SECTION III
2018 | Laura Aguilar, the photographer and chronicler of brown life who centered lesbians and her own fat body, passed away in April 2018 in Southern California. Her death from complications from diabetes was untimely, beset with tragedy. Diabetes, which is possible though not easy to reverse, reminds us of a U.S. healthcare system that brings into relief the depths of precarity to which Chicana artists, intellectuals, and cultural producers endure and succumb. Aguilar died from the same conditions that took Gloria Anzaldúa, the philosopher poet from the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas whose feminist theories of the borderlands envisaged a new “mestiza consciousness” emerging in response to the psychic wounds of colonial encounters and occupation. Anzaldúa’s philosophies of Chicana consciousness center on simultaneous awareness of and resistance to oppression, what literary theorist María Lugones describes as “the possibility of resistance revealed in the perceiving of the self in the process of being oppressed as another face of the self in the process of resisting oppression.” That conceptual ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail, is metabolized in Aguilar’s Nature series, where the photographer centers her own body in the desert. Her images are a quiet insurrection against policing engines that power the landscape, along with histories of violence against the Indigenous and Mexican people and otherwise marginalized bodies.
In Nature Self-Portrait #14 (1996), Aguilar’s body lays in side view within a bantam-sized landscape, with her hand on the reflective surface of a natural spring of water, enacting both Echo and Narcissus in her gaze. Aguilar as both subject and observer sets ablaze the Anzaldúan concept of nepantla: a “space in-between, the locus and sign of transition” that exists in the creative act as the “place/space where realities interact and imaginative shifts happen.”
In 1992, Aguilar, herself a Chicana lesbian, experienced an imaginative shift in her practice. She was so taken with the Plush Pony, a bar in East L.A. that catered predominantly to working-class Chicana lesbians, that she set up her camera and offered to take portraits of the locals as a way to socially lubricate what was an otherwise difficult scene for Aguilar, a shy self-identified introvert, to navigate. A very butch-femme joint, the Plush Pony was a space where Aguilar found some sense of kin with its barflies—enough to immortalize them in her now infamous Plush Pony series. Because its clientele was perhaps rougher than the usual ilk that frequented bars like the Palms or the Normandie Room in the West Hollywood of the eighties and nineties, the Plush Pony differed from the normative spectatorship that Aguilar had grown weary of appealing to. The lawyers, activists, artists, and academics she had previously photographed in her Latina Lesbians series were an echelon ready for its respectability close-up. In the portrait series encapsulating the years 1985 to 1991, we meet the subjects by name, accompanied by a lyrical caption summarizing their aspirations come to fruition. Carla, for example, in a sexy black motorcycle jacket, her voluminously coiffed bangs brushing the corner of her forehead like a Chicana Fonz, looks into the camera to emphasize her tenacity, which is corroborated by the text: “my mother encouraged me to be a court reporter … I became a lawyer (Carla, 1986).”
The Plush Pony dykes, however, always remained anonymous. Nameless, also, were the ways they overcame being underestimated. The intimacy in the portraits of butch lesbians in white A-shirts and baseball caps offers some entry into what their nightlives might have been like—that the Plush, as it was known to El Sereno locals, was where their gender nonconformity could be acknowledged and desired—but there’s not a sense of articulated interiority nor a conversation between narrator and subject made as legible as the one in Latina Lesbians.
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When I came to the Plush Pony, the bar signaled what it meant to be a brown, gender nonconforming queer from East Los Angeles—it was a time and space when one could traffic in the promiscuity between the aspirational lesbian and the rough queer. My queer adolescence took place at the convergence between the higher educational options that gave the subjects in Latina Lesbians language and empowerment, and the roughness of barrio nightlife captured in the deep creases of the subjects’ faces in the Plush Pony series.
In 2001 I joined a softball team called Las Traviesas, which translates to “The Naughties.” Bueno, bonito, y barato was our mantra. We were assembled by a mulleted East Los butch named Norma, who had recently broken up with the co-coach for the Redz, the last of the old-school lesbian haunts in Boyle Heights, and thus lost her coaching position.
