The queer digital touch of racial sight

Abstract

Michael Jason Enriquez digitally altered celebrity headshots to make the celebrities look like they are wearing chola make-up. The “cholafied” headshot circulated on a Tumblr account, which at its most popular, in 2012 and 2013, spread to over 160 countries and had half a million page views, over 20,000 Tumblr followers, 90,000 reblogs, and at least 60,000 shares on Facebook. Attending to the sensory, affective, and historical rituals hidden in the haptic register of this quotidian digital archive, the author argues, insinuates and approximates one aspect of what racial seeing feels like in our contemporary moment.

Keywords:

• race
• digital
• chola
• make-up
• feminine
• affect
• visual culture

Note on contributor

Monica Huerta is a Link-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Her work has appeared or will appear in J19: The Journal for Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Critical Analysis of Law: An International and Interdisciplinary Law Review, and American Literature. In the fall of 2019, she will join the Princeton faculty as an assistant professor in English and American Studies. She is currently working two manuscript projects. The first, Ghosts Seen in the Law: Photography and the Problem of Expression in 19^thCentury America, offers a critical historical account of the quandaries of property and personhood that new instantaneous cameras complicated in the adjudication of expressions and authorship in America. The second project, Face Poetics, asks a deceptively simple question of the long history of studying and reading faces: why do we think we are reading when we look at a face?

Notes

1 The Tumblr is newly active, after several years of dormancy. When I first took an interest in cholafied.com, in 2014, it was dormant. During the time it was inactive, it was nonetheless possible to find scores of cholafied images by simply searching for the word with a search engine.

2 Please also see “About,” MisterMichaelJason.com.

3 I am indebted, of course, to Eve Sedgwick’s (2003) work here in exhuming the generative interstices where the affective and haptic meet.

4 Sianne Ngai’s (2017) deconstruction of the “comic irritation” that gimmicks incite was deeply instructive as I worked through the aesthetics of cholafied.com.

5 Perhaps no account of photographic form has been more influential, and elusive, than Roland Barthes’ (1980) meditation on photography in Camera Lucida. Barthes offers in Camera Lucida that photographic form is characterized by the stadium and the punctum. He introduces the punctum of any image as what catches, what hurts, what wounds a viewer about an image.

6 There are too many excellent critics who have produced work in this vein to name them all. These are only some of them: Daphne A. Brooks (2006), Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910; Saidiya Hartman (1997), Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America; Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011), The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality; Leigh Raiford (2013), Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle; Gwendolyn Du Bois Shaw (2006), Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century; Shawn Michelle Smith (2004), Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and Visual Culture; Krista A. Thompson (2015), Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice; Irene Tucker (2012), The Moment of Racial Sight; Maurice Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (2012), Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity.

7 I draw judiciously from Tina Campt and other theorists of racial seeing and Blackness here, even as the category “Mexican American” has its own history as racial categorization (and not) in the United States. I am persuaded by the work of scholars like Natalia Molina (2014), who has shown the ways in which what she calls “racial scripts” have historically been recycled among groups to secure their social exclusion and dispossession. One such powerful script and method has been criminalization. In our contemporary moment, that takes the shape of the logics and practices of mass incarceration. The status of Mexican Americans as a distinct “race,” like their status as rightful citizens, has been uneven and the source of legal and political battles, from the nineteenth century to the present. But the possibility of criminalization for Mexicans has nonetheless been historically consistent, from mid-nineteenth-century episodes of “fraudulent” Spanish land grants, the origin of the term “illegal alien” with the new criminalization of immigration in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, the mass deportations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, and on into the late-twentieth-century drug war’s assault on communities of color, especially those filled with African Americans and Latinos. As with African Americans, criminality has worked in lock step with racialization to secure Mexican Americans’ dispossession in the modern United States. It is for these reasons that I use both the terms “criminality” and “racialized” in this essay, with full knowledge that originary moments of racial sight far precede modern criminal logics, that the tools of racialization can be more subtle than the logics of criminality, and that African diasporic histories and Mexican American diasporic histories are not analogous in obvious ways. Still, it is my sense that that the conceptual borrowing I do here is justified, in order to propose that the criminality assumed of chola style is a reasonable place from which to propose connections to racial sight in our contemporary moment. In addition to Molina, please also see Ian Haney Lopez (1996), White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race.

