For Coastal/Border, Sebastian proposed FTZ (Free/Foreign Trade Zone), a performance happening, text, and installation work concerned with contamination. Sebastian and I would get together at the Mexi-hipster café spot on Pacific Boulevard and talk through concepts of contamination as we combed through many of Leonard Nadel’s photographs of Mexican migrants coming to work in the U.S. through the Bracero Program. In the fifties, Nadel documented the Bracero Program for the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Republic, producing searing images of the Mexican Guest Worker program that endured from 1942 to 1964. These photographs were taken in connection with a survey of braceros done by Ernesto Galarza, a man of letters who emigrated to California from Nayarit, Mexico, to work in the fields as a child. He became both a labor organizer and activist, returning to Central California after completing his doctorate from Columbia University in 1944. Nadel’s photographs illustrate the issues Galarza wrote about in his publication, Strangers in Our Fields. During World War II, the U.S. and Mexico entered a farm labor agreement to offset the U.S. wartime labor shortage by importing braceros (from the term brazo, meaning “arm,” or those who work with their arms). The war ended but the bracero program continued through the early sixties, and by the time of Nadel’s photographs almost 500,000 Mexican contract workers were legally allowed to work on U.S. agricultural farms, mostly on short-term labor contracts that paid workers thirty cents an hour, considered a fair wage at the time. The workers were known as “dry-backs,” a take on the derogatory term “wetback,” suggesting that these Mexicans didn’t have to swim across the Rio Grande to get to U.S. soil. Being called “dry-backs,” however, is just one of the many indignities these Mexicanos endured as temporary workers upon arriving in the United States. As many of Nadel’s photographs show, the most disturbing indignities involved group bodily inspections and fumigation with toxic chemicals before entering the U.S.
While these images unabashedly document the undeniably exploitative conditions these men endured in pursuit of higher U.S. wages, for Sebastian, they also offered an opportunity to create an embodied choreographic dialogue with the ways in which brown masculine sexuality is displayed. Nadel composed many of his photographs chronicling this important period of mid-twentieth-century U.S. labor history with the Mexican masculine body, often nude, in groups of other nude Mexican torsos and bodies, being searched and scrutinized in such a way that imputes a sinister eros onto the images. Or at least that’s what happens with our queer brown gaze. That queerness can exist in the more degrading corners of American history is a concern Sebastian takes up in their work. Sebastian mentioned to me over our cloyingly sweet horchata lattes just how Nadel’s images paralleled their own experience with being subjected to forms of contamination control. Sebastian has felt the intersection of gay cis male cultural expectations and market imperative in the pressure to go on PrEP because they are perceived as someone at very high risk for contracting HIV—a brown femme body from a working-class, immigrant-dominant barrio called Huntington Park. A barrio peopled by those with minimal to no access to healthcare. The Centers for Disease Control has said that a pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) when taken daily lowers the chances of getting infected.
As a genderqueer, fluid femme interventionist who makes visible the fraught relationship with a body assigned otherwise at birth, Sebastian wants to fuck shit up. They situate their embodied subjectivity as a counterpoint to the kind of low-grade surveillance carried out by the pharmaceutical industry—no one wants to be cruised at the club and asked their PrEP status right out of the gate. Like, I get it, but don’t lead with it if you’re trying to step to me, they snap.
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The most visibly captivating of objects driving Sebastian’s FTZ is the cactus plant. The cactus is one of the most identifiable succulent plant species, taking various forms along the political borders between the United States and Mexico, most notably in the deserts of the Southwest. It is indefatigable, able to weather sweltering heat and recognized by border dwellers and crossers as a natural physical marker indicating that the demarcation of north and south is close. It is an object that brings awareness to the stark materiality of a bordered landscape that the Indigenous, Mexican, and Latinx migrants know or are at least familiar with in varied and intimate ways. Their histories, ancient and recent, are witnessed by the saguaros and opuntias that live side by side, a demarcation that separates people from those histories. By installing a nopal plant in the gallery, Sebastian gestures to a need for a phenomenologic of care, an anticipated instruction for nurturance, for softness toward the nopal’s requisite self-protection. This simple act, however, also offers the nopal—the cactus plant—as a symbol that calls our attention to the complicated relationship to brownness and the identity markings connected to Latinidad, Indigeneity, and the ways those markings of belonging are inscribed on the artist’s brown body. Sebastian’s cactus conceptual orchestration is forcing constructions of Latinidad and Indigeneity to reckon with each other. This reckoning, a prickly encounter where an elision of identity categories has no space to speak, brings to mind the folk metaphor “con el nopal en la frente,” lodged as a critical adage specifically at individuals of Mexican descent living in the U.S. who have assimilated readily, which requires a casting off of anything remotely “Mexican.” Awkwardly translated to “with the cactus on his forehead,” the nopal in this vernacular register is used to punish the darker-skinned Mexican with Indigenous physical traits who claim not to know Spanish or the customs belonging to Mexican culture. This betrayal is read as the absolute affront to cultural nationalists, especially those lighter-skinned Mexicanos who aren’t just passing for white.
