Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics

Performing Queer Latinidad highlights the critical role that performance played in the development of Latina/o queer public culture during the 1990s and early 2000s. The book charts Latina/o cultural affinities or latinidad in queer spaces in the United States over a 15-year period that saw a dramatic increase in the size and influence of the Latina/o population along with the growing scrutiny of the public spaces where latinidad could circulate. Performing Queer Latinidad argues that performances—from concert dance and street protest to the choreographic strategies deployed by dancers at nightclubs—served as critical meeting points and practices through which LGBT and other non-normative sex practitioners of Latin American descent (individuals with greatly differing cultures, histories of migration or annexation to the United States, and contemporary living conditions) encountered each other and forged social, cultural, and political bonds. At a time when latinidad ascended to the national public sphere in mainstream commercial and political venues and Latina/o public space was increasingly threatened by the re-development of urban centers and a revived anti-immigrant campaign, queer Latinas/os in places such as the Bronx, San Antonio, Austin, Phoenix, and Rochester, N.Y., returned to performance to claim spaces and ways of being that allowed their queerness and latinidad to coexist. These social events of performance and their attendant aesthetic communication strategies served as critical sites and tactics for creating and sustaining queer latinidad.