The Wunderkammer of Teaching

Summer has landed on Cold City with a bang. At least that what it felt like last Sunday, with a luscious high in the 70s and everyone and their grandmother out in the streets and parks and cars, in various states of undress, enjoying the beautiful weather. This would include yours truly, who made his way (late, natch; it was Sunday after all) to a brunch with Prancilla and our girlfriends Sister Disco and Ms. Tee. We found a little place in the middle of a residential neighborhood that was a little bit IKEA, a little bit Wallpaper Magazine, with decent food and a very put upon waitress who looked like she would rather be anywhere than serving up delectable dishes to the sleek-jowled middle-class babbitry and well-groomed gay men kibitzing over eggs, Swedish pancakes, and frittatas.

Revelatory of the way in which the end of the year has warped the lives of four young professors, it took us three weeks of planning and emails to arrange this brunch, although we are all resident in Cold City. I was in charge of picking up Ms. Tee and then meeting Prancilla and Sister Disco at the place, but even after three weeks of email after email I was unclear of the exact time we were meeting, and decided that morning to press the snooze button through several cycles, only to awake to the phone ringing almost simultaneously from three different cell phones in three different locations. What was happening? Where was I? What was the deal? It’s at moments like this that I am thankful for a buzz cut, which significantly reduces one’s primping time post-bath, is generally presentable since there’s really nothing to style, and one never, ever has to deal with bed head. A brief shower (with Klorane Gel douche avec crème nutritive, a souvenir from my last trip to Switzerland), a quick check to see that my zipper was up, and I was flopping out the door in my suede slides to fetch Ms. Tee, Ari Onassis glasses perched on my nose and waltzing into the street with a distinctively sleepy sway. Prancilla and Sister Disco I have known for several years, but I met Ms. Tee at a series of social events for faculty of colour here in Cold City, where she teaches as well, just at another institution. I pulled up to her house, which in fact is only ten blocks from my garret, approximately 20 minutes after getting out of bed, a record even for me and my notorious flojera.

Brunch with friends is always fun, but the feeling Sunday morning seemed extra special, given the weather and the impending close of our labouring duties, all of which gave us a slight buzz, although our summers remain decidedly murky in terms of plans. Over food and blessed coffee, we chatted about our lives, emotional and personal things that needed some group attention. Afterwards, I suggested that we sit outside on the lawn for a bit of sunshine, to which all in attendance rolled their eyes and said, “Oh, you mean to smoke?” which was more or less the truth, so out we went. Our exterior conversation was different in tone from the one in the interior, as we began discussing a series of questions in relation to teaching, in particular the role of hegemony in the responses of students to critical ideas and thinking.

While we all teach at different institutions, and have been trained in different disciplines, we all have certain things in common, not the least of which is that we are faculty of colour in white dominant institutions. But we also share, as many (but not all) faculty of colour do, a commitment to a certain critical approach to society, culture, and politics, which we attempt to instill, in various ways, in our teaching. That said, we all employ different methods in response to this challenge, which could be characterized as both in collaboration and in conflict. We are not pod people after all, and for any given faculty of colour you’ll find a different methodology, including, depressingly, doing nothing at all.


Sister Disco began the conversation by relating a query as to the power of dominant discourses on the student mind, using as an example the reaction of some of her students to Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, which critically takes apart the “Prison-Industrial” complex. The students in Sister Disco’s class could consciously recognize the power and persuasiveness of Davis’s critique, but still presented her with relatively conventional answers to the series of questions Davis presents in her text, namely and to paraphrase, “Prisons are bad, but bad people need to be locked up.” Sister Disco expressed dismay at the inability of critical thinking to penetrate the unconscious mind (and biases) of her students, relating their responses to a script that the students read from, without thinking about it. This engendered a lively conversation about, basically, hegemony and its overwhelming power on our minds, and how this control makes arduous the task of inculcating critical thinking in the classroom. Given that I have had my own series of troubles in my own classes this semester, around assessment, teaching difficult theoretical material in a working class classroom, and maintaining student interest, I found the conversation engaging. It also made me reflect a bit on a teaching conference held at Cold City U, a couple of weeks ago, which also raised several questions in my mind as to what I am trying to do in my classrooms, and how to do that effectively (or at least with less trauma, both for me and my students).

The teaching conference was, in some ways, filled with the usual platitudes we hear nowadays about teaching to the student as an individual, teaching to respect differences, teaching to enable student learning, teaching to reduce trauma and increase retention. And on some level, these teaching conferences always leave me feeling cold (I’ve been to several), the mismatch between educational theory and practice never so wide as in a seminar on teaching. But they are always engaging, if from a position of critique.


What exactly are we doing in the classroom? What are we attempting to achieve with our students? And more largely, what is the function of education in our society? We know the historically traditional approach to education: the model of students as tabulae rasae, to be filled with our collective socio-cultural knowledge. And while this model may have been taken apart by changes in American society stemming from the social movements of the sixties and the turbulence of the years that have followed, many of us, even the most progressive among us, still have at least (perhaps a small) part of one foot in this model. After all, the very structure of the classroom, the hierarchy of the institution, and the social relations that spring from it, are essentially based on this approach. Much discursive hay (and accompanying hand wringing) has been made, however, over the challenges and changes to this model, from both the political Left and Right. In the case of the former, there has been a broad-based movement to make education (and educators, such as we) more responsive to the particular needs of students, the intimacies of differential relationships to education (discrimination, exclusion, institutional and structural neglect), and student “empowerment,” however we want to understand that term (educational success, socio-political enlightenment, “teaching to transgress”). Some ways in which this movement has been influential is firstly in the very fact of teaching conferences for university professionals, in student evaluation forms become an institutional standard, in radical pedagogy methodology being taught unevenly across the institutional spectrum, and a general sense of the need to be present and aware of students as actors and participants in the educational mission.

Alternatively, the Right has a similar interest in student empowerment, in the form of accountability of institutions and educators to providing a commodified educational experience that does not evaluate as much as satisfies consumeristic demand for the quintessential “college experience,” right down to the logos and cute baseball caps. Some of the hallmarks of this particular strain of the movement have been a general turn towards thinking of students as customers and universities and degrees as consumer products, student evaluation forms (natch), online lists of bad radical professors, “Academic Freedom” motions before state legislatures, and a desire to transform academia into a good citizen of the republic of Mammon (the cynics among us would argue it's doing pretty well as it is).


Ironically, the place where these initiatives driven by different political agendas overlap is in the desire to harness the university to the wagon of social change. What both movements have profoundly misrecognized is the deeply conservative nature of the university itself— the Left in its inchoate desire to turn the university into little Radicality factories (“teaching to transgress”), and the Right in misapprehending the already incredibly reactionary nature of the place (graduate student unionization efforts have lately brought this to fore on both sides of the professorial political divide). But more importantly, what is interesting about both post-tradition critiques is that they are still inherently grounded, in some crucial ways, in the tabula rasa model of student consciousness, and do not, moreover cannot, recognize the deeply ambivalent nature of education, both for students and educators.

This ambivalence is found across the educational spectrum. In traditional four-year colleges, students wash up on their shores with the expectation that college is what one does if one is to be successful in our society. Not to sound too Pollyannaish about it, but this is hardly the love of intellectual rigour and practice that we seemingly seek to instill in our students. In non-traditional universities, like Cold City U., you have older students who are more consciously ambitious about the use value of a degree for their actual work lives. But again, this interest is driven not by an interest in intellectualism, per se, but by a utilitarian desire to, in the frankest possible sense, make more money. So students themselves have one idea of what they are in the classroom for, which does not necessarily meet the expectations of the professoriate, at least the humanities version of the professoriate.


But the larger point here is that education is coercion, that most students would rather be working and getting paid for it, or be with their families, or getting high, or eating pizza, or doing laundry, or fucking, or fishing, or whatever it is that undergraduates do, than sitting in a classroom either listening to a deathly dull lecture by an egghead or alternatively running around the classroom doing group exercises and tossing plastic balls and drawing on craft paper. Richard Rodriguez, over twenty years ago, triggered the ire of the Chicano Left for declaring that education was coercion, and declaring simultaneously his ambivalence about it, the necessity of the coercion for the student and society, yet the mourning of the loss of the former self, the burdens of consciousness, the changes to self and family through education. This ambivalence is also deeply grounded in our own experiences as educators, fully aware of the soul-crushing dimensions of our own educational curriculum vitae, as well as the new heights that our intellectualism has brought us.


