"Activism and Identity in the Ruins of Representation"

ELEVEN ACTIVISM AND IDENTITY IN THE RUINS OF REPRESENTATION Juana María Rodríguez Our scholarship on aids must be located at the crossroads of art and politics, life and art, and life and death.—Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, “Response to the Representation of aids” Activism is an engagement with the hauntings of history, a dialogue be- tween the memories of the past and the imaginings of the future manifested through the acts of our own present yearnings. aids has surrounded us with the living memory of familiar ghosts, faces that haunt our intimate realities of being infected/not yet infected, sick/not yet sick, alive but not yet dead. As we wait for passage to the other side, we plan our revenge and chart strategies of resistance to head off the silence. Identity politics, as an organizing tool and political ideology, has historically had specific investments for marginalized groups in this country. Political groupings based on identity categories, however, have become highly contested sites, splintering ever further into more specialized and discrete social and political units, based on more precise yet still problematic categories of identification and concomitant modes of definition. As a lived practice, strategic essentialism (and the policing of identity) that often defines it has become a messy and contentious organizing strategy that ultimately reveals the limits and problematic assumptions of identity politics. Identity politics formed in resistance to state power thus remains implicated in the perpetuation of the narratives upon which it is founded, specifically the conflation of identity, ideology, and political practices and the lived ramifications of the constructed and problematic duality of insider/outsider. Yet for many, it becomes impossible to conceive of political organizing without explicative narratives or definitive social positions. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest This chapter asks: What possibilities for political and social intervention are opened up outside the discourse of identity politics? How can we deploy power creatively and consciously in the ser vice of radical justice? And how effective are these strategies for bringing about individual and social change? Projecting Life This chapter uses the example of one social ser vice agency in San Francisco, Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida (pcpv), founded in August 1993, to analyze how it has negotiated and reimagined the discursive terrain of identity politics to respond to the social crisis that surrounds the aids pandemic.1 Its name indicates both what it is working against, ContraSIDA (against aids), and what it is working for, Por Vida (for life). Through an examination of the agency’s programming and cultural production, I document how it employs various creative strategies of organizing and intervention to enrich the cultural and political climate in the ser vice of radical social change. Rather than relying on personal interviews of clients, volunteers, or staff to document the work being conducted at the agency, I examine the existing representations of Proyecto that have already made their way into the public sphere through flyers, brochures, promotional materials, public speaking engagements, and published accounts. This methodological decision stems from my interest in bringing into focus the ways these subjects are continually involved in speaking back to contest and reimagine subjectivity through individual and collective selfrepresentation. Furthermore, by using archival materials generated by the individuals and groups I seek to present, I demonstrate in practice a methodological shift that foregrounds previously marginalized cultural production. The focus of this chapter is on analyzing the ways Proyecto represents and names itself and the communities it serves in the public arena, and how these practices of self-representation circumvent some of the pitfalls and limitations of identity politics. I argue that Proyecto is involved in forging a new type of identity project based on ideas, affiliation, and alignment rather than on static categories of race, gender, culture, or sexuality. Its organizing and outreach strategies speak to the creative, transformative powers of reading and writing language and images as symbolic codes. Its texts engage the possibilities of refusing explication, without abandoning the political significance of inscribing subjectivity. In the process, it is challenging cultural, social, and state apparatus conceptualizations of sexuality and culture in the postmodern wreckage of a metropolis crumbling under the weight of capitalist gentrification, racialized dis-ease, and social inequity. 258 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest San Francisco has been an epicenter of queer Latina/o organizing and resistance since the 1960s, as well as a focal point of the aids pandemic. Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida emerged through the threads of the many groups that preceded its existence: the United Farm Workers (ufw), the Gay Latino Alliance (gala), the Mission Cultural Center, Community United in Responding to aids/sida (curas), Mujerío, the National Task Force on aids Prevention, La Familia at uc Berkeley, and the strands of other groups and influences as numerous and diverse as the individual personal and political histories of its founders.2 The texture of its political and social ideology has been shaped through the traces of Black and Chicano nationalism, third world feminism, queer liberation, aids activism, immigrant rights movements, the third world peoples’ strike at San Francisco State University and at Berkeley, Freirian models of consciousness raising and education, and the Birmingham school of social education and organizing.3 Individuals, texts, and ideas from Ciudad de México, Los Angeles, La Habana, New York, Miami, the California Central Valley, and elsewhere have traversed the social and political landscape of San Francisco, creating established lines of motion that have facilitated and informed local organizing efforts. Proyecto is not the only queer Latina/o organization in San Francisco; many other groups and agencies also serve and represent the diverse configuration known as the San Francisco queer Latino community. The combined force of three ideological components differentiates Proyecto from other Latina/o community organizing projects: its commitment to multigender organizing, its declared posture of providing sex-positive programming, and its commitment to harm reduction as a model for prevention and treatment.4 Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida is neither representative of other organizing efforts nor a unique exception; however, its strategies for effective resistance and creative survival offer a window into the possibilities of local organizing in the ruins of representation. Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida is located at Sixteenth and Mission, a busy intersection in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, an area generally figured as a Latino neighborhood. This street corner and its vectors have a long history as a magnet for queer Latinos, having been the site of two gay Latino bars, Esta Noche and La India Bonita, and a short-lived Latina lesbian bar, Sofia’s.5 Yet the multiethnic, multicultural Latina/o majority of the Mission shares this geographic space with Arabs, Asians, Anglos, African Americans, and others, as well as a thriving criminalized drug culture and prostitution trade, elements that all come into play in Proyecto’s self-representation. Proyecto’s offices are street level; there are couches and Activism and Identity 259 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest magazines; music plays in the background. Its walls are papered with flyers and art produced by students, volunteers, and supporters; a basket of condoms sits at the reception desk, generally staffed by one of Proyecto’s many volunteers. Sex workers come in to pick up free condoms before running off to work, newly arrived immigrants come to find out about the intricacies of creating green cards and social security numbers, multihued transgenders and intravenous drug users stop by for information on needle exchanges for drugs and hormones, the queer neighborhood homeboys and girls come by to flirt or hang out with familiar faces. Sandra Ruiz, Proyecto’s youth health educator, comments, “All kinds of people stop and look in our windows, including grandmothers, cops and kids. . . . They ask, ‘What is this place?’ Well, this is a place where I can be everything I am.”6 Proyecto’s target audiences are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning Latinas/os, yet those who walk through its doors and avail themselves of its many ser vices reflect the ethnic and sexual diversity of the neighborhood and the complexities of social and biological families. Proyecto’s mission statement combines the elements of a radical social analysis and visionary political conviction with a poetic urgency that demands our attention and merits its full citation. Proyecto ContraSIDA Por Vida is coming to you—you joto, you macha, you vestida, you queer, you femme, you girls and boys and boygirls and girlboys de ambiente, con la fe and fearlessness that we can combat aids, determine our own destinies and love ourselves and each other con dignidad, humor y lujuria. Nos llamamos “a multigender, sex-positive, neighborhood-based Latina/o lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender hiv ser vice agency.” Multigender because we believe as the gay poet Carl Morse states, “. . . I want at least 121 different words to describe gender. Because there are at least that many ways of having, practicing, or experiencing gender.” Different nombres, different cuerpos, different deseos, different culturas coming together to form a community dedicated to living, to fighting the spread of hiv disease and the other unnatural disasters of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and poverty.7 Sexpositive quiere decir positively sexual and shameless, profoundly perverse and proud. Queremos romper el silencio y represión among our pueblos who for 500 years have been colonized/catholicized/de-eroticized. In the tradition of lesbian and gay liberation creemos en our gente’s right to desire as we please, to buscar placer when, how and with whom we choose. We believe that deseo transformará el mundo. We also understand that in 260 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest order to examine our sexualities we must first participate in groundbreaking discussions of diverse sexual practices: butch y femme, leather, bisexuality, etc. Neighborhood-based means we work within the barrio most identified with Latina lesbianas, gays, bisexuales y vestidas—the Mission as it is bordered by the Castro. Our current location at 18th and Dolores and street-front offices allow for easy access, for off-the-street clientele and keeps our programming en el pulso of our target population.8 All of the programming we provide here at pcpv attempts to continue to expand these notions and develop new ones. Our definitions are not rigid but rasquachi, our position playful, our efforts at empowering done with grace in the face of so much dolor.9 This mission statement, which is also referred to by its title, “Así somos” (This is how we are), begins with the deconstruction of binary sexual and gender terms, a direct address to a multiply constituted constituency. It articulates these multiple enactments of identities through naming: “you joto, you macha, you vestida, you queer, you femme, you girls and boys and boygirls and girlboys de ambiente.” The piece is published without indicating an originating author; however, Ricardo Bracho, the Chicano poet and playwright and Proyecto’s health education coordinator, is responsible for its composition, which grew out of a group writing exercise he developed for his coworkers at Proyecto. In a memo to this author, Bracho records how in this piece he intended to use the process of interpellation to effect hailing from a “non-dominant dialogic voicing.” He writes, “the althusserian model of interpellation posits the hegemonic hailing of the subject—the cop who screams ‘hey you’ thus giving the you a you to be—a state-derived identity, the subject for the (dominant) other in hegelian terms. I wanted to hail without such dominance. Hence you joto macha which not only reads the reader into the text but asks the reader to read the author(ity) within such signs of degradation.”10 Asking the reader to read both the author and the authority of hailing calls into focus the constitutive context in which discursive resignification operates. Through the process of interpellation, the text validates the existence of a subject that had previously been constituted through degradation. In the context of a promotional text for a social ser vice agency, this hailing offers “jotos and machas” not only a linguistic space to occupy but a physical site as well: the space of Proyecto. Yet these words bring with them the haunted histories of these names and the memories of their previous enunciation. The narrative shadows of joto, macha, and queer carry with them traces of violence, familiar rejection, and cultural alienation even as Activism and Identity 261 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest they confer social existence and oppositional validation. As troubling as this discursive resignification is to some, for others it becomes a rallying point for a discursive autonomy, which, while fictive, becomes a tool through which narratives of shame, violence, and alienation are verbalized and countered. Shifting the pronoun from the “you” in “you joto, you macha” to the “we” in “we believe” recontextualizes these linguistic memories by situating them in a framework of a shared philosophy of sexual liberation: “deseo transformará el mundo” (desire will transform the world). Yet it also maps the contested grounds of community: “Different nombres, different cuerpos, different deseos, different culturas coming together to form a community dedicated to living” (Different names, different bodies, different desires, different cultures . . . ). Bracho’s text reaches for the political valency of community without imposing an adherence to preexisting identity categories; instead identity and community are constituted through political commitment and action. It asserts desire and the expression of desire as basic human rights and advocates dialogue on sexual practices as a necessary strategy in order to counter silence and repression. The focus is on sexual liberation rather than gaining “equal rights” under the existing regimes of state power. Furthermore, the text and the mission of Proyecto remain open, playful, continually in process. Neither the Spanish nor the English is italicized or visually marked as “different” in the text, creating a visual seamlessness as it moves from one language to another. The insistence on code-switching from English to Spanish, as well as from street vernacular to political theory, blurs the boundaries of these discourses. Words such as xenophobia or rasquachi may not be equally accessible to all readers, yet the aim is not to create a text based on the lowest common denominator of language, but rather one that provides a diversely literate audience a point of entry into the text. Proyecto’s Spanglish poem–manifesto–mission statement reflects a disinvestment in static concepts of language, culture, and gender and mirrors the agency’s irreverent style of community organizing and education. Rather than focusing on aids as a discrete disease or as a single and primary health priority, Proyecto focuses on understanding and addressing the multiple social, economic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions that contribute to individual and collective health and well-being. Proyecto’s approach to hiv prevention and ser vice affirms its belief that as we near the fourth decade of the aids pandemic, handing out condoms and brochures is simply not enough. Instead, its work addresses the underlying issues of sexual and cultural shame and alienation, gendered and racialized social and sexual repression, and the 262 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest historical consequences of colonialism and political disenfranchisement. Underlying Proyecto’s prevention agenda is the belief that giving people a reason to want to live, survive, and resist erasure is imperative if we are to combat the spread of hiv and promote health in our diverse communities. Its work challenges basic assumptions that have guided much of mainstream aids prevention, namely, that all people want to live, that all of us are equally capable of negotiating sexual contracts, and that all of us benefit equally from health maintenance. In addition to more traditional prevention and support ser vices, such as street-level outreach, treatment and prevention counseling, and in-service