Unpacking has to be done in a controlled manner. Opening up these historical and intergenerational wounds can cause harm in unpredictable ways. There needs to be a way to close the wound so that it doesn’t affect or impact other people in the process.

Kevin Brown [1]

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I never knew chewing gum had ties to Mexico, but there was some syncretism in the air that brought me to reading art historian Roberto Tejada’s work on Celia Alvarez Muñoz where he gives a short diversion on the invention of Hubba Bubba Bubble Gum. He writes about how Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna, after going into exile for his failures during the Mexican America War, arrived in New York. There he met Thomas A. Adams, an “American entrepreneur” to whom he offered “a clump of natural chicle” with the intention to vulcanize the rubbery substance for making false teeth.  After failing to achieve this goal, he remarketed it for its already existing purpose of chewing, and eventually it would be accidentally died pink and named “Dubble Bubble.” [2]

Even though it was disapproved of by “polite-society,” it became popular in the US producing both a taboo and a mystique about it; it pushed up against the racial tensions and insecurities of Anglos as they swallowed up the Mexican North. Not to mention the sexual and gendered sensuality this product, it quickly became a staple of a feminine and childish desire as well as a symbol of an uncontrollable, mestiza attitude.

It may be the orality of chewing that made gum feminine and possibly the pink added to this, but fundamentally, it referred to a Mexican womanhood that was certainly uncomfortable, and there was also something to its auditory about it. I remember the clicks mi mama would make with her mouth as she loudly yapped on the phone with her friends, popping it in her mouth in quick succession; the only time mi mama would speak endlessly and laugh sincerely. The sounds of chicle evoke the signs of a happy mom but it also signaled an her vanity as an accessory to advertised her strength and independence and her willingness to take up space and attention. It marked mi mama as a woman of dignity, self-possessed and not to be messed with. A true beauty queen, she always dressed her best—she still never leaves the house without putting on makeup and has a great admiration for wealth with a classic Mexican desire for upward mobility. She is proud, aspirational and hard working.

Chewing gum expresses resistance in this way but it also does so because it is a form of pretend-eating as a resistant and unconsumable substance.

Sweet and minty, small and discreet, yet not to be swallowed.

Mi mama is made up of big dreams first and foremost, never saying much (but no one in the family ever say much). And so, as I began to interview her for this work on querencia, I was reminded how deficient language could be.

Querencia refers to a concept of home which is its own field of study in New Mexico. Based on Levi Romero’s work at UNM, Querencia studies extends from a Chicano framework that is quite unique to Northern New Mexico that focuses on dialogue (in the form the resolana) which I attempted to use as a way of learning more about my own past. I was hoping to gain some insight on my own sense of querencia by going to the source of my own querencia: mi mama. But as I was beginning to ask my questions, I began to realize that I was in uncharted territory.

Her tone was a dismissive awkwardness that signaled her disinterest in participating. I didn’t want to lecture at her or just talk at her, but I struggled to formulate more questions she was willing to answer. I asked about her sense of home, asking her about her childhood, but something kept her from beginning to answer basic things. Maybe, she just didn’t see why these questions mattered.

Now there’s a sticky clump in my throat which I have to sit with.

I’m like my mom.

I love to have something to chew on so I don’t have to think about myself. Gum can serve this function but so can any activity. But I love gum, so much so I have a bad case of lockjaw. Tension in my shoulders that sometimes tightens into a headache which squeezes the nerves right behind my right eye. I can’t see and I can’t think. Yet, I still want to chew gum, because mi mama loved to chew gum. I love to chew gum because popping the bubbles felt feminine. I want to wear makeup because mi mama wore makeup. Because mi mama was always the most beautiful in the room. I wanted to be like mi mama, but having been born a boy, I never knew I could be. I never knew I could want to be her. In this, she stays persistently other to me, persistently refusing to let me make sense of her, to digest her.
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[1] Kevin Brown, Vanessa Foseca-Chávez, Tey Marianna Nunn, Irene Vásquez, and Myla Vicenti Carpio, “Critical Reflections on Chicanx and Indigenous Scholarship and Activism,” in Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland, eds, Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Levi Romero & Spencer Herrera, (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 2020) 70.

[2] Roberto Tejada, “Language Arts” in Celia Alvarez Muñoz, (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press: Los Angeles, 2009) 29-30.

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Most of us do not wish to remember our lives as hell, and our stories help us sanitize this living. We desire heavenly childhoods. These memories hang on to beauty. Pleasure grips on to the sentimental cords that bind us to the past as a reality we must commit to. We will not commit to filth. Betrayal is the consequence of making unreasonable promises. Forgetfulness becomes the antidote for peace.

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Cuando mi mama quiere paz, she passes over the waters of Lethe by making a call on her phone; her friend answers and the waters of forgetfulness wash over all matters and at other end is the silence she seeks from all those ghastly appearances of life.

Forgotten, it is no longer a burden to carry.

Mestizas ligeras. Mi mama y yo.

She is from the sky and is of a heavenly spirit. But she’s also earthly; as a Taurus, she is stubborn; being born in Juarez, my mom had an ambition that transcended borders. The large, Juarez sky was her backyard, born with a desire that was bigger than her stomach but which she could eat up due to the bigness of her motherly heart. Ambitions for class mobility, for freedom, for independence, and for a family to do it for; hers was an American dream, truly. American in its utopianism. American in its desire to have it all. American in its desire to get as far away from the past (and from home) as possible.

