2019 | This excursion into another southwest horizon wouldn’t be complete without a Texas reverie. I was in a rental car, the window open, taking in the afternoon breeze outside San Antonio in late March, three interminable years into the Trump presidency. It was the start of a queer weekend and it felt like spring, which in Texas means a humidity. The kind of humid jolt that makes your hair bloom and skin glisten as it sneaks up on you in this part of the Lone Star State.
It had been a while since I found myself inside a car gridlocked by a slowly moving parking lot, inching forward a mile or two at a time. I was in the butt of a joke about Los Angeles made strange by the huge Texas flag waving in slow motion on the passenger side. It marked my welcome to San Antonio, a city that has always had a fraught meaning to my Angeleno nationalist, Californian, ambiguously brown self. Chicana and Chicanx still had much to prove to me as appropriate vessels for my failing identitarian loyalties. But the city of the Alamo provoked my contrarian desires for belonging to an identity forged in struggle. Here in Military City, USA, the patriotism bounces off the walls. San Antonio’s home to four military installations and is known as the mother-in-law of the Army. Soldiers and cadets in the military have been matchmade with local bachelorettes and debutantes. Heterosexuality might be the thing that is bigger than Texas.
On the other side of contradiction highway, San Antonio offers me several wonderful experiences in Texas-style icehouse slash gay clubs, all clustered conveniently together across the street from Luther’s all-night diner. The Fruit Loop, as it was known to me in the haze of a drunken hour and typically over a plate of smothered homefries, touts the best karaoke, the best two-step, and the best Selena-at-the-Astrodome drag queen impersonators, all within range of each other. The San Antonio poet and my friend Joe Jiménez was often my sole karaoke audience, singing along to my drunken rendition of Marco Antonio Solís’s “Si No Te Hubieras Ido.”
The spectacles seem to top one another as you move, again drunkenly, through the caverns that connect these places, much like a funhouse. And there are never enough dykes in this hall of mirrors. There are plenty of lesbians, coupled off with strict barriers. Probably military, too. But there is no cavorting openly outside of established social groups—endemic for those who are newly out. I wasn’t newly anything and the clubs were rainbow adherent, had probably doubled their prices during Pride season, but I was a visitor who would always leave. The queer relations here felt burdened by constraints of the political imagination, as if our similar identity markers automatically meant a shared politic. I was always aware of the proximities and distances that other queer and brown identity politicians had to Mexicanidad and the means to which whiteness always managed to be re-centered without the utterance of direct language, just oblique suggestions.
During one of my previous visits to San Antonio, I was with Cornerstone Theater Company, a cross-cultural collaborative ensemble project founded by Bill Rauch thirty-five years ago. I had come to interview Tejanos impacted by and living with HIV and AIDS. I led story circles and wrote short plays based on the dialogues culled from those meetings with everyday people—older gay men, former drug addicts, and those who were infected in the eighties through blood infusions. We were a crew of six from Los Angeles—myself and two gay men, one Latino, plus our tech and actors—and we returned several times to stage a performance where real people and actors shared monologues for a hometown audience at the historic Teatro Guadalupe, which operated as the “most opulent” movie theater from 1942 until it fell into disrepair and was closed in 1970. The city had rehabbed the theater in 1984, making it an ideal cultural center for the traditional Mexican community of the West Side. Today it is part of the larger Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, which continues to program culturally relevant projects and art events. I remember being wowed by the vintage art deco floors, feeling the warmth of its turbulent history in the bones of the building. I remember falling in love with every single community member who stepped out for the first time to talk about their hopes and fears around living with HIV.
But the theater experience was another strange encounter with the city, facilitated by Gilead, the pharmaceutical company that hired Cornerstone to do the story circles and to stage public readings. In hindsight, I can’t believe I participated in making art on Big Pharma’s dime to help people feel okay about starting treatment. But Cornerstone is where I got my nonprofit paycheck and PPO coverage. They paid for my flight and hotel. I had a per diem. Everything else was impoverishing. Why would my imagination be spared?
Do I love San Anto?
