Abolición del pato: relatos cortos por Larry La Fountain-Stokes

Abolición del pato (2013)

NOVEDAD: Abolición del pato de Larry LaFountain-Stokes

¿Se desea la abolición del pato, o es el pato mismo el que quiere abolirse? En el libro de Larry La Fountain-Stokes, todo el arsenal lingüístico, erótico, pop, filosófico, quiere escenificar el juego entre la escritura y la voz, la esencia y el simulacro. Es un teatro lírico de muñecas que incluye el relajo, la reivindicación y la rabia, escenas de instrucción para un público que está en todas partes y en ninguna.

Son fragmentos de una cotidianeidad que remite torcidamente a Puerto Rico: ese lugar-pato, esa piscina insular con sus límites tan definidos por la geografía, abolidos por el pato que nada en ella. Al igual que Pedro Lemebel, La Fountain-Stokes no escatima recursos a la hora de nombrar el abecedario de una condición fantasma, y como Manuel Ramos Otero, opta en ocasiones por la veta más experimental para volar hasta el centro de la patería y convertirla en carnaval. —José Quiroga

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Escritor, profesor y performero, nació en San Juan de Puerto Rico en 1968. Su libro Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora fue publicado por la Editorial de la Universidad de Minnesota en 2009. Su colección de cuentos Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails fue publicada por la Editorial Bilingüe de Arizona (2009). La Fountain-Stokes recibió su bachillerato en artes de la Universidad de Harvard en 1991 y su maestría y doctorado de la Universidad de Columbia en Nueva York en 1999. Es catedrático asociado en la Universidad de Michigan, Ann Arbor, donde enseña en el Departamento de Lenguas y Literaturas Romances, el Departamento de Cultura Americana y el Programa de Estudios Latinos. Se especializa en estudios literarios y culturales latinoamericanos, caribeños y latinos queer/LGBT.

Disponible próximamente directo de Terranova Editores. Ya disponible por Amazon.

Circuits of Trans Electronic Drag: Talk about Fausto Fernós at Northwestern Univ.

Talk by Larry La Fountain (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

The Puerto Rican performance artist, podcaster and drag queen Fausto Fernós has been performing in drag since the early 1990s, when he started studying under Linda Montano at the University of Texas, Austin. He transformed his drag cabaret Feast of Fools, created in Chicago in 1998, into an award-winning podcast in 2005, now known as Feast of Fun. Fernós and his partner Marc Felion have recorded over 1,750 hour-long shows, many with recurrent guest visitors. The show regularly features drag queens and trans women and is accompanied by extensive drag video production and occasional live drag appearances in Chicago. Numerous American drag and trans pioneers and stars such as Holly Woodlawn, Lady Bunny, Hedda Lettuce, Coco Peru, RuPaul, Kate Bornstein, and Heklina have been interviewed, as well as more recent drag celebrities such as many of the contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race. In this presentation I discuss the drag and performance career of Fernós and historicize drag and trans presence on the Feast of Fun. I also analyze the transformation from public access TV programs and live shows to podcasts and YouTube/Internet videos; map the complex intersections between drag and trans experience; and discuss the political use of technology and its intersection with live and recorded performance, as projects destined to promote Latina/o and LGBT acceptance and visibility in the U.S. and abroad.

Kresge 2-301
Northwestern University
1880 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208

CONTACT: Joanna V. Maravilla-Cano +1 847 467 3980
joanna@northwestern.edu

Sponsored by the Latina & Latino Studies Program, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Facebook event here.

Sonia Sotomayor and the Changing Face of Latina/o America

What does it mean to be a person of Latin American descent in the United States in 2013? For one, it means being part of an oxymoron: the majority minority, an increasingly growing population marked by the great success of very particular individuals accompanied by overall persistent social challenges such as poverty, lack of representation in many spheres of power, and aggressive harassment, particularly for the undocumented. This paradox is worthy of sustained attention, precisely of the sort we offer in many of the undergraduate and graduate Latina/o Studies classes we teach at the University of Michigan. How can we go about understanding this?

The publication in January of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir My Beloved World sheds light on some of these complexities. In her book, Justice Sotomayor traces her life experiences in great detail, from her birth to Puerto Rican parents in the Bronx in 1954, her educational experiences in Catholic parochial schools and later at Princeton and Yale Law School, to her experiences as an Assistant District Attorney in NY under Robert Morgenthau, her life in private practice in the law firm of Pavia and Harcourt, and her eventual confirmation as a judge, first at a federal District Court, then at the Court of Appeals, and in 2009 to the Supreme Court. Her memoir is filled with lucid details and moving anecdotes about the benefits of affirmative action, which she wholeheartedly endorses; the health challenges of living with type 1 diabetes; and her difficulties at successfully maintaining a personal relationship, which led to her divorce from Kevin Noonan. Sotomayor’s book is an engrossing read filled with inspiring stories and profound insights about the meanings of a life well lived. It is a profoundly optimistic story that emphasizes the importance of public service, of helping others and living in community, be it that of your friends, family, or the nation-state. Fiercely insistent in her non-partisanship as an independent voter, we can see in many of her positions a historic link to causes espoused by the Democratic Party, to which she also owes her judicial career: she first became a judge due to the nomination of a Democrat, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York, and was appointed to the Supreme Court after being nominated by President Barack Obama.