The challenge isn’t ridding education of its coercive aspect, which is the conceit of both the Right and Left in our current educational dramas, but utilizing it to effect some change, however small, in the intellectual lives of our students. And I think this is where most of us are, in reality, conscious of the limitations of our powers as Wizards of Oz yet desirous of doing something, even little things, that are material and lasting. Education as a process is in general a mysterious and non-rational practise, another reason as to why it is impossible to harness, really, to any explicit political or social agenda other than hegemony, which is implicitly woven throughout our practices, be they radical or reactionary. But the misapprehension of hegemony is that it is static, unmoving, immobile. Close readers of Gramsci will recognize, however, that hegemony is fluid, transforming, shape shifting. So, to put it colloquially, every little bit counts, to shift and mould hegemony. Which is why the purported leftist bias of the professoriate is so threatening to the political Right, because they, on some pre-Lapsarian unconscious level, recognize this elemental fact of hegemony, and wish to control it.

I teach in a field that has a contemporary history of using the classroom for radical ends, teaching students to transgress, attempting to ideological patrol the waters of the student mind, and turning students into soldiers for radical critique and change. While perhaps a laudable goal at one point, this model failed (and continues to fail) to take into account that, indeed following contemporary pedagogical theory, students are actors. All of which is to say that they are not vessels to be filled with our knowledge, but intellectual personae that need, on some essential level, to be persuaded, enticed, and seduced to accepting and employing our models of thinking.

Sometimes this is a complicated dance. While I teach hot button topics, I attempt in my classrooms to have an ideologically flat experience, to appeal to historical and political fact to convince rather than exhortation and haranguing. However, I have felt several times this semester that I crossed a line sometimes, revealed too much of my own political agenda, in an attempt to get students to engage with ideas and topics, triggering fears that my name will end up on some list of radical professors seeking to damage their students with their political views. The years during which I received my graduate education were ideologically polarized ones, and during my teacher training it was easy to spark conversation (sometimes to disastrous effect) by touching on racial, sexual, gendered controversy. Ten years later and in a different geographic and ideological world, it is less easy. The bored faces I have confronted this semester, disinterested in the reading and even less interested in conversation, have been a peculiar challenge. It is of course class and semester specific, for teaching the same material last year was easier.

My goals as an instructor strike me as fairly modest. I don’t necessarily “teach to transgress.” This particular articulation has always struck me as particularly self-indulgent, for it seems to exalt the ideological goodness of the professor/educator and seemingly only serves as political self-aggrandizement, since most “activist-educators” I know are teaching at R1 universities and making a whole lot more money than I am, with a whole lot less teaching. Yet, I do seek to affect some sort of intellectual process among my students, obviously. To find a position in relation to the material and critiques presented within. To take an articulated stand, whether in opposition or agreement, and be able to defend, rationalize it, define its borders and content with some coherency. In my mind, it is fine if my students leave my class as conservative or centrist as they entered, as long as they own it. This returns us to Sister Disco’s exasperation with her students: they refused to own their complicity. No one is perfect, least of all professors, but owning up to one’s choices (political, social, economic, or otherwise) is a good step in the right direction of any pedagogy.

But students, reflecting the society they live in, steadfastly resist this intellectual move. Students, like our society, want a beautiful experience, without the messiness and complications that human life entails. And this suits ideology just fine, as it prefers to remain invisible, unconscious, behind the scenes. I suppose in this sense students cannot be blamed for this laziness, given that we inhabit a resentful and schizophrenic society with free lunch for some and punition for most, but at the same time students cannot be excused from their responsibility as actors in their own lives. This is painful for them, and often times for the instructor as well. This is the pain of education that Rodriguez so eloquently tried to capture: the pain of educational consciousness.


A Wunderkammer is a “chamber of wonders,” a cabinet of curiosities, a nice little term I learned while viewing the work of Kiki Smith once in New York, who has a work with the same title. And it struck me as apropos to our modest and strange tools that we use as educators to reveal the superstructure of ideologies that rule our lives. In general, the contemporary classroom is no longer simply books and lectures, at least for most of us. Often we use textually based sources, history or narrative or primary documents. Other times personal stories in the classroom, the sharing of experiences. Yet other times videos and media-evidence to show students the larger world around them. Sometimes it the force of professorial exhortation or exasperation, as I have had to do this semester, which always risks the conscious rejection of students. In my case in particular, because of the area I teach in, I feel my own Wunderkammer must be stocked with a great many things, as I am attempting, both in the subject matter as well as in my methodology, to displace a vast amount of commonsense knowledge, not to transform my students into ideological soldiers but to get them to find ownership in their lives and in their society.


In this sense, our Wunderkammer are also magical and alchemic, we educators like witches over a cauldron, a little toadstool here, puppy’s tail there, pop rocks and Bionic Woman lunch boxes and bell hooks and Stuart Hall and Paolo Freire and Mom and the Dean and student evaluations and our mentor and our advisor and our committee and our first grade teacher and our favourite teacher and our pencils and our pens and our Trapper Keepers and our most hated teacher and our most boring lectures and our exhilaration and our best class and our worst class and ourselves, constantly changing our recipe to bewitch our students, to entice, to persuade, to communicate, in short, to educate.


Sometimes, however, the burlesque of our curious objects seems like an almost desperate attempt to engage our students in the realm of ideas. At the end of the semester, of course, this bump and grind has ground its last hip sway, as the professoriate collapses from exhaustion. Did it work? Did they learn? Were we effective? These are questions we shall ask ourselves, after the dust of the semester settles, and continue to ask ourselves as we teach. And they oft repeated truism of the student, twenty years later, who remembers us or a moment in the classroom that transformed their lives, probably remains the best that most of us can hope for, since education rarely offers us immediate effects, instant gratification, overnight results.

Yet, this is what university education seems to be up against, and increasingly capitulating to: instant gratification. You see it in surly students with credit-card attitudes and mealy-mouthed administrators smoothing over ruffled feathers. You also see it in the classroom, as professors, even in tenure-line positions, play up to students and grade high, to ensure good evaluations and glowing comments on RateMyProfessor.com. While our intellectual practice is archaic and quaint in many of its values, the brutalism of either Mammon or Stalin, broadly put, strikes me as an even more unpleasant venture. I do wonder, however, how long we shall be able to hold onto our values and approaches, our peculiar Wunderkammer, as the institution, like our society, changes and shifts and transforms, as both the Left and Right march forward with demands for empirical evidence, facts on paper. Yet, teaching remains intangible, mysterious, complicated, compromised.

All the teaching seminars and pedagogical yak and legislature bills and student attitudes won’t change this fact, but do risk driving it underground, deforming it, destroying its open practice. And that would be a terrible thing, both for our students, our society, and ourselves, as curators of the curious object of education, the chamber of wonders, in a world that thinks it no longer needs the peculiarity of that particular form of education.

Easter Parade

I am tired. Not just tired in the sort of end of semester way we are all feeling now, but tired as in, “I need a year off” tired. To wit, I have been worked down to the nubbin this year: a new institution, three search committees, four new preps, two college committees, along with the assorted campus activities, events, soirées, lunches, political intrigues, and five separate trips from Cold City to Big Eastern City to see Mr. Gordo. I am, of course, behind in everything except my taxes, which were dutifully sent off yesterday, and have been lingering around the house today in homage to a sudden but hopefully transitory stomach bug but also neatening, hanging up clothes and hiding papers in plastic IKEA boxes, paying bills and washing dishes and dropping off laundry. This week has become, de facto, devoted to catch-up grading and preparation of course reviews in anticipation of finals either next week or the one after. I have also dedicated myself to avoiding at all costs campus, except to teach. But in the words of Depeche Mode, “the grabbing hands, grab all they can.” A recent student newspaper controversy engendered an “emergency” campus meeting last Saturday for which I was distinctly not present. Yesterday in class, my students queried me as to how I could possibly miss that meeting, to which I responded that I only have so much to give. The summary of the meeting by one of my more dedicated students left me exhausted just listening to it. A confirmatory phone call from a colleague who did sacrifice three hours on Saturday and was present certified the insanity. Campus drama? Calgon, take me away!

No, instead of sacrificing a sixth day of the last week to work, I decamped late Friday afternoon for La Vickstrix’s house in Little City, a mid-sized town with a regional comprehensive university where she professes, about two and a half hours outside of Cold City, for Gay Easter! Little City is dull as dirt, but the local department store has a sale rack to die for (oddly enough), and I feel strangely comforted by the bland assortment of contemporary commercial Americana which dots the landscape of Little City, on the outskirts of its sad and denuded 19th century downtown: Applebee’s, Outback, Target, Hollywood Video, TJ Maxx, Barnes and Noble. All these stores are clustered in strips circling around a modest mall that offers the intrepid traveler no surprises: two regional anchor stores, Gap, a Sunglass Hut, and formerly an Eddie Bauer (the last time I was in town La Vickstrix and I arrived just in time to see them hawking the shelving). Wandering among and between these nodes of commercial pleasure are the pod people, Americans of all sizes, decidedly heterosexual, not a few mullets, the occasional queen standing out like Jezebel at the ball. The brilliance of George Romero in situating his second zombie thriller Dawn of the Dead at the mall cannot help but be recognised as one also trolls the glossy pathways, in search of what one is never sure.