For me, querencia is full of compromises, in its search for beauty. You cannot compromise on the truth, but you can compromise beauty because all beauty is a compromise. There is a balance found at the other end of her decision to care despite her feeling like her life was unremarkable.

“Paso a paso, subí la escalera” cantan Los Tigres Del Norte:

Despacito peldaño a peldaño

No hubo fuerza que me detuviera

Aunque para ello tarde muchos años

empecé desde lo más abajo

Nada más para estar a tu altura.[1]

For my mom, her childhood is filled with the complicated blessings of freedom she remembers but she also showed a flippant disdain for her struggles. Mi mama always told us about how mean and restrictive mis abuelos were and how they never supported her future and education. That my grandpa was a violent drunk; that my Tia Monica was “malvada” and my Tio Paulo “estaba muy chiple.”How mis abuelos made her sell chicles in the streets and how they wouldn’t let her hang out with any of the neighbor’s kids.

“Porque tenían piojos” mi Abuelita would tell her.

Her friends were her school friends she says. She didn’t name any. She told me that growing up, our family were “los riquillos del barrio,” and then describes mi Abuelo as having been “gente de cantinas,” implying the lowly source of his prestige.For fun, she remembers that as a kid she would play with trash heaps and play games like tiendita, el bote, or simply, con tierra. In middle-school she listened to rock en español—music I remember listening to when I was growing up. Canciones deManá or Los Enanitos Verdes. School played an important role in her sense of class, telling me about how mi Abuelita would make her burritos and how she was jealous of all the kids who could buy food at school. She remembered it fondly, but also not and there’s tension around this ambivalence. The ambivalence really reflects her own split feelings.

I sensed her restlessness. Oftentimes, I feel like I inherited my mother’s restlessness. Her desire for more and for better. Her ambitions shaped my sense of self. After I decided to become an artist, she would say to me, with a sense of defeat, “has lo que quieras, mientras que seas el mejor.” That seemed reasonable enough to me.

I know I also like to chase impossible things, and in mi mama I am confronted with my shadowy reflection in an obsidian mirror. Tezcatl, as the Nahuas call it, representing the dark, magical, and transformative aspects of the belly of the earth. Tezcatlipoca, lord of the shadows, and of the jaguar cult, who was Quetzalcoatl’s shadowy brother. Quetzalcoatl, the principle of air and language, of the sun at high noon; he cannot mix with the principles of darkness and transformation without obliteration. Embodying the eternal cycles of day and night, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca battle it out eternally, and in moments of peace, it is a passive conflict waiting to erupt.

Obsidian is a glass made when molten lava cools down quickly after coming into contact with the surface air. The glass, which comes from the bowels of the earth, cools quickly against the sky’s green air and crystalizes into a hard and sharp weapon. In its transformation into a sacred tool, into sacred mirrors and knives, our ancestors ask us to cut ourselves open and look inward into the shadowy depths of our own souls where you will recognize your image. Obsidian is dark like the night where magic mysteriously turns and mixes like the gasses of anxious bellies, spewing out steam and molten rock—the destructive residues of a deep digestion. Terrible songs vibrate and toxic aromas which blend into muddy dirt, smoking and dissolving before becoming ungraspable.

We are challenged by these forces to witness what we experience. To confront what the mirror tells us.

I hear: “Me encantaría quererte un poco menos\Cómo quisiera poder vivir sin ti”[2]

Mi Tia Monica, like Mi Abuelo, knew how to have a good time. She was fierce and powerful, like no other. A drinker and a smoker. Rebellious at her core, and let’s not forget “malvada.” She was the oldest, and while I’ve only heard snippets of her past, mi tia had a reputation for causing trouble in the family.Still, she also had a reputation for being the most loving and caring in the family. She had a deep interest in all of us and in what we liked, always buying the kids the best toys and presents. She could sing and shout and gamble. She would orchestrate romance. She would whistle our names to call us for food from anywhere down the block. There would be a loud shriek in the air that conjured both excitement and fear in the ears of her children. “Comida o castigo?”Usually, a little of both.

That was back before my Tia Monica died, when mis primos were young and optimistic. Before the days that mi abuelita would murmur prayers at pictures of mi tia, who was the rock of the family. Back when we all met every weekend in Juarez, despite the violence drug wars and militarized borders. Despite distance and despite resentment. But for my brother and I, it was only love. A clear sign of the inequalities of this earth; my brother, Victor, was her most beloved of all, more than mis primos. She would say it out loud how much she preferred us. She once broke down crying at Christmas for buying Victor the wrong present; her favoritism was no secret. Mis primos were gracious to not resent us to our faces, except maybe Cesarin who truly despised me. Cesarin was a year younger than me. Viscous towards me, always fighting and in trouble. Tough, angry eyes, constantly scorned by mi Tia. Cesarin understood humiliation. I used to think he was evil.