And I’m tripping because I’m a lighter shade of brown, a legible Latinx with more pronounced Spanish features (have you seen my hairy arms?), feeling the rush of blood flush my cheeks, feeling the indictment and invitation to question my own anti-Indigenous rhetorics with which I’ve been raised. For Sebastian, though, the nopal as incendiary castigating object is brought into the gallery space to invert the pejorative charge by offering it as a petition for an ethics of care for the brown femme body, one that animates another of Sebastian’s concurrent projects that they manage via their browncommonz Instagram account. The title is an homage to the work of the late José Muñoz, whose electrifying essay “The Brown Commons: The Sense of Wildness” is one of the multiple essays in a posthumous collection of Muñoz’s work on affect theories of brown ontology titled The Sense of Brown. Muñoz begins his essay (read in front of an academic audience at Eastern Michigan University in the spring of 2013) by describing a commons of “brown people, places, feelings, sounds, animals, minerals, and other objects … how these things are brown or what makes them brown is partially in the way they suffer and stride together but also the commonality in their ability to flourish under duress and pressure … in part because they have been devalued by a world outside of their commons.”25
Sebastian raises the stakes of Muñoz’s evocative call with their work by documenting the Los Angeles–specificity of a brown commons, which is important to their quotidian thinking and process as ways to forge an artistic practice contingent on demonstrating the simultaneity of flourishing and duress, beauty in the face of devaluement. These flourishings and devaluement can exist in parallel contexts—queer and hegemonic demonstrations of brown masculinity can coexist in and beyond the labor structures that call those masculinities into place as sources of labor, especially within the sociopolitical space of Southeast Los Angeles. However, in their almost contraband act of documenting a community (whether it’s Pacific Boulevard in Southeast Los Angeles’s Huntington Park or the commuter buses that crisscross downtown Los Angeles traffic) they bring into our purview the high risk Sebastian places themself in as a chronicler whose gender and embodiment may potentially be read and responded to violently. Sebastian, in their contribution to Coastal/Border, presents this quandary by utilizing nopals as material for both installation and the object for a performance mask (a “cara de nopal”). A way to both hide from and mess with a machismo that hinders their own sense of belonging to a brown commons they are actively seeking out on social media. The kind of machismo that puts Sebastian in real, physical danger. Which might be the same kind of machismo that turns them on. Putting on a cactus mask lets Sebastian play with machismo’s meaning safely, but the cactus still pricks.
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I left Tucson early on the second Friday of December to see Sebastian’s performance component for FTZ. It was scheduled to be the closing event for Coastal/Border. It took all day to get to Los Angeles, whereas past excursions between my two homes clocked in at under eight hours on the road, stops for gas included. Today, of all days, my car decided to break down, the engine wheezing its last breath fewer than twenty miles from the nearest gas station. My worst nightmare as a desert denizen is to break down on the highways in the middle of the desert, miles away from the nearest sign of help, stuck in the signalless ethers rendering my phone a useless technology—my gender, my sex, and my ethnicity putting me at risk in the pastoral hinterlands of my adopted town. As I’m waiting for the tow truck to come and find me, I think about the Carlos Almaraz car crash paintings I had seen over Thanksgiving break at LACMA. The explosions of automobiles in a meeting between Van Gogh’s violent strokes and Repo Man’s velocity, the Los Angeles of my youth in the background, concrete and palm trees, traffic and smoggy sunsets. I’m remembering the lore behind these paintings—the artist’s premonitions of a premature death through these visions, shared with his psychoanalyst who gently suggested he merely paint them. Maybe that would somehow diminish Almaraz’s propensity toward a legible selfannihilation at the hands of a killer no one would have thought twice about, since everyone in Los Angeles traverses as part of a death drive that goes with the flow of traffic.
