BROWN NEON
Essays by Raquel Gutiérrez
A meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders.
Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection Brown Neon gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds. Whether contemplating the value of adobe as both vernacular architecture and commodified art object, highlighting the feminist wounding and transphobic apparitions haunting the multi-generational lesbian social fabric, or recalling a failed romance, Gutiérrez traverses complex questions of gender, class, identity, and citizenship with curiosity and nuance.
Praise for Brown Neon
“Raquel Gutiérrez has crafted, in these inspired and astonishing essays, an unforgettably affecting voice that recounts parables of brown life in the arts. In narratives that describe the intergenerational landscape of queer cultural memory and self-ecologies of Latinx innovation within the current U.S. political economy, Gutiérrez dazzles. Sentences here excite and punctuate as they convey the historical losses and embodied gains comprising all those energies that animate artists, activists, and storytellers alike to ‘sing in similar and simultaneous registers of scarcity and plethora.’” —Roberto Tejada
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