Raquel Gutiérrez is a critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator whose subjects center on queerness and Latinx identity in the Southwest. As part of NMSU’s Nelson-Boswell Reading Series, Gutiérrez will be reading from her 2022 book of essays, “Brown Neon”, Friday night at 7:30 in the Creative Media Theatre inside Milton Hall on the NMSU campus. Scott Brocato recently spoke with Gutiérrez about “Brown Neon” and its themes.
Scott Brocato:
First of all, how did you get started on the path to being a writer?
Raquel Gutiérrez:
I remember in fifth grade we were asked to write essays for a contest that was being sponsored by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles County. I went to Catholic school, and so this was fifth grade, and I didn't know that no one else could write well enough in the sense that I didn't know that writing was special. And so I ended up winning second place in this contest, and that sort of shocked me into recognition of some sort of ability that I had that I didn't know wasn't just something that everybody had.
Scott Brocato:
And which authors have most influenced you?
Raquel Gutiérrez:
I would say people like Ruben Martinez and Wanda Coleman, Marisela Norte, Charles Bukowski--a lot of Los Angeles city-renowned writers or folks that maybe are more familiar to people from Southern California.
Scott Brocato:
Let's talk about "Brown Neon”, your debut essay collection. It's described on your website as “part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree”. Expand on that.
Raquel Gutiérrez:
Sure. So you know when you're asked to come up with a description for your book, I couldn't help but call on different writing traditions. And for myself, mining my own personal history is also mining my experiences with art and different creative ecosystems that I come out of in Southern California and the southwest, and feeling like a lot of the experiences I had with visual art performance art was very much a way of making myself of self-formation. And so using art as a way of telling the story of myself and what I've learned, just living in the desert, I learned from artists making work under very sort of stressful time these last ten years, I would say.
Scott Brocato:
As you started putting it together around COVID?
Raquel Gutiérrez:
I started putting it together shortly before COVID, and it started to kind of focus in the period of COVID just writing and rewriting. And also the urgency of not sure what COVID was in the time I was putting together my collection, and so sort of writing with a particularly new charge of urgency.
Scott Brocato:
Talk about the process of putting together a collection of essays: selection, and the order that you put them in. How important is that?
Raquel Gutiérrez:
It was important. I wanted to structure the reading experience around the feeling one has passing through time and space, and nothing like passing through time and space like a road trip, and so the book is structured in that way, and very much calling on the connection between Southern California to Central Texas. And no better way to connect that than the Interstate 10.
I'm from Los Angeles. I'm finding myself that I say “the” a lot before the name of highways, so it's a little internal joke I'm having right now. (Laughs) But the 10...the 10 as a way to sort of tell the story between different communities and different artists and different sort of generational connections that I'm making on the eve of losing one of my mentors. And the book is essentially starting out with a visit to a dying mentor: the late, great activist and writer Jeanne Códova, who took me under her wing and taught me what it was to be a Latinx butch lesbian; and how to take these, I guess, you know, these sort of oppressive impulses that happen to different aspects of the LGBTQ community and finding ways to sort of turn that around and and tell the story of our existence.
And so it starts out with a grieving period, sort of being unmoored by loss and grief and then coming to Tucson and becoming unmoored again by a romance gone awry, and trying to find a sense of self through different artistic communities in and around Tucson.
Scott Brocato:
Well, you'll be reading from this Friday night. You'll be here in town for the Nelson-Boswell Reading Series at 7:30 in Milton Hall (on the NMSU campus). You will be reading from "Brown Neon”, correct?
Raquel Gutiérrez:
Correct.
Scott Brocato:
Can you read us a passage from it now and set it up first?
Raquel Gutiérrez:
Of course. Yes. So a lot of the sections in the collection, the essays, are punctuated by the year in which a lot of this takes place. This is the beginning of an essay called “Do Migrants Dream of Blue Barrels?”, 2017.
I live in Tucson. People tell me they love the images they see on my various social media feeds or the mysterious moonscape desert that surrounds the city. Many of the friends, acquaintances, and strangers who follow me on social media live along both coasts. So of course, it gives me great pleasure to ignite their awe for the uncontainable beauty of the Sonoran Desert, even if from afar.
For me, being in this desert on any given morning or early evening means giving over to the expansive possibilities of the landscape. It has offered new perspectives when I'm stuck on a writing project, stepping out into any number of trails and parks and contemplating the day's ebbs and flows, whether it's the way the light moves across the shallow valleys of Gates Pass before sunset, or the way the temperature surprisingly drops ten degrees when your trail takes you into the shadowy parts sitting below Pima Canyon.
The infinity of surprise that lives here is hard to deny. But as 115 to 120° becomes the new normal for southern Arizona, indicating a climate change that may not be reversible in years to come, there is another thing one cannot deny: any slight carelessness on your part in the desert will kill you. That fact made itself clear on a ride along outing with Guillermo and Steven, two volunteers for the regional organization Humane Borders, Fronteras Compassivas. As soon as I climbed into their water replenishment truck, I was told that if we broke down in Arivaca, an hour and 15 minutes south of Tucson, we would be exposed to the same conditions as the Latinx migrants we were trying to help. I stared, dead eyed behind my Ray Bans at Guillermo. We would never be exposed to the same conditions as migrants making this trek.
Scott Brocato:
All right, that's from “Brown Neon”.
Before we go, I have to ask you a final question about President Trump and his recent policies that that he's been doing, affecting the trans community--not that this applies, but...the gay community: what are your thoughts on what has happened so far in the past couple of weeks?
Raquel Gutiérrez:
Well, Scott, you mentioned the word “community”, and I think transgender people, migrants, transgender migrants, are very much part of the community that I belong to and I live in that are important, and those are members of my community that I'm committed to supporting and finding ways in offering the various forms of shelter and support.
And so I'm really just trying to shore up my own inner resources as well as my own external resources to fight against these policies and these policy changes. And to also fight against my own sense of fear, and to find ways to activate and actualize the support. So it's a, it's a... yeah, it's a really charged time right now. And it really hurts my heart and spirit to see members of my community just being targeted. So I urge folks to just educate themselves, and that transgender people have nothing to do with the price of eggs at the grocery store.