I like the buying power my California dollars have had here. It has gotten me into the casual trouble that a brown big city queer dyke with arrested development typically encounters. But I was from Los Angeles, the lesser metropole with a messier cost of living. The one most people like to dump on until they come to visit, fall in love with neighborhoods previously inhabited by my friends’ Latino immigrant parents, and see that it’s not just Baywatch. Sports people were one sector that consistently bagged on L.A. One time I was at a late afternoon beer bust during a stressful game between the Lakers and the Spurs, and the dyke bar had a huge screen, ceiling to floor. I stood in front of it and whoa’ed when Shaq did something impressive with a pass. A dunk? Was I already blitzed by that point? One of the locals wearing Spurs everything asked me, in that way where you don’t hear the question mark at the end of the sentence, if I was a Lakers fan. Oh … no, not at all. I was teetering in nervous judgment but I still knew my place. I bought a round instead.
I nurtured my alcoholic tendencies and soothed my insecurities this way—at the gay bars on Main Avenue while cruising only for friendship and temporary nonsexual intimacies with strangers in similar straits. Bought more rounds that totaled to eleven dollars at Bar America, its orange faux leather seats as bright as the scenes from the John Sayles’s film Lone Star, which still play to this day in the movie theater of my third eye. My dollars went all night here, it’s true. I didn’t have the sticker shock of West Hollywood’s double-digit well drinks or price of gas or butchphobia to worry me.
I always came back and art was always the occasion—whether it was a two-week residency with my old performance art collective, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, at the long-running Jump-Start Performance Company in the King William Historic District, or the music and museum industry conferences that I attended in the past lives of my twenties and thirties. The conferences were always held in and around the city’s famed Riverwalk, and each time I demurred successfully from seeing the Alamo with my colleagues.
San Antonio is excessive. It brings out the sugar hound in me. I think of the pan dulce display at Mi Rancho. I think of the portions. I think of neon pink prickly pear cocktails. I think of my father’s weeping wound on his arm from the diabetes he fails to Master Cleanse. I remember my bootleg Frida Kahlo Converse high-top sneakers at the penultimate day of one Fiesta San Antonio celebration, a yearly, ten-day-long event and one of the biggest moneymakers for the city, which has overseen it for well over a century. Fiesta is a street party that seems divorced now from its original purpose—to commemorate the Battle of Flowers, a parade that celebrated the liberation of Texas from Mexico in the Battles at the Alamo in the winter of 1835 and San Jacinto in the spring of 1836. Divorced in the sense that the whole thing is peopled by Mexico’s descendants cavorting to the Tejano rhythms of Ram Herrera and feeling the boozy sugar rush from the individualsized pitchers of daiquiri or margarita. It’s the way these historical losses inspire deep-fried Dionysian binges that satiate one or all senses that feels familiar to me.
I saw my friend, the poet Joe Jiménez, as I slowly drove along the downtown street to where my GPS was leading me. Seeing Joe right off the bat was the queer omen I needed. I had on a lightweight bomber jacket, but he wore a classic weightlifting tank top, and rightfully so, for he was a rippled muscle majesty. Joe’s poetry is much like his appearance—pure masculine beauty in a panoramic state of longing. We had met twenty years earlier in Los Angeles, when I lived with a mutual friend of his who threw a party for Joe at a café in Hollywood called Espresso Mi Cultura, during which Joe gave a reading that stunned us baby brown queers into silence. I stopped and coasted along the sidewalk near to where he stood and wolfwhistled as I rolled down the passenger window. My favorite San Anto joto, I swooned. Joe smiled shyly and waved me off to primo parking.
I was excited to see rafa’s new work, in the simultaneous familiarity and cultural estrangement that Texas provided. I hadn’t seen him since January of that year when he debuted a performance at a large-scale event I co-hosted called Variedades. Rafa’s body had been “airbrushed,” painted into a bright Mexican Rose and styled into an embodied lowrider. That’s right—rafa made his body a site of dropped and faded glory, complete with East Los Angeles underground performance artist, Cyclona, painted over the entirety of his backside. Rafa dropped to his knees on an imagined catwalk and turned his head in profile to a roaring crowd. He struck poses, wearing stunning gold-plated jewelry braided into his ponytail and salon-styled manicured gels, the tips curling into glorious swoops, encrusted with colorful zirconias. Fucking legendary. The protective older sibling in me hoped this city had rolled out the red carpet for his talent.
