In May 2009, René Pérez Joglar (aka Residente), the Puerto Rican lead singer of Latino urban music group Calle 13, accepted the position of international ambassador for the Latino Commission on AIDS. At the fourteenth annual Cielo Latino gala benefit hosted at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City, he took to the stage to address the largely Latinx audience armed with a rather intriguing speech:

Residente neither asks his audience to consider the similarities between constructions of “Latinx” and “HIV/AIDS” in America, nor questions whether there is some implicit link between the two; rather, he posits their interrelatedness as self-evident, indexed by the constellation of discriminations aimed at Latinx groups in the US. Taken on its own, the conflation of Latinx identity with HIV/AIDS is worthy of greater consideration and remains uncharted terrain in the diverse fields of American studies, Latinx studies, and HIV/AIDS discourse. But he moves this analogy a step further, to a conceptual plane brimming with untapped potential. For Residente, it is the coalescence of people in multicultural space, which in turn produces the hybridization, or creolization, of race, a coalescence historically defined by transgressive sexual contact, that positions Latinxs in an economy of association in which they become defined by and through mixture, transmission and contamination, in which they may become “just like AIDS.”

Why should the blending and blurring of categories of race chime so decisively with HIV/AIDS? I contend that the answer lies in the observation that racial and cultural ambiguity invariably extends into another area of concern: the celebration and negation of mixed blood. More than any other trope, blood-mixing has resonated in twentieth-century Latinx discourse, positioned as central to the construction of mestizo/a – “mixed” – consciousness in the Americas. Indeed Mexican philosopher and politician José Vasconcelos famously anointed Latin Americans la raza cósmica (‘the cosmic race’), a diverse, united and durable ethnic soup impregnated with the blood of all the world's races.Footnote ² But, as Chéla Sandoval asserts, mestizo/a is not merely an ethnic signifier indexing a state of racial ambiguity or inbetweenness; it is a “tactical subjectivity with the capacity to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be moved.”Footnote ³ By the close of the century, mixed blood had become, in this sense, an embodied politics and a contested legacy, wielded as a rallying point for activism, manoeuvred to tactically link contemporary Latinx communities to a set of repressed and occluded nationalist and indigenous histories.Footnote ⁴ This narrative intensified with, and was complicated by, the meteoric rise of Chicana feminism in the 1980s, reaching its zenith with the publication of Gloria Anzaldúa's groundbreaking Borderlands/La Frontera in 1987. Anzaldúa's scholarship resonated, and by the end of the decade, as Lucy Lippard notes, the academy had authoritatively embraced mixture as “the central metaphor, the active component of the intercultural process.”Footnote ⁵ Yet as primarily Latinx academics and cultural producers were reflecting on this sanguineous subject matter, HIV/AIDS was already in the offing, a condition engendered by the circulation of infected bodily fluids: the depositing of semen, the ingestion of breast milk, the mixing of blood.

This article considers what it means, what it could mean, to contract a blood-borne virus when your blood is always already contoured by centuries of rhetoric, discourse, legislation and activism, censured and fetishized in equal measure. Much has been written on the segregation of races on account of fallacies of polluting blood; the blood of gay men has also been maligned and criminalized, as denoted by high-profile restrictions on blood donation by “men-who-have-sex-with-men” (MSM). Surveying the US blood-donor questionnaire, in which potential donors are asked “are you a male who has had sexual contact with another male, even once, since 1977,” Jeffrey Bennett draws lines of connection between blood-as-race taxonomies (tied to reproduction and national citizenship and used to rail against miscegenation) and blood-as-sexuality analogies (infected blood as an indicator of sexual behaviour, a stand-in for a diseased “queer” identity). “Just as ‘one drop’ of black blood was enough to rhetorically contaminate a white body,” he ventures, “a minute amount of queer blood (if any) is needed to subvert the reproductive nature of the community. In the discourse of the twentieth century, ‘one drop’ is not very far apart from ‘one time since 1977’.”Footnote ⁶ Despite the persuasiveness of this conjecture, and the proliferation of queer-of-colour critique that has emerged in the past two decades, few commentators have questioned how blood – as a material and rhetorical substance that indexes, and even brings into being, racial and sexual identities – signifies for gay men of colour after the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, in the first fifteen years of HIV/AIDS in the US (1981–96), before the advent of life-extending antiretroviral drugs, various self-proclaimed gay Latino writers, artists and performers complicated their already knotty mediations of mixed/biracial identity by imagining the assimilation of HIV into “brown(ed)” bloodstreams as a facilitator of racial interpenetration, revision and cultural confrontation.Footnote ⁷ Although these cultural producers often mired the transfer of HIV in wider narratives of colonization, historical (s)exploitation and the viral genocides that decimated indigenous populations in the Americas, they also reimagined the virus as an agent of transformation, a form of queer legacy that could potentially defuse the heteronormative imperatives which attend the reproduction of race. I have termed this process “viral mestizaje,” insofar as “this new conceptual coordinate reassesses the ways that bodies can relate to each other and be related by blood, without (unproblematically) invoking or privileging heteronormalized consanguineous filiation, the tacitly linear flow of blood between generations.”Footnote ⁸ I claim an affinity between mestizaje – the Spanish term for miscegenation and cultural syncretism – and HIV transmission because both processes illuminate modes of often sexual, often obscured, human interaction, rhizomatic bonds forged by the transference of blood (or viral matter in blood) and other seminal fluids between bodies. Furthermore, by sharing a single virus, racially discordant bodies can be brought to bear on each other, affecting how subjects access a specific racial identity in this moment.