training to schools and other social ser vice agencies, Proyecto’s prevention programming aims to tackle the ways health, disease, social and sexual power relations, and individual agency are socially and culturally constructed. Events have included a community forum series titled “Escándalo” (Scandal), a multicultural transgender support group, diverse multilingual rap groups, organized retreats, career guidance workshops, a soccer team for young women called Las Diablitas (The Little Devils), and an ever-changing offering of creative educational courses organized as part of Colegio ContraSIDA. These activities target the conditions necessary for social health and well-being: self-esteem, meaningful social bonds, individual and collective consciousness through dialogue and education, personal and political empowerment skills, and the tools of critical inquiry. Las Diablitas, for example, began as a Colegio class and later became established independently under the economic sponsorship of the bar Colors. Initially, under Proyecto, it was geared toward jotas twenty-five years of age and under; since then the parameters of membership have been expanded to include players ages sixteen to thirty, lesbian, bisexual, questioning women, an ftm transgender, and players of diverse ethnic backgrounds. It is one of the youngest and most inexperienced teams in the Golden Gate Women’s Soccer League. The vast majority of its members had never played soccer before joining and it is the only team in the league made up exclusively of women of color. The emphasis of the team is on “promoting young women’s physical and mental health.” One team member, Lisa Arellanes, writes, “Rather than sitting in a support group, having to ‘check in,’ introduce yourself, or worry about being put on the spot, all we do is play soccer, hang out, and build familia. If they need support later, they have seventeen fellow soccer players to turn to.”11 Some of these events are configured around gender, age, language, hiv status, or culturally specific audiences; some are organized exclusively by Activism and Identity 263 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest Proyecto; others are presented in collaboration with other community organizations.12 Proyecto has not abandoned the idea of creating identityspecific spaces as a means to interrogate the complexities of subjectivity; most of its programming is still designed by and for various configurations of queer Latinos. By continually shifting the terms around which these spaces are conceptualized, however, and by also creating spaces constructed only by a common interest or political agenda, its programs and events creatively circumvent some of the limits and exclusionary practices of other identity projects. Proyecto’s monthly informal community dialogues, “Escándalo,” are open to anyone interested in the topic and draw very different crowds from one event to the next. These have included “¿Y Tu Abuela Donde Está?” (And Where Is Your Grandmother?) in celebration of Black History Month, an event that brought together a panel of participants to talk about the legacy and lived realities of African culture, history, and identity in the Americas.13 Another discussion, “Sex: What’s Age Got to Do with It? A Discussion on Relationships between the Ages,” tackled the relationship between age, agency, desire, and power, a highly charged and controversial issue in most queer communities. This flyer used an image of the Mexican comedian Cantinflas with the US comedian Buster Keaton, with the heading “What’s Too Young? Too Old? Jail Bait or Chicken Hawk.”14 Queer and questioning youth form one of Proyecto’s primary target audiences; these are individuals whose sexual agency is currently criminalized by existing age-of-consent laws. One of the most controversial and well-attended roundtables was titled “Cracking On! A Roundtable and Community Dialogue on Amphetamine (Crystal) Use and Misuse.” The flyer depicted an image of a superhero cartoon figure surrounded by the phrases “Trick or Treat? partying hard? super stud? feeling powerful and alert? what’s the date? coming down? need some sleep? did you eat? safer sex? what a tweak.” Under the agency’s address and contact information are the words “Confidentiality Assured.” This particular roundtable attracted one of the largest and most diverse audiences, illustrating the lack of information and nonjudgmental dialogue on drug “use and misuse.” It also raised considerable opposition from several drug treatment providers in attendance because its premise, that not all forms of drug use are equivalent to abuse and that harm reduction is an effective and necessary model for addressing risk, directly challenged the established biomedical discourse on drug use and treatment. The images used to advertise these events are as intellectually sophisticated and visually complex as the ideas they represent. As part of Proyecto’s 264 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest FIGURE 11.1. Flyer produced by Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida, 1995. Design by Joel Reyna. outreach to transgenders, another flyer reads, “¡Reina! CuidaTe-Ta: Infórmate sobre Hormonas, tu Salud y tu Poder” (Inform yourself about hormones, your health and your power) (figure 11.1). The language combines the word reina, an endearment meaning “queen,” and CuidaTe-Ta, a wordplay that combines cuídate (take care of yourself) with teta, or tit. It lists a series of three workshops that present a glimpse of the range of ser vices directed toward transgenders: “Hormonas, el Uso y Efectos Secundarios” (Hormones, Their Use and Secondary Effects); “Las Relaciones entre Parejas, el Abuso, y el Autoestimo” (Relationships, Abuse and Self-Esteem); and “Televestida ContraSIDA: Un Talkshow muy a tu estilo con panelistas Latinas Transexuales” (Televestida ContraSIDA: A talk show, very much your style, with Latina Transsexual panelists). Televestida plays on the word tele, from television, and vestida, a popular word for drag queens. The three different events in the series reflect the multiple strategies of intervention offered by Proyecto: providing concrete information about health and risk factors; addressing the underlying issues of sexual power and agency in relationships Activism and Identity 265 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest necessary to negotiate sexual and emotional contracts; and providing a public forum in which to perform, celebrate, and discuss lived experiences and theories of living. The accompanying image is of a naked male-to-female transsexual standing in front of a portrait of herself, in which her hair, makeup, and dress are exaggerated. The image plays on a kind of doubling, where the “real” and the “representation” are set side by side. By providing a forum where the contradictions, implications, exaggerations, and lived consequences of identity, behavior, and affiliation can be explored, Proyecto creates a social, aesthetic, and critical context where questions of difference and divergence advance, rather than stifle, collective dialogue. The images and language used in these flyers are as thought-provoking as the events they advertise. In fact, their dissemination and visual presence in various citywide venues serve the function of providing a common cultural text that sparks interrogation and dialogue as it furthers the cause of propagating self-defined representations. One of the most innovative and vibrant features of Proyecto’s programming has been its Colegio ContraSIDA offerings. These are free multiweek classes taught by local artists, activists, and community residents. They have included makeup, sewing, and drama classes for Latina drag queens called “AtreDivas,” a neologism that plays with the words atrevida (daring one) and diva; Tai Chi classes; “girl-colored,” a photo-sculpture class for lesbian and bisexual women of color under twenty-five; various writing classes organized along and across language and gender; a multigender photography class titled “Jotografía,” a combination of joto (faggot) and fotografía (photography); and a video production workshop for young Latinas titled “Shoot This.” Here, the distinctions between students, clients, volunteers, and staff break down the entrenched categories of “victims, volunteers and experts” evident in many aids ser vice organizations.15 But the movement is not linear or progressive. Past employees now attend classes; paid Colegio teachers become unpaid volunteers. There is a continual exchange, movement, and circulation of