Vaquero World: Queer Mexicanidad, Trans Performance, and the Undoing of Nation (original) (raw)

2020, In Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell, ed., Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization, 75–96. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books

This essay is based on fieldwork in Las Vegas and Chicago at queer vaquero (cowboy) conventions centering Mexican regional music, food, and ranch culture and Latin American stage performers and audience-attendees. By contrast to U.S.-centric interpretations of Mexican and Mexican American queer identities and practices in terms of a premodern and working-class subaltern, I draw on scenes from ‘Vaquero World’ to argue that these identities and practices bear the imprint of cosmopolitan transnationalism and reveal cultural logics of sexual and gender nonessentialism—logics rooted in Latin America’s nonessentializing uptake of eugenicist ideas in the twentieth century, and more deeply, in its nonessentializing uptake of colonial racial and gender classifications in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the light of such interpretive tensions, I read the conventions’ Mr. Vaquero pageant as a liminal space where nonessentialist “digital” (in Susan Stryker’s sense) transgender and transnational performances by gay male contestants and their gender-nonconforming collaborators challenge both Mexican and Anglo-white “analog” notions of what constitutes mexicanidad. Through description and analysis of queer vaqueros’ racialized and gendered performances, constructions, and contestations of mexicanidad, my essay seeks to intervene in Chicane/x, Latine/x, and performance studies, and in LGBTQ+ musicology.