Meanwhile, my brother learned to multiply and read before starting kindergarten. He was a marvel. Everyone said he would one day become a doctor. My mom’s eyes would light up with the dreams of grandeur that he promised. Before we left Juarez, before I learned that I wasn’t Mexican. Back then there was an understanding, for some reason, that my brother and I were special, a myth no doubt started by mi mama. And while mi mama has always put my brother on a pedestal, she would tell me just how adored I was since the day I was born. The cutest, whitest blondest little baby. Huerinchi, they called me.

“Eras un bebe tan simpático. Blanquito y huerito, parecía que ni tenías pelo.” I was delicate little thing in her memories. I was coddled. To this day, my mom has eyes for me that she does not have for my other siblings. Her favoritism was no secret, and I had always stayed close to her, siempre muy apegado. Siempre su consentido.

I ask mi mama about mis primos occasionally, and it never sounds good, although admittedly nothing ever does when she says it. Yet, there is a concrete reality to the suffering that mis primos have experienced, especially after mi tia died of cancer in 2011. The family wasn’t the same after that. Inarticulable ghosts began to appear. The family acted in cruel ways. Things I don’t think mi tia would stand for if she were here. I believe that only she must’ve known how to resolve fights in this family. Probably from all her wild adventures she was known for. She was the only one with real experience. I think she knew a good fight from a bad one. She was the one who stomached our conflicts and digested them. Mi Tia Monica was a true earth monster; A true weaving mother; like Cipactli or Coatlicue; like Tezcatlipoca or Tlazolteotl; she was mostly mouth and stomach.

I still think fondly of her through this. I still think of her laughter and joy. How her graceful humility becomes an unashamed pride. I remember her careful attention to details and the intensity of both her love and anger. I also remember how the last thing she told me before she passed was to stop being so feminine. To dress like a boy. Things that still sink like stones at the bottom of my stomach. Like chicle in my gut.

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[1] Los Tigres Del Norte, “Paso a paso,” track 2 in Gracias America Sin Fronteras, (Fonovisa

Records: 1986).

[2] Maná, “Poder Vivir Sin Aire,” track 4 in ¿Dónde jugarán los niños? (WEA Latina: 1992).

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A not-so-quick tangent on philology.

Philology, meaning the love of language, is a field of study that focuses on the histories of words through etymological studies and predates linguistics as a professional field of study. Putting its long history aside, I want to focus on the strange philology of Edna Sarah Beardsley, who is my most precious philologist, as well as my most mysterious. Edna Sarah Bearddsley’s philology teaches that consciousness, which she etymologically writes as con-sicence (etymologically translating as “with-science”), emphasizing its meaning as a scientifically defined state internal to the mind, grounded on the scientific communion of mental faculties, which she writes as a com-union (with-union) of literate principles. While this essay does not pretend to explain her work, for I am just a humble painter, I will attempt to make use of her model of language which is mystical and poetic.

For example, when she talks about “con-science”, she is using philology and etymology to flesh out what the roots of the word consciousness is made up of. In her only book, The Word: A Philosophy of Words, published it in 1958 in San Francisco by The Filmer Brothers Press, she lays out her treatise. This mysterious book is cited nowhere, and the author has left no other trace I have been able to find apart from this turquoise-colored book. But I imagine this Edna (or maybe she preferred Sarah, or Mrs. Beardsley, or maybe her close friends called her Ed) and her place in society in 1958 when she decided to publish a book that, if not controversial, is certainly strange.

By reading her book, one can see that Beardsley was a serious woman with serious ambitions. She is straightforward about her intentions in the subtitle to the book which reads: “A literology or science of literate characters; a psychology or logic of The Logos (Soul); a word analysis or word treatise.” I wish to introduced her because she is my spiritual mother who taught me that language is magical and that it is sacred. As my spiritual mother, she is a home to me, and into her I enter as a home both lost and never lost.

So let’s get into it.

Beardsley’s goal is, as she says, “to set forth The Logos as Root of all radically literate words, and to point out the more grossly illiterate nature of words that only usurp the places of good words.”[1] Her classification system gives shape to a world where language takes part in an internal conflict between words and it is her utopic task to reassert a moral status to words which leads her to describe literacy as a divine mental space that is able to move between different realms. To understand her work we must understand that consciousness (as a co-science, or “a science done with an other”) is quite literally a science that emerges out of the cooperation of mental parts. Words are concepts, as in they must be conceived which occursin a six-part process of a hexa-sexual development. There is an esoteric decoding performed in her text by which activates words like concept via its etymological root of con- which means “with” in Latin and capere which means “to take,” literally meaning “to take with.” And conscience, which etymologically translates to “know with”, becomes the basis for conception. Alongside with Beardsley’s use of the word concept, she comes to give us a fundamentally social understanding of consciousness and conceptuality as an activity borne of a sexual mixture.

For Beardsley, consciousness is founded on a sexual (sixual) and gendered exchange between masculine and feminine principles in the mind which are internally germinating aspects of the mind. For Beardsley, words take on metaphysical significance through sexual processes of mixture. She requires consciousness to be made up of six genders, three masculine and three feminine, each allowing for concepts to be processed, germinate, gestate, and achieve conception at various levels of reality. From this logic she presents to us the “concipient thinker,” who is at the core subject of her system and who’s mind is gendered female.[2] While The Word is a complicated text full of sexist and heteropatriarchal tropes that are both religious and procedural in nature, it is deliciously complex and begins to give way to readings that are quite gender-queer and very subversive.

