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Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails
In the tradition of the Latin American testimonio, this is the story of Juan Rivera, a.k.a. Juanito Xtravaganza, a Latino runaway youth who ends up homeless in the streets of New York in the late 70s and becomes partner of the internationally famous 1980s Pop artist Keith Haring during some of the most frenetically productive years of his brief life, as told to the author and retold by him. A hybrid text - part testimonio, part linguistic and cultural analysis, and part art criticism - this is also a history of New York Latino neighborhoods during this period of devastating disinvestment and gentrification, as well as a personal, heart-felt meditation on the art of listening and the ethical limits of representing queer Latino lives.
240 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2007
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February 26, 2009The first section of this book is an interview with Juan Rivera, who was Keith Haring's lover for several years.
I haven't read keith haring the authorized biography by John Gruen, but it apparently required setting the record straight. The next section gives a brief biography of Keith Haring, including a photo of the "Fags Against Facial Hair" stencil which I'd previously read about in Art After Midnight The East Village Scene (not referenced by this book, however.)
And then there's a section which gets into academic analysis, "Listening Speaks (II): Testimonio, Queer Latino Representation, and Shame. He references I, Rigoberta Menchu and The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave. I don't know if we really need an analysis of West Side Story as a text about Puerto Ricans, but it's here.
He gets into Eve Kosfofsky Sedgwick's "Shame and Performativity" which is in the book Henry James's New York Edition The Construction of Authorship. He says Douglas Crimp is totally misreading the performance of Mario Montez in Warhol's Screen Test #2 in his essay "Mario Montez for Shame" (which appears in Regarding Sedgwick Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory.) Crimp's paper was delivered at the notorious 2003 Gay Shame conference at the University of Michigan. Cruz-Malave doesn't mention Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's reference to the conference as "trickle-down academics" in Nobody Passes Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, but does reference critiques by Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes, Judith Halberstam, and Hiram Pérez.
And then the book gets into a section of brief biographies of figures in it and a gloss of the use of Spanglish in the interview.
The interview is lively and interesting, the analysis not overly dense but still sprightly, but now that I actually look at how much space is taken by each part of the book it starts to look a little top-heavy. Still, I think it is useful as a corrective to other writing on Haring and the milieu of circa 1980s New York underground art culture.
I haven't read keith haring the authorized biography by John Gruen, but it apparently required setting the record straight. The next section gives a brief biography of Keith Haring, including a photo of the "Fags Against Facial Hair" stencil which I'd previously read about in Art After Midnight The East Village Scene (not referenced by this book, however.)
And then there's a section which gets into academic analysis, "Listening Speaks (II): Testimonio, Queer Latino Representation, and Shame. He references I, Rigoberta Menchu and The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave. I don't know if we really need an analysis of West Side Story as a text about Puerto Ricans, but it's here.
He gets into Eve Kosfofsky Sedgwick's "Shame and Performativity" which is in the book Henry James's New York Edition The Construction of Authorship. He says Douglas Crimp is totally misreading the performance of Mario Montez in Warhol's Screen Test #2 in his essay "Mario Montez for Shame" (which appears in Regarding Sedgwick Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory.) Crimp's paper was delivered at the notorious 2003 Gay Shame conference at the University of Michigan. Cruz-Malave doesn't mention Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's reference to the conference as "trickle-down academics" in Nobody Passes Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, but does reference critiques by Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes, Judith Halberstam, and Hiram Pérez.
And then the book gets into a section of brief biographies of figures in it and a gloss of the use of Spanglish in the interview.
The interview is lively and interesting, the analysis not overly dense but still sprightly, but now that I actually look at how much space is taken by each part of the book it starts to look a little top-heavy. Still, I think it is useful as a corrective to other writing on Haring and the milieu of circa 1980s New York underground art culture.
March 7, 2018
Raw testimony of the people who were left ignored during the 70s and 80s of NYC famously known for its gentrification and street aesthetics, the streets were actually left for dead...
November 8, 2015
a smart, extremely enjoyable meditation on the politics of oral history and narrativizing lives, especially the lives of the marginalized. Cruz-Malave's analysis of 1980s pop art is some of the best cultural analysis i've read recently.
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