Brown Neon, page 15
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).
Baby Themme Anthems: The Werq of Sebastian Hernández
2019 | “Everytime” by Britney Spears has haunted me since my friend Sebastian chose it as the opening number for their workshop presentation of Hypanthium, an ensemble multimedia performance that is, at its heart, a portrait of an artist as a young themme.22 In late January I was preparing to attend the work’s full-length debut, curious to see how the Hypanthium had evolved since its workshop presentation last summer. Britney’s baby piano and little girl howl opens a short three-minute film shot by rafa (one of Sebastian’s longtime collaborators) portraying Sebastian, scantily clad, running in a disoriented manner up and down the 4th Street bridge where Boyle Heights leads into downtown. The song is mashed up against a bit of spoken word from a pair of distinct sources—a poem colliding aurally with a broadcast news headline about Trump. It’s a cacophony signaling a meditation on queer, brown precarity—or what it means for femme-identified Sebastian to live in a time of complete uncertainty. The film offers Sebastian wrapped in pink cellophane ribbons, careening against the early evening canvas in high, hot-pink heels, with leather straps winding around their muscular calves like a fashionable gladiator when the song opens.