In this IRL version of the nightmare, though, it’s only fifty degrees, not in the middle of some scorch-storm of summer, and my phone works fine. And I reach a towing service willing to spirit me away to safety for two hundred dollars. My car of fourteen years though, trusty steed and witness to my elusive adulthood, is knocking on death’s door, and I am thankful that my tow truck driver is nice enough—a gruff-voiced Santa Claus type with an American flag air freshener dangling from the rearview. We talk cars and bond over a mutual love for late sixties model Ford Rancheros, an early prototype for the El Camino. I thank my San Francisco femme friends’ vehicular enthusiasm in my mind and take it all as a good sign that cacti whir alongside the truck and that my nervous system feels calm, intact. Once I leave the car with a mechanic in Glendale, Arizona, where it will stay forever, I decide to get a rental car and continue onward to Los Angeles.
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The next day I wake up in the guest bedroom at my parents’ new house in Downey, California, where they are busy getting ready for Christmas. They are both in their mid-seventies and exuding a radiance I hadn’t ever known before. Or not when they lived in Huntington Park. My mom and dad were happier? Happier to be in the town they always saw as several steps up from Huntington Park, where they felt vulnerable as they settled into the twilight of their lives. They used to live next-door to a family affiliated with the 18th Street gang—evident when the garage door was tagged with large, black, spray-painted Roman numerals after they were evicted by their landlord.
I swallow some coffee and a pastry, yell good-bye to my mom as I head out the door, and hit the road again, this time to San Pedro. The performance is scheduled for two in the afternoon, but I arrive at eleven to make sure Sebastian has someone from the exhibition management team present to receive them and their team. I don’t work for the nonprofit gallery, but for a fifteen-hundred-dollar stipend and eighteen months of engagement, collaboration, and production as a contracted curator, I’m called upon to be there. I want to be there for Sebastian but I’m also trying to melt the butter of resentment I feel toward the organization for paying me so little for the amount of time I have given them (the space). But that’s often what it takes to get artists like Sebastian their due resources to make new work, to experiment. In a Malcolm Gladwell world, I’m a connector archetype, so organizations often hire me to get them to the queer, young, brown talent while they’re cheap. It has been maddening working like this, coming out of community art settings and not profiting from nonprofits. I have always tried to shield artists from the weeds of this humiliation, the sense-dulling bureaucratic violence. I take a deep breath and recalibrate for the occasion, remembering that at least the location is stunning. The gallery is located on top of a bluff overlooking the Pacific and today the sun is peeking out behind billowy white clouds, a sky so cerulean it hurts me into poetry. The performance space is an old military barrack converted to a dance studio, with long vertical windows drawing in both light and ocean air to create the most optimal space for a queer and brown artistic intervention. Our barrack sits among other converted barracks that house painting studios and other gallery spaces.
Such a perfect day, I sing quietly to myself as I set up a little green room space with water, beer, tequila, and salty liquor store snacks for the talent, and some wine and water for the anticipated public. Now for Sebastian to arrive.
And they come, eyes blazing with focus. Sebastian arrives with their sister, Ashley, to set up. Ashley is soft-spoken but has the same eyes as her sibling. Intense, soft, intense, soft. They laugh audibly as they put the final touches on the tableaus, leaving objects like fruits and scissors in the corners and in the center of the space. I notice a series of plastic baggies filled with green, blue, orange, and yellow liquid. These soft sculptures are tied to each other in such a way that the only thing I can think to compare them to are rock candy swizzle sticks. They sit at the base of the columns in the large room, columns that interfere with sight lines. Sebastian has transformed the room. Gurl, yes, I think.