As I walked away from my parked car, I wondered if this place, which looked like all the other places that call themselves contemporary art centers, would be different. It’s not a museum—a museum has a permanent collection that draws on and reflects particular histories while also keeping the beneficiaries of those histories at arm’s length. I would learn a few nights later at the annual fundraising banquet that the contemporary art center was named ArtPace, after the owner Linda Pace, who was a locally beloved arts patron and daughter of David Earl Pace of Pace Foods. Pace Foods? Like Pace Picante? The gringo salsa Get-a-rope-Pace-Picante? Yes, the very one.
The space itself was like many contemporary arts centers I have been to, and much like the contemporary arts center I had worked at just a few years prior—big, boxy, bright, and existing in the monochromatic schemas of whites, beiges, blacks, and grays. On the off days, my old workplace also served as the site where the late Steve Jobs would reveal the latest tech gadget to the masses. That workplace would slowly but surely devote itself to tech companies needing venues to court venture capital firms or hold luncheons for CEOS to bloviate over women in tech. Bless the art workers in their unfettered desire to create space for art and those with ambiguous relationships to creative endeavors. I am conscious of these places in a way that living under capitalism requires me to be—living with an unexamined gratitude for places where artists can ascend to greater visibility, for curators who bring in artists from marginalized communities. However, the gallery is always a business. That and the tempered rage that is the 501c3 model and the healthcare insurance it’s tethered to are the best we can do for the workers who facilitate those organized spectacles. It’s often a difficult way to build a livelihood unless you, like Linda Pace, come from generational wealth.
Again, I was met with the familiarity with the bright jewel-toned accent walls in the lobby, in line with the upscale rasquache often utilized to satisfy tourists’ expectations of these downtown Southwest locales. I saw in the periphery of my vision the persistent recognition of a copper-toned signature in soil, dry and blanketing the ground under our feet, making the strangeness of the antiseptic gallery space more welcoming to those of us in Tejanas, Stetsons, Ropers, and tennis shoes. I felt the thrill running through my body, that familiar feeling that comes with seeing my friend’s ideas about matrilineal beauty, labor, history, and spectacle spilling into public spaces and washing over me. And I wanted, of course, to delay the gratification by looking away.
The food trucks out front signaled the masses who had gathered around tacos and beer. I scanned the grounds, taking in the hetero to homo ratio packed into the space of ArtPace as I marched toward the wine and snagged a small plastic cup of Chardonnay. I wondered if I would spot Joe, hoping for some queer alliance against the displays of varied hetero configurations. There were young families out alongside older couples, all of them Tejano, all of them scoring high on my compulsory heterosexuality exams. I was suddenly conscious of my solitude, aware that I had no one with whom to negotiate my time or space, nor to check in with at home. I scanned the hometown team on the patio again. Would they glean the queer contents in the gallery space? And if so, would they care? And if not, did it matter? They had as much a right to the conviviality the evening offered as anyone else, and the queer expressions I felt protective over could be the healing elixir that might allow for my sense of belonging to deepen here. I took a deep breath to calm or summon my nervous system before heading inside again.
I stopped right at the lip of the entrance to With Land, the title of rafa’s exhibit. It was full of people and I knew I would come back the next day to take in the show again when the gallery emptied and quieted down. But in that moment we all stood on the adobe fundament of a prolonged intimate creation, the fruit of labor salted by rafa’s sweat, the turn of his hands through earth soil, horse dung, bales of hay, and water—and lots of it, as it blanketed the entirety of the floors in the central gallery and touched every part of the four walls. I had been to several of rafa’s adobe-based projects, each one touched by the hands of his inner circles and close collaborators in Marfa and Los Angeles. But tonight I could sense the loneliness in the space of his work. The entirety of adobe bricks, panels, sculptures, and floor space were his and now he gifted them to us, a temple in disguise. We, the followers and zealots.