Considering HIV/AIDS as a form of mestizaje, as a way of being, or rather becoming, “mixed-blood” (insofar as HIV transmission involves the relocation of viral matter from one bloodstream to another), radically critiques identity formations based on purity. And whilst bodily fluids infected with HIV have historically, and phobically, connoted impurity, critical mestizaje actively rejects this stigmatization. As María Lugones asserts, mestizaje “defies control through simultaneously asserting the impure, curdled multiple state and rejecting fragmentation into pure parts.”Footnote ⁹ Commentators may baulk at the idea of HIV-positive people embracing impurity as liberatory, but this belies the potential of such a manoeuvre. I am particularly interested, therefore, in how impurity and mixture have been approached, and deployed, as celebratory by queer Latinx cultural producers, as a means to eschew and explode rigid categories of identity that fail to encompass racial and cultural hybridity and sexual multiplicity. Indeed, my conceptualization of “viral mestizaje,” which forms a larger project, is contingent on redemptive readings of not only miscegenation and cultural amalgamation but also the radical structures of feeling, newly imagined communities and quasi-kinship units that the transference of HIV could or can engender. As Tim Dean suggests, “HIV transmission has the potential to create social bonds which are both symbolic and material.”Footnote ¹⁰

Despite a reparative reading, to be “like a plague” and “just like AIDS” inevitably suggests a problematic and anxiety-provoking slippage, a displacement between signs that must remain sealed and detached, distanced via a rhetorical move that enshrines separation. After all, Residente employs similes, not metaphors, preserving an almost-but-not-quite level of abstraction; the “like” seems to deny the possibility of the Latinx with HIV/AIDS as a discrete, autonomous subject. Furthermore, the terms up for comparison are always already equivocal. Who counts as “Latinx” when Latinxs can hail from any race, religion or class, and do not share a common gender identity, sexuality, nationality or language? Indeed, for prominent Chicana feminists, such as Norma Alarcón and Chéla Sandoval, Latinxs sink into the interstices of binary logic, such as black/white, foreign/domestic, self/other; they constitute an “identity-in-difference”Footnote ¹¹ furnished with an “oppositional consciousness.”Footnote ¹² Likewise, we may well ask how something can be “like AIDS” when AIDS is not a tangible thing, but rather a dearth of immunity, a syndrome defined by the accumulation of a diverse yet individualized roster of opportunistic infections and diseases.

I contend that “the Latinx” becomes “like AIDS” at the end of the twentieth century precisely because both positions are approached as unruly, in excess of easy definition. (It is worth noting that although Residente is speaking from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, he is clearly mindful of the history of HIV/AIDS, reflecting on his own experiences with the virus.) To be “like AIDS” is to be apprehended as a recipient and agent of contamination, as a problem to be eradicated. In this article I argue that mixed blood emerges as an important nexus between Latinx and HIV/AIDS because, as Residente asserts, Latinx populations “have been able to mingle as a people … have been able to take in all races, all colors.” The spectre of mixed blood that haunts, and sometimes aggrandizes, both signifying surfaces opens up a space for further reflection on issues such as taboo sexual behaviour, mixed or “brown” identities, and alternative regimes of kinship that emerge under punitive hegemonic regimes such as colonialism and heteropatriarchy. This, in turn, facilitates a more nuanced consideration of how “mixed blood” could signify for Latinxs with HIV/AIDS in the US. I am, above all, interested in the problems and possibilities of analogy rather than invested in a master interpretation that rides roughshod over the inherent contradictions manifest in this configuration. Using Residente's speech as a point of departure, this article traces just some of the ways that “the Latinx” and “HIV/AIDS” cohere: as nodes in an affective economy, accruing meaning via sticky associations; as a form of “viral mestizaje”; as “brown” states that recuperate and reenergize notions of impurity and racial amalgamation. I will then turn to the work of queer Mexican author Pedro Bustos Aguilar, whose writing exemplifies the complex negotiation of race, nationality, sexuality and serostatus in America.

In Residente's analogy, Latinxs become “just like AIDS” due to the construction and circulation of specific anxieties, emanating from an undefined general public to adhere to Latinx demographics: “for some, we are.” This attempt to secure Latinx identity, to fix “the Latinx” as a knowable entity, open to categorization and surveillance whilst draining this emergence of any Latinx agency (the declarative “we are” conjoined to, subservient to, the misrecognition of “some”) is something to keep in mind. It is prudent, I suggest, to consider this rhetorical mechanism as an example of what Sara Ahmed terms the performativity of disgust. All emotions, for Ahmed, are an effect and residue of movement and contact: they flow, transgress and enact through transmission.Footnote ¹³ Emotions are performative insofar as they extend via reiteration, borne upon the reassertion of previous narratives that adhere to objects and signs in the present. As Judith Butler asserts, “performative ‘acts’ must be repeated to become efficacious.”Footnote ¹⁴ By this logic, emotions are meaningful because they can be depleted and endlessly replenished; emotions amass and are engendered by memories, are reliant on previous emotional responses, just as present narratives are contingent on past narratives that accumulate, laminate, forge new contours and persist. Disgust, therefore, is not an innate state housed within and transmitted by a specific subject, but an effect of (nonlinear) temporality. “Performativity depends upon the sedimentation of the past,” Ahmed insists; disgust “both lags behind the object from which it recoils, and generates the object in the very event of recoiling.”Footnote ¹⁵ In other words, emotions circulate, detach and reattach, affecting the surfaces and figures that they encounter, bringing these surfaces into being through these encounters.

But disgust is not merely an effect of accumulation, a stockpile of past anxieties. Disgust is also conditional, accruing value, potency and meaning as part of affective economies that function via association and exchange. Just as capital acquires surplus (and spurious) value as an effect of the movement between currency and commodities, “the movement between signs or objects converts into affect.”Footnote ¹⁶ And, like capital, the processes by which disgust emerges are invariably concealed, grafted onto constitutive objects as properties of that specific object rather than as an effect of conversion, circulation and the slippage between porous and viscid signs. Ahmed likens this subterfuge to commodity fetishism insofar as the object of disgust – the brown-skinned Latinx, say, or person with HIV/AIDS, or indeed both together – is held up as the root cause of that disgust: the histories that necessarily attend the construction of emotion are relegated and even erased.Footnote ¹⁷ It is clear that affect theory has a social component that engenders meaningful antiracist, anti-homophobic destigmatization; to position the Latinx or person with HIV/AIDS (or Latinx person with HIV/AIDS) as “simply one nodal point in the economy [of emotions], rather than its origin and destination,”Footnote ¹⁸ is emancipatory, reassessing the culpability of bodies made conspicuous – through stigma, skin colour, or the incubation of a virus – to provoke a sense of dis-ease, to impinge on the well-being of others.