People begin to arrive. And Sebastian retreats to the back of the space. First to arrive, as always, are our friends. It’s rafa, along with San Cha, and their new friend Fabian Guerrero, a tall and handsome photographer from Dallas who’s making a name for himself in the tough and fickle Los Angeles art world. It’s a family reunion, but for thirty minutes it’s just us, which begins to unnerve me. Where is everyone? But I don’t let anyone see me sweat. If it’s a small audience, then we shall all live to tell the tale. That’s what performance art is all about. Being there, regardless of the absences and because of the absences.
I’m suddenly finding myself greeting more people though—friends and acquaintances, acquaintances who shall become my friends. It’s a Saturday afternoon in one of the most far-flung locales in Los Angeles County and it’s being gorgeously inundated by young ones, queer ones, brown ones, femme ones, and their admirers. Sebastian’s parents are here and my heart swells. Anxiety assuaged, crisis averted, we start to build critical mass. The seating is nonexistent and no one in our audience has been directed on where to sit or where to stand, but organically everyone shifts toward the periphery of the space and sits down, most of us cross-legged, along each of the walls.
And it begins.
It begins when Sebastian comes out blindfolded, a black and white paisley handkerchief folded thickly over their eyes. They wear black jeans, a black sweatshirt, and black Nike Cortez, the sneakers made popular by any kid who ever grew up in a barrio. (Ironically, the sneaker was named after the conqueror who saw to the fall of the Aztec Empire.) They look so butch, a drag so deliciously overdetermined. Sebastian glides slowly yet assuredly, arms held at forty-five-degree angles, to different parts of the space, and finally falls to their knees, where they move like a quadruped toward the objects they have left like a trail of breadcrumbs, reaching them, touching vinyl boots, moving past the bowls of fruit, and crawling from the center of the space into various spectator zones, where they clutch at ankles, calves, shins, and knees of unsuspecting but totally expectant viewers. Sebastian slowly pulls a knife, a roll of clear mailing tape, and a banana from somewhere inside their shirt and begins to wrap the banana to their arm, cutting through the tape with their teeth, then cutting through the tape with the knife, then peeling the banana, then eating the banana and offering it blindly to the person sitting closest to them. It’s anxiety producing to watch because the tape pulled in one long swoop squeaks like an animal in pain, and Sebastian is jerking around with a steak knife in one hand and a mouthful of fruit, writhing around, waiting for someone to take their offering. In this instance, Sebastian doesn’t know to whom they crawl, but they have a series of rituals to go through and finding a willing participant is part of the rite. Next they are on their belly, slithering diagonally across the floor, carrying an orange now taped to the inside of their wrist and crawling, sliding their body along the floor, like they were swimming and bringing that fruit to safety. Sebastian arrives at their younger sister’s feet and she smiles, though obviously self-conscious; once she feels all of our eyes on her, her face flushes. But Ashley is focused on her sibling’s movements, watching Sebastian jut forward their wrist, take the steak knife, and slice through the clear tape to the center of the fruit, cutting away at the rind. When Sebastian offers the wrist, not suspecting that the receiver should be their own sister, Ashley’s face begins to contort and she cries, chest heaving, her mouth opens toward the orange, her hands wiping her tears from her eyes. It’s incredible to watch.
FTZ continues.
And it continues.
It is a durational piece with movement. Or an hour-long solo dance performance with objects. A choreography of gender that doesn’t stop, only pausing for the occasional outfit change. A choreography of genders disintegrating only to be spliced back and forth into each other, a binary deconstructed in colorful plastic gemstones, colorful high-heeled footwear, bright liquids in sandwich baggies—but it brings to mind those color-coded terrorism threat advisory scales. It brings to mind the ways federal agencies and state and local governments respond with specific actions when different levels are triggered. By color. Be they at airports or any other public facility that enables, or hinders, a queer, femme, brown body their mobility.
________
My last trip to Los Angeles to see Sebastian’s full-length debut of Hypanthium had been easier—no breakdowns of the vehicular kind—though so much had happened. In the weeks leading up to the performance, our friend and Sebastian’s mentor, Nacho Nava, had fallen ill with a strain of pneumonia that put him on life-support for three weeks.