It was a familiar material in various forms, activated with our bodies and sentience and our willingness for prolonged engagement with the histories these objects before us hoped to conjure. There were new bricks laid in ritualistic configurations, gestures to pyramids we could imagine with the help of the Xoloitzcuintli dog figures in protective repose at their feet. Rafa had also fashioned the adobe material into large panels that hung on the wall like empty portraits. You’d pivot your neck until your gaze quickly fell upon one panel in which he had painted a stunning portrait of his maternal grandmother, Doña Guadalupe, a stately and serious Indigenous woman from a small township called Ricardo Flores Magón in the Northern Mexico state of Durango. Doña Guadalupe’s presence loomed large enough to convince me at times that all five feet and eight inches of her were truly with us. Rafa had worked on this show for a few weeks prior to the exhibition’s opening that night and was staying in the loft apartment a few floors up from the galleries.
I ran into a local university professor who was a big fan of rafa’s work. She was a cultural studies scholar who seemed to me more like a gushing fan with a big research fund that allowed her to fly to Los Angeles, New York, Mexico City, or Tucson at a moment’s notice to see her favorite artists. I envied her resources but didn’t have it in me to sustain the institutional damage on my psyche, seeing what it has done to friends and foes alike. I stared at the scholar’s receding hairline and the broken capillaries on her cheeks and smiled politely at her halitosis as she recounted the latest drama in her department. This couldn’t be me. But, also, I really didn’t consider what weight my MFA would grant me in the world of academia. I only went back to grad school to escape the soft authoritarian hamster wheel of my last nine-to-five and to live in a more economically viable city for my persistent underemployment, continuing displacement cycles in the desert town where I could afford to live alone. Oh, and there was the possibility of getting my ex back while I was at it. Being alive was expensive and academia was hardly worse than a full-time job in its subtle insidiousness for disciplining the errant subject. Holding on to errancy meant holding on to my rasquachismo. And I was incapable of opting for stability through civility. I wasn’t mad; I just lacked that constitution, that refinement. Instead I counted on them, as did most of my artist friends in-between projects, for paid gigs every other year. The beauty of quarters and semesters meant new blood, holding at bay old age and the constant specter of precarity as long as Wall Street didn’t tank any more university endowments for the foreseeable future. I still appreciate academics helping artists delay poverty, by the hour.
The scholar went on about the spring break that never was and I caught sight of the first of my Angeleñxs in town, decked out in their finest borderlands runway looks. Sebastian Hernández, clad in everything black leather—vest, pants, and boots—and serving daddy vaquero looks on the somber soil runway.
Sebastian was blindfolded but still more sure-footed than many of us in the room. They moved forward and backward, arms stretched out toward willing participants, tinfoil-wrapped numbers and letters lodged into different sides of their Stetson brims, glinting, quivering as they moved, catching the light of a setting sun. Sebastian made contact with a long and loosehaired, scraggly bearded young man and they hugged in the middle of the space and swayed a bit, side to side, to an imaginary music only they could hear. But they were mostly holding each other still. It was a prolonged embrace between two young, masculine-presenting beings on display, yet the length of time marked the intimacy between them. They stopped being strangers or were only strange to themselves.
Mid-way through the performance, in between the adobe Xoloitzcuintli dogs set in tableau throughout the gallery, Sebastian suddenly let go of the young, bearded man and began to move carefully toward their next partner. Sebastian found at their side a woman in a black cotton dress with a red, plaid, long-sleeved shirt. Sebastian carefully and slowly moved their fingertips along her hand and arm until their hand made it to the top of her shoulder. They brought their other hand to her other shoulder and Sebastian moved in for a hug. The woman received them and wrapped her arms around Sebastian’s lithe body. They smiled at each other, the body language relaxed and genuinely warm as if they knew one another already. And they did, as I found out shortly thereafter; the woman was the curator of the exhibition, Risa Puleo. Once she and Sebastian parted, the blindfold came off and the Bic lighter appeared. Sebastian took off the Stetson—a sign of tried-and-true Texan prosperity—and I got a clearer view of what the tin-wrapped words spelled out: WILD DESIRE. And the numbers were a year: 1836. Since we were gathered in San Antonio, I assumed the reference had to do with the city’s largest historical wound, and a quick Google search confirmed that 1836 was the year of the Battle of the Alamo. The year that is implied in the call to arms Remember the Alamo. What they mean is to remember the several hundred Texans who lost their bid for freedom from Mexico’s army, led by General Santa Anna, after a nearly two-week-long siege at the Alamo mission. Back when this was Mexican Texas.