To approach disgust as part of an affective economy illuminates the conceptual conflation of abject signifiers. This is because circulation is invariably facilitated by intimate contact between objects, figures and signs. After all, contagion literally translates as “together touching.” But it is not just proximity between surfaces that engender the creation and transmission of disgust; for Ahmed, it is the condition of these surfaces that is significant: a sticky surface, for instance, may produce revulsion, just as revulsion may endow a surface with a certain stickiness. Something that sticks, that can adhere without consent or purpose, arouses anxiety precisely because it worries the tenuous line between (agential) self and other. As Jean-Paul Sartre notes, “to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity,”Footnote ¹⁹ to risk, in other words, debilitating the robust, autonomous (default white male) body by exposing it to a state that defies easy categorization, that is neither solid nor liquid, that oozes and clings – itself a feminized analogy – rather than temporarily flowing over and, crucially, away. Yet stickiness also has an important temporal component. Ahmed states,

Stickiness may well be the property of a specific object, but stickiness becomes disgusting because of previous associations that are recalled in the present. Furthermore, when figures adhere, this (literal and figurative) stickiness may be transferred, enacting upon a now imbricated plane, charging it with new meaning and affective potency. As Ahmed ascertains, stickiness is bound up in forms of relationality.Footnote ²¹ After all, becoming sticky invariably involves an intimate encounter and stickiness has little meaning unless it is qualified by contact with another surface, since stickiness is invariably aligned with touch rather than other sensory modes. I contend that, for Residente, the “sticky” relationship between “the Latinx” and “HIV/AIDS” – the ability of these states to adhere – relies upon several levels of abstraction, in which emotions oscillate between these signs via the conduit of “mixed blood” (I will return to this idea shortly) but also move backwards along a chain of signification.

It is patently obvious, for example, that the anxieties that attach to HIV/AIDS rely upon existing associations and conjecture, which in turn work to manoeuvre AIDS as a highly metaphorical disorder, a cipher imbibing, and coming into being through, multiple connotations.Footnote ²² As Douglas Crimp famously pronounced in the first decade of the epidemic, “AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices.”Footnote ²³ In the first wave of scholarship attending to HIV/AIDS in America, several critics mapped the epidemic onto a history of moral panics; Sander L. Gilman, for instance, excavates the points of connection between representations of people with AIDS (PWAs) and cultural depictions of “syphilis-sufferers” in the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁴ Similarly, HIV/AIDS, as Leo Bersani notes in his influential article ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1987), always already plays host to prior anxieties over sexual excess, undergirded by rampant homophobia, which in turn indexes a tacit misogyny:

The slippages in this passage are certainly telling. Disgust cascades between signs that, in turn, adhere to each other: promiscuity moves from cause (of infection) to symptom (of moral turpitude); AIDS becomes legible by and through its proximity to, its likeness to, earlier sexually transmitted diseases. Notably, gay men are vilified precisely because they purportedly veer uncomfortably towards the feminine rather than away (eschewing separation and hierarchies rooted in naturalized sexual difference), cast as endlessly penetrated and penetrable receptacles: passive, castrated, inert, un-manly. Gay men are not just like women in this analogy; they become women via the act of submission, an image grafted onto gay identity regardless of any actual sex acts that are performed. Disgust is, therefore, deferred along a chain of signification: HIV/AIDS is abject because it signifies gay sex; gay sex is abject because it signifies femininity; femininity is abject because it signifies penetration; penetration is abject because it signifies a loss of control, the relinquishing of sacred bodily borders to the other. And so on. In this sense, HIV/AIDS only has meaning as an expanding and retreating network of association and communion, a veritable “plague of discourse,” to appropriate Lee Edelman's evocative phrase.Footnote ²⁶

The “stickiness” of HIV/AIDS – its ability to accrue and deposit affect – extends beyond the blurred lines of gender and sexuality, however. Indeed as Simon Watney indicates, the spectacle of what he dubs “African AIDS” is contingent on deep-rooted colonialist fallacies and fantasies, in which discourses of “promiscuous” mixing, furnishing a morally inflected “truth” of AIDS and its emergence, have drifted out “across the Mediterranean to incorporate the entire African subcontinent and beyond, recharging ‘the orient’ with a deadly cargo of exoticism that reminds ‘us’ that negritude has always been, for whites, a sign of sexual excess and death.”Footnote ²⁷ Akin to Bersani's rendering – in which promiscuity becomes the sign of infection rather than HIV/AIDS itself – Watney imagines AIDS as endowed with an almost virulent potential to signify beyond its biomedical state. AIDS, in this analogy, expands to absorb and, most intriguingly, recharge already fraught configurations. In other words, an arbitrary manoeuvre which brings “the orient” – itself a metaphor for non-Western nations mediated through a Euro-American optic – into intimate proximity with AIDS (as concept) works to alter the properties of this geopolitical space and its inhabitants. Like an electric charge, the addition of AIDS (re)energizes, and in turn alters the signifying potential of, the African subcontinent, imbuing it with a negative force when placed in relation to other objects, in this case “us whites.” Africa, when linked with AIDS, becomes repellent. But “charge” also has an economic component: the Western conceptualization of HIV/AIDS as a foreign entity, rooted in racist narratives of African promiscuity and barbarism, levies an inordinate toll, draining precious stores of self-representation and preservation already depleted by colonization and its enduring legacies. Returning to Ahmed, it is not merely that “AIDS” and “Africans” become readable as forms of sexual excess and death; their conceptual proximity “constructs a relation of resemblance between the figures: what makes them alike may be their ‘unlikeness’ from ‘us.’”Footnote ²⁸