Beardsley’s universe is divided between the human and the divine realms which language moves between and she described words themselves as being rooted in a divinely inhuman Logos whose literacy is beyond our capacity to grasp. She also treats letters as if they were microorganisms mixing in an embryonic fluid which may be described as anthropomorphic. It is in these dynamics that a queer reading begins to emerge and so when I talk about Beardsley’s queer language, I want to talk about how her speech is grounded in the messiness of a sexualized, domestic metaphor, in which the female principle is the source of moral agency. In her structure, the female principle is the divine principle in human thought, meanwhile the male principle is the mundane one and so her structure queers the gender structure of traditional cosmologies. Beyond this, her philology is grounded on a biological principle of mixture and transference that is potent in linguistic activity.

Agency as the female principle gives mortal form to the moral word and gives actionable grounds for truth. Words are also grounded in the sentiments which shape our capacities to receive what words contain in them. What Beardsley’s feminine principle understands is that all consciousness is half ovum and half seed.

Her philological project bears out a queerness that has haunted me for years as I came out and likely helped me find a language for addressing myself in this process. Having been so dissociated throughout my life, I was haunted by queerness as I struggled to find the shapes of my desires. A queerness that is ghostly because it occupies me despite my desires. I still remember when I first encountered this book in the linguistics section during one of my shifts at the NMSU library and how appalled I was at reading it. Written out like a dictionary, The Word is structurally just a list of what Beardsley calls “perfectly literate words,” which contains words like Soul, Morality, and Christ, and then claiming that it was a scientific treatise. Having been recently inducted into the tradition of artistic semiology at the time, I couldn’t stand reading it.

Still, its turquoise cover kept calling my attention. Her absurdity and cryptic density kept irritating my Saussurean understanding of signs as arbitrary indexes insisting on her own words being divinely rooted and sexually propagated. But as someone who had a burgeoning interest in medieval art history, I recognized that her book contained a gnostic framework, stripped of the romance of eighteenth-century spiritualism, and filled with the technical language of modern empiricism, all of which haunted my understanding. This haunting offered a resistance to the slippage of signs that I had been depending on as I was beginning to discover my own queerness; it was queerness that depended on the arbitrariness of words; Beardsley haunted my refusal to let language be concrete; it haunted my desires for gender to be fluid.

She truly got under my skin.

But what haunted me was that, despite my understanding of heteropatriarchy and how I projected the political conservatism that has declared war on women and queer people, the first word in her dictionary was the word abortion.

This word functioned as an apt introduction to her unorthodox understanding of gender as it arises from the consciousness, specifically the consciousness of having made a mistake. Fundamentally, the word abortion embodies for Beardsley the very agency which defines feminine moral action. Abortion is given as an act of taking responsibility for what we conceive. Concepts are given a moral weight by framing them as choices which are made by our male and female faculties; a bad concept occurs when there is a lack of harmony between our male/female faculties, and abortion is the act of not following through with what one is not in harmony with. For a good conception, she says, “Sentiment must be mutual”[3] because if the sentiment is not mutual, one’s consciousness cannot conceive, as in, it cannot “take” (con-) what one faculty carries “with” (capere) another faculty . And so, Beardsley tells us that what abortion allows us to understand from its divinely literate root is the emergence of consciousness as an act of taking on moral awareness.

For Beardsley, words aren’t just borne out as single, objectified concepts in a disembodied and abstract space, as we usually think of them, but rather she expresses them as vital conceptions which are subject to gestation and must be tended to and cared for like children. As she says:

A mental conception must go through the same several processes of development as a physical one:

1.     She must conceive or contraceive. 

2.     She must gestate or abort.

3.     She must quicken or refuse to act upon the concept.

4.     She must give it her sentiments to sustain it or, or she must let it perish for lack of sentimental nutriment. [4]

It is thus in this context that Beardsley says:

“If the concipient thinker’s intuition, her conscience, her finer sensibilities and her highest sentiments do not sustain a rudimental issue, it is unstained. She cannot sustain it once her sentiments have turned against its advocates. She cannot honor that which she does not feel sentimentally inclined toward. Dishonor and disbelief continue either contraception or complete abortion. Miscarriage of a mental monstrosity is more honorable than mental war and infanticide when it does what abortion failed to do, or what contraception did not do in the first place. The mental anguish, labor, pain and contest is very similar to the physical kind of danger and extreme desperation that accompany miscarriage. It is the necessity to wrest oneself free from something that tenaciously adheres to one, as identified with one, while in reality it is not with one but against one, and is quite foreign to one. It means that she must wrest herself free from something that is not her own peculiar metaphysical property; something that she can no longer nourish or mother, conscientiously and rightly.” [5]

I would like to compare Beardsley’s expression of agency here against what Brenda Selena Lara calls an “epistemic haunting,” where “unresolved social violence interconnects temporality and space through knowledge.”[6] Taking on the real human weight of language, I want to consciously connect the way that Beardsley's work allows for there to be unresolved tensions in language which, despite the dramatically disembodied nature of her speech, she connects us back to the maternal principle of morality which can help us further process the nature of violence that Lara explores in her exploration of the international violence suffered by trans and cis women of color migrating to the US. Examining the stories from women of El Salvador, she enunciates the feminine agency of ghostly folklore, specifically that of La Ciguanaba in Central America.