money, knowledge, and resources.16 ¡Imagínate! Many of these courses have been focused on or resulted in creative manifestations of self-representation through autobiography and self-portraiture. Whether it is within the intimacy of these small classes or through the public persona of Proyecto’s promotional materials, Proyecto is continually engaged in the process of creative individual and collective representation. Its 266 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest programming is directly involved in addressing the themes of desire, pleasure, fear, and humanity to remap the theoretical and aesthetic terrains of sexuality and culture. These themes constitute the psychic excesses of structuralist categories of identity that often elude, or are excluded from, mainstream discourses on hiv infection and aids. The course offerings through Colegio ContraSIDA have also valued the role spirituality plays in healing and cultural activism. One such class, “Retablos del Retrovirus,” appropriates a culturally specific art form to meet the needs of gay Latinos living with “the heartbreak that is the aids epidemic.” In México retablos, or ex-votos, have historically been used as a form of visual prayer, painted on tin, and often combining both a visual representation of the spiritual or physical crisis and a textual accompaniment asking or giving thanks for divine intervention. This class, taught by the Chicana artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez, combined a culturally specific art therapy with self-determined spiritual expression as a means of coping with the loss, alienation, grief, and spiritual anxiety associated with aids. The flyer advertising the class used an established retablo image and situated it within a new interpretive context that complicates the form’s relationship to Catholicism and culture. It is the image of a man turning away from the priests at the hour of his death, facing instead the image of his desire in the hands of the devil. The accompanying text from the flyer reads: Retablos have been used for centuries by Latinos to speak of faith, suffering and miracles. pcpv’s Retablos del Retrovirus continues this tradition within the Latino Gay and Vestida communities and our heroic response to the heartbreak that is the aids epidemic. This series of visual art workshops will allow participants to discuss and draw the losses and grief they have experienced in the aids crisis, as well as illuminate moments of divinity and outrage. The following three images are examples of the retablos produced in the class that were reproduced in Proyecto’s first promotional calendar.17 In the first, the artist, Daniel Genara, writes, “Le pido al Sagrado Corazón de Jesús que oiga mis ruegos y me ayude en mi pelea contra este vicio” (I ask the Sacred Heart of Jesus to hear my pleas and help me in my fight against this vice) (figure 11.2). The solitary figure facing us sits with three bottles of beer and a lit cigarette. The bar slopes down onto the figure, as the Sacred Heart rests on a separate horizon flanked by Grecian columns, suggesting a heavenly plane. The bar depicted conforms to the visual layout of La India Bonita and is reminiscent of many Latino nightclubs. It appears as a kind of altar, Activism and Identity 267 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest FIGURE 11.2. Daniel Genara, retablo, 1993. complete with an image of the Virgin, flowers, and a picture nestled between bottles, glasses, and packages of chips. The “vice” in question is never named, yet the image allegorizes the alienation associated with the bar culture prevalent in many queer and Latino communities. In the second image, the artist, Juan Rodríguez, writes, “Sto. Niño de Atocha que me has protegido y cuidado desde el día que nací, te pido por mi salud en mi lucha contra el sida” (Santo Niño de Atocha who has protected and cared for me from the day I was born, I ask you for my health in my struggle against aids) (figure 11.3). Floating above the horizon are two seemingly celestial images connected along a curved path. At one end is a church marked “Plateros” and at the other the smiling figure of El Santo Niño de Atocha encased in a white and gold aura. Plateros is the site of the sanctuary dedicated to El Santo Niño de Atocha, a small village in the area of Fresnillo, the artist’s birthplace. At a reception for the artists, Juan recalled his childhood memories of making the pilgrimage on foot with his family to Plateros to visit the shrine of El Santo Niño. The image is marked by three dates, two incorporated into the image, and the other, in red, marking the date of signature. The first, Sept. 1964, appears next to a man and a woman carrying a child almost midway along the path, and suggests birth. The July 1989 date is situated below the path next to two images, one turned away from us with 268 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest FIGURE 11.3. Juan Rodríguez, retablo, 1993. the letters hiv and the other, crying figure facing the viewer, with the initials vih emblazoned across his chest. Here the artist uses both the Spanish and English initials for human immunodeficiency virus to denote a possible date of diagnosis, although it is noteworthy that the image marked in Spanish, vih, is the one facing us. These red letters physically mark the body, in the same way that an hiv diagnosis marks one physically, socially, and spiritually. In the third image, the artist, Angel Borrero, rather than relying on the words that usually accompany retablos, uses a combination of symbols to construct his prayer (figure 11.4). These eclectic icons—yin and yang, the Sacred Heart, the Bible, the moon, an ankh, the symbol of infinity, a butterfly, and others—hover above a weeping naked red figure. Borrero redraws the precolonial ideographic codices to produce a new postcolonial, transcultural imaginary landscape. To his right an image of a conquistador stands above two dark statues spewing yellow and white liquids, possibly urine and semen. These seem to be creeping into the blue water-like surface below the reclined figure as sources of contamination. The “bodily fluids” depicted in this retablo also include the tears of the figure and the red bloodlike color of the body.18 The recessed window peering out into a dark blue sky, situated in the center of the image, suggests the infinity of an afterlife, as the figure lies in a space between life and death. This workshop and the images produced attempt to address the question posed by Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, “What is the question of identity Activism and Identity 269 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest FIGURE 11.4. Angel Borrero, retablo, 1993. for a person with aids? After the diagnosis and continuous symptoms and diseases, how is a new speaking-subject constituted, articulated, and configured?”19 These artists are “speaking” their subjectivity through a visual language, but the medium and the context in which these articulations are produced respect both the process and singularity of individual subjectivity. This workshop and others like it reach toward an understanding of difference and affinity, of individual inscriptions of subjectivity within a larger political context of collective action and resistance. “de(a)dicated to the one i love,” a flyer advertising a reading from Bracho’s Chicano gay writing workshop “(t)he (w)rites of mourning,” transforms the lyrics of the oldies classic and juxtaposes it with an image of a fallen revolutionary hero, who lies bleeding, wrapped in the mantle of the Mexican flag (figure 11.5). The image/text plays with and against romanticized visions of Mexican nationalism and heterosexual romantic martyrdom, by situating them in a queer Latino context. In this refiguration of nationalism, as Bracho put it in his presentation, “dying for the nation” also becomes intermingled with “dying for love” in the age of the aids pandemic. It is the text, “de(a)dicated to the one i love,” that calibrates the image within this new appropriated context. Yet that new queer reading is dependent on a particular kind of previous diasporic literacy, in this case the iconography 270 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest FIGURE 11.5. Flyer designed by Ricardo Bracho and Willy B. Chavarria, 1993. of Mexican independence and the relevance of sixties pop music to urban Chicano culture.20 Similarly, the flyer for a sex-positive women’s retreat employs a 1927 photograph by the Peruvian Alberto Chambia titled La Señorita Torera