Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
ISSN: 1479-1420 (Print) 1479-4233 (Online) Journal homepage: http://nca.tandfonline.com/loi/rccc20
A journey to El Mundo Zurdo: queer temporality, queer of color cultural heritages Robert Gutierrez-Perez To cite this article: Robert Gutierrez-Perez (2017) A journey to El Mundo Zurdo: queer temporality, queer of color cultural heritages, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 14:2, 177-181 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2017.1293947
Published online: 10 Apr 2017.
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Date: 10 April 2017, At: 10:18
COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES, 2017 VOL. 14, NO. 2, 177–181 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2017.1293947
FORUM
A journey to El Mundo Zurdo: queer temporality, queer of color cultural heritages Robert Gutierrez-Perez Department of Communication Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada USA
Standing in the middle of the bridge Night, raining sheets like standing under a waterfall Lightning, strikes takes a picture posing, fear of the Other freezes In another time, she would have been honored revered, feared, worshiped Today, she is murdered, flayed on the dance room floor puddles of possibility, mopped up made into a museum of hate to forget—this has happened before I met her One day on the bridge We chatted about mariposas y travesuras She laughed and blessed my journey to El Mundo Zurdo Blessed, I braved the crossing shifting, remaining flexible learning the codes, rules, and obligations twisting, experiencing duality of thoughts the internal battle rages, the war external gathers the pitchforks In a moment of despair, I cut myself and others the pain is deep, oozing into every system, every body I can’t even use the restroom without persecution CONTACT Robert Gutierrez-Perez
[email protected]
© 2017 National Communication Association
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depressed, I squat in the woods for relief The ultimate question of conquest and colonization whispers hatefully in my ear: “Are you an animal or a human being?” Disheartened, I return to the bridge She is waiting, angry distressed that her children are not valued her serpent skirt hisses, the skulls, hearts, and hands around her neck watch, beat, and grab at me I let my mother hold me in her snakeskin for a moment, I forget the pain, yet it doesn’t stop crying, wailing, screeching Like La Llorona am I doomed to wander the earth alone? We are monsters she tells me not really, but here come the villagers forcing their way onto the bridge from both sides but before they arrived, we were dancing, worshipping our sacred bodies our sacred space “We can’t let you feel safe in your skin!” Burning the bridge Mother and son Lovers, allies, friends hold each other flesh melting As they shout, “How dare you think you can love?”
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Looking out at the crowd I’m afraid you don’t get it I fear you hear me, but are you listening? Are you seeing how you are implicated? How we are co-constructing this violence? Like a sacrificial victim on the altar, I am on top of the Great Temple bravely enduring the obsidian knife entering my chest cavity, carving out my precious stone I watch my own heart beat, so the world can keep spinning ba-dum, lift it up out of me, ba-dum lap up each drop preciously ba dum, for my family and ancestors, ba dum, for those lost at Pulse, ba dum, for those who will die next for your comfort Gloria Anzaldúa describes “El Mundo Zurdo” as the “The Lefthand World,” which when “applied to alliances, it indicates communities based on commonalities, visionary locations where people from diverse backgrounds with diverse needs and concerns coexist and work together to bring about revolutionary change.”1 In this essay, El Mundo Zurdo is the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, Questioning, and Transgender (LGBTQ) community that has suffered for centuries to maintain static conceptions of normal, everyday, and mundane. By centering the experiences of marginalized Others, I move through the trauma and tragedy of the events at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida to advocate for those struck down for simply existing. Journeying to El Mundo Zurdo is a purposeful process meant to address how “institutionalized heterosexuality constitutes the standard for legitimate, authentic, prescriptive, and ruling social, cultural, and sexual arrangements.”2 Shifting to El Mundo Zurdo highlights how heteronormativity is intimately connected to cultural orientations to time, race, class, nationality, gender, and ability. For instance, as a performative writer, I was unable to write this essay in the traditional, social scientific aesthetic rhetoric (read: White supremacist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal) because I felt too connected to the victims of this massacre. I remember pictures of close family and friends attending Pride events across the country and world in June 2016, and I saw their faces, their happenstance in each life story ended. In El Mundo Zurdo, we understand that our bodies are in constant danger, so I am choosing to weave academic/scholarly writing with poetry and personal narrative to show how queer of color cultural heritages are (post)colonial constructs. As a queer, Xicano, cisgender male, my entire world stopped as I felt a grief and fear I had always felt deep down but never previously felt so blatantly in my gut. I was lost in time as I went from susto to rage, to melancholy to susto. Even now, I am wiping away tears as I remember the lives and faces of queer people of color and their allies—lost. In
