Abstract
This essay brings together the US Supreme Court’s Boutilier v. INS decision and Arturo Islas’s The Rain God to analyze the negation of homosexual and queer experience in the legal negotiation of access to citizenship. The article brings together methodological frameworks from literary, legal, queer, and Latina/o/x studies to argue that citizenship requires a narrative presence, one that immigration policy and its judicial interpretation has, until recently, refused to homosexual migrants. In analyzing The Rain God’s depiction of Felix as a legal intermediary between migrant laborers and US citizenship alongside standing immigration policy insistent on homosexual exclusion, this article demonstrates how homosexuality is leveraged not only against queer people, but also against their immediately surrounding communities to negate queer presence in US legal and cultural contexts.
Resúmen
Este ensayo combina la decisión de la Corte Suprema de EE.UU. Boutilier v. INS y la novela The Rain God de Arturo Islas para analizar la negación de la experiencia homosexual y queer en las negociaciones jurídicas para acceso a la ciudadanía. El artículo junta marcos metodológicos procedentes de los estudios literarios, legales, queer y latinos para argumentar que la ciudadanía exige una presencia narrativa, la cual, hasta hace poco, las políticas migratorias y su interpretación judicial han negado a los inmigrantes homosexuales. Con un análisis de la representación de Felix en The Rain God como intermediario legal entre los obreros inmigrantes y la ciudadanía estadounidense junto con las políticas migratorias vigentes que insisten en excluir a los homosexuales, este artículo demuestra cómo la homosexualidad se utiliza no solo en contra de las personas queer, sino también en contra de sus comunidades inmediatas a fin de negar la presencia queer en los contextos legales y culturales de los Estados Unidos.
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Notes
L. Lowe suggests that the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act is evident in how, until the mid-twentieth century, “Chinese masculinity was marked as different from that of … ‘white’ citizens owing to the forms of work and community that had been historically available to Chinese men as the result of immigration laws restricting female immigration,” leading, as she later clarifies, to their “‘feminized’ positions” (1996, p. 11).
I use “homosexuality” in both its legal definition in Boutilier and in descriptions of sexuality between people of the same sex in a specific historical context. Because many of the restrictions on sexuality participated in similar exclusionary projects, both in terms of immigration and domestic definitions of sexuality, “queer” denotes the permanence of the statutes defining homosexuality in contemporary legal discourse, whereas my use of “homosexuality” underscores definitions of sexuality that appear to be more chronologically and culturally bound.
Somerville explains, “The legislative history of the 1952 INA suggests that race and sexuality were profoundly woven together in the boundary making logic of U.S. policies of immigration and naturalization at midcentury” (2005, p. 77).
In such a context, his deportation, the defense claimed, would be a violation of due process.
Islas, Migrant Souls (1990, pp. 41–42). In Migrant Souls, Islas’s sequel to The Rain God, the author’s description of the Angel family stresses a distinction between the terms “migrant” and “immigrant.” The narrator states, “They had not sailed across an ocean or ridden in wagons and trains across half a continent in search of a new life. They were migrant, not immigrant, souls. They simply and naturally went from one bloody side of the river to the other and into a land that just a few decades earlier had been Mexico” (p. 41). For the purposes of this article, I use the term “migrant” to describe the Angel family and those instances where people move from one location to another, while using “immigrant” to describe those whose purpose in crossing the border is implied to be informed by their “search for a new life” in the novel.
According to Aldama, Islas “did not exactly follow a 1970 s brown-power ideological line. He made efforts to keep politics separate from cultural-aesthetic endeavors, though he understood why traditionally marginalized groups identified the personal as political” (2005a, p. xiii).
Hames-García and Martínez (2011) borrow the term from M. J. Alexander, as they note in their introduction. The description brings to mind M. P. Brady’s theorization of the border as an “abjection machine—transforming people into ‘aliens,’ ‘illegals,’ ‘wetbacks,’ or ‘undocumented,’” whose abjection “functions through the dis-remembering and dismembering” in the ongoing rehearsal of estrangements the border itself produces (2002, pp. 50, 53).
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, passed 2 years before the decision, retained the same restrictions on homosexual migration added in the INA of 1952. Ngai describes a similar case in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Six years after the 1952 INA passed, “The US Supreme Court upheld the government's revocation of Clemente Martínez’s citizenship,” a case she describes as “a part of the history of legal conflict over the boundaries and terms of American Citizenship” (2004, p. 127). His revocation was under the Nationality Act of 1940, even if a different immigration policy was now in effect.
The court’s claim that Boutilier was afflicted with homosexuality then, which would legally deem him a psychopath, is only in reference to the Public Health Service (PHS) certification of his homosexuality in 1964, following his petition for citizenship in 1963. Because the PHS failed to legally identify the petitioner as a homosexual at the time of his entry in 1955, his deportation represents a judicial abuse of the law that required retroactively sanctioning the use of the 1964 medical assessment as a means for exclusion.
Luibhéid identifies four ways in which the US has attained population to “construct the nation”: immigration, slavery, colonization, and reproduction (2002, p. xiii).
Ortiz observes that, in Migrant Souls, “Islas’s narrator divulges that Miguel Chico has in fact produced” the novel that we have as The Rain God, but that exists in the narrative’s universe as Miguel Chico’s Tlaloc (2007, p. 409).
The narrator describes Miguel Chico as “a second generation American citizen,” alluding to the preceding generation’s legal status (Islas 1984, p. 4).
Padilla describes coyote as “the pejorative term for those who act as intermediaries between Mexicans trying to find work in the United States and U.S. contractors looking to cheap labor. They are viewed as dishonorable in Chicana/o culture because of their willingness to exploit their countrymen and women for personal gain” (2009, p. 18).
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Acknowledgements
I would, first, like to thank the generous anonymous reviewers for their truly productive feedback. I would also like to extend an overdue thank-you to Julie Minich at University of Texas–Austin and Stefanie K. Dunning at Miami University, for their guidance through the first drafts of this piece; the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies for being such an encouraging audience for an early version of it; the Department of Latina/o Studies and the Department of English at Florida Atlantic University, for seeing promise in my work; and Curtis Dickerson, for patiently reading endless revisions of the piece. Finally, and most importantly, gracias a mi familia—Blanca Valenzuela, Joe de la Garza, and Jordy de la Garza—por su infinito apoyo.
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de la Garza Valenzuela, J.A. Queer in a legal sense: Negation and negotiation of citizenship in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service and Arturo Islas’s The Rain God. Lat Stud 17, 187–206 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-019-00173-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-019-00173-3