8 For examples of the Tumblr’s reception as “hilarious,” please see these: emgn.com, “22 Celebs Got ‘Cholafied’ And It Is Totally Hilarious. The Queen Will Have You in Stitches!”; Magic 92.5.com, “29 Celebs Get ‘Cholafied’! HILARIOUS!”; Latina.com, “See What These 11 Celebs Would Look Like As Cholas.”

9 For a few of these examples of outrage against racist Snapchat filters, please see these: Hope King (2016), “Snapchat Under Fire for Another ‘Racist’ Filter,” Cnn.com; Robinson Meyer (2016), “The Repeated Racism of Snapchat,” TheAtlantic.com; Shandukani Mulaudzi (2017), “Let’s Be Honest: Snapchat Filters Are a Little Racist,” Huffingtonpost.com.

10 For a fuller exploration of this cinematic and cultural trope see, for example, Richard Mora (2011), “Abjection and the Cinematic Cholo: The Chicano Gang Stereotype in Sociohistoric Context.”

11 Please see, for example, Edward Flores (2014), God’s Gangs: Barrio Ministry, Masculinity, and Gang Recovery; Abigail Kolb (2012), “Are You Down?: Power Relations and Gender Reconstruction among Latina Gang Members in Los Angeles”; D. A. Lopez and Patricia O’Donnell Brummett (2003), “Gang Membership and Acculturation: ARSMA-II and Choloization”; James Diego Vigil (2002), A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega-City; Susan A. Phillips (2001), “Gallo’s Body: Decoration and Damnation in the Life of a Chicano Gang Member”; James Diego Vigil (1988), Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California. There are also many autobiographies that take after this style of contextualization. For examples of these, please see Luis J. Rodriguez (1994), Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in East L.A.; Jorja Leap (2012), Jumped In: What Gangs Taught me about Violence, Drugs, Love, and Redemption; Freddy Negrete (2016), Smile Now, Cry Later: Guns, Gangs, and Tattoos: My Life in Black and Gray.

12 Hector Silva’s work serves as important context and antidote for some of the damaging work the images of cholafied.com perform. In much of his work, Silva depicts queer cholos embracing one another, holding hands, kissing. His work, like Chicana art of the 1980s and 1990s that Laura Perez (2007) describes as “call[ing] attention to both the body as social, and to the social body that constitutes it as such, specifically through gendered and racialized histories of dress, labor (in domestic service and the garment industry), immigration, urban dwelling, academic discourse, art production, and religious belief” (31). As Richard T. Rodriguez (2006) notes, Silva uses fantasy to queer the homeboy aesthetic. Silva’s work offers an important counterpoint to the heteronormativity presumed of cholo/a subcultures by the “hilarity” that passes through the channels of homophobia and transphobia.

13 Rebecca F. Plante’s (2015) thinking on make-up as part of everyday life was helpful for me here.

14 On the dual nature of tattoos, please see also Phillips (2001).

15 In Nicole Fleetwood’s (2015) account, it is Black women who primarily carry the affective and economic weight for and about the imprisoned family members. And it is the photographs that family members can take inside the walls of the jail that continue to be a financial burden on the women who purchase the photographs for themselves and their family members who are imprisoned. Fleetwood also pays particular attention to the various emotional pathways that the photographs evoke and are a part of, in part through close readings of them, and in part through paying attention, at Elizabeth Edwards’ (2012) and others’ suggestion, to the ways that the photographs are displayed, when, and by whom.

16 Terence Turner’s “The Social Skin” (1980) helpfully articulates the ways in which “the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well. … The surface of the body, as the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual; becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted, and bodily adornment … becomes the language through which it is expressed.” His model of “social skin,” thinks of the existence of “boundar[ies] between ‘the individual actor and other actors’ problematized by queer thinking through of the subject as always already enmeshed in and disarticulable from environment. But he also offers social skin as “model[ing] [an] internal, psychic diaphragm.” I’ve been influenced by his thinking that skin and social skin have access to registers of both the individual and social that are subtle, although I do not take up his Freudian paradigm of ego/superego.

17 David Parsi, Mark Paterson, and Jason Edward Archer (2017) have recently put forward a haptic media studies “manifesto” to bring together work that is attentive to the ways in which technology like haptic interface systems interact with and shift the norms of sensory experience. This is the work that I am drawing on here, by being attentive to the material context and experiential limitations of my reading of the haptic register of these images.

18 The utopian dreams that live in some forms of ideological critique give way here to more quiet hopes embedded in the un-ideal world on the surface of these images.