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performance studies, considerations of queer futurity and temporality abound, but until you touch and feel how “fellow citizens” espoused hate from pulpits after the Pulse massacre; how “allies” turned an ignorant eye to the NBA or NHL Finals instead of mobilizing for our community; or how “family” and “friends” went back to posting pictures of their children and pets as if nothing had even happened,3 then you do not understand how queer bodies of color exist in a different temporality. This same normalization of temporality manifests in social science research as linear and material orientations to process where “an action orientation to field work develops, in which ‘doing’ something is necessary for it to be regarded as an appropriate ‘use’ of time.”4 Rather than adhere to this colonial construct, I ask how we, as communication studies scholars, can utilize performative writing to approach research “from a circular, holistic perspective” seeking “to understand the culture as a whole.”5 How can we embrace and love our queer temporality and queer of color cultural heritages in research and everyday life? The massacre at Pulse nightclub is not the first time our bodies have had to pay the price to maintain the false sheen of fixed understandings of race, class, nationality, sexuality, and gender. In 1901, Mexico City was in an uproar over the event that would come to be known as “El Baile de Los 41 Maricones” or the The Dance of the 41 Faggots. Prior to this moment in history and politics, Mexican male homosocial bonds were not viewed in our current understandings of homoeroticism, and within an already-established gender binary of masculine and feminine; “heterosexuality was seen as the only natural form of sexual relations, the erotics of relations between men, even conspicuously visible, were ignored.”6 On November 20th, the infamous El Baile was raided by la policia, and “as the story goes, half the men were dressed as women, half as men.”7 After immediately being jailed, these 41 men were punished through a variety of public humiliations, such as being depicted for months in newspapers, illustrations, and songs as social deviants.8 Additionally, many of the men were forced to sweep the streets in dresses,9 and all 41 Maricones were sent to do forced labor in the Yucatán “to dig ditches and clean latrines.”10 What did these men do wrong? Why did their dancing deserve punishment? Like most of history, these experiences of Jotería, or nonheteronormative mestiza/o performances of gender and sexuality, have been forgotten in our discussions of violence against queer people of color in our postmodern and postcolonial moment. After the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, El Mundo Zurdo was filled with confusion, disorientation, and fragmentation as each of us in our own way came face to face with our greatest fear. As queer people of color, you never forget that your accepted existence in communicative interactions and spaces is only an illusion—a hard-fought illusion —but an illusion nonetheless. Frozen, each of us grappled with whether or not to leave our beds. Hiding under the covers crying for those lost, I felt powerless and without. In my research, pedagogy, and everyday life, I orient myself as a critical humanist focused on locating agency and resistance in a world that would rather I dig my own grave and lie in it. After Pulse, I was without reason, without choices, and without a voice. How am I going to be able to follow my imperative to empower, remember, and advocate for queer people of color? Like a flash of lightning, I suddenly remembered how I met my husband at Splash nightclub in San Jose, CA. I remembered how that LGBTQ space propelled our dancing bodies into the limelight as one of the 18,000 couples married before the passage of Proposition 8, the California Constitutional amendment that banned marriage for LGBTQ couples. Quickly, I took to Facebook to announce that I wouldn’t be
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afraid to dance, to love, to exist. Reaching out via phone, text message, and social media, I gathered the few people available on a Wednesday night. In that sacred space, we watched our community sing karaoke, have a drink, flirt, and support the victims with our dancing/ worshipping. LGBTQ people have guts and courage; we are brave. Yes, our history is filled with oppression, marginalization, and violence (always violence), but our queer of color cultural heritage is our strength to look the system in the eye, read the mask, and choose to live on the bridge. The inhabitants of El Mundo Zurdo choose liberation.
Notes 1. Gloria Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2009), 322. 2. Gust Yep, “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies: Notes on Injury, Healing, and Queer World-Making,” Journal of Homosexuality 45, no. 2–4 (2003): 13. 3. Bernadette Calafell, Latina/o Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); Dustin Goltz, “Investigating Queer Future Meanings: Destructive Perceptions of ‘The Harder Path,’” Qualitative Inquiry 15, no. 3 (2008): 561–86; Robert GutierrezPerez, “Warren-ting A ‘Dinner Party:’ Nepantla as a Space In/Between,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 8, no. 5 (2012): 195–206; Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 4. María Cristina González, “The Four Seasons of Ethnography: A Creation-Centered Ontology for Ethnography,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 24, no. 5 (2000): 630. 5. Ibid., 644. 6. Robert McKee Irwin, Mexican Masculinities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 49. 7. Héctor Carrillo, The Night is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 18. 8. Irwin, Mexican Masculinities. 9. Stephen O. Murray, “Mexico,” in The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America: A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights, ed. Javier Corrales and Mario Pecheny (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 60–65. 10. Carrillo, The Night is Young, 63.