The silence was crackling with electricity as the audience quietly watched Sebastian light their cowboy crown on fire. A baby cooing in the background caught my ear’s attention, a reminder that the room was a spectrum of disclosures and disavowals of brownness and the various vectors of identification. There were those who knew themselves completely and those who questioned their compulsory assignments inherited from family, tradition, or the state. And there were those who might not see Sebastian outside of their masculine drag. WILD DESIRE went up in flames. An awareness of these identities, of course, comes laden with all kinds of assumptions and expectations embodied within our proximities and distances to a Mexico that exposes the many myths that move through us and through the corners of our Latinidad problem. And Sebastian knows that. Whether it’s the unexamined privileges of mestizaje and the white supremacy subtly cloaked in our language and relationality, or the toxic worship of Virgin of Guadalupe statues and our consent to maintaining the erasures of Indigenous thought and practice, Sebastian has a way of calling these colonized histories to account.
The hat burned into a smoldering mess, quickly put out with one stomp of Sebastian’s boot. I remembered that Sebastian’s last object of desire was a hunky, Texi-cano-raised butch queen who moved to Los Angeles a year ago. An avowed heartthrob any queer femme would love to have splashed on the cover of a crotch-burning romance novel. Sebastian began to unbutton their vest and shirt. They walked shirtless to the small pyramid pile of soil that sat north of the gallery and took a bit of the earthen dust, rubbing it on their hands. Holier than water. Sebastian fell to their knees and crawled slowly around the space, their torso elongated with each stretch, each movement accentuating muscle and rib cage. Sebastian then stopped and sat down, not quite cross-legged. Suddenly, a knife appeared in my sight line and Sebastian pulled their right foot toward their body and proceeded to use the blade on another object of Tejano authenticity—the black leather cowboy boots. Sebastian relentlessly worked the knife back and forth across the heel. The sound of leather tearing rung out. It felt endless. This was a durational performance art event with a predominantly hetero-Tejano audience that glowered at Sebastian. They finally made progress with the gutting of the boot, splitting it open like a lizard’s belly, exposing their black-socked foot. Nothing casts the demons of rejection out like a flagrant dismantling of cocksure masculinity.
San Cha had flown in a few days earlier and was absolutely glorious in a floor-length, Frida blue dress with hummingbird appliqués and winged epaulets, her hair slicked back in a femme ducktail. It was going to be a solo serenata performance, with San Cha strumming her acoustic guitar, a modest sized bottle of Corralejo Reposado at her feet.
I was filled with the ecstatic possibility that the traditional San Antonio crowd was not ready for San Cha’s Califas-chaos-imbued cumbias and torch song ranchera numbers. Originally from San Jose, California, home of Los Tigres Del Norte, San Cha (real name Lizette Anabelle Gutierrez) and I both lived in San Francisco from around 2013 to 2015. We never connected there yet her hustle was familiar to me. It was hard being an artist in San Francisco, and for that I will never forgive the city. She left her multiple part-time gigs and insufficient wage jobs for better pastures down south—first at her family’s ranch in a small Jalisco hamlet and then in Los Angeles, where she continues to be the jewel of its queer underground, playing to crowds who can’t get enough of her devastating cumbia originals and punk rock interpretations of modern Spanish-language classics. My first proper witnessing of San Cha’s beguiling performance had taken place a few years earlier at the First Street Pool and Billiard Parlor in Boyle Heights. San Cha played rhythm guitar on an old Fender Stratocaster and, backed by Oscar Santos and the queerest band of noisemakers this side of the Los Angeles River, played joint after hot joint for a cross-section of East Los aging punks, millennial deejays, and Gen Z club kids. The place was divey and timeless in that trapped amber kind of way where you knew the place would cease to exist, just as recreational sites were always the first to lose in the battle over a barrio’s soul. It was a perfect debut in the new city she would call home.