Lara traces the contours of narratives of violence against women to show a haunting pattern that echoes other Latin American ghost stories such as La Llorona, showing how such narratives become sings of a persistent resistance against the gendered violence of colonization.[7] Violence emerges as something which is difficult to process, and these ghost stories form themselves around the inexplicable horrors of historical events. As Lara puts it, “La Ciguanaba’s haunting transcends linear temporality to highlight the unresolved sexual violence against Indigenous and Mestiza Central American women and nonbinary femmes.”[8] Like with La Llorona drowning her children, La Ciguanaba’s legend revolves around the unresolved violence between the violated body of a racialized woman by which she is cast a s a “bad woman” in the Malinche archetype. Brenda Selena Lara shows how narratives and myths serve as deposits for memory where the unresolved violence deposited on the marginal bodies of women can be given shape, especially to the bodies of trans women of color, and it can now be redistributed to the rest of society.

She shows how such narratives haunt our cultural memory because the unresolvable and often unimaginable pain inflicted throughout the colonization of the Americas continues to pique our interest, as unresolvable mysteries. While such narratives have often been used to condemn women, it’s currency as a horror story serves to highlight the symbolic contradiction that fails to be easily digestible. This is how hauntings preserve the agency of violated women even within a story which struggles to normalize the violence by make these women monstrous, but what Lara also shows is that these hauntings are marks of women’s refusal to die silently and project into the future a contestation to of violent narratives. Her methodology interweaves the narratives of colonial folklore with contemporary accounts from contemporary newspaper headlines and true crime podcasts which dramatize these stories, remarking on how the language used to tell them still backgrounds heterosexism as the site of violence and resistance. Emphasizing the constant desire to silence and diminish the pain and suffering of these women, she reveals that the constant need to silence their pain and suffering itself makes a sound.

Here she introduces us to what she calls “hometactics” which is a form of queer and feminine survival in the face of the horrendous realities of murder and violence. Hometactics refers to those gestures on which marginalized individuals lean to express their discontent and to leave the mark of their refusal on record allowing for the violence against them to never settle into the quiet justification of a neat story. Refusal is brought to the foreground as hometactics function by making refusal legible by which marginalized individuals can leave clues that cannot be processed by the archives which are meant to erase them. Because they cannot be processed, these clues emerge as hauntings which irritate the narrative, bringing up questions that can help a previously silenced voice reemerge and be accounted for in History and it leaves the story open to justice and reconciliation.[9]

Hometactics is offered as a model for interpretation where desire and pleasure are brought to the center of the picture and where affective narratives can turn dehumanization into acts of rehumanization. Hometactics allows us to respect the continuity of agency and resistance which reveals that acts of violence are processes up for contestation, being always up for reprocess. What is gained from this interpretative model is that it allows us to read events in history in such a way that victims can be more than victims. Hometactics thus refers to the act of haunting as a deliberate act of projecting refusal into the future, and which emerges dialectically with the desires to collapse individuals in history into the simple roles of victim and perpetrator. For a ghost to truly rest, one must learn to respect the spirits which agitate what we desire to read for it is in the irreconcilable desire when reading history to reduce individuals into the roles of victim or perpetrator, that one welcomes ghosts into their life, buried in the cracks and crevices of our storytelling. A haunting must be understood as a presence that echoes beyond its death because it is not bound by matter but rather by a gaseous mentality.

A haunting is a specter because it is psychological, visual primarily, as in depending on the spectator because a specter appears before our eyes before it disappears. Hauntings thus remain speculative. Things to look about.

A haunting is something that transcends its own grave. It is a sticky residue in the air and that is caught dancing in the beams of light. A dust. An experience of breathing it in and becoming its host. To be occupied by that air. To be shaped by the past reemerging in the obtuse gesture of our thought and affection. You become a way for air to transform into stone. It what it means to be possessed. To be haunted is to have something external inside of you, attached to you, or chasing after you, making you heavy. It is the spiritual stench of the unprocessed past accumulating in your spiritual guts. An indigestion in consciousness.

We can talk about this as a spiritual debt. Residuals compounding. As the values carry over through time and accumulate interest, it is in our own spirits that this builds up and now our actions follow the form of confused and even cruel desires. Desires which are cruel because, int their accumulation, contradict themselves and become self-destructive. They build up beyond our capacity to speak (through) them, hiding beneath the crevices of a language of self-denial. To be haunted is to have a debt beyond account. To desire such a thing is to perversely love this debt. To love being beyond elaboration. There’s a safety in covering yourself in debts which cannot be processed—debts that cannot be paid—and so the silence and the impatience accumulate around all these debts. There is value in the weight of all these obligations. Things which accumulate exponentially as you outrun them. A ghost grows stronger as you fear it.

Debts I could not exorcise; ghosts which my ancestors themselves could not appease.

Ghosts are the inheritance of generations.

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[1] Edna Sarah Beardsley, “Forward,” in The Word: A Philosophy of Words, (Filmer Brothers Press: San Francisco, 1958), v.