But how can this be brought to bear on Residente's comparison of Latinxs and HIV/AIDS? Unlike the “African AIDS” example, “Latinx” – as a signifier that indexes a nebulous group, although one imagined to be conspicuously different from the de facto white citizen at the centre of a US imaginary (and the black “other” that shores up the binary) – is not necessarily recharged by its association with HIV/AIDS, although a case could be made for such a reading. Indeed Residente is not directly comparing them in any easy sense. Rather he creates a chain of abstraction: Latinxs are like a plague and a plague is just like AIDS. The “likeness” of Latinxs and HIV/AIDS hinges, therefore, on the abject signifier “plague,” which in turn suggests contagion-via-contact. It is more specific than this, however. I argue that Latinxs become like AIDS because both states index relations that invariably exceed or explode social, legal and moral boundaries, that stand in for (supposedly) illicit desire and illegitimate or even historically illegal sexual intercourse. That denote the mixing of bloodlines. As Residente ascertains, in the Caribbean – a region highly transected by the movement of differently raced bodies, movement accelerated by European colonization, the triangular slave trade, migration and tourism – the inhabitants “have been able to mingle as a people.” “Mingle” is ambiguous, of course, and pertains to a transmission and hybridization of language, culture and religion, as well as the relocation of bodies; but “mingle” does have a sexual component insofar as it suggests that the taking in of “all races, all colors” is achieved and sustained via, albeit heteronormative, procreation.

In this sense, blood-mixing – invariably used to demarcate the admixture of racial, national and kinship groups – becomes a feature of an often disavowed sexual congress. This is clear in Residente's layered analogy. Slipping across the surface of the figurative brown-skinned Latinx body are centuries of anxiety-provoking rhetoric over the danger of interracial sexual contact, which includes intermarriage and concubinage, rape and other forms of sexual coercion in colonial contact zones. This has historically played out through the highly mythologized primitive (in the sense of original) mixing of “pure” European blood and “dirty” indigenous and black blood. In a similar fashion, as Bersani highlights in the passage cited above, the “sexually promiscuous” gay man, wantonly exchanging bodily fluids, is a spectre haunting the emergence and definition of HIV/AIDS in the West, regardless of how the virus is subsequently transferred between bodies.Footnote ²⁹ Procreation may be one way in which bodies affect each other. The transmission of HIV is another. Brown bodies – when “brown” is a specific construction that requires careful enunciation, something I will turn to in due course – could, therefore, be approached as both demonized and aggrandized archives of colonial miscegenation, just as people who seroconvert could stand as proof of (previously hidden) sexual desire that extends beyond the bounded intimacy of a monogamous couple, to index a covert web of relatedness. To return to Ahmed, these “histories of contact” and fluid exchange are always already inscribed onto the signifying surface of “the Latinx” and “person with HIV/AIDS” in the US, which in turn renders them porous, sticky, able to adhere, to become analogous. In the affective economy of disgust, these histories of nonnormative contact form a nexus, a point at which disgust can be transmitted, contracted and circulated. To be “like AIDS” is, for Residente, to be made incoherent (and legible) by legacies of prohibited desire and unfettered mixture.

Disgust may be one way in which the Latinx and HIV/AIDS adhere in this moment. But this discounts the inherent ambiguity that attends the often politically motivated, culturally specific construction of mixing – mestizaje – in the Americas. “For some, we are like a plague, just like AIDS,” Residente asserts. What, therefore, is the flip side of this equation? It is clear that for Residente this configuration becomes a site of resistance. His Caribbean heritage, forged by the mingling of “all races, all colors” and sustained by a matrilineage of “strong, brave and wonderful women,” furnishes him with the “strength” to confront HIV/AIDS, to be positive to HIV (if not HIV-positive). I am keen, as I have already stated, to mine his speech for a more reparative reading of mixing, to consider his words in the context of critical mestizaje scholarship that accompanies discussions of Latinx identity in the twentieth century and beyond. This has opened up an arena for new forms of naming, hailing and feeling that transcend the limitations of identity politics to consider Latinx as an affective register, as a “brown” state. Because brown signifies in excess of a stable set of identities, and reaches intelligibility as impurity, it emerges as a potential nexus for the alignment of the Latinx, HIV/AIDS and the mixing of bodily fluids. I wish to consider this potential in relation to Residente and a broader archive of (specifically queer) Latinx writing responding to the epidemic.

To do this, I want to first expound on my theorization of “viral mestizaje.” I contend that critical mestizaje and HIV transmission share common characteristics, not least of which is a tendency to illuminate sprawling webs of intimacy, that expose the complex transference of matter in blood (genetic material or a virus) without privileging heteronormative desire and regimes of procreation. As Priscilla Wald asserts,

If we were to substitute “communicable/sexually transmitted diseases” for “mestizaje” this description would remain apt. This may well be the conceptual crux of Residente's analogy, because both critical mestizaje and HIV transmission eschew purity and strict coupling – insofar as Anzaldúa positions mestizaje “at the confluence of two or more genetic streams”Footnote ³¹ – to construct rhizomatic constellations of corporeal interrelatedness that transcend easy mapping and regimes of surveillance. As María Elena Martínez claims, in eighteenth-century Mexico colonial officials imbued their correspondence with the Spanish crown with “an almost paranoid fear of ‘blackness,’ and its capacity both to be invisible (hidden in the blood) and to influence phenotype and other biological traits.”Footnote ³² The swift emergence of HIV/AIDS in the US also fanned anxiety over how to detect bodies infected with the virus, especially as HIV was known to have a potentially long and asymptomatic incubation period.Footnote ³³ The fear that matter housed in blood (or other bodily fluids), be it DNA or a virus, could move imperceptibly between bodies, especially bodies marked as racially exogamous or sexually “deviant,” or from these bodies to an ideologically immune or racially pure “general public,” is a shared characteristic of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and colonial expansion in the Americas.Footnote ³⁴