Of course, Cold City also has these things in spades (especially Jezebel Queens), but their placement in placid Little City and my secret pleasure at their assurances of continuity, stability, and cheap oil remind me of my occasional trips in my youth to visit my mother’s sister and my cousins in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the seventies and eighties, a serenely surreal world quite different from my vibrant but inherently messy urban barrio (remember here that the word barrio in Spanish only means neighborhood; the “bad” that usually precedes the translation is an American invention).

Now, my mother and her sister were not exactly friends, if you know what I mean, so such trips always had a strange tension to them, which is one reason why they didn’t happen very often. My mother had chosen a fairly bohemian path, which in this case means having a child just barely in wedlock with an illegal alien and partaking in a working life, living alone and seeing men for both sexual and social pleasure. Her sister pursued a more conventional American narrative, marrying a bland Anglo junior exec at Jergen’s (yes, the lotion maker to your grandma), and moving through a succession of tract homes in the third ring suburbs of Los Angeles. What I remember most about these journeys to the edge of the expanding city was their profound exoticism. The first time I tasted American cheese was for lunch at my aunt’s house, on white bread with mayonnaise. I remember everything about this moment, from where I was (outside on the “deck”) to the plate the sandwich was served on (a Dixie paper plate with flowers on it). The whole concoction— plastic cheese, white bread, with mayonnaise, was such a unique experience for me at the time, for my mother generally made classic Chicano cuisine (this is a bit hard to explain, but I guess I could describe it as Anglo-Mexican fusion, to which most Mexican Americans might offer a guffaw): stews, lard, beans with a hambone, lard, tortillas, lard, fried and grilled meats, lard, salsas and sauces made from red chilies, lard, along with the white bread, Miracle Whip (Oh Mary, don’t ask), hot dogs, meatloaf, and (oddly) frozen potato latkes. The dynamic thing about Chicano cuisine is you never know exactly what or in what combination one will get.

Dinners Chez ma tante were classically Anglo circa 1976, wholesome meats spiced with salt and pepper, frozen vegetables, maybe an Iceberg lettuce salad with Thousand Island dressing, and flaked mashed potatoes, which struck me as singularly alien, served in a formal dining room on china. My mother and I usually ate in front of the television, watching Three’s Company or The Jeffersons or Taxi. Tortillas were never served at my aunt’s house. It was in one of these dream suburbs that I discovered what a cul-de-sac was, where I first went ice skating (in an enclosed arena gloating under the blazing Southern Californian sun), where I first saw an automatic dishwasher. The very quality of the living space was dramatically different. My mother and I were ensconced in a small “artist’s cottage” from the 1920s made from wood and mortar that had no foundation and was tilted in all sorts of strange directions, like the Winchester House, but had a wonderful view of the San Gabriel mountains, louvered windows in the bedrooms, and a garden filled with jade, aloe vera, river stones, and bougainvillea.

My aunt’s houses (all of them, really), by contrast, were made out of sheet rock and stucco, had cathedral ceilings with exposed beams and gas fireplaces with huge mantles made of brick, where on the second storey my cousins had their own bedrooms with large closets equipped with accordion doors in wood veneer, and carpeted throughout, with even green lawns leading up to the tasteful wooden door in a retro hacienda style. The contrasts between my home and this away were extreme, and it wasn’t that I thought of these places as repulsive, per se, but they were extremely foreign to me, and to this day I prefer to reside in old, knockabout places with history, nicks in the walls, and old plumbing. Although an avid fan of the adventures of the Brady Bunch, I preferred to keep this particular vision of Californian utopia at arm’s length, for something about it struck me (and still does) like living on the moon, or in a test tube. We shall leave aside here how American fantasies of domestic space moved in two generations from warmth to cold, lived to antiseptic.

La Vickstrix, strangely enough, resides in an apartment complex that shares a lot with the vision of American plastic utopia so pursued by my aunt and her assimilative proclivities, although in La Vickstrix’s case I think it is more a case of convenience than aesthetic desire. The space is uniformly American mass produced architecture, which means sheetrock walls you could punch a hole in if you look at them the wrong way, standard double-paned windows, an enclosed attached two-car garage with an automatic door, and a sliding glass door which looks out onto a small concrete patch (the "patio") and an uninviting lawn. The very anonymity of the space is the stuff of serial killer nightmares, except for the fact that the entire space has been crammed full of La Vickstrix’s rather baroque period furniture, foulards here and paisleys there, everything (or most everything) coated in a thick layer of gold. It’s like an alien spaceship from Planet bisabuela crash landed on the sterile American Petri dish of standardized living, and the effect is bizarre, to say the least.

Because Vicks keeps most of her research material at her university office, the house is strangely quiet of the intellectual noise of egghead clutter many of us so often hear in our own homes, with just small shelves here and there with books and monographs. How could there be more competing with the attentions of her tchotckes taking up every other inch, including gilt framed photos, gilt angels hanging off the lamp shades, and faux (gilt, natch) Fabergé eggs on little stands? And she wonders why she can’t find a man! I’ve told her, “My dear, you’re going to have to butch it up if you want to find love. Nobody wants to do their grandmother!” She sighs, rolls her eyes, and sullenly pouts as she fluffs the fleur-de-lis pillows with gold lasso trimming. The singular aesthetic is Borderlands Louis Quatorze.

While the domestic space may need some, um, work, La Vickstrix herself is nothing if not the consummate "hostess with the mostest," truly a gay daughter of the Mexican old school. I love arriving at La Vicks’ house, buzzed from my drive at high speeds swilling Diet Coke and lighting cigarette after cigarette, burning through my Extra Gay Driving Collection on my IPod, barreling down the interstate in the middle of nowhere, past fields and silos and farm houses, eventually descending into the river valley that holds Little City. In my moment of arrival, I can recapture briefly the sense of strangeness and familiarity from my aunt’s house, as we lay on La Vicks’s bed and yak, the cool breeze of the central air humming away in the background like a technological lullaby, Will and Grace on mute.

I have known La Vickstrix for about ten years, and she is one of my closest academic interlocutors. Happenstance and luck have brought us closer together, as Cold City and Little City are relatively close, although neither of us would have expected to end up in this little patch of the country back in graduate school, but here we are. We met at a particularly debauched Chicana/o Studies conference in the nineties, and instantly became fast friends, a relationship cemented by her frequent trips to the Bay Area in the same period when I lived there. She was not always La Vickstrix, for originally she was La Sally, so named because her glasses at the time bore a disturbing resemblance to those of Sally Jesse Raphael. The glasses are gone, but the attitude, honey, is still there. La Vicks is a true intellectual interlocutor and colleague, which is to say she watches out for me and I for her, with opportunities, organizing, and networking. She rules the roost of her current institution, in only the way a gay Chicano who thinks she is the Queen of Spain can. While I too have my diva moments, my insecurities and Sagittarius rising mean I have poor follow-through. La Vicks is more deliberate, but unlike most academic Divas, thinks in terms of communities and networks and connections (must be all that musty upper-crust study she does).

Vicks had planned a small Easter soirée, which included principally yours truly, her ex Ms. Clinique, with whom she shares her baroque Petri dish, a shy and über-sweet man who makes me look like an amateur with her collection of beauty potions, lotions, and (crushed) hopes in jars, as well as an assortment of other queens both affiliated with the local university or Little City homosexual institutions (i.e. the local library). In fact, all we were missing was a representative from the local cruising park (who no doubt couldn’t make it because he already had plans… with his wife) and the bars, of which Little City remarkably has three, one for the boys, one for the girls, and one for the skanks (of both genders). Vicks might cynically argue we indeed did have representation from these other cohorts, but in any event it turns out we were a cozy little group. In addition to Vicks, myself, and Ms. Clinique, we had two other professors from her institution, a local librarian, and for dessert, were joined by the gay brother of one of Vicks’ colleagues who was visiting from New Orleans, who is so refreshingly unjaded he is naturally entertaining.

Dinner was standard Easter fare, just more of it: Ham with pineapple and maraschino cherries, and Lamb with mint jelly, and asparagus wrapped in bacon, and potatoes au gratin, and a salad, and popovers, and a homemade cheesecake with strawberries, and a basket of Godiva chocolate bunnies, and champagne and wine, and tequila and anise afterwards, and coffee, and tea. The Chicano/Mexican/Latino hostess methodology depends on an overwhelming of the senses and stomach, which is why Chicanas/os tend to leave Anglo homes hungry (with the exception of certain white ethnics, Italians, Irish, Jewish, who can pile it on as much as any decent Mexican housewife).