[2] Beardsley, 3

[3] Beardsley, 1-2.

[4] Edna Sarah Beardsley, “The Word Abortion,” in The Word: A Philosophy of Words, (Filmer Brothers Press: San Francisco, 1958), 4.

[5] Beardsley, “The Word Abortion,” 5. Emphasis mine.

[6] Brenda Selena Lara, “Ciguanabas, Refugees, and Other Hauntings: Three Salvadoran Women’s Epistemic Hauntings as Resistance Against Heteropatriarchy,” in Monsters and Saints, LatIndigenous Landscapes and Spectral Storytelling, eds. Shantel Marinez & Kelly Medina-López (University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, 2024), 96

[7] Lara, 89-91

[8] Lara, 88

[9] Lara, “Ciguanabas, Refugees, and Other Hauntings,” 99-103

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“Soy como la águila que vuela por el cielo\Libre su vuelo por donde es amo y señor\ Arriba no está dividió como el suelo\Que la maldad de algunos hombres dividió.”

-Los Tigres Del Norte[1]

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 Mud enters as the inherited grammar of inherited outcomes; values too toxic to process. Values which don’t settle into what they mix. An endless mescla. An endless mestizaje. We are not haunted by Communism; no, we are haunted by mestizaje. We are haunted by the unpayable nature of colonial injustice. How Communism haunts Europe[2] mestizaje haunts Latin America. Like Communism, nobody understands it. Like Communism, mestizaje is rooted in the concrete language of racialized bodies. It is as real as the capital we produce. One cannot deny coinage or blood quantums in this dialect(ic)s. They are the structures through which value moves so that it can settle as capital. A grammar that reproduces the same, historical outcome: few rich, many poor. The grammar of hate and violence is the basic grammar of Capitalism as the basic desire to control the structures which allow for certain values to be deposited consistently and predictably in certain places with the following logic: wealth is deposited in the few and violence is deposited on the many.

A toxic logic. A logic that is like hating the air in your lungs! Forcing undeniable outcomes by mis-noting details in ledgers. A logic where pleasure is found outside the sweetness of the fruit, as if the stomach was not a stomach anymore, as if the lungs became haunted by the very air they breathe.

‍“Como quisiera poder vivir sin aire,”[3] canta Maná.

This is mestizaje. It's a type of poison. A mental impulse to self-destruct. Counterpleasures, as Karmen MachKendrick calls it.[4] Pleasures that are borne out the willing denial of that very pleasure. A pathological desire that builds up around a refusal to consummate that desire. An emotional poison, perhaps, but are medicines not also poisons? “Medicine is in the dosage” or something Paracelsus said. In this way, mestizaje can be medicine as much as it can be a poison. Mestizaje could indeed have its balance. It is moldable. It is lumpy and thick like rubber, but with some good heat and pressure, it can become smooth, consistent, and even extremely dense.

It can be as the tzictli which spews from the chicozapote trunk and become something soft to chew on. Something sweet and beautiful. Something ancient. A pleasure to break time with. Something to blow bubbles with, como mi mama.

“Pero no te lo tragues que se te atora en el hígado,” miTia Monica would say.

In this way, Mestizaje is the epitome of a “both/and” methodologies. Sweet like Bubbaloo. You bite into it, and you receive a sweet nectar. It is solid, then wet, then soft and then chewy. It is a methodology that emerges from a life lived ambivalently between jarring contradictions. An affective methodology where you don’t just chew, you get chewed. A methodology that leaves you raw. A chewing that churns things together—an anorectic chewing that says, “don’t swallow.” With chicle, the mouth is just for massaging out the feeling; it can allow the muscle to tender and let blood flow through its veins. Pushing around the tensions of experience that occupy those nerves that bind you. Things that build up in the body. Tensions that stiffen us—things that cannot just be softened by the sweet lyrics of Maná alone.

Not to ears that desire silence.

“Como quisiera poder vivir sin hambre.”[5]Sometimes, this isn’t romance but mundane fact.

The affections of a body that is dissociated is an affection that has found value outside itself, beyond its own desire. It is a body that has become apart from itself, or rather a body that has become a professional, an academic, or even an artistic body, which is a type of body shaped by the desire to collapse the world into single propositions. It is an objectified body.

Into the silence of single statements emerges the big-picture subjectivities. Maybe colonial subjectivities? Mestizaje is certainly a colonial subjectivity but as a subject, mestizaje is one which goes towards the limits of what a subjectivity is meant to hold. Limits that touch the trimmings of thought and the lining of the matter, the matter being race, the thought being violence. It holds it, maybe at bay, but it holds it. Tightly.

Being what we name the seam of cultures, mestizaje is marginal by nature. One cannot normalize it, by principle. The language that marks mestizaje as a lived reality is so dense that in it we reach an interpretive limit where very little can be said about it, especially in English, or in Spanish, or in peer reviewed research. Really, there’s too much to say about, mostly nonsense. The contradictions of everyday speech which we use to dig into reality bangs with fury against the hard, skeletal mineral deposits that are at the base of an unconsumable desire to not be who you are. A desire to be something other, to not be oneself, and that hard calcium deposit that mestizaje hits is one of persistence and continuity. One can’t simply discard of one’s own body for that is where we are. Time and matter have a stubbornness. But so does that I and those we that exist in time and matter. We refuse what they give us; that hardness is also that one’s own refusal to let go of what they think is beautiful, what they think is right, a refusal to be changed. It is this that makes our words hard enough to find this dense core.  