I don’t know who met Norma first, but our team was composed mostly of the Chicana lesbians I knew from the Thursday night weekly lesbian support group at one of the HIV prevention health service organizations near Beverly and Atlantic, where East Los turned into Montebello, where scrap met aspiration. We, too, were already losers. We had lost our posts as daughters in our families, lost jobs threatened by our legible queerness, and lost the barrio’s respect for the choices we made regarding desire. We were las tiradas, the castaways, before we were Las Traviesas.
We talked sex, art, and policy, and ate vegetarian gorditas after lighting candles at the Virgin of Guadalupe altar in the parking lot at El Mercadito on Sundays, like good Chicana lesbians. For me, the time was at best an experiment in elusive authenticity and connecting with the likes of Norma and the posse she brought over with her from Redz, especially as I sought to imagine different models of female masculinity. Much like the contextual specificities of each butch lesbian centered in the Plush Pony portraits, those representations were difficult to arrive at. My nascent Chicana lesbian spectatorship sought out visual registers to help name a difficult subjectivity within, one that wasn’t ubiquitous in the early aughts when Google could bring queer worlds closer with just a few search terms. Back then, we had heard of Laura Aguilar because we were activists, but had never seen her work in the flesh. We had missed the few showings at the LGBT Center in West Hollywood or other presentations made possible by VIVA, a Latinx gay and lesbian advocacy group bringing awareness to the HIV/AIDS pandemic affecting Latinxs in Los Angeles County. VIVA was one of the few platforms for lesbian and gay Latinx artists to perform and show art where celebration and grief could coexist. We never saw Aguilar’s work on the wall, but we had seen snapshots of her work in someone’s photo album or on a flyer.
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Even the most anonymous of Aguilar’s subjects were more than phantom sightings at the dyke bar, situated at the end of a block in a predominantly working-class Latino neighborhood. They could have been Norma’s friends in their early forties and equally enmeshed in the East Los lesbian bar scene. Vero, the catcher for Las Traviesas, was short, stocky, and had a carrot-colored bleach mop of hair styled after Norma’s own mullet. She was even-keeled and always managed to calm Norma’s bluster whenever the Redz team came up while they planned strategy. Man, Norma really had it out for the Redz.
The whole league seemed to have it out for Las Traviesas, a team untethered to a lesbian bar. A team composed of too many different kinds of Chicanas with different gradations of lesbian. A team with some of us in transit toward what we imagined to be queerer ports, queerer than what East Los Angeles was capable of making available to us at that time.
Our debut at Hazard Park was highly anticipated and the Redz was the first team we played. The innings flew past us. We were no batting match for the Redz’s powerful pitcher, a copper-skinned badass with a ferocious windmill. Dalila—a talented shortstop whose comet-like throws never made contact with the butch on first base who couldn’t catch for shit—was our only hope. The errors were stomach-turning for Norma. But they were fodder for the other teams. The Plush Pony oldtimers were laughing at us, holding paper plates heavy with ceviche tostadas in one hand and gesturing wildly at the diamond with the other.
Halfway through the season, we were already in last place and I learned the other teams hated us and called us stuck-up. The dykes from other bars and teams thought we were too good for them because most of Las Traviesas had gone to college. They also thought most of us were attractive and catcalled some of our players by jersey numbers during games. None of us made any indication that we would date players from other teams, mostly because we were all partnered up. But also—we were stuck-up. We were stuck-up in the way institutions train you to be as you dust yourself off from barrio life and powder yourself in newer, better aspirations.
The season ended and Las Traviesas never made it out of last place. But it was a tithe to the community to allow us our proximity to las duras—to learn how to inhabit our skins and to heed caution when skin became a liability. Laura Aguilar never came to our games, nor was she privy to this particular tension playing out between the lesbians with names and the ones who went without. But East Los Angeles bar league lesbian softball allowed for a nuanced inhabiting of an experience that was alongside what Aguilar represented. In her own words from a 1988 artistic statement, Aguilar wanted “to provide a better understanding of what it’s like to be a Latina and a Lesbian by showing images which allow us the opportunity to share ourselves openly, and to provide role models that break negative stereotypes and help develop a better bridge of understanding.”
