Can Chicana Feminists Create a Queer Mesoamerican Memory?

In Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas, Susy J. Zepeda examines queer Chicana/Xicana feminists who seek a connection with Indigenous ancestors and living Indigenous peoples. This important book covers both well-known activists, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Laura Aguilar, and less-known contemporary queer artists. In each case, Zepeda situates the individual in a historical narrative of colonization and decolonization, weaving between the present and the past, and examining connections with Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, California, and the Southwest.Zepeda's sources include oral histories, archival texts, the writings of feminists, and the artwork produced by a series of queer artists. Through these texts, she shows that colonization led to what she terms detribalization, an attempt to hide Indigenous heritage, and that more recently, activists from various groups have asserted a spiritual memory of Indigenous lineage. The central argument is that from the 1970s through today, Chicana/Xicana activists have invoked the memory of a queer Indigenous past both to assert their own spiritual and ancestral connections with a matriarchal past and to project an Indigenous form of a queer future.The book's strongest point is the development of what Zepeda, building on other scholars, calls a “spirit praxis,” or an understanding of knowledge formation in which feminists of color connect with Indigenous ancestors to transform contemporary lives and develop livable futures. Through such a spirit praxis, Zepeda argues for a different form of remembering that allows feminists to “trace and remember hidden histories and silences of queer Mesoamerican Indigenous ancestries” (1).Throughout the book, Zepeda uses the phrase “Xicana Indígena,” which intentionally elides the borderlands positionality that Anzaldúa, in her Borderlands/ Frontera (1987), famously asserted for Xicana feminists, instead arguing that a spirit praxis allows Xicana feminists to connect with indigeneity. The “X” at the beginning of the term Xicana relates both to memories of the Mexica and to the “X” recently placed at the end of terms such as Latinx and Chicanx, a crossing intended to avoid the gendering of the Spanish language.The term queer similarly plays a major role in Zepeda's text, often slipping between queer as identity marker and queer as verb. Thus, we have both “queering Mesoamerican diasporas” and “queer Indígena artists.” While such slippage is at times problematic for the book and her argument, Zepeda ably navigates much of this terrain to examine the ways Xicana artists and activists promote a memory designed to establish a queer connection with Indigenous ancestors that disrupts the “norm, barriers, and borders” (24) between the present and the past and the Indigenous and the mestiza. For Zepeda, the term queer asserts a nonlinear temporality, a chance to explore indigeneity, and a positionality related to two-spirit praxis and Latina lesbian histories.Zepeda does not focus enough on critiques related to cultural appropriation and anti-Blackness within some of the works that she studies. Indigenous activists have found some Chicano claims to indigeneity to be politically and ethically suspect refusals to confront the European parts of their ancestry. And Black feminists have decried the lack of reflection on African ancestry in some Chicano activism and scholarship. While Zepeda briefly addresses these critiques, she does not find them to be as significant as the spiritual practices on which she focuses.Still, Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas is an extremely important contribution to queer studies. The book is divided into four chapters, in addition to an introduction and an epilogue. The introduction discusses the key subjects of the book and ruminates on knowledge production in terms of trauma, healing, and spirit.Chapter 1, “Decolonizing 1848,” focuses on what Zepeda calls “root work,” by which she means dealing with the historical encumbrance of detribalization. Here she sets the terms for considering Indigenous ancestry. Many men in the Chicano movement promoted Chicano masculinity by invoking the memory of Mexica war gods, ignoring the mother goddesses. Further, the movement tended to ignore both non-Mexica Indigenous ancestors and contemporary Indigenous communities. Zepeda shows that early Xicana feminists responded by asserting their connections with Mexica deities such as Coyolxauhqui and Coatlicue. She asks, “How would the field of Chicana/x studies shift if community healing, and remembering our sacred selves and our ancestors/relations (human and nonhuman), were at the center of our intellectual work?” (31). Zepeda argues for a historical analysis that moves beyond mestizaje, and beyond 1848 (which overemphasizes the acquisition of Mexican land, ignoring the fact that Mexico itself is a colonial nation that took this land from the Indigenous peoples). Through such a re-periodization, Zepeda (somewhat confusingly, to my mind) calls for a history of Aztlan that seeks to recover queer ancestors.Chapter 2 rereads Anzaldúa's texts with a focus on her relationship with Indigenous figures. By re-situating Anzaldúa in relation to Indígena ancestry, Zepeda moves beyond the misreading of Anzaldúa in which many have asserted that she advocates hybridity and mestizaje as a way forward for the future, arguing instead that the borderlands for Anzaldúa is a hostile space in which survival is difficult (one may note that Anzaldúa is inconsistent on this point). Zepeda points to Anzaldúa's invocation of Coyolxauhqui as a queer/feminist icon and her use of altars, arguing that Anzaldúa's work becomes a spiritual altar for Xicana Indígena practice.Chapter 3 focuses on two queer Xicana Indígena artists, Gina Aparicio and Dalila Paola Mendez. These artists engage in healing work through the storytelling of Indigenous ancestors. Zepeda argues that these two and other artists have “found a way to bring together their spirituality, politics, and queer or non-conforming sexuality with their respective tracing of Indigenous lineages and racially gendered lives in order to build intentional prayers for collective healing in ceremony as a form of worldwide decolonization” (87). By connecting with a variety of Indigenous spiritual practices, both artists move beyond the dichotomy between fantasies of Mexica lineage and connections with living Indigenous peoples from other groups. Aparicio's sculptures, for example, evoke both Mexica goddesses and Apache and Mayan connections between motherhood, spirituality, and the earth. Mendez's prints and paintings reference Maya themes of energy and spirit, relating those to queer love stories. Both artists use the concept of Indigenous memory to understand contemporary struggles.Chapter 4 moves in a somewhat different direction than the first three, tracing Latina lesbiana historias to examine the way in which Latina lesbians have been central to Xicana knowledge formation and to challenging homophobia, sexism, and racism. These Latina lesbians built archives and transmitted knowledge, changing academic discourses as well as Chicano and feminist movements.The epilogue returns to Zepeda's commitment to building futurity through a spiritual praxis. Here, for example, we find artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez's 2019 work Cihuacoatl: Prayer for Our Future connecting a Nahua goddess with the development of a livable future for queer Xicanas. The relationship among spirituality, indigeneity, and futurity, the central theme of the book, becomes a political project that incorporates decolonial activism (“root work”), prison abolitionism, and queer rage.GLQ readers will find Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas most useful in challenging the secular White emphasis of queer studies. By incorporating memory work, Indigenous history, and Xicana feminism, Zepeda challenges queer activists to move in ways that may seem uncomfortable to those unaccustomed to such spiritual connections, but those who take up her challenge will find it rewarding to think about queerness, temporality, and epistemology in a new way.