San Cha’s rendition of “Los Laureles” summoned the spirit of Lola Beltran. She electrified the room with a voice as indelible as Beltran’s and stunned the audience into delayed waves of applause. I felt a pride swell up in me and maybe some Southern Californian snobbishness. Our artists were going to demonstrate to this San Antonio audience how precisely it is us who can scare them into feeling something. It is our talent that inoculates dignity into the pain of being cast out from the warm tendrils of family and cultural recognition.
San Cha had warmed up the crowd and now it felt like the party had finally climaxed. I was able to get my energy charge by way of hugs, kisses, and tequila shots with San Cha, rafa, and Sebastian. We were four brown queers from Los Angeles in San Antonio, spirited away, back up to rafa’s upstairs loft apartment for a quick huddle about what we were collectively witnessing downstairs.
Is it me or would people have lost their shit over you guys if we were in L.A.?
This place was only a hundred miles from Crystal City, Texas, the real birthplace of the Chicano movement. I always felt sheepish when I remember those of us from East Los who claimed the walkouts as if they didn’t occur in Texas first. This is the reckoning of a bad education. The Chicano pursuit of civil rights was a history worth hijacking to craft an identity, an aesthetic provision for a covetous representation. An identity based on a radical politic, and now we’re including queerness and rejection of the heteropatriarchy. We just want to be seen so we’re bearing it all.
There’s always going to be a push and pull between us—Californios and Tejanos. And our aesthetics. It’s a familiar violence that manifests in the strange policing that emerges when two sides of a coin join in temporary gathering. We make fun of each other’s foodways and the styles with which we code ourselves. Is that what families do? But it’s the unspoken critique of the other and the culture of whiteness we latch onto that registers when we step foot into each other’s habitus. The twang of y’all and the laidback órale—the ways in which we ignore the stoner cadence of too many Cheech and Chong references and the Caló we have dismissed in our pursuit of more suitable and less masculinist aesthetics.
The four of us were a fair sample of those who grew up either in SoCal or as the children of Mexican immigrants during the gubernatorial era of Pete Wilson and his toxic worship of the Reaganism free market death cult; we were the lot last night who grew up on dispatches from Insurgente Marcos and Comandante Ramona in the Lacandon jungle of Chiapas following the Zapatista uprising in 1994. We got tear-gassed while headbanging to Rage Against the Machine’s performance at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in the parking lot of the Staples Center. We did Arena, Circus, Tempo, Chico, and soaked up our excess at Gran Burrito on Santa Monica Boulevard at Vermont Avenue. We listened to Mark Torres’s Travel Tips to Aztlan on KPFK Pacifica Radio. We worshipped playwright Luis Alfaro and Marisela Norte, the unofficial poet laureate of East Los Angeles. And we witnessed the son jarocho purity wars of the mid 2010s between Quetzal and Las Cafeteras. We danced all night and we fucked our friends and we went to breakfast as our serotonin levels dropped to the floor and back again.
The four of us were brought up in the immigrant friendly-enough cradle of blue state California, taking a queer night in and out of red Texas. Over a few shots of San Cha’s half empty bottle of tequila, rafa, Sebastian, San Cha, and I chattered about our experiences as children of Mexican immigrants being encouraged, sometimes celebrated, and never encroached upon in our late twentieth century upbringings. Sebastian’s parents were danzantes, teaching Sebastian and their siblings to honor the four directions alongside beautiful routines in Aztec-style garb and performing ceremonies from dawn to dusk for Día de Los Muertos. San Cha dove deep into the Mexican songbooks of José Alfredo Jiménez and lived in Jalisco with her grandmother as a way to escape the slow death of wage labor in the Bay Area. My own dad, who arrived in Texas, Wisconsin, and then California from Pachuca, Hidalgo, to pick potatoes, lettuce, and strawberries as a farmworker, was a businessman by the time I was born in the mid-seventies. He knew wage theft firsthand and wanted to soften the hard knocks of the young Latino and monolingual men he would contract to work for him laying brick, installing plumbing, and hanging drywall. He would offer a fair day’s or week’s wage, meals, beer, and references for housing. Truthfully, my father’s favorite thing was to just drink and talk shit with these men.
