Waste

Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of the mass graves of unidentified immigrants discovered in South Texas in 2014. How, confronted with these decayed, dismembered border bodies, can literature and art move us beyond horror into a more just tomorrow? To answer, the author turns to two Chicanx science fiction novels: Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) and Pita and Sánchez’s Lunar Braceros (2009). Morales’s novel begins in colonial Mexico with a tale of La Mona, an unidentified plague similar to AIDS, and ends in a Los Angeles of the future, now known as LAMEX, beset by a similar disease curable only by the infusion of blood from “pure” Mexicans and threatened by waves of trash, which have taken on the characteristics of an animated organism, rolling in from the Pacific. Lunar Braceros, about nuclear waste workers of the future living on the moon, presents trash as a similarly transformative threat. Both novels offer conflicted visions of the human body as simultaneously of and apart from the land, a vulnerable but powerful catalyzing agent for change. The author frames this chapter with analyses of works in Mexican Canadian digital installation artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architecture series.

Face

In Cecile Pineda’s novel Face (1985), protagonist Helio Cara loses his face in a tragic accident. The novel documents the aftermath of his misfortune, as Helio grapples with his changing social world and strives to remake himself, piecing together both his face and the story of his life. In Face, Pineda works through the complex nexus of visible and invisible, focusing on the present absence of the human body and how Helio is variously seen and obscured as he moves through the city after his accident. In tracing Helio’s path from seen to unseen and back again, Face documents how community gathers around and through the human body, how Helio’s face galvanizes different groups into action. In this chapter, the author argues that contemporary photographers Stefan Ruiz and Ken Gonzales-Day deploy the body similarly to emphasize not the unique histories attached to individual bodies but rather the communal networks gathered around the bodies featured in their photographs. Like Face, the two photographers’ work can be seen as an extended project of reintegrating the brown body into historical memory and rescripting its political future away from subjectivity and rights and toward networks, institutions, and issues.

Race

This chapter begins with the discovery, in 1790, of the Aztec Sun Stone in Mexico City and a description of indigenous Mexican conceptions of time and history. The chapter uses the contrast between these and European notions of time and subjectivity to frame its argument about Gilb’s narrative and temporal play, using the scientific ambiguity surrounding affect to outline a nonrepresentational way of reading race, a strategy built on “racial immanence.” Across Gilb’s oeuvre, the body maintains an ambiguous and tenuous relation to language and narrative, becoming, in later works, a way of being in the world, a mode of interpretation. To get at the imbrication of words and feelings, or text and body, the author defines her concept of “racial immanence,” and so this first chapter sets the theoretical stage for the readings that follow.

Introduction

The introduction takes issue with the tendency of Chicanx and Latinx studies to read representationally. Beginning instead from the premise that both text and bodies are part of the physical stuff of the world, the author redefines reading as a mode of physical interaction with text that produces moments of affective chicanidad. To see reading as the intellectual processing of represented things is to approach text with expectations and preconception. Instead of learning what they already know, by contrast, readers of Racial Immanence will witness the objects gathered therein fostering networks of connection that deepen human attachment to the material world. Readers will be challenged to think of text as a physical engagement and to see reading as a process of connection rather than interpretation. To consider reading as merging with the stuff of the world opens the door to an ethics of shared vulnerability that reimagines the political.

Coda

In her conclusion, the author asks what kind of ethical future we can hope for when so many bodies are threatened. What good does reading do anyone? Throughout Racial Immanence, the author argues for reading as an intra-action of body and text. Granting the immanence of race reconfigures the space and time of reading and writing; it posits both as world-making performances that reimagine the social. Reading, the author argues, is the most resistant, punk rock thing we can do, an argument she makes by historicizing punk as a mode of affective, anti-colonial resistance whose genesis she locates in the nineteenth-century diary of a Mexican soldier whose sentiment mirrors contemporary Chicanx punk music. These filiations embody the book’s argument by insisting on a materiality energized by a racial immanence that comes together in fleeting, performative moments of chicanidad.

Place

Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s Coachella (1998) and Gil Cuadros’s City of God (1994) challenge readers to consider AIDS not as racial allegory but as the sublime limit of human experience. The chapter makes this argument by reading Taylor and Cuadros as textual embodiments of barbasco, a wild Mexican yam from which Russell Marker, an American chemist, was able to synthesize diosgenin, which can be turned into synthetic progesterone, from which all other synthetic hormones can be derived. The author weaves her reading of Taylor and Cuadros through barbasco’s chemical properties and scientific history. An obvious connection between the yam and the books is their relationship to nonreproductive sexuality: the yam through hormonal control, the novels with their investments in queer identity. Pushing further, however, both novels resist Susan Sontag’s admonition, in AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), to resist AIDS as political allegory. Its global influence contrasts with its indigenous roots in ways that parallel the dual search, catalyzed in both novels by the AIDS pandemic, for ethnic authenticity and transcendence of self.