Sometime after the clearing of the table and the second cigarette, I realized, as I looked around, that although we were in this strange domestic space of demented baroque glamour, we had here, in Little City, on a Christian high holy day, created a gay communitas, however fleeting and temporal. We here were six gay men, different races, ages, bodies, politics, fashion sensibilities, joined together by professional and personal circumstances but who also shared a sexual identity that was both awkward in its formal dimensions (sexuality being a fairly weak bond in some ways) as well as powerful (alternatively, sexuality being a potent bond in other ways).

Some of that depended on profession (although gay men, in my experience, make terrible academic networkers, contra the experience of many lesbians in academe), some of it on friendship outside of the academy, and some of it on chance. But I do feel that the energy created between gay men (or perhaps any group of self-identified people) is special and dear, even as intellectually we can recognise that such affiliations are temporal and contingent. I am reminded of Dorian Corey’s description of the ball houses in Paris is Burning: “a group of people, joined by a mutual bond.”

Recently Centre of Gravitas, my soul sister in blogging, as I find we are so often thinking of similar things thousands of miles apart, wrote of the necessity of LGBT community, and the ingrained homodistrust of heterosexuals. This reminded me of something an old colleague said to me years ago, when she stated that she categorically distrusted heterosexuals, and that all we could depend on were ourselves (LGBT folks). Of course, we are all bilingual for the most part: most LGBT people interact with heterosexuals every day, although we do have our dismissive, secret names for them. Many of us, myself included, count heterosexuals among our closest friends. But one thing that underlies the concerns that both CoG and my old colleague articulate is the fine line most LGBT folks feel, not necessarily from our heterosexual acquaintances but from society in general. How close are we to being declared sexual deviants? How acceptable are our social and sexual practises? Will we be thrown over for the str8 marriage, the child, the family? How close are we to violence? Many of us have very traumatic histories of heterosexism, which often times are indeed quite violent, and from a young age. I certainly don’t have any answers to these questions, but do wish to recognise here the special power of affiliation among and between LGBT people that is distinct and unique, and not solely grounded in persecution. LGBT folks do need to form coalitions and strategic relationships among each other, but aside from these are the coalitions of volition that we also nurture.

One of the reasons Paris is Burning resonated across the spectrum of gayness was its recognition of the synthetic nature of many LGBT communities, which some have read simplistically as an uncritical reconstruction of the nuclear family. Rather, the power of these synthetic bonds is precisely their transformative power on quotidian LGBT experience, their saving grace, if you will. It is an oft cited truism that LGBT folks are raised in alterity, since most of us continue to be products of heterosexual unions. And there are certainly tensions within LGBT communities over how different we really are. But it just takes a few incidents to realise that indeed many do consider us worthy of something less than respect. But the specific joy of coming together as LGBT people is both a reaction to hate as well as an action of affirmation and recognition (“I see you”), in a subculture so often dedicated out of necessity to secrecy, hiding, invisibility.

Where we LGBT people sometimes run into trouble is in thinking that the coalitions and alliances that can often bind us tightly to each other are natural, organic, biological. No. We create community, and we also destroy it too, when it no longer suits are needs, with other acronymic entities as well as with str8s. But it is the moment of existing that needs to be appreciated, and not the loneliness of the before, nor the maudlin expression at its loss after it is gone. “Change, or die,” said Moraga. And we six gay men in Little City, for a lovely evening of laughter, confidence, debate, and food, had community on Easter Sunday.

See Ya Later, Gator!

The academic year is slowly, begrudgingly giving up the ghost, along with winter. Students appear in class overly tired, or drop class, suddenly disappearing, or sending emails indicating their reasons, usually their lack of a guaranteed B+ or higher. Seniors rush their projects, panicked about edits and desperate to meet with you (“finally,” you think). End of year paperwork looms, along with final grading and commencement and all the rituals that you discover, after attending years of commencements, are part of the job and very different from the ambivalent yet optimistic feelings at your own ceremonies. You realize that your rented regalia is not glamourous, but actually polyester. The mortarboard makes you look like a pinhead. Yet you loathe the other style of academic head gear: the puffy yet floppy hats that make dowdy professors look like ridiculous Shakespearians in some small, pathetic summer stock troupe. The whole get up is so hot that if your commencement day starts out warm you could indeed be risking passing out. You are secretly relieved the shutter-snapping grandparents, beaming fathers and mothers, and every other assorted familial groupies attending for free cheese and crackers afterwards can’t see your sweat-soaked back under your regulation black.

And worse, as a final hideous act, the procession of the students across the stage, both favourites and less-than-favourite, awkward or arrogant, happy or bewildered, grabbing their diplomas and then posing for an instashot from the school photographer. Some students you are sad to see go, but others: Good riddance to bad rubbish! Feeling punchy at my last commencement at Sadistic College, Professor Fussylicious, a co-conspirator, and I actually hissed (discreetly, natch, so that only the faculty could hear) the students we hated as they passed across the stage, those students who had been pointy in class or written us bad evals or just been slagging students, while my girl Skank Huore sat prostrate next to us, suffering from the aforementioned overheating syndrome and close to babbling Sapphic love poems of delirium to nearby tent poles, which she would argue in more lucid moments held more appeal than her usual “dates.” Afterwards, a new (first year) assistant professor with a naïve demeanour said, “Did you hear people hissing?” to which Fussylicious and I proudly proclaimed, “Honey, that was US!” Shameless is as shameless does!

Thankfully, we are not there just quite yet. Cold City still looks dormant, only some of the trees have a fuzzy halo of new buds, the grass remains patchy and brown in places. On our rainy days, it could be April or it could be October. But the sun is out, and rising higher in the sky day by day, and warmer as well. The heart quickens, one ponders the closet: what to wear today? Needless to say, I have either been underdressed or overdressed this past week, enthusiastic about a light, elegant raincoat that I will later regret choosing as the wind comes up or alternatively sweating in a cotton turtleneck. The locals tell me to keep the woolens out until the end of the month, but on days like today, spent outside in a brown park under the glorious sun and returning home with the buzz of a slight sunburn on my face, all I can think of is linen pants and the thinnest possible button down shirts, a healthy spritz of Clarins Eau Dynamisante, a full pack of cigarettes and a Djeep lighter in Harlow white and silver comfortably and reassuringly in the shirt pocket, and a dinner date with Mr. Gordo in hot humid Big Eastern City. But we’re not quite there yet either.

Where we seem to be at, on the institutional clock of the Shop, is Offer Time! The academic version of The Price is Right, with the lucky candidates running down the aisle, bellies straining in tucked in shirts or breasts jiggling in tube tops: "Come On Down!" A series of different moments have come together recently to push my thinking towards this annual moment. One is the fabulous news of La Lecturess’s gaining of an academic position. “Skoal! Good Work, Eve!” Any tenure-track job acquired is a victory over the process itself. Another is the strange paranoia of my Cold City colleagues, who throughout the month of March have been asking me, in hushed tones in hallways and the lift and over business lunches, “Are you on the market? Are you leaving? We so want you to stay. We’re so glad you’re here. What can we do to convince you to stay?” This has been a hard one for me to decipher. For one, no one, and I mean no one, at Sadistic College ever (ever, Mary!) said, “We so want you to stay.” Ever. (What they would say is, “We certainly hope you can stay,” or some other ridiculousness. As Prancilla would say, “Please, girl!”) Secondly, I just got off the merry-go-round of the market. Why would I want get back on that hideous ride so soon? My responses to these queries have been careful, but generous. I appreciate the support, so refreshing after four years of mind-numbing abuse. But, inside I am thinking, “If I was on the market you wouldn’t know about it.” Discretion is the better part of valour, after all, and departures must be negotiated much more carefully than arrivals.

And yet another thread has been the deliciously satisfying news that the junior faculty of Sadistic College seem to be decamping for greener pastures before they can be dumped for no good reason. I know for a fact that my own case was educational in ways that the administration did not realize at the time. To wit, three junior faculty have resigned their positions this spring, one after the other, leaving for superior institutions or places where they are guaranteed a fairer shake. As one of the escapees tells me over email, “Incidentally, do you know that I am the third person to resign this semester? And possibly not the last...” My goodness! The giddiness over this implicit critique of the college is tempered by my knowledge that the administration of Sadistic College, sociopaths and thrill kill cultists that they are, has no capacity for introspection just as they have no soul, even if the senior faculty can clearly see the writing on the wall (and respond, as they always do, with depression instead of outrage). At any decent liberal-arts college, the loss of one junior faculty is regarded as a trauma; the loss of three in one semester (two faculty of colour and one gay man, natch) would be considered an institutional disaster! Still, it is a small pleasure, a reaffirmation of hard won knowledge, in the moment between brushing my teeth and applying moisturizer (Shiseido Hydrating Fluid for Men, if you’re curious), since I have had little time for anything else of late.