I don’t mean to build a contrarian trap here, but there is something to say about the way our encounter with the Tejano that evening is washed over by this hard-to-broach estrangement with Mexicanidad. Or rather, we are all witness to the palpable tension present when encountering the brownness in the environment born of rafa ‘s work, as well as the critical ethos in Sebastian’s embodied performance, and San Cha’s queer tequiladas reminiscent of Chavela Vargas. (San Cha’s own Mexican narrative is as unsettling as Chavela Vargas’s choice to disavow Costa Rica and choose Mexico, where she found her foothold as a beloved musical artist).
I also had to remember that rafa’s project is not an easy one to sit beside, especially when you’ve lived your life striving for stability away from the violence that imbricates an existence on the stolen land of the southwest region. On the contemporary art center’s walls, rafa plainly speaks of “the ways our bodies and land are targets of white supremacy and its violence.”21
This country has excelled in creating exclusionary systems. Maybe we’re just walking into one right now. Maybe we’re living in one hopped up on Adderall and Viagra. Maybe these systems have had forty years to improve their ability to prioritize the free market and facilitate our own surveillance and call it individualism.
The last few years have been an experiment in de-Californizing myself. It fuels my desire to be in the Southwest—Arizona and Texas—and to encounter the spectrum of ways that we inhabit this nebulous and suspicious category of brownness. What does brownness do to wrestle us away from national affiliations and other flattening machinations of categorization? De-Californizing myself that evening meant flirting with a Tejanx disavowal of that brownness. How might I explore the roots of that particular type of self-loathing I am familiar with, similar to aspirations toward whiteness that Texas history books teach brown kids. Am I seeing that energy subtly animate my encounters with Tejanos? Am I only hanging out with degreed and pedigreed aspirational brown queers? I know anecdotal evidence isn’t enough. And I get the history of Mexican lynchings and the violence of the Texas Rangers on the Mexican psyche and how, over time, that will make one reach for the basket of white bread on a dinner table over tortillas. Or remember the scoldings in front of your classmates for speaking Spanish. These violences are cyclical. Finding your history and culture and literature on a banned books list will do it, too. It may emerge in increments and in different parts of our depressive impulses, but we are all great at castigating and policing ourselves. I didn’t speak Spanish to my parents all throughout high school. I didn’t want to until I went to my first Los Crudos show and heard the music in Martín Sorrondeguy’s Spanish-language narration of the Latin American freedom movements that served as inspirations for each song.
Don’t let your takeaway be that only Tejanos excel at self-loathing—these are the modes of denial that traverse our politically constructed state lines. White supremacy is the norm, and the best white supremacists are often the ones with Spanish surnames.
It was the end of the opening and we left ArtPace for the guest house where I would be staying. I dropped off my suitcase and settled into my room before heading to where Risa, the curator and homegrown San Antonian, was staying. We were in the popular King William District, the arts center adjacent to downtown. It’s a familiar scene—coffee shops, breweries, gastropubs with their exposed brick and wooden beams, another upcycled neighborhood that has pushed through its own skin. Risa brought us to a house I had been to before, many years ago, through another friend, the arts educator Annele Spector, who brought me for a party with locals. That party was crowded with aging cowpunks, armchair anarchists, street artist types and ne’er-do-wells that I had much simpatico with, myself an ever-aspirational dirtbag who could find intimacies with the strangest of strangers. I remembered a missing plank in the kitchen floor on the way to the bathroom and an abundance of futons, indoors and out. And falling in love with Lone Star beer.
