Outlaw Aesthetics: John Rechy's Narrative Epistemology of the Borderlands

Abstract:This article examines how John Rechy's outlaw sensibility not only mobilized an early form of Queer Chicanidad but also inspired an experimental narrative discourse to critique the neo-imperial governance of the US-Mexico borderlands in the mid-twentieth century. Juxtaposing the recurrence of discrimination against marginalized groups in the United States with the reemergence of empire in the borderlands, Rechy's work articulates a historical genealogy of transnational displacement and migration, which shows how the ostensible freedoms of the present remain rooted in the unfreedoms of the colonial past. Rechy offers a narrative epistemology of border-thinking: a disclosure of transnational consciousness, positioned between temporal and spatial borders, which highlights the unavailability of existential freedom and the need for political struggle. In exploring the contours of Rechy's outlaw aesthetics this article offers a new understanding of Rechy's work that helps expand the fields of global modernism, postwar American literature, and Chicanx studies.