Nacho founded, ran, and deejayed Mustache Mondays, one of the longer running nightclubs in downtown Los Angeles. Mustache was hugely popular with queer Black and brown club kids of all ages, performance artists, musicians, and anyone versed in their own experiential history of underground culture. It was a party that had outgrown various venues, finally settling in for a near decade-long Monday night residency at La Cita, a Mexican restaurant turned epicenter, as lit on the inside as it was on the outside, with five-foot neon lights shouting its name into downtown Los Angeles’s visual vernacular. Anyone who took their nightlife seriously ventured out every Monday to Hill Street at the base of downtown’s infamous Bunker Hill to see the likes of Robyn performing a secret midnight show, or to have their minds blown by a then-unknown rafa sculpting masks out of plaster inside a translucent cylinder just a few feet from a crowded dance floor, or to watch a young femme named Sebastian perform kinetic choreographies for femmes and the fury that binds them.
Nacho died the Friday before Hypanthium opened. Rafa and I had been communicating about Nacho, hoping that the San Lázaro candle would right this wrong, praying that we would never arrive at this hole-in-the-universe kind of loss. Losing the Chronos of our queer underground, the figure who swallowed his children in protective fervor—the joto maricón bear of a dad whose smile and sweaty, hairy arms held you for as long as you needed to be held, metabolizing you into the vastness of queer possibility.
Nacho.
And, oh, how this loss animates everything about Sebastian’s performance. Everything, even Britney’s song, takes a new shape. Everything—from the opening hard-thumping catwalk in the club house number that felt like an eight-minute extended club mix familiar to anyone who’d ever taken a tumble trying to deathdrop at Mustache, to the last aching tableau where Sebastian and their two collaborators, Angel Acuña and Autumn Silas Randolph, become a melancholic version of the Three of Cups tarot card, arms raised in a glorious vining up the invisible tree of grief, and then back to each other, one behind another, the musical score swelling as Sebastian’s mouth opens, face crumpling, to let out un grito en luto, a wailing so familiar to anyone who’s ever let that primal scream of femininity collect its dues, taking what it is owed.
________
Deep, deep, deep inside
Deep, deep down inside
Deep, deep, deep inside
Deep, deep down inside
Deep, deep, deep inside
Deep, deep down inside
Deep, deep, deep inside
Deep, deep down inside
It wasn’t always familiar. The thumping bass, the clapping snare, the crash cymbal. The gorgeous hazing that was waiting in an ungodly queue. The glaring at the bouncer but looking like callejón couture, a working-class catwalk. The kids that lived in my old neighborhoods, who carpooled from Huntington Park and Bell, who knew the back ways to downtown through Vernon, who looked ready to be there like it was an assignment to ace, everyone looking like they created themselves. The Hollywood Salvis who danced until their church-appropriate, long-sleeved button-ups were drenched in sweat. And then there were the thirty-somethings who had not hung up the clubbing gloves but now partied with some aesthetic theory under their belts. This was a Monday night routine. This was Mustache.
I was in that latter group. I was still a punk and dressed in secondhand J.Crew to pass as a university administrator but I deejayed for so many queer women of color events that it was impossible not to love house, disco, and techno. It’s strange—I realize my generation was so haunted by genre and the selfpolicing energies imprinted on any of us who claimed fandom over criticism. Why else would poseur be so wounding?
But as a deejay and nascent music critic, I wanted to master those genres—to play the original vinyl albums and learn the production history of Sylvester’s “Mighty Real,” or make queer theory out of it through close listening analysis. I pulled out those records from the milk crates I took from the El Criollo, the Cuban market on Bellevue at Lafayette, in my Silver Lake apartment. I played those records for the twenty lesbians out on the second Wednesday of each month, lesbian nights I begged the old queen who managed Woody’s on Hyperion Boulevard to host.
I didn’t have time for that the way I did when I was a postpunk indie record vinyl junkie right out of high school, working as a turbo Coke/red-eye pre-Starbucks-era barista at Eagle’s Coffee Pub and Newsstand in North Hollywood. I was spending my weekly tips at Aron’s Records on Highland in Hollywood, amassing a collection of records by bands I heard on KXLU. But after graduate school almost a decade later, my musical recreational activities were compromised. I had to sell that collection to afford the move from my eight hundred-fifty-dollar, two-bedroom Silver Lake apartment to another roommate situation in Prospect Heights for twice that same amount. I returned to Los Angeles when I completed my drive-through master’s degree in Performance Studies and didn’t get into the program’s actually funded PhD program. At the time, I could not fathom surviving the gladiator match it takes to live in New York just to stay close to the program community. José Muñoz was my advisor and urged me to apply again. But I did not have the vanity or the pedigree to strive for a creative hustle in New York City. I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on the financial burden of having a glamourous, but hard, graduate student life but I couldn’t admit that so I became a self-saboteur. I did not have the working-class mettle needed to succeed. State colleges and universities were referred to as “Podunk University” during a critical race theory seminar, a joke laughed at by people with whom I am still in touch. The resources I’d gained to learn performance art histories was not meager, but my podunk university undergraduate training didn’t quite prepare me for post-structuralist critic school.
