Chicanidad, XicanOsmosis, and the Sexually-laced Psyche

One of the ways we can interrupt the logic of stereotypes is to complicate our representation of essential categories like "sexuality" or "identity."

For Chicana/o writing then, the narratives of an Arturo Islas (The Rain God) or John Rechy (City of Night) are heady indeed; especially with regard to the way they cause certain "Latino" heterosexist or heteronormative (gracias to Michael Borgstrom [scroll down]) tendencies to wobble or destabilize--Mexican "bandits" aren't always straight and aren't always bandits, and so on and so on.

All this as a preface to a review of Rechy's new memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman, in the SFGate by Ilan Stavans.

I am working on a revision of a chapter on the work of Rechy in an old manuscript I never published entitled Portraits and Signatures: An Analecta of Chicana/o Literature; the original manuscript was greenlighted and contracted by the great Alexander (Sandy) Taylor of Willimantic, Connecticut-based Curbstone Press, who sadly passed last November. For various reasons, I never finished that book and am now driven to do so to pay my debt to Taylor and Curbstone (and to Martín Espada as well, who was one of Portraits and Signature's first readers), to whom I owe the debt of tenure and more.