This is the queer mestizaje which I find in my search for a queer querencia and which I uncover between myself and my family; a queerencia which is at the ends of the world where words empty themselves out. Queerencia as rooted in the legacy of mestizaje, both bitterly and tenderly, is the epitome of the “both/and” ambivalence. It does so because it is an identity crisis that carries in its affective structures all the contradictions of desire housed in the colonized body which the decolonizing mind strives for and against. Contradictory desires because they shift their value as we move towards them. As soon as we get familiar with the desire, it puts on another mask and slips away into the shadows. Like Tezcatlipoca in the night; transformative, beautiful, viscous and dangerous.

These are contradictions so basic and fundamental that they cannot be processed and the desires so irreconcilable that a crisis forms around it. A crisis that is a crisis, not because the contradictions are untenable but because they are undesirable. Undigestible.

Queerencias are indigestible not just because of the stories we tell but because of the choice we make about what those stories mean. In a colonial story, the story doesn’t matter because the conclusions are the same. The conclusions are always that some are born to be lowly, dirty creatures, and others not. Some are born above others. Some are stronger. Some are quicker. Some are more literate. And as Beardsley affirms, Adam is the characteristic ancestor of all human sins which are based on illiterate desires, mixing and reproducing in lower sentiments. He is the masculine root of “unregenerate or depraved human nature,” as the “human (hummus-man) kind or the human race, human clan, kin, family, tribe or people.”[6] Made of the red earth, “terra rubra,” as “earthly, worldly, mundane, temporal, unspiritual or profane; as pertaining to humanity which is of the humus or ground.”[7]But as if to complicate her own self, she distinguishes “Adam-kind” from “Humanhood” as distinct expressions of the same, earthly nature, showing that in recognizing this lowliness (through humility), one can transcend the Adamic nature which “has never risen any higher than his own pattern or conception of himself, which conception is negative, passive to all misfortune and contraceptive of all good, good fortune or moral prosperity.”[8] To be Adamic, unlike being human, is to be made of perverse desire.

To be human, unlike to be Adamic, is to be like the ground not because we are lesser but because we are chthonic, made of the earth from below the ground but which rises, which is invisible and then revealed, meaning we are esoteric and beyond perfect literacy, but not condemned to a dark consciousness. We are made from illiterate earth, from the humus, which is Latin meaning “earth, soil,” mythologically raised by heavenly breath into humanity as an embodiment of divinity.In this sense, we are all human in that we are all sprouts of the soil embodying the divine desire to rise. Like Mestizaje, it rises from dirt, from a dark ground full of dignity. It is a form of death raised to divinity through a conscious seeding of divinity into it. As we are still defined by the languages of racism, sexism, and homophobia, we must recognize that these are the toxic fumes of decomposition emanated by our dying “civilization.”

A burning mix of irreconcilable otherness. It is the toxic air of distrust. Of a fear of syncretic, mysterious, and of magical activity. The hardening against the world for fear of finding pleasure in the wrong places—the risk of feeling at home in hostility. Instead, we have to pretend there is no hostility to begin with.

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[1] Los Tigres Del Norte, “Sin Fronteras,” track 2 in Gracias America Sin Fronteras, (Fonovisa

Records: 1986).

[2] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels

Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker, (W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 1978), 473-500.

[3] Maná, “Poder Vivir Sin Aire,” track 4 in ¿Dónde jugarán los niños? (WEA Latina: 1992).

[4] Karmen MacKendrick, Counterpleasures, (State University of New York Press: Albany, 1999)

[5] Maná, “Poder Vivir Sin Aire.”

[6] Edna Sarah Beardsley, “The Word, Adam,” in The Word: A Philosophy of Words, (Filmer Brothers Press: San Francisco, 1958), 7.

[7] Edna Sarah Beardsley, “The Word, Adam,” in The Word: A Philosophy of Words, (Filmer Brothers Press: San Francisco, 1958), 7.

[8] Beardsley, 183,

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Mi Mama, loved to chew chicle and I do too, though I’ve had to stop. I’ve chewed so much gum I have lockjaw now.

I believe we both love gum so much because we are both impatient—it gives us something to silence our nerves a bit.

I also think it connects us to our roots.  

Mi mama has rarely spoken of her childhood without the need to make a point of romanticizing a little. Never without the need to tell us about how different life was. For better or for worse, the point was that my siblings and I just would never understand how much more beautiful and romantic and easy life was but also we could never understand how much more dangerous and miserable it was. How, compared to her, we my siblings and I are more privileged, yet because of all our modern leisure, we are also less fortunate. If we understood suffering we’d understand work, she thinks, and I don’t disagree. In my privilege, my choices are wasteful. Not real work, certainly not important work.

“Ay, las cosas que haría su tuviera las oportunidades que ustedes tienen,” she tells me.