But, crucially, this transference also defines critical mestizaje, an assemblage sensitive to the radical, world-making potential of hybridity and impurity. Mestizaje in this iteration can be a way to unsettle problematic binaries, to enunciate “multiple and relational identity positions.”Footnote ³⁵ Critical mestizaje, emerging in the academy in the 1980s, fundamentally resists heteronormative imperatives that define mixing as reproduction alone: “Everything, everyone – male, female – who alters me, subjects me to mestizaje,” Jean-Luc Nancy insists.Footnote ³⁶ My theory of “viral mestizaje” – in the manner of other scholarship that tactically utilizes mestizaje as a critical apparatus signifying beyond race, to encompass contingent configurations, including sexuality, religion and disabilityFootnote ³⁷ – positions HIV as an intermediary agent, suturing bodies, forging affective relations and working to reroute lineage as linear genealogy, to think about HIV as a form of queer inheritance, one that questions but does not necessarily erase existing models of kinship.Footnote ³⁸ Alteration, in Nancy's revision, stands as a form of ambivalent encounter, one that doesn't negate the problems of claiming a universal mestizaje or the violence that may attend mixing. Rather, mestizaje emerges as always already queer, negotiating the gendered dyad of man and woman (a binary that nevertheless remains robust in Nancy's rendering). Furthermore, queer becomes a way to construct mestizaje, to accelerate it. As Anzaldúa is keen to claim in her extended discussion of mestizaje, homosexuals “come from all colors, all classes, all races, all time periods. Our role is to link people with each other – the Blacks with Jews with Indians with Asians with whites with extraterrestrials. It is to transfer ideas and information from one culture to another.”Footnote ³⁹ Here Anzaldúa outlines a form of relatedness that invokes and encompasses a plethora of points of contact across already contrived categories of sexuality, gender, race and nationality, one that champions virality as compassionate connection. Queers and mestizo/as, in an Anzaldúan model, exist as embodied interfaces and vital bridges, infiltrating all spaces, classes and genders to form powerful alliances. It seems that queer is mestizaje for Nancy and for Anzaldúa because both approach the body as convivial, in Jasbir Puar's utilization of this term, as a “place to meet.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Whilst HIV transmission emerges as a feature of Residente's biological family narrative, transmitted via heterosexual partnerships, the comparison he draws between mestizaje in the Caribbean and HIV/AIDS testifies to wider patterns of blood-mixing and exchange that extend beyond the monogamous couple to reference the interconnectedness of numerous bodies. In other words, both processes – mestizaje and HIV transmission – evidence how people (plural) have “been able to mingle.” Bodies contain each other in Residente's speech; the amorphous “we” have been able to subsume “all races, all colors.” Furthermore, Residente imagines himself as a product of multiple encounters (his blood finds refuge in other bodies, just as the blood of others contours his body). He is “the blood” of his friends, his parents, his cousins, his uncle “who died of AIDS,” his aunt (who is turn is the blood of “her first love,” from whom she contracted HIV), and he is Caribbean, the blood of “all races.” That the Latinx body, like the body housing HIV, may be an archive of various meetings, of colonial, sexual, medical, transcultural encounters, should not be overlooked.Footnote ⁴¹ To think through this more I would like to turn to the concept of “brownness,” a designation with roots in Latinx grassroots activism of the 1960s and 1970s that has accrued considerable critical currency in the field of Latinx studies since the new millennium, especially amongst queer-of-colour scholars. Like the appropriation of “queer” by LGBT subjects, the resurgent tendency to adopt a “brown” positionality moves beyond the remit of identity politics. To identify as “brown” or with “brownness” may well be a tactical manoeuvre, deployed to short-circuit racial taxonomies tethered to a black/white binary opposition. To claim “brownness” involves a conscious redetermination of existing power structures, where the abject cipher is proudly adopted to mark a break with hegemonic, stabilizing norms. To be “brown” allows for a new enunciation of Latinx identity, one not necessarily rooted in geography, colonial history, or gendered regimes of language.

In the preface to Brown: The Last Discovery of America, prominent gay Latino author and critic Richard Rodriguez outlines his investment in brown as a feature of mixed blood:

Brown, Rodriguez claims, encapsulates impurity precisely because it involves the mixture of a spectrum of colours (not just black and white, but yellow and red): to get brown you must “create a real fine mess, like shit.”Footnote ⁴³ And although racial mixture is a symbol of pride in Latin America, and for Rodriguez himself, the “United States has never spoken of such matters.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This silence may well be, as I have already mentioned, a symptom of the affectively potent displacements that “brown” engenders, its deployment as a stand-in for something else: the breakdown of racial taxonomies concocted by federal channels; the historical shattering of state-sanctioned taboos, such as those prohibiting interracial sexual union; the sexual coercion of indigenous women; the immoderate desire of white men (not wholly unlike the assumptions surrounding the emergence of HIV/AIDS in America, primarily cast as a white gay man's disease).Footnote ⁴⁵ Although Rodriguez's choice of language is highly suspect – to describe the sexual exploitation that accompanied European conquest as “careless,” a mere “accident,” is needlessly inflammatory – he does offer clarification: “Brown, the color of consort; brown, the color of illicit passion … brown, the stench of rape and of shame, sin, slippage, birth.”Footnote ⁴⁶ For Rodriguez, “brown” is always the colour of excessive desires, something that he is keen to own and rehabilitate. When considering the redemptive likeness of HIV/AIDS and Latinx identity at the close of the twentieth century, “brown” holds a particularly strong allure. Not only does it inhabit the conceptual borderlands of racial classification, eschewing clarity in favour of confusion; it emerges as a marker that self-reflexively encapsulates, appropriates and celebrates the historical and metaphorical connections between Latinxs and contamination in the Americas. Like HIV/AIDS, brown speaks to a beleaguered and often hidden history of erotic desire and “illicit passion.” Like HIV/AIDS, brown emerges through networks of intimacy and contact, spreading far beyond the fecundity of “two” bodies (one man, one woman) to index the melded desire of “several” (indiscriminately gendered) bodies. Both mestizaje and viral epidemics are, after all, communal and emerge through numerous acts happening simultaneously.