But the differences here between Sadistic College and Cold City U. are terribly instructive, both about faculty support, “fit,” the tensions and competitions in the profession over junior faculty, and an emergent politics of faculty desire. Cold City U. is a modest institution, which regards a hire as an investment in permanence, or in other words, when you are hired it is assumed, barring any egregious actions and the fulfillment of contractual obligations towards service, teaching, and research, that you will indeed be tenured. Cold City U. is a “hire to tenure” institution. Therefore, support can be offered unequivocally, as an honest gesture of collective institutional desire to reaffirm the decisions made by the extensive and exhausting hiring process. As a modest institution, Cold City U. also recognizes implicitly that the professoriate has options of movement that make collegial support (because it is free, and therefore an available resource) all that much more important. This thinking is sort of along the lines of, “We may not be able to give you money or an R1 library, but we can appreciate your contribution and presence.” This, as you soon discover, is nothing to cluck at.

Compared to Sadistic College’s hyper-inflated self-importance and egomania, the “You’ll Never Be Good Enough For Here” school of thought (with of course, accompanying dead wood faculty, deadly institutional politics, a surprising lack of any resources, and the stick of both R1 and Liberal Arts College life), my current perch is more than enough as a place to catch my breath, a querencia de experiencia. Querencia is a sophisticated Spanish word Mr. Gordo taught me, one I thought of a lot in the last, difficult year at Sadistic College. Literally, a querencia is the place where the bull goes to escape the arena. It is also translated as a den or a lair. But as a metaphor, it can be read as a homing instinct, as well as a sort of safe space to escape to. A querencia is what most junior faculty are looking for, and soon discover that to actually find it requires, in many cases, the wherewithal to actually go look for it.

The trick, of course, is to make it over the wall in the first place: once you have a position on the tenure-track, movement across the institutional spectrum becomes that much easier, even if such movement is lateral or up and down. However, a story in Inside Higher Ed this week got me to thinking over another angle to the annual comings and goings that typify the season. What if contemporary junior faculty want something more than what the Shop has traditionally offered for them, which is to say abjection, hard work, and sublimation, after which you’re not only tenured but also dead. It is an intriguing line of thinking.

The article in IHE discusses this transformation in desire on the part of junior faculty in terms of generations, specifically the Gen X professor, through the work of a Harvard think tank that has looked at generational differences in professional expectation, process, and outlooks. Some of the interesting observations of this work have been that younger (junior) professors value quality of life, transparency in hiring, tenure, and promotion, and multi-dimensional understandings of intellectual work, as opposed to more traditional professional models of privileging research and academic work over personal life, secrecy in promotional and institutional matters, and a singular model for academic evaluation (peer-review, monographs, etc.). IHE notes that,

Trower’s [one of the study researchers] generation gap work is an outgrowth of her work on the push from younger faculty members for policies that are more “family friendly” and the anger many younger scholars feel over the way tenure standards have gotten so much tougher in recent years — and are frequently presided over by senior scholars who couldn’t meet those standards today. While looking at what she called “a culture clash of generations” doesn’t make those issues go away, it helps explain some of those tensions.

This differential in experience and expectation has been building since the 1970s, but as the academic job market crisis has become a permanent state, some junior faculty have responded by reordering the rules of the game. In other words, new faculty increasingly want flexibility, transparent accountability, and an appreciation of the nuances and complexities of lived experience (i.e. family life, child care, emotional states and identities beyond the Shop) as part of their professional experience. They do not want to be the bookish professor, infatuated with peer-review or institutional politics: they want to be people. They fit into what Richard Florida calls, in his two volumes, “The Creative Class”: professionals that desire satisfaction from work as well as connection and involvement with life outside of professionalism. And they’re willing to schlep to find this. As the IHE article observes,

Trower noted that another key quality about Gen Xers generally, including those in the academy, is that they don’t have the patience of their elders. Gen X faculty members are less likely to see inherent value in staying at one institution for a long time, or to give administrators lots of time to work on reforms. As a result, she said, senior faculty members and administrators can’t assume they will hold on to their Gen X talent — unless they start to rethink policies that make no sense to the members of that generation.

Hello, Sadistic College! Your phone is ringing! The comment thread on this story has been incredible, with some proclaiming the laziness of the young, others decrying the dulling effects of popular culture on work ethics and attention spans, and yet others attempting to think through what these changes in perspectives mean for our insular, self-assured profession, including the vast increase in work loads for junior faculty combined with job insecurity.

Centre of Gravitas has a funny yet chilling entry on the generational differences in his department, my reaction to which upon my first reading was, “Those historians!” but afterwards, connected in my mind to this conundrum of expectation that the IHE article, and its comment thread, examines, gave me pause. CoG’s white male historians are angry; they are pissed off at race, at gender. At change, in other words. And they have made it clear they will fight it out, their vision of academia and academic life. As CoG puts it:

On Friday, we had a meeting to discuss hiring our super-special-senior historian. In that time, the “traditional” historians seethed with anger and venom. They demanded the department hire another historian just like them. One senior “traditional” historian actually stated, “We have gone along with all of these ‘diversity’ hires. We allowed the department to offer courses in things that are irrelevant, like ‘Border Studies’ and ‘Women’s History.’ How many women historians do we need? Now it’s time to give back to the department’s real strengths: Traditional History.”

Ouch! This is where these abstract ideas about generation and expectation meet the hard realities of institutional life. This is also where the broad professional generalizations become intimate and personalised, because I would argue, as CoG implies, that indeed many of the “generational” differences are actually reflective of the institutional changes as they relate to race, gender, sexuality, and our idea of the scholar, as well as scholarship and scholarly life.

Calcified infrastructures of senior professors with agendas of ressentiment can prevent institutional growth and transformation, to the point where you could argue they threaten the very future of the profession (as one of many different aspects at play). Indeed, this is one way to evaluate what happened to me at Sadistic College: a senior black professor (historian, natch), whose whole way of academic understanding was threatened by new models and methodologies, refused the questions by eliminating the symbol of change (me), but not change itself (as evidenced by the presence of an army of similarly trained scholars behind me; her own obsolescence as an agent of stasis confronting her). The situation detailed at CoG seems in some ways even worse: a split department torn between old and new academic practitioners, locked in a death match that sometimes leads to receivership, sometimes to one side or another moving on (or retiring) and a pyrrhic victory, or most depressingly, a continued deadlock that eventually drags the department down into a morass of resentment, bitterness, and frustration.

A lot of these debates can also be found filed under interdisciplinarity, and the effect of different modalities of thought on parts of the professoriate that are committed to more traditional methodology (along with all its limitations, problems, and histories of racial and sexual bias). This mirroring of the professional (tensions between interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity) and the personal (racial, sexual, gendered, socio-political differences) can both illuminate and obscure. For how are these debates then written on the bodies of the new professoriate? Is it coincidental that those leaving Sadistic College all meet our definition of non-traditional (i.e. non-white str8 male) academics? What sacrifices in person and thought that, for instance, earlier generations of scholars of colour were willing to make for professional success are now no longer valid, or legitimate? What kind of resentments does this generate among and between the professoriate of colour, or among women scholars? Among the professoriate as a whole? Or rather, how do new scholars of all races and genders (with their fancy tools of interdisciplinarity, cultural studies, popular culture, et al.) embody and refuse (refute) other, older, positivist conceptions and representations of the professor and professorial practice? For that is what we are attempting to unravel in these "generational" debates, after all. And how does all this meet the deadly challenges to academic governance and academic freedom mounting as we speak in state legislatures and Capital Hill? For as we debate, on some level, the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin (and some of us try to survive this exquisite debate), Joe Q. Public, mirroring the racial and gendered ressentiment of CoG's senior colleagues and thinking the whole crock is bollocks, in classic American anti-intellectualism, is ready to call the whole thing off. We may not have the time it will take to work these issues out amongst ourselves, but will have to forge new visions while simultaenously struggling to preserve or save the most crucial aspects of our intellectualism, even if that may have to occur outside of the bounds of the university.

Springtime is change. Easter, coming soon, promises rebirth, renewal, optimism and hope. For a lucky few, this theme is found in this time of their first contract, their first job. For others, more seasoned hands, in the possibilities of the next job. I would like to think that new academics, in their desire for community, for personal and professional satisfaction, for querencia, represent positive changes in our profession. But as the birds fly from the warren of horror that is Sadistic College and other unsatisfying institutional situations, I know that for many of us the search will continue. But the thing to focus on here is not the defeat of change, but the very possibility of flight itself.

