Performance Studies, like Latina/o Studies, is a discipline built between and across disciplines. Just as one’s latinidad exists both within and between spaces explicitly marked as “Latino,” so too does performance... [ view full abstract ]
Performance Studies, like Latina/o Studies, is a discipline built between and across disciplines. Just as one’s latinidad exists both within and between spaces explicitly marked as “Latino,” so too does performance happen within and between spaces explicitly marked as “performative.” This panel considers the juncture between Latina/o Studies and Performance Studies to investigate how bridging the methodologies of these two fields produces a generative space for studying queer Latinidades. We explore how studying Latinidad as performance allows us to locate the field outside of a nationalist or essentialist agenda, while still maintaining an activist focus. Through an analysis of drag performances at Celia Cruz’s funeral (Soares), Puerto Rican hip hop in Minneapolis (Lopez Lyman), and Afro Latinx abolitionist artistry (Reed), this panel considers the centrality of studying performance as a mode of political engagement. It argues that as scholars and teachers we can adopt a performance studies lens as a way to introduce the “promiscuous” politics of Latina/o Studies into the otherwise resistant neoliberal university system. What this panel theorizes as promiscuous performance articulates art-making attentive to collective social life as the raw material for active hope informed by community-based practices of survival and resilience—not sleek political campaigns.
Soares’s intervention explores how LGBTQ mourning rituals, such as vigils, have received increased media attention in recent years with the rise of violence against queer and transgender individuals. Similarly, Latina/o mourning rituals are progressively represented in the national media, with anti-immigrant rhetoric fueling violence against this community. To date, however, little work has been done on the particularities of queer Latina/o mourning, namely the central role of the body. This paper remedies this gap by examining the practice of Afro-Caribbean music and dance as a radical form of queer mourning, particularly as seen in the 2003 funeral of the “Queen of Salsa,” Celia Cruz. Lopez Lyman explores the work of Maria Isa Pérez, a St. Paul, Minnesota born Puerto Rican hip hop emcee, singer, and actress. A self-identified “Sotorican” — a combination of Puerto Rican and Minnesotan — Maria Isa from a young age was encouraged to use art, specifically bomba, as a vehicle for community activism. Lopez Lyman’s critical ethnography of Pérez’s work suggests that the artist political engagement with LGBTQ organizations and activists expands heteropartiarchal and homonational boundaries within hip hop. Reed’s intervention suggests that amidst dystopian realities, Afro Latinx performance literature contends with the structural traumas of global racial capital to forge queer networks of creative solidarity that imagine and inhabit a livable social world. Looking to concrete utopias in Josefina Báez’s Comrade, Bliss ain’t playing, Reed argues that communal practices of love activate social actors seeking the dissolution of oppressive institutions—against the colonialist imposition of borders, nations, walls, and cages. Ultimately, the utopian impetus of Báez’s performance text theorizes love as never simply reactionary to, but transformative of, the terms meant to dictate its experience.
