"Necessarily Hidden Truth(s)": Documenting Queer Migrant Experience in Rigoberto González's Crossing Vines

Abstract

Published in 2003, Rigoberto Gonz (cid:2) alez’s novel Crossing Vines depicts a California migrant worker community in ways structurally reminiscent of the Chicanx classic . . . Y no se lo trag (cid:2) o la tierra [ . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him ] (1971) by Tom (cid:2) as Rivera. 1 Unlike Rivera’s, Gonz (cid:2) alez’s novel presents vignettes of a day in the life of migrants employed in a vineyard that Leonardo, one of the novel’s many characters, asks his mother to record for a class assignment at a university in Los Angeles. In this sense, the text also reminds readers of The Rain God (1984), the gay Chicanx classic by Arturo Islas, whose narrator in part observes how Miguel Chico, one of the prominent gay characters in the text, understands his relationship to community and family while enrolled in a university in California in the aftermath of his uncle’s death. In her early analysis of Islas, Marta E. S (cid:2) anchez describes this mode of gay Chicanx writing as deploying “narrative strategies that highlight the ‘minority’ writer’s role of mediator be-tween cultures” (285). Unique to Gonz (cid:2) alez’s narrative intervention is his trans-parency in the observation of the community, which follows an ethnographic structure that the novel, as a piece of fiction, necessarily betrays. Rather than field notes, the novel presents vignettes of labor at the vineyard, providing the primary material for Leonardo’s project and details about characters that lie well beyond the scope of what his recording devices can capture. The narrative foregrounds memories of gay Mexican migrants that ethnographers and their research subjects both elide in the novel. Gonz (cid:2) alez places documents, such as Permanent Resident Cards (or green cards) and Leonardo’s