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“Just Like AIDS”: Latinx Identity, HIV/AIDS, and the Problems and Possibilities of Analogy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2019
Abstract
In 2009, Residente, the lead singer of a well-known Latinx music group and newly appointed international ambassador for the Latino Commission on AIDS, likened Latinxs in the US to HIV/AIDS. Taking this fertile equivalence as a conceptual point of departure, this article tracks the pitfalls and possibilities of aligning these two positions, touching on the performativity of disgust, the transmission of brown affect, and economies of racialization and deracination via the exchange of viral matter. Building upon the reparative labour of critical mestizaje, which came to the fore of Latinx studies in the 1980s, I reimagine the potentiality of a “viral mestizaje,” a form of relatedness that allows for networks of intimacy, multiplicity, and reproduction that extend beyond heternormative coupling. What is at stake in the positioning of Latinxs as “just like AIDS”? What are the possibilities and problems of analogy?
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References
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69 Two examples come to mind. In their play Quinceañera (1998), written to mark the first 15 years of the American HIV/AIDS crisis, Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and Alberto Antonio Araiza reimagine the sixteenth-century invasion of the Aztec empire by Hernán Cortés and the subsequent genocide of indigenous peoples as a moment of HIV transmission in a gay club in the late twentieth century. In “My Aztlan: White Place,” a short story taken from City of God (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1994), Gil Cuadros figures his gay Chicano narrator's infection with HIV as a way to sever his allegiance to his homophobic dark-skinned family and create new kinship bonds with his white lover.
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71 Ibid., 192.