Or as Soul II Soul put it in the eighties, Keep on Movin'.

¿Que Onda, Aztlán?

Destroy everything you touch today
Destroy me this way
Anything that may desert you
So it cannot hurt you

[…]

What you touch you don’t feel
Do not know what you steal
Destroy everything you touch today
Please destroy me this way

— Ladytron

Tonight, in a strange bit of synchronicity, Mr. Gordo asked me what I thought of the recent immigration debacle filling television screens and Internet bandwidth and radio airwaves. Oddly enough, I was working on this very post, and it gave us a chance to discuss the recent events of protest and controversy, his telegraphed through Univision, mine through the Internet. The media, the blogosphere, and even my academic conference of the last week, has been consumed in the frenzy of discussion over the national protests that began a week or two ago and continue against proposed immigration reform legislation currently being considered by Congress. This legislation, as widely reported in the print and televisual media, would make it a felony to assist undocumented immigrants (illegal aliens, or as they are being called on many right wing sites, “Illegals”), offer them medical or social assistance, and subject the immigrants themselves to felonious prosecution for being in the United States without appropriate documentation.


Aside from the very good chance that this controversy may in fact be a red herring to distract us from other more pressing political scandals, the response of huge swaths of the American public to the proposed legislation has been compelling. Large numbers of immigrants, their children, and naturalised and native-born Americans have hit the streets, raising their voices to counter what seems, on the face of it, not only incredibly punitive legislation, but futile legislation as well, which if I were a pessimist I would say is the only kind that gets a public airing in our bloated and corrupt capital. Especially in the right blogosphere, the publication and repetition of a series of particularly unfortunate images of Latina/o students in the eastern Los Angeles suburbs running the Mexican flag up a flagpole with the American flag (upside down) beneath has enraged many and served as a lamentable opportunity both to misunderstand US Latinas/os and express more traditional anti-immigrant and racist loathing. And true to form, the right blogosphere has been full of (ignorant, ahistorical, and racist) pop theorizations of Mexican American history, the much-feared reconquista or the Mexican reconquest of the American west, and unmeltable immigrants as the biggest threat to Mom and Apple Pie since the Red Scare. In other words, American history repeating itself, in a vicious and incoherent cycle of hysteria and hyperbole.

These flag images, which for what it's worth I also found disturbing, first struck me as a case of very poor politics. These are the images that inflame racial tensions and Anglo panic more than any other, although I understand that secondary school students are gripped by a number of emotions aside from political sophistry, not the least of which is the rush of collective power and adolescent transgression. But, on second thought, one must attempt, on some level, to intellectually understand what is going on here. Rightists claim such efforts are “girly-man” justifications, to which I would counter that such knee-jerk polemics obscure (aside from the tiresome homophobia) the tangible reasons as to why, almost forty years after the Chicano Movement, Latina/o students would be privileging the Mexican flag over the American, alterity over homogeneity, alienation over inclusion. In short, the flag images more than the protests themselves made me think we are in need of another Chicana/o Movement.


Let me preface my remarks by saying that, like most US Latinas/os, I have an intimate and profound personal connection to this spectre of Latin American immigration. I am in love with an immigrant from Latin America. My father was an undocumented worker from Mexico, an “Illegal,” who met my mother, the Nueva Mexican Española, as he was painting my grandparents' house in the early winter of 1968. In this way, my parents represented the coming together of pre- and post-1848 Mexican presences in the USA, and are not atypical of the mixed-generation profile of many Mexican Americans. I grew up surrounded by Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, employed by my grandparents. These were, invariably, honourable people, the proverbial salt of the earth: hardworking, put-upon, struggling, striving, and surviving. These were people who, as Jesse Jackson once was fond of saying, “took the early bus”: They came to work, and work, hard and dreary and underpaid and exploitative, is what they found.


As a teenager, the summer before I was to leave for Prestigious Eastern U., I took a summer job in a paper factory arranged through the Tejano married couple next door who were floor managers at the factory, the husband downstairs on the loading dock, the wife upstairs in the packing division, which was were I was placed, at the end of the production line boxing and taping the finished products (dinner napkins, cocktail napkins, formal napkins, picnic napkins, any napkin you could think of, in a myriad of colours). Precocious and ignorant, fascinated at the time by the Bauhaus and the connection between design and industrialism, I considered the job an opportunity to discover what drove the Weimar designers and architects firsthand. The entire line, aside from my neighbor and myself, were undocumented Mexican women, “Illegals,” girls really, who were amused by my presence on the floor, the only man (boy, really) among them. And aside from the ridiculousness of a scholarship winner with a 4.0 GPA working in a factory, I learned quite a lot of what it meant to work, I mean really work, that summer. We would arrive at 4:00 am and open the windows, start the machines, and at 4:30 the women would arrive, wrapped in shawls or cute little jackets bought on Broadway downtown or Brooklyn Avenue in East LA. The line began shortly afterwards, with the women at the far end counting and arranging by colour and design, on to plastic wrapping, labeling, and finally arriving at my station, where I placed the product into boxes and sealed them with a tape machine, then loaded the boxes onto palettes that would eventually be moved downstairs. I worked a full eight-hour day, for which I earned minimum wage. Many of the women would work through their lunch hour so they could leave early, either for childcare or other jobs. The summer passed, and I too, onto PU and a different future.


That a Chicano scholarship student would taste this side of community working life is not in itself extraordinary. My mother had always worked full time, and I was fully aware of the necessity of work to survive, legal or otherwise. Everyone in my modest neighborhood worked, in offices or factories or stores or in the underground economy: drugs or smuggling or prostitution or as a coyote. This makes it sound sinister but in fact it wasn’t any more dangerous than other working class barrios in the northeastern section of Los Angeles. We had our cholos and cholas and gangbangers, but we also had scholarship students and secretaries taking AA degrees at the community college. My neighbors and friends universally appreciated the opportunity to get out of it all; to go East to PU and American success, or as my mother put it, the acceptance letter from PU in her hand, “the American Dream.” This from a woman whose family was New Mexican when it was still a Spanish Crown Colony, long before there was a glimmer of the United States in British North America’s eye. Lucky and clever Chicanas and Chicanos of my generation could chase the dream in a way markedly different from our parents or grandparents, thanks to the Chicano Movement of the sixties.


The Chicano Movement (generally, 1967-1975), the civil rights struggle of Mexican Americans, came at a period of great foment nationally. Mexican Americans, inspired by Cesar Chavez and the African American Civil Rights Movement, began their struggle as a way to find place in a country that regarded them as foreigners, trespassers, “Illegals,” uncivilized and barbaric and criminal and good for nothing. Above all, the Chicano Movement was about place, about placing Mexican Americans within the larger diorama of the United States as legitimate and equal citizens, a struggle that had begun in the 1930s but that reached a critical zenith in the sixties. Chicanas and Chicanos in the sixties did not turn towards Mexico or the United States to define their identity. Instead, they sought a third way, Chicanismo and the concept of the mythic Chicano homeland Aztlán, to articulate their state in-between, their difference yet connection to the larger American drama. Chicana/o identity is a profoundly American statement of being.

And it was towards our Movement that my mind turned when I saw the images of these students and their Mexican flags marching in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles. The Chicano Movement was also started by high school students who staged a walk out and strike (called “blow-outs”) in several eastern Los Angeles schools in 1967 to protest the institutional and social racism that destined them to economic and political marginality. But we seem to have lost the collective thread here, the thread of Chicanismo that was such a powerful idea then and now. Chicana/o activists of the 1960s would have been highly critical of the use of the symbol of the Mexican republic to speak to their desires and needs as American citizens, as Aztlánistas, aware as they were of the derision Mexican nationals had for Chicanas/os (viz. Paz). But the social and political revolution fomented by Mexican American young people in the 1960s and 1970s and so profoundly influential in my own political and intellectual development has been surpassed by older, more reassuring but simplistic tokens of resistance to Anglo racism. And I think, this is what happens when a society delineates its revulsion as the US has with its proposed felonious solution to undocumented immigration: desperation and futility. Centre of Gravitas had a compelling post on Latinas/os and race a couple of weeks back, that for me addressed the problems of organizing around Latina/o identity, and that is our profound diversity: generational, political, linguistic, racial, sexual, economic, educational.


