A Collection of Queer Decolonial Methods and Yearnings
Queering the Border: Essays
by Emma Pérez
Houston: Arte Público Press, 2022.
163 pp. $19.95 Paperback.
Reviewed by
Ruben Zecena
Sometimes, words assuage wounds—colonial wounds, border wounds, imperial wounds. Words can serve as a call to action. They can flicker desire upon the flesh. These are some of the lessons that Emma Pérez’s latest collection of essays imparts upon her readers. The book is organized in three sections: “Sitio y Lengua (Site and Discourse),” “Queering the Border,” and “The Decolonial Imaginary Revisited.” The collection brings together prose poems, epistolary writings, some of Pérez’s more well-known essays, along with more recent scholarship and a short story. Queering the Border stands as an evocative reminder that, despite “historical and psychic trauma,” there is an abundance of sitios y lenguas that help to fuel revolutions waged in the name of justice.
The first section grapples with the gravity of symbolic, structural, and historical violences while offering a distinctly queer Chicana critique of power. The prose poems, “Nopales” and “Cages,” capture the nuance of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by reckoning with the borders and cages that are meant to expel, contain, and detain Brown communities. As a challenge to these colonial forces, the speaker in “Nopales” fiercely proclaims, “Even in the desert heat the saguaros bloom…” These prose poems signal that we live in times of “emergency” as much as emergence. The two epistolary pieces, letters to Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (Sor Juanx) and Gloria Anzaldúa, show Pérez’s depth as a writer interested in the longings, whispers, and yearnings of sexual desire in the literary archive, as well as her nuanced engagement with Anzaldúan epistemologies. Pérez offers a striking account of contemporary critiques leveled at Anzaldúa’s work, which often dismiss the late writer’s contributions as racist due to the citation of José Vasconcelos in Borderlands/La Frontera. With a heavy heart, Pérez accounts for the material conditions that shaped Anzaldúa’s career as a writer whose radical visions were contentious and precarious in academic spaces (her own life cut short by health complications with diabetes). It is noteworthy that Pérez provides these details not as an excuse, but as a historical contextualization of Anzaldúa’s work when so many of her critics come from places of privilege. In fact, Pérez succinctly demonstrates that Anzaldúa’s theorizations re-imagined mestizaje as a transformative “consciousness, NOT biology, not phenotype.” This type of analysis displays the important role that Pérez continues to play as a critically conscious scholar. The section ends with Pérez’s essay, “Sexuality and Discourse,” where she theorizes the concept of “sitio y lengua,” which has provided the basis for much scholarship within the fields of Chicana studies and queer Chicanx studies. Pérez deconstructs the sociosexual power affecting Chicana/o/x communities to speak about, write about, and imagine revolutions centering women of color.
The heart of the collection lies, accordingly, in its titular section, “Queering the Border.” It begins with Pérez’s frustrations at colonial and heteronormative historiography (both in methodological approach and its archives), leading her to theorize a “decolonial queer gaze that disidentifies from the normative in order to survive…” The essay, “Queering the Border,” identifies methodologies from which to read texts anew while demonstrating the links between border policing and homophobic classifications of sexuality. In the next essay, Pérez offers a powerful engagement with Gloria Anzaldúa’s theoretical interventions. Discussing Anzaldúa’s work, ranging from her theorizations on Nepantla to the Coatlicue State, Pérez demonstrates how this “conscious myth-making” was born from Anzaldúa’s decolonial vision as a queer of color. This is a thoughtful and loving piece that highlights Anzaldúa’s mark on the world and on Pérez’s imagination. Following this essay, Pérez employs decolonial methods of analysis to critique Chicano nationalist aversions to the artwork of Alma Lopéz, particularly her reclamation and reinterpretation of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Offering sharp critiques of the virgin-whore dichotomy that is meant to subjugate Chicanas, Pérez rejects colonial mindsets and pushes for decolonial modes of analysis that make pleasure and desire possible among Chicanas. The penultimate essay of this section provides case studies on “border queers” in El Paso, Texas. Drawing on oral histories, Pérez analyzes how border queers negotiate the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a space of colonial control and as a space of survival. The section ends with an urgent response to the ongoing feminicides happening in Júarez, showing how Pérez wields decolonial methods through writing, analysis, and activist practice.
Finally, “The Decolonial Imaginary Revisited” taps into the imaginary, symbolic, and transient energies of what Pérez resoundingly calls “the will to feel.” She interrogates the rejection of the “imaginary” as not real, showing that what is imagined can be felt, and thus, can cause real/material change. As a powerful rumination on decolonial thought and desire, Pérez willingly calls upon us to peer into the abyss, to feel the pain and hurt of the world to hopefully be transformed for the better. Given Pérez’s literary craft, the section convincingly ends with a short story titled “Trio,” which focuses on the narrator’s predicament: an unexpected meeting with the lover whom they escaped from. The narrator, Valeria, greets their lover, flirts with them, but ultimately senses the “stale” perfume that reflects the state of their relationship. Desire yearns, it wants and continues to want, it might never be fulfilled, but it is worth the journey.
This collection will prove vital to undergraduate and graduate courses in the interdisciplinary fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies, Queer Studies, and Borderlands Studies. Through Pérez’s decolonial interpretive methods, she guides us into worlds that willfully challenge the borders/boundaries of standard academic prose—the collection, like her theorizing, is alive because it insists on life. Queering the Border provides a path toward decolonial futures for those who most need it and feel it.
Ruben Zecena is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is completing his first monograph tentatively titled, Impossible Possibilities: The Unruly Imaginaries of Queer and Trans Migrants. The book explores the cultural productions of LGBTQ migrants as a blueprint from which to question, critique, and re-imagine the contours of national belonging. His work appears in WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, Diálogo, an Interdisciplinary Studies Journal, among others.