to draw in the imagination of its audience (figure 11.6). The use of an image from the twenties with a sexually ambiguous figure serves to situate the Latina butch as part of a historical cultural iconography, to reclaim a queer Latina past. Again the framing text attempts to answer “what is it?” with the words Tetatúd and el deseo es la fuerza (the desire is the power), responding to questions about both the image and the idea of a sex-positive retreat. The term sex positive inverts the negative connotations of being “positive” in a queer context and resignifies it as a statement of resistance against the imposed sexual abnegation evidenced in much mainstream aids prevention. The word tetatúd, assembled from the phrase actitud con tetas (attitude with tits), was coined by Marcia Ochoa and Nancy Mirabal. Activism and Identity 271 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest FIGURE 11.6. Flyer produced by Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida, 1994. Design by Marcia Ochoa. It is one of several neologisms employed in Proyecto’s promotional materials and resonates with power and sexuality. Equally impor tant, it was a catchy phrase, the significance of which traveled quickly throughout the communities it was intended to reach and beyond. Initially, the word tetatúd functioned as an intentionally imprecise translation for sex positive, evidencing the need to re-create or “trans-create” a sexual language in Spanish. Redefining the words that have been used to silence or shame us, reinterpreting them within a new queer cultural context that values sexual expression and sexual self-determination, subverts the hegemony of linguistic and cultural codes and uses language itself as an expression of agency. 272 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest ¿Y Qué? Recently, Proyecto has produced several new bilingual promotional brochures targeting specific audiences as part of its social marketing campaign.21 The idea behind social marketing is to use traditional marketing tools “to ‘sell’ healthy behaviors to target audiences.”22 Proyecto’s reconceptualization of social marketing extends this concept to confront community norms and values. Rather than simply using advertising to advocate condom use or promote its services, Proyecto’s promotional materials invite the audience to challenge ideas about sexuality, culture, representation, and communities. One such brochure, titled What’s the T? is geared toward transgenders. It is small, bright, colorful, and seductive. The opening text reads, “Pues, tú sabes, we the T. Transgenders, that is. Oh, so who exactly are transgenders? Well, that’s anyone experimenting with their biological sex. This includes a whole lot of folks, so it’s safe to say anyone who calls themself a transgender is one.” “What’s the T?” is San Francisco queer barrio-speak for what’s up? new? hot? happening? The text directly engages the reader and responds to a question, “What’s the T?” but shifts it into a new context of meaning. Inside appear the words Props, Respeto, Riesgo, Risk, Presence, Presencia, Rhythm, Ritmo, Magic, and Magia. Though these words include the repetition of translation, there is no attempt to make them equivalent or even parallel. The word Respeto, for example, is translated as Props, borrowing from an intersecting queer and urban lexicon. The front image is of a papaya, already charged as a visual and linguistic female sexual signifier for many Latinos/as, sliced both vertically and horizontally and situated so the pieces fit together to suggest a female sex (figure 11.7).23 Inverted, it becomes a small penis and the circular hole dripping with shiny black seeds becomes an anus, suggesting the rich complexity of organic forms, magic, and incisions as a metaphor for transgender realities. A group picture included in the flyer depicts a diverse set of individuals consciously posing for the camera (figure 11.8). A frequently stated or unstated response to this photograph is the question, “Are they all transgenders?” An equally charged question might also be, “Are they all Latinos?” It is the question rather than the answer that produces the moment of critical intervention, forcing a confrontation with assumptions about transgender identities and communities. Rather than relying on authorial strategies of representation or explicative narratives, the image draws in the viewers’ faculties of interpretation. In a flyer geared at youth, ¡y que! Young, Queer & Under Emergency, photographs, images, and text work together to lure and entice, to make action, vida, Activism and Identity 273 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest FIGURE 11.7. Flyer produced by Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida, 1997. Design by Jill Bressler, Pail of Water Design. Photograph by Patrick “Pato” Hebert. Text by spikxildren kolectiv. and learning desirable and even sexy (figure 11.9). It is a message of exploring options, of figuring it out together, of doing something for yourself and for others. The language is sweet and picante at once; layers of barrio youth Spanish and English rub and play together. As in the flyer What’s the T? the text appears in both English (heavily spiked with Spanglish) and a more standard but still colloquial Spanish. The opening “English” text reads, “Wassup mujer? Qué onda homeboy? What’s up with your young, fine Latina/o lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual or just curious self? If you got questions about coming out, dealing con tu familia, friends and your sweet thang, and how you can help stop the spread of hiv en tu barrio y entre tu gente. . . . Pues, then you gots to come check out ¡Y Q.U.E.!” Inside it offers youth a 274 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest FIGURE 11.8. Flyer pro- duced by Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida, 1997. Design by Jill Bressler, Pail of Water Design. Photograph by Patrick “Pato” Hebert. Text by spikxildren kolectiv. whole range of opportunities for self-discovery and self-expression, from resume writing and participation in one of Colegio ContraSIDA’s many youthspecific classes or rap groups to learning street outreach and tabling. It also tells them that Proyecto is a place where you can come by and just “kick it on the couch with your friends.” ¡y que! (so what? or literally, and what?) functions as a response to the hailing of the subject, a response to the names jota, macha, vestida. It is a statement against the totalizing implications of interpellation. By responding to the injurious name with a question, rather than an explanation, a counterattack, or a claim to misrecognition, it shifts the focus back onto the author and Activism and Identity 275 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest FIGURE 11.9. Flyer produced by Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida, 1997. Design by Jill Bressler, Pail of Water Design. Photograph by Patrick “Pato” Hebert. Text by spikxildren kolectiv. the authority that hails. ¡y que! forces an interrogation of the constructed significance of those names. It deflects the power of naming away from the singularity of the hailed subject and restates it as an indictment of heteronormative authority to name and thus define. Included in the brochure are two panels that echo the words of what other youth think about ¡y que! Some of the quotes read, “Me siento en casa” (I feel at home), “Me di cuenta de mi misma y mi comunidad” (I became aware of myself and my community), and “I’m going to become an advocate for lesbian safe sex.”24 These responses capture the multiple levels of empowerment and discovery available through Proyecto’s programming and presence—creating a space of safety and support, offering a space for conscious and critical learning about ourselves and our relationship to the world, and serving as a springboard for collective and individual action. In fact, many of the queer youth affiliated with Proyecto as volunteers, clients, 276 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest or staff have gone on to gain employment in other community-based ser vice and arts organizations, testifying to the material benefits of the formal and informal job skills (public speaking, teaching, community outreach, public relations, computer skills, and direct ser vice) gained through their association with Proyecto. The prevalence of Spanglish in Proyecto’s textual self-representation suggests its dynamism as a powerful language of activismo. Yet the ability to make sense of linguistic codes is also constructed