Tonight’s party was different—populated by the college-educated, the autodidacts, the patrons, the benefactors, the art-schooled. And the middle-aged dilettantes and recovered punks finding new ways of self-employment—the house flipper, the nascent tech bro, the trust funded, the food justice activist, and several performance artists. The rosé was flowing.
The cryptomnesia of that dwelling nagged at me, making me too aware of the palimpsestic crux of a place’s convivial history and potentiality. Its future was mapped out in familiar ways. It was another reminder of the ways I have consumed my identity over the course of my adulthood. The constrictions of debt made it impossible to strive for collective action to dismantle the capitalist systems that didn’t simply oppress me—they bored me. Nonstop accumulation of wealth meant no time for pursuing various vagaries for connection. My misery lived for company. Anything to delay my spirit entering a living vegetative state. And the site of that night’s party was where flights of fancy had come to die and be reborn into commodities.
The five of us had rolled up to this house and immediately split up to find our respective vices. I circulated through the backyard, which was lit up beautifully with string lights and neon lights on the shed. The backyard was immense and seemed to be shared between four houses on a lot. It had no fencing, which felt like a hopeful signal that those who lived here might value something other than private property. I caught a young woman holding up her iPhone to snap a shot of the neon sign on the shed. And the rosé had done its job when I called her attention and asked if it was hard to photograph the neon at night. I had taken plenty of smartphone photographs of neon over the last few years and knew the ghostly streaks caused by moving your phone suddenly, or losing the legibility of the text without enough light. I had caught her off guard, self-conscious of the Instagram post interruptus.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt your social media post. But also, your dress is amazing. I was teasing and I was serious—her dress was a colorful, eighties-era Meso-American-patterned multiverse in maximalism. And this woman’s eyes flashed in that way that signaled she was down to play.
What are you? She didn’t mean my ethnic background. We did the astrological info swap and proceeded to guess each other’s ages terribly. I guessed thirty and she guessed fifty and we both laughed ouch! S was San Antonio-born and Stanford-bred—I never understood why high achievers were drawn to me, moth to flame. Our back-and-forth flirtation was going off like a firing squad when her tall and lanky boyfriend rolled in to fetch her. We did not say good-bye in that way that illuminates millennial social norms. We retracted quietly to our respective corners.
San Antonio didn’t feel like a queer city but a gay and lesbian one where people have eschewed promiscuity for marriage. Gay marriage was legalized in Texas in June 2015 and three years later the honeymoon in Texas was still going strong. This is what makes me unlikably Californian—to have had this thing since 2011 and have automatically rejected it, not wanting to partake in an institution built on the stability of shared property accumulation. It’s beyond taking the opportunity for granted.
I spotted Sebastian, eyes flashing over the cloud on their face. We were both teetering on a glamorous rage, smiling through gritted teeth. Back in boy drag and swishing their agave spirit in their plastic cup as they politely kept attention on the local gay performance artist who also had a piece in the exhibition. This was my first trip in half a decade and the first time I was introduced to peoples’ wives and husbands. Don’t people just fuck anymore? I whispered to Sebastian. We were both between and over the idea of commitment, so naturally we linked arms and walked over to the center of the yard where several picnic tables stood, our kin sitting and gathering around San Cha, who had been strumming her guitar—a different, smaller instrument than the one she had played in the gallery. She smiled impishly and batted her eyelashes as she regaled us with song. I was losing my shit. The intimacy of this queer serenata, an homage to where the many hearts of the Tejano music world converge. San Cha started playing the familiar chords of Selena’s “Si Una Vez,” but in a quicker tempo which was, of course, pretty punk. We sang along, our voices rising in harmony. San Cha played an extended version. Then we were shushed by an older white man in a seersucker suit that signaled to me that he was possibly one of the owners of the several homes surrounding the green space. One of us croaked, oops, and the white man nodded his head and smiled sheepishly, perhaps trusting that we might adhere to his caution. Before the man could walk away out of earshot San Cha started strumming faster and scream-singing as the rest of us broke into hysterical laughter. Pinche viejo.
21. From With Land (https://www.artpace.org/works/iair/iair_spring_2018/with-land).