In Rodriguez's rendering, brown is not easily conflated with race (as biology) alone – it is “a color produced by careless desire, even by accident; by two or several” – and does not, presumably, rely on regimes of heteronormative procreation to cohere or adhere: it is produced rather than reproduced by desire. Brown is not implicitly tethered to racial or ethnic identity and is not the purview of any one group, such as Latinx, South Asian or Middle Eastern. Could, therefore, bodies that present as white in fact be brown, or become brown, when they speak to histories of “careless” or immoderate desire? For critics such as Hiram Pérez, brown is once again a signifier that beckons to and amasses a wide array of connotations, expanding beyond race as biological ontology. Brown, he states, “remains deliberately slippery, referring to bodies perceived, or at least described, liberally as brown but also to the fantasies about racial and sexual others who fascinate modern gay male identity with their instinctive, earthy, volatile, scatological, savage, and dirty allure.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus brown becomes an anointed surface contoured by affective responses that extend its signifying potential and ambiguous appeal. This is because, as Pérez outlines in A Taste for Brown Bodies, brown bodies become a necessary erotic girder supporting modernity and the emergence of gay cosmopolitan life (and lifestyles) in the West. Although often overlooked, “the homosexual” is not merely a “late Victorian invention” (as Foucault would have us believe) but an “agent of neo-colonial expansion … serviceable both to modern nation building and to transnational flows of capital.”Footnote ⁴⁸

But Pérez takes this a step further, for although brown bodies may well attract the “gay gaze,” they also transmit brownness to those “proletariat journeymen” that circulate within cosmopolitan economies of mobility and exchange. The overwhelmingly white itinerate figures that populate a kind of (romanticized) US cosmopolitanism-as-trade imaginary – merchant marines, rogue soldiers, cowboys – “convey the brown body to the traveling eye of gay modernity … through their legendary encounters with the primitive, by themselves embodying brownness (or modes of primitivity), and by acting as intermediaries for cosmopolitan identification.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Brownness, in this example, could accrue to those figures transgressing sexual boundaries regardless of skin colour or racial identification. And, importantly, it is through (sexual) encounters with “the primitive” that brownness is transferred. This is not necessarily an act of infection, in which the immaculate cosmopolitan white gay male is contaminated and indelibly marked by contact with some miasmic earthy savage always already aligned with dirt. This is not the adherence of sticky surfaces. Rather, “browning” is invariably affirmative when approached as an affective response rather than an identitarian turn. As José Esteban Muñoz insists, brown can be a convivial space of group bonding: “feeling Brown is feeling together in difference. Feeling Brown is an ‘apartness together’ through sharing the status of being a problem.”Footnote ⁵⁰ At first glance this sounds decidedly utopian, risking a “we-are-all-brown-now” nullifying of difference that Richard Rodriguez, in particular, is guilty of perpetuating.Footnote ⁵¹ But Muñoz is at pains to indicate that “feeling together” is not a mechanism that lets white America off the hook, but a complex response to the systemic violence that (specifically) attends a rejection of Latinx multiplicity in the US:

When whiteness is the (albeit overtly sterile) norm, Muñoz suggests, a brown(ed) performance of affect, or indeed the performance of brown affect, often appears contrived: extravagant, spicy, exotic. In Disidentifications he acknowledges that lesbians and gay men of colour may appear to reproduce dominant stereotypes, “rendered in all their abjection,”Footnote ⁵³ fuelling the marginalization of nonwhite cultures. He insists, however, that these cultural producers often act to reappropriate these jarring stagings of affect, imbuing their performances with disidentificatory difference – performing identity without assimilating with or actively rejecting dominant ideologies – “which help[s] toxic images expand and become much more than quaint racisms.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The point seems to be that the very impossibility of “Latinx” as a coherent identity or easy nexus of community formation and coalition necessitates a communal affective performance of brownness to counteract a national affect aligned with feeling right, feeling white. Latinx ethnicity emerges as a “structure of feeling,” to appropriate Raymond Williams's term, an “identity-in-progress” set against the cultural logic of hegemonic white affect. “Feeling brown,” therefore, is much more than just “feeling down,” Muñoz proffers.Footnote ⁵⁵ Excess is being reclaimed for its myriad possibilities.Footnote ⁵⁶

I'm interested, therefore, in the possibilities of imagining people with HIV/AIDS as brown, when brown speaks to a complex history of abjection in America, to the exclusion, (in)visibility and misrecognition of those subjects positioned as chaotic, for those inhabiting the position of feeling like a problem. This is, after all, the inverse point that Residente is making; if Latinx people in the US are “like a plague, just like AIDS,” precisely because they index the mixture of blood and histories of taboo sexual contact, then to what extent are people with HIV/AIDS like Latinxs? Can people with HIV/AIDS become brown when brown indicates “impurity” and “desire”? Yet the likeness of Latinxs to HIV/AIDS is a sentiment that exceeds and precedes Residente's analogy. Speaking to the inadequate efforts of US mainstream media to capture the racial diversity of Latinx groups in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings, Victor Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres draw a very intriguing comparison: “like the new virus which the body's immune system has not yet learned to recognize, the media lacked a semantic category with which to identify and conceptualize Latino ambiguity.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Clearly the slipperiness of the term “Latino” – the impossibility to identify, indefinitely, who is and who isn't (because Latinxs signify between and across official categories of race) – resonated with contemporaneous narratives of HIV/AIDS as a troublesome signifier, invested in a shifting landscape of displacements in which meaning is never fully tenable. There is a sense that the invention of these new semantic categories in the late twentieth century, and the proffering of these labels as official markers of identity, entail an attempt to manage the unmanageable, to corral the abject. Latinxs may be “just like AIDS” precisely because both reach intelligibility within a brown structure of feeling that defies fixity.