Yet, what’s old is new again. US society seems once again to be focused on the “problem” of Latina/o immigration, “Illegals,” without either a sense of political economy or an understanding of the empirical effects of asymmetrical economies on human migration. My doublegood Sister Disco in Minnesota forwarded this story to me that seems to address the concerns in a practical manner: “Why are Americans angry at us? All we do here is work.” A number of factors have been addressed in various media: the rule of law, the effect of undocumented and desperate labour on job markets for native/naturalised citizens, criminality, and exploitation. All of these issues strike me as perfectly legitimate questions, but the tenor of the debate has given me chills. The ugly face of the old racisms that the Chicano Movement sought to displace are still there, and have now been given new life in the post-9/11 hysterical state that remains barely suppressed in this country.


Indeed, the debate, for what its worth, over undocumented immigration has seen a parade of the old shibboleths marching across the discursive stage in all their hideous glamour: the unassimilating Mexican, the rude Mexican, the ungrateful Mexican, the Mexican who insists on speaking Spanish in front of me (me!), the criminal “Indian” nature of the Mexican, the dirty and devious Spic, the brown horde stealing jobs and services from hardworking Americans. Bar the door and close the gate, we hear, with fantastical notions of high tech walls and border checkpoints and the criminalisation of a whole class of people. But it is too late for all that, for that horse has already left the barn. Some commentators have astutely observed that the response to undocumented immigration should not be to criminalise people, but to make it so that labour conditions for all workers in the USA, native/naturalised as well as undocumented, are fair, just, and effective. But it is much easier to make political hay out of the most vulnerable, those without a public voice, than to actually change the way things work here. And let’s be clear about one thing: this debate is really not about immigrants per se, for they will keep coming regardless of the risks and abuses. This is more about how we see ourselves as a society, how Americans feel about themselves, and their prospects, and who counts as a human being. Cycles of optimism and pessimism mark our history, and we definitely seem to be on a swing towards the latter, both in our public culture and intimate feelings. The old bugaboos of the "culture wars" echo here as well, with debates on American gender, race, and sexuality from the sixties returning to duke it out. What I find especially distressing is how we ended up here, for arguably the proposed legislation that is at the heart of this whole tempest in a teapot is mean and taciturn and brutalist.

It is also easier to rely on old and violent stereotypes that are essentially racial in character, than to attempt to understand why the world works the way it does. For the nature of this debate is, I would argue, profoundly racialised, a racialisation that includes anglophone US Latinas/os as much as undocumented brown people speaking Spanish. While commentators rail against the “Illegals” marching in the streets, US Latinas/os should be paying attention (and I would say are indeed paying attention, from the composition of the marches and the yak online), because it is a half-step at best between those “Illegals” and us, a slippery slope of distrust and ignorance and “When did you come here?” and “You speak English so well” and “Dirty Illegals.” The Chicana/o and the immigrant are distinct and separate categories, linked by racism and marginalisation, which is why so many Chicanas/os serve as advocates for undocumented immigrants, because our communities are so often treated similarly, and in many ways overlap and merge, through marriage, cohabitation, and ethnic identification.

I could repeat here the statistical reassurances on the rate of linguistic and cultural assimilation for New Americans, but will leave that work to the intrepidly curious. For if Anglo Americans truly wanted reassurance on the inherent assimilation principle, they only need to look at US Latinas/os, who speak English perfectly well, have imbibed the myths of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, have lived their entire lives within the provenance of the American God of Mammon and Manifest Destiny and the Brady Bunch, and are still struggling with chasing the American Dream, from either the position of marginalisation or success.



What young Latinas/os today need, seemingly, is their own epiphany, their own Chicano Movement, which will make sense of their presence in the United States, their identity as Latinas and Latinos within a changing and dynamic multi-racial and polyglot American society, as well as a position of critique that enables them to confront racism and xenophobia and discrimination. This is what all us US Latinas/os who yearn to be free need, and what indeed is happening, in fits and starts as the very term Latina/o comes into focus, into being, as a pan-ethnicity, a classic American maneuver. US society hasn't generally liked the changes wrought by immigration, historic or contemporary, and it certainly hasn't liked its historic communities of colour very much. However, in the classic spirit of American optimism, these conversations and arguments can lead to the creation of new, dynamic Americanisms that triumph over the fears and panics that typify our rocky history. The irony of the impending Congressional legislation and the unsightly racism it has unleashed is that it may become one key to this cultural formation, this new state of being, this uniquely American creature: The Latina/o.

Where I Am From

This past week an academic gathering brought me back to San Francisco, and California, for the first time in three years. The conference passed in a blur, due to a number of different reasons, but did make me think I should probably learn to schmooze a bit more, or at least a bit more effectively. I was joined by the fabulous La Vickstrix, who like the colonial Doña she is, never travels without a retinue, which in this case consisted of an ex, a wannabe ex, several wool suits, a panic attack over a missing name tag, and the rest of the panel (including me). The panel itself was an exercise in academic performativity (aside from the funny frisson of sexual separation by one degree for the presenters, which we strangely figured out only right before the panel), moderated by someone none of us knew who was clearly disinterested (not part of the various sexual histories, clearly), and an anemic Q and A that garnered exactly 0 questions for my paper (and only a smattering, well, OK, two other questions total, for the other three papers). For a nanosecond afterwards, I was consumed with questions: Didn’t I say mean things? Wasn’t I provocative? Then we went to lunch, and the thread was lost in a scallop salad.


The members of the panel were an interesting gathering of fellow travelers engineered by La Vickstrix, who is nothing is not a playa, but only reasserted in some ways the primacies of the academic conference form: a reunion with old friends now distant (networks, baby! Sexual, professional, sartorial, or otherwise) and a simultaneous reinforcement of the genuflections of the profession (i.e. yes, there’s no one here at your panel or there’s no one interested/interesting here at your panel, but this performative work is what keeps the Shop running: Knowledge, moving forward, into a vacuum of cheap hotel pens and rancid water in banal hotel glassware and tax deductions and really ugly canvas conference bags). A later panel with my old doublegood LL and her crew from her current university was much livelier (Pop Culture, hoorah!), but after the first day I decamped into the City for shopping, introspection, and much needed visiting with friends. Yet another aspect of the academic conference: if a panel presents in an incredibly ugly hotel “conference” room, does it make a sound? It indeed may, but not if you’re getting a pedicure at Saks.


The week before the trip had been full of work stresses and tensions, as well as a strange and growing emotional vibration surrounding the impending return to a city that I lived in seemingly as a different person, at a different time in my life. Tying up the last minute loose ends in Cold City, having a lovely last minute bon voyage lunch with Prancilla (new culinary theme: BBQ), and making my way to the airport, the vibration built, and I spent the uncomfortably full flight (a middle seat, natch) immersed in an emotional fog of depression, anticipation, and introspection. Upon arrival, I took BART into the City, transferred to MUNI at Embarcadero, and made my way under Market Street to Castro Station, ostensibly to rendezvous with La Connaire, my hostess for the week, but in reality to retrace a movement that always brought me a thrilling frisson when I lived there: the crowded rush hour K, L, and M trams full of the coifed and poised and self-possessed creatures seemingly specific to San Francisco: The City Homosexual, a decidedly diverse niche in the global homosexual ecology, similar to other variants (the LA Homo, the New York Homo, the London Homo, et al.) yet strangely unique.


And as the trams emptied out their homosexuals onto the platform, leaving behind relieved str8 Asian Americans headed out to the western “Avenues,” the rush up, and up, of dozens and dozens of LGBT folks of various genres (“beautiful and pierced,” bears, cubs, white queens, femmes, daddies, suit queens, twinks, Black queens, leather queens, tranny boys, trolls, beauties, hair queens, realness girls, butches, Asian queens, gym bunnies, Latin@ queens, tech nerds, shop girls and lawyers and doctors and gay fathers with Chinese or Romanian babies and prostitutes) in a synchronized movement, up the escalator and through the turnstiles and newspaper vendors and into the fray of Castro Street and Market. Next Stop: Gay Ground Zero. Upon my reenactment of this ritual, done in a deeply appreciative scopophilia, a hyperawareness of the reenactment itself, I was greeted with the sight of the etoile, the meeting place of Market, Castro, and 17th streets, with the huge rainbow flag and the marquee of the Castro Theatre rising above, and suddenly overwhelmed with the fecund smell of spring and rain and greenery and soil and the distinctive odour of a San Francisco sewer. Cold City, still in the dying grip of winter and brown and dead, this was definitely not. As I attempted to explain this emotional vibration to La Connaire later, as she prepared dinner Chez elle that evening, she deadpanned while dumping some exquisitely expensive pasta in a roiling pot of water, “Oh girl, you’re always verklempt when you come back here.”