This advanced art degree hung low on me, like a pair of cannonballs in my sports bra. It had weakened my shot at class mobility when I returned to Los Angeles with forty thousand dollars in debt. I lost my time trying to pay off the astonishing student debt bill that came to the tune of four hundred dollars every month. And not having the time to nurture and maintain this familiar and necessary sensory pleasure to hone hard-fought critical reading is painful. As in the tech disruption of music listening apps like Spotify that make it too easy to create personalized playlists, my fealty was to the originally sequenced album. You listen to the album as the artist intended. But you needed space and money to house and support those analog technologies.
Did Steve Jobs know we would soon not have the same disposable temporality that we once did in the late twentieth century? Learning a new sensory pleasure required time I did not have. I worked now and found modes of release through curated sonic excursions through Detroit techno, Chicago house, Latin American psychedelica, and “Back That Azz Up?” I was going into personal debt alleviating the forty-hour grind by not just partying Friday through Sunday but also including Monday in that lineup.
How could any of us not be prone to trances? Have you ever heard “Lightyears” by Juan Atkins? Isn’t that why we wait in the interminable line? Isn’t it the repetition that keeps us there?
________
Few nightlife venues are capable of creating the conditions necessary for spiritual communing. But this was California, birthplace of the new age. And brown and Black kids wouldn’t be denied this healing. We would all sit under this Bodhi tree. We would snap back and forth through the portals availed to us. There are nightclubs that last the fraction of most lifetimes, let alone reincarnations. Mustache was special. But we didn’t know it at the time.
Mustache held court in several downtown venues over the course of a decade. For me, Mustache came at a time marked by upheaval, a period of vulnerable adulthood butting up against restrictive episodes spurred by the stability-shattering of the 2008 recession. The frustrated energies echo today, and I am spirited back to a time of diminished job hours. But back then I could still turn heels and pump my fists to the beat in the necessary oblivions and escape hatches that Mustache offered me. It is these memories that kept the dream of nightlife alive when the pandemic foreclosed any remaining sense of futurity I had.
When you’re younger, you excel at taking it all for granted. Or you don’t realize how good this is because you timed your drugs correctly. Or you see the genealogy unfolding before your eyes and do the work of community making, no matter how much you end up hating each other. Or you’re just trying to keep people from leaving the dance floor. Or you were always already borne from the necessary cliché that tomorrow isn’t promised. Anyone with a generational membership doesn’t realize that their points of contact with one another often transpire in these publics. That great love stories emerge here. That habits and vices do too. These are the sites that teach art while eschewing the prohibitive nature of respectability—it’s where we are uninhibited by the vices of our choosing. The generation of queer Latinxs before me didn’t have the freedom to be open in their exhibition of joy, the desiring of subjectivity, or the convergence of identities through song and dance. They were conditioned by gender. They drank through their social anxieties. They had to abide by the strict binaries, the rules of civility, familial and institutional legibility. Some veered toward homonormativity, relegating these furtive histories to one month a year. But I don’t begrudge them. You actually have to plan to stay alive. Lives, not just history. Both deserve their own unearthing.
22. A themme is a resilient creature or a nonbinary femme, sometimes both and seldom mutually exclusive.
23. “The allies,” in reference to Santee Alley in Downtown Los Angeles, where bargain shopping for brand-name knockoffs is popular with Latinxs.
24. Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance: 1980–1981, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hsieh-one-year-performance1980-1981-t13875.
25. “JNT Dialogue 2013: José Muñoz and Samuel Delany (Part 1/4).” April 1, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-YInUlXgO4.