by age, geography, culture, and experience; each constitutes an impor tant vector of analysis in social mappings of insider/outsider. Linguistic and cultural codes, however, create permeable borders that can be traversed through knowledge and affiliation. Understanding how these borders are constructed and mediated also gives us another way to understand and appreciate the cultural phenomenon of US African American santeros, Filipina artists constructing altars for El Día de los Muertos, or barrio-bred Anglo cholos cruising the Mission in their low-riding Impalas. A shared cultural and spiritual heritage, a mutual colonial religion, or a common city block create the organic conditions for the expression of these cultural affinities to emerge. Very often, however, conscious attempts to learn about a culture only serve to reveal the intricacies, complexities, and depth of cultural codes. The process of cultural affiliation, appropriation, and transformation occurs interethnically, but it also takes place within ethnic groups. Particularly for Spanish speakers, participation in the multiethnic, multicultural, multinational, multigenerational Latino community of San Francisco necessitates a willingness to learn and adapt to new cultural idioms, regional synonyms, and local vernacular. On a political and collective level, this multilingualism becomes an acquired skill used to navigate different discursive spaces in order to achieve specific goals: to reach and inspire different constituents; to get and maintain funding; to learn about viral counts, double blind studies, and the language of pharmacology; to manipulate the intricacies of the legal system; or to access the resources of the social ser vice sector. Understanding the ways communities are structured linguistically assumes paramount importance in creating promotional materials that speak the languages of their target audiences. Part of Proyecto’s success has been its ability to speak and respond in multiple registers of language in order to reach different constituents. In addition to the interlingual mission statement cited earlier, Proyecto also has a more “traditional” monolingual mission statement directed toward its various funding sources, and has recently produced Spanish and English Activism and Identity 277 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest FIGURE 11.10. Photograph taken on set by Patrick “Pato” Hebert, from Sabrosura, directed by Janelle Rodríguez, 1996. versions of a newly conceived mission statement directed at a more general audience. The final text for consideration is the three-minute public ser vice announcement for Proyecto titled Sabrosura (Tastiness), directed by a young Puerto Rican filmmaker, Janelle Rodríguez.25 This fast-paced, colorful collage of moving images is set to the sizzling sounds of salsa and relies almost exclusively on visual language to promote its message. In her comments following the film’s screening, Rodríguez noted that the film involved twenty-three separate location shoots and the collaborative work of eighty individuals. Most of the film is shot in the bright light of day and draws heavily on the local color of the urban geography. It intercuts scenes depicting young cholos and cholas flirting against a backdrop of one of San Francisco’s many vibrant murals, wrestling in grass, dancing on the steps of Mission High School, masturbating in the dim light of a bedroom, marching down Market Street, kissing on street corners, hanging out in Dolores Park, and cruising through el barrio (figure 11.10). Advocating and eroticizing safer sex forms part of the message. In one scene a fierce femme blots her lipstick through a dental dam; in another a young cholo flashes a rainbow collection of condoms; in still another a lounging Diane Felix, Proyecto’s program director, slowly slides a condom down 278 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest a banana. Cultura is everywhere, but it is the cultural hybridity of San Francisco’s Latino community that is evident rather than any specific national or regional culture. Leana Valencia, wearing a traditional multilayered Mexican dress, spins her skirt to the soundtrack of a Caribbean salsa beat; another shot captures a zoot suiter flashing the twists and turns of a veteran salsero. In one scene, reminiscent of a gang jumping in ceremony, a topless Ruben Carillo, Proyecto’s intake specialist, is held down and sprayed with a hose in slow motion as he playfully resists. Proyecto is about familia, but it is also about a new gang of urban warriors “fighting the spread of hiv disease and the other unnatural disasters of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and poverty.” The message of the film is that belonging to a community is life-affirming, safer sex is sexy, that activism is about reclaiming the streets where you live and play. The film is meant to turn you on; the rhythm and energy of the music and images are contagious, they make you want to join the party, join the gang, join the movement. The film is not about explaining or translating experiences or culture. It is representation without explication. The individuals who appear in the footage may not all be Latina/a or queer. Some of them may be sex workers or academics, some of them may shoot drugs and others may be celibate. There is no attempt to make representation and identity equivalent. Yet in the final scene they all come together under the banner of Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida: “a community dedicated to living.” Proyecto’s willingness to address the issues of desire and difference, fear and power, evidenced in representations of subjectivity, respects and fosters the deployment of agency as a tool for individual and collective empowerment. Its programming, cultural production, and critical practices function as missiles of resistance against the hegemonic structures that demand our conformity or erasure. Proyecto’s strategies for survival and resistance creatively engage and transform ideas of visibility, identity, representation, community, and activism within the ruins of postmodern representation. In the process, Proyecto has also succeeded in impacting the lived realities of some of the most disenfranchised members of queer Latina/o communities: immigrants, youth, iv drug users, sex workers, transgender people, and people living with hiv and aids. Toward that end, Proyecto has trained and supported a new generation of artists, activists, thinkers, and community workers to respond to the state of emergency that constitutes queer life en el barrio and in the world. Proyecto creates spaces where not only individual “subjectsin-process” emerge but where the collective subject of “community-inprocess” is also given an open venue for expression, self-representation, and self-discovery. Activism and Identity 279 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest Unlike other plagues and pandemics, the nightmare of aids has been used by activists as an attempt to bring diverse sectors together to talk about the ways death and sex are represented in our diverse communities, to begin to understand how our fears and desires unite us. aids itself creates a community of ghosts, linked through transmission. Bracho writes, “Given that it takes one to infect one, in aids heaven there is a relationality, a collectivity that undoes the individuated singularity of Western morbidity.”26 Perhaps the ironic collectivity that we share in death will serve as the occasion for our collective will to creatively circumvent the systematized divisiveness that haunts our organizing efforts, an homage to our shared ghosts enacted through our daily practices of survivance and resistance. Postscript: Los Jodidos/The Fucked Peepo OCTOBER 7, 2017 If there is an afterword to the activist legacy of Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida and the kind of community engagement that it inspired then, that word is gentrification. Proyecto closed its doors in 2005, and the scant remaining energies left in its wake were poured into its successor, El/La Para TransLatinas, which opened in 2006 and has been struggling to survive ever since with a much smaller budget and a more focused mission. As housing prices have risen in the Mission District, poor, working-class people of color have moved out, and white, more educated, and wealthier people have moved in, riding the tumultuous waves of the tech boom and housing market that have left San Francisco one of the most expensive cities in the United States. By 2015, 60 percent