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Scholars such as Anjali Arondekar, Antoinette Burton, and Ann Cvetkovich have suggested that the archive is a space for dwelling and a quotidian site for erotically charged energies, meanings, and other bodily processes. Following and extending these ideas, this essay seeks to establish a capacious notion of the archive devised and enabled by undocumented queer immigrants' households in New York City. Using ethnographic fieldwork and buoyed by writings in affect theory and material culture studies, this essay aspires to understand how seemingly chaotic and disorderly household material, symbolic, and emotional conditions are arenas for the queer contestations of citizenship, hygiene, and the social order. This essay suggests that mess, clutter, and muddled entanglements are the “stuff” of queerness, historical memory, aberrant desires, and the archive. Archives, therefore, are constituted by these atmospheric states of material and affective disarray and the narratives spun from them. As such, this essay maps out these queer immigrant archives (conceived as mess) to showcase the relationships between and among objects, bodies, narratives, and desires.

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This essay is an exploration of queer (im)possibilities and of the "worlding" of urban spaces by focusing on voices from below. Using ethnographic fieldwork and queer theory to bear upon a conceptualization of "queer "and urban world-making in terms of mess, this essay focuses on the lives of two Filipino working class queers living in Manila and New York. Located at the fringes of gay global modernity, these subjects inhabit recalcitrant and chaotic spaces and quotidian practices that re-narrate and resist the idealized integrative spatial order of global queer cities. This essay contributes to a critical theorization of queerness and urban spatial politics within a transnational framework.