“Necessarily Hidden Truth(s)”: Documenting Queer Migrant Experience in Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines

Abstract

The interpretation of documents holds together the center of Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines (2003). Presented as time-stamped vignettes detailing the life of laborers at a vineyard for an university assignment, the novel throws into question the distance between the experiences the characters have and those accessible to Leonardo, the ethnographer-in-training. In Crossing Vines, queer migrant characters such as Aníbal and Moreno develop a narrative agency over access to details that the government or ethnographer might solicit in these narrative gaps. Analyzing González’s use of character’s institutional and personal archives, such as Permanent Resident Cards/green cards, photographs, and Leonardo’s ethnography, I argue that despite offering competing narratives about migrant life, these documents methodologically limit how queer migrants are textually represented and interpreted. Crossing Vines critiques the institutional processes by which migrant stories are gathered, interpreted, and violently cross-examined to foreground the blurred lines between studying and surveilling migrant communities. Whereas Leonardo’s project and the inspection of green cards puts pressure on the migrants in the novel to disclose information to produce or cross-reference an institutional archive, González asks us to put the limitations of the documents under scrutiny. In representing what these archives cannot, Crossing Vines makes a case for the utility and centrality of fiction in attending to the often intentional oversights of institutional archives, including those in our own fields of study.