Selena, when will this end? I dreamt of you again last night. Not a wet dream. You didn’t suck me off or anything. No, no, nothing like that. It was all very civilized. Very decent. I was sitting up at the University in that dark, dusty archive office, fantasizing about you as I often am these days. “These days?” what am I saying? It’s been every god damn day for the last five years practically. Wait, wait! Hold up a minute. I’m not complaining! It’s a blessed thing when you feel like you have a reason to get up in the morning. Even if that “reason” defies every logical fiber in your body. I never fashioned myself a ghost hunter. But here I am, obsessing, lusting, chasing after a dead woman, a ghost, a memory of a person I never knew. I’m like every other sucker out there, trying to connect with a piece of history I did not live through. It would be easy to say that the root of my fascination is sexual. Like if I think about you long enough, hard enough, earnestly enough, perhaps some unearthly, benevolent force will transport us into some alternative space and time. Some othered, third space when and where our impassioned love affair would be possible. I’d like that to be the irrational, rationale for all my theorizing. Really, I would. But shit, it ain’t the truth. When I imagine who it is that I fuck, and who it is that I like to be fucked by, you don’t even cross my mind. Quite simply, you ain’t my type. And that’s the god honest truth.
Saying that I do not desire you sexually doesn’t mean I do not desire you, punto. To think of desire as purely sexual would be a narrow-minded mistake. On the contrary, you spark in me a level of desire, a form of longing, a deep dark questioning that propels me into some ontological vortex that appears infinite. Those nights when you visit me in my dreams, you give me the answers. For a fleeting moment, I understand the root of my desire and the necessary means through which it can be satisfied. Yet each morning I wake, feeling as if I had received and lost an infinite thing.
Here are the facts...
This is going to sound cliché...like every pick up line any other lovesick academic has thrown at you...but listen to me when I say, it’s something in the way you move. The way you move across space. Spiritual, Gendered, Sexual, Geographic, Linguistic… Damn girl, you’re the OG border-crosser! You have the abuelas, the machos, the jotas and jotos, and the niños, all together! Not only are they moving to the same beat, they are dancing on the same dance floor. Only an artist who sings, moves and performs through tactile consciousness can create a harmonious beat within such cacophony. It’s a way of knowing that is learned on the margins, in the periphery, in an outsider space that gives you a particular perspective of how power moves, shapes and fragments our world. It is with this embodied knowledge that you navigate these disparate spaces and create a new space. A third space: a trans-border, de-colonial dance floor, held together, if only for an ephemeral moment, by the ambiguities that spill forth when rigid binaries collapse into one another. In a single instant, your dance floor destabilizes the categorical certainties through which we make sense of the world. How do I know this? I think my very presence your dance floor proves my point. I am not what you would call the Ideal Selena fan. In fact, I am the categorical other, the wannabe, the queer, la haba (Judias) en los moros y cristianos. More pointedly, I am the reformed Jewish American Princess from Marin County, turned gender bending, LA-dwelling, bio, girl, queer, reticent hipster, with an insatiable love for the Spanish language. See what I’m saying about my outsider status? Yet here I am, a pilgrim on their way to worship at the historic site of your dancefloor. Off to Corpus Christi, where 20 years ago, someone with an obsession even more illogical than mine, took you from this world. Perhaps Saldívar saw something in you? Saw part of herself that she couldn’t bear to confront any longer? But I’m not interested in unpacking the logic of a crazy person.
One of my mentors back at the University likes to give me shit for using the Mexican-American experience as a proxy to understand my own fucked up, Jewish one. This Profe is one of the old timers, one of the pioneers, one of those fronteriza, Chicana butches who has been looking at the world through serpent and eagle eyes, since before I had eyes of my own. She says my desire for you, Selena, is an act of re-conocimiento, “a process of perceiving, naming, knowing, acknowledging, and accepting the Other at the same time that the self is mirrored in the Other, and therefore identifies with and recognizes the Other as the self.” (322) And perhaps you are my point of re-conocimiento? I am letting that question guide me as I begin this pilgrimage. It is a quest to map, re-map, [de]map your life, and perhaps my own
Saying that I do not desire you sexually doesn’t mean I do not desire you, punto. To think of desire as purely sexual would be a narrow-minded mistake. On the contrary, you spark in me a level of desire, a form of longing, a deep dark questioning that propels me into some ontological vortex that appears infinite. Those nights when you visit me in my dreams, you give me the answers. For a fleeting moment, I understand the root of my desire and the necessary means through which it can be satisfied. Yet each morning I wake, feeling as if I had received and lost an infinite thing.
Here are the facts...
This is going to sound cliché...like every pick up line any other lovesick academic has thrown at you...but listen to me when I say, it’s something in the way you move. The way you move across space. Spiritual, Gendered, Sexual, Geographic, Linguistic… Damn girl, you’re the OG border-crosser! You have the abuelas, the machos, the jotas and jotos, and the niños, all together! Not only are they moving to the same beat, they are dancing on the same dance floor. Only an artist who sings, moves and performs through tactile consciousness can create a harmonious beat within such cacophony. It’s a way of knowing that is learned on the margins, in the periphery, in an outsider space that gives you a particular perspective of how power moves, shapes and fragments our world. It is with this embodied knowledge that you navigate these disparate spaces and create a new space. A third space: a trans-border, de-colonial dance floor, held together, if only for an ephemeral moment, by the ambiguities that spill forth when rigid binaries collapse into one another. In a single instant, your dance floor destabilizes the categorical certainties through which we make sense of the world. How do I know this? I think my very presence your dance floor proves my point. I am not what you would call the Ideal Selena fan. In fact, I am the categorical other, the wannabe, the queer, la haba (Judias) en los moros y cristianos. More pointedly, I am the reformed Jewish American Princess from Marin County, turned gender bending, LA-dwelling, bio, girl, queer, reticent hipster, with an insatiable love for the Spanish language. See what I’m saying about my outsider status? Yet here I am, a pilgrim on their way to worship at the historic site of your dancefloor. Off to Corpus Christi, where 20 years ago, someone with an obsession even more illogical than mine, took you from this world. Perhaps Saldívar saw something in you? Saw part of herself that she couldn’t bear to confront any longer? But I’m not interested in unpacking the logic of a crazy person.
One of my mentors back at the University likes to give me shit for using the Mexican-American experience as a proxy to understand my own fucked up, Jewish one. This Profe is one of the old timers, one of the pioneers, one of those fronteriza, Chicana butches who has been looking at the world through serpent and eagle eyes, since before I had eyes of my own. She says my desire for you, Selena, is an act of re-conocimiento, “a process of perceiving, naming, knowing, acknowledging, and accepting the Other at the same time that the self is mirrored in the Other, and therefore identifies with and recognizes the Other as the self.” (322) And perhaps you are my point of re-conocimiento? I am letting that question guide me as I begin this pilgrimage. It is a quest to map, re-map, [de]map your life, and perhaps my own