And I still understand. I admit that there’s a certain delusion I chase, one which hopes to be free beyond the dictates of class and labor. She hates that I don’t desire money. My desires are all off. Strange incentives. Maybe this is why she resists me interviewing her.

It’s a lot of pressure to be represented and written about. I cannot say I have pure intentions either given that it took a school assignment to begin to ask questions, but also, I know that I am guilty of filtering what she tells me through layers of doubt that have sedimented over the years. There is an honesty to our awkward silence that expresses our lack of trust. A recognition that these questions are strange, forced, and maybe even a little dangerous. We recognize that there’s no reason why we’re only now having these conversations with an uneasy understanding that we just might not want to have these conversations.

Maybe our desires are all wrong.

Impotent thoughts that happen between the silence of each question, as I explain to her the different things I’ve learned about querencia, struggling to translate my experience into a poetic and inspired form that could awaken her memories. I get stuck in my pochismos, feeling how my language is to anglicized to connect to her. A conversation that feels hard because of the internal translations constantly at work, but also, because of the external translation I desire with someone that, at some level, just doesn’t take me seriously. I still sense that here, my life choices are not serious pursuits. At best, I’m caught up in some collective delusion; Art, poetry, history: “sabes que escriben muchas mentiras en eso libros,” she tells me.

I don’t really know what to say.

I consider first time I came out to mi mama was when I told her I was an artist. I’ve always felt a little ashamed to have chosen this life. It was difficult to say that back then, and it is difficult today. It is hard to be a poet/scholar in front of someone who treats what I do as if it were a phase that they are waiting for me to grow out of. Of course, she always knew I was an artist, and I was never shy about it, but when it came time to seriously imagining my future, mi mama wouldn’t have it. At some level, she still refuses to understand it. And though she’s had to concede to the reality of the life I’ve built as an artist, she still never asks the question: “¿de qué pintas mi hijo? ¿De qué piensas? ¿Cuáles artistas son tus favoritos? ¿Que tienes en tu corazón?”

I sat on the other side of the line wondering what to say now; I was out of flowery speech. It was difficult to translate my life, not just into Spanish but into the values and vernaculars of her daily life; from my repertoire to hers. I sat there with that desire to leap out of myself and become something she could recognize. There was a deep desire for her validation, and as I came to terms with the fact that she was not invested in doing that, all my thoughts and desires to ask questions deflated.

 “Pues, tengo que escribir mi papel, mami,” I told her, “te marco después, buenas noches.”

She calmly said goodnight.

“Te quiero mucho mijo.”

            “Yo también mami.”

I sat for moment with the echoes of unasked questions. Questions that get stuck in my gut and in my liver. Clumps in my throat. I feel all this indigestion. My body and nerves only know how to find relief by forgetting about it.

My partner, the love of my life, still hasn’t eaten dinner.

I packed up my day and my homework and bundled it back in the zippered canvas of backpacks and tote bags; tucked between scholars, artists, and poets, all gently put to sleep.

Today, my partner Owen, and I were on the way to Chispas Farm where we tabled for a raffle that was raising money for Palestine and where they DJ’d a transcendent set. I was buckling in, telling them about how angry I was and how mi familia just wouldn’t budge, how they refused to elaborate and answer questions with care. I told them how vulnerable I’ve been feeling. My heart was feeling like old chicle.

I said, “I should have interviewed you for my paper.”

“I was waiting for you to say that, but I knew you had to process what you were processing” they said.

“Where is your querencia,” I asked.

They put their hand on my heart and my chest filled up with a hot obsidian that felt like it was ready to burst.

Beardsley, Edna Sarah, The Word: A Philosophy of Words, (Filmers Brothers Press: San Francisco, 1958)

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Brown, Kevin, “Critical Reflections on Chicanx and Indigenous Scholarship and Activism,” interview with Vanessa Foseca-Chávez, Tey Marianna Nunn, Irene Vásquez, & Myla Vicenti Carpio, in Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland, eds, Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Levi Romero & Spencer Herrera, (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 2020), 54-73.

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Lara, Brenda Selena, “Ciguanabas, Refugees, and Other Hauntings: Three Salvadoran Women’s Epistemic Hauntings as Resistance Against Heteropatriarchy,” in Monsters and Saints, LatIndigenous Landscapes and Spectral Storytelling, eds. Shantel Marinez & Kelly Medina-López(University Press of Mississippi: 2024), 89-105.

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MacKendrick, Karmen, Counterpleasures, (State University of New York Press: Albany, 1999).

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Maná, “Poder Vivir Sin Aire,” track 4 in ¿Dónde jugarán los niños? (WEA Latina: 1992).

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Martinez, Amanda R., “Legacies of Land, Cultural Clashes, and Spiritual Stirrings: A Testimonio of New Mexican Ghost Stories,” in Monsters and Saints, LatIndigenous Landscapes and Spectral Storytelling, eds. Shantel Marinez & Kelly Medina-López (University Press of Mississippi: 2024), 39-60.

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Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker, (W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 1978), 473-500.

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Roberto Tejada, “Language Arts” in Celia Alvarez Muñoz, (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press: 2009), 29-52.

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Tigres del Norte, Los, “Sin Fronteras,” track 2 in Gracias America sin fronteras, (Fonovisa Records: 1986)

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