To return to my question: could acquiring HIV constitute becoming brown? And what if one is already “brown” in the first place? I am willing to contend that the transmission of HIV between bodies has, over the course of the epidemic, been sutured to the transmission of race or processes of becoming raced and deracinated via viral contamination (when race extends beyond a set of biological traits or shared geopolitical history).Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed, for a number of canonical queer theorists, such as Jeffrey Weeks and Lee Edelman, the early HIV/AIDS crisis emerged as a highly metaphorical blight on previously coherent notions of white male selfhood (and, particularly, white male blood) in the West, provoking an apocalyptic annulling of normative subjectivity in the asphyxiating promise of postmodern erasure and endlessly deferred becoming.Footnote ⁵⁹ In a sense, the epidemic congealed as the “oncology of ontology,” to appropriate Thomas Yingling's striking phrase.Footnote ⁶⁰ Some radical queer factions even sought to promote HIV as a weapon with which to defile and dismantle (often by fetishizing) regimes of white privilege, narratives of pristine innocence and processes of gay assimilation, to luxuriate in the murky allure of a victimhood routinely aligned with racial otherness. As heterosexual, haemophiliac, HIV-positive centrefold model Kevin Irvine quipped in a 1992 edition of the queer AIDS zine Diseased Pariah News, “it is the liberal, heterosexual white male's wet dream to be a member of an oppressed minority.”Footnote ⁶¹ This statement, although designed to provoke and alienate, nevertheless demonstrates how HIV/AIDS has been imagined as an agent of disidentification.

The rather problematic conflation of race and infection, or brown with bodily contagion, has not been lost on Latinx commentators responding to the epidemic. When Residente argues that those with Caribbean heritage are inevitably approached as “polluted” in the US precisely because “we have been able to mingle,” he is retracing these well-established (and exploded) lines of connection. Countless Latinx cultural producers have proffered similar narratives, charting the ways that HIV/AIDS has “othered” bodies regardless of gender, sexual, class, economic or racial privilege. In the remainder of this article I want to consider the writings of San Francisco-based Mexican author Pedro Bustos Aguilar, to think about his own analogous positioning of Latinxs and HIV/AIDS. Writing on the sexual exile (sexile) of Latino men infected with HIV via homosex, Bustos Aguilar states,

This is one way that AIDS can be “like Latinx” rather than vice versa. Of course AIDS, unlike HIV, cannot travel, cross borders or be transmitted between bodies in any simplistic sense, although the spreading of the virus always holds the possibility of its emergence and relocation (and, importantly, blood can be the conduit for this movement). Yet AIDS, as a “plague of discourse,” generates a multitude of discursive offshoots and analogies: AIDS as migrant body, for example. Once again, we can intuit the adherence of “AIDS” and “migrant,” two signs that ostensibly trouble the integrity of the host, the tacitly white body-at-home. In this analogy, diaspora is no longer merely a phenomenon that happens to bodies or a dialogue unfolding between a transient subject and a stable nation-state. Rather, HIV can be theorized as a diasporic entity in its own right, dislocated from its “home” by the evacuation of contaminated bodily fluids and forced to put down fresh roots, encouraged to adopt the legacies and histories of its new host genome. Indeed the etymology of “diaspora” denotes the “scattering of seeds,” thus diaspora presents an intriguing conceptual slippage between the relocation of populations and the widespread transmission of disease through the unrestricted dispersal of infected semen, or, more colloquially, “seed.” HIV becomes the epitome of the assimilated agent: once inside the host cell it survives as that cell, possessing no prior autonomy and no sense of self or its history. Like the retrovirus, it is imagined that the repositioned immigrant body must become integrated into the dominant systems of its host country in order to flourish.

Nevertheless, in Bustos Aguilar's rendering, AIDS resists being manoeuvred as some abstract conceptual stand-in for the migrant, migrating or migratory body, as the subject of a simile that inevitably works to position AIDS and migration in an asymmetrical dialectic, in an almost-but-not-quite economy of association (as Residente does). Rather, AIDS becomes a way for the body, and the constitutive body of discourse, to be in constant flux, transition and exile, to be and, perhaps more significantly, to become migratory. AIDS is not like migration; AIDS is migration. Those incubating this “unreasonable migrant” – regardless of race or nationality – become more than migratory: they become “undocumented,” “illegal,” perpetually in opposition to and in excess of the rooted, sanctioned biopolitical citizen-subject. Interestingly this is not a facet that Residente acknowledges, perhaps because, as someone of Puerto Rican descent, he can claim American citizenship (which is not to say that Puerto Ricans enjoy the full roster of rights and privileges). The Caribbean becomes a place of incorporation for Residente: a place to “take in” rather than expel. This is just one variable that impedes that construction of a coherent or unified Latinx identity in the US.

For Bustos Aguilar, HIV/AIDS not only “browns” potentially white bodies (if this construction is not too fraught); it transforms how Latinxs function and signify as part of an always already stigmatized, racially ambiguous, heterogeneous group residing within the (historically fluctuating) boundaries of a nation-state that perpetually affirms their place as contingent and disposable. In his semi-autobiographical, bilingual short story “Nueva Flor de Canela,” published in Jaime Cortez's edited anthology Virgins, Guerrillas & Locas: Gay Latinos Writing about Love, Bustos Aguilar approaches HIV as a racialized pathogen that invariably impacts the autonomy of the gay, Latino, HIV-positive first-person narrator. Significantly, this story wonderfully demonstrates the ambivalent responses to Latinx identity as it engages with HIV/AIDS, responses that this article seeks to illuminate. The “love story” opens with an extended stream of consciousness:

The interaction between the narrator and his virus performs a dissembling of and from normative intimacies, positioning infected host and parasitic virus in a symbiotic affective economy. The narrator and the virus are no longer “strange bedfellows” but a non-heteronormative flip side: “queer lovers,” forged beneath the sheets. Intimacy is not imagined as an affective flux between two ostensibly separate bodies or surfaces; after all, viruses cannot exist in strict isolation from bodies and “to be,” to survive, is to be together. Rather, intimacy is now achieved through the always partial accommodation of the other within the self. The virus is both “I” and “not I,” “intruder” (not quite human, a “creature”) and “part of me, and only me,” alien yet inalienable.

