Border Mariposas: The Phantasmatic Archive and the Space of Gay Chicano/Latino Literature

“Border Mariposas: The Phantasmatic Archive and the Space of Gay Chicano/Latino Literature” argues that materials in gay Chicano special collections and the “archiving” of materials within the world of some Chicanx literary productions resist a disciplinary model of ideal gay Chicano identity and emergence of that identity in narrative form. In these objects that obliterate a desired for clarity in ethnoracial and sexual identity for gay Chicanos, the experiences that exist in the object through narrative or memory offer instead fragments of experience that can be shared across identitarian groups who become “insiders” to the texts and secondary holders of the objects. These objects hold forth a hope for an expansion of queer community in their potential for sharing a simultaneity in memory and experience with their holder across time. In this queer potential the material offers, the dissertation shows that the hope that is of the archive may be positively and negatively augmented by researchers’ contact with it to produce what I refer to as the phantasmatic.My chapters draw from the archival holdings of fiction writers Arturo Islas and Gil Cuadros and the personal papers of Latina/o/x, LGBTQ, and HIV/AIDS activist, archivist, and teatrista Hank Tavera, and interviews with Kevin Martin, the owner of the uncollected Gil Cuadros Papers and executor of Gil Cuadros’s estate. These locations of inspiration present to us a type of hope for a visibility, recognition, and place in history alongside the current scene and canon of Chicanx/Latinx Queer study. Regarding the phantasmatic, researchers can bring with them an anxiety-driven hope inspired by a discourse of paucity in Chicano/Latino cultural work that is often framed as gay Chicano failure in identity, politics, belonging, and narrative quality. The objects in the archive resist the pull of the ideal gay Chicano identity that emerges in discourse and, when bent to conform to the discourse that does not belong to it, produce strange-ifying, phantasmatic effects that are seen in the more textual objects’ direct, text-based data that radically misalign with researcher report. To some extent, this misalignment demonstrates that the discourse of gay Chicano paucity and its production of an ideal gay Chicano identity and prescription for its emergence in narrative is, itself, a phantasmatic. The hope that exists “naturally” in the archives themselves changes when researchers graft their activating “hope” to them. These activating hopes may produce a desire for the fantastic, a following of the hope in the archive to its beautiful and impossible dream; the kind of readings I strive for in my work with the Tavera Papers. These may also produce an archive whose “natural” hope is made to twist in relation to a negative activating hope such that it may seem to overcome the anxiety of paucity that belongs to the researcher and to the discourse that the papers know nothing of. I call both of these transformations of the materials a production of the phantasmatic archive. Hope is used to rescue maligned authors like Arturo Islas, whose archive I investigate in my first chapter and in which I offer a new manuscript history for his novel The Rain God, to recover under-read authors such as Gil Cuadros, whose archive recommends we read the text in a specific order that makes HIV/AIDS care and the archival imperative of the book as crucial a component to queer cultural production as the writing, or to experience the hope of the archive, a hope that follows me through my work in the Tavera Papers and offers to me new and more generous ways to read the texts that have spoken of gay Chicano paucity without erasing the impact of those words completely. The dissertations’ focus on the material in gay Chicano/Latino special collections and the archiving of objects in gay Chicano literary works demonstrates the promise of these objects in drawing our attentions to a broader, newer, and more fitting potential for queer sociality, community. They prompt us to be wary of the phantasmatic construction of the ideal gay Chicano identity and its emergence in narrative—an ideality that, because it is phantasmatic, does not offer potential for the queer community longed for—and to be observant of the ways the phantasmatic of this discourse can make the archive speak a language not native to it. In doing so, my dissertation’s showing the hope for expansion of queer potential for community and identity suggests that we can grow our study in more egalitarian ways that can recast the discourse of paucity as an historically situated discourse and performance and not as the wide pronouncement that we continue to carry and reproduce, rethink the role of gay Latino/Chicano cultural work as part of a connective history with canonical works in Chicanx/Latinx queer Studies, and begin to critically embrace and investigate the efficacy of “queer” as concept as it relates to LGBT Chicana/o/x-Latina/o/x history, literary study, and politics. This study prepares a path to greater attention to and intervention in the discourse of paucity that it reads out of.

Advisor: González, Marcial