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Aguilar’s artistic corpus is only now circulating in institutional ways. The Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell retrospective traveled to Miami and opened at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum six weeks before Aguilar’s death. Her 1993 photograph Will Work For, a self-portrait centering Aguilar holding a cardboard sign that reads “Artist Will Work For Axcess,” in front of a building with the word GALLERY prominently displayed, reminds us twenty-five years later of the cultural precariat’s means toward eking out a life. Aguilar endured as much danger alive as the opportunities her oeuvre will have in her death. Aguilar’s prescient images brought to life the crumbling edges brown artists are compelled to navigate, the terrain she moved through as her name came to national and international platforms.
Aguilar’s work has been continuously haunted by her own self-image as “ugly” and “fat,” policing categories that demand those named to exist in lack. At the zenith of her career, Aguilar was able to break open and into a joy for her own brown abundance; an unabashed exploration that steers her outlaw body, a vessel among other vessels, toward generative and seditious destinations. Yet those of us who have lived in the prisons of wounding designations can attest that her work, especially the Grounded series of color photographs depicting Aguilar’s body contracted and splayed in gestures that mirror the earthen spheroid formations in Joshua Tree National Park, is both respite and revolution in its wild hinterland of quiet intensity.
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I am attesting as someone who has, too, lived in the prison of wounding—a wounding unto my own body and a wounding onto my most beloved others and their desires to love my wounded body—to know that letting my own body splay over the soft rocks of Hidden Valley, Split Rock Loop Trail, Arch Rock, and Indian Cove Boy Scout Trail is an act of setting myself free. To walk unencumbered by the trapping of modernity through the shadows of Mojave yucca plants, ocotillos, and gravel trails—to piss in the wind and jerk off into the shadowy parts of the canyons—means that I can be as free as those who own the land on which I stand and make my own land art. I’ve stood in one place, in several places over the years, for hours just to see the light change over the landscape. It might be prayer. It might be what grounds me to surrender to the ancestral seizures that make themselves known to me.
Waiting for more moths to alight from my lazy pompadour—is that you, Big Poppa? Showing me the way to the light?
Or how I might get over the breakup that broke me down for the last time on the side of the road near the Cottonwood Springs entrance of a national park. These are the ways I come to recalibrate how I see the vastness of my own body held in the center of Joshua Tree’s vastness.
For Laura, whose body took up much of the air and space of any given social configuration she inhabited, I imagine that her coming to the desert meant making and taking an opportunity to be small. What might it mean to revel in the aura of smallness? To forget the bulldagger-in-a-china-shop policing of self for a moment and take in the safety offered in the eternity of sky above. In a city, in a dark, red-bulbed dancehall, a smoky bar in the bottoms of El Sereno, the large bodies of gender renegades are read as suspect in both appetite and desire. Good lays, bad citizens. Laura takes those suspicions and distills them in the photographs of her body, where she captures herself in the middle. She cropped many of the images to make her body appear as another presumed object taking its rightful place in the natural environment—another boulder, another mass of sediment containing the narrative of collision where two, three, or unknown numbers of cultures come to situate in the folds of her rippling belly or the stretch marks on her back. The largesse of that gesture seems only right to settle into a space like Joshua Tree, haven for the thing it’s named after, and haven for embodied sites of excess, and weary in the face of inevitable extinction.
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Early Spanish explorers and settlers perceived Joshua Tree as a wasteland. In the 1850s, Mormon pioneers encountered the species of desert flora and named it after Joshua, who raised his hands to the sky in prayer, according to the Biblical story, a discursive mirror for the Joshua tree’s long prickly branches raised skyward. In the late 1800s, miners and early homesteaders made attempts to settle the land, leaving behind evidence of those efforts with the Lost Horse and Desert Queen Mines, and the Desert Queen Ranch. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that South Pasadena socialite and amateur gardener Minerva Hoyt made Joshua Tree trendy. Hoyt lobbied for more than twenty years to create a protected desert park where she could quiet the internal noise and find renewed health in the clean air, as well as beauty in its unrelenting topography. The name Joshua Tree National Monument was chosen to honor the park’s most unique inhabitant.