Although I am was not born and raised in San Francisco, I am a native Californian, and San Francisco, in retrospect, made sense as a place of residence for an Angeleno displaced into the East and returning with different ideas of the spatial organization of the city, for it is after all the only classic city in the US West. Upon my graduation from Prestigious Eastern U., terrified of moving to New York like so many PU go-getters and not having a better plan, I joined a group of non-westerners who had set their sights on San Francisco as a landing pad for their gap year between college and professional school. I, having no such plan but not wanting to be alone, decided to join them, much to the consternation of my mother, who recognized the move for what it was: a solidification of the permanence of my homosexual state. This was most definitely not a phase now.

That summer subsequent to my graduation from PU, I had been involved in a desperate relationship with a confused boy, and my arrival in this unknown city, away from him yet not at home really, triggered a panic attack. All of a sudden, it all seemed like a really bad idea. My first evening, decamping with an older PU grad in Dolores Heights and confronted by my panic, I rang my Big Sis, slaving away in her own hell for a lunatic Broadway producer with lodging in a maid’s room in a super swank Park Avenue apartment. Big Sis, always practical in an extravagant sort of way, told me “Just get back on the plane tomorrow. We’ll find a place for you here in New York and that will be that. I told you before it was a bad idea!” Caught between feeling suffocated by the enormity of the move, but also aware that all my stuff was currently en route courtesy of UPS (as well as the distinct paucity of a future with confused boy), I demurred on the invitation and stuck it out (much to the kvetching of Big Sis), for what turned out to be the first of many years in San Francisco.


San Francisco is where, in many ways, I became myself. I lost my virginity here, to a kindly but trollish man in Alameda with a beautifully appointed Victorian mansion and a discreet “play room.” I learned how to smoke here, grace à La Connaire and her stale ass Canadian cigarettes. Before grad school, I managed the wage slavery of temping, job searching, and living up to the lowest expectations in a full-time office job, as the put upon receptionist slash office manager for a non-profit. I struggled with my grad school comps here (finishing the final draft, with my girlfriend Mahku running edits, a small earthquake rumbled the flat, marking the moment), I negotiated shared living with idiosyncratic and/or depressed roommates and the equally strange rhythms of dating, tricking, and gay sexual culture. Here I learned what it was to be gay, to be one of the fabulous creatures of the gay ghetto. Here I walked the streets in high-heeled clogs and learned the fine art of pawning one’s material possessions for a fancy dinner or a pack of cigarettes between paychecks. In this city I grew close to La Connaire, and Mahku, and distant from others formerly close. Here I lived on a shoestring and high on the hog, as well as falling into a dark depression over finishing the thesis that eventually drove me out of the City, and out of California, back to Eastern grey decomposition (California may offer its own delights, but for its native children, it can become uncomfortably like living under glass, or as Dusty Springfield so memorably put it on having to move from California, “Too many of my friends were turning into handbags.”). It was here that I learned the initial lessons of becoming an academic and a professional intellectual and university instructor, in the seminar room as well as through the heated and pitched battles among the graduate students in my program. It was here.


Yet, the simple fact is I haven’t lived in San Francisco for almost a decade, and the coterie of friends and places has changed, for like all cities, San Francisco is driven forward through its own dynamic energy. Bars have closed, and reopened, and closed again. Stores have shifted, or are gone, or have moved. A whole generation of new LGBT transplants is making the City their home, while the ones I knew have gone away, to New York or Chicago or Seattle or Vancouver or Berlin or Tokyo or the East Bay or wherever. I moved away right at the beginning of the dot com boom, although I was a visitor enough during those years to see the deleterious change in attitude, the me-ism and greed and fanatic attachment to things that threatened to topple the quaint leftist qualities of the City as the last redoubt of unapologetic US radicality: a contentious experiment in living. By the turn of the century, those values had been scattered by so many shiny Land Rovers and ambitious young millionaires with bad attitudes and too much cash braying on cell phones about the next “deal.”


Of course, for those of us who had slaved away the nineties working on PhDs and TAing for peanuts and selling CDs to eat, the bursting of that particular bubble brought a delicious schadenfraude, although the bubble’s effects are still written on the City, in terms of the continual extremely high cost of living. San Francisco has always been precious, a toy city, more Amsterdam than America, contained within seven small square miles, rows of Edwardians and Victorians marching up and down the streets, interspersed with uninspired apartment blocks from the fifties and sixties and seventies. It has also always been a bourgeois and cliquish city, proudly drawing open the drapery to display the finery of a restored living room, and the excellent decorative taste of its inhabitants, the vivid life of candlelight and fresh flowers. This also gave it a decidedly voyeuristic pleasure as well, which was not limited to furnishings, as you gazed out your own windows (also open) to see the human dramas of sex, bodies, celebrations, and mournings, displayed without self-consciousness for the audience of the City itself, windows and buildings piled upon one another. Yet, when I knew it, it also seemed a place where one could eek out a living, and still enjoy.


With my old girlfriend La Zeez, I walked through my old neighborhood of Dolores Park and paid a call at my former flat, still dismally painted and seemingly unchanged, and except for the clues of the new sconce over the porch (a reproduction of the original Edwardiana) and the luscious velvet draw curtains, I could still be living there. These small symbols of the dissolution of the building’s typically San Franciscan community of leftist truck drivers, pensioners, grad students and shop girls, arranged under rent control and the bad reputation of the neighborhood, has been replaced sometime over the last ten years by rising property values and Pottery Barn aesthetics. The drug dealers were gone, the ugly headache brown and orange apartment buildings on the street have been repainted with Martha’s palette of colours, and my presence on the street, my constant comings and goings, seem so distant.


My last visit here, three years ago, was with Mr. Gordo, his first visit to California, and I choreographed our entry and initial tour of the streets of San Francisco as a seduction, with an eye towards the secret experiences of the living, breathing City, away from the cheap façade of tourism, the ungainly statement of a “San Francisco” baseball cap on the heads of people (tourists) on my flight back to Cold City. This seduction was grounded in my own experiences living here, the hidden but delicious side of life in one of the world’s unique places, a fact again reasserted for me during this past trip, when I could stand back and truly appreciate San Francisco as beautiful and dense and wonderfully pleasurable to the eye. Cold City is an All-American place, functional and business-like and, quite frankly, completely uninspired visually (i.e. ugly). The freeways, buildings, parks, malls, and roads present a uniform and utilitarian image of a place that suffers through long winters and a decided lack of imagination. No nonsense and easily plowed, an architectural form matched by the society that inhabits the space. By contrast, San Francisco, with its catholic pleasures and visual seductions, seems almost too alive, too fecund, too exotic, too vibrant to live outside of its particular greenhouse. Perhaps this is one reason why non-Californians consider the state, to put it generously, a nut house.

Unlike Cold City, with its mall culture and atomized freeway experiences and its neat but flavourless public places, San Francisco is almost universally described as a city of idiosyncratic neighborhoods, a city of planes and angles and intimacies: a city of inhabitants, not commuters. For me, the symbols of the City are not the Cable Cars (which unless you live or work on Nob Hill, no resident would have use for), or Union Square, or Finocchio’s, or heaven forbid Fisherman’s Wharf, although these places are the image for the non-resident, communicated both through the shrewd marketing of the City as well as by our popular culture (You can’t have a San Francisco filmic or televisual scene without the obligatory clanging of the Cable car bells someplace in the sound design).


In my memory, the City expresses itself more clearly through Sutro Tower, the utilitarian three-pronged television tower rising from Twin Peaks above the city, or the twang of the wires of the trolley buses as they silently prowl up and down the streets. Or the secret cat universes of San Francisco back yards and the lush hidden gardens contained within, behind the façade of 19th century propriety: Tasmanian tree and Mother ferns, jasmine vine and honeysuckle. Dolores “Beach” on a sunny day filled with homos and mothers and kids and cholos and cholas, going to Cole Valley via the 37 Corbett rising and falling on the slopes of Twin Peaks, and the huge, lively Safeway on Market, behind which stands the solemn US Mint, marooned on a rock. It is the green mystery of Telegraph Hill gardens and the sixties sterility of Jackson Square. It is Vietnamese pork, jicama, and cilantro sandwiches on Clement Street and the unparalleled Green Apple Bookstore. The glorious marching of the palms down Dolores Street and movies at the Kabuki and cheap eats in J-town and evil MUNI drivers and CD shopping at Streetlight and the dusty smell of a San Francisco flat and greasy breakfasts at Sparky’s and the space-age futurism (now worn) of BART and coffee houses with overly strong coffee and crowds of the seemingly underemployed and overemployed taking up all the tables and the homo scene at Café Flore and waiting forever for the J-Church and Thai food on 16th Street and Eric’s for Chinese and cinnamon croissant French Toast at Chloé’s and fancy restaurants and holes in the wall and bear bars and twink bars and troll bars and lesbian bars and the magnificent Castro Theatre, where queens recite aloud the lines to camp classics.

This is where I am from.