Many of the girls at Central High School in Phoenix, Arizona, couldn't hide their excitement when John McCain introduced "Ramón," the Puerto Rican reaggaetonero "Daddy Yankee." From one daddy to another, McCain praised DY for being married fifteen years and for “making the right choices” in his youth. "Man of few words," Ramón said McCain was the right choice for president for his stance on immigration issues (mind you, not that Ramón has to worry about deportation like many other Latino homies), and for being "a fighter for the Hispanic community." McCain, a fighter for the Latino community? Not since Ricky Martin's performance at the George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration have progressive Puerto Ricans been so perplexed if not outright appalled. It was a career ender for Ricky, though he purportedly thought the performance would increase his appeal among the oxford button-down and Sperry top-siders crowd. The bread and circuses were captured in the video below. Many continue to sleepwalk though history, while others simply can not understand why "history is what hurts" when a reaggaetonero dispenses somnambulence with every repetitive beat of a soon to be worn postmodern lullaby. "Gasolina," indeed.
"Gasolina"
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An Interactive Blog to Accompany the Book
Bookshelf
Book Description
The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory (NYU Press, 2007) tells the story of the United States Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state. This interactive blog continues some of the discussions initiated in the book and, in the process, expands the book’s obsessions by further interrogating national conceptions of Latina and Latino forms of personhood and how these have been written on the Latino body. (The book was published by NYU Press' Sexual Cultures Series.) Irreverent, polemical, visually provocative, and hopefully fun to peruse, the interactive blog is meant to persuade and influence conversations on and about the Latino body politic. Send related images, videos, art and text to me at lazlima@gmail.com. You can get the book directly from NYU Press and Amazon.
Book Blurbs
"Through a bricolage of carefully crafted textual readings, Lima has produced a text that traces the relationship between corporeality and citizenship by marking the process by which the Latino body has become historical. Situated in moments of national and bodily crisis, his archive is decidedly precise and imaginatively expansive, metaphorically rich and politically dynamic. Drawing on texts central to third world feminism, queer studies, and Latin and Latino American literatures, this work is as central to rethinking the American literary canon as it is to an invigorating remapping of Latino Studies."
—Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley, author of Queer Latinidad
—Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley, author of Queer Latinidad
"Lima's Latino Body promises to productively disrupt the business-as-usual of critical and scholarly practice in the still-emerging field of U.S. Latino studies; it will contribute directly to the next stage in the long process of what it itself terms Latino identity's 'becoming historical' in North American cultural, political, and intellectual contexts. For this reason alone, The Latino Body could not be more welcome, or more timely."
—Ricardo L. Ortíz, Georgetown University, author of Cultural Erotics in Cuban America
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