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In Aguilar’s Grounded series, shot in 2006 and 2007, there’s an elemental allusion to being earthbound. As a queer brown butch, I can’t help but make my own affective assignations to the longing in the photographs of Aguilar in Joshua Tree, the ways her body sits, back to the camera as if in some heartbroken repose, the landscape embracing what’s left of her body in wait and in the quietest of want. What the body wants is the earthliest of desires and in Aguilar’s bodily charge the desire is as immense as the rock formations it mirrors. In the interstitial space where my identity lives alongside my own desire to scrutinize, I wander on to Aguilar with eyes closed, her naked belly spilling over into the narcissistic mirrors on the surfaces of puddles that dot the New Mexican landscape in the Nature Self-Portrait series (1996) as if to plead to a lover or a swath of land, Will you ever be mine?
Following her recent death, however, it’s hard for me not to think of the ways the earthly qualities of Aguilar’s portraits—of desire situated in a land left in its own wild repose—refract the hauntological nature of brown bodies traveling through the west or, in this particular juncture, Joshua Tree. Joshua Tree is often cast as a site for Pinterest-plucked fantasies of pioneering hipsters heading into the high desert to escape the demands of urban modernity and capitalist fatalism. But in Aguilar’s hands Joshua Tree remains a site haunted by the lost excesses of brown queer desire. In Aguilar’s hands, we remember that Joshua Tree as a national park is a place just as available to the blue-collar butches holding court over the pool tables of the Plush Pony as it is to the tech industry’s nouveau riche lesbian programmers, who prove to the dominant culture that queers can contribute to the gross national product too. And while I may remember Joshua Tree as the setting for an older and possibly wiser Laura Aguilar as the vulnerable sad butch splayed on the rocks for queer and brown publics to behold and to continue beholding even more closely in her death, I am reminded of another specter of working-class beauty and grace—the living ghost of Tejana pop queen Selena, a patron saint of joyful femme ebullience dancing in the foreground of another Joshua Tree. Selena holds a particular type of hold over the desert in the video for “Amor Prohibido,” filmed in Joshua Tree thirteen years before Aguilar created her own California desert oeuvre. Her Tejana femme vulnerability is situated in a classed conflict that, on first listen to the song, suggests a parallel to warring families a la Capulets and Montagues intervening in young love. But on closer examination there’s an economic quandary: that despite being poor, everything the speaker of the song gives is better than money. Both Selena and Aguilar not only ignite Joshua Tree with the particular travails of a heart in want, but they also offer a response to the majesty of its grandeur through gesture and image that pollinate its landscape with indelible histories that speak to the quotidian manifestations of the border wound. Their presence invites me to consider how the colonial encounter and the ways in which the U.S.–Mexican War and the Mexican Revolution—losing the collectivism of the ejído system to the profit-maximizing hacienda system, for example—persist in everyday relationships that brown queers try to enact with each other and with the land in various points along the Southwest. Selena and Aguilar, respectively, speak of a love that is forbidden, and so why not enact that queer contraband in the lost trails of this barren hinterland? A prohibition of desire that pulsates all the more ecstatically among the trees Mormons named Joshua in the ascetic setting of the California high desert.
And thus, a dance emerges between star-crossed lovers of mixed economic backgrounds and blood—the butch lawyers and the femme sex workers of Aguilar’s portraitures, the girl on the wrong side of the “Amor Prohibido” railroad tracks. This dance emerges and flirts with recognition and visibility, leaving the penumbra of anonymity in its wake. It gets choreographed between an austere landscape like Joshua Tree and its partner in brown excess; to see the movement of every wrinkle like it were desert mallow, every keloid like churro cholla, every bit of broken skin blooming in liberated relief. Laura Aguilar and Selena have both trafficked in those excessive intersections through a radical praxis of their brownness. This is a malleable brownness that sits and lays corpulently in the annals of art and popular culture, misperceived and misaligned as well as in the valleys of Joshua Tree, a mestizaje of suspicion where two bodies in a desert sing in similar and simultaneous registers of scarcity and plethora.