It is certainly not difficult to imagine Bustos Aguilar's virus as a referent haunting Julia Kristeva's foray into abjection, as the cause of “one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside.”Footnote ⁶⁴ HIV/AIDS works to undermine facile notions of separation precisely because it has, from the beginning, been constructed as an indistinct entity emanating from regimes of social interaction – that “exorbitant outside,” a place of congress and excess – and as a malignancy growing from within. It engenders exclusion yet solicits identification. It is, like Kristeva's abject, “Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This blurring of origins is crucial to the arrival of the abject; when asked in an interview to translate the gist of l'abjection for an English audience, Kristeva responded that it is “an extremely strong feeling that is at once somatic and symbolic, which is above all a revolt against an external menace from which one wants to distance oneself, but of which one has the impression that it may menace us from the inside.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Like Ahmed's performativity of disgust, which occurs within a closed system of allusion, Kristeva's abject highlights the emotions that arise when things refuse to stay in line, when distance and separation are not preserved.Footnote ⁶⁷

Yet the threat to selfhood becomes further complicated when racial otherness is introduced as a factor accompanying the transmission of viral matter. For if, as Ed Cohen and Julie Livingston state, HIV “troubles our beliefs about separation and hierarchy [because it] reveals our ability to touch one another, even across tremendous distances and socioeconomic differences,”Footnote ⁶⁸ infection has the ability – at least figuratively – to bring people of different races together, to mix races in ways that exceed, mimic or resist heterosexual(ized) unions such as marriage and procreation. HIV may not only be the “other” in the “self” but the white man in the brown or vice versa. Latinxs are like AIDS because they have been able to take in all races, all colours. Certainly deracination via HIV infection has played out under numerous guises in the cultural production of gay Latinos responding to the epidemic, levied as anxiety-provoking and erotic, liberating or equalizing and exploitative, likened to earlier regimes of colonization and sexual coercion as nation-building agenda.Footnote ⁶⁹ Bustos Aguilar explores one facet of this dilemma in “Nueva Flor de Canela”:

Clearly the Mexican-born, brown-skinned narrator intuits his HIV-positive serostatus as a consequence of his “love for the white boy” and his relocation from Mexico to America. HIV, along with his sexuality, his proclivities for white men, and his acquisition of English, work to undermine his ability to perform brownness, when “brown” is more than just a moniker of race but a feeling of shared defiance in the face of multicultural erasure, as in Muñoz's conceptualization. HIV may not lead to AIDS in this scenario (indeed AIDS is barely mentioned, primarily because this story charts the introduction of antiretroviral therapy), but it does engender the narrator's “acquired color-deficiency syndrome,” the contamination of his racial identity insofar as having HIV in his body stands as proof of, as a legacy of, his “pale desire.” Whiteness has entered his body inside a viral agent, has “violently adopted” him via processes of viral territorialization, viral RNA spliced into human DNA, only to abject him from the nation-state because he is not pale enough. His body is re-colonized, the white boy infused into his cellular makeup as paternal progenitor, crafting new familial networks between gay men. Kinship is contagious here, especially poignant as the word “adopt” suggests a taking without consent, a new filial configuration that the child has no decision over. In one fell swoop, HIV infection has rendered the narrator familiar and alien, American and un-American, white and not-quite-white. Brown. He is intensely abject: adopted thus rejected, taken in in order to be thrown away, browned (made illicit, marked, impure) via intimate contact with whiteness.

This literary grappling with the intimacies and intensities of feeling that accompany the narrator's interactions with the (racialized) viral agent residing in his body is both complex and contradictory. Published after the success of protease inhibitors was officially verified, Bustos Aguilar confronts the altered reality that renewed health presages. He has been changed, he notes,

Hailing combination therapy as a miraculous drug regime, one that has delivered the narrator from “a place of no hope,” he must nevertheless adapt to a further disruption of his identity: the disruption engendered by the infusion of protease inhibitors in his bloodstream. With this new “chemical landscape” he is furnished with “new blood,” a now vital substance that will allow him to claim (or rather reclaim, suggesting that he has had some prior claim) a disenfranchised homeland, language and future, those valuable commodities unavailable to him in the past. Staving off AIDS, defanging the (white) virus, allows for a recuperation of identity, allows him to be Latinx in America.

Latinos are just like AIDS. When Residente uttered these words he was tapping into a complex and at times tortuous history of Latinx oppression in the Americas. The descendants of colonial encounters between differently raced bodies, Latinxs are imagined as subjects that have crossed over sanctioned lines of racial separation, beings that stand as evidence of multiple forms of sexual permissiveness, and subject-citizens ambivalently positioned in relation to the US nation-state. He was also talking to the emergence of HIV/AIDS, a blood-borne disorder, at a time when Latinx studies in the academy was gravitating toward a celebration of mixed blood, of a critical mestizaje that defied heteronormative procreation to symbolize new forms of relatedness. In this article I have considered “the Latinx” and “HIV/AIDS” together, to think about how this likeness can be processed, performed and rerouted, to consider how terms with considerable currency in Latinx studies – brownness, blood-mixing and mestizaje (and, in my larger project, immunity, colonization, familia, diaspora, transculturation, borders) – can be made to signify differently, can expand to encompass HIV/AIDS discourse at the end of the twentieth century and beyond.