Sotomayor’s story is enormously inspiring but it is sobering to realize how unusual it is; how few Latinas/os there actually are at the upper echelons of power in Washington, D.C., in spite of the fact that the entire Mexican-American Southwest has been part of the U.S. since 1848, that Puerto Rico has been a colony since 1898, and that Cubans have been arriving in large numbers since 1959. Professor John A. García’s book Latino Politics in America: Community, Culture, and Interests (revised edition 2012) discusses this uneven electoral integration; he includes a list of the Mexican-American and Cuban-American men who have served on the Senate, listing only four, the first three from New Mexico, plus Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey); we can now add the dramatic rise of Cuban-American Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in 2013. (Fortunately, Latinas/os have been better represented in the House.) Professor García, who is a faculty associate of our Latina/o Studies Program, has spent his life analyzing the role of Latinas/os in American politics, be it at the local, regional, state, national, or international level, nudging his fellow political scientists to engage with this matter in a serious way. In his book he offers a nuanced story of the many challenges faced and of many strategies for effectively overcoming some of these.

Sonia Sotomayor is just one of many wise Latinas to leave her mark in the United States, as we learn from Professor María Cotera’s groundbreaking book Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González and the Poetics of Culture, published in 2008. As Cotera describes, González’s efforts at documenting South Texas history and folklore led her to write books such as Dew on the Thorn and the novel Caballero (co-authored with Margaret Eimer); her political interests led to her participation in the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in the 1930s and 40s and later motivated her struggle to institute bilingual education for Spanish-speaking students with her husband Edmundo E. Mireles. Professor Cotera highlights how in spite of her fervor and talent, González (1904-1983) was frequently unable to find publishers for her books, and how it was only recently (in the 1990s) that some of these pioneering texts have seen the light.

The struggle for social justice embodied by Sonia Sotomayor’s life has impacts on our own Ann Arbor campus, for example in the Coalition for Tuition Equality’s efforts to achieve in-state tuition for undocumented immigrant students who have graduated from a Michigan high school but currently have to pay out-of-state fees. The Latina/o Studies Program is an active member of this coalition and has lent its voice at Board of Regents’ meetings and through letter writing, for example in support of Kellogg Community College’s affirmative measures on this matter. Latina/o Studies alumna Carla Fernandez (Class of 2011) works with many of these youth at the Voces Community and Cultural Center in Battle Creek, Michigan, before they enroll in KCC. Her work is a close-to-home example of how activist efforts can lead to actual change: how the positive labor of transforming American society happens at a local level as much as at the national one.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Associate Professor of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s Studies, and director of the Latina/o Studies Program. He can be reached at lawrlafo@umich.edu.

Published in American Culture News (Spring 2013), Department of American Culture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (page 13).

Luis Alfaro Loves Me! (The Sweetest Friend)

The extraordinary Chicano playwright Luis Alfaro wrote the kindest words for my birthday this week! Thank you so much, Luis, ¡eres muy dulce! Luis talks about our participation in a march at the LLEGÓ conference in 1997. (The National Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization, better known as LLEGÓ, sponsored its conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico from October 9 to 13 of that year, as José Quiroga discusses in his book Tropics of Desire). Luis also mentions a panel held as part of the Latina/o Focus Group Pre-Conference on Monday, August 2, 2010, before the ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) annual conference held at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles, CA. (That was the same day I got a $185 jaywalking ticket downtown while going to the open mike at the Company of Angels located at the historic Alexandria hotel! The very handsome, African-American motorcycle-riding policeman who stopped us was not persuaded by our argument that we were from out of town. I was supposed to read some fiction at the open mike but ended up offering some stand-up comedy instead.)

I am moved my Luis's words, and also by the knowledge that we have known each other for so long and have coincided in such different places! My favorite memory of Luis is when he picked me from the audience (or perhaps I volunteered?) to be his assistant in his performance at the CLAGS Crossing Borders U.S. Latina/o Queer Performance Conference held at the University of Texas, Austin, February 2 to 4, 2001. I was supposed to serve shots of tequila that Luis would gulp down periodically. He soon caught me sipping the tequila myself and stealing the show! (For a discussion of this conference and of Luis's Twinkie-eating segue, see Jill Dolan's review "Remembering Beyond the Self: Crossing Borders 2001" in the CLAGS Summer 2001 newsletter, available here.)

¡Gracias, Luis, por tantos años de amistad y tan lindas memorias!

This is what Luis wrote this week:

Who is the happiest academic I have ever met? I would have to say the most wonderful Larry La Fountain at the University of Michigan. A specialist in Latin-American, American, English and LGBT issues, Larry is his own special person and I always get the feeling that no one enjoys life more than he does.

In academic settings, he seems to break down the walls of the academy to create spaces for others to be truly themselves. I haven’t seen him in a long time and I have only danced around the edges of his spotlight a few times. I can remember a human rights march through the streets of Puerto Rico sometime in the mid 90’s and watching Larry as if he was marching through the streets of Disneyland.

A few years ago at a conference in Century City, I was on a panel, and people were slowly dutifully streaming in, kind of stoic and reverential, and it was quiet and there were not enough chairs and all of sudden (super hero music) Larry strolls in, not on the panel, but he could have been the Broadway producer of it, and he YELLS out, “Oye, why are we acting like we are in church? Everybody grab a chair and come in, all the way in, there are seats down in the front, this is going to be very fun, I am really looking forward to it! Hurry up, let’s not waste any time, let’s start, the Latinos are here, we have to bring the fun!” It was a kind of call to action by way of party invitation. I love that about him. Sweet, funny, smart and so very full of life. Happy Birthday, Larry La Fountain, wherever you are! — with Larry La Fountain.

Viveca Vázquez en el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico

This promises to be a fantastic series of events! Viveca Vázquez is a leading postmodern choreographer and dancer in Puerto Rico that has collaborated over her career with many of the most important dancers, actors, and performance artists on the island. (Many of her performers have gone on to have stellar careers of their own.) The museum is holding the first full retrospective of her work. Videos of many of her performances can be accessed through the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics' Digital Video Archive.

Year of the Queer at Oberlin College!

Bravo for Oberlin College! I am very excited to be participating in this fantastic series!