of all leases in San Francisco were for technology companies, making it hard for nonprofits to compete but also driving up rents for local residents and driving away the club spaces, art spaces, and community venues that had created such a vibrant, multicultural scene in the first place. Like aids, the ghosts of gentrification perform their own slow death of disappearance and erasure. In the 1980s and 1990s, queer Latinx immigrants to San Francisco, whether arriving from the agricultural towns of California’s Central Valley or as sexiled refugees from Havana, Mexico City, or San Salvador, thought they had arrived at the promised land—a place to live and die together; a land of queer salsa, hunky vaqueros, and multilingual sexcapades. But increasingly, the thriving multigendered, multicultural, multigenerational community that helped bring Proyecto into existence has slowly slid off the map. With the arrival of PrEP and new kinds of retrovirus cocktails, hiv infection and aids have become manageable conditions for those 280 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest who can manage, where managing is often a code for being white, educated, employed, and connected to the dominant gay male scene in the city. But Proyecto was always about more than just responding to hiv and aids; it was a project of community health and healing from the “unnatural disasters of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and poverty,” and that work remains crucial to our collective survival.27 Today, as we fight back against state-sanctioned and increasingly emboldened attacks against immigrants and queers; against the undocumented, the homeless, the poor and the disabled; against transgender peoples’ right to pee or sex workers’ right to work; against Black, Brown, and Native peoples’ ability to walk, drive, protest, or just live free from police violence, the risks facing our communities are just as life threatening and our collective work is just as urgent. Having survived the aids pandemic (if only for now), those of us still committed to a “community dedicated to living” are struggling to keep the spirit of community and the space of utopian possibility that Proyecto embodied alive. But, if “activism is an engagement with the hauntings of history,” much of the queer Latinx activism now is also about mourning the loss of what used to be.28 Few if any of the original crew of Proyecto can afford to live in San Francisco anymore. Today, when and if we are called back to the city from our new disparate locations spread across Oakland, Richmond, San José, and other more affordable and less picturesque localities, we are the ones who now haunt the hipster corridors of a city that no longer has a place for us. But one summer evening in 2017, we were called back to witness the gentrified remains of the city that made the vision of Proyecto possible. Performance artist Xandra Ibarra, née La Chica Boom, invited us—the queer-, trans-, Latinxplus community—on a walking tour of the Mission district for a piece she called “The Hookup/Displacement/Barhopping/Drama Tour.” This mobile public performance functioned as a moving funeral procession commemorating the death of a neighborhood that we once called our own, a chance to publicly mourn all that we have lost in recent years. In her description of the event, Ibarra wrote: I can still hear the music, feel los dedos, smell the sobacos and see the drag queen mugre on the walls of our old neighborhood haunts even after they resurfaced as sterile establishments. I know you can too . . . you just need a little motavation. Let’s invade, resurface, and imprint our titties, besos sucios, and pleasures on the phantom walls of our adored queer nightlife venues! Activism and Identity 281 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest FIGURE 11.11. Xandra Ibarra, performance permit. Courtesy of the artist. Join me as I barhop to 5 former beloved queer Latino and Lezzi historic sites in the Mission!!!”29 An homage to what once was, the performance piece also enacted an insistence on the radical potential of exerting our continued presence. Like so many of Proyecto’s own published texts, Ibarra’s language intentionally code switches to perform a playful localized urban vernacular, hailing those participants who know how to interpret the linguistic codes presented. In a swipe at the need for the city to authorize the use of public space, Ibarra created her own permissions from the Department of Puras Mamadas, a “Public Notice of Application for Jotx Pleasure,” listing the applicants as “Los Jodidos/ The Fucked Peepo” (figure 11.11).30 The event assembled a ragtag band of aging Latinx memory seekers hugging old friends and fellow survivors, an equal number of younger queer performance artist types, many newly arrived to a city they had dreamed of making their own, and anyone else who wandered into the fray. The first stop was the iconic Esta Noche (1979–2014), the last queer Latinx bar to close in the Mission. Of the numerous sites on the Drama Tour, Esta Noche was the longest lived and its closure was most deeply felt. In his essay “The Dirt That Haunts: Looking at Esta Noche,” Iván Ramos describes it as “an explicitly working class Latino gay bar that catered to a queer Latino microcosm 282 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest of culture, adoration, and desires.”31 There in the alley, against the wall where so many of us had grinded our queer desires onto the crotches of strangers, Ibarra projected excerpts from the 1994 film ¡Viva 16!, directed by Valentin Aguirre and Augie Robles, a visual reminder of the vibrant club and street scene that had once existed at the corner of Sixteenth and Mission. The film’s projection onto the walls of the alley, screened onto the bodies of those of us in attendance, created a kind of virtual communion with the dead—allowing us to dance, mingle, and flirt, if just for a moment, with the floating presence of friends now gone, with younger versions of our own aging bodies, and with a community that is being forcibly disappeared. As the procession traveled to the five spots designated on Ibarra’s Drama Tour—La India Bonita (1970s–1996); Amelia’s (1978–91); the Lexington Club (1997–2015); and Osento’s Bathhouse (1979–2008)—participants stopped to make out on the streets, shout at the new skinny blond residents in Spanish, snap selfies, and refresh our motivation. As a group, we responded as best we could to Ibarra’s demands to keep it bien sucio, real dirty. The event description stated that “sexual activity with the architecture of our old haunts and/or people is encouraged.”32 At each location, participants set up altars in the nearby alleys, leaving behind flowers, carnival beads, dildos, and empty condom wrappers, chalking up the sidewalks with pink and purple messages of our love and hate. All the spaces of jotería in the Mission are gone, but so are all of the “Lezzie” spaces, the bookstore, the bars, the bathhouse, erased from the newly sanitized city made safe for tech workers and their bright white families of urban pioneers. So much of the affective work of Proyecto was about teaching us how to deal with the loss and devastation that surrounded the aids pandemic, creating a space where we could mourn, dream, and create—together. Being together, being in close physical proximity to the places and the people that affirmed our right to exist, made so much of that work possible. Today, the white supremacist state is trying to make an example of California, punishing our sanctuary cities, trying to dismantle our public education system, and making access to health care more impossible while unchecked development fuels the never-ending needs of the tech sector for more yoga studios and vegan burritos. Forced evictions, skyrocketing rents, and a lack of community ser vices combine with the notoriously racist, sexist, ageist hiring practices of the tech sector to feed a growing income gap and opportunity gap for those displaced and shut out of the new “bro”-based economy that has taken over the city. But that night, on Ibarra’s Drama Tour, some of us managed to “expose avenues of pleasures buried away under the sign of tech Activism and Identity 283 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest progress.”33 Like ghosts summoned from the great beyond, those of us close enough to answer Ibarra’s call showed up for ourselves, each other, and a vision of another way of living and loving—making a fleshy spectacle of our broken hearts, smearing our disease- and trauma-stained fluids over the power-washed sidewalks of a city we once called home, our stubborn commitment to survive serving as the ultimate revenge against those who plot our erasure. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Adapted from Juana María Rodríguez, “Activism and Identity in the Ruins of Representation,” in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 37–83. © 2003 Reprinted by permission of nyu Press. In its promotional materials, it is variously referred to by its full name, by the initials pcpv, or as Proyecto. I refer to it as Proyecto throughout the body of the text. Origin stories are always fraught with controversy. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate to offer a narrative that accounts for the genesis of Proyecto. It emerged from the National Task Force on aids Prevention (ntfap), where Jesse James Johnson and Juan Rodríguez worked at the time; they would be the first director and assistant director. The first national gay men of color hiv organization, ntfap was also Proyecto’s first fiscal agent from 1993 to 1998. The initial founders of Proyecto included Ricardo Bracho, Diane Felix, Jesse Johnson, Hector León, Reggie Williams, and Martín Ornellas-Quintero. The order cited is not intended to present a chronological, linear, or developmental progression. Many of these groups and movements emerged simultaneously and there exist both significant overlap and divergence relative to individuals, ideology, and social context. The Harm Reduction Coalition, with offices in Oakland, California, and New York City, states in its promotional brochure: “Harm reduction accepts, for better and for worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world and chooses to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them.” Proyecto’s reformulation of harm reduction extends this philosophy toward the practices of safer sex, stressing reducing risk whenever possible rather than simply condemning or ignoring unsafe sexual practices. See the 1994 film ¡Viva 16!, directed by Valentin Aguirre and Augie Robles. Ferriss, “Mission Meets Castro,” a12. The phrase unnatural disaster is borrowed from Yamada, “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster.” Proyecto began at Eighteenth and Dolores, then moved to its storefront offices at Sixteenth and Mission. pcpv, “Calendar of Events,” promotional calendar, 1994. 284 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest 10 Ricardo Bracho to Juana María Rodríguez, August 8, 1997. 11 Lisa Arellanes, to Juana María Rodríguez, September 4, 1997. 12 Among the many community-based programs Proyecto has worked with in the past are Mission Neighborhood Health Center, Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, Institute for Community Health Outreach, Asian and Pacific Islanders Wellness Center, New Leaf, Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center (lyric), Young Brothers Program, and Tenderloin aids Resource Center. Arts organizations Proyecto has collaborated with include Galeria de la Raza, Folsom Street Interchange for the Arts, Mission Cultural Center, the Mexican Museum, Artists Television Access (ata), Cine Acción, San Francisco Cinemateque, and Brava for Women in the Arts. 13 This popular refrain is often credited to “¿Y tu agüela a’onde ejtá?,” a poem written in the local Afro-Antillian vernacular by the Afro–Puerto Rican poet Fortunato Vizcarrondo. It is a reference to the practice of negating dark-skinned ancestors or relatives. 14 Unless other wise indicated, all the flyers were produced in-house at Proyecto without credits, using appropriated images from a variety of sources. This disinvestment in authorial ownership seems particularly significant as an expression of collective subjectivity and a commitment to collective representation. 15 Patton, Inventing aids, 5. 16 The instructors for Proyecto’s classes are too numerous to cite individually; however, I feel compelled to name several of the instructors who formed part of the Proyecto village: Patrick “Pato” Hebert and Marcia Ochoa co-taught the “Jotografía” class; Jaime Cortez, the comic book artist, writer, and editor of A la Brava: A Queer Latino/a Zine, taught “La Raza Cósmica Comix”; the writer and playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas taught the writing class “Bemba Bilingüe: Double Tonguing”; the visual artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji taught “girl-colored”; the photographer Laura Aguilar and Patrick “Pato” Hebert taught “Diseños del Deseo: Sexual Self-Imaging in Photography”; Horacio Roque Ramírez taught “Te Toca la Tinta”; Marcia Ochoa and Lebasi Lashley taught “Cyberspace for Women”; Ana Berta Campos taught a Spanish-language video class for women; and Al Lujan taught “Altarations,” an altar-making workshop. Other instructors are mentioned throughout the text. 17 pcpv, “Calendar of Events.” 18 All three of these artists died from aids shortly after these images were produced; they are remembered with love. 19 Sandoval-Sánchez, “Response to the Representation of aids,” 183. 20 This class was funded by ntfap and preceded Proyecto; however, it served as an inspirational and organizational model for Colegio and brought together individuals who would later become significant in the genesis of the organization, including Juan Rodríguez, Jesse Johnson, Valentín Aguirre, Augie Robles, Loras Ojeda, and Willy B. Chavarria, to name a few. Activism and Identity 285 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest 21 These two flyers were funded by the Department of Public Health-aids Office. 22 San Francisco hiv Prevention Planning Council and Department of Public Health aids Office, San Francisco hiv Prevention Plan, 402. 23 In certain cultural circles, particularly in many parts of Cuba, papaya is a reference to vagina. 24 Unless other wise noted, all translations are my own. In this portion of the flyer that records participants’ responses, the quotes are not translated and instead appear in the languages in which they were recorded. 25 Sabrosura never aired as a psa on local television stations but was shown at various national and international film festivals. 26 Bracho to Juana María Rodríguez, August 8, 1997. 27 pcpv, “Calendar of Events,” promotional calendar, 1994. 28 Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad, 37. 29 La Chica Boom, “Hook Up.” My translation notes are decidedly imprecise. Dedos are fingers; sobacos are armpits; mugre is filth; motavation is a neologism that draws on one of the many Spanish-language terms for marijuana, mota; besos sucios are dirty kisses. 30 Puras mamadas refers to pure bullshit, but mamada also refers to blowjobs. Los Jodidos is accurately translated as “The Fucked Peepo.” The new owners are listed as “La pura crema y neta,” which could be translated as the cream of the crop; neta can be used to signify something wonderful but also to signal the truth of something. 31 Ramos, “Dirt That Haunts,” 135. 32 La Chica Boom, “Hook Up.” 33 Ramos, “Dirt That Haunts.” Bibliography La Chica Boom. “The Hook Up/Displacement/Barhopping/ Drama Tour.” Accessed September 5, 2017. https://www.facebook .com/events/168340807031647/?acontext=%7B%22action _history%22%3A%22null%22%7D. Ferriss, Susan. “Mission Meets Castro.” San Francisco Examiner, June 1, 1997, A12. Patton, Cindy. Inventing aids. New York: Routledge, 1990. Ramos, Iván A. “The Dirt That Haunts: Looking at Esta Noche.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 16, no. 2 (2015): 135–36. doi:10.1080/15240657.2015.1038195. Rodríguez, Janelle, dir. Sabrosura. Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida (pcpv), San Francisco, 1996. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDsPB8If PzY. Rodríguez, Juana María. Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Sandoval-Sánchez, Alberto. “A Response to the Representation of aids in the Puerto Rican Arts and Literature: In the Manner of a Proposal for a Cultural 286 Juana María Rodríguez Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest Studies Project.” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 6, nos. 1–2 (1994): 181–86. San Francisco hiv Prevention Planning Council and Department of Public Health aids Office. San Francisco hiv Prevention Plan, 1997. San Francisco: Harder and Company Community Research, 1996. Yamada, Mitsuye. “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman.” Bridge: An Asian American Perspective 7, no. 1 (1979): 11–13. Activism and Identity 287 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790146/9781478009269-012.pdf by guest