B ased on queer of color critique's theories of surplus populations in conversation with the special issue theme of Las Americas, I propose some initial ruminations of lo sucio or, and by extension, the sucias associated with suciedad-a Latino vernacular for dirty, nasty, and filthy-as a Latino queer analytic. 1 Lo Sucio is also informed by José Esteban Muñoz's theorization of chusmería, a form of behavior that refuses bourgeois comportment and suggests that Latinos should not be too black, too poor, or too sexual, among other characteristics that exceed normativity. 2 Moreover, I situate the queer analytic of lo sucio in relation to contemporary neoliberal projects that disappear the most vulnerable and disenfranchised by cleaning up spaces and populations deemed dirty and wasteful: welfare moms, economically impoverished neighborhoods, and overcrowded rental dwellings. As Christina Hanhardt suggests in Safe Space, neoliberal economic agendas' scapegoating of undocumented immigrants and the poor has found a powerful partner in the gay and lesbian campaigns to decontaminate queer sexuality from the obscene, offensive, and diseased. 3 Accordingly, lo sucio is aligned with Roderick Ferguson's assertion of how sociological discourses of pathology become central to how surplus populations, especially poor women of color and racialized genderqueers, are not merely viewed as violators of race and nation but "are made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior." 4 I draw on queer of color theorizations of "surplus populations" because I believe the dirty and obscene of surplus holds some potentiality of sustainability and persistence for queer sex and sexuality. Accordingly, queer surplus tastes and smells sucio and cultivates a presence and lingering perseverance of queer sex and joy within neoliberal hetero-and homonormative violences. By extension, the queer surplus of sucias-dirty and filthy nonnormative genders-demonstrate capital's contradictions. Lo sucio gives rise to what Ferguson describes as "the polymorphous perversions that arise out of the production of labor." 5 "As capital disrupts social hierarchies in the production of surplus labor," he argues, "it disrupts gender ideals and sexual norms that are indices of racial difference." 6 | 716 American QuarterlyThus the analytic of lo sucio operates in conversation with three racialized discourses of difference, with attention to queer genders and sexualities: first, lewd, obscene, offensive hypersexual undisciplined bodies; second, darkened, suspect citizens perpetually untrustworthy, impure, and nonloyal to the state; and third, diseased "cultures of poverty" subjects overdetermined to fail to arrive to normative womanhood and manhood. Likewise, racist and classed discourses of sucias operate through the ways in which phenotypic characteristics such as darker skin color and hair texture exceed what is visually inoffensive. Underclass cultural sensibilities are also racialized through the senses, such as being too loud and dressing in ex...
No abstract
Country music has often been held together in dominant public narratives by binaries, such as Mexican-white or Black-white in an attempt to maintain a sense of authentic whiteness. A similar historiographical move occurs in Chicano/Mexican American Studies with regard to the binary brown/white. My focus then is to consider how we might listen to the Black musical sounds of country music through the performances of a brown country boy, Freddy Fender.
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